On this date, 30 June 1934, The Night of the
Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany,
takes place. I will post information about this purge from Wikipedia and other
links.
The
Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer (help·info)), sometimes called
Operation Hummingbird or, in Germany, the Röhm Putsch
(German spelling: Röhm-Putsch),
or sometimes mockingly Reichsmordwoche (Reich Murder Week), was a purge that took
place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime
carried out a series of political extra-judicial executions. Leading members of
the left-wing Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), along with
its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were killed, as were prominent
conservative anti-Nazis (such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and
Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in
1923). Many of those killed were leaders of the Sturmabteilung
(SA), the paramilitary Brownshirts.
Hitler
moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm because he 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. Hitler also wanted to conciliate
leaders of the Reichswehr, the official German military who feared and
despised the SA—in particular Röhm's ambition to absorb the Reichswehr into the
SA under his own leadership. Additionally, Hitler was uncomfortable with Röhm's
outspoken support for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth
(in Röhm's view, President Hindenburg's appointing of Hitler as German
Chancellor on January 30, 1933 had accomplished the "nationalistic"
revolution but had left unfulfilled the "socialistic" motive in
National Socialism). Finally, Hitler used the purge to attack or eliminate
critics of his new regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von
Papen, as well as to settle scores with old enemies.[a]
At
least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have
been in the hundreds,[b][c]
and more than a thousand perceived opponents were arrested. Most of the
killings were carried out by the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo (Geheime
Staatspolizei), the regime's secret police. The purge strengthened and
consolidated the support of the Reichswehr for Hitler. It also provided a legal
grounding for the Nazi regime, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept
aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to
demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. The Night of the Long Knives was a
turning point for the German government. It established Hitler as "the
supreme judge of the German people," as he put it in his July 13, 1934
speech to the Reichstag.
Before
its execution, its planners sometimes referred to it as Hummingbird
(German: Kolibri),
the codeword used to send the execution squads into action on the day of the
purge. The codename for the operation appears to have been chosen arbitrarily.
The phrase "Night of the Long Knives" in the German language predates
the massacre itself and refers generally to acts of vengeance. Germans still
use the term Röhm-Putsch
to describe the murders, the term given to it by the Nazi regime, despite its
unproven implication that the murders were necessary to prevent a coup. German
authors often use quotation marks or write about the sogenannter
Röhm-Putsch
("so-called Röhm Putsch") for emphasis.
 |
|
Hitler
posing in Nuremberg with SA members in the late 1920s. Julius Streicher is to
Hitler's right, and Hermann Göring stands bedecked with medals beneath Hitler.
|
Hitler
and the Sturmabteilung (SA)
President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on January 30,
1933.[d]
Over the next few months, during the so-called Gleichschaltung,
Hitler dispensed with the need for the Reichstag as a legislative
body[e]
and eliminated all rival political parties in
Germany, so that by the middle of 1933 the country had become a one-party
state under his direction and control. Hitler did not exercise absolute
power, however, despite his swift consolidation of political authority. As
chancellor, Hitler did not command the army, which remained under the formal
leadership of Hindenburg, a highly respected veteran field
marshal. While many officers were impressed by Hitler's promises of an
expanded army, a return to conscription, and a more aggressive foreign policy, the
army continued to guard its traditions of independence during the early years
of the Nazi regime.
To
a lesser extent, the Sturmabteilung (SA), a Nazi paramilitary organisation, remained
somewhat autonomous within the party itself. The SA evolved out of the remnants
of the Freikorps movement of the post-World War I years. The Freikorps
were nationalistic organisations primarily composed of disaffected,
disenchanted, and angry German combat veterans founded by the government in
January 1919 to deal with the threat of a Communist revolution when it appeared
that there was a lack of loyal troops. A very large number of the Freikorps
believed that the November Revolution had betrayed them when Germany was alleged to be
on the verge of victory in 1918. Hence, the Freikorps were in opposition
to the new Weimar Republic, which was born as a result of the
November Revolution, and whose founders were contemptuously called
"November criminals". Captain Ernst Röhm
of the Reichswehr served as the liaison with the Bavarian Freikorps.
