The Night of the Long Knives

Between 30 June and 2 July 1934, on the orders of Adolf Hitler, SS units, Gestapo officers and Hermann Göring’s police murdered, all across Germany, the leadership of the SA – the party’s paramilitary force, millions strong – as well as dozens of people who had nothing to do with the SA: conservative critics of the regime, Catholic activists, Hitler’s former rivals and people with whom the Nazis had old scores to settle. Among the dead were the SA Chief of Staff, Ernst Röhm, one of Hitler’s oldest comrades; the former Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, together with his wife; the party’s former organisation chief, Gregor Strasser; and Bavaria’s former dictator, Gustav von Kahr. Propaganda called the operation the suppression of the “Röhm Putsch”, which had never existed. It has gone down in history as the Night of the Long Knives, although the killing went on for three days and was done not with knives but with pistols and rifles. It was the first political mass murder on such a scale to be personally ordered by the head of a German government and then declared lawful by that government.

The SA after the seizure of power

The SA had brought Hitler to power. Its men had fought communists and Social Democrats in the streets, broken up meetings and intimidated voters, and after 30 January 1933, serving as auxiliary police, they arrested, tortured and killed opponents in “wild” camps and cellars. After absorbing the veterans of the Stahlhelm and other associations, the SA numbered, by various accounts, between three and four and a half million men by mid-1934 – many times more than the Reichswehr, which the Treaty of Versailles limited to 100,000 men.

Once opponents had been crushed and the parties dissolved, this mass of men lost its purpose. Many stormtroopers, often unemployed, had hoped for jobs, money and a social upheaval that never came. Röhm spoke of a “second revolution” that would drive the old elites from power, and above all he wanted the SA to become the core of a new National Socialist army, with the Reichswehr dissolved into a militia under his command. In February 1934 he sent the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von Blomberg, a memorandum under which the army would be confined to training recruits.

For Hitler this was unacceptable. For the war he was planning he needed professional generals and a conscript army, not a party militia. He also needed the backing of the Reichswehr in order to take over the office of the ailing President Paul von Hindenburg, and with it command of the armed forces, after Hindenburg’s death. On 28 February 1934, in the presence of generals and SA and SS commanders, he announced that the army would remain the sole bearer of arms in the state, while the SA would be responsible for pre-military training and political education. Röhm signed an agreement with Blomberg, but after the officers had left he is said to have told his own men that what the “ridiculous corporal” had announced did not apply to them. One of those present, Viktor Lutze, reported this to Hitler’s deputy in the party, Rudolf Hess, and then to Hitler himself.

The coalition against Röhm

In the spring of 1934 everyone Röhm threatened united against him. The generals saw the SA as a rival and a rabble. Göring, Prime Minister of Prussia, wanted to be rid of a competitor for future military command and to bring SA violence in his state under control. Heinrich Himmler, whose SS was still formally subordinate to Röhm, wanted to break free of the SA. In April, in a sign of what was coming, Göring handed him control of the Prussian Gestapo, and Himmler and the head of his security service, Reinhard Heydrich, now held the political police of almost all of Germany. Hess and Joseph Goebbels also worked against Röhm. The SD and the Gestapo gathered material, and from May lists of people to be “removed” circulated among Göring’s and Himmler’s associates.

Pressure also came from the conservatives who in 1933 had brought Hitler into government hoping to “tame” him. On 17 June 1934 the Vice-Chancellor, Franz von Papen, gave a speech at the University of Marburg in which he warned against a second revolution, condemned terror and the cult of personality, and called for freedom of speech. The text had been written by his adviser, the publicist Edgar Julius Jung. Goebbels banned the circulation of the speech, but word of it reached Hindenburg, and people around Papen, among them his press chief Herbert von Bose, hoped that the President and the army would force a change of course. A few days earlier, on 14–15 June, at a meeting in Venice, Benito Mussolini had rebuked Hitler over the SA’s rowdiness.

On 21 June Hitler visited Hindenburg at his estate of Neudeck in East Prussia. According to some historians, Blomberg warned him there that if he did not restore order, the President would declare a state of emergency and hand power to the army. Other scholars regard these accounts as rumours unsupported by Blomberg’s notes. What is certain is that Hitler made his decision in those days. On 25 June the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Werner von Fritsch, put the army on alert, and SS and SD commanders were told that the SA was preparing a revolt. The Reichswehr supplied the SS with weapons, ammunition and lorries. On 25 June the Gestapo arrested Jung. On 28 June Röhm was quietly expelled from the German Officers’ League, and on 29 June the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an article by Blomberg in which the minister affirmed that the army stood behind Hitler. Röhm, who was taking a cure at the spa of Bad Wiessee on the Tegernsee, was told that Hitler would arrive on the morning of 30 June for a conference with the SA leaders. The SA had been sent on leave for July. Historians agree that there was no conspiracy.

30 June: Munich and Bad Wiessee

During the night of 29–30 June Hitler, who was then in the Rhineland, received reports that the SA in Munich had taken to the streets. At around 2 a.m. he took off from near Bonn and landed in Munich at around 4 a.m. At the Bavarian Interior Ministry he tore the insignia from the shoulders of two local SA commanders, August Schneidhuber and Wilhelm Schmid, and had them taken to prison. Then, with Goebbels, Lutze and a group of SS men and criminal police officers, he drove to Bad Wiessee. At around 6.30 a.m. he entered the Hanselbauer guesthouse and personally arrested a drowsy Röhm. In the next room the Silesian SA commander Edmund Heines was found with a young man, a scene Goebbels’s propaganda exploited widely. The SA leaders, including those who were only just arriving for the conference, were taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich.

