5
It is possible and seems likely that the masses of the petite bourgeoisie fall again into a morality tailored for them on the basis of a dirty psychology; and that they see Hitler as the saviour once more.
— Thomas Mann, journal entry, 4 July 19341
Although the first wave of Nazi violence against real and imagined opponents of the dictatorship lessened toward the end of 1933, the early months of 1934 saw increasing tensions in Germany. This growing conflict was largely internal and pitted those who insisted on completing the ‘revolution’ by pushing for a fundamental transformation of German society in line with National Socialist ideology against those who favoured compromise with traditional elitist groups in order to further consolidate the NSDAP’s newly acquired position of power. These two positions, commonly associated with Röhm on the one side and Hitler, Göring, and Himmler on the other, were not only about ideological differences but also fundamental discrepancies in life experience and social status. This chapter will first trace the lines of this important conflict and re-examine the political ambitions of the SA in the first half of 1934. It will then analyse the events that unfolded between 30 June and 2 July in some detail and discuss their immediate political consequences. Finally, it will put the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ into the wider context of the legal and political development of the Third Reich, touching as well on the origin of the cliché of the homosexual stormtrooper.2
Showdown
Despite the Nazi takeover of power and regardless of the stormtroopers’ elevated social status and improved chances on the job market, as outlined in the previous chapter, dissatisfaction among them had grown steadily since the summer of 1933. A considerable number of the better educated but relatively new members of the Nazi Party had already been able to embark on new careers thanks to their new political affiliation. In common parlance, these individuals were the so-called Märzgefallene, the ‘March windfalls’ or ‘March victims’, an allusion to the more than 200 revolutionaries who had died in Berlin and Vienna in March 1848. By contrast, many of the long-time activists still suffered economic hardship, persistent unemployment, and generally poor career prospects. These men were quick to blame the usual suspects, Jews and the ‘fat cats’ of industry and politics, but increasingly they also questioned the party leadership’s ambition and ability to fulfil the far-reaching promises made in previous years.
Furthermore, the thousands of Communists and Social Democrats who now dressed in the brown shirt contributed to the growing dissatisfaction that in particular troubled the long-time rank-and-file stormtroopers. The extent to which these former competitors infiltrated the SA has been a matter of debate since the early 1930s.3 Even prior to the Nazi takeover of power, the KPD claimed that it had successfully penetrated the SA. By its own account, by late 1932, it had no fewer than 164 ‘confidants’ in Berlin, and in Saxony had established eighteen in Zwickau, and forty-two in Chemnitz.4 In the following two years it is clear that many more Communists and Social Democrats joined the SA, at times voluntarily, at times by summary integration. The notoriously unreliable Rudolf Diels, the first chief of the Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, or Gestapa, later claimed that about 70 per cent of all new members of the SA in the capital in 1933 had been former Communists.5 Such figures are certainly excessive. It should also be noted that some of these ‘beefsteaks’ (so named because they were brown on the outside, but red within) only joined the Nazi paramilitaries for tactical reasons and not out of enthusiasm or political ‘awakening’. At a time when SA terror was almost unrestricted, many reasonably believed it advisable to join the ranks of the stormtroopers, particularly if one had a background in a rival organization. Those Social Democrats and Communists who in the spring and summer of 1933 joined the Stahlhelm, the only remaining legal non-Nazi paramilitary group, for tactical reasons quickly found themselves integrated into the expanding SA. The degree of loyalty that existed within the ranks was therefore extremely unclear, all the more if one recalls that paramilitary affiliations prior to 1933 were in many cases not stable, with the parties involved regularly struggling to determine whether conversions were ‘genuine’ or ‘formal’. Yet contemporary observers and later historians agree that the number of individuals who joined the SA for tactical reasons was significant, and that they were partly responsible for the intensified anti-capitalist and anti-reactionary currents among the stormtroopers in the early stages of the Third Reich.6
In December 1933, Hitler appointed Röhm and Hess as Reich ministers without portfolio. The ambitious Röhm took this as an endorsement of his far-reaching goal to secure a lasting and important role for the SA in the Third Reich in general and in military matters in particular. To achieve this, the SA was to be elevated to the most important armour-bearer in the Reich, ideally absorbing the comparatively small Reichswehr and its ‘reactionary’ generals. The ‘grey rock’ of the Reichswehr had to sink in the ‘brown flood’, Röhm allegedly once said.7 It is, however, highly doubtful that Röhm intended to push through such plans at any cost. For his biographer Eleanor Hancock, it is more likely that he would have backed down if he had been unable to win Hitler’s favour for his plan, as he had done in 1925.8
At the beginning of 1934 the SA numbered more than three million men, whereas the Reichswehr remained officially limited to 100,000 professional soldiers. In the following months the rivalry between the SA and the Reichswehr escalated into a veritable beauty contest for the favour of the Führer. Initially, Hitler refrained from taking sides. Even if he was early on more inclined to favour the Reichswehr for military reasons, he sought to benefit from the SA’s pressure on the regular army, which he believed would make its leaders more willing to accept the political prerogatives of the regime. However, in a keynote speech delivered to military leaders on 28 February 1934, Hitler for the first time publicly rejected Röhm’s plans to turn the SA into a people’s militia and instead confirmed that the Reichswehr would remain the regular armed force of the German Reich. For practical reasons he urged close collaboration between the Reichswehr and the SA in the areas of border protection and pre-military training of German youth for the time being, but he left no doubt that in the longer run the SA was to abstain from acting as a military force.9 In doing so, Hitler renewed his commitment to a position that he had taken ever since the reorganization of the SA in 1925–6. Yet Röhm also remained loyal to his ideas from the mid-1920s. In this way the earlier conflict between Röhm’s Frontbann politics and Hitler’s idea of a party-controlled SA now clashed for a second time. In 1934, however, this conflict was no longer confined to the fringes of an obscure splinter party and its paramilitary wing, but took centre stage in national politics. Consequently, more actors were involved, and all of them were playing for high stakes.10
Röhm had been a controversial figure in the NSDAP ever since he had returned from Bolivia in late 1930, and his position had not been helped by the ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz’s publication in March 1932 of Röhm’s private letters to the physician Karl-Guenter Heimsoth, a psychologist who shared the SA supreme leader’s military passion and had himself a strong interest in male homosexuality.11 Highly intimate in nature, these letters left no doubt about Röhm’s homosexuality. Not least for this reason, Röhm developed more and more enemies within the NSDAP and even became the target of a murderous conspiracy that failed.12 In the spring of 1934 he faced not only hostility from several Nazi leaders, including Göring and Himmler, but also pressure from Werner von Blomberg and his loyal assistant Walter von Reichenau. Dubbed a ‘rubber lion’ by the military staff for his well-known allegiance to Hitler, Blomberg in the months prior to 30 June 1934 deliberately played up the risks posed by the SA and presented the Reichswehr as the only reliable defence the regime had. Some historians, most notably John Wheeler-Bennett, have claimed that Blomberg successfully compelled Hitler to initiate a violent crackdown on the SA. The available evidence does not validate such accusations.13 Yet there is no denying that Blomberg and his confidants intended to defeat the rival SA and were willing to pay a high price for that success.14
