‘I gave the order to shoot those most guilty of this treason, and I further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning…’
Hitler, addressing the Reichstag on 13 July 1934
‘The Reich Chancellor kept his word when he nipped in the bud Röhm’s attempt to incorporate the S A in the Reichswehr. We love him because he has shown himself a true soldier.’
Walther von Reichenau, part of guidelines for
political instruction of the troops, 28 August 1934
The making of the dictator was still incomplete at the end of 1933. Despite an astonishing transformation of the political scene which, at a speed few if any could have foreseen, had inordinately strengthened Hitler’s position, two notable obstacles remained, blocking his route to untrammelled power in the state. The obstacles were closely bound up with each other.
Hitler’s unruly party army, the SA, had outlived its purpose. That had been to win power. Everything had been predicated on the attainment of that single goal. What would follow the winning of power, what would be the purpose and function of the SA in the new state, what benefits would flow for ordinary stormtroopers, had never been clarified. Now, months after the ‘seizure of power’, the SA’s ‘politics of hooliganism’1 were a force for disruption in the state. And particularly in the military ambitions of its leader, Ernst Röhm, the SA was an increasingly destabilizing factor, above all in relations with the Reichswehr. But its elimination, or disempowering, was no simple matter. It was a huge organization, far bigger than the party itself. It contained many of the most ardent ‘old fighters’ (in a literal sense) in the Movement. And it had been the backbone of the violent activism which had forced the pace of the Nazi revolution since Hitler had become Chancellor. Röhm’s ambitions, as we have seen in earlier chapters, had never been identical with those of Hitler. A large paramilitary organization that had never accepted its subordination to the political wing of the party had caused tensions, and occasional rebellion, since the 1920s. But, whatever the crises, Hitler had always managed to retain the SA’s loyalty. To challenge the SA’s leadership risked losing that loyalty. It could not be done easily or approached lightly. Faced with the dilemma of what to do about the SA, Hitler for months did little to resolve the tensions which continued to build. Characteristically, he acted finally when there was no longer a choice – but then with utter ruthlessness.
The problem of the SA was inextricably bound up with the other threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power. Reich President Hindenburg was old and frail. The issue of the succession would loom within the foreseeable future. Hindenburg, the symbol of ‘old’ Germany, and ‘Old’ Prussia, was the figurehead behind which stood still powerful forces with somewhat ambivalent loyalties towards the new state. Most important among them was the army, of which as Head of State Hindenburg was supreme commander. The Reichswehr leadership was intensely and increasingly alarmed by the military pretensions of the SA. Failure on Hitler’s part to solve the problem of the SA could conceivably lead to army leaders favouring an alternative as Head of State on Hindenburg’s death – perhaps resulting in a restoration of the monarchy, and a de facto military dictatorship. Such a development would have met with favour among sections, not just of the military old guard, but of some national-conservative groups, which had favoured an authoritarian, anti-democratic form of state but had become appalled by the Hitler regime. The office of the Vice-Chancellor, Papen, gradually emerged as the focal point of hopes of blunting the edge of the Nazi revolution. Since Papen continued to enjoy the favour of the Reich President, such ‘reactionaries’, though small in number, could not be discounted in power-political terms. And since at the same time there were growing worries among business leaders about serious and mounting economic problems, the threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power – and with that of the regime itself – was a real one.
Hitler did not act before he was compelled to do so. The pressure from the Reichswehr leadership and the machinations of Göring, Himmler and Heydrich played decisive roles in bringing matters to a head in summer 1934. Then, within a matter of five weeks, the destruction of the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives (accompanied by the murder of leading figures in the ‘reaction’) and the rapid takeover by Hitler of the headship of state on Hindenburg’s death (under a law agreed by the cabinet while he was still alive) amounted to a decisive phase in the securing of total power.
I
Ernst Röhm’s SA had been the spearhead of the Nazi revolution in the first months of 1933. The explosion of elemental violence had needed no commands from above. The SA had long been kept on a leash, told to wait for the day of reckoning. Now it could scarcely be contained. Orgies of hate-filled revenge against political enemies and horrifically brutal assaults on Jews were daily occurrences. A large proportion of the estimated 100,000 persons taken into custody in these turbulent months were held in makeshift SA prisons and camps. Some hundred of these were set up in the Berlin area alone. Many victims were bestially tortured. The minimal figure of some 500–600 murdered in what the Nazis themselves proclaimed as a bloodless and legal revolution can largely be placed on the account of the SA.2 The first Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, described after the war the conditions in one of the SA’s Berlin prisons: ‘The “interrogations” had begun and ended with a beating. A dozen fellows had laid into their victims at intervals of some hours with iron bars, rubber coshes, and whips. Smashed teeth and broken bones bore witness to the tortures. As we entered, these living skeletons with festering wounds lay in rows on the rotting straw…’3 In one of numerous letters with which he bombarded Reich President Hindenburg in autumn 1933 on the ‘violent activity and lawlessness (Willkür) in the German Reich ruled by you’, his erstwhile comrade, now thorn in his flesh, Erich Ludendorff, reported ‘unbelievable events’ which were ‘mounting up in horrifying fashion’, and spoke of the final phase of Hindenburg’s presidency as ‘the blackest time in German history’. The letters were passed on to Hitler.4 Appeals for discipline by Hitler were ignored. Even those by Röhm were not heeded.5 Such appeals were in any case half-hearted and merely tactical. Behind the scenes, Hitler was quashing – often following requests from within the party leadership or from Reich Justice Minister Gürtner – case after case of maltreatment and torture of prisoners, many by SA men.6
As long as the terror was levelled in the main at Communists, Socialists and Jews, it was in any case not likely to be widely unpopular, and could be played down as ‘excesses’ of the ‘national uprising’. But already by the summer, the number of incidents mounted in which overbearing and loutish behaviour by SA men caused widespread public offence even in pro-Nazi circles. By this time, complaints were pouring in from industry, commerce and local government offices about disturbances and intolerable actions by stormtroopers. The Foreign Office added its own protest at incidents where foreign diplomats had been insulted or even manhandled. The SA was threatening to become completely uncontrollable. Steps had to be taken.7 Reich President Hindenburg, exercised about the upheavals in the Protestant Church, himself requested Hitler to restore order.8
The need for Hitler to act became especially urgent after Röhm, in a programmatic article in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in June 1933, had openly stated the SA’s aim of continuing the ‘German Revolution’ in the teeth of attempts by conservatives, reactionaries, and opportunist fellow-travellers to undermine and tame it. ‘The SA and SS will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed half-way there by the non-fighters,’ he railed. ‘Whether they like it or not,’ the article ended, ‘we will carry on our struggle. If they finally grasp what it is about, with them! If they are not willing, without them! And if it has to be: against them!’9
Röhm was clearly signalling to the new rulers of Germany that for him the revolution was only just starting; and that he would demand a leading role for himself and the mighty organization he headed – by now some 4½ million strong.10
Forced now for the first time to choose between the demands of the party’s paramilitary wing and the ‘big battalions’ pressing for order, Hitler summoned the Reich Governors to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery on 6 July. ‘The revolution is not a permanent condition,’ he announced; ‘it must not turn into a lasting situation. It is necessary to divert the river of revolution that has broken free into the secure bed of evolution.’11 Other Nazi leaders – Frick, Göring, Goebbels and Heß – took up the message in the weeks that followed.12 There was an unmistakable change of course.
