Edmund Heines was born on July 21, 1897, in Munich, then part of the German Empire. He was the illegitimate child of Helena Marta Heines, whose father was Lieutenant Edmund von Parish, a member of a Hamburg merchant family in whose service his mother worked as a nanny.
When World War I began on July 28, 1914, Heines was still a young man. The following year he joined the Bavarian Army and fought on the Western Front as a field artillery operator.
In the fall of 1915 he was severely wounded in the head. He received the Iron Cross first and second class and was promoted to Lieutenant of the reserve in 1918.
World War I ended on November 11, 1918, when German leaders signed the Armistice in the Compiègne forest in France. In the new Weimar Republic, the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933, Heines became involved in the Freikorps movement in the aftermath of the war and during the German Revolution of 1918–1919.
Freikorps, or independent paramilitary units, proliferated across Germany and were composed primarily of World War I veterans returning from the war. The Freikorps fought against Communists and other groups they believed were responsible for German defeat.
Freikorps units acted with particular brutality and violence, and many proved rebellious and difficult for the German government and military to control. By 1921, approximately 400,000 men were involved in Freikorps paramilitary groups.
One of these groups was Freikorps Rossbach, which fought in West Prussia and the Baltic states. In March 1920, Heines participated in the Kapp Putsch, an attempted coup against the German national government in Berlin on March 13, 1920.
Its goal was to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, overthrow the Weimar Republic, and establish an autocratic government in its place. It was supported by part of the German Army as well as nationalist and monarchist factions.
After the failure of the putsch, members of the Freikorps went into hiding. In July 1920, Edmund Heines was involved in the murder of Willi Schmidt, a 20-year-old farm worker who allegedly wanted to reveal hidden arms caches of the disguised Freikorps.
Following Schmidt's murder, Heines returned to Munich. In 1922 he became leader of the Munich Ortsgruppe, the local Freikorps Rossbach group.
In December of the same year, Heines became member number 78 of the Nazi Party and transferred his Munich Ortsgruppe to the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Stormtroopers or the Brownshirts for the color of their uniform. He would soon become one of the SA's leading members.
One of the SA's first organized activities was the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which took place on November 8 and 9, 1923. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government.
The plotters hoped to march on Berlin to launch a national revolution, but the insurrection failed miserably. Units of the Munich police force clashed with the Nazi Stormtroopers as they marched into the city center.
The two groups exchanged fire, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers. This attempted coup d'état came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Its ringleaders, including Adolf Hitler, were arrested. Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison.
Heines was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment at Landsberg prison and was held together in the same cell with Hitler. In the end Hitler only served eight months of his sentence, and Heines was released prematurely in September 1924.
In the wake of the putsch, the federal and Bavarian governments banned the Nazi Party, its formations, and its newspaper. But Hitler's public commitment to coming to power legally induced the authorities to lift the ban in 1925.
From 1925 to August 1926, Heines was the federal director of the Schilljugend, a right-wing youth organization affiliated with the SA and the Nazi Party. In 1926 Heines enrolled at Erlangen University to study law and became a Sturmführer of the SA.
On January 22, 1928, Heines was arrested in Schongau for his involvement in Willi Schmidt's murder in 1920, which was exposed during a blackmail attempt. Heines was transferred to Stettin as the main defendant in the trial for Schmidt's murder.
During the trial, Heines claimed that Schmidt had been shot while trying to escape. The prosecution demanded the death penalty for Schmidt's murder, but the judgment of the Stettin Court was 15 years in prison for manslaughter, later reduced to five years.
On May 14, 1929, Heines was released from custody by decision of the Stettin Court for a bail of 5,000 Reichsmarks. In 1929 Heines was also convicted of the murder of Communist Conrad Pietzuch, who had been beaten to death by an SA gang led by Heines.
The trial had to be reopened due to a technical error, and Heines soon received an amnesty because of a supposedly patriotic motive. At this time Edmund Heines was one of the most feared and hated men in the Nazi Party, notorious among the population for his brutality, ruthlessness, and sadism.
He was known for personally killing political opponents of the Nazi Party. Despite his high-ranking status, he is said to have killed at least 18 people before 1933.
Heines was also an open homosexual. He was unusually tall and powerfully built, with a contradictory youthful and boyish face.
On May 1, 1931, Heines was appointed deputy to Ernst Röhm, the effective commander of the SA and a close friend to Hitler. While Adolf Hitler seemed to have a personal aversion to Heines, Röhm considered him one of his closest personal friends.
Heines's position in the Nazi Party was weakened by his homosexuality, and he was dependent on Hitler's personal support. Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who sought to cement the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing.
Heines's homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism.
In 1931 the leader of the Berlin SA, Walter Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Popenjungen, meaning male prostitutes. Among these so-called Röhm prostitutes also belonged Edmund Heines.
Internal opposition to Röhm intensified in February 1931 when Hitler replaced Stennes with Paul Schulz, who promoted Edmund Heines and Karl Ernst, both homosexuals, within the Berlin SA.
On the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag Parliament building burned down due to arson. The consensus of nearly all historians is that a Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was the one who set the fire.
However, the 1933 Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, which was published in Paris, France, claimed that Röhm's assistant Georg Bell, who was murdered in early 1933 in Austria, had been his pimp and had procured Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe for him.
