Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (85 page)

Nor did the growing dissatisfaction escape the notice of foreign diplomats. It was unmistakable, reported the Danish envoy, Herluf Zahle, in April 1934, that “the enthusiasm greeting the government has cooled to some degree.”
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Jews who were being harassed in Germany took heart. “People are no longer as convinced that what’s going on right now will last for ever,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary in early February 1934. “There’s a gnashing of teeth going through all too many classes, professions and faiths.”
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In fact, the dissatisfaction rarely went beyond general grumbling. But Goebbels took it seriously enough to launch a counter-offensive in May aimed at the “pessimists, moaners and critics.”
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The decline in the public mood formed the background to the growing conflict between the Reich government and the military, on the one side, and the SA on the other. In a speech he gave to his Gauleiter in Berlin on 2 February 1934, Hitler once again attacked the SA leadership without naming any names. Only “fools” could maintain that the “revolution was not yet at an end,” Hitler fumed, which was merely a way of trying “to put themselves in certain positions.”
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The day before, Röhm had sent Werner von Blomberg a letter in which he demanded that the SA take over the function of defending the country and that the Reichswehr be reduced to a mere training army.
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The military leadership saw this as an open declaration of hostility and began to draft its own “Guidelines for Working with the SA,” in which the Brownshirts were degraded to the role of offering preliminary military instruction and helping to monitor the Reich’s borders. In a demonstration of loyalty towards the Nazi leadership, at a meeting of military commanders on 2 and 3 February, Blomberg announced that the Reichswehr would require officers to prove their Aryan heritage and would adopt the swastika as an official military emblem.
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The time had come for Hitler to make a decision, and he did. At a meeting with the heads of the Reichswehr and the leaders of the SA and SS on 28 February, he openly rejected Röhm’s ideas. A militia of the sort suggested by the SA chief of staff, Hitler said, “was unsuitable even for the smallest national defensive action,” to say nothing of the future war for “living space” he again put forward as a vision. For that reason, he was determined to raise “a people’s army, built up on the foundations of the Reichswehr, of thoroughly trained soldiers equipped with the latest weaponry.” The SA was to subordinate itself to his orders. There could be no doubt, Hitler concluded, that “the Wehrmacht is the only armed force of the nation.”
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Röhm pretended to give in, but that evening he vented his rage at the “ignorant private.” He did not intend to stick to what had been agreed, Röhm raged. Hitler was “without loyalty” and had to be “sent on holiday at the very least,” the SA leader was reported as saying. One of those present, SA Obergruppenführer Viktor Lutze, passed on these utterances to Hitler, who responded tellingly: “We will have to let this matter ripen.”
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As early as January 1934, Hitler had ordered the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels—by Diels’s own account—to collect incriminating material against the leaders of the SA. An identical order was issued to Reichswehr departments.
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On 20 April, Göring appointed Heinrich Himmler, who had taken over the political crimes divisions in the police forces of almost all the German states in the preceding months, as the inspector of the Prussian Secret State Police. He and Reinhard Heydrich, who was made director of the State Police Office, moved from Munich to Berlin. The Gestapo now began to cooperate more intensely with the intelligence department in the Reichswehr Ministry, swapping information about the SA. The net around Röhm and his associates was gradually drawn tighter and tighter.
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In the battle for power that commenced with Röhm, Hitler had no qualms about publicising the former’s homosexuality and using it as a weapon against him. In mid-May, he had a one-to-one discussion with Goebbels, after which the propaganda minister noted: “Complaint about Röhm and his personnel policies under paragraph 175. Revolting.”
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Previously Hitler had shielded Röhm from attacks on his well-known homosexual leanings. In a decree in early February 1931, Hitler had particularly emphasised that the SA “was not a moral institution for the education of well-born daughters but a band of rough-hewn fighters.” Members’ private lives were only an issue “if they ran truly contrary to the National Socialist world view.”