Röhm’s ambitions were, however, undaunted. They amounted to little less than the creation of an ‘SA state’, with extensive powers in the police, in military matters, and in the civil administration. Little of this had been realized by the end of 1933. Göring had removed the SA from the role of auxiliary police in Prussia in the summer. By October, the SA had also been excluded from any control over concentration camps.13 The army leadership had the sharpest of antennae towards Röhm’s proclaimed intention of building up a huge people’s militia alongside the Reichswehr. And the SA ‘Special Commissioners’ (Sonderbeauftragte) attached to government offices in the Länder, especially in Bavaria and Prussia, were indeed substantial irritation factors, but had advisory, not controlling, functions. Even so, there was enough for the growing number of powerful enemies of the SA to worry about. When, in December 1933, Röhm was given cabinet status as Reich Minister without Portfolio, it was mainly as a consolation for the major offices and powers which had not come his way. However, his own hints that this might be a step to an ‘SA Ministry’ and, possibly, in the end to his scarcely concealed hope of taking over the Defence Ministry, were hardly guaranteed to calm the nerves of the Reichswehr leadership.14 Immediate steps were put in place to curtail cooperation with the SA and exclude it from influence in military matters.15
It was not just a matter of Röhm’s own power ambitions. Within the gigantic army of Brownshirts, expectations of the wondrous shangri-la to follow the day when National Socialism took power had been hugely disappointed. Though they had poured out their bile on their political enemies, the offices, financial rewards, and power they had naïvely believed would flow their way remained elusive. Certainly, the top leaders of the SA fully exploited the new financial benefits which came the way of an organization now able to rely on extensive state funding.16 There was no shortage of high living at this level. The ostentatious splendour of Röhm’s own new villa in Munich’s Prinzregentenplatz, complete with mahogany chairs from the château of Fontainebleau and sixteenth-century Florentine wall-mirrors, was only one indication of this.17 But little filtered through to the base. Here, unemployment was higher than average. The reputation for poor work-discipline deterred many employers from taking on SA men, even now the National Socialists were in government.18 The resentments against ‘bourgeois’ authorities or party opportunists seen to block chances of obtaining the posts or material benefits thought of right to be theirs were profound among the ‘Old fighters’ in the SA. Talk of a ‘second revolution’, however little it was grounded in any clear programme of social change, was, therefore, bound to find strong resonance among rank-and-file stormtroopers.
Ernst Röhm had, then, no difficulty in expanding his popularity among SA men through his continued dark threats in early 1934 about further revolution which would accomplish what the ‘national uprising’ had failed to bring about. He remained publicly loyal to Hitler. Privately, he was highly critical of Hitler’s policy towards the Reichswehr and his dependency on Blomberg and Reichenau. And he did nothing to deter the growth of a personality cult elevating his leadership of the SA.19 At the Reich Party Rally of Victory in 1933, he had been the most prominent party leader after Hitler, clearly featuring as the Führer’s right-hand man.20 By early 1934, Hitler had been largely forced from the pages of the SA’s newspaper, SA-Mann, by the expanding Röhm-cult.21
At least in public, the loyalty was reciprocated.22 Hitler wavered, as he would continue to do during the first months of 1934, between Röhm’s SA and the Reichswehr. He could not bring himself to discipline, let alone dismiss, Röhm. The political damage and loss of face and popularity involved made such a move risky. But the realities of power compelled him to side with the Reichswehr leadership.23 This became fully clear only at the end of February. Before then, however much he had assuaged the Reichswehr leadership, he had never explicitly renounced the SA’s claims in military matters.24 But even thereafter, Hitler hesitated to take the action that this political choice demanded.25 The consequence was that the crisis would gather throughout the spring and early summer.
By 2 February 1934, at a meeting of his Gauleiter, Hitler was again criticizing the SA in all but name. Only ‘fools’ (Narren) thought the revolution was not over; there were those in the Movement who only understood ‘revolution’ as meaning ‘a permanent condition of chaos’.26
The previous day, Röhm had sent Blomberg a memorandum on relations between the army and the SA. What he appeared to be demanding – no copy of the actual memorandum has survived – was no less than the concession of national defence as the domain of the SA, and a reduction of the function of the armed forces to the provision of trained men for the SA.27 So crass were the demands that it seems highly likely that Blomberg deliberately falsified or misconstrued them when addressing a meeting of army District Commanders on 2 February in Berlin. They were predictably horrified.28 Now Hitler had to decide, stated Blomberg.29 The army lobbied him. In a conscious attempt to win his support against the SA, Blomberg, without any pressure from the Nazi leadership, introduced the NSDAP’s emblem into the army and accepted the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ for the officer corps, leading to the prompt dismissal of some seventy members of the armed forces.30 Röhm, too, sought to win his support. But, faced with having to choose between the Reichswehr, with Hindenburg’s backing, or his party army, Hitler could now only decide one way.
By 27 February the army leaders had worked out their ‘guidelines for cooperation with the SA’, which formed the basis for Hitler’s speech the next day and had, therefore, certainly been agreed with him.31 At the meeting in the Reichswehr Ministry on 28 February, attended by Reichswehr, SA, and SS leaders, Hitler rejected outright Röhm’s plans for an SA-militia. The SA was to confine its activities to political, not military, matters.32 Hitler indicated how he saw matters developing. The NSDAP had cleared away unemployment, he is reported as having stated, but within about eight years an economic blow-out (Durchschlag) was bound to take place unless living-space was created for the surplus population. It was typical Hitlerian rhetoric. Unemployment had fallen sharply but by this time had by no means been eliminated. And severe economic constraints were already making themselves acutely felt. But, as he invariably did, Hitler painted for his audience a black-and-white scenario: that of following his diagnosis – attainment of ‘living-space’ – or facing the consequences of certain economic collapse. He drew the military consequences. ‘Short decisive blows against the West then against the East could therefore become necessary.’ But a militia, such as Röhm was suggesting, was not suitable even for minimal national defence. He was determined to build up a well-trained ‘people’s army’ (Volksheer) in the Reichswehr, equipped with the most modern weapons, which must be prepared for all eventualities on defence within five years and suitable for attack after eight years, ‘In domestic politics, one had to be loyal, but in foreign policy one could break one’s word,’ he declared. He demanded of the SA that they obey his orders. For the transitional period before the planned Wehrmacht was set up, he approved Blomberg’s suggestion to deploy the SA for tasks of border protection and pre-military training. But ‘the Wehrmacht must be the sole bearer of weapons of the nation’.33
Röhm and Blomberg had to sign and shake hands on the ‘agreement’. Hitler departed. Champagne followed. But the atmosphere was anything but cordial.34 When the officers had left, Röhm was overheard to remark: ‘What the ridiculous corporal declared doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage the thing without Hitler.’ The person taking note of these treasonable remarks was SA-Obergruppenführer Viktor Lutze, who reported what had gone on to Hitler. ‘We’ll have to let the thing ripen’ was all he gleaned as reply.35 But the show of loyalty was noted. When he needed a new SA chief after the events of 30 June, Lutze was Hitler’s man.