At around 10 a.m., from the Brown House, the party’s headquarters in Munich, Goebbels passed the agreed codeword “Kolibri” (Hummingbird) to Göring in Berlin. At this signal, in Berlin, Silesia, Saxony and elsewhere, SS, SD and Gestapo squads and Göring’s police began arresting and killing according to the prepared lists. In the evening at Stadelheim a firing squad from the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler under Josef “Sepp” Dietrich shot six SA commanders selected by Hitler, among them Heines, Schneidhuber and Schmid.

In Berlin the arrested SA commanders were brought to the Leibstandarte barracks at Lichterfelde, where, after a sham trial lasting a few minutes, they were shot against a wall. Among those killed there was the head of the Berlin SA, Karl Ernst, who had been detained in Bremen as he set off on his honeymoon. In Silesia the SS commander Udo von Woyrsch had dozens of people murdered, taking the opportunity to include his own rivals within the SS.

Settling old scores

Hitler used the opportunity to deal with more than just the SA. Armed men in plain clothes entered Schleicher’s villa near Potsdam and shot the former Chancellor and his wife, Elisabeth. On the same day his former associate, General Ferdinand von Bredow, was murdered. Strasser, who had broken with Hitler in 1932 and had since kept away from politics, was shot in a cell in the basement of Gestapo headquarters. At the Vice-Chancellery SS and Gestapo men shot Bose, while Jung was killed during the night of 30 June–1 July and his body dumped outside Berlin. Papen, although Vice-Chancellor, was held under house arrest for several days. Erich Klausener, head of Catholic Action in the Diocese of Berlin, was killed in his office at the Transport Ministry. In Munich SS men took the seventy-one-year-old Kahr, who in 1923 had put down the Beer Hall Putsch, from his home and murdered him at the Dachau camp. The music critic Wilhelm Eduard Schmid fell victim to a mistake, taken for the SA commander of the same name. The former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, warned in advance by acquaintances, had left Germany in May and so escaped Schleicher’s fate.

For a day Hitler hesitated over what to do with Röhm, an old friend with whom he was on first-name terms. On 1 July, urged on by Göring and Himmler, he gave the order. The commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke, and his subordinate Michael Lippert left Röhm a pistol with a single round in his cell. When Röhm had not shot himself within the allotted time, they went in and killed him with shots at close range. Accounts differ as to the hour, but it happened on the afternoon of 1 July. Killings in various parts of the country continued on 2 July, when the operation was officially ended.

How many died

The number of victims is still not known precisely, because Göring ordered the records of the operation to be burned and the press was allowed to report only a few names. In the autumn of 1934 foreign newspapers wrote of as many as a thousand dead, but later research rejected such figures. Historians have identified 85–90 victims by name (Karl Martin Graß counted 85 in 1968, Otto Gritschneder 90 in 1993). Some scholars, among them Wolfgang Sauer and Charles Bloch, estimated the total number killed at 150–200, and many general histories give this range, although some modern historians of the SA believe that at most a handful would need to be added to the 90 known names. More than a thousand people were taken into protective custody.

The leader’s law

On 3 July 1934 the government passed a law consisting of a single sentence: “The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July 1934 to suppress treasonous attacks are lawful as acts of self-defence of the state.” The draft was prepared by the conservative Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner. At the cabinet meeting Blomberg thanked Hitler on behalf of the army. On 2 July a telegram was sent to Hitler in Hindenburg’s name expressing “profound gratitude” that by his resolute intervention he had “nipped in the bud” the treasonous intrigues; whether the old President knew its content is disputed in the literature. On 13 July Hitler justified himself before the Reichstag: in that hour, he said, he had been responsible for the fate of the nation and had become its “supreme judge”. The jurist Carl Schmitt responded with an article entitled “The Führer Protects the Law”.

The army accepted the murder of two of its generals in silence. The government announced that Schleicher had conspired with Röhm and with a foreign power and had resisted arrest, and General Walter von Reichenau of the Reichswehr Ministry repeated this version in public. Only at the beginning of 1935, under pressure from their old comrades-in-arms, were Schleicher and Bredow unofficially cleared. Pensions were paid to the families of those murdered from a secret fund. Most Germans, weary of the terror and rowdiness of the SA, accepted the government’s version with relief, and the loyal Lutze became the new Chief of Staff of an SA that had been cut down to size and stripped of its importance.

Significance

The Night of the Long Knives ended the period in which Hitler had to take anyone into account. It removed the only force within the Nazi movement capable of opposing him, intimidated the conservatives and made the army an accomplice. The generals believed they had bought themselves security and a monopoly of arms. They paid a heavy price for it: when Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor, and that same day the soldiers swore allegiance no longer to the constitution but to him personally. That oath bound the army to Hitler until 1945 – through the invasion of Poland, the war of annihilation in the east and its participation in crimes.

The greatest winner was the SS. On 20 July 1934 Hitler rewarded it for its “services” by making it independent of the SA, and Eicke, who had shot Röhm, had already been made Inspector of Concentration Camps on 4 July. From this SS there grew, in the years that followed, the political police of the whole Reich, the camp system, the Waffen-SS and the apparatus that carried out the Holocaust. The law of 3 July established the principle that the leader’s will stood above the law and that the state could kill without trial. Hitler invoked this principle many times thereafter, and the men who in June 1934 had learned to murder on command did so on a continental scale during the war. In 1943 in Poznań (Posen) Himmler told SS generals that just as they had not hesitated to shoot their comrades on 30 June 1934, so now they would not shrink from the “extermination of the Jewish people”.