Meanwhile, Goering was not slow to sense the smell of change. If Chancellor Hitler no longer needed the S.A. rabble and wanted to forget its undignified associations with the street, Premier Goering no longer wanted to be thought a policeman whose men were increasingly associated with excesses he was either unable or unwilling to control. Hitler’s genial “paladin,” master of two great palaces in Berlin, owner of the splendid Carinhall, the Führer’s special ambassador, the official host of diplomatic and foreign representatives, the Reich Master of the Hunt, the lover of art and the administrator of the Prussian state theater, the recognized associate of a well-known actress, could no longer afford to be directly responsible for the other great cause of public scandal and international criticism, the blood of tortured men and women that seeped through the walls behind which the S.S. and the Gestapo conducted their specialized forms of interrogation. Goering made what show he might of his clemency during this first year; for example, in the case of the camps, he was later to point to his having “helped the families of the inmates financially” and ordered at Christmas the release of five thousand prisoners.1 As we have seen, in 1934, with (as he put it) a gesture of generosity toward his Führer, he offered no opposition to the transfer of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (with its police, the Gestapo) to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, and on April 1 Himmler took charge of the national police, becoming therefore chief of Goering’s “beloved children” as well as of the S.S. On the same day Rudolf Diels was appointed police chief of Cologne and so was removed from his central office; handsome Reinhard Heydrich became Himmler’s principal assistant. Goering then began to build another small and private police force, the Landespolizeigruppe, based near Berlin, at Lichterfelde, to give him some personal security in the likely event of trouble.2
The field was now almost ready for battle, and the deployment of the forces involved was being gradually clarified. The first phase was the discussions held late in May and early in June; Goering maintained at Nuremberg that he had had Roehm brought to him and had charged him with the rumors then circulating that he was planning a coup d’état with his old friend Schleicher and with Gregor Strasser. Even Prince August Wilhelm seemed to be involved. But Gritzbach, the authorized biographer, says that Goering went to Roehm and pleaded with him to remain loyal. However this may be, the principal discussion was one that took place between Hitler and Roehm in which, according to Hitler’s account, Roehm promised “to put things right.” Hitler then personally announced that the storm troopers as a whole were to go on leave for the month of July. Roehm replied by going on “sick leave” himself with his favorite youths. He retired to Bavaria on June 7, but issued an ominous statement which claimed in effect that the S.A., in spite of what might be done to prevent it, would reassemble in full force after its period of leave and must be regarded as “the destiny of Germany.” He then invited Hitler to confer with the leadership of the S.A. in Wiessee, near Munich, on June 30. Hitler accepted. Goebbels himself, playing what may well have amounted to a double game, kept in touch with Roehm, ostensibly on Hitler’s behalf. Like Roehm, he was a radical; like Goering, he was beginning to enjoy the fuller fruits of power. But he was as near a friend as Roehm could find among Hitler’s immediate circle, and he may well have done some double-thinking about his relationship with Roehm in case there were a putsch that turned out to be successful. Goebbels’ prime concern was to keep his position at the top. So he went to Munich to see Roehm at the famous Bratwurstglöckle. Hitler, subject now to mounting pressure from Goering to take action against Roehm, left for Venice, dressed like a depressed commercial traveler, and there met Mussolini, who was resplendently uniformed.
The tension mounted when Papen, inspired by an appeal made to him personally by Hindenburg, delivered a speech at the University of Marburg on June 17, in which he made the last public gesture to come from the ranks of the Cabinet itself of opposition to the imposition of Nazi rule and to the underhand methods that were being used by his colleagues. It was a notable act of courage and of atonement by the man who had done so much to give Hitler the power against which he now felt bound to protest. He spoke as a Catholic and on behalf of Catholics, and he risked his life to do so. The tone of the speech, though its publication was immediately suppressed, soon became widely known and seemed likely to rally public opinion both inside and outside Germany against the Nazi Party. It therefore helped to determine Hitler to take action while there was still time. On the very same day he was himself conferring with Goering and other party leaders at Gera, in Thuringia, and he referred to “the pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic revival of a people’s life.” On January 20, speaking at the Prussian State Council, Goering admitted that there was unrest and that “dissatisfaction” had broken out “here and there.” Then, referring to talk of a second revolution in Germany, he added, “The first revolution was ordered by the Führer and ended by the Führer. If the Führer wants a second revolution we shall be ready, in the streets, tomorrow. If he does not want it we shall be ready to suppress anybody who tries to rebel against the Führer’s will.”
The following day, June 21, Hitler went to see Hindenburg at Neudeck, but was told by Blomberg that unless he modified both the policy and the practice of his party, martial law would be proclaimed by the President himself. Distressed and worried by the threat, Hitler retired once more to determine what must now be done; it is evident that he hated the thought of precipitating violence in his own ranks and feared the repercussions of any drastic action during this initial period in the consolidation of his power when so many forces in the State were ready to oppose him. It was many weeks since he had promised the high command that he would suppress the S.A., and it was plain they were impatient to see him do it. For a few more days his nerves demanded distraction from the action he was being pressed to take from every side, by Roehm’s intransigence, by Hindenburg’s and the Army’s increasing criticism of his leadership, by Goering’s insistence that now was the time once more to cleanse the Augean stables.
