Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Meanwhile, the upper stratum of the Reichswehr leadership had been alerted to the SA putsch and had been told that the SS was on the side of the army and therefore should receive arms from it if necessary. An order issued by Lieutenant General Beck on June 29 warned all officers at army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse in Berlin to have their pistols at hand. That same day the Völkische Beobachter published an article by Defense Minister Blomberg that took the form of a declaration of total loyalty. It was also a request to Hitler, in the name of the army, to take measures to curb the SA.

  Everything was now prepared. The SA had been kept in ignorance. The SS and SD, backed by the army, were ready to strike. The conservatives were intimidated, and the President, ill and relapsing into the vagueness of senility, was in distant Neudeck. One last attempt by several of Papen’s associates to get to Hindenburg and have him impose a state of emergency was frustrated by Oskar von Hindenburg’s fear and stupidity.

  Hitler himself had left Berlin early in the morning on June 28 in order to, as he himself later explained, “present an outward impression of absolute calm and to give no warning to the traitors.” A few hours later he was in Essen to attend the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven. But all around him frenzied activity was already developing, while he himself repeatedly dropped into sulky, absent-minded brooding. That evening he telephoned Röhm and ordered him to summon all the higher SA leaders to Bad Wiessee for a frank discussion on Saturday, June 30. Evidently the telephone conversation went amicably, if only because Hitler wished to lull any suspicions his chief of staff might have. At any rate, when Röhm rejoined his fellows at table in Bad Wiessee, he looked “very contented.”

  All that was needed now was the uprising. In fact, the SA had remained calm, and a good many of its members had dispersed. The weeks of investigation by the Sicherheitsdienst had produced no results that would have justified bloody proceedings. While Hitler went to Bad Godesberg on June 29 and Göring ordered his Berlin units on full alert, Himmler set about producing the SA “mutiny” provided for in the plans, which so far had failed to take place.44 Summoned by handwritten, anonymous notes, units of the Munich SA suddenly appeared on the streets and marched about aimlessly. Their surprised leaders were called and promptly ordered their men to go home; but Gauleiter Wagner of Munich could now report to Bad Godesberg the appearance of allegedly rebellious SA formations. Hitler had just attended a Labor Service ceremony in front of the Hotel Dresden, overlooking the Rhine, an affair that culminated in 600 Labor Service workers bearing torches forming a glowing swastika on the slope of the hill across the river. The message from Gauleiter Wagner reached Hitler shortly after midnight. Simultaneously, word arrived from Himmler that the Berlin SA was planning a sudden occupation of the government district next day. “In these circumstances I could make but one decision,” Hitler later declared…. “Only a ruthless and bloody intervention might still perhaps halt the spread of the revolt.”

  It may be that Hitler was genuinely alarmed by the two messages; possibly he imagined that Röhm had seen what was up and was preparing a counterstroke. To this day no one has been able to establish to what extent Hitler himself was among the deceived, whether and how much he was misled by Himmler in particular. For, by eliminating the leadership of the SA, Himmler was indubitably furthering his own rise.

  In any case, Hitler discarded his original plan of flying to Munich next morning and decided to leave at once. At dawn, which came around four o’clock, he arrived in Munich accompanied by Goebbels, Otto Dietrich, and Viktor Lutze. The action began. At the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior Hitler settled accounts with the “mutineers” of the previous day, Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber and Gruppenführer Schmidt. In a fit of fury he ripped the epaulets from their shoulders and ordered them taken to Stadelheim Prison.

