In view of this situation, Hitler had no choice but a “vigilante killing on a grand scale.”49 Röhm, too, could not simply give up his position. He had obligations to the dynamism and the unsatisfied cravings of his millions of followers. Both rivals were governed by objective necessities. Perceiving this, we cannot fail to see in the bloody affair of June, 1934, a measure of tragedy—the only instance of tragedy in Hitler’s career.
The consequences at home and abroad made June 30, 1934, the decisive date, after January 30, 1933, in the Nazi seizure of power. Hitler immediately set about concealing the importance of the event by a great show of restored normality. As early as July 2 Göring instructed all police stations: “All documents concerning the action of the past two days are to be burned… Word went out from the Propaganda Ministry forbidding the press to publish the death notices of those killed or “shot while trying to escape.” And at the cabinet meeting of July 3 Hitler had the crimes sanctioned by slipping in among some twenty decrees of rather secondary importance one consisting of only a single paragraph: “The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State.”
But Hitler seemed to realize quickly that all efforts to hush up the affair were a waste of time. For a while he seemed perplexed and was evidently haunted by the murders of Röhm and Strasser. Otherwise his ten days of silence, breaking all the rules of psychology and propaganda, can hardly be explained. On July 13 he at last delivered to the Reichstag his speech of self-justification. But its verboseness, its lapses in logic, the gaps in the explanations, and its one imperious gesture mark it as one of his poorer oratorical achievements.
After a rambling introduction summing up his own cares and merits, and once more resorting to the most reliable theme in his rhetorical stock, the Communist peril—which, he promised, he would combat in a war of extermination if it took a hundred years—he heaped all the blame on Röhm. Röhm had repeatedly confronted him with unacceptable alternatives, had admitted corruption, homosexuality, and excesses into his circle, had encouraged all these vices. Hitler spoke of the destructive, rootless elements who had “completely lost sympathy with any ordered human society” and who “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.” But the revolution, Hitler continued, “is for us not a permanent condition. When a fatal check is imposed by force upon the natural development of a nation, this artificially interrupted evolution may be set free by an act of violence so that it can resume its free natural development. But periodically recurring revolts… cannot lead to salutary development.”
Once again he rejected Röhm’s concept of a National Socialist army, and, referring to a promise he had given the President, he reassured the Reichswehr: “In the State there is only one bearer of arms, and that is the army; there is only one bearer of the political will, and that is the National Socialist Party.” It was only toward the end of his speech, which lasted several hours, that Hitler became aggressive.
Mutinies are suppressed in accordance with laws of iron which are immutable. If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not turn to the regular courts of justice for conviction of the offenders, then all I can say to him is this: in this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people!… I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life…. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the state, then certain death is his lot.
Hitler’s uncharacteristic wavering from justification to aggression reflected the profound shock that the events of June 30 had been to the public. Instinctively, the public seemed to sense that on this day a new phase had begun and that other frightening adventures, might lie ahead. Up to then, illusions about the nature of the regime had still been possible; it might have been argued that injustice and terrorism were the inevitable concomitants of a revolution, that they would cease with time’, and that on the whole the new regime was aiming at orderliness. But no such belief in a happy ending could survive the massacre.
Hitler had openly claimed for himself the role of the “supreme judge,” who could dispose over life and death without let or hindrance. Henceforth, there were no longer any legal or moral guarantees against arbitrary acts by Hitler or his cohorts. As if in explicit corroboration of these tendencies, all the accomplices in the crime, from Himmler and Sepp Dietrich down to the low-ranking SS bullies, were rewarded and praised. On July 4 at a ceremony in Berlin they were all presented with an “honorary dagger.” It is by no means a fabrication of hindsight to see a direct connection between the killings of June 30 and the subsequent practice of mass murder in the camps of the East. In fact, Himmler himself in his famous Posen speech of October 4, 1943, established this link and thus confirmed that “continuity of crime” which permits of no distinctions between a purportedly constructive initial period of Nazi rule, inspired by passionate idealism, and a later period of self-destructive degeneration.
The public’s uneasiness soon gave way to a certain relief that the SA’s revolutionary activities—which had revived deep-seated fears of disorder and mob rule—had at last been brought to an end. Official propaganda tried to pretend that the public reaction had been one of “incredible enthusiasm.” There was nothing of that kind, which explains Hitler’s often-repeated charge against the middle class: that it was obsessed with constitutionality and always raised a loud outcry “when the government renders a noxious menace to the nation harmless, for example by killing him.” But the public did tend to interpret the two-day orgy of killing in terms of its traditional antirevolutionary feelings. The movement was at last “overcoming its adolescence”; the moderate, order-oriented forces around Hitler were triumphing over the chaotic energies of Nazism. This notion was supported by the fact that among those liquidated were notorious murderers and sadistic ruffians. Actually, the whole operation against Röhm presents itself as a paradigm of Hitler’s trick of striking in such a way that reaction would be split, so that those who were most outraged had reason to thank him. How well he had put it across can be seen in the telegram from President Hindenburg expressing his “profoundly felt gratitude.” “You have saved the German people from a grave peril,” the President wired. He also bestowed the ultimate accolade: “He who wishes to make history must also be able to shed blood.”
