Pace Pastor Niemöller, Hitler's first really murderous move wasn't against the Communists or the Social Democrats, let alone the Jews. It was, of course, against his own side - specifically the radical wing of the Nazi Party (i.e. even more specifically Ernst Röhm and the other gays of the SA), over which he most immediately needed to exert control. And whom, of course, no one would particularly miss!
But it wasn't just gay Nazis who died on the Night of the Long Knives. At the same time, several non-Nazi right-wingers also met their maker. As, indeed, did a certain modernist Catholic priest* by the name of Fr Bernhard Stempfle.
As with Röhm, Fr Stemfle's main real crime had been simply that he knew too much. Like Röhm, he had been a member of Hitler's inner circle. Indeed, he had helped Hitler to write Mein Kampf, and may quite possibly have written much of it himself. Unlike Röhm though, he had wanted out.
Which rather raises the question what exactly he must have known about Hitler that could have been so damaging that he ended up paying for it with his life.
And here, of course, the conspiracy theories can kick off with abandon. How close were he and Hitler really? Had he ever heard Hitler's confession? What might he have known about Hitler's sex life? Would it really have been so very damaging for Hitler if people learnt quite how little of his famous book he had actually written personally? Or was Fr Stempfle's death simply one final, symbolic, paranoiac and parricidal Oedipal repudiation of the Catholicism from which the Führer had long ago lapsed?
And, of course, was it significant that it was Emil Maurice (Hitler's Mischling - i.e. partly Jewish - driver, whom he'd sacked for seducing his niece) who personally did the deed?
No answer is entirely satisfactory, though it can be said almost for certain that the death of Fr Stempfle marked the final end of whatever vestigial or superficial Catholicism had remained within the Nazi movement.
From 2nd July 1934 onward, neither gays nor Catholics (let alone gay Catholics!) would have any place in mainstream Nazism.
*The myth that he was a Jesuit is hilariously widespread, and of course it speaks volumes not just about the anti-Catholic bigotry of those who perpetuate it but also about the lazily anti-intellectual attitude of virtually the entire political Left when dealing with either the Catholic Church or the Third Reich (let alone both!). In truth, he was of course (because Wikipedia really is just two clicks away!) a Hieronymite.
