The man pictured above is Ernst Rohm. He was one of Hitler's closest confidants. He had been part of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, the one that failed and got Hitler and several of the others who took part in it (including Rohm) convictions for treason. Hitler got a five year sentence, though he only served nine months. Rohm and several others were also convicted. Some did prison time but Rohm got off with a suspended sentence. However, the loyalty he had shown to the Nazi idea and to Hitler himself earned him a special, close relationship with Hitler for the next nine years. 

He built up the SA (in English, roughly "Storm Troopers"), the NAZIs' private militia. The SA were the street fighters who broke up the rallies of every rival political party and harassed Jews and any immigrants not seen as "Aryan" through the years until Hitler got the chancellorship. With the chancellorship, of course, he got power over all departments of the state ...Armed Forces, police, courts, schools, health care, taxation, etc. 

Hitler then gradually came to see Rohm as a threat to his leadership and long term goals. World conquest. Lebensraum. The Thousand Year Reich. 

Rohm really believed the "socialist" part of "National Socialist Workers' Party" (NAZI, for short). The idea of nationalizing the large industries of Germany was poison to the owners and financiers and also to the Reichswehr's officers, nearly all of whom had backed Hitler and the NAZI party in the later years of their rise to power. SA men, under orders from the hierarchy of the SA (often Rohm, himself), supported strikers in many major labor disputes during the 20's and 30's. 

In late June and early July of '34, Rohm and almost all of the upper echelon of the SA, all Rohm's personal associates, were assassinated - much faster than they could hide or fight back - by teams of the most secret and deadly assassins in the rival NAZI organization, the SS. 

But what did the NAZI propaganda then tell the baffled German public? How could they justify this monstrous, impossible-to-hide act? 

It was easy. Almost all of the men killed (at least 85 whose names were released, but probably closer to 200 total) were gay. They were homosexuals in a time when homosexuality was the "mortal sin", the one no excuse could excuse. German public opinion swayed in a day. Expressions of relief at the state's being freed of this "menace" became the correct opinions of all. Even though in reality there were still closet homosexuals in the party and in the SS, they stayed hidden. Politics. 

Hitler and his cronies went on, of course, to co-opt the legions of the SA (over 3 million men in 1934, at a time when the army, the Reichswehr, had been limited by the Treaty of Versailles to one hundred thousand). Gradually, the SA men were slipped into the Reichswehr as Hitler re-armed Germany and further and further defied the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The rest, as they say, is history. 

But why is Rohm's story especially interesting from the moral realist's point of view? Let's contrast it with the story of the man pictured below. 


                            

Alan Turing was comfortably homosexual for years and many who knew him were also aware of his homosexuality. But he was not shamed or harassed in the circles in which he lived, in academia and in the British code-breaking staff at Bletchley Park during WWII. He was probably the man who did the most, by his genius for math and logic, to win that war for the Allies. He broke the NAZI codes. 

He was arrested and charged for being a homosexual seven years after the end of the war, and his story has been cited often as an example of British hypocrisy in regard to homosexuality. But he was not assassinated. There was never a hint of his being assassinated for his sexual preference though if the NAZI's had known of his work during the war years, he would almost certainly have become a target for strategic reasons.  

My point is this: yes, I know he suffered a huge injustice in the end, being made to take pills to stifle his sex drive and eventually committing suicide when his friends mostly abandoned him. But all of this was far in the future when he was doing his invaluable work in cryptography. I am confident that there were almost certainly geniuses of a similar caliber in Germany in 1934, young people who saw how the politics of Germany were going, how dangerous it was to be gay, and who simply withdrew from any job in which their secret might be disclosed. The Brits were not free of homophobia, in public or private. They were just more tolerant than the NAZIs, and their more accepting attitude had real, major consequences.   

In addition to the above examples involving individuals, I like to cite the more general examples of the Codetalkers in the US Armed Forces (the Marines, especially) who made it possible during WWII for the Americans to employ a code that the Japanese simply could not break. This was because it was Navajo and only a few hundred speakers of this language even existed. All of these were loyal to the US and remained so. (As did the Lakota, Meskwaki, and Comanche employed in that war and the Cherokee and Choctaw similarly employed earlier in WWI.)  



   

                                                                    U.S. Army codetalkers in WWII


Tolerance makes pluralism, and pluralism makes us strong. Really strong, in hard, practical ways. Resourceful. Resilient. Nimble. Adaptable. 

And pluralism is just the result of brotherly love. No, we don't have it down very well yet, but yes, absolutely, you are stronger - YOU are stronger - over the long haul for really loving your neighbor. One day, the ways in which she/he now seems strange may save the lives of you and everyone you love. 

Freedom left to run as it wished would result in the formation of in-groups and suspicion, then hostility and violence. When it is attenuated and guided with a balancing portion of love, it makes for a complex, sometimes stressed community. But that community is strong. In the long haul of generations and centuries, it will outrun its less nimble competitors every time. 

There is hope in spite of how desperate our circumstances sometimes appear. Love really can guide us. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a nice day.