The distraction he took was to fly to many different places in Germany, like a frightened bird diverting attention from its nest. Between June 21 and June 29 he was in Bavaria inspecting a mountain road, in Essen attending the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven and touring the Krupp plant, and in Westphalia inspecting labor camps. In Berlin the Army was alerted on June 25 and Roehm formally expelled from the German Officers’ League on June 28, the same day Goering went with Hitler to visit the Krupp plant and to act as a witness at Terboven’s wedding. That evening during the wedding festivities Himmler arrived in Essen from Berlin with further reports of Roehm’s alleged designs. Hitler was seen to whisper in Goering’s ear, and they withdrew together to a private room in the Kaiserhof, where they talked until midnight. Then, according to Gritzbach, they parted and Goering returned to Berlin. The campaign was being planned. Himmler’s S.S. and Goering’s police had already been ordered to stand by for action. In Munich Roehm, who had received confirmation that Hitler would attend his S.A. conference on June 30, made arrangements for a banquet at the Vierjahreszeiten Hotel.
On Friday, June 29, Hitler and Goering, again according to Gritzbach, kept in direct touch with each other by means of dispatches sent by air over the three hundred miles that separated them. Even so, Hitler distracted himself with a tour of some local labor camps, returning afterward to his hotel in Godesberg. There he was joined in the evening by Goebbels, who brought the news that Karl Ernst had placed his Berlin S.A. men on the alert, in spite of Hitler’s order that they should go on leave on July 1. Hitler had also heard that a specialist had been summoned to attend Hindenburg. The men with Hitler now were, apart from Goebbels, Viktor Lutze, a reliable S.A. leader, and Otto Dietrich. Meanwhile Goering waited in Berlin for the final order from the Führer and took close counsel with Himmler and Blomberg.
Later, Hitler was to claim that he received alarming messages from Goering by telephone announcing that a
n S.A. putsch was about to take place in both Berlin and Munich. In the small hours he sent a telegram to Roehm to say he was on his way to join him and then hastened into a plane on an airfield near Bonn for the two-hour journey to Munich. When he landed with Goebbels, Lutze and Dietrich at four in the morning, he found that the local S.A. leaders had already been placed under arrest by the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. With the help of Army transport, Sepp Dietrich’s S.S. Leibstandarte special detachment, some seven hundred strong, had been brought from Berlin to provide the necessary gunmen. Then Hitler and his supporters and a detachment of Sepp Dietrich’s men left Munich in a fleet of cars that drove in swift formation down the road to the lakeside forty miles away. There Roehm was sleeping unguarded in the Hanslbauer sanatorium. In the room next to him lay Heines, embracing a boy. Hitler’s convoy sped along the autobahn that cut through the shadowy forests in which misty shafts of light from the early morning sun were beginning to slant; then the cars turned south to reach the shores of the Tegernsee.
Hitler’s self-control was by now uncertain; he had been virtually without sleep for a considerable time, and the moment was approaching when he had to face Roehm. The cars drew up, and the avengers, led by their Führer, crept silently in. Heines, according to Otto Dietrich, presented “a disgusting scene”; he and the boy with him were taken out, hustled into the back seat of one of the cars, and there shot. Dietrich describes Hitler pacing up and down in front of Roehm with huge strides, “fiery as some higher being, the very personification of justice.” Roehm, still dazed with sleep, would not speak. Hitler took his prisoners back to Munich, where they were put into the Stadelheim prison. There they were kept while Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, did what he could through the rest of the day to save their lives. Hitler left them and shut himself away in the Brown House. Eventually Sepp Dietrich’s men complained that it would soon be too dark for the firing squads to shoot, and urgent phone calls to Berlin for instructions as to who should be shot among those whose names appeared on the hastily prepared lists led finally to confirmation that nineteen of the two hundred men held should be killed at once. They were hurried out to be shot in the gathering dusk, and others were assassinated the following day. Roehm was not among them; two days later, on July 2, he was invited to commit suicide. When he refused, he was shot down in his cell by two S.A. officers while, stripped to the waist, he stood contemptuously to attention.
There was none of this inefficient, squeamish uncertainty of action about the proceedings in Berlin. There, like the generals in Julius Caesar, Himmler and Goering had their death lists ready and in proper order.
These many then shall die; their names are prick’d . . .
He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him.
Goering was determined on immediate action against the proscribed without any reference to the formalities of justice, which might have caused the same unfortunate delays as were happening in Munich once Hitler’s back was turned. The Ministry of the Interior was bypassed. Arrests and examinations began during the night on the direct instructions of Goering, who conducted the purge from his personal residence in the Leipzigerplatz, assisted by Himmler and Heydrich and by his aide Paul Koerner, who belonged to the S.S. Liveried footmen served sandwiches while men taken from their houses or from the streets and dragged to Goering’s house under guard stood about in anterooms in a state of apprehension. As the names of the latest arrivals were called, Goering could be heard shouting, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” With their names pricked on Goering’s lists, they were hastened away for death at the cadet school of Lichterfelde, where men attached to Goering’s Landespolizei stood by to provide the firing squads.
