“All revolutions,” said Ernst Rohm, leader of Adolf Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs, the S.A., “devour their own children.”

Ernst Rohm

Fittingly, he said this as he sat inside a prison cell awaiting his own execution.

On June 30, 1934, Hitler had ordered a massive purge of his private army, the S.A., or Stormtroopers. The purge was carried out by Hitler’s elite army-within-an-army, the Schutzstaffel, or Protective Squads, better known as the SS.

The S.A. Brownshirts had been instrumental in securing Hitler’s rise to Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. They had intimidated political opponents and organized mass rallies for the Nazi Party.

But after Hitler reached the pinnacle of power, they became a liability.

Ernst Rohm, their commander, urged Hitler to disband the regular German army, the Reichswehr, and replace it with his own legions as the nation’s defense force.

Frightened by Rohm’s ambitions, the generals of the Reichswehr gave Hitler an ultimatum: Get rid of Rohm—or they would get rid of him.

So Rohm died in a hail of SS bullets—as did several hundred of his longtime S.A. cronies.

SS firing squad

Among the SS commanders supervising those executions was Reinhard Heydrich—a tall, blond-haired formal naval officer who was both a champion fencer and talented violinist.

Ultimately, he would become the personification of the Nazi ideal—”the man with the iron heart,” as Hitler eulogized at Heydrich’s funeral just eight years later.

Reinhard Heydrich

Even so, Heydrich had a problem: He could never escape vicious rumors that his family tree contained a Jewish ancestor.

His paternal grandmother had married Reinhold Heydrich, and then Gustav Robert Suss. For unknown reasons, she decided to call herself Suss-Heydrich.

Since “Suss” was widely believed in Germany to indicate Jewish origin, the “stigma” of Jewish heritage attached itself to the Heydrich family.

Heydrich joined the SS in 1931 and quickly became head of its counterintelligence service. But his arrogance and overweening ambition created a great many enemies.

Only a year later, he became the target of an urgent investigation by the SS itself. The charge: That he was part-Jewish, the ultimate sin in Hitler’s “racially pure” Nazi Germany.

The investigation cleared Heydrich, but the rumor of his “tainted” origins persisted, clearly tormenting the second most powerful man in the SS. Even his superior, Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, believed it.

When Heydrich was assassinated in 1942 by Czech commandos in Prague, Himmler attended his funeral. He paid tribute to his former subordinate at the service: ”You, Reinhard Heydrich, were a truly good SS-man.”

But he could not resist saying in private: “He was an unhappy man, completely divided against himself, as often happened with those of mixed race.”

Those who dare to harshly judge others usually find themselves assailed just as harshly.

A modern-day example is Rick Santorum, the former United States Senator from Pennsylvania (1995 – 2007) and a Republican candidate for President in 2012 and 2016.

Rick Santorum

From his entry into politics, Santorum has been a fierce opponent of legalized abortion and even birth control.  Among his comments on these issues:

• On why abortion should be illegal even in rape cases: “I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created—in the sense of rape—but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.”
• On criminal penalties for doctors who perform abortion: “I believe that, that any doctor who performs an abortion—that—I would advocate that any doctor that performs an abortion should be criminally charged for doing so.”
• On de-funding Planned Parenthood: “I can’t imagine any other organization with its roots as poisonous as the roots of Planned Parenthood getting federal funding of any kind. This is an organization that was founded on the eugenics movement, founded on racism.”
• On opposing birth control: “One of the things I will talk about [if elected President in 2012] that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s okay.  Contraception’s okay.’ It’s not okay, because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Like the Nazis, Republicans are eager to lecture their fellow citizens on “how things are supposed to be.”  And to enforce their beliefs on “how things are supposed to be” with draconian laws.

So it no doubt shocked Santorum—and his anti-abortion supporters—when he found himself accused of being “soft” on abortion.

The attack came in the form of pink fliers appearing on car windshields at many South Carolina political events in January, 2012.

They were the work of Elizabeth Leichert, an anti-abortion activist.

Dated January 18, 2012, the flier read:

“Like many Christians I know, I was originally very attracted to Rick Santorum’s positions – especially on the Right to Life issue.

“But that was before I began digging into his record….

“Did you know Rick Santorum’s wife, Karen, had a six-year affair with an abortionist named Tom Allen?”