WI: Rohm Wins Power Struggle?

We think of the nazis as a machine, and that just wasn’t always the case.

Very true. The Third Reich looked all neat and tidy on the outside because that was the image the Nazis wanted to present. Inside...it was not. It was a polycratic mess full of competing satraps with their private fiefdoms, held together by Hitler. We're very fortunate that it was not a well-oiled machine.


Regarding the Holocaust, while with the benefit of hindsight it seems like there was a clear, linear road from Hitler's delusional rantings in Mein Kampf and Munich beer halls to the gas chambers of the death camps and the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen, when the Nazis came to power they did not have a step by step plan in the drawing board, just waiting to be implemented. It was always going to terrible for Jews to live under their regime, but their anti-Jewish policy evolved over time.


There was a lot of back and forth, from the rowdy antisemitism of the early 30s, to the SD's policy of 'encouraging' emigration (by working with Zionist groups and making conditions for Jews in Germany as bad possible through administrative measures, while also taking away all their assets), to the plans for a Jewish 'reservation' in eastern Poland or Madagascar and the first deportations, to the escalation of mass killings and the start of the Holocaust as we know it.
 
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NoMommsen

Donor
Aside the extensive and almost not to be supplemented posts of @Tolkiene I would like to add some thoughts
..

Much has been made about Röhm taking the Socialist part of National Socialism more seriously than Hitler, but what he wrote and said about the 'Second Revolution' was vague.

...
... and most of it without reason and with as much 'weight' as the almost as often in this situation named 'Strasserists'.

About the latter :
First question should always be (and only rarely asked ... or even known about) about which Strasser is meant, Gregor or Otto. The first evolving until 1932 into something very much resembling socialdemocrats of Germany in the 60ies/70ies (aside the nationalistic and chauvinist-rassistic positions 'fancy' in interwar period), the latter even in the postwar GDR shouting out national-bolshevistic phrases.

Röhm and the overwhelming majority of the SA were neither.

For most SA-members the 'true' NSDAP or then the 'Second Revolution' should have lead to them getting some 'proper' position with payment best without having to work for what for the average SA-bloke would have meant : "Now I am the boss instead of my boss!"
... and that essentially was it.

Röhm probably thought a wee bit 'deeper' in trying to revive the 'experience of the trench comradeship' what he somewhat heroized as the only 'true comradeship' and highest expression of a social community. He essentially wished to turn the whole german state into a kind of permanent SA/militia/military field-training camp in an uneducated misinterpretation of the antiprussianis phrase pf "an army that affords itself a state".
Perhaps that could count as kind of a "social(istic ?)" utopia ... or rather dystopia.
 
... and most of it without reason and with as much 'weight' as the almost as often in this situation named 'Strasserists'.

Ayyup. Arguably, the only Strasserist in the 30s who produced anything close to a concrete Third Posititonist plan was Otto Strasser, and said plan got him more or less booted from the party.

With the approval of his own brother.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
Ayyup. Arguably, the only Strasserist in the 30s who produced anything close to a concrete Third Posititonist plan was Otto Strasser, and said plan got him more or less booted from the party.

With the approval of his own brother
.
To be more precise :
Otto Strasser left the NSDAP on his own account - not 'held back' by his brother. And that happened already on 4th July ( :openedeyewink: ) 1930.
 
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