In the spring of 1934 another group in German politics attempted to strike at the SA and in this way target the Nazi regime more generally. This was the opposition from within the government. The core of this group consisted of men who worked for Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. Led by the Bavarian lawyer and political writer Edgar J. Jung and von Papen’s chief press officer Herbert von Bose, these individuals belonged to the so-called Jungkonservativen, or ‘neoconservatives’, who had initially advocated for an authoritarian state to overcome the problems of the Weimar Republic but were quickly repelled by the Nazi regime’s contempt for human rights and civil liberties. They were disgusted by the SA’s radical rhetoric, seeing a Nazi ‘social’ revolution as the ultimate victory of the ‘rule of the inferior’, and thereby of terror, brutality, and lawlessness.15 Unlike von Papen, who constantly talked about higher values and morale but in the end would accept even the political murder of his closest collaborators, the members of this circle demonstrated genuine courage and determination. They prepared to overthrow the Nazi regime and ideally replace it with a new government of the conservative right supported by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and the Reichswehr.16
As a starting signal of their campaign the members of this group carefully drafted a damning speech for von Papen to deliver in Marburg in Middle Hesse on 17 June 1934, with the hope that such harsh criticism of the Nazi regime would spark a political sea change. This criticism was both substantial and cutting, and represented a frontal attack on the character of the NSDAP’s rule as well as its ideology: ‘No nation can afford a constant revolt from below if it wants to pass the test of history,’ von Papen lectured. ‘The movement must come to a standstill some day; at some time a stable social structure must emerge, maintained by an impartial judiciary and by an undisputed state authority.’ Not surprisingly, the speech did not dismiss the ‘national revolution’ of 1933 and its ‘achievements’ of the last one and a half years, but it clearly deplored the ‘excesses’ that had occurred. The conspirators’ conclusion was nothing less than a verbal declaration of war: ‘The time of emancipation of the lowest social orders against the higher orders is past.’17 When von Papen spoke these words, much to the delight of the majority of his audience, two local SA leaders in uniform are reported to have left the hall.18
The location of the speech, the old auditorium of one of Germany’s most respected universities, was well chosen for an attack on the arrivistes of the Third Reich. The decorous academic atmosphere contrasted sharply with the bloody realities of the streets. However, it also demonstrated the isolation of the conspirators. While the Nazi Party could easily bring together thousands of followers in market squares and sport stadiums, the former had chosen a respectable but in many respects limited location for their damning words. These limitations were aggravated by the fact that Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda just hours after the speech prohibited the newspapers from reporting on it and also prevented it from being broadcast on the radio. Nevertheless, the speech became widely known in Germany and abroad, as the conspirators, in anticipation of Nazi censorship, had distributed hundreds of copies of it to friends and foreign journalists, who in turn made it into an international media event. Yet the intended political wake-up call turned out to be a failure, as the Reichswehr as well as the aged Reich President Hindenburg did nothing. The speech did not cause a change of government; instead, it accelerated the arrival of the long-built-up clash within the Nazi camp.
On 19 June 1934, just two days after von Papen’s Marburg speech, the governors of the German provinces met at the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin. In his opening speech at this confidential meeting Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Minister of the Interior, not only announced a further centralization of powers, but also lamented the increasing internal frictions that were undermining the authority of the state. In addition, he reported, in what was perhaps a direct reference to the von Papen speech, acts of sabotage had increased over the last few days. The euphoria of the spring of 1933 could not be expected to last very long, Frick said, claiming that it was all the more necessary to take a tough stance against ‘defeatists’ of all kinds. Following this speech, several governors offered reports of widespread criticism of the Nazi Party and its representatives in their respective regions. They pointed out that many ‘character deficiencies’ among local and regional Nazi leaders had become a serious problem for the public image of the party. The German population could not understand the comparatively high salaries of higher functionaries of the Nazi Party and its organizations, the Oberpräsident Ferdinand von Lüninck from Koblenz claimed, particularly as several of these leaders now boasted openly of their new titles and wealth. His colleague from Düsseldorf, Carl Christian Schmidt, referred directly to the SA as one of the sources of local discontent in his province and asked for more support from the SA field police to deal with marauding stormtroopers, who were otherwise nearly exempt from prosecution.19
The immediate results of this meeting are not known. Yet the topics addressed, as well as the relatively frank debate that occurred, indicate that the von Papen speech had encouraged conservative critics of the NSDAP and its policies to come out into the open. In line with this shift, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, reported on 20 June 1934 about the tensions existing within the German government. There were rumours, he said, ‘that the Reichswehr, which has already increased its force with new recruits, will, in conjunction with the SS troops, of which the SA are jealous and which are supposed to be composed of conservative elements and also perhaps with the Prussian police, compel the Chancellor to dismiss his radical advisers and also the SA troops, and to govern conservatively. Some seem confident that this consummation will be reached fairly soon.’ However, the ambassador continued, a ‘revolution to the right’ was unlikely to happen, as Hitler, not least because of his ‘unwillingness to sever connections with his old followers’, would not ‘lend himself to any such movement’.20
Dodd’s report testifies to the extent to which observers expected a violent clash between the ‘revolutionary’ SA and the comparatively ‘conservative’ forces of the Reichswehr and the increasingly powerful SS in the early summer of 1934. Although the ambassador clearly overemphasized Hitler’s loyalty to Röhm and other ‘Old Fighters’, he was right about the timing of this confrontation, in that it took only several days for these political tensions to erupt into a veritable political coup within the Nazi Party. Ever since the deadly events of early July 1934, political observers have speculated on the background of the killings and those who orchestrated them.21 Many who were directly involved in politics during this time reported that Hitler was not the central figure in the events, as he seemed quite reluctant to press for tough decisions until late in June 1934. However, as we will see later in this chapter, it was Hitler who made the final decision to strike and, once he had made up his mind, pushed it through without mercy or remorse.
