The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Hitler rushed off to consult with Hindenburg. Arriving at Neudeck on 21 June, he was confronted by Blomberg, who had been discussing Papen’s speech with the President. The army chief made it clear that if the brownshirts were not immediately brought to heel, Hindenburg would be prepared to declare martial law and put the government in the hands of the army.31 Hitler had no option but to act. He began planning Röhm’s overthrow. The political police, in collaboration with Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service, began to manufacture evidence that Röhm and his stormtroopers were planning a nationwide uprising. Leading officers in the SS were presented with the ‘evidence’ on 24 June and given instructions on how to deal with the supposed putsch. Lists of ‘politically unreliable’ people were drawn up and local SS leaders informed that they would be called upon to kill a number of them, particularly any who resisted, when the day of action came on 30 June. The army put its resources at the disposal of the SS for the eventuality of a serious conflict.32 Woe betide anyone, warned Rudolf Hess in a radio broadcast on 25 June, who thought to betray their loyalty to the Führer by carrying out revolutionary agitation from below.33

  On 27 June, Hitler met with Blomberg and Reichenau to secure the army’s co-operation; they responded by expelling Röhm from the German Officers’ League the next day, and by putting the army on full alert. Blomberg published an article in the Nazis’ flagship daily, the Racial Observer, on 29 June declaring the army’s absolute loyalty to the new regime. Meanwhile, it seems, Hitler learned that Hindenburg had agreed to give an audience to Papen, scheduled for 30 June, the day of the planned action against the SA. This confirmed the leading Nazis in their belief that the opportunity must be used to strike against the conservatives as well.34 Nervous and apprehensive, Hitler sought to allay suspicions by going to a wedding reception in Essen, from where he telephoned Röhm’s adjutant in his vacation hotel at Bad Wiessee ordering the SA leaders to meet him there on the morning of 30 June. Hitler then organized a hurried conference in Bad Godesberg with Goebbels and Sepp Dietrich, the SS officer who commanded his personal bodyguard. He would act against Röhm the next day, he told the astonished Goebbels, who had been expecting merely a blow against the ‘reactionaries’ and had hitherto been kept in the dark about everything else.35 Goring was sent off to Berlin to take charge of the action there. Fantastic rumours began to circulate, and the SA itself began to be alarmed. Some 3,000 stormtroopers rampaged through the streets of Munich on the night of 29 June, shouting that they would crush any attempt to betray their organization and denouncing the ‘Leader’ and the army. Calm was eventually restored by Adolf Wagner, the Regional Leader of Munich; but there had been other, similar demonstrations elsewhere. When Hitler learned of these events on flying into Munich airport at 4.30 on the morning of 30 June 1934, he decided that he could not wait for the planned conference of SA leaders at which he was going to launch the purge. Now there was not a minute to lose.36

  III

  Hitler and his entourage drove first to the Bavarian Interior Ministry, where they confronted the leaders of the previous night’s brownshirt demonstration in the city streets. In a rage, he shouted at them that they would be shot. Then he tore off their epaulettes with his bare hands. As the chastened stormtroopers were taken off to Munich’s state prison at Stadelheim, Hitler assembled a group of SS bodyguards and police and drove off in a convoy of saloon cars and convertibles to Bad Wiessee, where they entered the Hanselbauer Hotel. Accompanied by his head chauffeur Julius Schreck, and followed by a group of armed detectives, Hitler marched up to the first floor. The brownshirts were still sleeping off a major drinking bout from the night before. Erich Kempka, who had driven Hitler to Wiessee, described what happened next:

  Taking no notice of me, Hitler enters the room where SA-Senior Group Leader Heines is lodging. I hear him shout: ‘Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes I’ll have you shot on the spot!’ I take a few steps back and a police officer whispers to me that Heines had been in bed with an 18-year-old SA Senior Troop Leader. Eventually Heines comes out of the room with an 18-year-old fair-haired boy mincing in front of him. ‘Into the laundry room with them!’ orders Schreck. Meanwhile, Röhm comes out of his room in a blue suit and with a cigar in the corner of his mouth. Hitler looks at him grimly but says nothing. Two detectives take Röhm to the vestibule of the hotel where he throws himself into an armchair and orders coffee from the barman. I stand in the corridor a little to the side and a detective tells me how Röhm was arrested.

