Night of the Long Knives

• 1. Introduction

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  The Night of the Long Knives began at roughly 04:30 on the 30th of June 1934, when Adolf Hitler and his entourage flew to Munich. Within hours, men who had helped build the Nazi movement would be dragged from their beds, handed pistols with a single cartridge, or simply shot where they stood. The event had three official names: the Night of the Long Knives, the Röhm purge, and Operation Hummingbird. What it was, in plain terms, was a state-ordered massacre carried out without trial, without charges, and without legal authority. At least 85 people died, though some estimates place the true toll between 700 and 1,000. More than 1,000 people were arrested.

  The killings settled an internal power struggle that had been building for years inside the Nazi Party. Ernst Röhm, the chief of staff of the SA paramilitary force and one of Hitler's oldest allies, was at the centre of it. But the purge reached far beyond Röhm. Former chancellors, conservative politicians, Catholic leaders, a music critic mistaken for someone else - all died in those three days. When it was over, Hitler stood before the Reichstag on the 13th of July 1934 and declared himself, in his own words, "the supreme judge of the German people." The question the rest of this documentary will trace is how Germany arrived at a moment when the murder of hundreds of its citizens could be called legal - and applauded.

• 2. The SA and Its Origins

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  Captain Ernst Röhm of the Reichswehr earned the nickname "The Machine Gun King of Bavaria" in the early 1920s, because he was responsible for storing and distributing illegal machine guns to Bavarian Freikorps units. The SA he would later command had grown from those same Freikorps - nationalistic organisations of disaffected World War I veterans who believed that the November Revolution had betrayed Germany when it was allegedly on the verge of victory in 1918.

  Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the SA operated as a private militia, breaking up meetings of Social Democrats and Communists and fighting pitched battles in city streets. In June 1932 alone, more than 400 street battles left 82 people dead. The violence served Hitler's political purposes during the climb to power. Once he became chancellor on the 30th of January 1933, it became a liability.

  The SA's ranks had swelled dramatically during the Great Depression, drawing in unemployed workers who believed the Nazis would deliver a genuine economic revolution: breaking up the aristocracy's landed estates, redistributing wealth, fulfilling the "socialist" part of National Socialism. When the regime did none of these things, disillusionment spread. SA men began attacking passers-by on the streets after drinking, assaulted foreign diplomats, and ignored police. Complaints of "overbearing and loutish" behaviour were common by mid-1933. The Foreign Office registered formal objections. At a gathering of senior Nazis on the 6th of July 1933, Hitler declared it was time to channel the revolution into "the secure bed of evolution" - a signal that he intended to rein in the force that had helped carry him to power.

• 3. Röhm's Ambitions

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  By January 1934, SA membership had surpassed three million men, dwarfing the Reichswehr, which the Treaty of Versailles had capped at one hundred thousand soldiers. Röhm delivered a formal memorandum to General Werner von Blomberg that month demanding the SA replace the Reichswehr as Germany's ground forces, with the regular army reduced to a training body for the SA. The army's officer corps, recruited largely from the Prussian nobility, regarded the SA as what one general's circle called a plebeian rabble. Röhm, who had participated in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, now wanted to lead a genuine military force and had lobbied for the position of Minister of Defence.

  On the 28th of February 1934, Hitler convened a meeting with Blomberg and the SA and SS leaderships. Under pressure, Röhm reluctantly signed a pledge acknowledging the Reichswehr's supremacy. But after Hitler and most army officers had left the room, Röhm reportedly declared he would not take orders from "the ridiculous corporal" - a contemptuous reference to Hitler. The remark did not trigger immediate retaliation, but it deepened a rift that had been growing for months.

  SA leader Max Heydebreck, speaking to his men in Rummelsburg, had already made the internal tensions explicit. He told the assembled brownshirts: "Some of the officers of the army are swine. Most officers are too old and have to be replaced by young ones. We want to wait till Papa Hindenburg is dead, and then the SA will march against the army." Such statements confirmed the fears of conservatives in the army and in the German political establishment that the SA represented an armed faction pursuing its own agenda.