Röhm was given the nickname "The Machine Gun King of Bavaria" in the
early 1920s, since he was responsible for storing and issuing illegal machine
guns to the Bavarian Freikorps units. Röhm left the Reichswehr in 1923
and later became commander of the SA. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA
functioned as a private militia used by Hitler to intimidate rivals and disrupt
the meetings of competing political parties, especially those of the Social Democrats and the Communists. Also known as the
"brownshirts" or "stormtroopers", the SA became notorious
for their street battles with the Communists. The violent confrontations
between the two contributed to the destabilisation of Germany's inter-war
experiment with democracy, the Weimar Republic. In June 1932, one of the
worst months of political violence, there were more than 400 street battles,
resulting in 82 deaths.
Hitler's
appointment as chancellor, followed by the suppression of all political parties
except the Nazis, did not end the violence of the stormtroopers. Deprived of
Communist party meetings to disrupt, the stormtroopers would sometimes run riot
in the streets after a night of drinking. They would attack passers-by, and
then attack the police who were called to stop them. Complaints of
"overbearing and loutish" behaviour by stormtroopers became common by
the middle of 1933. The Foreign Office even complained of
instances where brownshirts manhandled foreign diplomats.
Hitler's
move would be to strengthen his position with the army by moving against its
nemesis, the SA. On July 6, 1933, at a gathering of high-ranking Nazi
officials, Hitler declared the success of the National Socialist,
or Nazi, brown revolution. Now that the NSDAP
had seized the reins of power in Germany, he said, it was time to consolidate
its control. Hitler told the gathered officials, "The stream of revolution
has been undammed, but it must be channelled into the secure bed of
evolution."
Hitler's
speech signalled his intention to rein in the SA, whose ranks had grown rapidly
in the early 1930s. This would not prove to be simple, however, as the SA made
up a large part of Nazism's most devoted followers. The SA traced its dramatic
rise in numbers in part to the onset of the Great Depression, when many
German citizens lost both their jobs and their faith in traditional
institutions. While Nazism was not exclusively – or even primarily –
a working
class phenomenon, the SA fulfilled the yearning of many unemployed workers
for class solidarity and nationalist fervour.[f]
Many stormtroopers believed in the socialist
promise of National Socialism and expected the Nazi regime to take more radical
economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the
aristocracy. When the Nazi regime did not take such steps, those who had
expected an economic as well as a political revolution were disillusioned.
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| Röhm with Hitler, August 1933 |
Conflict
between the army and the SA
No
one in the SA spoke more loudly for "a continuation of the German
revolution", as one prominent stormtrooper put it, than Röhm.[h]
Röhm, as one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party, had participated in the
Munich Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt by
Hitler to seize power by force in 1923. A combat veteran of World War
I, Röhm had recently boasted that he would execute 12 men in retaliation
for the killing of any stormtrooper. Röhm saw violence as a means to political
ends. He took seriously the socialist promise of National Socialism, and demanded that
Hitler and the other party leaders initiate wide-ranging socialist reform in
Germany.
Not
content solely with the leadership of the SA, Röhm lobbied Hitler
to appoint him Minister of Defence, a position held by the
conservative General Werner von Blomberg. Although nicknamed the
"Rubber Lion" by some of his critics in the army for his devotion to Hitler,
Blomberg was not himself a Nazi, and therefore represented a bridge between the
army and the party. Blomberg and many of his fellow officers were recruited
from the Prussian nobility, and regarded the SA as a plebeian rabble that
threatened the army's traditional high status in German society.
If
the regular army showed contempt for the masses belonging to the SA, many
stormtroopers returned the feeling, seeing the army as insufficiently committed
to the National Socialist revolution. Max Heydebreck, an SA leader in Rummelsburg,
denounced the army to his fellow brownshirts, telling them, "Some of the
officers of the army are swine. Most officers are too old and have to be
replaced by young ones. We want to wait till Papa Hindenburg is dead, and then
the SA will march against the army."