It is meanwhile well established that the driving individuals in the fatal attack on Röhm and the OSAF in the months prior to 30 June 1934 were Göring; Himmler; Himmler’s adjutant Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence agency; and the Reichswehr generals Werner von Blomberg, in 1934 the Minister of Defence, and Walter von Reichenau, at this time head of the Wehramt under Blomberg’s control. In the view of the historian Kurt Gossweiler and the materialist historiography advocated within the German Democratic Republic, ‘big business’ was another, if not the most important, factor in the liquidation of Röhm’s SA, as the latter allegedly aimed at the ‘abolition of the preeminent position of the heavy industries’ and big farmers (Großagrarier).22 Goebbels switched sides in this clash just in time to remain in office, yet most commentators of the time noticed that his position after the purge seemed considerably weakened. By contrast, post-war statements that asserted the existence of an elaborate ‘SA plot’ to overthrow the government in order to violently fulfil the Nazi ‘revolution’ and kill lists ‘issued by the OSAF’ should be treated with extreme care.23 Dissenting voices and the dissatisfaction of many SA leaders should not be confused with a sustainable political strategy. A proper plan for violent action against Hitler, the increasingly powerful SS, and the Reichswehr simply did not exist.24
‘Reich Murder Week’
There is no lack of colourful accounts of the course of action that unfolded between 30 June and 2 July 1934.25 Instead of providing yet another detailed narrative, the aim of the following section is to single out those aspects that shed light on the ways the SA reacted during and immediately after this deadly blow. The best documents for investigating this aspect of the events are the detailed notes of Viktor Lutze, appointed by Hitler as Röhm’s successor on 1 July 1934 (Plate 17). A few weeks after his appointment, Lutze began to regularly record his political thoughts in writing, a habit he continued until his death in a car accident on 2 May 1943. His 312-page-long ‘political diary’ remains unpublished to this day, with the exception of his notes on the ‘Röhm purge’, which were printed in a series of three articles that appeared in the liberal Frankfurter Rundschaubetween 14 and 16 May 1957. Similar to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Lutze’s notes were written both for himself and for posterity. After the ‘Röhm purge’ the new SA Chief of Staff felt a particular need to defend himself against the accusation that he had betrayed his comrades in the SA, as he was one of the very few SA leaders who personally benefited from the murderous events. This desire for justification was an important reason for starting his diary in the first place. In later years, particularly between 1941 and 1943, the activity of writing in his notebook also took on a therapeutic character, as Lutze found it increasingly difficult to find a political audience, let alone influence the course of politics, which left him frustrated and ultimately depressed.26
Despite Lutze’s long and successful career within the Nazi movement, including his service as governor of the Prussian province of Hanover between 1933 and 1941, he has never attracted strong interest among historians on Nazi Germany.27 In most cases Lutze is presented as a submissive man without character,28 a ‘pale vassal of Hitler’,29 one of his ‘featureless creatures’ (nichtssagende Kreatur).30 Such harsh characterizations partly reflect the stereotypes of the post-1934 SA, but they also point to the perception that he was unimportant, at least compared to his predecessor. However, it was Lutze who oversaw the complicated mutations of the SA, which remained one of the largest National Socialist mass organizations, for the next nine years, until May 1943.
Lutze was born on 28 December 1890 in Bevergern in Tecklenburg. A professional soldier during the First World War and, starting in 1922, an early member of the NSDAP and the SA, he became the leader of the SA ‘Gausturm Ruhr’ in 1926 and two years later was promoted to SA-Oberführer Ruhr. After the September 1930 elections he represented the NSDAP in the Reichstag. Despite his important role in the Nazi movement prior to 1 July 1934, his appointment as head of the SA came as a surprise. It is indicative of his low public profile that his name was not mentioned even once in the nationally distributed illustrated weekly Der SA-Mann between January 1932 and June 1934.31 From the perspective of Röhm’s adversaries, the promotion of Lutze to SA Chief of Staff was intended to permanently diminish the influence of the Brownshirts. As Lutze could not (yet) rely on a stable power base within the SA, he was entirely dependent on Hitler’s goodwill. As his diary notes make plain, he uncritically venerated the Führer and exempted him from all criticism. Even more than other SA generals, Lutze was willing to execute his master’s will and careful not to overstep his own authority.
