About a century and a half ago, a sick-minded little boy was born in Austria. He was inbred, his parents were cousins, and his family name was Schiklgruber. His first name, Adolf. Had his father never changed his last name to Hitler then this ridiculous little ass may never have grown to the awful stature that he did. “Heil Shicklgruber” just doesn’t have the catchy ring that “Heil Hitler” does, so future parents might want to be cautious about the names they choose.
In any case, this stupid little imp named Adolf was an average student who never finished high school. He had ambitions of being a famous artist and took off for Vienna where he planned to attend an architectural institute. He tried making a living by painting but he ran into one major problem: he had no talent. He thought of himself as too superior to do manual labor so he lived on handouts and charity, nearly starving to death, and reading voraciously while living in flophouses.
Hitler fought in World War I and even earned a medal or two. After the surrender, Hitler moved to Munich where he attended meetings held by the German Worker’s Party. This small political gang were leftist and socialist but also had a preoccupation with antisemitism. Members included occultists, conspiracy theorists, economic ranks, and a gay pedophile name Ernst Roehm. They were impressed by Hitler’s oratorical skills and quickly admitted him to their inner circle. For a time, Roehm would prove to be Hitler’s greatest ally until he became Hitler’s greatest enemy.
During the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic was swinging. Democracy was flourishing, the economy was growing, art schools were thriving, and cabarets were packed on a nightly basis. In the middle of this progressive, freewheeling time of cultural experimentation, politics also began to change. The Communist Party and the more moderate Social Democrats started winning elections. But then the booming economy went bust; thousands of blue-collar workers lost their jobs and poverty gripped the nation by the throat. These rough factory workers began to flock to the German Worker’s Party which had already been renamed the National Socialist Worker’s Party of Germany, also called the NSDAP, colloquially the Nazis. They were attracted by a young new demagogue street preacher named Adolf Hitler who blamed the Jews for their misery. He promised them an end to unemployment, free food and rent, and the destruction of the aristocratic class. Of course, this promise was never fulfilled because the label of National Socialism was only a ruse for a new kind of politics called fascism. But the NSDAP had authentic socialists supporting it, one of which was Ernst Roehm.
Most of these young unemployed men were organized into ranks and given uniforms by Roehm. They became officially known as the SA. In the streets, people called them “stormtroopers” or “brownshirts” because of the color of their uniforms. The SA were a continuation of the German Freikorps, paramilitary vigilante organizations that were called up ad hoc to help the army and police commit acts of violence. Originally, Roehm summoned the SA to act as security guards at Nazi meetings and rallies. Then they began invading and attacking crowds at events held by rival political groups. Being frequent customers at beer halls, they roamed the streets when drunk, intimidating and attacking random people passing by. At their most organized, they engaging in rioting, looting, vandalism, rape, and street fights with Communists. At least 100 people were known to have been murdered during these melees. As the brownshirts got more rowdy and unpredictable, they became a liability to Hitler and the Nazi party which was rising in the hierarchy of the German government.
By 1930, the NSDAP had gained a handful of seats in the German Reichstag. The Communists and Social Democrats were also making inroads into this legislative body. But Hitler’s ambition for political power was not coming fast enough. He began soliciting meetings with government officials and after associating for a while with the right people, he eventually earned an audience with the German President Paul von Hindenburg. As the aging leader grew closer to death, he appointed Hitler Chancellor. The first act of the supreme leader of the Nazi Party, and the second most powerful man in the government, banned all political parties in Germany with the exception of the NSDAP. The Nazi Party and the state were joined together as one and the same thing. Another bold move by Hitler was making extra-judiciary imprisonment, punishment, and execution entirely legal. The practice of granting a fair trial was no longer a reality in Germany and the Nazis could kill anybody they wanted, for any reason they chose, and it would be entirely legal. The third move Hitler made in his ascent to power was to dissolve the Reichstag, thereby making him the sole lawmaker of the German nation. The only two things separating Hitler from absolute control in his nation were the army, a state organ that acted independently of the Chancellor, and the ailing president Hindenburg. Deutschland, no longer a nation of laws had degenerated into a nation of men and the lone man who led the way had a delusional mind, saturated in paranoia and hate, a lunatic leading his nation directly into the deepest pits of hell.
Werner von Blomberg’s position was Minister of Defense, meaning he held the commanding position over the Reichswehr, the German army. Blomberg was on friendly terms with Adolf Hitler but he was not a member of the Nazi Party. To the ambitious Ernst Roehm, this was not acceptable. Hitler stood between the two men, not just ideologically but in terms of power politics too. Blomberg and his officers had all come from the Prussian aristocracy while Roehm and his SA thugs came directly from the working class. Blomberg looked down on the SA as the rabble, an undisciplined mob, and the riffraff of the German nation. He did, however, see as them as potentially useful for bulking up the Reichswehr ranks. Roehm, on the other hand, saw Blomberg as an effete snob, a weakling from the upper class who bought his position rather than earning it. Roehm’s reasoning for supporting National Socialism was entirely socialist. He wanted to lead a proletarian uprising to eliminate the aristocracy and establish populist rule by the laboring masses. The two authorities were fundamentally incompatible, exemplifying a schizophrenic fault line in the character of the Nazi Party.
