Hitler
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Four days later, a talk by the vice-chancellor at the University of Marburg put the NSDAP leadership on a state of red alert. Not only did Papen criticise the cult of personality surrounding Hitler, arguing that “Great men are not made by propaganda but gain that status through their deeds.” He also excoriated the regime’s use of violence and unchecked radicalism. “It would be reprehensible to believe that a people could be unified through terror, which is always the product of bad conscience,” Papen stated.
No people can afford constant revolt from below if it wants to survive the court of history. At some point the movement will have to end, and a fixed social structure, held together by an independent justice system and a universally accepted power of state, must come into existence. Nothing can be built with constant dynamism. Germany cannot be allowed to become a train speeding blindly ahead without anyone knowing where it is headed.
The government, Papen assured his audience, “knows all about the selfishness, lack of character, mendacity, non-chivalry and presumption that tries to spread under the cover of the German revolution.”255
What Papen did not mention was that he himself bore considerable responsibility for the conditions he criticised. In the first months of the regime, he had not tried to restrain Hitler once, and even after his speech, he did not necessarily want a confrontation. Immediately after his talk, he sent Hitler a telegram that read: “In the venerable university of town of Marburg, I just went to bat for the unwavering and true continuation of your revolution and the completion of your work. In admiration and loyalty, your Papen.”256 But it did not fool anyone within the Nazi leadership. Goebbels seethed: “Papen gave a wonderful speech for gripers and critics. Entirely against us except for a few empty phrases. Who wrote it for him? Where is the scoundrel?”257 It soon emerged that Edgar Julius Jung had written the talk. He was arrested on 26 June, and Goebbels censored the speech but not before it had been read out on the Reich radio station in Frankfurt.258 Papen’s supporters had also distributed an abridged version to the press, and news of disagreement within the regime spread like wildfire. “It seems that there’s something like a mood of conflict in the upper spheres at the moment,” wrote Theodor Heuss on 20 June. “A speech Papen held last Sunday in Marburg has been deemed unsuitable for printing…”259 Foreign diplomats racked their brains as to what Papen’s speech could mean. “The atmosphere was heavy and oppressive, like that ahead of an oncoming thunderstorm,” recalled François-Poncet.260
After the ban on his speech, Papen had no other choice than to offer to quit, but Hitler—who, according to Goebbels, was “very enraged” by the Marburg speech and determined to “get his own back against Papen”—deemed the time not right for his vice-chancellor’s resignation.261 He asked Papen to wait until they had the chance to discuss the situation with Hindenburg. Papen agreed, writing to Hitler that he felt like “a soldier duty bound to your work.” At the same time, he protested against Jung’s arrest. “If someone has to go to jail for the Marburg speech,” Papen wrote, “I stand at your disposal.”262 In reality, Hitler had no intention of going to Neudeck with Papen. Instead, on 21 June he travelled there alone and was relieved to discover that the Marburg speech had made no impression on Hindenburg. “Never had the old man been as friendly,” Hitler reported after his visit.263 At the same time, Defence Minister von Blomberg, who was also at Neudeck, had urged him once again to rein in the SA.264
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From 23 to 26 June, Hitler retreated to the Obersalzberg, and it was there that he apparently made his final decision. With his unique instinct for power, Hitler realised that the time had come for a double blow—against the SA leadership clique and the “reactionaries” around Papen—to cut through the domestic political stalemate. Himmler and Heydrich’s staff immediately set about concocting an opaque mixture of rumours, false reports and manipulated orders intended to suggest that an SA rebellion was nigh. At the same time, lists were drawn up of those to be arrested and executed. On 25 June, Himmler summoned SS leaders to Berlin, where they were informed about Röhm’s imminent putsch and made preparations to put it down.265 That same day, Hess gave a speech on Cologne radio, in which he threatened: “Woe to him who breaks his loyalty in the belief that he is serving the revolution by revolting. It’s pathetic how some people think they’ve been chosen to help the Führer by organising revolutionary agitation from below.”266 As Erich Ebermayer noted in his diary, Hess’s speech was cause for “great commotion and agitation—everyone knows that something’s in the air.”267 On 27 June, Hitler met with Blomberg and the head of the minister’s office at the Reichswehr Ministry, Walther von Reichenau, to assure himself of the military’s support for the planned action. Local defence commandos were put on high alert, and on 29 June, Blomberg published an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he declared his loyalty to the Nazi regime, writing, “The Wehrmacht and the state are one.”268