  Hitler had entered Röhm’s bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him had stood two detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed at the ready. He had spat out the words: ‘Röhm, you are under arrest.’ Röhm had looked up sleepily out of the pillows on his bed. ‘Hail, my Leader.’ ‘You are under arrest’, Hitler had bawled for the second time. He had turned on his heel and left the room. Meanwhile, upstairs in the corridor things have become very lively. SA leaders are coming out of their rooms and being arrested. Hitler shouts at each one: ‘Have you had anything to do with Röhm’s machinations?’ Of course, none of them says yet, but that doesn’t help them. Hitler mostly knows the answer himself; now and then he turns to Goebbels or Lutze with question. And then comes his decision: ‘Arrested!’37

  The brownshirts were locked in the hotel’s linen cupboard and shortly afterwards taken off to Stadelheim. Hitler and his party followed them back to Munich. Meanwhile leading brownshirts arriving at Munich’s main railway station en route for the planned meeting were arrested by the SS as they got off the train.38

  Back in Munich, Hitler drove to Nazi Party Headquarters, which he had had sealed off by regular troops, and ranted against Röhm and the brownshirt leaders, announcing that they were dismissed and would be shot. ‘Undisciplined and disobedient characters and asocial or diseased elements’ would be annihilated. A senior brownshirt, Viktor Lutze, who had been informing on Röhm for some time and had accompanied Hitler to the Bad Wiessee hotel, was named as the new leader of the SA. Röhm, Hitler shouted, had been in the pay of the French; he was a traitor and had been conspiring against the state. The Party faithful who had gathered to hear his diatribe yelled their assent. Ever obliging, Rudolf Hess volunteered to shoot the traitors personally. Privately, Hitler was reluctant to have Röhm, one of his longest-serving supporters, put to death; eventually on 1 July he sent word to him that he could have a revolver with which to kill himself. When Röhm failed to make use of the opportunity, Hitler sent Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau, and another SS officer from the camp, to Stadelheim. Entering Röhm’s cell, the two SS officers gave him a loaded Browning and told him to commit suicide; if not, they would return in ten minutes and finish him off themselves. On re-entering the cell after the time was up, they encountered Röhm standing up, facing them with his chest bared in a dramatic gesture designed to emphasize his honour and loyalty; without uttering a word they immediately shot him dead at point-blank range. In addition, Hitler ordered the Silesian brownshirt Edmund Heines, who in 1932 had led an uprising against the Nazi Party in Berlin, to be shot, along with the leaders of the Munich demonstration the night before, and three others. Other SA men were driven off to the concentration camp at Dachau, where they were badly beaten by SS guards. At six in the evening Hitler flew off to Berlin to take charge of events in the capital city, where Hermann Goring had been implementing his orders with a ruthlessness that belied his widespread reputation as a moderate.39

  Goring had not confined himself to carrying out the action against the brownshirt leaders. The atmosphere in Göring’s office, where the Prussian Minister-President was closeted with Heydrich and Himmler, was later described as one of ‘blatant bloodthirstiness’ and ‘hideous vindictiveness’ by a policeman who looked on as Goring shouted orders for people on the list to be killed (‘shoot them down . . . shoot . . . shoot at once’) and joined in bouts of raucous laughter with his companions as news of successful murder operations ca
me in. Striding up and down the room in a white tunic, white boots and grey-blue trousers, Goring ordered the storming of the Vice-Chancellery. Entering with an armed SS unit, Gestapo agents gunned down Papen’s secretary Herbert von Bose on the spot. The Vice-Chancellor’s ideological guru Edgar Jung, arrested on 25 June, was also shot; his body was dumped unceremoniously in a ditch. Papen himself escaped death; he was too prominent a figure to be shot down in cold blood. The assassination of two of his closest associates had to be warning enough. Papen was confined to his home for the time being, under guard, while Hitler pondered what to do with him.40