• 4. The Coalition Against Röhm

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  On the 20th of April 1934, Hermann Göring transferred control of the Prussian political police - the Gestapo - to Heinrich Himmler. Two days later, Himmler appointed his deputy Reinhard Heydrich to run it. This was a deliberate manoeuvre. Göring believed Himmler could be counted on to move against Röhm, and control of the Gestapo gave Himmler the instrument to do it. By May, lists of those to be "liquidated" were circulating between Göring's and Himmler's people, who traded names - adding enemies of one side in exchange for sparing allies of the other.

  At the end of May, two former chancellors received warnings from friends in the Reichswehr that their lives were in danger and they should leave Germany immediately. Heinrich Brüning fled to the Netherlands. Kurt von Schleicher dismissed the warning as a bad joke. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath, acting at the request of Presidential State Secretary Otto Meißner and without Hitler's knowledge, asked the German Ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassell, to arrange for Mussolini to speak privately to Hitler about the SA. Mussolini agreed - Neurath was a former ambassador to Italy and knew Mussolini well. During the Venice summit on the 15th of June, Mussolini told Hitler directly that the SA's violence, hooliganism, and the homosexuality of its leadership were damaging Hitler's reputation internationally. He cited the June 1924 kidnapping and murder of Italian socialist Giacomo Matteotti as an example of the damage that unruly followers could inflict on a leader.

  On the 17th of June 1934, Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen delivered a speech at Marburg University warning explicitly against a "second revolution." According to his memoirs, he privately threatened to resign if Hitler did not act. Then Blomberg, meeting Hitler at the residence of President Hindenburg in Neudeck, delivered the most direct pressure of all: Hindenburg was close to declaring martial law and handing the government to the Reichswehr. Hindenburg was the one person in Germany whose authority could potentially remove Hitler from power.

• 5. The Purge Itself

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  Hitler arrived in Bad Wiessee between 06:00 and 07:00 on the 30th of June 1934, at the Hanselbauer Hotel where Röhm and his SA commanders were staying for a planned conference. The SA leadership, still in bed, were taken completely by surprise. SS men stormed the building. Hitler personally placed Röhm and other senior SA leaders under arrest.

  In Breslau SA leader Edmund Heines's room, SS men found him in bed with an unidentified eighteen-year-old male SA senior troop leader. Hitler ordered both shot outside the hotel immediately. Joseph Goebbels would later emphasise this detail heavily in the propaganda justifying the purge. At 10:00, after returning to party headquarters in Munich, Goebbels telephoned Göring in Berlin with the codeword Kolibri - the signal for execution squads across Germany to move against their targets.

  At Stadelheim Prison in Munich, Sepp Dietrich received orders to form an "execution squad" from the Leibstandarte. A firing squad shot five SA generals and an SA colonel in the prison courtyard. Those not killed immediately were given one-minute "trials" at the Leibstandarte barracks at Lichterfelde and then shot. In Berlin, an SS unit stormed the Vice-Chancellery on Göring's personal orders. Gestapo officers shot Papen's secretary Herbert von Bose without arresting him first. Papen's close associate Edgar Jung, author of the Marburg speech, was executed and his body dumped in a ditch. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was also murdered.

  Among the dead was Willi Schmid, the music critic of the Münchner Neuste Nachrichten newspaper, killed because his name was confused with one of the Gestapo's actual targets. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the former Bavarian state commissioner who had helped suppress the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, was also killed. Both Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were shot dead at their home. Karl Wolff, Himmler's adjutant, later described watching a personal friend - Karl von Spreti, Röhm's adjutant - die with "Heil Hitler" on his lips, believing to the end that the executions were an anti-Hitler SS plot rather than Hitler's own order.

• 6. Röhm's End

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  Ernst Röhm was held at Stadelheim Prison in Munich while Hitler weighed what to do with him. On the 1st of July, Hitler sent Theodor Eicke, the Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, and Eicke's SS adjutant Michael Lippert to carry out the final act. The two men entered Röhm's cell and handed him a Browning pistol loaded with one cartridge, telling him he had ten minutes to shoot himself. Röhm refused, saying, "If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself."

  When they returned at 14:50, Röhm was standing with his bare chest pushed forward in defiance. Eicke and Lippert shot him. Not until 1957 did German authorities try Lippert for the killing, in Munich. Lippert had been one of the few executioners from the purge to have evaded justice for more than two decades. He was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

  Röhm was subsequently erased from Nazi public memory. A copy of Leni Riefenstahl's film The Victory of Faith, about the 1933 Nuremberg rally and showing Röhm frequently at Hitler's side, had been edited to remove him. A copy of the original, unedited version survived and was found in the 1980s in the film archives of the German Democratic Republic.

