‘Reich Murder Week’
There is no lack of colourful accounts of the course of action that unfolded between 30 June and 2 July 1934.25 Instead of providing yet another detailed narrative, the aim of the following section is to single out those aspects that shed light on the ways the SA reacted during and immediately after this deadly blow. The best documents for investigating this aspect of the events are the detailed notes of Viktor Lutze, appointed by Hitler as Röhm’s successor on 1 July 1934 (Plate 17). A few weeks after his appointment, Lutze began to regularly record his political thoughts in writing, a habit he continued until his death in a car accident on 2 May 1943. His 312-page-long ‘political diary’ remains unpublished to this day, with the exception of his notes on the ‘Röhm purge’, which were printed in a series of three articles that appeared in the liberal Frankfurter Rundschau between 14 and 16 May 1957. Similar to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Lutze’s notes were written both for himself and for posterity. After the ‘Röhm purge’ the new SA Chief of Staff felt a particular need to defend himself against the accusation that he had betrayed his comrades in the SA, as he was one of the very few SA leaders who personally benefited from the murderous events. This desire for justification was an important reason for starting his diary in the first place. In later years, particularly between 1941 and 1943, the activity of writing in his notebook also took on a therapeutic character, as Lutze found it increasingly difficult to find a political audience, let alone influence the course of politics, which left him frustrated and ultimately depressed.26
Despite Lutze’s long and successful career within the Nazi movement, including his service as governor of the Prussian province of Hanover between 1933 and 1941, he has never attracted strong interest among historians on Nazi Germany.27 In most cases Lutze is presented as a submissive man without character,28 a ‘pale vassal of Hitler’,29 one of his ‘featureless creatures’ (nichtssagende Kreatur).30 Such harsh characterizations partly reflect the stereotypes of the post-1934 SA, but they also point to the perception that he was unimportant, at least compared to his predecessor. However, it was Lutze who oversaw the complicated mutations of the SA, which remained one of the largest National Socialist mass organizations, for the next nine years, until May 1943.
Lutze was born on 28 December 1890 in Bevergern in Tecklenburg. A professional soldier during the First World War and, starting in 1922, an early member of the NSDAP and the SA, he became the leader of the SA ‘Gausturm Ruhr’ in 1926 and two years later was promoted to SA-Oberführer Ruhr. After the September 1930 elections he represented the NSDAP in the Reichstag. Despite his important role in the Nazi movement prior to 1 July 1934, his appointment as head of the SA came as a surprise. It is indicative of his low public profile that his name was not mentioned even once in the nationally distributed illustrated weekly Der SA-Mann between January 1932 and June 1934.31 From the perspective of Röhm’s adversaries, the promotion of Lutze to SA Chief of Staff was intended to permanently diminish the influence of the Brownshirts. As Lutze could not (yet) rely on a stable power base within the SA, he was entirely dependent on Hitler’s goodwill. As his diary notes make plain, he uncritically venerated the Führer and exempted him from all criticism. Even more than other SA generals, Lutze was willing to execute his master’s will and careful not to overstep his own authority.
