The Vengeance of Rome

Röhm said Hitler’s instinct was to keep all his balls in the air. He was a feckless Austrian at heart and hated reaching decisions. Decisions were usually made for him by events. Schlamperei, in Röhm’s view. His friend ‘Alf had become addicted to a cycle of longing, of repressed desire, violent fulfilment, then guilty retreat and denial. ‘Just like his sex life.’

Röhm knew far more than he could say publicly but was often loose-tongued when drunk. Like so many Germans of his generation, Hitler discovered sex in the trenches and knew only extremes. Röhm was by nature a bluff Bavarian, ’open heart and open mouth’, as they say. He hated intrigue as much as he hated secrets. Only on the subject of his friend was he at all reticent. He never revealed the name of the young lieutenant who had opened Hitler’s sexual floodgates. The seducer was in civilian life a well-known painter who had taken an interest in Hitler’s architectural drawings. In turn one night the lieutenant had shown Hitler some of his special etchings. Confusion. Repulsion. Attraction. Yet it had still been rape in the end. Hitler responded with horror. He retreated into denial fearing he would not be able to control such lusts and emotions. Control, even then, was hugely important to him.

‘That’s what made him such a good dispatch runner.’ Röhm and I were relaxing one evening in his hot pool. Röhm drank Bollinger from the bottle and smiled with affectionate reminiscence. ‘He was afraid at any minute he’d again feel Lieutenant Feistfucher’s throbbing bongo up his scrawny jacksie. He fairly flew along those trenches. He was more terrified of his own desires than he was of death. And believe me, Max, he’s pretty fucking scared of death! Fascinated, too. Always running back and forth from the edge. He knows what makes him afraid and therefore knows what works on other people. You could call it the common touch. They love him for it.’

Röhm massages my shoulders, thighs and buttocks. The action is painful to him. He has hard, expectant fingers. He is terrified they will turn into claws. He plays the piano to exercise them. ‘We used to call him “Alfy-run-and-fetch” in the mess. You’re never sure of soldiers like that. But now I respect his talents. He’s special. We’re still a perfect couple, him and me. Sides of the same coin. Yin and yang. Male and female. Talk and action . . .’

Röhm obviously carried, as the Americans say, a torch for Hitler. Almost everything he did was because of those powerful feelings. His obsession with me was strong, but it was of a different quality. ‘Alf and ‘Ernstie’ had parted a few years earlier, ostensibly for political reasons. Röhm had not desired the separation but had accepted the reasoning. I speak of an age when it still meant something to give up personal desire in favour of a higher principle. Those old fighters were bound together by far more than cooling affection.

‘Doctor Diamond finks ‘Itler ‘ad thyroid trouble.’ Mrs Cornelius grows thoughtful. ‘It makes yer eyes bulge.’

‘He didn’t start out looking like that,’ I remind her. ‘He wound up bulging, I agree. Everything changed after ‘31.’

That was before I met him, but his colleagues still complained how distant he was to his old friends, how close to Big Business, the men he had always described as vampires. Had they already bought him? Would they now determine his political direction?

‘He’s a performer, that’s his drawback as well as his advantage,’ Röhm said. ‘Typical actor. Can’t resist an audience. And it loves him. It probably doesn’t matter about the colour of the politics with him as long as the crowd responds. He says the crowd is like a woman. He flatters it, frightens it, fucks it.’ To the end Röhm was inclined to make excuses for Hitler. ‘Besides, Strasser can afford to be snotty. He takes his money from Farben. And he has his own thriving business. We can’t do what we have to do on a few pfennigs in the hat. We have to keep the Nazi balloon up. Hitler has to get his “eggs” from somewhere! At least until we’re ready to strike.’

Röhm believed in the Nazi slogans. No longer a monarchist, he wanted common ownership and what he called ‘a clear battlefield’. He was convinced that Germany’s ills could only be corrected by a violent revolution and an absorption of the regular army into his SA. His classless people’s militia would uphold all the old Spartan values. Meanwhile, if a few foolish tycoons thought their interest lay with the Nazis, the Stabschef didn’t care. He had massive secret stockpiles of weapons and ordnance all over Germany.

I think he rather yearned for the past before he had gone to Bolivia. He spoke warmly of the good times they had all had in the early days. They had been more light-hearted then. ‘Hitler was a great comedian. Professionally, Max, you would have appreciated his talents. On those long drives, he used to keep us in stitches.’