Relations With Hitler
The Freikorps were largely fanatically right-wing fighters, part of Europe-wide conflict like the White Guard in Finland, and subsequently formed the core of the Nazi establishment. But Hitler also viewed some of them as threats. A huge ceremony was arranged on November 9, 1933 in which the Freikorps leaders symbolically gave their old battle flags to Hitler's SA and SS. It was a sign of allegiance to their new authority, the Nazi state. When Hitler's internal purge of the party, the Night of the Long Knives, came in 1934, a large number of Freikorps leaders were targeted for killing or arrest, including Ehrhardt and Röhm. Historian Robert GL Waite claims that in Hitler's "Röhm Purge" speech to the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, he implies that the Freikorps are one of the groups of "pathological enemies of the state".
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