Despite
such hostility between the brownshirts and the regular army, Blomberg and
others in the military saw the SA as a source of raw recruits for an enlarged
and revitalised army. Röhm, however, wanted to eliminate the generalship of the
Prussian aristocracy altogether, using the SA to become the core of a new
German military. Limited by the Treaty of Versailles to one hundred thousand
soldiers, army leaders watched anxiously as membership in the SA surpassed
three million men by the beginning of 1934. In January 1934, Röhm presented
Blomberg with a memorandum demanding that the SA replace the regular army as
the nation's ground forces, and that the Reichswehr become a training adjunct
to the SA.
In
response, Hitler met Blomberg and the leadership of the SA and SS on February
28, 1934. Under pressure from Hitler, Röhm reluctantly signed a pledge stating
that he recognised the supremacy of the Reichswehr over the SA. Hitler
announced to those present that the SA would act as an auxiliary to the
Reichswehr, not the other way around. After Hitler and most of the army
officers had left, however, Röhm declared that he would not take instructions
from "the ridiculous corporal" – a demeaning reference to
Hitler. While Hitler did not take immediate action against Röhm for his
intemperate outburst, it nonetheless deepened the rift between them.
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|
Franz von Papen, the conservative
vice-chancellor who ran afoul of Hitler after denouncing the regime's failure
to rein in the SA in his Marburg speech. (Picture taken 1946 at the Nuremberg
trial)
|
Growing
pressure against the SA
Despite
his earlier agreement with Hitler, Röhm still clung to his vision of a new
German army with the SA at its core. By early 1934, this vision directly
conflicted with Hitler's plan to consolidate power and expand the Reichswehr.
Because their plans for the army were mutually exclusive, Röhm's success could
only come at Hitler's expense. Moreover, it was not just the Reichswehr that
viewed the SA as a threat. Several of Hitler's lieutenants feared Röhm's
growing power and restlessness, as did Hitler himself. As a result, a political
struggle within the party grew, with those closest to Hitler, including Prussian premier Hermann Göring, Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler,
and Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, positioning themselves against Röhm. While
all of these men were veterans of the Nazi movement, only Röhm continued to
demonstrate his independence from, rather than his loyalty to, Adolf Hitler.
Röhm's contempt for the party's bureaucracy angered Hess. SA violence in
Prussia gravely concerned Göring, Minister-President of Prussia. Finally in the
spring of 1934, the growing rift between Röhm and Hitler over the role of the
SA in the Nazi state led the former Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, to start playing politics
again. Schleicher criticised the current Hitler cabinet while some of
Schleicher's followers such as General Ferdinand von Bredow and Werner von Alvensleben started passing along
lists of a new Hitler Cabinet in which Schleicher would become Vice-Chancellor,
Röhm Minister of Defence, Heinrich Brüning Foreign Minister and Gregor
Strasser Minister of National Economy. The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who knew Schleicher and
his circle well, wrote that Bredow displayed a "lack of discretion"
that was "terrifying" as he went about showing the list of the
proposed cabinet to anyone who was interested. Although Schleicher was in fact
unimportant by 1934, increasingly wild rumours that he was scheming with Röhm
to reenter the corridors of power helped stoke the sense of crisis.
As
a means of isolating Röhm, on April 20, 1934, Göring transferred control of the
Prussian political police (Gestapo) to Himmler, who, Göring believed, could be
counted on to move against Röhm. Himmler envied the independence and power of
the SA, although by this time he and his deputy
Reinhard Heydrich had already begun restructuring the SS from a
bodyguard formation for Nazi leaders (and a subset of the SA) into its own
independent elite corps, one loyal to both himself and Hitler. The loyalty of
the SS men would prove useful to both when Hitler finally chose to move against
Röhm and the SA. By May, lists of those to be "liquidated" started to
circulate amongst Göring and Himmler's people, who engaged in a trade, adding
enemies of one in exchange for sparing friends of the other. At the end of May
two former Chancellors, Heinrich Brüning and Kurt von Schleicher, received
warnings from friends in the Reichswehr that their lives were in danger
and they should leave Germany at once. Brüning fled to the Netherlands while
Schleicher dismissed the tip-off as a bad practical joke. By the beginning of
June everything was set and all that was needed was permission from Hitler.
