by Ian Kershaw
Hitler arrived back in Berlin around ten o’clock on the evening of 30 June, tired, drawn and unshaven, to be met by Göring, Himmler and a guard of honour.92 Later that evening, Göring recommended an end to the ‘action’.93 According to Göring’s own comments in private to Papen, while in prison in Nuremberg after the war, Hitler only reluctantly agreed, insisting that there were still many who deserved to be shot.94 Röhm, however, was still alive. Hitler hesitated until late the following morning about the fate of the former SA Chief of Staff. According to one piece of post-war testimony, there was talk of a show-trial, only for Hitler to dismiss the idea because of possible damaging revelations of Röhm’s connections with the French ambassador, François-Poncet.95 The story sounds dubious. Whatever the reasons for not having him dispatched immediately, Hitler was, it seems, put under pressure by Himmler and Göring to have Röhm liquidated. In the early afternoon of Sunday 1 July, during a garden party at the Reich Chancellery for cabinet members and their wives, Hitler finally agreed. Even now, however, he was keen that Röhm take his own life rather than be ‘executed’. Theodor Eicke, Commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp, was ordered to go to Stadelheim and offer Röhm the chance to recognize the enormity of his actions by killing himself. If not, he was to be shot. Along with his deputy, SS-Sturmbannführer Michael Lippert, and a third SS man from the camp, Eicke drove to Stadelheim. Röhm was left with a pistol. He was also left the latest edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, a special edition containing the details of the ‘Röhm Putsch’. It was hoped, presumably, that this would convince him that suicide was the only recourse left to him. But after ten minutes, no shot had been heard, and the pistol was untouched on the small table near the door of the cell, where it had been left. (Whether Röhm had used his last minutes alive to read the Völkischer Beobachter is not recorded.) The pistol was removed from the cell. Eicke and Lippert then returned to the cell, each with pistol drawn, signalled to Röhm, standing and bare-chested, and trying to speak, that they would wait no longer, took careful aim, and shot him dead.96 Hitler’s published announcement was terse: ‘The former Chief of Staff Röhm was given the opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behaviour. He did not do so and was thereupon shot.’97
On 2 July, Hitler formally announced the end of the ‘cleansing action’.98 On the same day, Göring ordered the police to burn all files connected with the affair.99 Not all files, however, were destroyed. Enough survived to list the names of eighty-five known victims, only fifty of them SA men.100 Some estimates, however, put the total number killed at between 150 and 200 persons.101
With the SA still in a state of shock and uncertainty, the purge of its mass membership began under the new leader, the Hitler loyalist Viktor Lutze. Within a year, the SA had been reduced in size by over 40 per cent. Many subordinate leaders were dismissed in disciplinary hearings. The structures built up by Röhm as the foundation of his power within the organization were meanwhile systematically dismantled. The SA was turned into little more than a military sports and training body.102 For anyone still harbouring alternative ideas, the ruthlessness shown by Hitler had left its own unmistakable message.
IV
Outside Germany there was horror at the butchery, even more so at the gangster methods used by the state’s leaders.103 Within Germany, it was a different matter. Public expressions of gratitude to Hitler were not long in coming. Already on 1 July, Defence Minister Blomberg, in a statement to the armed forces, praised the ‘soldierly determination and exemplary courage’ shown by the Führer in attacking and crushing ‘the traitors and mutineers’. The gratitude of the armed forces, he added, would be marked by ‘devotion and loyalty’.104 The following day, the Reich President sent Hitler a telegram expressing his own ‘deep-felt gratitude’ for the ‘resolute intervention’ and ‘courageous personal involvement’ which had ‘rescued the German people from a serious danger’.105 Much later, when they were both in prison in Nuremberg, Papen asked Göring whether the President had ever seen the congratulatory telegram sent in his name. Göring replied that Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s State Secretary, had asked him, half-jokingly, whether he had been ‘satisfied with the text’.106
Hitler himself gave a lengthy account of the ‘plot’ by Röhm to a meeting of ministers on the morning of 3 July. Anticipating any allegations about the lawlessness of his actions, he likened his actions to those of the captain of a ship putting down a mutiny, where immediate action to smash a revolt was necessary, and a formal trial was impossible. Nor would there be a subsequent trial. Using language almost identical to that of his tirade in the Senators’ Hall of the Brown House, he said he had made an example of the rebels not simply to quash the revolt, but to serve as a deterrent to any further conspirators against the regime, who would know they were risking their heads. ‘The example he had given would be a healthy lesson for the entire future. He had stabilized the authority of the government for all time.’ Even where guilt had not been fully proven, and though not all the shootings had been ordered by him, he took full responsibility, he went on, for the shootings which had saved the Reich. He asked the cabinet to accept the draft Law for the Emergency Defence of the State that he was laying before them. In a single, brief paragraph, the law read: ‘The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July for the suppression of high treasonable and state treasonable attacks are, as emergency defence of the state, legal.’ The Reich Minister of Justice, the conservative Franz Gürtner, declared that the draft did not create new law, but simply confirmed existing law. (According to the official communiqué, though not included in the cabinet minutes, Gürtner added that Hitler’s actions had not merely to be seen as legal, but also as ‘statesmanlike duty’.)107 Reichswehr Minister Blomberg thanked the Chancellor in the name of the cabinet for his ‘resolute and courageous action through which he had protected the German people from civil war. The Reich Chancellor had acted as statesman and soldier in a spirit which, among members of the Reich Government and the entire German people, called forth a pledge for attainment, loyalty, and devotion in this difficult hour.’ With this statement of suppliance by the head of the armed forces, and the statement by the head of the judicial system accepting the legality of acts of brute violence, the law acknowledging Hitler’s right to commit murder in the interest of the state was unanimously accepted. The law was signed by Hitler, Frick and Gürtner.108
The account to the cabinet was in essence the basis of the justification which Hitler offered in his lengthy speech to the Reichstag on 13 July. Why he delayed almost a fortnight before addressing the Reichstag is unclear. Mental and physical fatigue may have been one reason. He did not appear at a meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in Flensburg on 4–5 July, which he might in the circumstances have been expected to address.109 After returning on 4 July from an overnight stay in Neudeck, where he reported to Hindenburg, the only public duty he carried out was to receive the German ambassador to Ankara two days later.110 Indicating a concern for overseas reactions, he granted on the same day, 6 July, an interview, for publication in the New York Herald, to Professor Alfred J. Pearson, a former American ambassador in Poland and Finland, currently head of a liberal arts college in the USA. Pearson was introduced by Schacht, who must have instigated the interview in an attempt to calm feelings abroad, especially in business circles.111 Allowing the dust to settle, awaiting any further relevations of ‘conspiracy’ from the investigations still under way by the Gestapo,112 and requiring the time to prepare a vital speech, one of the most difficult he had ever given, may have been further reasons why Hitler took so long before appearing before the Reichstag.113
Hitler’s two-hour speech to the Reichstag on 13 July, if not one of his best rhetorical performances, was certainly one of the most remarkable, and most effective, that he was ever to deliver. The atmosphere was tense. Thirteen members of the Reichstag had been among those murdered; friends and former comrades-in-arms of the SA leaders were among those present. The presence of armed
SS men flanking the rostrum and at various points of the hall was an indication of Hitler’s wariness, even among the serried ranks of party members.114 After he had offered a lengthy, fabricated account of the ‘revolt’ and the part allegedly played in the conspiracy by General Schleicher, Major-General Bredow and Gregor Strasser, he came to the most extraordinary sections of the speech. In these, the head of the German government openly accepted full responsibility for what amounted to mass murder. Hitler turned defence into attack. ‘Mutinies are broken according to eternal, iron laws. If I am reproached with not turning to the law-courts for sentence, I can only say: in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the supreme judge (oberster Gerichtsherr) of the German people… I gave the order to shoot those most guilty of this treason, and I further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning and the poisoning from abroad.’115 The cheering was tumultuous.116 Not just among the Nazi Reichstag members, but in the country at large, Hitler’s ruthless substitution of the rule of law by murder in the name of raison d’état was applauded. It matched exactly what Nazi parlance dubbed the ‘healthy sentiments of the people’.
The public was ignorant of the plots, intrigues, and power-games taking place behind the scenes. What people saw for the most part was the welcome removal of a scourge. Once the SA had done its job in crushing the Left, the bullying and strutting arrogance, open acts of violence, daily disturbances, and constant unruliness of the stormtroopers were a massive affront to the sense of order, not just among the middle classes. Instead of being shocked by Hitler’s resort to shooting without trial, most people – accepting, too, the official versions of the planned putsch – acclaimed the swift and resolute actions of their Leader. ‘If only the Führer knew’ was already a phrase on people’s lips in this early phase of the Third Reich, excusing Hitler from knowledge of all that was felt to be negative. On this occasion, it seemed, he had learned of what was afoot, and had acted swiftly and resolutely, with utter ruthlessness, in the interests of the nation. As the Sopade, the SPD’s organization in its Prague exile, perceptively remarked, not just the detestation of the despotic SA, but also the adaptation to violence which had systematically undermined a sense of legal norms since the start of the Third Reich had paved the way for ‘strong sympathies for summary justice’.117
Already in the days immediately following the Night of the Long Knives (as the murderous 30 June 1934 came to be known), the authorities reported ‘unreserved recognition for the energy, cleverness, and courage of the Führer’.118 His standing had, it was claimed, risen even among those who had been previously unsympathetic to National Socialism. ‘The Führer… is not only admired; he is deified,’ ran a report from a small town in north-eastern Bavaria where the KPD had done well before 1933.119 From all over Germany the picture was much the same.120 Hitler’s intervention was seen as a ‘liberation from a strongly felt oppression’.121 In this climate of opinion, Hitler’s speech on 13 July struck all the right notes. The response to it was overwhelmingly positive.
