The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich's focus on the sexual proclivities of the Third Reich's leadership was very much representative of a certain postwar subgenre that explained the crimes of the Third Reich. Broadly speaking, the general idea behind these explanations was that the Nazi leadership's degeneracy in the bedroom was interrelated with their aggressive politics. This explanation had particular relevance in the Adenauer years of the FRG where conservative German Christian groups, many of whom were not as untarnished by Nazism as they claimed, asserted that the Nazis were sadosexual perverts who possessed a distinct lack of sanctity for life or other Christian virtues. This larger discourse on Nazi sexuality conflated rumors and innuendos about Hitler's alleged deviancy such as coprophilia, the existence of homosexuals in the SA like Röhm, as well as the very real examples of sexual degradation in the various Nazi camps as evidence there was a connection between sexuality and the Nazis' brand of politics. Shirer was no stranger to these rumors as a journalist operating in the Third Reich and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich repeated a number of them.

The problem with this reductionism is that it really is often repeating rumors and fitting them into an analytical framework that is quite faulty. There were homosexuals within the NSDAP and its organs, but their sexuality was often a very real liability rather than an asset or a precondition to their involvement with Nazism. Shirer and his ilk often draw a straight line between homosexuality and Nazism which is not a sound explanation for the crimes of the dictatorship or what drew various Germans towards it.

Röhm is a case in point for the complexities of sexual identity within interwar Germany. Ernst Röhm really was not an open homosexual in the 2018 meaning of the term; ie someone who openly admits to their sexual orientation. Instead, Röhm tended to be more candid about his proclivities in private NSDAP or other social circles. He also tried to compartmentalize his personal life away from his political one. His autobiography likewise tangentially attacked Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code against sodomy. He would attack German prudery and hypocrisy that prevented men from acting on their passions, a coded attack on 175. Röhm's activities sometimes landed him in an occasional police questioning, especially since the NSDAP's political rivals sniffed out an obvious scandal. The SA leader would never deny he was attracted to both men and women in these interrogations, but he always denied he had actually broken Paragraph 175 which had specific definitions for what constituted sodomy.

Some conservative commentators both in the postwar FRG and in the post-Cold War US (eg tripe like The Pink Swastika) have taken Röhm's sexual orientation as an example of Nazi depravity and how at ease the Nazis were with homosexuality. This is an untenable thesis as Röhm was something of an outlier in the Party in terms of his personal life and indiscretions. Moreover, his homosexuality was a component of a larger matrix of how he conceived of masculinity's place in the new order.

The SA leader cultivated a very hypermasculine image both in his own life and his leadership of the SA. According to Röhm, masculinity was the highest form of power and discipline. He valorized the camaraderie of the frontline trenches and male community. Röhm's Weltanschauung associated chaos and disorder with feminine characteristics. His ideal world was one in which women had little to no say and male virtues reigned supreme in society. His attacks on Paragraph 175 obliquely as a public figure were notable, but he was no Magnus Hirschfeld; Röhm's views on sex almost exclusively focused on male pleasure. Lesbianism or even straight female sexuality had little space in this vision of an ideal society. He in private maintained that his sexual proclivities were just an expression of this masculinity. But gay liberation was not his main focus. Rather, Röhm framed male same-sex sexuality as a component of a social order that was highly patriarchal and very heteronormative when it came to defining masculinity. The ideal men in Röhm's view were to be militaristic and men of action. There was little room for alternative masculinities such as crossdressing in this narrow definition of gender.

It was this regimented, violent, and predatory masculinity that made Röhm an asset to the NSDAP in its seizure of power. But Röhm's ideas on social leveling via mass paramilitarism made him powerful enemies within the Reichswehr. Additionally, the SS also recognized that Röhm was a rival, as did Göring. This constellation of enemies meant that Röhm's star fell precipitously. His homosexual activities became a liability in this internal power struggle, but they were just a pretext for the extrajudicial murder of the SA's leadership during the Night of the Long Knives.

Did the NSDAP have gay members? Yes. Did these gay members find freedom to express their sexuality in the Party? Hell no. Once in power, the Third Reich launched a sweeping homophobic campaign that targeted males for homosexual behavior. Röhm's fall also showed that homosexuality was a convenient crime to pin against political enemies in lieu of actual evidence. Homosexuals inside the Party might find the endemic corruption of the NSDAP gave them protection from the law, but this was a double-edged sword. The polycratic Nazi state ensured a cut-throat level of competition and rumors of deviance, or direct evidence of it, could be used by rivals to remove an internal enemy. The old guard Reichswehr officer Werner von Fritsch was forced out of his position in OKH after he had expressed doubts about rearmament on the pretext of an alleged solicitation of a male prostitute. Homosexuality was always a liability inside the Third Reich, and this was no different inside the corridors of the Party. Lesbians factored very little in Nazi formulations on sex, and women convicted for same-sex offenses usually received the charge of asocial in the Nazi justice system. One of the more disturbing aspects of this treatment of these women was that part of such asocials' "correction" during the war was to serve in KZ brothels servicing men. The highly gendered division of the Party and its celebration of youth and masculinity certainly facilitated the opportunities for same-sex contact, but this was a behavior that was clearly at odds with how the NSDAP defined masculinity.

Shirer's uncritical focus on the sexual activities of the Nazi leadership is one of many reasons why The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a horribly dated work. Critics in the 1960s recognized that the American journalist did not understand German history and produced a rather slipshod history of a complex period. Scholarship on Nazi Germany, especially in areas such as sexuality, has grown considerably since the 1960, which makes this aspect of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich look really behind the times.

Sources

Hancock, Eleanor. Ernst Röhm: Hitler's SA Chief of Staff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Siemens, Daniel. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017

Hi, this answer by u/jimjay goes into detail about the relationship between the Nazis, Homosexuality and Rohm, as well as this one by /u/kieslowskifan.