Demands
for Hitler to constrain the SA strengthened. Conservatives in the army,
industry, and politics placed Hitler under increasing pressure to reduce the
influence of the SA and to move against Röhm. While Röhm's homosexuality
did not endear him to conservatives, they were more concerned about his
political ambitions. Hitler for his part remained indecisive and uncertain
about just what precisely he wanted to do when he left for Venice to meet Benito
Mussolini on June 15. Before Hitler left, and at the request of
Presidential State Secretary Otto
Meißner, Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath ordered the German Ambassador to Italy Ulrich von Hassell — without Hitler's knowledge
— to ask Mussolini to tell Hitler that the SA was blackening Germany's good
name. Neurath's manoeuvre to put pressure on Hitler paid off, with Mussolini
agreeing to the request (Neurath was a former ambassador to Italy, and knew
Mussolini well). During the summit in Venice, Mussolini upbraided Hitler for
tolerating the violence, hooliganism, and homosexuality of the SA, which Mussolini
stated were ruining Hitler's good reputation all over the world. Mussolini used
the affair occasioned by the murder of Giacomo
Matteotti as an example of the kind of trouble unruly followers could cause
a dictator. While Mussolini's criticism did not win Hitler over to acting
against the SA, it helped push him in that direction.
On
June 17, 1934, conservative demands for Hitler to act came to a head when
Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, confidant of the ailing
Hindenburg, gave a speech at Marburg University warning of the threat of a
"second revolution". Privately according to his memoirs, von Papen, a
Catholic aristocrat
with ties to army and industry, threatened to resign if Hitler did not act.
While von Papen's resignation as vice-chancellor would not have threatened
Hitler's position, it would have nonetheless been an embarrassing display of
independence from a leading conservative.
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|
SS-Brigadeführer Heydrich,
head of the Bavarian police and SD, in Munich, 1934
|
Heydrich
and Himmler
In
response to conservative pressure to constrain Röhm, Hitler left for Neudeck to
meet with Hindenburg. Blomberg, who had been meeting with the President,
uncharacteristically reproached Hitler for not having moved against Röhm
earlier. He then told Hitler that Hindenburg was close to declaring martial
law and turning the government over to the Reichswehr if Hitler did not
take immediate steps against Röhm and his brownshirts. Hitler had hesitated for
months in moving against Röhm, in part due to Röhm's visibility as the leader
of a national militia with millions of members. However, the threat of a
declaration of martial law from Hindenburg, the only person in Germany with the
authority to potentially depose the Nazi regime, put Hitler under pressure to act.
He left Neudeck with the intention of both destroying Röhm and settling scores
with old enemies. Both Himmler and Göring welcomed Hitler's decision, since
both had much to gain by Röhm's downfall – the independence of the SS for
Himmler, and the removal of a rival for the future command of the army for
Göring.
In
preparation for the purge 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 marks
(EUR 48.2 million in 2016) by France to overthrow Hitler. Leading officers
in the SS were shown falsified evidence on June 24 that Röhm planned to use the
SA to launch a plot against the government (Röhm-Putsch). Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, and
Victor Lutze (at Hitler's direction) drew up lists of people in and outside the
SA to be killed. One of the men Göring recruited to assist him was Willi
Lehmann, a Gestapo official and NKVD spy. On June 25, General Werner von Fritsch placed the Reichswehr
on the highest level of alert. On June 27, Hitler moved to secure the army's
cooperation. Blomberg and General Walther von Reichenau,
the army's liaison to the party, gave it to him by expelling Röhm from the
German Officers' League. On June 28 Hitler went to Essen to attend a
wedding celebration and reception; from there he called Röhm's adjutant at Bad
Wiessee and ordered SA leaders to meet with him on June 30 at 11h. On June
29, a signed article in Völkischer Beobachter by Blomberg
appeared in which Blomberg stated with great fervour that the Reichswehr
stood behind Hitler.
Purge
Further
information: Victims of the Night of the
Long Knives
At
about 04:30 on June 30, 1934, Hitler and his entourage flew into Munich. From the
airport they drove to the Bavarian Interior Ministry, where they assembled the leaders
of an SA rampage that had taken place in city streets the night before.
Enraged, Hitler tore the epaulets off the shirt of Obergruppenführer August
Schneidhuber, the chief of the Munich police, for failing to keep order in the
city on the previous night. Hitler shouted at Schneidhuber that he would be
shot. Schneidhuber was executed later that day. As the stormtroopers were
hustled off to prison, Hitler assembled a large group of SS and regular police,
and departed for the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee, where Ernst Röhm and his
followers were staying.