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Moreover, during the presidential elections in March 1932, when the left-wing
Welt am Montag
and
Münchener Post
newspapers published compromising letters written by the SA chief of staff, Hitler had sworn: “Lieutenant Colonel Röhm will remain my chief of staff. Even the dirtiest and most repulsive smear campaigns will not change that fact in the slightest.”
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In the spring and early summer of 1934, however, Hitler tried to use Röhm’s homosexuality as a noose to hang him with.

In early June, it appeared as if the situation might relax somewhat. In a personal conversation, Hitler extracted from Röhm a promise to send the SA “on holiday” for the entire month of July and to take a cure himself at the Bad Wiessee spa on Tegernsee Lake. But this discussion was not a genuine attempt at reconciliation. Hitler continued to mistrust Röhm’s intentions. Goebbels noted: “He no longer trusts the SA leadership. We all need to be on our toes. Let’s not feel too secure.”
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Röhm, too, only pretended to be placated. At an evening of partying in the SA’s main headquarters on Berlin’s Standartenstrasse, Ernst Hanfstaengl witnessed the chief of staff, intoxicated, “cursing in the wildest fashion” the Reichswehr, which had drawn Hitler over to their side.
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But it was Franz von Papen, and not anything the SA did, who caused the situation to come to a dramatic head in June 1934. A group of young conservatives—led by Papen’s speechwriter, Edgar Julius Jung, his press director, Herbert von Bose, and his personal assistant, Günther von Tschirschky—had coalesced around the vice-chancellor. They saw the tensions within the Nazi movement as a chance to curb Hitler’s demands for absolute power and to steer the regime in the more moderate direction of a restored monarchy.
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The ambitions of the Papen circle were no secret to the Nazi leadership. In April they began to suspect that Papen was positioning himself to succeed Hindenburg, who had contracted a bladder infection the previous month and would withdraw completely to his Neudeck estate that June.
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Another thorn in the side of Hitler and his entourage was the fact that Papen’s office was increasingly becoming a focal point for complaints about the regime’s dictatorial exercise of power. “Papen is the true complaints office,” Goebbels fumed on 13 June.
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Four days later, a talk by the vice-chancellor at the University of Marburg put the NSDAP leadership on a state of red alert. Not only did Papen criticise the cult of personality surrounding Hitler, arguing that “Great men are not made by propaganda but gain that status through their deeds.” He also excoriated the regime’s use of violence and unchecked radicalism. “It would be reprehensible to believe that a people could be unified through terror, which is always the product of bad conscience,” Papen stated.

No people can afford constant revolt from below if it wants to survive the court of history. At some point the movement will have to end, and a fixed social structure, held together by an independent justice system and a universally accepted power of state, must come into existence. Nothing can be built with constant dynamism. Germany cannot be allowed to become a train speeding blindly ahead without anyone knowing where it is headed.

The government, Papen assured his audience, “knows all about the selfishness, lack of character, mendacity, non-chivalry and presumption that tries to spread under the cover of the German revolution.”
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What Papen did not mention was that he himself bore considerable responsibility for the conditions he criticised. In the first months of the regime, he had not tried to restrain Hitler once, and even after his speech, he did not necessarily want a confrontation. Immediately after his talk, he sent Hitler a telegram that read: “In the venerable university of town of Marburg, I just went to bat for the unwavering and true continuation of your revolution and the completion of your work. In admiration and loyalty, your Papen.”
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But it did not fool anyone within the Nazi leadership. Goebbels seethed: “Papen gave a wonderful speech for gripers and critics. Entirely against us except for a few empty phrases. Who wrote it for him? Where is the scoundrel?”
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It soon emerged that Edgar Julius Jung had written the talk. He was arrested on 26 June, and Goebbels censored the speech but not before it had been read out on the Reich radio station in Frankfurt.