In his diary Lutze noted that he had first learned of the plans to remove Röhm from the leadership of the SA on 22 June 1934 from Hitler himself. On that day the chancellor had requested that Lutze come to Berlin and in a face-to-face conversation presented him with the alleged ‘Putsch’ plans supposedly contrived by Röhm.32 When Lutze replied that he had never heard of such ideas, Hitler referred to evidence provided by the Gestapo and commanded Lutze to no longer accept orders from the OSAF in Munich.33 If we believe Lutze’s version to be ‘true’ – in the sense that he himself believed what he wrote – then he was not offered Röhm’s position prior to 1 July. Yet, from 22 June 1934 onward, he was aware that an upper leadership change within the SA was imminent. We can also reasonably assume that Lutze expected to be on the winning side of this conflict.34
Lutze pretended not to have been involved in this matter until 28 June 1934, when he attended the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven in Essen, at which both Hitler and Göring were groomsmen. As the dinner was being served, Hitler quickly left the wedding table to receive several phone calls from the Gestapo and the Minister of State in the Prussian State Ministry, Paul Körner, Göring’s right-hand man. ‘I got the impression that certain people had an interest in exacerbating the situation precisely at a moment when the Führer was not in Berlin and could not be informed in writing, but saw and heard everything only on the phone,’ Lutze commented later. He maintained the view that Röhm had never planned a putsch against Hitler on 30 June 1934. If anything, Lutze credited Röhm with formulating plans to limit or abolish the ‘reactionary and un-socialist military [sic!]’.35
Hitler left Terboven’s wedding party early and spent the rest of the night in the nearby Hotel Kaiserhof with Göring and Lutze. During the evening hours Körner arrived from Berlin with news that – according to Lutze’s report – provoked Hitler to exclaim: ‘I am fed up, I will make an example!’ Hitler then called Röhm and summoned a meeting with him and the other SA leaders in the Hanselbauer Pension located in the spa town of Bad Wiessee in Upper Bavaria, a short drive south from Munich. This meeting was to take place at 10 a.m. on 30 June, the first day of the SA’s national holiday month. At about 1 a.m. on 29 June, Göring left Essen for Berlin, charged with carrying out the events planned for the capital.36 Berlin was to become the second centre of the murderers’ action, after Bavaria.
Hitler and Lutze spent Thursday, 29 June, in Bad Godesberg near Bonn. Goebbels arrived later that day. Lutze described the atmosphere as relaxed until shortly after midnight, when Hitler received another call from Berlin and ordered that he, Goebbels, and Lutze be driven to the nearby Hangelar Airport. Their plane departed at about 1.45 a.m. Lutze remembered a ‘magnificent, clear sky’ and the shining lights of Frankfurt. The men on board did not speak much. Lutze claimed to have approached Hitler and to have asked him to ‘alter the way of the impending arrests’, but supposedly did not receive an answer. Their plane finally landed at the Oberwiesenfeld Airfield at sunrise. SS men immediately surrounded Hitler and passed on the latest news to him, which led to a new outburst of rage and excitement. Hitler then had the two local SA leaders, the SA-Obergruppenführer August Schneidhuber and the SA-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Schmid, woken up and summoned to the airfield. When they arrived he called them ‘traitors’ and snatched off their epaulets, declaring: ‘You are arrested and will be shot!’ SS units then swarmed into town with blacklists containing the names of those to be taken into custody. Next, Hitler, Goebbels, and Lutze, accompanied by Hitler’s adjutants Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner and several SS men and police, drove southbound.37 In Bad Wiessee they had Röhm and several other SA leaders present arrested and brought to Munich’s Stadelheim Prison. There, they were shot either in the early evening hours of the same day or, in the case of Röhm, the following day.38
At about 11.30 a.m. on 30 June, still prior to the first executions in Munich, a meeting of leading National Socialists including Hitler, Goebbels, Hess, and other party luminaries took place in the city’s ‘Brown House’. Several SA-Obergruppenführer were present as well, among them Lutze, his later successor Max Jüttner, and SA-Gruppenführer Karl Schreyer. The latter in 1949 remembered that Hitler dashed into the hall ‘like a madman, with foam at the mouth’. He accused Röhm of high treason and called the alleged putsch the greatest betrayal the world had ever seen.39 Hitler then appointed Lutze as Röhm’s successor. ‘For a moment, I would have preferred to refuse,’ Lutze noted, before explaining at length how over the following days he had consolidated and attempted to help his fellow SA leaders but had not been able to prevent the pre-planned executions from taking place.40 The situation was so tense that even the new SA Chief of Staff did not dare go to the OSAF headquarters but instead took a room in Munich’s Vier Jahreszeiten, a luxury hotel, where he claimed to have installed a kind of provisional bureau.41
In Berlin, Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich acted with similar ruthlessness. They were well prepared for their task, having previously asked the Gestapo and the SD to compile lists of the names of those to be arrested.42 At about 10 a.m. on 30 June 1934, Goebbels called Göring in Berlin. When the prearranged code word ‘Kolibri’ was exchanged, Göring knew what to do. In close cooperation with Himmler and Heydrich, he ordered the arrests and executions of several high-ranking SA leaders, as well as the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and other influential Nazi critics and internal rivals. Members of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler carried out at least sixteen summary executions in Berlin-Lichterfelde between 30 June and 2 July. Nine other people were shot in their homes or offices, in the cellars of the Gestapo headquarters, or ‘taken for a ride’.43