With
Hitler's arrival in Bad Wiessee between 06:00 and 07:00, the SA leadership,
still in bed, were taken by surprise. SS men stormed the hotel and Hitler
personally placed Röhm and other high-ranking SA leaders under arrest.
According to Erich Kempka, Hitler turned Röhm over to "two
detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed", and the SS
found Breslau
SA leader Edmund Heines in bed with an unidentified
eighteen-year-old male SA senior troop leader. Goebbels emphasised the latter
in subsequent propaganda justifying the purge as a crackdown on moral
turpitude. Both Heines and his partner were shot on the spot in the hotel
grounds on the personal order of Hitler. Meanwhile, the SS arrested the other
SA leaders as they left their train for the planned meeting with Röhm and
Hitler.
Although
Hitler presented no evidence of a plot by Röhm to overthrow the regime, he
nevertheless denounced the leadership of the SA. Arriving back at party
headquarters in Munich, Hitler addressed the assembled crowd. Consumed with
rage, Hitler denounced "the worst treachery in world history". Hitler
told the crowd that "undisciplined and disobedient characters and asocial
or diseased elements" would be annihilated. The crowd, which included
party members and many SA members fortunate enough to escape arrest, shouted
its approval. Hess, present among the assembled, even volunteered to shoot the
"traitors" himself. Joseph Goebbels, who had been with Hitler at Bad
Wiessee, set the final phase of the plan in motion. Upon returning to Berlin,
Goebbels telephoned Göring at 10:00 with the codeword Kolibri to let loose the execution squads on
the rest of their unsuspecting victims.
Against
conservatives and old enemies
The
regime did not limit itself to a purge of the SA. Having earlier imprisoned or
exiled prominent Social Democrats and Communists, Hitler used the occasion to
move against conservatives he considered unreliable. This included
Vice-Chancellor Papen and those in his immediate circle. In Berlin, on Göring's
personal orders, an armed SS unit stormed the Vice-Chancellery. Gestapo
officers attached to the SS unit shot Papen's secretary Herbert
von Bose without bothering to arrest him first. The Gestapo arrested and
later executed Papen's close associate Edgar
Jung, the author of Papen's Marburg
speech; they disposed of his body by dumping it in a ditch. The Gestapo
also murdered Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action, and
a close Papen associate. Papen was unceremoniously arrested at the
Vice-Chancellery, despite his insistent protests that he could not be arrested
in his position as Vice-Chancellor. Although Hitler ordered him released days
later, Papen no longer dared to criticise the regime and was sent off to Vienna
as German ambassador.
Hitler,
Göring, and Himmler unleashed the Gestapo against old enemies as well. Both Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler's predecessor as
Chancellor, and his wife were murdered at their home. Others killed included
Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi who had angered Hitler by resigning from the
party in 1932, and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the former Bavarian
state commissioner who crushed the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Kahr's fate was
especially gruesome. His body was found in a wood outside Munich; he had been
hacked to death, apparently with pickaxes. The murdered included at least one
accidental victim: Willi Schmid, the music critic of the Münchner
Neuste Nachrichten, a
Munich newspaper. The Gestapo mistook him for Ludwig Schmitt, a past supporter
of Otto
Strasser, the brother of Gregor. As Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff
later explained, friendship and personal loyalty were not allowed to stand in
the way:
Among others, a charming fellow [named] Karl von Spreti, Röhm's personal adjutant. He held the same position with Röhm as I held with Himmler. [He] died with words "Heil Hitler" on his lips. We were close personal friends, we often dined together in Berlin. He lifted his arm in the Nazi salute and called out "Heil Hitler, I love Germany".
Several
leaders of the disbanded Catholic Centre Party were also murdered in
the purge. The Party had generally been aligned with the Social Democrats and Catholic
Church during the rise of Nazism, being critical of Nazi ideology, but
voting nonetheless for the enabling act of 1933.