II
From the beginning of 1934, Hitler seems to have recognized that he would be faced with no choice but to cut down to size his over-mighty subject, Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. How to tackle Röhm was, however, unclear. Hitler deferred the problem. He simply awaited developments.36 The Reichswehr leadership, too, was biding its time, expecting a gradual escalation, but looking then to a final showdown.37 Relations between the army and the SA continued to fester. But Hitler did, it seems, order the monitoring of SA activities. According to the later account of Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels, it was in January 1934 that Hitler requested him and Göring to collect material on the excesses of the SA.38 From the end of February onwards, the Reichswehr leadership started assembling its own intelligence on SA activities, which was passed to Hitler.39 Once Himmler and Heydrich had taken over the Prussian Gestapo in April, the build-up of a dossier on the SA was evidently intensified. Röhm’s foreign contacts were noted, as well as those with figures at home known to be cool towards the regime, such as former Chancellor Schleicher.40
By this time, Röhm had incited an ensemble of powerful enemies, who would eventually coagulate into an unholy alliance against the SA. Göring was so keen to be rid of the SA’s alternative power-base in Prussia – which he himself had done much to establish, starting when he made the SA auxiliary police in February 1933 – that he was even prepared by 20 April to concede control over the Prussian Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler, thus paving the way for the creation of a centralized police-state in the hands of the SS. Himmler himself, and even more so his cold and dangerous henchman Reinhard Heydrich, recognized that their ambitions to construct such an empire – the key edifice of power and control in the Third Reich – rested on the élite SS breaking with its superior body, the SA, and eliminating the power-base held by Röhm. In the party, the head of the organization, installed in April 1933 with the grand title of the Fuhrer’s Deputy (for party affairs), Rudolf Heß, and the increasingly powerful figure behind the scenes, Martin Bormann, were more than aware of the contempt in which the Political Organization was held by Röhm’s men and the threat of the SA actually replacing the party, or making it redundant.41 For the army, as already noted, Röhm’s aim to subordinate the Reichswehr to the interests of a people’s militia was anathema. Intensified military exercises, expansive parades, and, not least, reports of extensive weapon collections in the hands of the SA, did little to calm the nerves.42
At the centre of this web of countervailing interests and intrigue, united only in the anxiety to be rid of the menace of the SA, Hitler’s sharp instinct for the realities of power by now must have made it plain that he had to break with Röhm. How radical the break would be was at this stage unclear. In February, and again in April, he indicated to Anthony Eden, at that time Lord Privy Seal in the British government, that he would be prepared to reduce the SA by two-thirds and place the rest under international supervision to ensure their demilitarization. He told Eden that his common sense and political instinct would never allow him to sanction the creation of a second army in the state – ‘never, never!’ he repeated.43 His remarks were a marker for the western powers both of an apparent accommodation in disarmament negotiations and of his gestating thoughts on the problem of the SA. There is no hint at this stage of a plot to kill Röhm, nor plans for a modern St Bartholomew’s Night Massacre. These would be largely improvised only at the last moment.44
In the meantime, the problem of the SA was part of the first looming crisis of the regime’s existence, as spring turned into summer in 1934. Hitler himself was well aware of the situation. The position of the German economy – chronically lacking raw materials, with falling exports, soaring imports, and a haemorrhage of hard currency fast approaching disaster level – had become highly precarious. The foreign press predicted Hitler’s early downfall.45 It was a matter of ‘preventing a catastrophe’, Hitler told a meeting of Reich Governors and other party high-ups on 22 March 1934. He went on to criticize the constant interference in the economy by party and SA activists. Continued boycotting of department stores could easily lead to a bank crisis, signalling the death of hopes of economic recovery, was his sombre assessment, based on the information he had been given in no uncertain terms by his economic advisers.46
At the level of the ordinary mass of the population, the excited and anticipatory mood of ‘national renewal’ that had swept the country during the breathless upheavals of 1933 had given way to widespread discontent and criticism as disillusionment and material disappointment took over. A nationwide propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels in May to combat the ‘moaners’ was a resounding failure. All across the country, there were reports of a deterioration in the mood of the people. Angered by the imposition of a maze of bureaucratic controls by the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) – the vast and unwieldy organization headed by agriculture minister Walther Darré and set up in September 1933 to direct every aspect of German farming – peasants vented their spleen on the corruption of a system in which only ‘big-shots’ profited. Industrial workers, cowed and intimidated, nevertheless revealed their feelings in elections for the newly established ‘Councils of Trust’ (Vertrauensräte) in April. The ‘Councils of Trust’ had been created in January 1934 in place of the former ‘Works Councils’ (Betriebsräte), purportedly to look after the interests of both employers and employees in the larger firms. Workers recognized them for the sham they were – largely vehicles for employer control. The results of the elections to the councils were so embarrassing to the regime that they were never published. The commercial middle class complained bitterly at poor economic prospects, currency and credit restrictions, raw material shortages, and the failure of the government to stimulate trade.47 Also, for the millions still unemployed, the reality of the Third Reich bore little resemblance to its propaganda. Hitler himself was still massively popular. But criticism of corrupt and high-handed party functionaries was extensive. Not least, the arrogant, overbearing, and bullying behaviour of the SA – acceptable even to Nazi sympathizers only when directed at Communists, Socialists, Jews, or other disliked minorities – was for many the most intolerable daily manifestation of Nazi rule.
The wide-ranging public discontent amounted, of course, to nothing like rooted political opposition. As the exiled Social Democratic leadership acknowledged, much of it was little more than grumbling ‘whose dissatisfaction has purely economic causes’. For most of the middle classes and peasants, Nazism, whatever its faults, was preferable to Bolshevism, which Hitler had successfully depicted as the only alternative. ‘The anxiety about Bolshevism, about the chaos which in the opinion of the great mass in particular of the Mittelstand and the peasantry would follow on the fall of Hitler, is still the negative mass base of the regime,’ adjudged the SPD’s exiled analysts.48 The ‘dark side’ of the regime, which had revealed itself only too clearly in the opening phase of Nazi rule, was seen by many in this light. It was bad; but Bolshevism would have been worse. There was also a good deal of feeling that those who had suffered most – Communists, Socialists and Jews – had deserved it. And that – sharing President Hindenburg’s views – much of what had happened, if at times regrettable, was inevitable amid such political upheaval, but would settle down. Whatever his minions might do, many thought, Hitler meant the best for Germany. Amid the continuing idealism and avid enthusiasm of millions of Hitler loyalists, it was certainly the case that National Socialism had lost ground in terms of public support by the spring of 1934. But this in itself, attributable only in part to the behaviour of the SA, did not suggest danger for the regime.
More threatening was the growing dismay among national-conservative élites about the Pandora’s box they themselves had helped prise open. Some among them recognized the potential for exploiting the crisis to turn the party dictatorship they so detested into what they had always wanted: an authoritarian state without parties – and under their own control. The ‘taming’ of Hitler had failed disastrously in 1933. The antics of Röhm, and the wild talk of a ‘second revolution’, offered a second opportunity. ‘We are partly responsible that this fellow has come to power,’ commented Edgar Jung, an intellectual on the conservative Right and speech-writer for Papen, of Hitler. ‘We must get rid of him again.’49 Another member of Papen’s circle, his press secretary Herbert von Bose, used his control over the Vice-Chancellor’s press agency to contact numerous generals known to be critical of the regime. His hope was to use the SA crisis to weaken Hitler. Crucially, given Hindenburg’s frailty, it was urgently necessary to make plans for his replacement as Head of State. The restoration of the monarchy, perhaps with a Hohenzollern prince as regent in the first instance, was the hope of the conservatives. Hitler’s chances of obtaining supreme power would thereby be blocked. However limited the realistic chances of success of this strategy were, the very substance of the National Socialist regime was at this time in question.50
In April it became known that Hindenburg was seriously ill.51 Hitler and Blomberg had already been told that the end was not far off.52 At the beginning of June, the Reich President retired to his estate at Neudeck in East Prussia. The most important prop of the conservatives was now far from the centre of the action. And the succession issue was imminent. Moreover, to remove the obstacle which the SA was providing to recommencing talks about rearmament with the western powers, Hitler had, at the end of May, ordered the SA to stop military exercises, and, in the last talks he had with Röhm, a few days later, had sent the stormtroopers on leave for a month.53
This defusing of the situation, together with Hindenburg’s absence, made the situation more difficult, rather than easier, for the conservatives. But Bose was anxious not to let the initiative seep away. He knew that Jung had been working on and off since December on a speech for Papen which would attack the ‘degeneration’ (Entartung) of the new state. As it happened, Papen was due to deliver a speech on 17 June at the University of Marburg. The text prepared by Jung and completed eight days earlier was adopted for it. Papen’s secretary was concerned at its tone. But Papen was given a copy only as he left for Marburg and was prevented from making any alterations.54 Sensationally, he delivered his boldly challenging speech – a passionate warning against the dangers of a ‘second revolution’ and a heated broadside against the ‘selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry, and arrogance’ featuring under the guise of the German revolution. He even criticized the creation of a ‘false personality cult’. ‘Great men are not made by propaganda, but grow out of their actions,’ he declared. ‘No nation can live in a continuous state of revolution,’ he went on. ‘Permanent dynamism permits no solid foundations to be laid. Germany cannot live in a continuous state of unrest, to which no one sees an end.’55 The speech met with roars of applause within the hall. Outside, Goebbels moved swiftly to have it banned, though not before some extracts were printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of Germany’s most respected newspapers and still able to avoid the tightening Nazi straitjacket on the press. Copies of the speech were run off and circulated, both within Germany and to the foreign press.56 Word of it quickly went round. Never again in the Third Reich was such striking criticism at the heart of the regime to come from such a prominent figure. But if Papen and his friends were hoping to prompt action by the army, supported by the President, to ‘tame’ Hitler, they were disappointed.57 As it was, the Marburg speech served as the decisive trigger to the brutal action taken at the end of the month.
