Night of the Long Knives (1934): Hitler's Purge of the SA

The Night of the Long Knives was a purge in which Adolf Hitler had the leaders of the Nazi Party’s own paramilitary force, the SA, and other real or imagined opponents murdered between 30 June and 2 July 1934. The chief victim was the SA chief of staff, Ernst Rohm, once one of Hitler’s closest allies. By crushing the SA and silencing conservative critics, Hitler won the backing of the German army and became the unchallenged master of Germany.

Background: the problem of the SA

The Sturmabteilung (SA), or stormtroopers, had been the Nazi movement’s street army since the early 1920s. Its brown-shirted members fought Communists and Social Democrats, protected Nazi meetings and took part in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Ernst Rohm, a First World War officer and early Nazi, took command of the SA in 1931.

After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the SA’s membership swelled. Unemployed men and opportunists joined in huge numbers, and by 1934 it had grown to roughly three million members or more, compared with the 100,000 men allowed to the regular army, the Reichswehr, by the Treaty of Versailles. SA men had played a key role in the terror of 1933, running improvised camps and beating political opponents.

Many SA members were disappointed by what the Nazi “revolution” had delivered. Rohm spoke of a “second revolution” against the old elites and wanted the SA to form the core of a new people’s army that would absorb the Reichswehr. This alarmed the army’s leaders, industrialists and the conservative circle around President Paul von Hindenburg.

Rising tension in 1934

Hitler had no wish to provoke the army. He needed the generals for rearmament, and he knew that Hindenburg, then 86 and in failing health, would soon die. To succeed him as head of state, Hitler needed the army’s support. In February 1934 he imposed an agreement under which the army would remain the sole bearer of arms, but Rohm privately made clear to his SA leaders that he did not accept it.

Rohm’s rivals inside the Nazi movement saw their chance. Hermann Goring, who controlled the Prussian police, and Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of the SS, which was still formally part of the SA, compiled evidence, much of it fabricated, that Rohm was planning a coup. The army quietly supplied weapons and transport to the SS.

Pressure came from the conservatives too. On 17 June 1934 Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen gave a speech at the University of Marburg, written by his adviser Edgar Jung, that criticised the regime’s excesses and the talk of a second revolution. Goebbels banned its publication. Shortly afterwards Hindenburg and the defence minister, General Werner von Blomberg, reportedly warned Hitler that unless he restored order, the president might hand power to the army.

The purge: 30 June to 2 July 1934

Hitler had ordered SA leaders to gather at the spa town of Bad Wiessee in Bavaria, where Rohm was on sick leave. Early on 30 June 1934 he flew to Munich and drove with an armed escort to the Hanselbauer guesthouse in Bad Wiessee. Hitler personally confronted Rohm and had him arrested. Edmund Heines, the SA leader in Silesia, was found in bed with a young man, a fact Nazi propaganda later exploited.

The arrested SA leaders were taken to Stadelheim prison in Munich, where several were shot that evening. Hitler hesitated over Rohm, his old comrade. On 1 July Rohm was given a pistol and the chance to kill himself; when he refused, he was shot in his cell by Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau concentration camp, and his deputy Michael Lippert.

In Berlin, Goring and Himmler directed the operation from Goring’s headquarters, with the code word “Kolibri” (hummingbird) said to have been used to launch the killings. SA leaders were rounded up and shot at the Lichterfelde barracks of the SS Leibstandarte. Karl Ernst, the Berlin SA chief, was seized as he was about to leave on honeymoon and shot.

The victims

The purge went far beyond the SA. Hitler and his lieutenants used it to settle old scores and remove possible centres of opposition. Victims included:

• Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor and general, shot at his home together with his wife, Elisabeth.
• Ferdinand von Bredow, a general and Schleicher’s close associate.
• Gregor Strasser, once the second most powerful Nazi, who had broken with Hitler in 1932.
• Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian official who had helped suppress the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923; he was murdered near Dachau.
• Erich Klausener, head of the Catholic Action organisation in Berlin.
• Edgar Jung and Herbert von Bose, aides of Vice-Chancellor Papen, who was himself placed under house arrest.

