correction: the SA and the SS were different organizations — both certainly ruthless and depraved, but it was Rohm and the SA leadership of “brown shirts” who were most notoriously homosexual, and they are the ones that Hitler purged in the “night of the long knives”......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm
Death
Although determined to curb the power of the SA, Hitler put off doing away with his long-time comrade to the very end. Himmler, Heydrich, and Göring used Röhm’s published anti-Hitler rhetoric to support a claim that the SA was plotting to overthrow Hitler. By late June, this story had been officially recognised and Himmler was giving protective orders to the SS, while Sepp Dietrich went around showing army officers a purported SA execution list. Reports of the SA threat were passed to Hitler; it is possible that Himmler and his colleagues actually deceived Hitler into thinking the plot was real.
Meanwhile, Röhm and several of his cronies went away on holiday at a resort in Bad Wiessee. On June 28, Hitler phoned Röhm and asked him to gather all the SA leaders at Bad Wiessee on June 30 for a conference. Röhm agreed, apparently unsuspicious.
The day and night of June 30 marked the Night of the Long Knives, when the entire leadership of the SA was purged, along with many other political adversaries of the Nazis. At dawn that morning, Hitler flew to Munich and then drove to Bad Wiessee, where he personally arrested Röhm and the other SA leaders. All were imprisoned at Stadelheim Prison in Munich.
Hitler was uneasy authorising Röhm’s execution and gave Röhm an opportunity to commit suicide. On July 2, he was visited by SS-Brigadeführer Theodor Eicke (then Kommandant of Dachau) and SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert, who lay a pistol on the table, told Röhm he had ten minutes to use it, and left. Röhm refused, saying “If Adolf wants to shoot me, he can do it himself”.[citation needed] When Eicke and Lippert returned, he stood in the middle of the cell with his shirt opened, theatrically baring his chest as they shot him. Röhm was buried in the Westfriedhof (Western Cemetery) in Munich.
The purge of the SA was legalised the next day with a one-paragraph decree: the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence. At this time no public reference was made to the alleged SA rebellion; instead there were generalised references to misconduct, perversion, and some sort of plot. John Toland noted that Hitler had long been privately aware that Röhm and his SA associates were homosexuals, but said nothing, though he of course disapproved. Nazi propaganda now made use of their sexual orientation as justification of the executions.
A few days later, the claim of an incipient SA rebellion was publicised and became the official reason for the entire wave of arrests and executions. Indeed the affair was labeled the “Röhm-putsch” by German historians, though after World War II it has usually been modified as the “alleged Röhm-putsch”. In a speech on July 13, Hitler alluded to Röhm’s homosexuality and explained the purge as chiefly defence against treason. [3]
Thanks, Enchante, for the correction.
I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” way back in the sixties and time does have a tendency to make facts run together, such as SS and SA.
What I was trying to demonstrate was that Obama’s throwing close associates under the bus when they become inconvenient is typical of certain tyrannical types of personalities. No one and no group in this nation will have any rights save Obama. Notice how he made nicey with certain conservative pundits at a dinner last night?