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

THE BLOOD PURGE 741Fritz Krausser, a friend of Rohm's, who had been ennobled by the Kingof Bavaria for outstanding bravery in the World War. Other members ofthe group were Manfred von Killinger, Prime Minister of Saxony; ex-Colonel August Schneidhuber, chief of police in Munich, and Reinerand Count Spreti, Rohm's aides-de-camp.It was a group which fully deserved the epithet of Uprooted andDisinherited. Helldorf was perpetually bankrupt and had borrowedmoney from a certain Steinschneider who wanted his favor. This manwas probably of Jewish origin and earned a great deal of money intheaters as a 'clairvoyant' under the pseudonym of Hanus-sen. In April,1933, by order of Helldorf, he was kidnapped from a theater entranceand murdered in a woods near Berlin. Georg Bell, a former intimatefriend of Rohm's who had broken with him, fled to Austria and fromthere threatened to make revelations concerning the Reichstag fire. Byorder of Rohm he was pursued by a group of assassins who discoveredhim in a border village and murdered him in his hotel room. The ideasand aims of these men can hardly be better described than by the wordswhich Plato in his Banquet put into the mouth of one of their ilk: 'If itwere possible to form a state or an army exclusively of homosexuals,these men would direct all their emulations toward honors, and goinginto battle with such a spirit would, even if their numbers were small,conquer the entire world.'A curious appendage to this group was Goebbels, who, from an oldhabit, was always on the side of the dissatisfied S.A. so long as hebelieved that in the end Hitler would do what they wanted. WithHelldorf he formed a kind of political leadership of the bloc aroundRohm; he gave Rohm publicity; he gave him opportunities to speakbefore foreign diplomats; he put the S.A. leaders' complaints into wordsmore eloquent than Rohm himself could have done; he praised him inspeeches and writings. In the April edition of his so-called diary he stillgave Rohm credit for the chief contribution to the 'seizure of power.'Should it ever come to a revolutionary settlement, such a cliquewould need troops ready to strike at a moment's notice. In order to movequickly, this force must not be numerous, nor did it have to benumerous; for the party which, within a short time, could lay