To publicly justify the executions and arrests, the regime claimed that Röhm and his conspirators in the SA had planned a violent overthrow, and that Hitler had therefore carried out a pre-emptive strike. Because of the imminent danger a less violent option had not been available. In the late afternoon hours of 30 June, Göring in a public speech called the operation ‘a process of purification’ and promised that its ultimate goal would be a ‘cleaner, more consolidated state’.44 A detailed decree from Hitler to Lutze, published on the same day, adopted the same rhetoric. Containing twelve points, it ordered the SA leaders ‘to help maintain and to strengthen the SA as a clean and tidy organization’. Hitler asked all stormtroopers for nothing less than ‘blind submission’ and ‘absolute discipline’ – in other words, unrestricted obedience. The days of splendid parties with alcohol flowing were over, once and for all, Hitler decreed. Most humiliating for the SA was a paragraph that characterized the organization as shot through with morally depraved homosexuals. From now on, Hitler declared, ‘SA men should be leaders, not abominable apes!’45Whereas Hitler’s tone was crude, Werner von Blomberg’s order to the army of 1 July 1932 was a plainly cynical move. He not only assured the Nazi authorities of the army’s gratitude for the party’s ‘self-sacrifice and loyalty’, but also pretended to be on friendly terms with the now ‘purified’ SA: ‘The good relationship towards the new SA, demanded by the Führer, will be fostered with pleasure by the Army, conscious of their common ideals.’46 Two days later, on 3 July, the murderers granted themselves absolution with the ‘Law on State Self-Defence Measures’, which exempted all crimes committed by the regime between 30 June and 2 July from criminal prosecution.47
Despite the high level of uncertainty and violence of these days, the German public reacted to the news calmly and with composure. Nowhere did the SA try to fight back once the news of the arrests and Röhm’s removal were confirmed. The disarming of individual men and complete SA units proceeded without impediment, even if Lutze in his diary complained bitterly about the arrogant and humiliating methods employed by the SS.48 The U.S. military attaché, Jacob Wuest, reported from Berlin on 2 July 1934: ‘The trouble was over within a few hours and by Saturday evening all was again quiet, the people of the streets hardly realizing that anything had happened. The lack of excitement on the streets both during the raids and subsequent thereto was remarkable.’ He also observed that as the raids unfolded, ‘practically all brown uniforms disappeared from the streets’, although he admitted that this was probably not simply an immediate reaction to the violence, but also a consequence of the beginning of the stormtroopers’ long-planned July vacation.49 The Bavarian authorities likewise reported that all Bavarian cities had remained calm, with the exception of Munich, where some people had been arrested during the night of 1–2 July because they had been spreading ‘inappropriate’ rumours about the recent events.50
Such rumours continued to circulate in the following weeks, particularly as hundreds of people had disappeared and their relatives and friends remained without the slightest idea of their whereabouts. At times the news of someone’s execution reached the victim’s family only weeks or months later, as in the case of Kurt Mosert, the leader of the SA-Standarte in Torgau. His parents learned only in October 1934 that their son had been shot while ‘trying to escape’ from KZ Lichtenburg three months earlier.51 In the meantime some of those who had been directly involved in the killings bragged about their participation. According to post-war testimonies, Max Müller, a groundsman at the Munich Sports Club, and his son of the same name were two such figures. In the summer of 1934 both men were members of the SS and were said to have publicly shown acquaintances the badges of those SA leaders who had been executed.52
Behind the scenes, the regime tried to strike compromises with the relatives of the victims, particularly when they had been influential or prominent. On 5 July, four days after the murder of Röhm, the Bavarian Minister President Ludwig Siebert claimed that Hitler had given orders that Röhm’s mother Sofia Emilie should inherit her son’s private estate, and that her apartment should from now on be spared further raids. According to Siebert, the seventy-six-year-old woman had unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself after she learned of her son’s execution.53 Several families of those who had been murdered between 30 June and 2 July 1934 were later offered compensatory monthly payments. According to Viktor Lutze, at least one of the widows turned her back on the proposal in disgust, claiming that a state that pretended to operate on an ‘idealist’ (ideell) basis but resorted to financial compensation exemplified the ‘rule of mammon’. ‘Where has the decent National Socialist gone?’ she asked.54 The regime prohibited the publication of obituary notices and never cleared the names of those it had executed.
The overall number of victims between 30 June and 2 July was close to 100. Rainer Orth, as much a knowledgeable historian as a scrupulous detective, has so far identified ninety of the murdered people by name.55 Even if regional studies suggest that some additional killings were so successfully hidden from later scrutiny that the belated identification of these victims is impossible, the number of these ‘unsolved’ cases can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.56 The latest figure of 100 is surprisingly close to that reported in official statistics from the summer of 1934. An early alphabetical ‘dead list’, provided by the police and approved by Hitler, contained the names of eighty-three people, as well as the places and dates of their executions. As this list makes clear, the cities of Munich, Berlin, and Breslau were the centres of the executions, with twenty-four, twenty-two, and nine victims respectively. Murders also took place in Dresden, Stettin, and near the Lichtenburg concentration camp, as well as in the cities of Stuttgart, Plauen, Glogau, Tilsit, Landshut, and a few other places.57
Apart from Berlin and Munich, the geographical distribution of the murders reveals a regional focus on Lower Silesia and Saxony, areas in which the SA had been particularly ‘unruly’ in the previous years.58 Yet the SA leaders executed – among them the Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, his Silesian counterpart Edmund Heines, and the head of the SA’s special representatives in Prussia, Georg von Detten – were just one group of victims among many. Well-informed observers like the writer Thomas Mann speculated that several of the killings were in fact cover-up executions that targeted those who were directly involved in or knew too much about the Reichstag fire.59 Still other victims had been outspoken opponents of the regime and were killed for this reason alone. Such was the case in the murders of Kurt von Schleicher, Edgar Jung, and Herbert von Bose. A fourth and final group consisted of those unfortunate individuals who were executed by mistake, among them the music critic Wilhelm Schmid, who had been confused with the SA-Gruppenführer of the same name.60