The area round Goering’s palace was cordoned off by S.S. guards armed with machine guns. Through this display of armed force, Papen was led by Bodenschatz, who had been sent by Goering to fetch the Vice-Chancellor from his office, to which he had been summoned early in the morning by his anxious staff. Goering told him the situation and bluntly refused to let him take any action or even to inform President von Hindenburg of what was happening. He was, he said, in complete control. Meanwhile Himmler had stolen out of the room to give the signal for a raid on Papen’s Vice-Chancellery, where the principal members of his staff were either shot or arrested. Goering, his desk covered by a flood of incoming messages, ordered Papen out; he was placed under house arrest with his telephone cut off. Papen admits that by doing this Goering undoubtedly saved his life, and that both Goebbels and Himmler had wanted to have him assassinated. Goering, sensible of the effect Papen’s murder would have had on public opinion, prevented it; Papen was, after all, still Vice-Chancellor and a close friend of the President.3
Goering broke away from his bloody assize to conduct a foreign-press conference in the late afternoon at the Chancellery. He spoke briefly and brutally about the purge to an agitated gathering of journalists. When the name of Schleicher was mentioned, Goering smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I know you journalists like a headline. Well, here it is. General von Schleicher had plotted against the regime. I ordered his arrest. He was foolish enough to resist. He is dead.” With that he left the conference.4
The arrests and killings went on throughout the day and the night. Schleicher and his wife had already been shot in their house at Neu Babelsberg; Karl Ernst, who may well have known more than was wanted about the Reichstag fire, was captured on the road to Bremen while traveling with his bride on their honeymoon, taken to Berlin and shot as he cried the words “Heil Hitler!”; Papen’s advisers Herbert von Bose and Edgar Jung were shot; Kahr, who had defied Hitler in 1923, was killed now, at the age of seventy-three, and his hacked and mutilated body thrown into a swamp near Dachau; Erich Klausener, the leader of the Catholic Action, was shot; Gehrt, in spite of his former position as Air Force captain in Goering’s squadron and holder of the Pour le Mérite, was, according to Heiden, ordered to wear his decorations so that Goering might strip them from his uniform before sending him to the shooting wall. Other victims were General Kurt von Bredow, a friend of Schleicher’s, Willi Schmid, a music critic (killed in error for Willi Schmidt, an S.A. leader), and Father Bernhard Stempfle, who was said to know too much about the death of Geli Raubal. Quickly the circle widened and private feuds were being settled in many parts of Germany by men supposed to be carrying out the process of the purge. Gregor Strasser was flung into the Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison, where the bullets fired into him burst an artery and splashed the walls of his cell with blood. The bodies of the men shot were cremated.
During the evening Hitler flew to Berlin from Munich with Dietrich and Goebbels. Gisevius watched the scene at Tempelhof airport, the blood-red sky from which the plane descended, the pale, unshaven face of Hitler, who had not slept for forty hours, the “diabolic” grinning face of Goebbels, the ghostly formalities as Goering, Himmler and Frick stood in line to greet the Führer, the ominous silence broken only by the sound of their clicking heels. Behind them a guard of honor presented arms. Himmler took from his pocket a long, tattered list of names, and in the angry twilight Hitler, Goering and Himmler stood on the runway. The Führer stared at the list with dull eyes and a gray face while the others whispered at him with insistent gestures. Hitler ran his finger down the list and then stopped at one name, probably that of Strasser; then he silenced the whispering of his subordinates with a savage toss of his head. No more was said, and he went at once to his car.
The shooting and the killing and the suicides, real or induced, went on through the following day, and Hitler, rested now, gave a garden party at the Chancellery. The streets of Berlin seemed quiet when Ambassador Dodd, anxious about the fate of his friend Papen, drove slowly by his house but could see nothing untoward. The names of the dead were coming through, but the papers were filled with the most pedestrian news. Only the foreign journalists were trying to penetrate the rumors and reach the full story of the night of the long knives.
Goering ordered all papers and any other eviden
ce connected with the purge to be destroyed. The German press was silenced by Goebbels. In the version of what happened presented by Hitler himself to the Reichstag on July 13, Roehm’s name was blackened and the essential details were veiled. “Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand against the State, then certain death is his lot,” said Hitler. He, and he alone, had been the supreme justiciar of the German people during this period of national danger, and that was why trials in the courts of justice had been put aside. The events in any case were hallowed by the telegrams sent from Hindenburg to both Hitler and Goering on July 2; that addressed to Goering read: “Accept my approval and gratitude for your successful action in suppressing the high treason. With kind regards and greetings. von Hindenburg.” Hindenburg was too old and ill by now to know what he was saying or what was being said for him. The reward to Himmler was more substantial than kind thoughts or telegrams: the S.S. was made a force in its own right independent of the S.A., which was immediately disarmed and reduced in status to a civilian athletic organization. Papen, released after a few days from his detention, vehemently protested his innocence and resigned as Vice-Chancellor. At the end of July Hitler told him he was to become the German minister to Austria, and he accepted in spite of what had happened.
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