To preserve the illusion of normality and keep the SA leadership feeling secure, on 28 June Hitler went with Göring and Viktor Lutze to Essen to attend the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven. Having received word that Hindenburg had granted Papen an audience on 30 June, he drew up a schedule for the purge. “I’ve had enough,” Lutze recorded Hitler saying. “I’m going to set an example.”269 On the evening of 28 June, Röhm was instructed by telephone to summon all SA Obergruppenführer, Gruppenführer and inspectors to Bad Wiessee for a meeting with Hitler. While Göring flew back to Berlin to take care of the measures that had been prepared, Hitler spent the morning of 29 June, as planned, inspecting a Reich Labour Service camp in the town of Buttenberg in Westphalia. At the crack of dawn, he had called Goebbels and summoned him to Bad Godesberg. “It’s getting started,” the propaganda minister noted. “In God’s name. Anything is better than this terrible waiting around. I’m ready.”270 When he arrived at the Rheinhotel Dreesen, he learned to his surprise that the purge would be directed not just against the “reactionaries” around Papen, but against “Röhm and his rebels” as well. “Blood will flow—everyone should know that rebellion will cost people their heads,” Goebbels wrote. “I’m in agreement. If you’re going to do it, then do it ruthlessly.”271
In Bad Godesberg, Hitler received cooked-up reports about increasing unrest within the SA, and all the evidence suggests that, having made his irreversible decision, he worked himself up into an extraordinary psychological state. It is hardly plausible that he believed the transparently constructed lies about an imminent SA putsch, but in order to legitimise the purge he seized upon even the most ridiculous conspiracy theories. He told Goebbels, for instance, that there were “indications that Röhm was conspiring with François-Poncet, Schleicher and Strasser.”272 That evening, as word came in that individual SA men had been marauding around Munich and causing trouble, Hitler decided on the spot to fly to the Bavarian capital with his entire entourage. The three-engine Junkers 52 landed at 4 a.m. on Oberwiesenfeld, the precise location where, ten years previously, he had been forced into a humiliating retreat by Bavarian police and Reichswehr units. Now he had no reason to fear resistance from either of those quarters. At the airport, Hitler was received by Gauleiter Wagner, who briefed him on the situation. “He was extraordinarily agitated,” aeroplane captain Baur observed. “He kept fidgeting around in the air with his riding crop, several times bringing it down on his own foot.”273
From the airport Hitler had himself sped to the Bavarian Interior Ministry. There, he summoned Munich SA leaders August Schneidhuber and Wilhelm Schmid and tore their designations of rank from their uniforms with his own hands. “You are under arrest and will be shot,” he snarled.274 Without waiting for his bodyguards in the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to arrive, Hitler ordered three cars and had himself driven to Bad Wiessee. Most of the guests in the Pension Hanselbauer, where Röhm and his men were staying, were still asleep when the cars arrived at 6:30 a.m. Accompanied by two police officers with drawn pistols and whip in hand, Hitler stormed into the SA
chief of staff’s room and blurted out the words: “Röhm, you are under arrest!” Still half asleep, Röhm looked up from his pillows and replied, “Heil, my Führer.” “You are under arrest,” Hitler screamed again, turning around and leaving the room.275 One by one the SA leaders were taken into custody. Among them was Breslau Police President Edmund Heines, who was found in bed with a young man—a discovery Nazi propaganda used in the days to come to depict the Bad Wiessee guest house as a den of homosexual iniquity.276
Those arrested were held in the guest house basement before being taken to Munich’s Stadelheim prison. Hitler also returned to the Bavarian capital with his entourage, stopping the cars full of SA leaders driving in the other direction to what they thought was their meeting with the Führer and ordering them to join his motorcade. Police officers from the political crimes division stopped SA leaders in Munich’s main train station, arresting those whose names were on the lists. They, too, were taken to Stadelheim.277 Around noon, Hitler arrived at the Brown House and addressed a large number of party and SA leaders. He was still in a state of hysteria and, as one eyewitness reported, he spat out a ball of froth when he began speaking. His voice cracking with over-excitement, he accused the Röhm clique of the “greatest betrayal in world history.” He also named Röhm’s betrayer, Viktor Lutze, as the new SA chief of staff. That afternoon, Hitler ordered Sepp Dietrich to have six of the detained SA men, whose names he had marked on a list in green pencil and who included Schneidhuber, Schmid and Edmund Heines, liquidated by an SS commando. Röhm was initially spared. Apparently, Hitler was still somewhat hesitant about having his old comrade-in-arms murdered.278