In the months and years following the purge, anti-Nazi authors often speculated that the murder rate had been much higher. Excessive numbers like Kurt Lüdecke’s figure of ‘over five hundred SA men murdered’61 were at times the result of deliberate exaggerations, but they can also be attributed to the uncertainty and widespread fear that followed the ‘Reich murder week’ (Reichsmordwoche).62 In early July 1934 more than 1,000 people were arrested, and many more went temporarily into hiding. Two anonymous reports from imprisoned Berlin SA leaders testify to the bad treatment such detainees faced during their internment, first in the notorious Columbiahaus Prison in Berlin-Tempelhof, and then later in the Lichtenburg concentration camp. Explanations for their arrests were initially not provided, and none of the more than sixty SA leaders held in confinement in Lichtenburg was ever arraigned.63 A similar situation unfolded in other parts of the Reich. SA leaders who were not shot were kept in limbo for days and sometimes weeks, with the authorities not even pretending to investigate the alleged preparations for a violent putsch planned by Röhm and his followers. According to official German press communications from August 1934, the regime took no fewer than 1,124 people into ‘protective custody’ on the occasion of the ‘Röhm revolt’. While the regime claimed to have released 1,079 of them by mid-August, the other forty-five remained in prison ‘for further inquiries’. Despite these pending arrests a governmental statement issued in August declared that the ‘action of 30 June 1934’ was over.64 For many high-ranking stormtroopers this declaration was premature. Apart from those interned by the Gestapo and the SS, many more were temporarily suspended or even permanently expelled from the SA. On 2 August 1934, Lutze, in collaboration with Walter Buch, the chairman of the NSDAP’s Supreme Party Court, established an SA disciplinary court consisting of two to three SA leaders and Buch himself that started the internal cleansing of the SA leadership corps, as requested by Hitler on 1 July.65
A list compiled by the Silesian SA of those regional SA leaders who were temporarily removed from the ranks in late July 1934 contains detailed information on the accusations later advanced in this court. Some of these charges were juridical in nature, concerning participation in excessive violence, defalcation, or male homosexuality. Other charges were highly subjective and, in a stricter sense, hardly more than moral judgements based on personal observations or rumours. One SA leader, for example, was accused of ‘having been in nearly all political parties’ prior to joining the SA in 1932, while another was accused of being married to a Czechoslovakian wife who was now regarded as a spy. Still other SA leaders were criticized for their ‘totally improper private lives’, for being a ‘bumbler’, or for being ‘too young, arrogant, and with an unclear comportment’ during the Röhm revolt.66 As these examples demonstrate, the accusations partly reflected criticisms previously levied by Hitler, but they also point to the interpersonal character of the ‘cleansings’. Even those character traits that had previously been considered positive qualities for an SA leader during the Kampfzeit – such as boldness and the readiness to violently push one’s interests through – could now be turned against those caught in the crosshairs.67
This ‘transvaluation of values’ constituted a severe problem for many convicted stormtroopers long after the immediate crackdown on the SA had come to an end, as even those who remained in the organization and even climbed the SA’s hierarchy were unable to forget the humiliation of the summer of 1934. The scars from these events remained, even after Hitler in his infamous justification for the killings delivered on 13 July 1934 reached out to the SA, predicting that ‘in a few weeks’ time, the brown shirt will once again dominate the German streets’.68 Lutze remained a sworn enemy of Himmler for the rest of his life, in private accusing the Reichsführer-SS of murder and hypocrisy.69 Even if the SA leaders managed to push aside these painful memories in carrying out their daily routines, a grain of insecurity remained. A good example of these lingering effects is the case of Siegfried Kasche, who, as leader of the SA-Gruppe Ostmark in Frankfurt an der Oder, only narrowly escaped the hangman in July 1934. Seven years later, in November 1941, while serving as German envoy to Croatia, he met with Himmler in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery in Berlin on the occasion of Croatia, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Denmark, and Finland joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. When the men disagreed about the SS’s influence in eastern Europe, Himmler maliciously told Kasche that ‘he had apparently not yet forgotten the 30 June’. ‘I understood the warning his words implied,’ Kasche wrote in his personal notebook. He was apparently so troubled by this clash with the Reichsführer-SS that he noted this incident twice – the only repetition in his otherwise short and aphoristic notes.70
The Myth of the Homosexual Nazi Activist
‘Daddy, what does homosexual mean?’ Hitlerjunge Knax asks his begetter.
‘That is what you become as soon as you are a traitor,’ his father snarled.71
This joke, printed in the Social Democratic Neuer Vorwärts in Czechoslovakia on 15 July 1934, in a nutshell sarcastically summarizes how the murderers in the wake of the ‘Röhm purge’ exploited the stigma of male homosexuality to legitimize their politically motivated killings. The paradigmatic image that was produced to help justify such actions appeared in a summary of the events of 30 June 1934 provided by the Reich Press Office on the same day: ‘The enforcement of the detention [of Röhm and the other SA leaders in Bad Wiessee, D.S.] revealed images morally so sad that the slightest grain of sympathy had to vanish. A number of the SA leaders present had taken toy boys along, and one even had to be awoken and arrested in the most despicable situation. The Führer ordered the uncompromising extermination of this pestilential bubo.’72
Colourful accounts of Hitler breaking into the Pension Hanselbauer in the morning hours of 30 June 1934 and finding SA leaders in bed with other men are part of many accounts of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.73 From a careful historian’s point of view, it is impossible to verify such testimonies, given the political context and the partisan stance of those numerically few witnesses who were later able to provide first-hand accounts of the arrests. Even if one assumes that such statements were based on facts, their morally self-righteous tone was plainly hypocritical, as the homosexuality of some high-ranking SA leaders, most notably Röhm and Heines, had become an open secret within Germany prior to June 1934.74 Hitler had early on taken notice of it but until the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ had come to Röhm’s defence, claiming that the SA was ‘not a school to educate the daughters of the upper classes, but a formation of rough fighters’.75 Moralization was for a long time second to mobilization. As party leader, Hitler had also tolerated the presence of other known homosexuals in the upper ranks of the SA, much to the distaste of many in his party.
