Hitler then confronted Röhm and the others and sent them to Stadelheim prison outside Munich to be later shot by the SS.
An exception was made in the case of Edmund Heines, an SA leader who had been found in bed with a young man. When told of this, Hitler ordered his immediate execution at the hotel.
A number of the SA leaders, including Röhm, were homosexuals. Prior to the purge, Hitler for the most part ignored their behavior because of their usefulness to him during his rise to power. However, their usefulness and Hitler’s tolerance had now come to an end. Later, their homosexual conduct would be partly used as an excuse for the murders.

The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak.
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom with which, as a rule, they can do little, and are prone to feel that they have been abandoned. They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization and the hideous abuse of their human freedom, for they absolutely fail to suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they always submit in the end. […]
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace again, they sacrifice the hated individual.
However, the fools obtain no peace.
The game begins again and is repeated over and over until fear of the mad dog results in suggestive paralysis. […]
They fear an irnpotent, spineless genius less than a forceful nature of moderate intelligence. […]
This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison gas.
It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be.
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses.
Here, too, the psychological effect can be calculated with precision.
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.

Bear with me for another round of quotes, in which Hitler directs his frustration from his unfulfilled artistic past and his present enmity with Social-Democrats against Jews that infiltrated both artistic and political life:

What had to be reckoned heavily against the Jews in my eyes was when I became acquainted with their activity in the press, art, literature, and the theater. All the unctuous reassurances helped little or nothing It sufficed to look at a billboard, to study the names of the men behind the horrible trash they advertised, to make you hard for a long time to come. This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people was being infected with it!
It was terrible, but not to be overlooked, that precisely the Jew, in tremendous numbers, seemed chosen by Nature for this shameful calling.
Is this why the Jews are called the ‘chosen people’?
The fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly one hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants, could simply not be tanked away; it was the plain truth. […]
When thus for the first time I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic [prostitution] in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back. […]
When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.
Even in my daily relations with my fellow workers, I observed the amazing adaptability with which they adopted different positions on the same question, sometimes within an interval of a few days, sometimes in only a few hours. It was hard for me to understand how people who, when spoken to alone, possessed some sensible opinions, suddenly lost them as soon as they came under the influence of the masses. It was often enough to make one despair. When, after hours of argument, I was convinced that now at last I had broken the ice or cleared up some absurdity, and was beginning to rejoice at my success, on the next day to my disgust I had to begin all over again; it had all been in vain. Like an eternal pendulum their opinions seemed to swing back again and again to the old madness.
All this I could understand: that they were dissatisfied with their lot and cursed the Fate which often struck them so harshly; that they hated the employers who seemed to them the heartless bailiffs of Fate; that they cursed the authorities who in their eyes were without feeling for their situation; that they demonstrated against food prices and carried their demands into the streets: this much could be understood without recourse to reason. But what inevitably remained incomprehensible was the boundless hatred they heaped upon their own nationality, despising its greatness, besmirching its history, and dragging its great men into the gutter.
This struggle against their own species, their own clan, their own homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was unnatural.
It was possible to cure them temporarily of this vice, but only for days or at most weeks. If later you met the man you thought you had converted, he was just the same as before.
His old unnatural state had regained full possession of him.

To conclude with, Hitler was engaged in a larger war with what he perceived as human weakness in his German fellows. He thought that Jews took over the nation in many fields of public life, like arts and politics. Like other leaders or political thinkers of the past (Plato, f.i.), he thought that this individual weakness cannot be cured without changing the political organization of the community (the polity). He took it upon himself to address this problem by becoming the inspirational figure and the leader of a political elite that was supposed to cure the illnesses of the society of that time. From the quotes I provided, it’s easy to see that he was also frustrated that he couldn’t find a method to deal with this madness that he tried to address using reason and later learning more about psychology and the masses. A very strict organisation of society included integrating the young in youth camps, setting very clear separate roles for genders based on archaic nationalistic myths, eliminating ‘the weak and corrupted’, directing a nation’s ‘vital force’ into work and waging war against ‘inferior races’, etc. So, for Hitler it was more than an issue of power, as it probably was for many of his fellows in the Nazi political elite. As he said, it was an issue of ‘to be or not be’ (weak, we might add). As I wrote in the beginning of this message, at the end of the 19th century Europe was decadent and torn by political conflict. We all know what happened in both world wars, how much human destruction they brought about.
Ironically, after the first world war, Einstein was preoccupied with finding ways to avoid any future war. He wrote a letter to Freud to ask him about the possibility of such enterprise. Freud replied in a long and very carefully explained answer that mankind is torn between conflicting drives, like an individual and physically bonding drive (Eros) and a destructive and outward drive of aggression (Thanatos). According to Freud, humans found ways to work around this conflict by finding less dangerous outlets. Men’s aggressive instinct could be directed into war or it could be tamed by the communal bonds of laws and other individual bonds. On the other hand, a diminished aggressive drive contributed to and promoted man’s cultural progress in history. So the future was uncertain, according to Freud, and men of “cultural disposition” like Einstein and him could only hope that the cultural drive will eventually prevail if there was any hope for wars never to occur again. That was ironic for the exchange between these two Jewish thinkers, because after Freud sent his reply in July 1932, by the end of the year Einstein had to flee Germany and find a new home in the United States, just one month short of Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933.
Now enters the stage this man called Scott Lively that I understand wrote a book in which he claims a homosexual cult was the driving force behind Nazism. I haven’t read the book and therefore cannot comment on his arguments, but if this is what he claims, from the arguments I exposed here one can get an idea that it was a larger picture that motivated Nazis, in which homosexuality per se was not such a big public issue. On the contrary, like so many things in life, the elite itself was mixed and the policy of dealing with homosexuality was contextual, not strictly defined. So if this is Lively’s thesis, there are more reasons which contradict this idea, by all appearances.