Hitler’s own mood towards the ‘reactionaries’ was darkening visibly. Without specifying any names, his speech at Gera at the Party Rally of the Thuringian Gau on 17 June, the same day as Papen’s speech, gave a plain indication of his fury at the activities of the Papen circle. He castigated them as ‘dwarves’, alluding, it seems, to Papen himself as a ‘tiny worm’. Then came the threat: ‘If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury (Meineidstat), they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.’58 Such a mood prefigured the murder of some prominent members of the conservative ‘reaction’ on 30 June. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the Papen speech, a strike against the ‘reactionaries’ seemed more likely than a showdown with the SA.59
At the imposition of the ban on publishing his speech, Papen went to see Hitler. He said Goebbels’s action left him no alternative but to resign. He intended to inform the Reich President of this unless the ban were lifted and Hitler declared himself ready to follow the policies outlined in the speech. Hitler reacted cleverly – in wholly different manner from his tirades in the presence of his party members. He acknowledged that Goebbels was in the wrong in his action, and that he would order the ban to be lifted. He also attacked the insubordination of the SA and stated that they would have to be dealt with. He asked Papen, however, to delay his resignation until he could accompany him to visit the President for a joint interview to discuss the entire situation.60 Papen conceded – and the moment was lost.
Hitler wasted no time. He arranged an audience alone with Hindenburg on 21 June, officially to discuss his meeting with Mussolini in Venice a few days earlier.61 This, Hitler’s first visit abroad (if we discount his time during the war spent in France and Belgium), had given the opportunity for an airing of the Austrian question. But Mussolini and Austria were not on Hitler’s mind as he travelled to see the ailing Reich President.
On the way up the steps to Hindenburg’s residence, Schloß Neudeck, he was met by Blomberg, who had been summoned by the President in the furore following Papen’s speech. Blomberg told Hitler bluntly that it was urgently necessary to take measures to ensure internal peace in Germany. If the Reich Government was incapable of relieving the current state of tension, the President would declare martial law and hand over control to the army.62 The Reich President himself, according to Meissner’s later account, told Hitler ‘to bring the revolutionary trouble-makers finally to reason’.63 Hitler realized that there could be no further prevarication. He had to act. There was no alternative but to placate the army – behind which stood the President. And that meant destroying the power of the SA without delay.
Any action had to be undertaken by 1 August, when the stormtroopers were due to return from leave. Probably the decision to purge the SA had already been taken by the date, four days after Hitler’s audience with Hindenburg, when Heß ominously threatened, in a radio broadcast: ‘Woe to anyone in breach of loyalty in the belief of serving the revolution through a revolt.’64
What Hitler had in mind at this stage is unclear. He seems to have spoken about deposing Röhm, or having him arrested.65 By now, however, Heydrich’s SD – the part of the labyrinthine SS organization responsible for internal surveillance – and the Gestapo were working overtime to concoct alarmist reports of an imminent SA putsch. SS and SD leaders were summoned to Berlin around 25 June to be instructed by Himmler and Heydrich about the measures to be taken in the event of an SA revolt expected any time.66For all their unruliness, the SA had never contemplated such a move. The leadership remained loyal to Hitler. But now, the readiness to believe that Röhm was planning a takeover was embraced by all the SA’s powerful enemies. The Reichswehr, during May and June becoming increasingly suspicious about the ambitions of the SA leadership, made weapons and transport available to the SS (whose small size and – at this time – confinement to largely policing work posed no threat to the military). An SA putsch was now thought likely in summer or autumn. The entire Reichswehr leadership – most prominently Blomberg and Reichenau, but also Fritsch and Beck – were prepared for imminent action against Röhm.67 The psychological state for a strike against the SA was rapidly forming. Alarm bells were set ringing loudly on 26 June through what seemed to be an order by Röhm for arming the SA in preparation for an attack on the Reichswehr. The ‘order’, in fact a near-certain fake (though by whom was never established), had mysteriously found its way into the office of the Abwehr chief, Captain Conrad Patzig. Lutze was present when Blomberg and Reichenau presented Hitler the following day with the ‘evidence’. Hitler had already hinted to Blomberg two days earlier that he would summon SA leaders to a conference at Bad Wiessee on the Tegernsee, some fifty miles south-east of Munich, where Röhm was residing, and have them arrested. This decision seems to have been confirmed at the meeting with Blomberg and Reichenau on 27 June.68The same day, SS – Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commander of Hitler’s house-guards, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, arranged with the Reichswehr to pick up the arms needed for a ‘secret and very important commission of the Führer’.69
III
The timing of the ‘action’ seems to have been finally determined on the evening of 28 June, while Hitler, together with Göring and Lutze, was in Essen for the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven.70 During the wedding reception, Hitler had received a message from Himmler, informing him that Oskar von Hindenburg had agreed to arrange for his father to receive Papen, probably on 30 June. The meeting had been initiated by Herbert von Bose and Fritz Günther von Tschirschky und Boegendorff, the personal secretary of the Vice-Chancellor. It marked a final attempt, after they had heard of the arrest of Edgar Jung by the Gestapo, to win the Reich President’s approval for moves to constrain the power not only of Röhm and the SA, but of Hitler himself.71 Hitler left the wedding reception straight away. As a non-drinker and non-smoker, content only when he was holding court and dominating proceedings, such festivities gave him little pleasure anyway (and his presence was presumably an inhibition as well as an honour to other guests). He raced back to his hotel. There, according to Lutze, he decided there was no time to lose: he had to strike.72
Röhm’s adjutant was ordered by telephone to ensure that all SA leaders attended a meeting with Hitler in Bad Wiessee on the late morning of 30 June.73 In the meantime, the army had been put on alert. Göring flew back to Berlin to take charge of matters there, ready at a word to move not only against the SA, but also the Papen group.74 On the morning of 29 June, betraying no sign of anything unusual, Hitler inspected Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) camps in Westphalia. But that afternoon, he travelled to Bad Godesberg, to be joined in the Rheinhotel Dreesen by Goebbels and Sepp Dietrich, flying in from Berlin. Goebbels had been impatient at Hitler’s delay in dealing with the ‘reaction’.75 He flew to Godesberg thinking the strike against Papen and his cronies was finally going to take place. Only on arrival did he learn that the main target was Röhm’s SA. Hitler reported to him how serious the situation was. There was proof, he claimed (and evidently believed), that Röhm had conspired with the French ambassador François-Poncet, Schleicher and Strasser. So he was determined to act the very next day ‘against Röhm and his rebels’. Blood would be shed. They should realize that people lose their heads through rebellion. While arrangements were made, total secrecy had to be maintained.76