Röhm's
fate
Röhm
was held briefly at Stadelheim Prison in Munich, while Hitler
considered his future. In the end, Hitler decided that Röhm had to die. On July
1, at Hitler's behest, Theodor Eicke, later
Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, and SS Officer
Michel
Lippert visited Röhm. Once inside Röhm's cell, they handed him a Browning pistol loaded with a single bullet and told
him he had ten minutes to kill himself or they would do it for him. Röhm
demurred, telling them, "If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it
himself." Having heard nothing in the allotted time, they returned to
Röhm's cell at 14:50 to find him standing, with his bare chest puffed out in a
gesture of defiance. Lippert then shot Röhm three times, killing him. In 1957,
the German authorities tried Lippert in Munich for Röhm's murder. Until then,
Lippert had been one of the few executioners of the purge to evade trial.
Lippert was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Aftermath
As
the purge claimed the lives of so many prominent Germans, it could hardly be
kept secret. At first, its architects seemed split on how to handle the event.
Göring instructed police stations to burn "all documents concerning the
action of the past two days". Meanwhile, Goebbels tried to prevent
newspapers from publishing lists of the dead, but at the same time used a July
2 radio address to describe how Hitler had narrowly prevented Röhm and
Schleicher from overthrowing the government and throwing the country into
turmoil. Then, on July 13, 1934, Hitler justified the purge in a nationally
broadcast speech to the Reichstag:
In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.
Concerned
with presenting the massacre as legally sanctioned, Hitler had the cabinet
approve a measure on July 3 that declared, "The measures taken on June 30,
July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defence
by the State." Reich Justice Minister Franz
Gürtner, a conservative who had been Bavarian Justice Minister in the years
of the Weimar Republic, demonstrated his loyalty to the new regime by drafting
the statute, which added a legal veneer to the purge.[j]
Signed into law by Hitler, Gürtner, and Minister of the Interior Wilhelm
Frick, the "Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence" retroactively
legalised the murders committed during the purge. Germany's legal
establishment further capitulated to the regime when the country's leading
legal scholar, Carl Schmitt, wrote an article defending Hitler's July
13 speech. It was named "The Führer Upholds the Law".
Reaction
Almost
unanimously, the army applauded the Night of the Long Knives, even though the
generals Kurt von Schleicher and Ferdinand von Bredow were among the victims.
The ailing President Hindenburg, Germany's highly revered military
hero, sent a telegram expressing his "profoundly felt gratitude" and
he congratulated Hitler for "nipping treason in the bud". General von
Reichenau went so far as to publicly give credence to the lie that Schleicher
had been plotting to overthrow the government. In his speech to the Reichstag
on July 13 justifying his actions, Hitler denounced Schleicher for conspiring
with Ernst Röhm to overthrow the government; Hitler alleged both were traitors
working in the pay of France. Since Schleicher was a good friend of the French
Ambassador André François-Poncet, and because of his
reputation for intrigue, the claim that Schleicher was working for France had
enough surface plausibility for most Germans to accept it. François-Poncet was
not declared persona non grata as would have been usual if
an Ambassador were involved in a plot against his host government. The army's
support for the purge, however, would have far-reaching consequences for the
institution. The humbling of the SA ended the threat it had posed to the army
but, by standing by Hitler during the purge, the army bound itself more tightly
to the Nazi regime. One retired captain, Erwin
Planck, seemed to realise this: "if you look on without lifting a
finger," he said to his friend, General Werner von Fritsch, "you will meet the same
fate sooner or later." Another rare exception was Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who spoke about the
murders of Schleicher and Bredow at the annual General Staff Society meeting in
February 1935 after they had been rehabilitated by Hitler in early January
1935.