The Münchener Post had attacked Röhm and with him the SA for homosexual activities as early as June 1931. Yet it was the publication of Röhm’s private letters in March 1932 that proved most influential in triggering debates on ‘morality’. These letters had been confiscated by the Berlin police in 1931 and were then leaked to the journalist Helmuth Klotz, a former Nazi activist who had switched sides. Since 1929, Klotz had worked closely with the SPD and edited several anti-Nazi brochures on its behalf.76 Some 300,000 copies of Röhm’s letters were published and a few weeks later provoked a violent incident in the national parliament.77 On 12 May 1932, Heines recognized Klotz in the Reichstag café and, with several other Nazi deputies, beat him bloody on the spot. The attack made nationwide headlines and helped establish a connection between National Socialism and male homosexuality. Derisive nicknames such as ‘Rent boys’ and ‘Paragraph 175 Guard’ – referring to the paragraph of the German penal code that illegalized male homosexuality – became common. Nazi opponents publicly greeted stormtroopers with shouts of ‘Hot Röhm!’ (Geil Röhm!) or ‘Gay Heil!’ (Schwul Heil!).78
However, it would be wrong to assume that in the early 1930s those opposing the Nazis widely exploited such accusations for their own ends. Apart from the tone emanating from the Communist and Socialist left, a restrained atttitude dominated the discourse.79 Characteristic of the efforts to not misuse intimate private information to influence national politics was an article by Kurt Tucholsky in the left-liberal Die Weltbühne in April 1932. The well-known writer and journalist had no problem revealing the hypocrisy of the National Socialists, who publicly attacked the allegedly sinful republic while at the same time tolerating homosexuals within their leadership. Yet a personal attack on Röhm’s homosexuality, which he carefully tried to keep private, could not be justified – not for the purpose of preserving his dignity, but for preserving our own, Tucholsky explained: ‘One should not go to see one’s opponent in bed.’80 Even if the perception that parts of the SA leadership were gay gained ground in the two years following the ‘Röhm scandal’, it was ultimately the National Socialists themselves who contributed to its lasting effect. The previous rumours and disclosures had set the stage for the regime’s 1934 accusations that the SA was a bunch of homosexual ‘perverts’, and the idea immediately caught on, to the extent that the cliché of the ‘gay Nazi’ is still firmly embedded in the cultural imaginary of the Nazi movement.
Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer, Alexander Zinn, Jörn Meve, and Andreas Pretzel have rightly emphasized, the ‘myth of legions of gay Nazis has no historical basis’; rather, it was a ‘propaganda tool created by the German Left’ that survived well into the post-war decades.81 This is not to say that homosexual stormtroopers did not exist, but rather that we have no historical record to assume that the percentage of homosexual men in the SA was higher than their proportion in the general male population.82 This assertion holds true despite the companionship and mutual affection among men in local units, as Andrew Wackerfuss has recently demonstrated with regard to the Hamburg SA in the Kampfzeit.83 In fact, it would have been highly surprising if homosexual men had deliberately chosen the SA as an environment in which to live out their sexuality. The official Nazi discourse was distinctly homophobic, putting forward ‘biological’ and ‘social’ arguments against the orientation. Official party doctrine declared that in order to guarantee the future of the German people, all attempts to legalize and promote male homosexuality had to be blocked. As early as February 1933 the new government under Hitler started to close down places of homosexual encounters, such as gay bars and bathhouses. This was only the beginning of a violent crackdown on male homosexuals that in the following years led to the condemnation and imprisonment of several 10,000 men, including hundreds of cases of forced castration.84
Among National Socialists the conception of a homosexual ‘fighter’ as a particularly masculine identity – in the tradition of Hans Blüher’s Männerbund ideal – remained a minority opinion.85 Unlike Röhm, most of its militants did not believe in the image of the ‘homosexual warrior-activist’ and instead conventionally associated male homosexuality with ‘femaleness’ and weakness, characteristics with which they carefully contrasted their own self-images.86 For a stormtrooper to ‘come out’ by free choice was thus extremely difficult, if not impossible. The fact that homosexuals in the SA leadership at times established networks that protected or actively promoted fellow homosexuals, such as those created in the Silesian SA under Heines and within the SA leadership under Karl Ernst, was ultimately a consequence of the party’s homophobia – and not the other way round.87 Yet, after 1945, the popular myth of the gay stormtrooper featured even in the serious historical scholarship on the SA. When it came to sexual politics, there was no zero hour; instead, a homophobic continuity prevailed, stretching from the self-declared moral crusades of the SS to later mainstream historiography. Homophobic attitudes now coalesced with anti-Fascist convictions, an unfortunate liaison that for decades contributed to the belittlement of the persecution of homosexual men in the Third Reich.88
Consequences
Mindful observers understood the fundamental consequences of the events that took place in the summer of 1934. An American diplomat called the occurrences of 30 June 1934 ‘without parallel in the history of civilized Europe’.89 Ten years later, when news of the failed assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944 emerged, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ still served as a point of reference in Germany. A critical observer remarked that the ‘butchery of 1934’ would be nothing compared to the crackdown on conspirators that he expected to follow.90 And even long after the Second World War had come to an end, the liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau in 1957 referred to the summer of 1934 as ‘one of the most atrocious chapters in the history of our people’.91
In contrast to these later judgements, the opinion in Germany in the days and weeks after those deadly days was divided. After the arrests became known, Social Democrats observed that the first reactions in the streets of the capital on the afternoon of 30 June 1934 were often smiles and expressions of Schadenfreude. Others noted disbelief and apathy, particularly from rank-and-file stormtroopers.92 Because several SA leaders had the reputation of being corrupt and indecent, many Germans credited Hitler for what they regarded as his determined intervention. Some even saw the days of a ‘moral renewal’ drawing near.93