In his diary Lutze noted that he had first learned of the plans to remove Röhm from the leadership of the SA on 22 June 1934 from Hitler himself. On that day the chancellor had requested that Lutze come to Berlin and in a face-to-face conversation presented him with the alleged ‘Putsch’ plans supposedly contrived by Röhm.32 When Lutze replied that he had never heard of such ideas, Hitler referred to evidence provided by the Gestapo and commanded Lutze to no longer accept orders from the OSAF in Munich.33 If we believe Lutze’s version to be ‘true’ – in the sense that he himself believed what he wrote – then he was not offered Röhm’s position prior to 1 July. Yet, from 22 June 1934 onward, he was aware that an upper leadership change within the SA was imminent. We can also reasonably assume that Lutze expected to be on the winning side of this conflict.34
Lutze pretended not to have been involved in this matter until 28 June 1934, when he attended the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven in Essen, at which both Hitler and Göring were groomsmen. As the dinner was being served, Hitler quickly left the wedding table to receive several phone calls from the Gestapo and the Minister of State in the Prussian State Ministry, Paul Körner, Göring’s right-hand man. ‘I got the impression that certain people had an interest in exacerbating the situation precisely at a moment when the Führer was not in Berlin and could not be informed in writing, but saw and heard everything only on the phone,’ Lutze commented later. He maintained the view that Röhm had never planned a putsch against Hitler on 30 June 1934. If anything, Lutze credited Röhm with formulating plans to limit or abolish the ‘reactionary and un-socialist military [sic!]’.35
Hitler left Terboven’s wedding party early and spent the rest of the night in the nearby Hotel Kaiserhof with Göring and Lutze. During the evening hours Körner arrived from Berlin with news that – according to Lutze’s report – provoked Hitler to exclaim: ‘I am fed up, I will make an example!’ Hitler then called Röhm and summoned a meeting with him and the other SA leaders in the Hanselbauer Pension located in the spa town of Bad Wiessee in Upper Bavaria, a short drive south from Munich. This meeting was to take place at 10 a.m. on 30 June, the first day of the SA’s national holiday month. At about 1 a.m. on 29 June, Göring left Essen for Berlin, charged with carrying out the events planned for the capital.36 Berlin was to become the second centre of the murderers’ action, after Bavaria.
Hitler and Lutze spent Thursday, 29 June, in Bad Godesberg near Bonn. Goebbels arrived later that day. Lutze described the atmosphere as relaxed until shortly after midnight, when Hitler received another call from Berlin and ordered that he, Goebbels, and Lutze be driven to the nearby Hangelar Airport. Their plane departed at about 1.45 a.m. Lutze remembered a ‘magnificent, clear sky’ and the shining lights of Frankfurt. The men on board did not speak much. Lutze claimed to have approached Hitler and to have asked him to ‘alter the way of the impending arrests’, but supposedly did not receive an answer. Their plane finally landed at the Oberwiesenfeld Airfield at sunrise. SS men immediately surrounded Hitler and passed on the latest news to him, which led to a new outburst of rage and excitement. Hitler then had the two local SA leaders, the SA-Obergruppenführer August Schneidhuber and the SA-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Schmid, woken up and summoned to the airfield. When they arrived he called them ‘traitors’ and snatched off their epaulets, declaring: ‘You are arrested and will be shot!’ SS units then swarmed into town with blacklists containing the names of those to be taken into custody. Next, Hitler, Goebbels, and Lutze, accompanied by Hitler’s adjutants Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner and several SS men and police, drove southbound.37 In Bad Wiessee they had Röhm and several other SA leaders present arrested and brought to Munich’s Stadelheim Prison. There, they were shot either in the early evening hours of the same day or, in the case of Röhm, the following day.38
At about 11.30 a.m. on 30 June, still prior to the first executions in Munich, a meeting of leading National Socialists including Hitler, Goebbels, Hess, and other party luminaries took place in the city’s ‘Brown House’. Several SA-Obergruppenführer were present as well, among them Lutze, his later successor Max Jüttner, and SA-Gruppenführer Karl Schreyer. The latter in 1949 remembered that Hitler dashed into the hall ‘like a madman, with foam at the mouth’. He accused Röhm of high treason and called the alleged putsch the greatest betrayal the world had ever seen.39 Hitler then appointed Lutze as Röhm’s successor. ‘For a moment, I would have preferred to refuse,’ Lutze noted, before explaining at length how over the following days he had consolidated and attempted to help his fellow SA leaders but had not been able to prevent the pre-planned executions from taking place.40 The situation was
so tense that even the new SA Chief of Staff did not dare go to the OSAF headquarters but instead took a room in Munich’s Vier Jahreszeiten, a luxury hotel, where he claimed to have installed a kind of provisional bureau.41