Roehm petitioned Hitler to execute Blomberg and appoint him in his place as Minister of Defense. The high and mighty Hitler had the means at his disposal to do this but the potential for a military coup was great. Due to the humiliating Versailles treaty, the heavily armed Reichswehr was limited to having only 100 troops while SA membership had expanded into the millions. Hitler stood in the middle of a potential civil war. In 1934, Roehm made a proposal to Blomberg; he wished to bind the army and the SA into one entity with the army acting as an auxiliary unit to the stormtroopers. Blomberg also liked the idea of joining the two forces into one division but decided to take the case to Hitler to make the pivotal decision. Hitler agreed to make the Reichswehr and the SA one but instead decided that it would be the SA that acted as an auxiliary unit to the army. The fuehrer had frustrated Roehm’s greedy power grab and the SA leader was furious. The first crack in the connection between Hitler and Roehm had shown.
At this point, The Nazis’ public image was not entirely favorable. A large part of this had to do with the SA. Not only were the brownshirts feared for their joy in busting skulls, but Ernst Roehm had become a liability as well. He openly flaunted his homosexuality and stories of his lavish orgies in gay bathhouses, some involving children, were whispered by citizens afraid to speak too loudly out of fear of violence perpetrated against them by the secret police. Roehm notoriously offered promotion in the ranks of the SA in exchange for sexual favors from the boys he found attractive and those that refused his offers were sometimes beaten and raped. Some of them were even murdered after being sexually assaulted. To the conservative Nazis, Roehm was an embarrassment. Members of the fuehrer’s inner circle like Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goering, and Heinrich Himmler began discussing ways to pressure Hitler into slicing the SA leader’s throat. Other politicians were unimpressed with the brownshirts’ antics too. Vice Chancellor von Papen threatened to resign if the SA were not reigned in and Hindenburg, the President himself, threatened to declare martial law if the SA were not subjugated and brought under control. Hitler had no use for von Papen but the Vice Chancellor’s resignation would be a blow to his image as an infallible leader and the declaration of martial law would be a loss of face he would never be able to recover from.
Meanwhile, when Hitler embarked on a trip to Rome for a meeting with his accomplice Benito Mussolini, a Nazi official with cordial ties to the Italian fascist dictator made a secret phone call and asked Mussolini to pressure Hitler to eliminate Roehm. Mussolini told the fuehrer that the SA were ruining Germany’s international reputation. Considering Hitler’s stated long range goals to dominate the world by acts of evil, this was an odd line of reasoning. But in the minds of many sharp-dressing Mediterranean people, public appearances can count for a lot.
While Ernst Roehm’s unsavory reputation got worse and worse, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler upped the ante by writing an intelligence briefing in which they claimed the Gestapo had intercepted messages proving that the French government were willing to pay Roehm a huge sum of money if he were to oust Hitler and take over the country. Logistics of this secretive operation were said to be forthcoming. This information was entirely fabricated by Goering and Himmler since the two of them both had vested interests in the removal of Roehm. Goering saw this as an opportunity to take over as leader of the Reichswehr. Himmler saw this operation as a chance to break the SS, Hitler’s elite squad of bodyguards, free from the SA’s control. The deluded mind of Hitler was well-primed by his consiglioris for violence and slaughter. While Hitler’s hate-filled brain churned over his options, high ranking members of the NSDAP drew up hit lists and held meetings to discuss which people they wanted to eliminate, forever, from their presence on terrestrial soil.
On the morning of June 30, 1934, Nazi commander Hermann Goering waited for a phone call from Josef Goebbels. Earlier, at 4:00 am, Hitler and an entourage had flown off to Munich. The city was tattered after a drunken night of brownshirt rioting. Shattered glass and pools of blood could be seen on several streets. The group drove to the local headquarters of the Nazi Party and summoned the chief of police and the leaders of the local SA. Hitler furiously shrieked at them for their brutality and browbeat the police chief for failing to control the mob. He tore the epaulets off the chief’s shirt before his henchmen took him outside and shot him in the alley. The SA leaders were arrested.
Hitler rounded up a group of SS officers and police. They drove off to Bad Wiessee, the location of the Hanselbauer Hotel where Ernst Roehm and his lieutenants were sleeping soundly in the early morning hours. As the sun began to rise, Hitler barged into Roehm’s suite and personally arrested his longtime friend and one of the first men to declare his loyalty to the fuehrer in his rise to power. Hitler’s posse gathered together all the other commanders of the SA and arrested them as well. One of them, Edmund Heines was found naked in bed with a teenage boy. The SS troopers took them outside and shot them dead, leaving their bodies to rot in a ditch.