  Other pillars of the conservative establishment did not fare so well. General von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as Reich Chancellor, and a man who had once described Hitler as unfit to hold office, was shot dead by the SS in his home, together with his wife. He was not the only army officer to be killed. Major-General Kurt von Bredow, who was thought to have published criticisms of the regime abroad, was killed at his home, shot, the newspapers reported, while resisting arrest as a partner to Röhm’s infamous conspiracy. Apart from anything else, these killings served as a warning to the army leadership that they too would have to face the consequences if they did not toe the Nazi line. The former police chief and leader of ‘Catholic Action’ Erich Klausener, now a senior civil servant in the Transport Ministry, was shot down on Heydrich’s orders as a warning to another former Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, who had been tipped off about the purge and had left the country. Klausener’s murder sent a clear message to Catholics that a revival of independent Catholic political activity would not be tolerated. Subsequent claims by the Nazi leadership that men such as these had been involved in the Röhm ‘revolt’ were pure invention. Most of these men had been listed by Edgar Jung as possible members of a future government, without actually having agreed to it or even known about it. Their mere inclusion on the list amounted to a death-warrant for most of them .41

  Gregor Strasser, the man whom many thought of as a possible figure-head for the Nazi Party in a restored conservative government, was targeted as well. A short time before Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, Strasser, the head of the Nazi Party’s administration and the architect of many of its principal institutions, had resigned in despair at Hitler’s refusal to enter any coalition government except as its head. Strasser had been negotiating at the time with Schleicher and there had been rumours that he had been offered a position in Schleicher’s cabinet late in 1932. Although he had lived in retirement since his resignation, Strasser continued to pose in the minds of the leading Nazis a potential threat as an acceptable coalition partner for the conservatives. He was also a long-time personal enemy of Himmler and Goring, and he had not been sparing in his criticism of them while he had been a member of the senior Party leadership. Goring had him arrested and taken to police headquarters, where he was shot dead. Strasser’s friend and collaborator Paul Schulz, a former top official in the SA, was also sought out by Göring’s emissaries and taken into a forest to be shot; on getting out of the car at the chosen place of execution, he made a dash for it and feigned dead when he was shot, though he was only lightly wounded. He made good his escape while his attackers went back to the car to get a sheet to wrap his body in, and later managed to negotiate his exile from Germany with Hitler personally. Another target who escaped was Captain Ehrhardt, the Free Corps leader in the Kapp putsch of 1920, who had helped Hitler in 1923; he fled as the police entered his home and eventually managed to cross the border into Austria .42

  In Berlin, the ‘action’ took on a different character from the events in Munich, where SA leaders from all over the country had been gathering on Hitler’s orders. In Munich the brownshirts were the principal target, in Berlin the conservatives. The action was carefully planned in advance. Ernst Müller, the head of the SS Security Service in Breslau, was given a postdated sealed letter in Berlin on 29 June and sent back home on a private plane supplied by Goring. On the morning of 30 June Heydrich ordered him by telephone to open it; it contained a list of brownshirt leaders to be ‘eliminated’, along with instructions to occupy the police headquarters and summon the leading SA men to a meeting. Further orders included the seizure of SA arms stores, the securing of airports and radio transmitters, and the occupation of SA premises. He followed his instructions to the letter. By the early evening not only were the police cells at Breslau full, but also numerous other rooms were packed with bewildered brownshirted prisoners as well. Heydrich phoned Müller repeatedly to demand the execution of those men on the list who had not already been disposed of in Munich. The men were taken to SS headquarters, their epaulettes were removed, and they were driven out to a nearby forest and shot in the middle of the night.43