Rumours of unrest in the SA were meanwhile being passed to Hitler, whose mood was becoming blacker by the minute. The telephone rang. The ‘rebels’, it was reported, were ready to strike in Berlin.77 There was, in fact, no putsch attempt at all. But groups of SA men in different parts of Germany, aware of the stories circulating of an impending strike against the SA, or the deposition of Röhm, were going on the rampage. Sepp Dietrich was ordered to leave for Munich straight away. Soon after midnight, he phoned Hitler from Munich and was given further orders to pick up two companies of the Leibstandarte and be in Bad Wiessee by eleven in the morning.78 Around 2a.m. Hitler left to fly to Munich, accompanied by his adjutants Brückner, Schaub and Schreck, along with Goebbels, Lutze and Press Chief Dietrich.79 The first glimmers of dawn were breaking through as he arrived. He was met by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner and two Reichswehr officers, who told him that the Munich SA, shouting abuse at the Führer, had attempted an armed demonstration in the city. Though a serious disturbance, it was, in fact, merely the biggest of the protest actions of despairing stormtroopers, when as many as 3,000 armed SA men had rampaged through Munich in the early hours, denouncing the ‘treachery’ against the SA, shouting: ‘The Führer is against us, the Reichswehr is against us; SA out on the streets.’ However, Hitler had not heard of the Munich disturbances before he arrived there in the early hours of the morning. Now, in blind rage at what he interpreted as the betrayal by Röhm – ‘the blackest day of my life’, he was heard to say – he decided not to wait till the following morning, but to act immediately.80
He and his entourage raced to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. The local SA leaders Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber and Gruppenführer Schmid were peremptorily summoned. Hitler’s fury was still rising as he awaited them. By now he had worked himself into a near-hysterical state of mind, reminiscent of the night of the Reichstag fire. Accepting no explanations, he ripped their rank badges from their shoulders, shouting, ‘You are under arrest and will be shot.’ Bewildered and frightened, they were taken off to Stadelheim prison.81
Hitler, without waiting for Dietrich’s SS men to arrive, now demanded to be taken immediately to Bad Wiessee. It was just after 6.30a.m. as the three cars pulled up outside the Hotel Hanselbauer in the resort on the Tegernsee, where Röhm and other SA leaders were still sleeping off an evening’s drinking. Hitler, followed by members of his entourage and a number of policemen, stormed up to Röhm’s room and, pistol in hand, denounced him as a traitor (which the astonished Chief of Staff vehemently denied) and declared him under arrest. Edmund Heines, the Breslau SA leader, was found in a nearby room in bed with a young man – a scene that Goebbels’s propaganda later made much of to heap moral opprobrium on the SA. Other arrests of Röhm’s staff followed. Those taken in custody were held in the cellar of the hotel until a bus hurriedly chartered from a Bad Wiessee coach firm arrived to transport the SA leaders to Stadelheim prison in Munich. A potentially hazardous moment occurred while the prisoners were still being held in the cellar, as a lorry bringing more of Röhm’s staff to the scheduled conference with Hitler arrived from Munich. Hitler stepped out and addressed the men, telling them that he had taken over the leadership of the SA himself, and ordered them to return to Munich. They obeyed without demur.82
Hitler and his entourage then travelled back themselves to the Brown House. At midday he spoke to party and SA leaders gathered in the ‘Senators’ Hall’. The atmosphere was murderous. Hitler was beside himself, in a frenzy of rage. One of those present later recalled spittle dribbling from Hitler’s mouth as he began to speak. He spoke of the ‘worst treachery in world history’. Röhm, he claimed, had received 12 million Marks in bribes from France to have him arrested and killed, to deliver Germany to its enemies. The SA chief and his co-conspirators, Hitler railed, would be punished as examples. He would have them all shot.83 One after the other, the Nazi leaders demanded the extermination of the SA ‘traitors’. Heß pleaded that the task of shooting Röhm fall to him.84
Back in his own room, Hitler gave the order for the immediate shooting of six of the SA men held in Stadelheim, marking crosses against their names in a list provided by the prison administration.85 They were promptly taken out and shot by Dietrich’s men. Not even a peremptory trial was held. The men were simply told before being shot: ‘You have been condemned to death by the Führer! Heil Hitler!’86
Röhm’s name was not among the initial six marked by Hitler for instant execution. One witness later claimed to have overheard Hitler saying that Röhm had been spared because of his many earlier services to the Movement.87 A similar remark was noted by Alfred Rosenberg in his diary. ‘Hitler did not want to have Röhm shot,’ he wrote. ‘He stood at one time at my side before the People’s Court,’ Hitler had said to the head of the Nazi publishing empire, Max Amann. (Amann’s view was simply that ‘the great swine had to go’. He told Heß he was ready to shoot Röhm himself. Heß retorted that, no, that was his duty, even if he himself should afterwards be shot for it.)88
The loss of face at having to murder his right-hand man on account of his alleged rebellion was most likely the chief reason for Hitler’s reluctance to order Röhm’s death. For the moment, at any rate, he hesitated about having Röhm killed. In Berlin, meanwhile, there was no hesitation. Immediately on return from Bad Wiessee, Goebbels had telephoned Göring with the password ‘Kolibri’ (‘Humming Bird’), which set in motion the murder-squads in the capital city and the rest of the country.89 As in Bavaria, a great deal was improvised. Göring later announced in a press conference that he had extended his commission to strike against ‘these malcontents’.90 He meant primarily the ‘reactionaries’ in the Papen group, and the former Chancellor Schleicher. Herbert von Bose was brutally shot down by a Gestapo hit-squad after the Vice-Chancellery had been stormed by SS men. Edgar Jung, in ‘protective custody’ since 25 June, was also murdered, found dead in a ditch near Oranienburg on 1 July. Papen’s staff were arrested. The Vice-Chancellor himself, whose murder would have proved a diplomatic embarrassment, was placed under house-arrest. The killing was extended to others who had nothing to do with the leadership of the SA. The head of ‘Catholic Action’, Erich Klausener, who had at one time been head of the police department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, was also brutally shot down by an assassination squad of SS men, on Heydrich’s orders. Old scores were settled. Gregor Strasser was taken to Gestapo headquarters and shot in one of the cells. General Schleicher and his wife were shot dead in their own home. Also among the victims was Major-General Bredow, one of Schleicher’s right-hand men. In Munich, Hitler’s old adversary Ritter von Kahr was dragged away by SS men and later found hacked to death near Dachau. The music critic Wilhelm Eduard Schmid was murdered by mistake; the SS men who killed him thought he was Dr Ludwig Schmitt, a one-time sympathizer of Otto Strasser. Among the twenty-two victims in and around Munich, mostly killed through ‘local initiative’, was one of Hitler’s early supporters, Pater Bernhard Stempfle, who had helped with the editing of Mein Kampf. No motive for his murder is known. It may also have been a case of mistaken identity. Nor in Silesia, where, under Heines, the terror of the SA had been a hallmark of political life, was the revenge-killing guided by any central directives.91 The blood-lust had developed its own momentum. All in all, the ‘action’ was beginning to get out of hand.
