Known officially as the Sturmabteilungen, or SA, the stormtroopers had been formed in 1921 as a squad of large, intimidating doormen to keep troublemakers out of Nazi Party meetings. The SA grew rapidly in numbers and soon had their own para-military uniform dominated by the brown shirts which gave the SA another nickname. The SA became notorious for starting fights at the meetings of other political parties, or pouncing on known communists in the street. In many working class areas it was the dashing uniform and sense of belonging which they got in the SA that induced many young men to join the Nazis.
At first the SA had been led by Ernst Röhm, who created the organisation and drill. He left in 1926 after becoming embroiled in a particularly sordid homosexual scandal. Röhm was forced to leave the country, spending some time in South America as a military adviser. Hitler called him back to Germany as soon as he was the leader of a large party in the Reichstag and Röhm again led the SA. By the end of 1932 the SA had 300,000 members, making it three times larger than the armed forces. In 1933 the added prestige of Hitler’s being Chancellor brought a flood of recruits to the SA, which in May 1934 had 4 million members. Only a minority of the SA had guns, but all were trained in their use and in military-style drill and combat duties. Röhm and his chief supporters in the SA made no secret of their views that they and their men represented the true martial spirit of the German nation and that they should become the armed forces of Nazi Germany. It is easy to see why the generals were nervous of the SA and its possible future in a Nazi Germany.
At the same time, Hitler was beginning to have doubts about the SA and about Röhm in particular. Ernst Röhm was another war hero. He had been wounded in action three times and had joined the Nazis in Munich in the party’s earliest days. Röhm was a fervent believer in the need to overthrow the decadent German democracy, as the Nazis saw it, which was undermining the country’s greatness and he proved to be an inspirational leader for the SA. After his return in 1931, Röhm organised the rapid growth in numbers and power of his stromtroopers as they took over the streets.
It was just as the SA was achieving its greatest success that Hitler began to grow apart from the revolutionary fervour of Röhm. Hitler and the Nazis needed the support of the army officers and the wealthy industrialists if they were to hold on to power, and Röhm despised and was despised by both. He had also managed to make enemies within the Nazi Party.
While the SA were guarding early Nazi Party meetings, a second organisation was guarding Nazi Party leaders. These were the Schutzstaffeln, the Protection Squads or SS, led from 1929 by Heinrich Himmler. Under Himmler, the SS took on the task of rooting out disloyalty or divergent views among Nazi Party members. Himmler was soon in command of some 50,000 men working full time or part time for the SS. As Hitler consolidated his power as Chancellor, the SS took on some of the duties of the state police, especially when it came to tracking down communist activists. Already the SS was earning the reputation for extreme violence and ruthless actions that would become its hallmark.
By early 1934 the intensely ambitious Himmler had come to see Röhm and the SA as rivals for power in the soon-to-be-established Nazi dictatorship of Germany. He decided to get rid of both, but Röhm was an old friend of Hitler’s. Himmler cultivated the army officers, stirring up their unease about Röhm, knowing that they would make this clear to Hitler. Meanwhile, Göring joined Himmler in dislike of the SA.
Before long, reports were appearing on Hitler’s desk alleging that key senior members of the SA were planning a coup. It was alleged that the SA felt Hitler had done a deal with the conservative establishment and so betrayed Nazism. Many of these reports came from Himmler’s SS in their role of finding internal disquiet in the Nazi Party. While there is no doubt that many SA officers felt Hitler was betraying Nazism, there is no real evidence that Röhm himself was anything more than peeved. Certainly no coup was planned. Nevertheless, Himmler built up a case against Röhm based on half-truths, innuendo and smears. When in June 1934 Hitler was finally shown ‘evidence’ implicating Röhm in a plot to overthrow him, Hitler was ready to believe it.
At this time the SA was enjoying its traditional June break from active duties and Röhm himself was at the spa town of Bad Wiessee enjoying a cultural holiday. On 28 June Himmler phoned Hitler while he was attending the wedding reception of a senior Nazi Party official and poured out a stream of accusations, allegations and ‘evidence’. Göring was also at the wedding and added his own voice of warning to Hitler that the SA were about to move in revolt.
Hitler at once ordered all the senior SA officers to travel to Bad Wiessee to join Röhm for an emergency meeting with himself. The army, meanwhile, was put on alert and all troops ordered to report to barracks at once. The senior generals were told that Hitler had heard the SA were planning an armed coup and that the army might be needed to put it down. Most generals welcomed the chance to put the SA in their place, though some worried about taking on 4 million men, and others were convinced the SA were planning no such thing as a coup.
On 29 June, Hitler flew to Bad Wiessee to confront Röhm and the SA leadership. He did not wait for his armed SS guards, but stormed into Röhm’s bedroom at dawn waving a revolver. Aided by a dozen other men, Hitler personally arrested the SA’s most senior officers and locked them in a laundry. There was a nasty moment when 50 armed SA men arrived, but Hitler persuaded them to go back to the SA barracks, where he followed and delivered an hour long speech to the SA stormtroopers present who were wondering what was going on.