  Immediately afterward, he set out for Bad Wiessee in a long column of cars. “Whip in hand,” as his chauffeur, Erich Kempka, described the events, Hitler entered “Röhm’s bedroom, two police detectives with cocked pistols behind him. He blurted out: ‘Röhm, you’re under arrest!’ Sleepily, Röhm raised his head from the pillows and stammered: ‘Heil, mein Führer!’ ‘You’re under arrest!’ Hitler bellowed for the second time, turned on his heel and left the room.” The procedure was the same for the other SA leaders who had already arrived. Only a single one of them, Edmund Heines of Silesia, who was surprised in bed with a homosexual, put up any resistance. Those who were still on their way to Bad Wiessee were intercepted by Hitler on his way back to Munich. Like their comrades they were taken to Stadelheim—making a total of some 200 of the higher SA leaders from all parts of the country. Toward ten o’clock in the morning Goebbels telephoned Berlin and gave the agreed code word: “Hummingbird.” Thereupon Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich also dispatched their squads. The SA leaders on the Reich list were picked up, taken to the Lichterfelde Cadet Academy, and in contrast to their fellows in Munich were lined up against a wall and shot without more ado.

  Meanwhile, Hitler had gone to the Brown House, now heavily guarded by army troops. After a brief address to the party paladins who had been hastily convoked, he at once began drawing up the guidelines for the forthcoming propaganda on the purge. For several hours he dictated instructions, orders, and official explanations, in which he himself figured in the third person, as “der Führer.” But in his haste to cover up and color the events he made a strange oversight. Contrary to the later official version, none of the many announcements made on June 30 mentioned a putsch or attempted putsch by Röhm. Instead there was talk of “gravest misconduct,” “opposition,” “pervert dispositions,” and although occasionally something about a “plot” was thrown in, the overwhelming impression was that Hitler had acted as a guardian of morality. As Hitler put it in one of his less happy metaphors: “The Führer gave the order for the ruthless cleaning out of this pestilential sore.” Now, however, the public was safe. “In the future he will no longer stand for millions of decent people being incriminated and compromised by a few persons with perverted dispositions.”

  Quite understandably, to the very end many SA leaders could not grasp what was going on. They had planned neither a putsch nor a plot, and Hitler had never before looked into their morality. Berlin SA Gruppenführer Ernst, for example, who, according to the messages from Himmler, had planned an attack on the government quarter for the afternoon of June 30, was actually in Bremen about to set out on his honeymoon. Shortly before he was to board the ship, he was arrested. Thinking this was a coarse wedding joke on the part of some of his fellows, he enjoyed the whole thing immensely. He was taken by plane to Berlin, where he was still laughing as he showed his handcuffs and joked with the SS squad that conducted him from the plane to the waiting police car. The extras that were being sold outside the airport building were already reporting his death, but Ernst still suspected nothing. Half an hour later he died at the wall in Lichterfelde, incredulous to the last, a perplexed “Heil Hitler!” on his lips.

  Hitler flew back to Berlin that evening. Before leaving, he had ordered Sepp Dietrich to go to Stadelheim Prison, ask for the surrender of certain persons, and execute these persons at once. Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, intervened and succeeded—if we are to believe him—in reducing the number of victims. Reich Commissioner von Epp, on whose staff Röhm had long ago served as the friend and promoter of the rising demagogue, vainly tried to dissuade Hitler from his bloody course. It may be, however, that his intercession had some effect and induced Hitler to postpone the decision on Röhm.

  In Berlin Hitler was received by a large delegation at cordoned-off Tempelhof airfield. One of those present set down his impression of the arrival shortly after the event:

  The plane from Munich was announced. In a moment we saw it looming swiftly larger against the background of a blood-red sky, a piece of theatricality that no one had staged. The plane roared down to a landing and rolled toward us. Commands rang out. An honor guard presented arms. Göring, Himmler, K�
�rner, Frick, Daluege and some twenty police officers went up to the plane. Then the door opened and Adolf Hitler was the first to step out.

  His appearance was ‘unique,’ to use a favorite word of Nazi commentators. A brown shirt, black bow tie, dark-brown leather jacket, high black army boots—all dark tones. He wore no hat; his face was pale, unshaven, sleepless, at once gaunt and puffed…. Hitler silently shook hands with everyone within reach…. I… heard amid the silence the repeated monotonous sound of clicking heels.45