Hitler arrived back in Berlin around ten o’clock on the evening of 30 June, tired, drawn and unshaven, to be met by Göring, Himmler and a guard of honour.92 Later that evening, Göring recommended an end to the ‘action’.93 According to Göring’s own comments in private to Papen, while in prison in Nuremberg after the war, Hitler only reluctantly agreed, insisting that there were still many who deserved to be shot.94 Röhm, however, was still alive. Hitler hesitated until late the following morning about the fate of the former SA Chief of Staff. According to one piece of post-war testimony, there was talk of a show-trial, only for Hitler to dismiss the idea because of possible damaging revelations of Röhm’s connections with the French ambassador, François-Poncet.95 The story sounds dubious. Whatever the reasons for not having him dispatched immediately, Hitler was, it seems, put under pressure by Himmler and Göring to have Röhm liquidated. In the early afternoon of Sunday 1 July, during a garden party at the Reich Chancellery for cabinet members and their wives, Hitler finally agreed. Even now, however, he was keen that Röhm take his own life rather than be ‘executed’. Theodor Eicke, Commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp, was ordered to go to Stadelheim and offer Röhm the chance to recognize the enormity of his actions by killing himself. If not, he was to be shot. Along with his deputy, SS-Sturmbannführer Michael Lippert, and a third SS man from the camp, Eicke drove to Stadelheim. Röhm was left with a pistol. He was also left the latest edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, a special edition containing the details of the ‘Röhm Putsch’. It was hoped, presumably, that this would convince him that suicide was the only recourse left to him. But after ten minutes, no shot had been heard, and the pistol was untouched on the small table near the door of the cell, where it had been left. (Whether Röhm had used his last minutes alive to read the Völkischer Beobachter is not recorded.) The pistol was removed from the cell. Eicke and Lippert then returned to the cell, each with pistol drawn, signalled to Röhm, standing and bare-chested, and trying to speak, that they would wait no longer, took careful aim, and shot him dead.96 Hitler’s published announcement was terse: ‘The former Chief of Staff Röhm was given the opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behaviour. He did not do so and was thereupon shot.’97
On 2 July, Hitler formally announced the end of the ‘cleansing action’.98 On the same day, Göring ordered the police to burn all files connected with the affair.99 Not all files, however, were destroyed. Enough survived to list the names of eighty-five known victims, only fifty of them SA men.100Some estimates, however, put the total number killed at between 150 and 200 persons.101
With the SA still in a state of shock and uncertainty, the purge of its mass membership began under the new leader, the Hitler loyalist Viktor Lutze. Within a year, the SA had been reduced in size by over 40 per cent. Many subordinate leaders were dismissed in disciplinary hearings. The structures built up by Röhm as the foundation of his power within the organization were meanwhile systematically dismantled. The SA was turned into little more than a military sports and training body.102 For anyone still harbouring alternative ideas, the ruthlessness shown by Hitler had left its own unmistakable message.
IV
Outside Germany there was horror at the butchery, even more so at the gangster methods used by the state’s leaders.103 Within Germany, it was a different matter. Public expressions of gratitude to Hitler were not long in coming. Already on 1 July, Defence Minister Blomberg, in a statement to the armed forces, praised the ‘soldierly determination and exemplary courage’ shown by the Führer in attacking and crushing ‘the traitors and mutineers’. The gratitude of the armed forces, he added, would be marked by ‘devotion and loyalty’.104 The following day, the Reich President sent Hitler a telegram expressing his own ‘deep-felt gratitude’ for the ‘resolute intervention’ and ‘courageous personal involvement’ which had ‘rescued the German people from a serious danger’.105Much later, when they were both in prison in Nuremberg, Papen asked Göring whether the President had ever seen the congratulatory telegram sent in his name. Göring replied that Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s State Secretary, had asked him, half-jokingly, whether he had been ‘satisfied with the text’.106
Hitler himself gave a lengthy account of the ‘plot’ by Röhm to a meeting of ministers on the morning of 3 July. Anticipating any allegations about the lawlessness of his actions, he likened his actions to those of the captain of a ship putting down a mutiny, where immediate action to smash a revolt was necessary, and a formal trial was impossible. Nor would there be a subsequent trial. Using language almost identical to that of his tirade in the Senators’ Hall of the Brown House, he said he had made an example of the rebels not simply to quash the revolt, but to serve as a deterrent to any further conspirators against the regime, who would know they were risking their heads. ‘The example he had given would be a healthy lesson for the entire future. He had stabilized the authority of the government for all time.’ Even where guilt had not been fully proven, and though not all the shootings had been ordered by him, he took full responsibility, he went on, for the shootings which had saved the Reich. He asked the cabinet to accept the draft Law for the Emergency Defence of the State that he was laying before them. In a single, brief paragraph, the law read: ‘The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July for the suppression of high treasonable and state treasonable attacks are, as emergency defence of the state, legal.’ The Reich Minister of Justice, the conservative Franz Gürtner, declared that the draft did not create new law, but simply confirmed existing law. (According to the official communiqué, though not included in the cabinet minutes, Gürtner added that Hitler’s actions had not merely to be seen as legal, but also as ‘statesmanlike duty’.)107 Reichswehr Minister Blomberg thanked the Chancellor in the name of the cabinet for his ‘resolute and courageous action through which he had protected the German people from civil war. The Reich Chancellor had acted as statesman and soldier in a spirit which, among members of the Reich Government and the entire German people, called forth a pledge for attainment, loyalty, and devotion in this difficult hour.’ With this statement of suppliance by the head of the armed forces, and the statement by the head of the judicial system accepting the legality of acts of brute violence, the law acknowledging Hitler’s right to commit murder in the interest of the state was unanimously accepted. The law was signed by Hitler, Frick and Gürtner.108
The account to the cabinet was in essence the basis of the justification which Hitler offered in his lengthy speech to the Reichstag on 13 July. Why he delayed almost a fortnight before addressing the Reichstag is unclear. Mental and physical fatigue may have been one reason. He did not appear at a meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in Flensburg on 4–5 July, which he might in the circumstances have been expected to address.109 After returning on 4 July from an overnight stay in Neudeck, where he reported to Hindenburg, the only public duty he carried out was to receive the German ambassador to Ankara two days later.110 Indicating a concern for overseas reactions, he granted on the same day, 6 July, an interview, for publication in the New York Herald, to Professor Alfred J. Pearson, a former American ambassador in Poland and Finland, currently head of a liberal arts college in the USA. Pearson was introduced by Schacht, who must have instigated the interview in an attempt to calm feelings abroad, especially in business circles.111 Allowing the dust to settle, awaiting any further relevations of ‘conspiracy’ from the investigations still under way by the Gestapo,112 and requiring the time to prepare a vital speech, one of the most difficult he had ever given, may have been further reasons why Hitler took so long before appearing before the Reichstag.113
Hitler’s two-hour speech to the Reichstag on 13 July, if not one of his best rhetorical performances, was certainly one of the most remarkable, and most effective, that he was ever to deliver. The atmosphere was tense. Thirteen members of the Reichstag had been among those murdered; friends and former comrades-in-arms of the SA leaders were among those present. The presence of armed SS men flanking the rostrum and at various points of the hall was an indication of Hitler’s wariness, even among the serried ranks of party members.114 After he had offered a lengthy, fabricated account of the ‘revolt’ and the part allegedly played in the conspiracy by General Schleicher, Major-General Bredow and Gregor Strasser, he came to the most extraordinary sections of the speech. In these, the head of the German government openly accepted full responsibility for what amounted to mass murder. Hitler turned defence into attack. ‘Mutinies are broken according to eternal, iron laws. If I am reproached with not turning to the law-courts for sentence, I can only say: in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the supreme judge(oberster Gerichtsherr) of the German people… I gave the order to shoot those most guilty of this treason, and I further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning and the poisoning from abroad.’115 The cheering was tumultuous.116 Not just among the Nazi Reichstag members, but in the country at large, Hitler’s ruthless substitution of the rule of law by murder in the name of raison d’état was applauded. It matched exactly what Nazi parlance dubbed the ‘healthy sentiments of the people’.