Rumours
about the Night of the Long Knives rapidly spread. Although many Germans
approached the official news of the events as described by Joseph Goebbels with
a great deal of scepticism, many others took the regime at its word, and
believed that Hitler had saved Germany from a descent into chaos.[k]
Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg
schoolteacher, echoed the sentiments of many Germans when she cited Hitler's
"personal courage, decisiveness and effectiveness" in her private
diary. She even compared him to Frederick the Great, the 18th-century King of Prussia. Others
were appalled at the scale of the executions and at the relative complacency of
many of their fellow Germans. "A very calm and easy going mailman," the
diarist Victor Klemperer wrote, "who is not at all
National Socialist, said, 'Well, he simply sentenced them.'" It did
not escape Klemperer's notice that many of the victims had played a role in
bringing Hitler to power. "A chancellor", he wrote, "sentences
and shoots members of his own private army!" The extent of the massacre
and the relative ubiquity of the Gestapo, however, meant that those who
disapproved of the purge generally kept quiet about it. Among the few
exceptions were General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord and Field
Marshal August von Mackensen, who started a campaign
to have Schleicher rehabilitated by Hitler. Hammerstein, who was a close friend
of Schleicher, had been much offended at Schleicher's funeral when the SS
refused to allow him to attend the service and confiscated the wreaths that the
mourners had brought. Besides working for the rehabilitation of Schleicher and
Bredow, Hammerstein and Mackensen sent a memo to Hindenburg on July 18 setting
out in considerable detail the circumstances of the murders of the two generals
and noted that Papen had barely escaped. The memo went on to demand that
Hindenburg punish those responsible, and criticised Blomberg for his outspoken
support of the murders of Schleicher and Bredow. Finally, Hammerstein and
Mackensen asked that Hindenburg reorganise the government by firing Baron
Konstantin von Neurath, Robert Ley, Hermann
Göring, Werner von Blomberg, Joseph Goebbels and Richard Walther Darré from the Cabinet.
Instead, the memo asked that Hindenburg create a directorate to rule Germany
comprising the Chancellor (who was not named), General Werner von Fritsch as Vice-Chancellor,
Hammerstein as Minister of Defense, the Minister for National Economy (also
unnamed) and Rudolf Nadolny as Foreign Minister. The request that
Neurath be replaced by Nadolny, the former Ambassador to Moscow who had
resigned earlier that year in protest against Hitler's anti-Soviet foreign
policy, indicated that Hammerstein and Mackensen wanted a return to the
"distant friendliness" towards the Soviet Union that existed until
1933. Mackensen and Hammerstein ended their memo with:
Excellency, the gravity of the moment has compelled us to appeal to you as our Supreme Commander. The destiny of our country is at stake. Your Excellency has thrice before saved Germany from foundering, at Tannenberg, at the end of the War and at the moment of your election as Reich President. Excellency, save Germany for the fourth time! The undersigned Generals and senior officers swear to preserve to the last breath their loyalty to you and the Fatherland.
Hindenburg
never responded to the memo, and it remains unclear whether he even saw it, as Otto
Meißner, who decided that his future was aligned with the Nazis, may not
have passed it along. It is noteworthy that even those officers who were most
offended by the killings, like Hammerstein and Mackensen, did not blame the
purge on Hitler, whom they wanted to see continue as Chancellor, and at most
wanted a reorganization of the Cabinet to remove some of Hitler's more radical
followers.
In
late 1934–early 1935, Werner von Fritsch and Werner von Blomberg, who had been shamed into
joining Hammerstein and Mackensen's rehabilitation campaign, successfully
pressured Hitler into rehabilitating Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow.
Fritsch and Blomberg suddenly now claimed at the end of 1934 that as army
officers they could not stand the exceedingly violent press attacks on
Schleicher and Bredow that had been going on since July, which portrayed them
as the vilest traitors, working against the Fatherland in the pay of France. In
a speech given on January 3, 1935 at the Berlin State Opera, Hitler stated that
Schleicher and Bredow had been shot "in error" on the basis of false
information, and that their names were to be restored to the honour rolls of
their regiments at once. Hitler's speech was not reported in the German press,
but the army was appeased by the speech. However, despite the rehabilitation of
the two murdered officers, the Nazis continued in private to accuse Schleicher
of high treason. During a trip to Warsaw in January 1935, Göring told Jan Szembek that Schleicher had urged Hitler
in January 1933 to reach an understanding with France and the Soviet Union, and
partition Poland with the latter, and Hitler had Schleicher killed out of disgust
with the alleged advice. During a meeting with Polish Ambassador Józef
Lipski on May 22, 1935, Hitler told Lipski that Schleicher was
"rightfully murdered, if only because he had sought to maintain the Rapallo
Treaty". The statements that Schleicher had been killed because he
wanted to partition Poland with the Soviet Union were later published in the
Polish White Book of 1939, which was a collection of diplomatic documents
detailing German–Polish relations up to the outbreak of the war.