• 7. Legal Cover and Reaction

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  On the 3rd of July 1934, Hitler's cabinet approved a measure declaring that "the measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defence by the State." Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner, a conservative who had previously served as Bavarian Justice Minister under the Weimar Republic, drafted the statute. It was signed by Hitler, Gürtner, and Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, retroactively legalizing the murders. Germany's leading legal scholar, Carl Schmitt, went further: he wrote an article defending Hitler's the 13th of July Reichstag speech titled Der Führer schützt das Recht - "The Führer Upholds the Law."

  The army almost unanimously applauded the purge, even though two generals, Kurt von Schleicher and Ferdinand von Bredow, had been among the victims. A telegram purportedly from the ailing Hindenburg expressed his "profoundly felt gratitude" and praised Hitler for "nipping treason in the bud." Göring later admitted at the Nuremberg trials that Hindenburg never saw or signed the telegram - the Nazis had written it themselves.

  Public reactions ranged widely. Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz praised Hitler's "personal courage, decisiveness and effectiveness" in her diary, even comparing him to Frederick the Great. Diarist Victor Klemperer noted the detachment of ordinary Germans: a postman who was not a Nazi sympathiser told him simply, "Well, he simply sentenced them." Among the few open dissenters, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord and Field Marshal August von Mackensen sent a detailed memo to Hindenburg on the 18th of July describing the murders of Schleicher and Bredow and demanding that Hindenburg reorganize the cabinet and punish those responsible. Hindenburg never responded. Whether he even received the memo is unclear, since Otto Meißner, who by then had aligned himself with the Nazis, may not have passed it along.

  In late 1934 and early 1935, army pressure finally won a partial concession: at the Berlin State Opera on the 3rd of January 1935, Hitler stated publicly that Schleicher and Bredow had been shot "in error" on the basis of false information, and that their names were to be restored to their regiment honour rolls. The speech was not reported in the German press. Privately, Hitler continued to accuse Schleicher of treason: during a meeting with Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski on the 22nd of May 1935, Hitler said Schleicher was "rightfully murdered, if only because he had sought to maintain the Rapallo Treaty."

• 8. The Name and Its Legacy

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  The phrase "long knives" carried centuries of weight before Hitler ever used it. The term traces to the Historia Brittonum, a ninth-century text recording the Treachery of the Long Knives, an event reputedly from the fifth century during the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain. According to that account, the Saxon leader Hengist invited Vortigern and the British leaders to peace talks, then commanded his men to draw their Seax - the long knives - and massacre the unarmed Britons. The story entered Welsh as "twyll y cyllyll hirion" (Deceit of the long knives, first recorded around 1587) and English as "Treachery of the Long Knives" (recorded around 1604). Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Britons, which brought many Arthurian legends to western Europe, helped spread the story to Germany.

  By 1928, the Nazi song "Wetzt die langen Messer" - "Sharpen the long knives" - had already adopted the phrase to call for the mass murder of Jews and the desecration of synagogues. The term was well enough known in Germany that the 2nd of August 1932 issue of The Times reported that prominent Nazi leaders had been invoking "the night of the long knives" to stoke their followers. The codename the purge's planners actually used internally was Kolibri - Hummingbird. It was Hitler himself who publicly attached the "Night of the Long Knives" label to the events, in his Reichstag speech on the 13th of July 1934.

  The SA's membership collapsed in the years that followed: from 2.9 million in August 1934 to 1.2 million in April 1938. Viktor Lutze, whom Hitler named to replace Röhm, made no effort to assert the organisation's independence. The purge had done what Hitler needed it to do. As Albert Speer later described it, the right wing of Germany's establishment had lined up behind Hitler, while the left wing of the Nazi party itself had been eliminated. Former Kaiser Wilhelm II, in exile in Doorn in the Netherlands, put the political reality bluntly: "We have ceased to live under the rule of law and everyone must be prepared for the possibility that the Nazis will push their way in and put them up against the wall." Retired captain Erwin Planck warned his friend General Werner von Fritsch, who had stood by while the killings took place: "If you look on without lifting a finger, you will meet the same fate sooner or later."