On 13 July 1934, Hitler attempted to justify his line of action in the previous weeks in a long speech at the Kroll Opera House, the provisional parliamentary building. The speech was broadcast live and eagerly awaited by many, yet the reactions to it were very mixed. One critical listener described Hitler as having been ‘in a state of highest excitement and near-pathological depression’. Hitler had even exclaimed that he would put a bullet through his own head if the state and the party organizations did not remain united.94 Thomas Mann noted in his diary that Hitler had delivered a ‘barking speech’ in which he elevated the murders into an act of salvation, interrupted by frequent applause. The writer’s comment was short: ‘Nightmarish’.95 Yet, by and large, Hitler’s unusually emotional address did not fail to impress the public. For example, the conservative but independent mayor of the city of Celle in Lower Saxony, in a public speech on the occasion of the annual marksmen’s festival, said that he had been deeply moved by Hitler’s confession (Selbstbekenntnis) and even exclaimed: ‘From a human point of view alone he merits our profound sympathy and honest adoration.’96 Such a grotesque, but not atypical, reaction transformed this cold-blooded killer into a sensitive and responsible political leader. Hitler’s (staged) suffering paid direct political dividends – and it seemed to contrast him favourably with the allegedly simple-minded and brutal ‘hotheads’ of the SA. Within the Reichswehr, the events of 30 June 1934 confirmed the army’s role as the nation’s only armour-bearer and were celebrated as nothing less than a decisive ‘victory over the SA and the party’ – regardless of the blood-soaked nature of this political success that made the regular military command accomplices in crime.97
Whereas the Celle mayor’s appreciation was derived from his taking Hitler’s emotional theatre at face value, Carl Schmitt, the leading jurist of the early Third Reich, justified the political murders as a form of higher justice. On 1 August 1934, Schmitt published an article entitled ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht’ (‘The Führer Protects the Law’) in which he not only justified the killings but even elevated the ‘Führer’s action’ into an act of ‘true jurisdiction’. Taking up Hitler’s remarks on the alleged Socialist betrayal during the First World War, Schmitt insisted that a true political leader would thereby also serve as the nation’s highest judge, and as such would ‘defend the law from the most fatal abuse if, at a moment of danger, he creates unmediated justice’.98 In so arguing, Schmitt not only abandoned the established principle of the separation of powers but even compared the new state of lawlessness favourably to the alleged liberal ‘positive web of compulsory legal norms’.99 This was a remarkable position even for Schmitt, who less than five months earlier had insisted on the ability of German jurists to distinguish between a politically motivated ‘empty dictum’ (leerer Machtspruch) and a ‘legal dictum’ (Rechtsspruch).100 National Socialist ideology was to be applied in those cases where sweeping clauses were at hand, but in all other cases the legal norms had to be respected, Schmitt had argued. Yet even in this earlier text, Schmitt accepted the pre-eminence of formal laws only conditionally. It was ultimately the political sovereign who enjoyed the discretion to alter the legal framework at any given moment, Schmitt argued, as he was restricted only by a higher righteousness that was beyond human judgement. Consequently, Schmitt reduced the state in its entirety to a ‘body at the disposition of the leader of the [Nazi] movement’.101
With his highly political legal writings Schmitt contributed to what Ernst Fraenkel in 1940 described as the parallel existence of the ‘prerogative state’ and the ‘normative state’. Although the German judiciary applied legal norms in a formal way throughout the Third Reich, the government was permitted to ‘exercise unlimited arbitrariness and violence’, Fraenkel observed.102 In this respect the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ was a key event, not only putting an end to the far-reaching ambitions of the social-revolutionary wing of the Nazi movement but also indicating that from now on Nazi leaders could justify even the most serious capital crimes as long as they were deemed necessary to prevent an imminent danger to the nation’s development and expansion. Based on such reasoning, even Hitler’s ‘Commissar Order’ of June 1941, which requested the summary execution of alleged Bolshevists behind the eastern front lines, or the Nazi policies of ethnic cleansing and mass murder in eastern Europe, could be technically ‘justified’. The ‘Night of the Long Knives’ thus contributed decisively to the development of a Nazi morality that did not accept uncircumventable limits.
The immediate consequence of these developments was that ‘power shifted decisively upwards’, as the economic historian Adam Tooze has put it. Unlike the political situation of the early 1920s, not only was the independent labour movement destroyed, but the ‘autonomous paramilitary potential of the right’ was also strictly contained.103 The SA special representatives were officially recalled on 10 July 1934, indicating the end of the short-lived era of ambitious and somehow ‘autonomous’ SA politics.104 At about the same time, the infamous SA-run concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin closed. On 19 July 1934, Adolf Wagner, the Munich Gauleiter and Bavarian Minister of the Interior, decreed that from now on the civil administrations alone would be charged with maintaining public order and security.105 In the years to come, the Nazi Party kept the SA on a short leash, allowing only brief outbursts of violence. Most of the time the stormtroopers were assigned tasks that were considerably more ‘civilian’ in nature, testifying to the transformation of the SA into a regular feature of German society. Young men who received professional training in one of the SA’s northern schools, for example, served their local communities by furnishing a marching band at a children’s fair, organizing an SA artist group, staging amateur theatre performances, fighting against environmental problems, and organizing midsummer festivals (Plate 18).106
However uncertain the political consequences of 30 June 1934 appeared to be in the immediate aftermath of the killings, it was obvious to all observers that the SA would ‘doubtless be lessened in size’ and perhaps reduced in status to an ‘unarmed political organization’.107 Yet the political murders not only marked an end point in the sense that they concluded the period of the Nazi takeover and consolidation of power.108 They also indicated the beginning of five relatively stable years that witnessed Germans’ growing approval of Hitler’s domestic and foreign policy. The reincorporation of the Saarland after the plebiscite of 13 January 1935, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 all contributed to the restoration of German hegemony in central Europe and added to Hitler’s ever-growing popularity in the Reich.
For the SA, however, these five years were anything but stable. The organization underwent a radical transformation, both internally and with regard to its political goals. The days of relative independence from the NSDAP were irrevocably over, as were the times of political brawls with ideological opponents in the streets of the German Reich. The new role of the SA was comparatively unadventurous: they were supposed to educate the male German youth in Nazi ideology and to prepare them for military service in the Wehrmacht. At first glance this mission was a far cry from the organization’s far-reaching ambitions of the previous years. A closer examination will prove, however, that this new role had a lasting effect on the political situation in Germany and the mentalities of its people.