Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

30 DER FUEHRERnature. He was the secret head of a band of murderers. For his arsenal,he had men killed without the slightest qualm. In his inconspicuousposition, he spent four years in Bavaria, secretly building up an army;or, more accurately, he kept building up new armies, for this secretarmy often disbanded. It was scattered by commands from above, tornby internal struggles. It allowed itself to be used for different purposesby political leaders who the next day abandoned them. But somehowRohm always kept his army in hand, for he disposed of the arms andmaintained a bloody guard over them.It was this atmosphere that led him personally astray. Many sectionsof this secret army of mercenaries and murderers were breeding placesof perversion. One of these was Rossbach's free corps. Rossbach and hisadjutant, Heines, seem to have brought Rohm to the path whichultimately led to his destruction.It is no contradiction that this misled leader should have been attachedto his soldiers and thought more about them than most of his comradesdid. Rohm was the type of officer who fights with the revolution for thesoldier's soul. He grasped the great truth that the new army should notdestroy the revolution but use it. 'The revolutionary school ofcommunism prepares the German worker for the struggle for nationalfreedom,' he writes. He never wearies of praising the communists andtheir military qualities. Once he had him in his company, he assures us,he could turn the reddest communist into a glowing nationalist in fourweeks.The future workers' army passes through the school of civil war.These freebooters do not complain about the inner conflict in theirfatherland. There are too many soft and rotten elements among thepeople, wipe them out! Rohm calls them the 'philistines,' and by that hemeans everything mediocre: in spirit, in passion, in possessions;sometimes he seems to mean everyone who has a family. He praises thehave-nots without office and property, the raw warriors. They are thestuff the new army needs, for the new army must wage war in Germany,to wean the workers from the parties.To this end, Rohm founded the National Socialist German Workers'Party. It might be said to have existed before him, first under thesimpler name of the German Workers' Party. But that was a