  Impatient and nervous, Hitler asked to see the list of those liquidated even before he left the airfield. Because of the “unique opportunity,” as one of the participants later stated, Göring and Himmler had extended the killings far beyond the group of “Röhm putschists.” Papen escaped death solely because of his personal relationship with Hindenburg. Nevertheless, his position as Vice-Chancellor was ignored, his protests disregarded, and he was placed under house arrest. Two of his closest associates, his private secretary, von Bose, and his ghost writer, Edgar Jung, were shot, and two others arrested. A squad had killed Under-secretary Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action, at his desk in the Ministry of Transportation. Another squad had tracked down Gregor Strasser in a pharmaceutical plant, brought him to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and shot him in the cellar of the building. Around noon a troop of killers had broken into Schleicher’s home in Neu-Babelsberg, asked the man sitting at his desk whether he was General von Schleicher, and without waiting for a reply fired. Frau von Schleicher was likewise killed.

  Among the murdered were also one of General von Schleicher’s associates, General von Bredow, and former General State Commissioner von Kahr, whose “treachery” on November 9, 1923, Hitler had never forgiven. Another victim was Father Stempfle, who had been one of the editorial readers of Mein Kampf but had since moved far from the Nazi party. Another was the engineer Otto Ballerstedt, who had crossed Hitler’s path during the period of the party’s rise. An utterly innocent music critic, Dr. Willi Schmid, was killed because of a confusion with SA Gruppenführer Wilhelm Schmidt. The rage for murder seemed to have been most violent in Silesia, where SS leader Udo von Woyrsch lost control over his units. Significantly, the liquidations frequently took place wherever the victim was found, in offices, in homes, on the street, with utterly brutal casualness. Many corpses were not found until weeks later, in woods or rivers.

  June 30 was not a good day for any of Röhm’s followers, even if they were engaged in praiseworthy actions against Jews. Three SA men who happened to demolish a Jewish cemetery on that day were expelled from the SA and given a year’s prison term.46

  At a press conference held that very day, Göring actually boasted that he had stretched his assignment on his own initiative. We do not know how many of these arbitrary executions Hitler approved of. The purge represented a break with his tactical imperative of strict legality, and every additional victim made that break all the more obvious. For years Hitler had practiced all the arts of dissimulation, had abstained from the old wild poses and carefully built up the image of himself as a temperate, if also imperious, politician. Now, so close to his goal of total power, he was risking the loss of his painfully earned credit in a single act of self-unmasking. Suddenly he and his cronies had dropped their disguise and appeared in all the harshness of their nature. If Hitler intervened, as several accounts have claimed, to moderate the course of events, it must have been from such considerations.

  Still, Hitler let the killing take on the miscellaneous quality that it did. By shooting in all directions he would deprive all sides of any hope of profiting from the crisis. Hence the barbarous insouciance of the killings anywhere and everywhere, the corpses left where they dropped, the ostentatious traces left by the murderers; and hence, also, the abandonment, for once, of any pretence of justice. There were no trials, no weighing of evidence, no verdicts; there was nothing but an atavistic slaughter. Later, Rudolf Hess tried to justify the indiscriminate killing: “During those hours when the very existence of the German nation was at stake, it was not permissible to judge the amount of guilt borne by individuals. Despite the harshness there is a profound meaning in the practice of the past, in which mutinies among soldiers were punished by a bullet for every tenth man, without the slightest inquiry into guilt or innocence.”

  Once again Hitler had acted wholly in terms of the ends of power. The contemporary polemicists were surely mistaken when they pictured him as a sadist decking out his blood lust by references to pitiless Renaissance princes.47 The other view of him is equally mistaken: that he was emotionally indifferent, cold and unfeeling as he eliminated comrades, followers, and intimate friends of many years’ standing. In fact, the first view applies more accurately to Göring, the second to Himmler; both went about their murderous business efficiently—with total lack of scruple. Unlike them, Hitler seemed to feel considerable inner pressure. All those who met him during this period noted his extraordinary agitation. The strain on his nerves was evident in all his movements. In his speech of justification to the Reichstag he himself spoke of the “bitterest decisions” of his life. And unless all indications are deceptive he was haunted for months afterward by memories of his murdered friends and followers—for example, in that highly secret conference of January 3, 1935, when he hastily summoned the heads of the party and the army and in a dramatic scene exhorted them to achieve unity. On this, as on many other occasions, it turned out that his nerves were not as armored as his conscience. In keeping with his maxim that one must always strike faster and harder than the enemy, the smooth course of the June 30 purge was based largely on a surprise assault. How conspicuous, therefore, is Hitler’s hesitation before he ordered the first execution of seven SA leaders, and his hesitation again before the killing of Röhm. In both cases, Hitler’s conduct can be adequately explained only on grounds of sentimentality. He was obeying the reflex of an emotional tie which at least for a few hours proved stronger than the cold rationale of power.