That morning, Goebbels had already sent the agreed code word “Hummingbird” to Berlin, signalling to Göring that he should mobilise the execution commandos. Papen’s colleagues Herbert von Bose and Edgar Julius Jung were shot. The vice-chancellor escaped with his life but was placed under house arrest. Also executed was the leader of the religious lay organisation “Catholic Action” and ministerial director of the Transport Ministry, Erich Klausener, who had been linked with the Papen circle. Former Chancellor Schleicher and his wife were killed in their home in Neubabelsberg, and the same fate befell Schleicher’s associate General Ferdinand von Bredow a few hours later. He was taken from his Berlin apartment on the evening of 30 June and shot. At the same time, Nazi thugs throughout the Reich took the opportunity to settle old scores. Gregor Strasser was put to death in the basement of Gestapo headquarters. Gustav Ritter von Kahr and the editor-in-chief of the Catholic magazine Der gerade Weg (The Straight and Narrow), Fritz Gerlich, who was one of Hitler’s most passionate critics, were both put to death in the Dachau concentration camp. Otto Ballerstedt, an early political rival who had succeeded in putting Hitler behind bars for a few weeks in 1922 after being physically attacked by him, was found dead from a bullet to the back of the head in the vicinity of Dachau. Father Bernhard Stempfle, an early confidant of Hitler’s, was also executed—probably for knowing too much about the Führer’s past. Such was the murderous zeal of the SS commandos that they did not always adequately check the identities of people they took into custody. Willi Schmid, for example, a music critic for the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, fell victim to a case of mistaken identity. Ninety people are known to have been killed in what became known as the “Night of the Long Knives”—the actual number is likely twice that.279 Goebbels was satisfied that everything had gone to plan, noting: “No mistakes other than Frau Schleicher also going down. A shame, but there’s no changing that.”280
Hitler returned to Berlin on the evening of 30 June. A delegation led by Göring, Himmler and Frick greeted him at Tempelhof Airport. “The sight of him was ‘one-of-a-kind,’ ” reported one eyewitness. “Brown shirt, black tie, dark brown leather coat, high, black military boots, everything dark upon dark. Above it all, bare-headed, a chalk-white, sleepless, unshaven face which seemed to be sunken and swollen at the same time and from which a pair of extinguished eyes stared through some clotted strands of hair hanging down.”281 After the murderous release of the previous twenty-four hours, Hitler began to regain his inner balance. Christa Schroeder, who encountered him late at night in the Reich Chancellery, recalled him sitting next to her, breathing heavily and saying: “I’ve just had a bath and feel like I’ve been born again.”282 The following day, a Sunday, Hitler was already playing the role of the congenial, good-humoured host at a garden party in the Chancellery. That afternoon, he ordered the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp to call upon Röhm, who was imprisoned in Stadelheim, to shoot himself. When Röhm refused, he was executed.283 “All revolutions devour their own children,” the former SA chief of staff had told Hans Frank, who visited him a few hours before.284
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Berlin was abuzz with the wildest rumours on 1 July. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened. That evening, Goebbels gave a radio address in which he talked about a “small clique of professional saboteurs” who had deserved no mercy. “We’re cleaning house,” he said. “A herd of pestilence, a herd of corruption and pathological symptoms of moral barbarism that appear in public life will be smoked out and eradicated down to the bone.” The propaganda minister dwelt at length on the homosexuality of Röhm and his circle, accusing them of being about to “bring the entire party leadership under the suspicion of a contemptible and disgusting sexual abnormality.”285 At a cabinet meeting on 3 July, Hitler also used Röhm’s “unhappy predilection” as an explanation for both “the inferior personnel in SA leadership positions” and his “wilful conflict with the Wehrmacht.” Then he proceeded on to the heart of the conflict. Röhm wished to make the SA a “state within a state,” Hitler explained. In a four-hour conversation, he, Hitler, had implored the former chief of staff to desist from this, but to no avail. Röhm had given him every assurance under the sun, but behind Hitler’s back, he had done exactly the opposite. Hitler did not shy away from spinning a fairy tale about a coup d’état Röhm was planning with Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and the French embassy. With that, the condition of “high treason” had been fulfilled, Hitler claimed, and he had been forced to act immediately in order to “prevent a catastrophe.” Hitler brushed aside any legal objections by arguing that this had been a “military mutiny” that did not admit of any trials or similar procedures. Although he had not personally ordered all the executions, he took full responsibility for them. They had “saved the lives of countless others,” Hitler asserted, and “stabilised the authority of the Reich government for all time.”
