Röhm scandal

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The Röhm scandal resulted from the public disclosure of Nazi politician Ernst Röhm's homosexuality by anti-Nazis in 1931 and 1932. Röhm was an early member of the Nazi Party and was close to party leader Adolf Hitler. In the late 1920s, he lived in Bolivia where he wrote letters to a friend, Karl-Günther Heimsoth, in which he candidly discussed his sexual orientation. Röhm's double life began to fall apart when he returned to Germany in 1930 and was appointed leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's original paramilitary wing. Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) supported the repeal of Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality, both parties utilized homophobia to attack their Nazi opponents and inaccurately portrayed the Nazi Party as dominated by homosexuals. Their goal was to prevent or delay the Nazi seizure of power, which ultimately occurred in early 1933. Beginning in April 1931, the SPD newspaper...

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