At 10:00 that morning, Goebbels made a call from an office in the Munich Nazi headquarters. At the other end, Goering picked up the receiver and heard the German word “kolibri” which means “hummingbird” in English. It was a word randomly chosen and had no symbolic meaning. But it was a code word and it certainly meant something to Goering. It meant the Roehm Purge was meant to begin immediately. While Hitler made a speech to the crowd assembled outside the Munich offices, SS soldiers, police, and Gestapo agents around the country went into action arresting hordes of SA members and taking them off to a prison camp.
Dachau would later become notorious as the extermination camp where hundreds of thousands of victims were executed for no good reason whatsoever. On this day, the fascists initially opened the gates to the inferno when they transported thousands and thousands of SA members to its prison cells. Later that night, each one of them were brought before a kangaroo court, given a one minute trial in which they were inevitably found guilty, and then marched off to the outside of the building. They were stood up against a blood-covered wall, their feet standing in a pile of brains and gore since the Nazis never bothered to clean up the mess between executions. Many of them, believing themselves to be victims of a treacherous SS conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, raised their arms in the Nazi salute and barked “Heil Hitler” before having their bodies ripped apart by bullets from the guns of the executioners. When their bodies collapsed, a wheelbarrow was brought to haul them away. They were dumped together in a mass grave, never able to fully understand why they died as martyrs for an insane cause, killed by the same nationalist political party they so wholeheartedly supported. One might be inclined to feel sadness for the slaughter of these people, but, then again, these dumkopfs were Nazis so there is no need to waste tears in memoriam for their deaths.
While this mass murder was in progress, Ernst Roehm was sitting in his cell. A team of guards came in with a loaded pistol and left it on a chair. “You have ten minutes to commit suicide,” they told him. He replied, “If I am to be executed then Hitler must do it himself.” When the guards returned he was still alive and standing with his shirt off, his chest puffed out in defiance. Roehm shouted, “Heil Hitler, mein fuehrer”, and made the stiff armed salute while the guards shot him point blank. Had Roehm instead shouted “Heil Schicklgruber” this horrific scene would have been comic.
Brownshirts were not the only victims of this purge. Journalists, professors, and leaders of rival political parties were shot in the streets and dumped into the sewers. Elders in the Catholic church who supported Hitler only halfheartedly were also killed. Vice Chancellor Papen was arrested because Hitler did not like the comments he made about the SA’s lack of discipline; his staff and family members were killed but Papen was later released from prison.
This two day murderous rampage has been dubbed by historians as “The Night Of the Long Knives”, a German idiom meaning a time when something hideous happens in the name of vengeance.
After the killings, Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda for the NSDAP had a lot of damage control to do. It was impossible to keep the purge secret due to the large number of deaths but he persuaded the media to portray this as being necessary to cleanse homosexuality and moral depravity from the SA, as well as being a strike against an internal enemy with plans for insurrection. President Hindenburg, on his deathbed, praised Hitler for having the courage to kill off the enemies. Likewise, Blomberg, head of the Reichswehr also praised Hitler and declared the army’s undying loyalty to the dictator. The German citizens also cheered for the purge but some were only putting on a show of approval for public display while those who disapproved remained silent; the Gestapo had turned Germany into a surveillance state with eyes and ears everywhere so those who did not like these events made themselves inconspicuous to prevent retaliation from the secret police.
After those two bloody days, Adolf Hitler had taken over command of the Reichswehr. He also eliminated the socialist faction of the NSDAP but retained the name of National Socialism. Fascism was never intended to be about honesty. The socialist side of the Nazis was nothing but a sham to trick the proletariat into acting as interchangeable pieces in Hitler’s totalitarian machine. Enlistment in the SA dwindled until the organization was officially disbanded in 1938. The NSDAP would go on to become a dictatorship of the aristocracy, a new breed of oligarchs to replace the senile and aging conservative upper class of old. Hitler completed his consolidation of power when Hindenburg died, leaving the Chancellor as supreme commander of all German-speaking peoples.
The Night Of the Long Knives would not be the last time Hitler attacked and killed his own supporters. After failing miserably to conquer the Soviet Union while England and America bombed Germany, destroying much of the country in air raids, Hitler turned his fury against the German people and commanded his own Luftwaffe to bomb German power plants and radio stations in retaliation for his people not fighting hard enough for victory. Hitler couldn’t win therefore no one could win and he proceeded to turn his own country into another Valhalla’s Wake. With his wife Eva Braun, who probably died a virgin considering Hitler had no sexual interest in women, he committed a cowardly suicide in his underground bunker by shooting himself in the head.
During the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Josef Goebbels admitted that Roehm’s plot to overthrow Hitler was entirely fabricated by Goering and Himmler.
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