The book claimed that a clique of homosexual Stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines set the Reichstag fire and that the convicted arsonist van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection. The book also claimed that Röhm's assistant Georg Bell was killed to cover it up.
There was no evidence for these claims, and in fact Heines was in Breslau at the time. Nevertheless, the matter was so politically explosive that it was aired at van der Lubbe's trial in Leipzig.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in Germany in January 1933. After Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, many political leaders, including President Paul von Hindenburg and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, feared that the SA had become too powerful.
While in 1930 the SA had 60,000 members, by April 1934 it was 3 million, which meant that it significantly outnumbered the German army. The SA continued to provide key support to the Nazi regime as it consolidated its power into a dictatorship in 1933.
However, the SA leadership had demands to finish the Nazi Revolution. Röhm's plan was for the SA to absorb and replace the German military.
Hitler saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his newly gained political power. This behavior became a source of embarrassment and discomfort for Hitler in his dealings with the traditional German nationalist elites.
The SA leadership sought to remove the elites from power and replace them with fanatical Nazis. However, Hitler, the Nazi Party leadership, and the leadership of the SS at the time of the formation of the SA understood that the Nazi regime needed to work with the traditional elites, as they would need their support to consolidate power and prepare the nation for a war of expansion.
As early as April 1934, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich began to conspire with Hermann Göring to persuade Hitler to eliminate Röhm. In June 1934, in preparation for the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, both Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, assembled a dossier of manufactured evidence to suggest that Röhm had been paid 12 million Reichsmarks, 60 million United States dollars in today's value, by the government of France to overthrow Hitler.
Leading officers in the SA were shown falsified evidence on June 24 that Röhm had planned to use the SA to launch a plot against the government. At Hitler's direction, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich drew up lists of people in and outside of the SA to be killed.
Meanwhile, President von Hindenburg, the leadership of the Reichswehr, and Hitler's conservative coalition partners, including Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, issued warnings about the increasingly radical Nazi regime. If the revolutionary elements of the Nazi regime were not brought under control, the Army leaders threatened to overthrow the Hitler government and place the country under martial law.
Despite radical rhetoric, neither Röhm nor his top commanders ever planned to seize power in Germany. Hitler considered Röhm one of his few friends and procrastinated over the decision.
Tension meanwhile increased towards the end of spring 1934, and the plot against Röhm took on a more defined shape. Hitler tasked Himmler and the SS with carrying out the purge.
On June 28, Hitler ordered Röhm to assemble the top SA leaders at a Bavarian spa in Bad Wiessee. On the morning of June 30, as Hitler was landing in Munich located just 50 kilometers away, SS units commanded by Dachau concentration camp commandant Theodor Eicke surprised the SA leaders asleep in a hotel.
Some were there with their male lovers. Among them was Edmund Heines, who was caught in bed in the arms of an unidentified 18-year-old male. The boy was later identified as Heines's young driver.
Heines refused to cooperate and get dressed, and when the SS detectives reported this to Hitler, Hitler stormed into Heines's room and yelled, "Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes I will have you shot on the spot." After five minutes had passed, Heines had still not complied with the order.
As a result, Hitler became furious and ordered his SS men to have both men executed. According to Alfred Rosenberg's account, Heines's lover was led to the cellar and murdered there.
Edmund Heines, then 36 years old, was executed the same day, on June 30, 1934, in the courtyard of the Stadelheim prison by a firing squad commanded by Sepp Dietrich.
Hitler remained indecisive about Röhm's fate until July 1. On that day, on Hitler's order, Röhm was shot. All evidence suggests that Röhm was loyal to Hitler until the very end, despite Nazi claims otherwise.
The purge also targeted the top SA leaders both in Munich and around the country, and it also took the opportunity to eliminate several other political opponents such as General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler's predecessor as Chancellor. They mostly targeted right-wing nationalists as well as former supporters whom they believed had betrayed the Nazis.
In all, scholars have identified by name 90 persons killed in the Röhm Purge. The actual number is probably around 100 persons.
One of the killed was Heines's younger brother Oskar, who was an Obersturmführer of the SA. On the morning of July 1, 1934, he heard a radio report concerning the execution of his brother, and soon after he reported to the police in Breslau, where he was immediately placed under arrest by the SS and then shot at dawn on July 2, 1934.
At Hitler's request, the German Parliament declared the killings legal after the fact, based on a false accusation that the Röhm commanders had planned to overthrow the government. In a speech on July 13 justifying his actions, Hitler alleged that both Schleicher and Röhm were traitors working in the pay of France.
In his speech, Hitler identified Heines as one of the principal members of a small group of elements which were held together through a like disposition. This episode demonstrated the Nazi regime's willingness to go outside the law to commit murder as an act of state for the perceived survival of the nation.
On August 1, 1934, one day before President Hindenburg's death, Hitler's cabinet passed the Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich, which stipulated that upon Hindenburg's death the office of the President, head of state, would be abolished and its powers merged with the Chancellor, head of government, under the title of Führer.
On August 2, 1934, two hours after Hindenburg's death, Hitler proclaimed himself the Führer of Germany and claimed absolute power. There were no tears shed for Edmund Heines.