Meanwhile, the SS were in action across Germany. In Berlin, the former Chancellor of Germany Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were shot dead at their home. Other political rivals were shot, stabbed or simply vanished. Senior SA men everywhere were killed out of hand. Nazis from the the old days in Munich also died, if they had annoyed Himmler in some way. At least 180 men and women, perhaps as many as 800, died in the few hours of the SS action.
Back at Bad Wiessee, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Hans Frank, arrived with a squad of police to take charge of what he thought was a straightforward arrest of political subversives. Hitler had, by now, left for Nazi Party offices in Munich. Soon after Frank and his police took control of Röhm and the other prisoners, a force of armed SS men led by Sepp Dietrich, later to be a crucial SS figure, arrived and announced they had come to execute the prisoners. Gallantly Frank refused to let them in and insisted that all prisoners should get a fair trial. Dietrich phoned Hitler, Hitler phoned Frank and told him to allow Dietrich to carry out the orders of the German Government ‘unless you are in league with those scum’. Frank eyed the SS machine guns and gave way. Röhm’s colleagues died in a hail of bullets; Röhm himself was given the option of suicide, ‘due to his former close relationship with the Führer’. He chose not to take it, and was shot by SSStandartenführer Michael Lippert.
Hearing of the purge of the SA leadership, President Hindenburg put into a telegram to Hitler the views of most of the army officer corps ‘You have saved the German Nation from serious danger’, he wrote. ‘For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.’ But then he heard of the deaths of Schleicher and his wife, and began to have second thoughts. When he learned that the musician Wilhelm Schmid had been shot dead in mistake for the SA officer Wilhelm Schmid, Hindenburg was even move disturbed by the violent action, taken outside the normal course of legality.
Other army officers were having a similar reaction. Their initial satisfaction at the elimination of the SA, turned to disquiet at the methods used and the innocents killed. Hitler moved quickly to assuage military alarm. The widows and orphans of the dead were given generous pensions, though some refused them, and the propaganda machine of Josef Goebbels went into overdrive.
On 13 July Hitler appeared before the Reichstag, the first time since the killings that he had been seen in public, to justify what had happened. The building and all routes to it were under heavy guard by the army and the SS. Hitler reiterated the �
�evidence’ against Röhm and other SA men, then claimed that only 74 people had been killed, including three SS men who had shot an innocent man during a bungled arrest. None of it was true, nor was Hitler’s claim that he had taken ‘the bitterest decisions of my life’ in order to ‘preserve the most precious treasure of the German people, internal peace and order.’ The Reichstag then voted to approve the executions in retrospect.
It was Blomberg who won over the army officers. He convinced them that the SA had, indeed, been planning a coup which would have spelt the end of the German army and established the armed SA as the sole political and military power in Germany. Some officers were convinced and wholeheartedly embraced Hitler’s view. Others, such as the future submarine admiral Karl Dönitz merely went along with it. Only a few voiced opposition, and those were mainly older officers who were near or past retirement. Hitler could afford to ignore them.
The importance of the so called ‘Night of the Long Knives’ to Hitler’s relationship to the army cannot be overlooked for it was immense. In April of 1934, Hitler had met with Blomberg together with Raeder, head of the navy, and with Werner von Fritsch, head of the army while watching a series of naval manoeuvres. Although no notes of that meeting have survived, if any were made, it is clear that the four men had made an agreement. Hitler had promised to break the power of the SA, while the three military men had agreed that after Hindenburg ceased to be President that the Chancellor, Hitler, would become the symbolic head of the armed forces not the President.
Heinrich Himmler (2nd left), Ernst Röhm and Hermann Göring (2nd from right), attend an early Nazi Party rally
In the event, things moved faster than anyone could have imagined. Hitler destroyed the SA in June and at the end of July Hindenburg fell dangerously ill. He took to the old iron camp bed he had always used on campaign and refused the offer of a soft, fur cloak. ‘Soldiers do not wear robes,’ he said contemptuously. When it became clear the old warrior was dying, Hitler rushed to the deathbed, but Hindenburg refused to talk to him. On 2 August, Hindenburg died.
Later that day the German government announced that the offices of President and Chancellor had been merged into one. Hitler was not merely head of government, he was now head of state as well.
He was the Führer.
The same day, Hitler summoned Blomberg, Raeder and Fritsch to his office. It was traditional for the heads of the armed forces to be the first to recognise a new head of state, be he Kaiser or President. They came to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fatherland and the President. But when Hitler read out the oath for them to repeat they had a surprise.
‘I swear before God this holy oath: to give my unconditional obedience to the Führer of the Reich and people, to Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and I pledge my word as a brave soldier to observe this oath always even at the risk of my life.’
It was an unprecedented oath. Even in the days of the Kaiser the oath had been to the Fatherland as much as to the monarch, and since then the oath had been to the office of President not to the individual holding that office. But now the senior commanders were asked to swear a sacred oath to Adolf Hitler by name. To a German army officer an oath such as this was a very serious thing, it was not called a holy oath for nothing. The sanctity of a promise, and even more so of an oath, was a fundamental truth for army officers brought up in the proud Prussian tradition.