The public was ignorant of the plots, intrigues, and power-games taking place behind the scenes. What people saw for the most part was the welcome removal of a scourge. Once the SA had done its job in crushing the Left, the bullying and strutting arrogance, open acts of violence, daily disturbances, and constant unruliness of the stormtroopers were a massive affront to the sense of order, not just among the middle classes. Instead of being shocked by Hitler’s resort to shooting without trial, most people – accepting, too, the official versions of the planned putsch – acclaimed the swift and resolute actions of their Leader. ‘If only the Führer knew’ was already a phrase on people’s lips in this early phase of the Third Reich, excusing Hitler from knowledge of all that was felt to be negative. On this occasion, it seemed, he had learned of what was afoot, and had acted swiftly and resolutely, with utter ruthlessness, in the interests of the nation. As the Sopade, the SPD’s organization in its Prague exile, perceptively remarked, not just the detestation of the despotic SA, but also the adaptation to violence which had systematically undermined a sense of legal norms since the start of the Third Reich had paved the way for ‘strong sympathies for summary justice’.117
Already in the days immediately following the Night of the Long Knives (as the murderous 30 June 1934 came to be known), the authorities reported ‘unreserved recognition for the energy, cleverness, and courage of the Führer’.118 His standing had, it was claimed, risen even among those who had been previously unsympathetic to National Socialism. ‘The Führer… is not only admired; he is deified,’ ran a report from a small town in north-eastern Bavaria where the KPD had done well before 1933.119 From all over Germany the picture was much the same.120 Hitler’s intervention was seen as a ‘liberation from a strongly felt oppression’.121 In this climate of opinion, Hitler’s speech on 13 July struck all the right notes. The response to it was overwhelmingly positive.
There was great admiration for what was seen to be Hitler’s protection of the ‘little man’ against the outrageous abuses of power of the overmighty SA leadership. Even more so, the emphasis that Hitler had placed in his speech on the immorality and corruption of the SA leaders left a big mark on public responses.122 The twelve points laid down by Hitler in his order to the new Chief of Staff, Viktor Lutze, on 30 June had focused heavily on the need to eradicate homosexuality, debauchery, drunkenness and high living from the SA. Hitler had explicitly pointed to the misuse of large amounts of money for banquets and limousines.123 The homosexuality of Röhm, Heines and others among the SA leaders, known to Hitler and other Nazi leaders for years, was highlighted as particularly shocking in Goebbels’s propaganda. The Sopade commented shrewdly on the success of propaganda ‘in diverting the attention of the great mass of the population from the political background to the action, and at the same time elevating Hitler’s standing as the cleanser of the Movement’.124 Above all, Hitler was seen as the restorer of order. That murder on the orders of the head of government was the basis of the ‘restoration of order’ passed people by, was ignored, or – most generally – met with their approval. There were wide expectations that Hitler would extend the purge to the rest of the party – an indication of the distance that had already developed between Hitler’s own massive popularity and the sullied image of the party’s ‘little Hitlers’, the power-crazed functionaries found in towns and villages throughout the land.125
There was no show of disapproval of Hitler’s state murders from any quarter. Both Churches remained silent, even though the Catholic Action leader, Erich Klausener, had been among the victims.126 Two generals had also been murdered. Though a few of their fellow officers momentarily thought there should be an investigation, most were too busy clinking their champagne glasses in celebration at the destruction of the SA. Blomberg forbade officers to attend Schleicher’s funeral. Only one, General Hammerstein-Equord, disobeyed.127 It could be overlooked. Hammerstein’s antipathy to the Nazis had already led to his resigning his post as army commander (Chef der Heeresleitung) the previous February. He no longer mattered greatly. As for any sign that the legal profession might distance itself from acts of blatant illegality, the foremost legal theorist in the country, Carl Schmitt, published an article directly relating to Hitler’s speech on 13 July. Its title was: ‘The Führer Protects the Law’.128
The smashing of the SA removed the one organization that was seriously destabilizing the regime and directly threatening Hitler’s own position. Thereafter the emasculated SA was no more than a loyalist section of the movement whose activism, when opportune, could be directed against the Jews (as in the November pogrom in 1938) or other helpless target-groups. Without the backing of the army, which had much to gain by the disempowering of the SA, Hitler’s action would have been impossible. No longer would the SA pose a threat to the army or an obstacle to rearmament plans. The army leadership could celebrate the demise of their rival, and the fact that Hitler had backed their power in the state. ‘The Reich Chancellor kept his word when he nipped in the bud Röhm’s attempt to incorporate the SA in the Reichswehr,’ wrote Reichenau a few weeks later. ‘We love him because he has shown himself a true soldier.’129 The army’s triumph was, however, a hollow one. Its complicity in the events of 30 June 1934 bound it more closely to Hitler. But in so doing, it opened the door fully to the crucial extension of Hitler’s power following Hindenburg’s death. The generals might have thought Hitler was their man after 30 June. The reality was different. The next few years would show that the ‘Röhm affair’ was a vital stage on the way to the army becoming Hitler’s tool, not his master.
The other major beneficiary was the SS. ‘With regard to the great services of the SS, especially in connection with the events of the 30th of June’, Hitler removed its subordination to the SA. From 20 July 1934 onwards, it was responsible to him alone.130 Instead of any dependence on the huge and unreliable SA, with its own power pretensions, Hitler had elevated the smaller, élite praetorian guard, its loyalty unquestioned, its leaders already in almost total command of the police. The most crucial ideological weapon in the armoury of Hitler’s state was forged.
Not least, the crushing of the SA leadership showed what Hitler wanted it to show: that those opposing the regime had to reckon with losing their heads. All would-be opponents could now be absolutely clear that Hitler would stop at nothing to hold on to power, that he would not hesitate to use the utmost brutality to smash those in his way. But for all their repulsion at the public display of barbarism, observers abroad drew no lessons about Hitler’s likely behaviour in matters of foreign policy. Most took the view that, brutal though it was, the purge of the SA was an internal affair – a type of political gangland bloodbath redolent of Al Capone’s St Valentine’s Day massacre. They still thought that in the business of diplomacy they could deal with Hitler as a responsible statesman. The next years would provide a bitter lesson that the Hitler conducting foreign affairs was the same one who had behaved with such savage and cynical brutality at home on 30 June 1934.
V
An early intimation that a head of government who had had his own immediate predecessor as Chancellor, General von Schleicher, murdered might also not shy away from involvement in violence abroad was provided by the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss, in a failed putsch attempt undertaken by Austrian SS men on 25 July while Hitler was attending the Bayreuth Festival.
For months, Hitler had left Theo Habicht, a German member of the Reichstag whom he had appointed to head the Austrian wing of the NSDAP, on a long leash to put pressure on the Dollfuss government. Under Dollfuss, Austria was a repressive single-party dictatorship bearing some distinctly fascist traits. Bans on political parties were applied not just to socialists and liberals. The Austrian NSDAP had been banned since June 1933. From spring 1934, the terror campaign of the outlawed party had brought tough reaction from the government, leading to a further spiral of terrorist violence. The feeling among the underground, factionalized Austrian Nazis that they were being left in the lurch by Berlin was intensified by Hitler’s meeting with Mussolini in Venice on 14–15 June. Mussolini had made it plain that Italy backed Dollfuss. Hitler had wanted elections, and National Socialists to be taken into the Austrian government. But he could not risk alienating Italy, and was prepared to let matters ride for the forseeable future. He gave an undertaking to respect Austrian independence. His underlings in Austria were less patient, and suspicious that Berlin was selling out their interests. The terror attacks, using bombs and grenades, increased. Hitler was told that the situation was highly volatile. Putsch plans were worked out among underground SS leaders and party functionaries.131
Hitler’s own role, and the extent to which he had detailed information of the putsch plans, is less than wholly clear.132 The initiative for the coup attempt clearly came from local Nazis. It seems that Hitler was aware of it, and gave his approval, but on the basis of misleading information from the Austrian Nazis. Hitler had rejected the idea of a putsch the previous autumn. In the immediate aftermath of the meeting with Mussolini, it was unlikely that he would readily back such a risky venture. However, it could not take place in clear breach of his wishes. Habicht misleadingly informed him, therefore, that officers of the Austrian army were planning a coup, and asked whether the National Socialists should not support the move to topple the Dollfuss government. Hitler agreed.133 Whether it was a deliberate piece of deception on Habicht’s part, or whether Hitler misconstrued what was said to him, is uncertain. However, that Hitler was aware of what was happening, but on the basis of a flawed understanding of what was to take place, is apparent from the post-war recollections of General Adam, at that time Army District Commander VII in Munich and formerly Chef des Truppenamts. At a meeting on the morning of 25 July, Hitler told Adam that on that very day the Austrian Federal Army would topple the government. When Adam seemed sceptical, Hitler insisted that the army would launch its strike, which would lead to the immediate return of those Nazis forced into exile. He wanted Adam to make preparations to send weapons for them into Austria. He promised to keep Adam informed about events in Vienna, and later that day rang to tell him that events were proceeding satisfactorily, and that Dollfuss was wounded.134 In reality, there had been no putsch plans by the Austrian army. There had been only the hare-brained attempt at a coup by the Nazi activists. The putsch attempt-partly sabotaged even within the Nazi Movement by the SA – was rapidly put down.135 Under Kurt Schuschnigg, successor to the murdered Dollfuss, the Austrian authoritarian regime, treading its tightrope between the predatory powers of Germany and Italy, continued in existence – for the present.