There was great admiration for what was seen to be Hitler’s protection of the ‘little man’ against the outrageous abuses of power of the overmighty SA leadership. Even more so, the emphasis that Hitler had placed in his speech on the immorality and corruption of the SA leaders left a big mark on public responses.122 The twelve points laid down by Hitler in his order to the new Chief of Staff, Viktor Lutze, on 30 June had focused heavily on the need to eradicate homosexuality, debauchery, drunkenness and high living from the SA. Hitler had explicitly pointed to the misuse of large amounts of money for banquets and limousines.123 The homosexuality of Röhm, Heines and others among the SA leaders, known to Hitler and other Nazi leaders for years, was highlighted as particularly shocking in Goebbels’s propaganda. The Sopade commented shrewdly on the success of propaganda ‘in diverting the attention of the great mass of the population from the political background to the action, and at the same time elevating Hitler’s standing as the cleanser of the Movement’.124 Above all, Hitler was seen as the restorer of order. That murder on the orders of the head of government was the basis of the ‘restoration of order’ passed people by, was ignored, or – most generally – met with their approval. There were wide expectations that Hitler would extend the purge to the rest of the party – an indication of the distance that had already developed between Hitler’s own massive popularity and the sullied image of the party’s ‘little Hitlers’, the power-crazed functionaries found in towns and villages throughout the land.125
There was no show of disapproval of Hitler’s state murders from any quarter. Both Churches remained silent, even though the Catholic Action leader, Erich Klausener, had been among the victims.126 Two generals had also been murdered. Though a few of their fellow officers momentarily thought there should be an investigation, most were too busy clinking their champagne glasses in celebration at the destruction of the SA. Blomberg forbade officers to attend Schleicher’s funeral. Only one, General Hammerstein-Equord, disobeyed.127 It could be overlooked. Hammerstein’s antipathy to the Nazis had already led to his resigning his post as army commander (Chef der Heeresleitung) the previous February. He no longer mattered greatly. As for any sign that the legal profession might distance itself from acts of blatant illegality, the foremost legal theorist in the country, Carl Schmitt, published an article directly relating to Hitler’s speech on 13 July. Its title was: ‘The Führer Protects the Law’.128
The smashing of the SA removed the one organization that was seriously destabilizing the regime and directly threatening Hitler’s own position. Thereafter the emasculated SA was no more than a loyalist section of the movement whose activism, when opportune, could be directed against the Jews (as in the November pogrom in 1938) or other helpless target-groups. Without the backing of the army, which had much to gain by the disempowering of the SA, Hitler’s action would have been impossible. No longer would the SA pose a threat to the army or an obstacle to rearmament plans. The army leadership could celebrate the demise of their rival, and the fact that Hitler had backed their power in the state. ‘The Reich Chancellor kept his word when he nipped in the bud Röhm’s attempt to incorporate the SA in the Reichswehr,’ wrote Reichenau a few weeks later. ‘We love him because he has shown himself a true soldier.’129 The army’s triumph was, however, a hollow one. Its complicity in the events of 30 June 1934 bound it more closely to Hitler. But in so doing, it opened the door fully to the crucial extension of Hitler’s power following Hindenburg’s death. The generals might have thought Hitler was their man after 30 June. The reality was different. The next few years would show that the ‘Röhm affair’ was a vital stage on the way to the army becoming Hitler’s tool, not his master.
The other major beneficiary was the SS. ‘With regard to the great services of the SS, especially in connection with the events of the 30th of June’, Hitler removed its subordination to the SA. From 20 July 1934 onwards, it was responsible to him alone.130 Instead of any dependence on the huge and unreliable SA, with its own power pretensions, Hitler had elevated the smaller, élite praetorian guard, its loyalty unquestioned, its leaders already in almost total command of the police. The most crucial ideological weapon in the armoury of Hitler’s state was forged.
Not least, the crushing of the SA leadership showed what Hitler wanted it to show: that those opposing the regime had to reckon with losing their heads. All would-be opponents could now be absolutely clear that Hitler would stop at nothing to hold on to power, that he would not hesitate to use the utmost brutality to smash those in his way. But for all their repulsion at the public display of barbarism, observers abroad drew no lessons about Hitler’s likely behaviour in matters of foreign policy. Most took the view that, brutal though it was, the purge of the SA was an internal affair – a type of political gangland bloodbath redolent of Al Capone’s St Valentine’s Day massacre. They still thought that in the business of diplomacy they could deal with
Hitler as a responsible statesman. The next years would provide a bitter lesson that the Hitler conducting foreign affairs was the same one who had behaved with such savage and cynical brutality at home on 30 June 1934.