In Berlin, Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich acted with similar ruthlessness. They were well prepared for their task, having previously asked the Gestapo and the SD to compile lists of the names of those to be arrested.42 At about 10 a.m. on 30 June 1934, Goebbels called Göring in Berlin. When the prearranged code word ‘Kolibri’ was exchanged, Göring knew what to do. In close cooperation with Himmler and Heydrich, he ordered the arrests and executions of several high-ranking SA leaders, as well as the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and other influential Nazi critics and internal rivals. Members of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler carried out at least sixteen summary executions in Berlin-Lichterfelde between 30 June and 2 July. Nine other people were shot in their homes or offices, in the cellars of the Gestapo headquarters, or ‘taken for a ride’.43
To publicly justify the executions and arrests, the regime claimed that Röhm and his conspirators in the SA had planned a violent overthrow, and that Hitler had therefore carried out a pre-emptive strike. Because of the imminent danger a less violent option had not been available. In the late afternoon hours of 30 June, Göring in a public speech called the operation ‘a process of purification’ and promised that its ultimate goal would be a ‘cleaner, more consolidated state’.44 A detailed decree from Hitler to Lutze, published on the same day, adopted the same rhetoric. Containing twelve points, it ordered the SA leaders ‘to help maintain and to strengthen the SA as a clean and tidy organization’. Hitler asked all stormtroopers for nothing less than ‘blind submission’ and ‘absolute discipline’ – in other words, unrestricted obedience. The days of splendid parties with alcohol flowing were over, once and for all, Hitler decreed. Most humiliating for the SA was a paragraph that characterized the organization as shot through with morally depraved homosexuals. From now on, Hitler declared, ‘SA men should be leaders, not abominable apes!’45 Whereas Hitler’s tone was crude, Werner von Blomberg’s order to the army of 1 July 1932 was a plainly cynical move. He not only assured the Nazi authorities of the army’s gratitude for the party’s ‘self-sacrifice and loyalty’, but also pretended to be on friendly terms with the now ‘purified’ SA: ‘The good relationship towards the new SA, demanded by the Führer, will be fostered with pleasure by the Army, conscious of their common ideals.’46 Two days later, on 3 July, the murderers granted themselves absolution with the ‘Law on State Self-Defence Measures’, which exempted all crimes committed by the regime between 30 June and 2 July from criminal prosecution.47
Despite the high level of uncertainty and violence of these days, the German public reacted to the news calmly and with composure. Nowhere did the SA try to fight back once the news of the arrests and Röhm’s removal were confirmed. The disarming of individual men and complete SA units proceeded without impediment, even if Lutze in his diary complained bitterly about the arrogant and humiliating methods employed by the SS.48 The U.S. military attaché, Jacob Wuest, reported from Berlin on 2 July 1934: ‘The trouble was over within a few hours and by Saturday evening all was again quiet, the people of the streets hardly realizing that anything had happened. The lack of excitement on the streets both during the raids and subsequent thereto was remarkable.’ He also observed that as the raids unfolded, ‘practically all brown uniforms disappeared from the streets’, although he admitted that this was probably not simply an immediate reaction to the violence, but also a consequence of the beginning of the stormtroopers’ long-planned July vacation.49 The Bavarian authorities likewise reported that all Bavarian cities had remained calm, with the exception of Munich, where some people had been arrested during the night of 1–2 July because they had been spreading ‘inappropriate’ rumours about the recent events.50
Such rumours continued to circulate in the following weeks, particularly as hundreds of people had disappeared and their relatives and friends remained without the slightest idea of their whereabouts. At times the news of someone’s execution reached the victim’s family only weeks or months later, as in the case of Kurt Mosert, the leader of the SA-Standarte in Torgau. His parents learned only in October 1934 that their son had been shot while ‘trying to escape’ from KZ Lichtenburg three months earlier.51 In the meantime some of those who had been directly involved in the killings bragged about their participation. According to post-war testimonies, Max Müller, a groundsman at the Munich Sports Club, and his son of the same name were two such figures. In the summer of 1934 both men were members of the SS and were said to have publicly shown acquaintances the badges of those SA leaders who had been executed.52
Behind the scenes, the regime tried to strike compromises with the relatives of the victims, particularly when they had been influential or prominent. On 5 July, four days after the murder of Röhm, the Bavarian Minister President Ludwig Siebert claimed that Hitler had given orders that Röhm’s mother Sofia Emilie should inherit her son’s private estate, and that her apartment should from now on be spared further raids. According to Siebert, the seventy-six-year-old woman had unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself after she learned of her son’s execution.53 Several families of those who had been murdered between 30 June and 2 July 1934 were later offered compensatory monthly payments. According to Viktor Lutze, at least one of the widows turned her back on the proposal in disgust, claiming that a state that pretended to operate on an ‘idealist’ (ideell) basis but resorted to financial compensation exemplified the ‘rule of mammon’. ‘Where has the decent National Socialist gone?’ she asked.54 The regime prohibited the publication of obituary notices and never cleared the names of those it had executed.