  By Sunday, July 1, Hitler had overcome the previous day’s uncertainties and was once more in firm control of his own reactions. Toward noon he appeared repeatedly at the historic window in the chancellery to greet a crowd rounded up by Goebbels, and in the afternoon he actually gave a garden party for the party bigwigs and members of the cabinet, to which their wives and children were also invited. While the firing squads were still at work in Lichterfelde, a few miles away, he moved about among his guests in excellent humor, chatting, drinking tea, showing affection for the children—all the while breathless and in flight from reality. There is an element of high drama in this scene; what comes to mind is the physiognomy of one of those Shakespearean villains who are not fully up to the requirements of evil. And from the midst of this sham that he had so hastily set up he evidently gave the order to kill Ernst Röhm, who was still waiting in his cell in Stadelheim. Rudolf Hess had for hours tried in vain to obtain instructions for the execution. Shortly before six o’clock, Theodor Eicke and SS Hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert entered Röhm’s room. Together with the latest edition of the Völkische Beobachter, which carried a lengthy account under banner headlines of the events of the previous day, they laid a pistol on Röhm’s table and told him he had ten minutes in which to use it. Nothing disturbed the quiet; prison guards were told to fetch the weapon. When Eicke and Lippert entered the cell, shooting, Röhm was standing in the middle of the room, his shirt histrionically ripped open exposing his chest.

  Base and repellent as were the circumstances surrounding this murder of a friend, we must nevertheless ask whether Hitler had any alternative. No matter how far Röhm might have been willing to go in bringing about the SA state, his real goal was the primacy of the ideological soldier. In his proud sense that he had a following of millions pressing behind him, he was incapable of recognizing that he was being overambitious. For he would necessarily encounter bitter opposition from both the Political Organization and the army, and at least passive resistance
on the part of the general public. It is true that he thought he was still being loyal to Hitler. But it was only a question of time before the objective contradictions would lead to personal antipathy. With his keen tactical sense, Hitler had instantly realized that Röhm’s aims also threatened his own position. After the elimination of Gregor Strasser from the party, the SA chief was the only remaining individual who had preserved personal independence of Hitler and who resisted the hypnotic spell of Hitler’s will. Hence he was Hitler’s only serious rival, and it would have flouted all the principles of tactics to grant him as much power as he wanted. Certainly Röhm had not planned a putsch. But he embodied, for a suspicious Hitler, the permanent threat of a potential putsch.

  On the other hand, Röhm could not simply be deposed or isolated. He was not just any lieutenant; he was a popular generalissimo. An attempt to strip the chief of staff of his powers would indeed have sparked some sort of uprising. And even if Röhm could have been deposed, he would have remained a permanent threat, for he had many connections and influential friends. A court trial was virtually out of the question. After the unsatisfactory outcome of the Reichstag fire trial, Hitler had little confidence in the judiciary. But above and beyond that, Hitler’s own secrecy complex made it unthinkable to give an intimate friend, and one who was driven to the wall, the opportunity to defend himself in public. Too much would have come out. It was precisely their many years of friendship that made Röhm so strong, but also left Hitler no other way out. A bare three years later Hitler declared that to his “own sorrow” he had been forced “to destroy this man and his following.” And on another occasion, speaking to a group of high-ranking party leaders, he remarked upon the decisive share that this greatly gifted organizer had had in the NSDAP’s rise and conquest of power. When the time came to write the history of the National Socialist movement, he said, Röhm would always have to be remembered as the second man, right beside himself.48