Karl Ernst
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karl Ernst was an SA gruppenfuhrer who, in early 1933, was the SA leader in Berlin. Before joining the NSDAP he had been a hotel bell-boy.
It has been suggested[1] that it was he who, with a small party of stormtroopers, passed through a passage from the Palace of the President of the Reichstag, who was Hermann Göring, and set the Reichstag building on fire on the night of February 27, 1933. There is evidence indirectly to substantiate this: Gisevius at Nuremburg implicated Goebbels in planning the fire,[2] Rudolph Diels stated[3] that Göring knew how the fire was to be started, and General Franz Halder stated[4] that he had heard Göring claim responsibility for the fire.
Karl Ernst was bisexual; he was close to Ernst Röhm and was nicknamed "Frau Röhrbein" due to his intimacy with Paul Röhrbein.[5]
On June 30, 1934, Ernst had just married, and was in Bremen on his way to Madeira to honeymoon with his new wife. On this night Adolf Hitler, possibly at the instigation of Göring and Heinrich Himmler, but also possibly at the urging of the army high command, undertook a purge of the SA — an event known to history as the Night of the Long Knives. Ernst's wife and chauffeur were wounded, and he was taken back to Berlin by a detachment of the SS. Some 150 SA leaders, including Ernst, were stood against a wall at the Cadet School at Lichterfelde and shot by Leibstandarte-SS firing squads. Ernst, believing that he faced a putsch from the political Right, died shouting Heil Hitler.