The reaction of the army was perhaps even more decisive in alleviating the public’s doubts and premonitions. Feeling itself the real victor of those three days, the army blatantly expressed its satisfaction at the elimination of the “brown trash.” On July 1, while the killing was going on unabated, the Berlin Guards Company goose-stepped down the Wilhelmstrasse, past the chancellery, to the tune of Hitler’s favorite Badenweiler March. Two days later Defense Minister von Blomberg congratulated Hitler for the successful completion of the “purge.” And, contrary to his policy of earlier years, Hitler now made a point of reinforcing the Reichwehr’s sense of triumph. In his Reichstag speech he not only named it the sole bearer of arms in the state but also declared that he would preserve “the army as an unpolitical instrument.” He assured the officers and soldiers that he could not “demand from them that as individuals each should take up a clear-cut position towards our Movement.”
By these unusual and never-to-be-repeated concessions Hitler expressed his gratitude to the army leadership for having remained loyal to him in the recent critical hours, when his fate lay in their hands. Once again, everything had hung in the balance after the SS squad had killed General von Schleicher, his wife, and General von Bredow. If at this moment the army had insisted on a legal investigation, the theory of a conspiracy would have
been exploded and the blow against the conservatives exposed as the murderous coup it was. The bourgeois Right would not have been permanently paralyzed; it might possibly have emerged from the affair with increased confidence. It would have preserved moral standing. In any case, Göring would not have gone uncontradicted when he concluded the Reichstag session of July 13 by declaring that the entire German people, “man by man and woman by woman,” was united in a single outcry: ‘We always approve everything our Führer does.’ ”
Hitler, with his intuition for power relationships, had realized that if the army would stand for the murder of army men, he had achieved the breakthrough to unlimited control. An institution that accepted such a blow could never again effectively oppose him. At the moment the army leadership was still gloating, and Reichenau was commenting complacently that it had not been a simple matter to have the whole thing appear as a purely internal party dispute. But Hitler had not intended to give the army a large enough part in the elimination of Röhm to put him under obligation to it. He involved it just far enough to corrupt it. It was an unequal alliance that these dilettantes in uniform, who were dabbling in politics, struck up with Hitler. Defense Minister von Blomberg had made the unforgettable statement that henceforth the German officer’s honor must consist in being cunning. But, as has been trenchantly pointed out,50 the military were guided by political incompetence and arrogance.
If the public order was actually threatened by rebels and conspirators, as von Blomberg later represented the situation, then the army probably had the duty to intervene. If that were not the case, then it should have called a halt to the killing. Instead, it had waited, had made weapons available, and in the end its leaders had congratulated themselves on their acuteness at emerging with clean hands and nevertheless as victors. They succumbed not to the “nemesis of power,” as the English historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett has asserted, but to their failure to recognize how short-lived this victory would be. At the height of the killing former State Secretary Planck urged General von Fritsch to intervene. The commander in chief of the army replied that he had no orders to do so. Planck warned him: “If you, General, stand by idly watching, sooner or later you will suffer the same fate.” Three and a half years later, Fritsch, together with Blomberg, was dismissed under a dishonoring cloud. The charge, as in the cases of Schleicher and Bredow, was based on forged documents, and now it was the turn of the SA to rejoice over the “revenge for June 30.” Les institutions périssent par leur victoires.
This aphorism was totally borne out by subsequent events. It is true that June 30 dealt a fatal blow to the SA. Its formerly rebellious self-assertive profile henceforth almost vanished behind petty bourgeois features. Brass knuckles and rubber truncheons gave way to collection boxes. But the army did not assume the place vacated by the storm troopers. Three weeks later Hitler coolly took advantage of the manifest weakness of the army leadership. On July 20, 1934, he freed the SS “in view of its great services… especially in connection with the events of June 30” from its subordination to the SA and raised it to the rank of an independent organization directly subordinate to himself. At the same time, it was allowed to rival the army in maintaining armed fighting forces—at first of only one division.
Few acts so clearly reveal the core of Hitler’s technique as this decision. No sooner was the SA eliminated than he was promoting the building of a new power center of the same kind, in order to be able to continue his game of protecting his own rule. All those who were intimately or remotely participants in the events of June 30 naïvely assumed that the purge had resolved a question of power. But Hitler secured his own personal power precisely by never really settling the power conflicts within his entourage. He merely shifted them to other planes and continued playing out the game with new pieces, in altered confrontations.
Politically, as well as tactically, the SS took over many of the functions of the SA. But it markedly avoided that claim to independence which Röhm’s following had always so obtrusively made. For the SA had never wholly submitted to the principle of blind obedience; it had always emphasized its aloofness from the despised corps of party people. By contrast, the SS felt itself to be a totally loyal elite, serving as the sentinel and vanguard of the National Socialist idea, a pure instrument of the Führer’s will. In this spirit it began, on June 30, its inexorable process of expansion in all directions. Soon the SA and then the party also vanished in its mighty shadow, so that there ceased to be any road to power that bypassed the SS.