Hitler then presented the cabinet with a draft law that would legalise the series of murders ex post facto. “The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to put down treasonous acts against the nation and states are a legal form of emergency government defence,” the draft read. Justice Minister Franz Gürtner hastened to add that this was not tantamount to creating a new legal code, but merely confirmed the validity of the existing one. In the name of his cabinet colleagues, Werner von Blomberg thanked Hitler for his “decisive and courageous action, which has spared the German people a civil war.”286
While the cabinet meeting was still in session, Papen, whose house arrest had just been lifted, appeared. “Completely broken,” noted Goebbels. “Asked for leave to speak. We all expected him to resign.”287 But although two of his closest associates had been murdered, Papen did not consider for a moment breaking with Hitler. In a conversation with the Nazi leader on 4 July, the two men agreed that Papen would continue in the office of vice-chancellor until September and then join the diplomatic corps. In the days that followed, Papen complained that the situation was “completely unbearable” as long as he and his team were not rehabilitated and the confiscated files from his office returned. And he announced once again that he intended to travel to Neudeck to tender his resignation to Hindenburg. But he does not seem to have meant these very serious threats, and when Otto Meissner informed him that the Reich president was “very much in need of peace and quiet,�
� he abandoned his plans. When Hitler told him in another conversation on 11 July that he intended to take public responsibility for everything associated with putting down the SA revolt, Papen replied: “You will allow me to say to you how great I find that in both a manly and human sense.”288 From a moral standpoint, Papen could not have sunk any lower.
Nor did Hindenburg—even though he had been on familiar terms with Kahr and had thanked him the preceding October for his “loyal birthday wishes”—have any qualms about sending Hitler a congratulatory telegram, in which he wrote, “You have saved the German people from a serious threat.”289 On the afternoon of 3 July, Hitler travelled to Neudeck where he gave Hindenburg a private half-hour lecture about the alleged “Röhm revolt.” Hindenburg reiterated his blessings for the crimes being committed by the German government: “That’s the right way to go. Nothing will happen without bloodshed.”290 After returning to Berlin, Hitler told Goebbels: “Hindenburg was smashing. The old man is really something.”291
The initial uncertainty people felt when they heard the news of the murders on 30 June soon gave way to relief. The SA men, who had been so welcome when suppressing the political Left in early 1933, had used up all of their credit among the general populace with their disorderly conduct. The bloody excesses of the SS were excused because they had helped remove an unwanted source of disruption. Goebbels was probably exaggerating when he noted: “A limitless enthusiasm is passing through the country.”292 But it is true that, far from losing prestige, Hitler’s reputation had improved. This is reflected in a number of Nazi Party reports on the mood within the population. Among the broad masses, and particularly among those who took a wait-and-see attitude towards the movement, Hitler has achieved a great victory with his decisive action—he is “not only admired; he is deified,” read one report from a small industrial town in Upper Bavaria.293 Immediately after the Night of the Long Knives, Luise Solmitz noted in her diary: “The personal courage, the decisiveness and effectiveness [Hitler] showed in Munich, that’s unique.”294 Neither Solmitz nor the majority of the German people were bothered by the state planning and carrying out acts of murder—a clear indication of how dulled people’s sense of right and wrong was after only one and a half years of Nazi rule.