English: Photo of
Ernst Roehm, probably taken in Munich (München), Germany (Weimar Republic) on 1 April, 1924, as one of the defendants in the
Beer Hall Putsch (Munich Uprising) trial (
Hitler-Ludendorff-Prozess), dressed in the uniform of a
Hauptmann (captain) in the
Reichswehr:
- Peaked cap (German M1910 officer visor cap?) with cockades (Schirmmütze, Kokarden)
- Officer lace collar bars (Kragenspiegel, Litzen)
- Decorations:
- Epp Free Corps (Bayerisches Schützenkorps, Freikorps von Epp, Bund Freikorps Epp) diamond-shaped sleeve cloth patch badge (Ärmelabzeichen des Freikorps "Epp"; Rundes Abzeichen aus Messing mit Löwenkopf auf schwarzer Stoffraute).
- Gloves
- Shoulder belt
- Ceremonial sword, sword knot
- etc.
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm (28 November 1887 – 1 July 1934) was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). As one of the members of its predecessor, the German Workers' Party, he was a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler and a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung (SA, "Storm Units"), the Nazi Party's militia, and later was its commander. By 1934, the German Army feared the SA's influence and Hitler had come to see Röhm as a potential rival, so he was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
Following the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended the war, Röhm continued his military career as a captain in the Reichswehr. He was one of the senior members in Colonel von Epp's Bayerisches Freikorps für den Grenzschutz Ost ("Bavarian Free Corps for Border Patrol East"), formed in Ohrdruf in April 1919. In 1919 he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), which the following year became the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Not long afterward he met Adolf Hitler, and they became political allies and close friends. Röhm resigned or retired from the Reichswehr on 26 September 1923. Throughout the early 1920s, Röhm remained an important intermediary between Germany's right-wing paramilitary organizations and the Reichswehr. Additionally, it was Röhm who persuaded his former army commander, Colonel von Epp, to join the Nazis, an important development since Epp helped raise the sixty-thousand marks needed to purchase the Nazi periodical, the Völkischer Beobachter.