On Wednesday, Feb. 19, students gathered at noon in Varner Hall, Room 432, as Phi Alpha Theta hosted Professor Derek Hastings for a preview of his forthcoming book on Ernst Röhm, one of the most controversial figures of early Nazi Germany.

The event invited attendees to explore not only Röhm’s life but also the research process behind writing history, as Phi Alpha Theta organized the talk to give students insight into archival research and how long-term scholarly projects develop from concept to publication.

Hastings structured his talk around key stages of Röhm’s life, tracing his development from childhood to his rise and eventual fall within the Nazi movement.

Hastings, a historian of modern Europe, focuses on the social and cultural history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He is the author of “Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism” and “Nationalism in Modern Europe,” and is currently completing his third book, a project more than a decade in the making.

“This is stuff I’ve had to slog through for years and years and years,” Hastings said. “Being able to talk about it a little bit kind of ends the insularity.”

A paradoxical figure

Hastings described Röhm as a deeply paradoxical figure, both a perpetrator and a victim.

As head of the SA, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, Röhm played a crucial role in helping Adolf Hitler consolidate power in 1933. Under Röhm’s leadership, SA membership grew dramatically, expanding from roughly 60,000 members in 1930 to hundreds of thousands by 1933.

Yet Röhm was also the most prominent victim of the 1934 purge known as the Night of the Long Knives. Executed on Hitler’s orders, Röhm was vilified as a “moral cancer,” with Nazi leaders using his sexuality as part of the justification for his killing.

“He’s clearly a perpetrator,” Hastings explained. “He helped drive forward the Nazi rise to power. But he’s also a victim in the sense that he was the most important and highest-profile early victim of Nazi violence.”

Part of what makes Röhm so compelling, Hastings argued, is that he was a gay man operating at the highest levels of an aggressively homophobic regime. His sexuality was an open secret by the early 1930s and later became central to the regime’s public narrative after his death.

The challenge of research

Much of the historical focus on Röhm has centered on his execution rather than his life. To date, only one full-length scholarly biography exists: “Ernst Röhm: Hitler’s SA Chief of Staff” by historian Eleanor Hancock.

After the purge, the Nazis destroyed nearly all of Röhm’s private papers and correspondence, eliminating the centralized archive historians typically rely on and making the research process significantly more challenging.

“None of that exists in the case of Röhm,” Hastings said. “I’ve had to come at it obliquely at every level and do a massive search through different archival sources and different types of sources to try to illuminate Röhm’s life.”

Instead of relying on a single collection, Hastings reconstructed Röhm’s life through scattered materials: military records, school registers, church documents, parliamentary records and surviving family correspondence.

One major breakthrough came through contact with Röhm’s nephew, the son of Röhm’s brother, who serves as the sole custodian of the remaining family materials. Now 94, he lives with his wife in a villa outside Munich, where he preserves the only surviving collection of family documents related to Röhm.

“I found that, lo and behold, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters that the authorities missed,” Hastings said. “That’s been a nice new sort of thing in fleshing out aspects of Röhm’s life that haven’t been known.”

Longing to belong

Born in Munich in 1887, Röhm grew up in a deeply religious Protestant family in predominantly Catholic Bavaria, a minority status that contributed to an early sense of marginality.

Research in Munich church archives revealed that Röhm’s father and uncle played leading roles in founding their Protestant congregation, evidence of an intensely religious upbringing that had been largely overlooked in previous scholarship.

Röhm’s adolescence unfolded between two contrasting worlds: the bohemian counterculture of Munich’s Schwabing district, known for cabarets and experimentation, and the rigid discipline of the nearby military barracks. That tension, Hastings suggested, shaped Röhm’s identity.

Kameradschaft and the military ideal

Röhm entered the Bavarian army as a young man and later fought in World War I, where he was severely wounded.

Hastings emphasized that the war years were formative.

Röhm became devoted to the ideal of Kameradschaft, an intense form of comradeship and male bonding that he would later translate into political organization.

“This experience in the war is extremely important for him,” Hastings said. “He takes this idea of male bonding or togetherness and uses it as a kind of organizing principle politically.”

After World War I, Röhm joined the Nazi Party in 1919, then still called the German Workers’ Party, becoming one of its earliest members. He served as a key recruiter within military circles and helped legitimize Hitler among army officers.

Hastings also examined Röhm’s years of transformation following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

During his time in prison and later while serving briefly in parliament, Röhm reflected on his identity and experienced Berlin’s vibrant gay nightlife.

In a 1928 memoir, “Geschichte eines Hochverräters” (History of a Traitor), Röhm presented a carefully curated account of his life, devoting only two pages to his childhood, a selective narrative Hastings argues obscured as much as it revealed.

Continuing discoveries

The book, currently under consideration with Oxford University Press, remains unfinished in part because new discoveries continue to surface.

“Every time I go back to Germany, I find materials I hadn’t known existed before,” Hastings said. “That’s why I’ve waited to finalize the contract; there’s always more to uncover.”

For members of Phi Alpha Theta, the event offered a rare look behind the scenes of historical scholarship. Hastings’ decade-long project demonstrated both the painstaking nature of archival research and the complexity of reconstructing a life deliberately erased from the record.

By piecing together fragments, Hastings is working to present a fuller portrait of a figure long defined primarily by his violent end.

The Oakland Post

Message History

Delivery option(s)