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Papen’s supporters had also distributed an abridged version to the press, and news of disagreement within the regime spread like wildfire. “It seems that there’s something like a mood of conflict in the upper spheres at the moment,” wrote Theodor Heuss on 20 June. “A speech Papen held last Sunday in Marburg has been deemed unsuitable for printing…”
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Foreign diplomats racked their brains as to what Papen’s speech could mean. “The atmosphere was heavy and oppressive, like that ahead of an oncoming thunderstorm,” recalled François-Poncet.
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After the ban on his speech, Papen had no other choice than to offer to quit, but Hitler—who, according to Goebbels, was “very enraged” by the Marburg speech and determined to “get his own back against Papen”—deemed the time not right for his vice-chancellor’s resignation.
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He asked Papen to wait until they had the chance to discuss the situation with Hindenburg. Papen agreed, writing to Hitler that he felt like “a soldier duty bound to your work.” At the same time, he protested against Jung’s arrest. “If someone has to go to jail for the Marburg speech,” Papen wrote, “I stand at your disposal.”
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In reality, Hitler had no intention of going to Neudeck with Papen. Instead, on 21 June he travelled there alone and was relieved to discover that the Marburg speech had made no impression on Hindenburg. “Never had the old man been as friendly,” Hitler reported after his visit.
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At the same time, Defence Minister von Blomberg, who was also at Neudeck, had urged him once again to rein in the SA.
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From 23 to 26 June, Hitler retreated to the Obersalzberg, and it was there that he apparently made his final decision. With his unique instinct for power, Hitler realised that the time had come for a double blow—against the SA leadership clique and the “reactionaries” around Papen—to cut through the domestic political stalemate. Himmler and Heydrich’s staff immediately set about concocting an opaque mixture of rumours, false reports and manipulated orders intended to suggest that an SA rebellion was nigh. At the same time, lists were drawn up of those to be arrested and executed. On 25 June, Himmler summoned SS leaders to Berlin, where they were informed about Röhm’s imminent putsch and made preparations to put it down.
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That same day, Hess gave a speech on Cologne radio, in which he threatened: “Woe to him who breaks his loyalty in the belief that he is serving the revolution by revolting. It’s pathetic how some people think they’ve been chosen to help the Führer by organising revolutionary agitation from below.”
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As Erich Ebermayer noted in his diary, Hess’s speech was cause for “great commotion and agitation—everyone knows that something’s in the air.”
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On 27 June, Hitler met with Blomberg and the head of the minister’s office at the Reichswehr Ministry, Walther von Reichenau, to assure himself of the military’s support for the planned action. Local defence commandos were put on high alert, and on 29 June, Blomberg published an article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
in which he declared his loyalty to the Nazi regime, writing, “The Wehrmacht and the state are one.”
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To preserve the illusion of normality and keep the SA leadership feeling secure, on 28 June Hitler went with Göring and Viktor Lutze to Essen to attend the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven. Having received word that Hindenburg had granted Papen an audience on 30 June, he drew up a schedule for the purge. “I’ve had enough,” Lutze recorded Hitler saying. “I’m going to set an example.”
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On the evening of 28 June, Röhm was instructed by telephone to summon all SA Obergruppenführer, Gruppenführer and inspectors to Bad Wiessee for a meeting with Hitler. While Göring flew back to Berlin to take care of the measures that had been prepared, Hitler spent the morning of 29 June, as planned, inspecting a Reich Labour Service camp in the town of Buttenberg in Westphalia. At the crack of dawn, he had called Goebbels and summoned him to Bad Godesberg. “It’s getting started,” the propaganda minister noted. “In God’s name. Anything is better than this terrible waiting around. I’m ready.”
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When he arrived at the Rheinhotel Dreesen, he learned to his surprise that the purge would be directed not just against the “reactionaries” around Papen, but against “Röhm and his rebels” as well. “Blood will flow—everyone should know that rebellion will cost people their heads,” Goebbels wrote. “I’m in agreement. If you’re going to do it, then do it ruthlessly.”
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