Despite this, none of the senior commanders murmured a word of disquiet that day in Hitler’s office. They swore the oath, then left to pass the wording of the oath on to the men under their command. By midnight on 2 August 1934 every serving officer and man in the German armed forces had taken the exact same oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Thereafter everyone joining the services made an identical promise.
On 6 August the funeral service for Hindenburg took place in Berlin amid great solemnity and ceremony. The streets were lined with the soldiers of the army, but there were also on parade units from the SS and even the SA. The service over, Hitler led the funeral march to the strains of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods. The coffin was then taken to the scene of Hindenburg’s greatest military triumph, the Battle of Tannenberg, and buried beneath the vast memorial to the German dead.
Hitler then hurried back to Berlin and asked Hindenburg’s son if the President had left any papers. There was a sealed envelope addressed to Hitler. The new Führer opened the envelope and his face darkened with rage. He shoved the paper in his pocket and stormed out. On 15 August the contents of the letter were published. The letter applauded the army, its officers and men and then went on to praise Hitler and his government. There were widespread rumours that the letter had been altered.
Nevertheless, on 19 August a referendum was held in Germany to seek changes to the constitution that allowed Hitler to merge the powers and duties of his two offices into one. The proposal was carried by an overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote of 90%.
Despite the rise to the position of Führer and the extraction of the personal oath of loyalty, Hitler was still not master of the military. Many senior officers viewed Hitler as a superb politician but, so far as military matters were concerned, merely a very brave corporal. They had an inbuilt belief in the powers and duties of the generals and high command to control the army. Like Blomberg, they saw the armed forces as a pillar supporting the German nation, a pillar which was entirely separate from government, from politics and, in particular, from the Nazi Party. Hitler saw the armed forces as just one more cog in the machinery of state. He now set out to make it so.
In 1935 Hitler announced that he was renouncing the Versailles Treaty and its stipulations limiting the size of Germany’s armed forces. He also announced a reorganisation of the Reichswehr, which now became known as the Wehrmacht. This reorganisation affected only the very highest personnel, but was crucial. Each of the three services -the army, navy and air force - was to have its own Commander in Chief who was directly answerable to Blomberg. Blomberg was made not only Defence Minister in the government, but also Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht as an active military commander.
As President, Hitler was Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. Unlike earlier Presidents Hitler provided himself with his own staff officers. This allowed Hitler to produce detailed plans of his own and to test whether his senior officers were right when they told him a particular plan was possible or not.
Hitler also had the power to appoint officers right down the hierarchy. He used this power to appoint General Wilhelm Keitel as Blomberg’s chief of staff. Keitel was from the old landed gentry and had been serving as an army officer since 1901. He had risen rapidly through the echelons of the officer corps and by the late 1920s was a senior member of the planning staff. Throughout his military service, he had remained scrupulously outside politics, and actually seemed bored by them. He was, therefore, eminently acceptable to the more traditional officers.
But, as so often, Hitler knew his man. He had met Keitel in 1933 and it was clear from the start that the general had fallen victim to the charm that Hitler’s personality could work on so many people. Keitel was completely won over, believing Hitler to be a genius sent to save the German nation. Over the next few months, Keitel seemed almost to lose his own personality and to be absorbed into that of Hitler. Some of his colleagues jokingly called him Lakeitel, meaning ‘toady’ or ‘lickspittle’, but such puns soon became dangerous. With Keitel in place as Blomberg’s chief of staff, Hitler had a man totally loyal to himself at the heart of the war machine.
But for Hitler, the control this gave him was not enough. He knew the military was a powerful force in German society and politics. By 1935 it was probably the only force able to remove him from power. Hitler wanted total obedience from such a dangerous organisation.
In part, this was coming slowly of its own accord. The massive increase in the size of the armed forces was bringing in large numbers of new, younger officers. By 1936 these men outnumbered the older professional offic
ers by a large margin. They were drawn from a broader cross section of society than the officer intakes of the 1920s and had grown up during the years that the Nazi Party was gathering strength. They were more open to Nazi ideology and, in particular, to the magical charm of Hitler. Slowly the army was changing its character. But not the senior ranks and the high command. To get instant and total obedience from them, Hitler would have to make more effort.
Again the situation Hitler desired was slowly evolving. Throughout the later 1930s, the generals continually urged caution on Hitler in his forays into foreign policy. The military professionals were very aware that Germany was ringed by countries with more powerful armed forces. They knew that in a direct confrontation in 1934 Germany would undoubtedly lose. Even with rearmament taking a firm hold, as late as 1938 the senior staff officers doubted Germany’s ability to win a war and some still had doubts in 1939.
Hitler, however, was playing a very different game. Although aware of the military strength of his opponents, he was paying more attention to their moral strength. He calculated that the British and French were so terrified of another bloodbath in the trenches that they would do almost anything to avoid a major European war. Hitler also believed that the smaller states of eastern Europe would do nothing so long as he kept them divided diplomatically and so long as the major powers did not move. After one meeting with Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, Hitler turned to Göring and said, ‘We can do what we like in the East. They won’t do anything.’
Hitler: Military Commander Page 10