Former
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was in exile in Doorn, Netherlands,
was horrified by the purge. He said, "What would people have said if I had
done such a thing?". Hearing of the murder of former Chancellor Kurt von
Schleicher and his wife, he also commented, "We have ceased to live under
the rule
of law and everyone must be prepared for the possibility that the Nazis
will push their way in and put them up against the wall!"
SA
leadership
Hitler
named Victor
Lutze to replace Röhm as head of the SA. Hitler ordered him, as one
prominent historian described it, to put an end to "homosexuality,
debauchery, drunkenness, and high living" in the SA. Hitler expressly told
him to stop SA funds from being spent on limousines and banquets, which he
considered evidence of SA extravagance. Lutze did little to assert the SA's independence
in the coming years, and the SA lost its power in Germany. Membership in the
organisation plummeted from 2.9 million in August 1934 to 1.2 million in April
1938.
The
Night of the Long Knives represented a triumph for Hitler, and a turning point
for the German government. It established Hitler as "the supreme leader of
the German people", as he put it in his July 13 speech to the Reichstag.
Later, in April 1942, Hitler would formally adopt this title, thus placing
himself de
jure as well as de facto above the reach of the law. Centuries of
jurisprudence proscribing extra-judicial killings were swept aside.
Despite some initial efforts by local prosecutors to take legal action against
those who carried out the murders, which the regime rapidly quashed, it
appeared that no law would constrain Hitler in his use of power. The Night of
the Long Knives also sent a clear message to the public that even the most
prominent Germans were not immune from arrest or even summary execution should
the Nazi regime perceive them as a threat. In this manner, the purge
established a pattern of violence that would characterise the Nazi regime.
Röhm
was purged from all Nazi propaganda, such as the film of the 1933 Nuremberg
rally, although a print copy of the motion picture by film director Leni
Riefenstahl survived and was found in the United Kingdom many years later.
Footnotes
Papen, nonetheless, remained in his position
although people quite close to him were murdered.
"At least eighty-five people are known to have been
summarily killed without any formal legal proceedings being taken against them.
Göring alone had over a thousand people arrested." Evans
2005, p. 39.
"The names of eighty-five victims [exist], only fifty
of them SA men. Some estimates, however, put the total number killed at between
150 and 200." Kershaw
1999, p. 517.
In the November 1932 parliamentary elections,
the Nazi
Party won 196 seats in the Reichstag out of a possible 584. The Nazis were
the largest party in the legislature but were still considerably short of a
majority.
Through the Enabling Act of 1933 Hitler abrogated the
nation's legislative power and was thereafter effectively able to rule through promulgation
of decrees that
avoided the legislative
processes of the Weimar Constitution
"The most general theory—that National Socialism was
a revolution of the lower middle class—is defensible but inadequate." Schoenbaum
1997, pp. 35–42.
"But in origin the National Socialists had been a
radical anti-capitalist party, and this part of the National Socialist
programme was not only taken seriously by many loyal Party members but was of
increasing importance in a period of economic depression. How seriously Hitler
took the socialist character of National Socialism was to remain one of the
main causes of disagreement and division within the Nazi party up to the summer
of 1934." Bullock
1958, p. 80.
The quote is attributed to Breslau SA Chief Edmund Heines.
Frei
1987, p. 126.
Coincidentally, Hitler himself had been incarcerated at Stadelheim
Prison for about five weeks following the Nazi's disruption of an opposing
party's political rally in January 1921.
Gürtner also declared in cabinet that the measure did not
in fact create any new law, but simply confirmed the existing law. If that was
indeed true then, as a legal matter, the law was entirely unnecessary and
redundant. Kershaw
1999, p. 518
"It was plain that there was wide acceptance of the
deliberately misleading propaganda put out by the regime." Kershaw
2001, p. 87.
12.
"After the 'Night of the Long Knives,'
[Reich Minister for Justice Franz Gürtner] nipped in the bud the attempts of
some local state prosecutors to initiate proceedings against the killers."
Evans
2005, p. 72.
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