The rise of the SS, which so crucially determined the history and features of the Third Reich and by no means ended with the downfall of the regime, incidentally revealed something else: that Röhm had rightfully considered himself as being, in the last analysis, of one mind with Hitler. Himmler, constantly prodded by Reinhard Heydrich restively operating in the background, tranformed the Reichsführung-SS[13] into a mighty, many-branched apparatus. Ultimately, it became a genuine subsidiary government that penetrated into all existing institutions, undermined their political power, and gradually began replacing them. What Himmler thus accomplished was nothing less than Ernst Röhm’s impatient though ultimately vague vision. Röhm’s ambitious lieutenants had dreamed of an SA state. Himmler brought into being, at least in its initial phases, an actual SS state. Röhm was liquidated because he wanted to achieve by immediate action what Hitler, as he explained to intimates, sought to arrive at “slowly and deliberately, by taking the tiniest steps at a time.”
June 30 also signified the elimination of a type of personality that had been almost indispensable for the history of Hitler’s rise: the rough daredevil, usually a onetime army officer, who had fought first in the Free Corps and then as one of Hitler’s street-battle heroes, trying to carry over his wartime experiences into civilian reality and suddenly left without any assignment once the goal was reached. Machiavelli. pointed out in a famous aphorism that power is not maintained with the same following that has helped to win it. Mussolini is said to have made this comment to Hitler when they met in Venice. In the course of the conquest of power a limited degree of revolution from below had been permitted. By destroying the top leadership of the SA, Hitler choked off that limited revolution. The Röhm affair concluded the so-called period of struggle and marked the turning point away from the vague, utopian phase of the movement to the sober reality of a disciplined state. The romantic barricade fighter was replaced by the more modern revolutionary types such as the SS produced: those passionless bureaucrats who supervised a revolution whose like had never been known. Thinking not in terms of the mob but in terms of structures, they placed their explosive charges deeper than perhaps any revolutionaries before them.
But Röhm’s impatience would scarcely have been a mortal flaw had not Hitler had other things in mind besides eliminating the SA chief. As the propaganda campaign preceding the operation indicated, the events of June 30, 1934, were aimed at any opposition, at any independent position in general. For years to come there was no serious organized resistance. The dual thrust of the operation also disclosed an aspect of Hitler that one might have thought he had transcended. Strictly speaking, he charged the SA leaders only with premature haste and stupidity. But his boundless hatred, nourished by old resentments, erupted against those conservatives who had thought to “hire” and outwit him:
They’re all mistaken. They underestimate me. Because I come from below, from the “lower depths,” because I have no education, because my manners aren’t what they with their sparrow brains think is right. If I were one of them they’d call me a great man—now, already. But I don’t need them to confirm my historic greatness. The rebelliousness of my SA has cost me many trumps. But I still hold others. I’m not at a loss for resources when something goes wrong for me once in a while….
I’ve spoiled their plans. They thought I wouldn’t dare, that I’d be too cowardly. They could already see me thrashing in their nets. They thought I’d become their tool. And behind my back they made jok
es about me, said I no longer had any power, that I’d thrown away my party. I saw through it all long ago. I’ve taught them a lesson they’ll remember for a long time. What I lost in passing judgment on the SA I’ll regain in bringing judgment down on these feudal gamblers and professional card-sharpers, the Schleichers and their crew.
If I call upon the people today, they’ll follow me. If I appeal to the party, it will stand as solid as ever…. Come on, Messrs. Papen and Hugenberg—I’m ready for the next round.51
What he knew, and really meant, was that there would be no next round for these opponents.
To sum up, the challenge facing Hitler before June 30 required the simultaneous solution of no fewer than five problems. He had to quash Röhm and his rebellious band of SA permanent revolutionists definitively. He had to satisfy the demands of the army. He had to dispel public dissatisfaction with the rule of the streets and visible terrorism. He had to head off the conservatives’ counterplans. All this had to be done without becoming the prisoner of one side or the other. He took care of it all by means of a single limited operation and at a cost of relatively few victims. With this behind him, he could move directly to his principal aim, which would complete the process of seizing power. That aim was to succeed Hindenburg as President.
From the middle of July on, the President’s condition was visibly deteriorating. His death was expected any day. On July 31 the government for the first time issued an official bulletin on the state of his health. And although on the following day the news sounded somewhat more optimistic, Hitler irreverently anticipated the event by presenting to the cabinet a law concerning the succession. The new law was to take effect on Hindenburg’s death. It provided for combining the office of President with that of the Führer and Chancellor, a measure that could be justified by evoking the law of January 30, 1934, which gave the administration powers to alter the Constitution. But since this authority derived from the Enabling Act, any action based on it should have taken into account the guarantees explicitly set forth in that act. Inviolability of the office of the President was one of the guarantees. But the “law concerning the head of state” boldly ignored that limitation—once more violating Hitler’s principle of legality—and thus broke through the last barrier to Hitler’s dictatorship. Hitler’s exuberant highhandedness is further shown in his affixing the signature of ViceChancellor von Papen to the new law, though Papen was not even present at the cabinet session.
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