The overall number of victims between 30 June and 2 July was close to 100. Rainer Orth, as much a knowledgeable historian as a scrupulous detective, has so far identified ninety of the murdered people by name.55 Even if regional studies suggest that some additional killings were so successfully hidden from later scrutiny that the belated identification of these victims is impossible, the number of these ‘unsolved’ cases can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.56 The latest figure of 100 is surprisingly close to that reported in official statistics from the summer of 1934. An early alphabetical ‘dead list’, provided by the police and approved by Hitler, contained the names of eighty-three people, as well as the places and dates of their executions. As this list makes clear, the cities of Munich, Berlin, and Breslau were the centres of the executions, with twenty-four, twenty-two, and nine victims respectively. Murders also took place in Dresden, Stettin, and near the Lichtenburg concentration camp, as well as in the cities of Stuttgart, Plauen, Glogau, Tilsit, Landshut, and a few other places.57
Apart from Berlin and Munich, the geographical distribution of the murders reveals a regional focus on Lower Silesia and Saxony, areas in which the SA had been particularly ‘unruly’ in the previous years.58 Yet the SA leaders executed – among them the Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, his Silesian counterpart Edmund Heines, and the head of the SA’s special representatives in Prussia, Georg von Detten – were just one group of victims among many. Well-informed observers like the writer Thomas Mann speculated that several of the killings were in fact cover-up executions that targeted those who were directly involved in or knew too much about the Reichstag fire.59 Still other victims had been outspoken opponents of the regime and were killed for this reason alone. Such was the case in the murders of Kurt von Schleicher, Edgar Jung, and Herbert von Bose. A fourth and final group consisted of those unfortunate individuals who were executed by mistake, among them the music critic Wilhelm Schmid, who had been confused with the SA-Gruppenführer of the same name.60
In the months and years following the purge, anti-Nazi authors often speculated that the murder rate had been much higher. Excessive numbers like Kurt Lüdecke’s figure of ‘over five hundred SA men murdered’61 were at times the result of delibe
rate exaggerations, but they can also be attributed to the uncertainty and widespread fear that followed the ‘Reich murder week’ (Reichsmordwoche).62 In early July 1934 more than 1,000 people were arrested, and many more went temporarily into hiding. Two anonymous reports from imprisoned Berlin SA leaders testify to the bad treatment such detainees faced during their internment, first in the notorious Columbiahaus Prison in Berlin-Tempelhof, and then later in the Lichtenburg concentration camp. Explanations for their arrests were initially not provided, and none of the more than sixty SA leaders held in confinement in Lichtenburg was ever arraigned.63 A similar situation unfolded in other parts of the Reich. SA leaders who were not shot were kept in limbo for days and sometimes weeks, with the authorities not even pretending to investigate the alleged preparations for a violent putsch planned by Röhm and his followers. According to official German press communications from August 1934, the regime took no fewer than 1,124 people into ‘protective custody’ on the occasion of the ‘Röhm revolt’. While the regime claimed to have released 1,079 of them by mid-August, the other forty-five remained in prison ‘for further inquiries’. Despite these pending arrests a governmental statement issued in August declared that the ‘action of 30 June 1934’ was over.64 For many high-ranking stormtroopers this declaration was premature. Apart from those interned by the Gestapo and the SS, many more were temporarily suspended or even permanently expelled from the SA. On 2 August 1934, Lutze, in collaboration with Walter Buch, the chairman of the NSDAP’s Supreme Party Court, established an SA disciplinary court consisting of two to three SA leaders and Buch himself that started the internal cleansing of the SA leadership corps, as requested by Hitler on 1 July.65
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 27