Some were killed by mistake, such as the Munich music critic Willi Schmid, apparently confused with an SA man of a similar name.

The exact death toll is unknown. In his speech to the Reichstag on 13 July 1934 Hitler admitted to 77 deaths. Historians generally identify at least 85 victims by name, and many estimate the true total at between 150 and 200 or more. Over a thousand people were arrested. Many families were not told how their relatives had died, and the bodies of some victims, among them Erich Klausener, were cremated without their families’ consent.

Key people

• Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who ordered the purge and personally arrested Rohm.
• Ernst Rohm (1887–1934), SA chief of staff and the purge’s principal victim.
• Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) and Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), SS leaders who prepared the lists and directed the killings.
• Hermann Goring (1893–1946), who ran the operation in Berlin.
• Kurt von Schleicher (1882–1934), the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, murdered with his wife.

“Legalising” murder

On 3 July 1934 the cabinet approved a law with a single article, which declared that the measures of 30 June to 2 July had been legal as “emergency defence of the state”. The Justice Minister, Franz Gurtner, a conservative, accepted it. Using powers his government had gained under the Enabling Act, Hitler had now made political murder lawful after the fact.

In his Reichstag speech of 13 July Hitler claimed that Rohm and Schleicher had been plotting a coup with a foreign power, and that in that hour he had been responsible for the fate of the nation and therefore the “supreme judge” of the German people. No evidence of such a plot was ever produced. Hindenburg sent a public telegram thanking Hitler for saving the nation, though historians doubt how much the sick president himself knew of its wording.

Consequences

The army had got what it wanted, and it repaid Hitler. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor and took the title Fuhrer und Reichskanzler. On the same day, soldiers of the army swore a new oath of unconditional obedience not to Germany or its constitution but to Hitler personally. A referendum on 19 August approved the merger with about 90 per cent of the votes cast.

The SA, now led by Viktor Lutze, was reduced to a minor role of parades, sport and training. The SS, rewarded for its part, became an independent organisation within the Nazi Party on 20 July 1934. Under Himmler it grew into the regime’s main instrument of terror, running the concentration camps and, later, the machinery of the Holocaust.

Myths and facts

“Rohm was planning a coup.” There is no evidence that Rohm planned to overthrow Hitler in June 1934. The SA had in fact been sent on leave for July. The “Rohm Putsch” was a story invented to justify the killings.

“It was all over in one night.” Despite its name, the killing lasted from the early hours of 30 June until 2 July 1934, and murders happened in many parts of Germany, especially Bavaria, Berlin and Silesia.

“Germans were horrified.” Many Germans, according to secret reports by the exiled Social Democrats and others, welcomed the end of the SA’s rowdiness and believed Hitler had restored order. Few understood at the time that the state had openly committed mass murder.

Timeline

• 1934, February: The army and SA sign an agreement under Hitler’s pressure; Rohm resists it.
• 1934, 17 June: Papen’s Marburg speech criticises the regime.
• 1934, 30 June: Hitler arrests Rohm at Bad Wiessee; killings begin in Munich and Berlin.
• 1934, 1 July: Rohm is shot in Stadelheim prison.
• 1934, 2 July: The killings end.
• 1934, 3 July: A law declares the killings legal.
• 1934, 13 July: Hitler justifies the purge in the Reichstag.
• 1934, 2 August: Hindenburg dies; the army swears an oath to Hitler.

Why it matters

The Night of the Long Knives completed Hitler’s seizure of power. It showed that the Nazi state would kill its own members and respected no law, and it tied the army to Hitler by a personal oath. The purge also raised the SS to power, preparing the way for the terror and genocide that followed, including the Nuremberg Laws of the next year and the persecution that culminated in the Holocaust.