The international embarrassment for Hitler was enormous, the damage to relations with Italy considerable.136 For a time, it even looked as if Italian intervention was likely.137 Papen found Hitler in a near-hysterical state, denouncing the idiocy of the Austrian Nazis for landing him in such a mess.138 Every attempt was made by the German government, however unconvincingly, to dissociate itself from the coup.139 Habicht was dropped. The headquarters of the Austrian NSDAP in Munich were closed down. A new policy of restraint in Austria was imposed.140 But at least one consequence of the ill-fated affair pleased Hitler. He found the answer to what to do with Papen – who had ‘just been in our way since the Röhm business’, as Göring reportedly put it.141 He made him the new German ambassador in Vienna.142
VI
In Neudeck, meanwhile, Hindenburg was dying. His condition had been worsening during the previous weeks. Signing Papen’s letters of appointment to Vienna was his last official act. At the end of July, the public was made aware of the grave condition of the Reich President.143 On 1 August, Hitler flew to Neudeck. Hindenburg, mistaking him for the Kaiser, addressed him as ‘Majesty’.144 Hitler told the cabinet that evening that the doctors were giving Hindenburg less than twenty-four hours to live.145 The following morning, the Reich President was dead.
So close to the goal of total power, Hitler had left nothing to chance. The Enabling Act had explicitly stipulated that the rights of the Reich President would be left untouched. But on 1 August, while Hindenburg was still alive, Hitler had all his ministers put their names to a law determining that, on Hindenburg’s death, the office of the Reich President would be combined with that of the Reich Chancellor.146 The reason subsequently given was that the title ‘Reich President’ was uniquely bound up with the ‘greatness’ of the deceased. Hitler wished from now on, in a ruling to apply ‘for all time’, to be addressed as ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. The change in his powers was to be put to the German people for confirmation in a ‘free plebiscite’, scheduled for 19 August.147
Among the signatories to the ‘Law on the Head of State of the German Reich’ of 1 August 1934 had been Reichswehr Minister Blomberg. The law meant that, on Hindenburg’s death, Hitler would automatically become Supreme Commander of the armed forces. The possibility of the army appealing over the head of the government to the Reich President as Supreme Commander thereby disappeared.148 This caused no concern to the Reichswehr leadership. Blomberg and Reichenau were, in any case, determined to go further. They were keen to exploit the moment to bind Hitler, as they imagined, more closely to the armed forces. The fateful step they took, however, had precisely the opposite effect. As Blomberg later made clear, it was without any request by Hitler, and without consulting him, that he and Reichenau hastily devised the oath of unconditional loyalty to the person of the Führer, taken by every officer and soldier in the armed forces in ceremonies throughout the land on 2 August, almost before Hindenburg’s corpse had gone cold.149 It seems most likely that Blomberg discussed the oath with Hitler (who later offered his profuse thanks in public)150 shortly before Hindenburg’s death, probably on 1 August. The speed and coordination of the taking of the oath by all the troops throughout the entire country certainly needed preparation.151 But, as Blomberg himself made clear, the initiative came from the Reichswehr leadership, not from Hitler. Reichenau had asked two members of his staff to prepare drafts, then rapidly dictated his own version. That Blomberg, as Reichswehr Minister, had no legal power to alter the oath, previously sworn to the Constitution and not to the person of the President, was simply ignored.152
Some traditionalists in the army, including the Chef der Heeresleitung Werner von Fritsch, saw the oath as reinstating the type of relationship that had existed under the Kaiser. But Blomberg and Reichenau thought in more modern, power-political terms. They hoped, through this personalized demonstration of loyalty, to cement a special relationship with Hitler which would separate him from the Nazi Party and consolidate the dominance of the army as the Third Reich’s ‘power-house’. ‘We swore the oath on the flag to Hitler as Führer of the German people, not as head of the National Socialist Party,’ was Blomberg’s later comment.153 Among the officers, the reaction to the oath was mixed. Some were sceptical or dubious. ‘The darkest day of my life,’ Beck was reported to have remarked.154 ‘A momentous oath. Pray God that both sides hold to it with the same loyalty for the good of Germany,’ wrote Guderian.155 But the majority spent little time reflecting on its implications.156 The oath meant that the distinction between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Hitler had been eradicated. Opposition was made more difficult. For those later hesitant about joining the conspiracy against Hitler, the oath would also provide an excuse. Far from creating a dependence of Hitler on the army, the oath, stemming from ill-conceived ambitions of the Reichswehr leadership, marked the symbolic moment where the army chained itself to the Führer.157
‘Today Hitler is the Whole of Germany,’ ran a headline on 4 August.158 The funeral of the Reich President, held with great pomp and circumstance at the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia, the scene of his great victory in the First World War, saw Hindenburg, who had represented the only countervailing source of loyalty, ‘enter Valhalla’, as Hitler put it.159 Hindenburg had wanted to be buried at Neudeck. Ever alert to propaganda opportunities, Hitler insisted on his burial in the Tannenberg Memorial.160 On 19 August, the silent coup of the first days of the month duly gained its ritual plebiscitary confirmation. According to the official figures, 89.9 per cent of the voters supported Hitler’s constitutionally now unlimited powers as head of state, head of government, leader of the party, and Supreme Commander of the armed forces.161 The result, disappointing though it was to the Nazi leadership,162 and less impressive as a show of support than might perhaps have been imagined when all account is taken of the obvious pressures and manipulation, nevertheless reflected the fact that Hitler had the backing, much of it fervently enthusiastic, of the great majority of the German people.
In the few weeks embracing the Röhm affair and the death of Hindenburg, Hitler had removed all remaining threats to his position – with an ease which even in the spring and early summer of 1934 could have been barely imagined. He was now institutionally unchallengeable, backed by the ‘big battalions’, adored by much of the population. He had secured total power. The Führer state was established. Germany had bound itself to the dictatorship it had created.
After the crisis-ridden summer, Hitler was, by September, once again in his element on the huge propaganda stage of the Nuremberg Rally.163 In contrast even to the previous year’s Rally, this was consciously devised as a vehicle of the Führer cult. Hitler now towered above his Movement, which had assembled to pay him homage. The film which the talented and glamorous director Leni Riefenstahl made of the Rally subsequently played to packed houses throughout Germany, and made its own significant contribution to the glorification of Hitler. The title of the film, devised by Hitler himself, was Triumph of the Will.164 In reality, his triumph owed only a little to will. It owed far more to those who, in the power-struggles of the summer, had much to gain – or thought they had – by placing the German state at Hitler’s disposal.