Ernst Roehm was an early Nazi Party member and head of its paramilitary unit, the Sturm-Abteilung (SA), before a deadly clash of wills with party leader Adolf Hitler. Roehm was considered a danger because he advocated a merger between the SA into the German army itself--a situation that could have easily lent itself to an internal coup within the Nazi Party. Roehm's assassination was accompanied that week by a wave of similar acts of violence known as the Roehm Affair that purged the Party of any dissidence.

Roehm was born in 1887 in Munich into a family of civil servants. He became an army officer in the Imperial German forces, reaching the rank of captain in World War I, but was irate when German military strength was reduced considerably after the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He was involved in some political agitation in Munich in 1919, evenforming...