  There were further arrests and shootings the next morning, on 1 July. In the general climate of violence, Hitler and his underlings took the opportunity to settle old scores or eliminate personal rivals. Some, of course, were too grand to touch, notably General Erich Ludendorff, who had been causing some headaches for the Gestapo with his far-right, anti-Freemasonry campaigns; the hero of the First World War was left alone; he was to die peacefully on 20 December 1937 and to be granted respectful obsequies by the regime. But in Bavaria, the former Minister-President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had played a key part in quelling the Hitler putsch in 1923, was cut to pieces by SS men. The music critic Wilhelm Eduard Schmid was also killed, in the mistaken belief that he was Ludwig Schmitt, a former supporter of Gregor Strasser’s radical brother Otto, who had been forced to resign from the Party because of his revolutionary views and had maintained a constant barrage of criticism of Hitler from the safety of exile ever since. The conservative Bavarian politician Otto Ballerstedt, who had successfully prosecuted Hitler for breaking up a political meeting at which he had been speaking in 1921, resulting in the Nazi Leader spending a month in Stadelheim, was arrested and shot in Dachau on 1 July. One senior SS officer, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, chose the moment to get rid of a hated rival, the SS Cavalry leader Anton Baron von Hohberg und Buchwald, who was duly gunned down in his home. In Silesia, the regional SS boss Udo von Woyrsch had his former rival Emil Sembach shot despite a prior agreement with Himmler that Sembach should be sent to Berlin to be dealt with. The violence spilled over into another unconnected area too. Four Jews were arrested in Hirschberg and ‘shot while trying to escape’. The leader of the Jewish veterans’ league in Glogau was taken out to a wood and shot dead.44

  Despite such obviously personally motivated actions, the Nazis lost no time in pumping out propaganda justifications for the murders. Goebbels broadcast a lengthy account of the ‘action’ the next day, alleging that Röhm and Schleicher had been conspiring to bring about a ‘second revolution’ that would have plunged the Reich into chaos. ‘Every clenched fist that is raised against the Leader and his regime’, he warned, generalizing the action potentially to every kind of opposition, ‘will be prised open, if necessary by force.’45 Despite this, Hitler still had a lot of explaining to do, not least to the army, two of whose senior officers he had had killed during the purge. Addressing the cabinet on 3 July, Hitler alleged that Röhm had been plotting against him with Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and the French government for over a year. He had been forced to act as these plots threatened to culminate in a putsch on 30 June. If there were legal objections to what he had done, then his answer was that due process was not possible in such circumstances. ‘If a mutiny broke out on board a ship, the captain was not only entitled but also obliged to crush the mutiny right away.’ There was to be no trial, therefore, just a law to legalize the action retroactively, backed enthusiastically by Reich Justice Minister Gürtner. ‘The example that he has given would be a salutary lesson for the entire future. He had stabilized the authority of the Reich government for all time.’46 In the press, Goebbels concentrated on underlining the breadth and depth of support for the action, in order to reassure the public that order had been restored rather than un
dermined. The formal gratitude of Blomberg and Hindenburg was recorded in banner headlines, while other stories recorded ‘declarations of loyalty from all over Germany’ and ‘everywhere veneration and admiration for the Leader’. The events were generally described as a clean-up of dangerous and degenerate elements in the Nazi movement. Some of the brownshirt leaders, the press reported, had been found with ‘catamites’ and one ‘was startled from his sleep in the most disgusting situation’.47

  When the Reichstag was convened on 13 July, Hitler elaborated on these remarks in a speech broadcast on the radio and blared out to the population in pubs, bars and town squares across the land. Surrounded by steel-helmeted SS men, he presented his audience with an elaborate and fantastic web of claims and assertions about the supposed conspiracy to overthrow the Reich. There were four groups of malcontents who had been involved, he said: Communist street-fighters who had infiltrated the SA, political leaders who had never reconciled themselves to the finality of 30 January 1933, rootless elements who believed in permanent revolution, and upper-class ‘drones’ who sought to fill their empty lives with gossip, rumour and conspiracy. Attempts to curb the excesses of the SA had been frustrated, he now knew, by the fact that they were all part of the mounting plot to overthrow public order. He had been forced to act without recourse to the law: