Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (86 page)

In Bad Godesberg, Hitler received cooked-up reports about increasing unrest within the SA, and all the evidence suggests that, having made his irreversible decision, he worked himself up into an extraordinary psychological state. It is hardly plausible that he believed the transparently constructed lies about an imminent SA putsch, but in order to legitimise the purge he seized upon even the most ridiculous conspiracy theories. He told Goebbels, for instance, that there were “indications that Röhm was conspiring with François-Poncet, Schleicher and Strasser.”
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That evening, as word came in that individual SA men had been marauding around Munich and causing trouble, Hitler decided on the spot to fly to the Bavarian capital with his entire entourage. The three-engine Junkers 52 landed at 4 a.m. on Oberwiesenfeld, the precise location where, ten years previously, he had been forced into a humiliating retreat by Bavarian police and Reichswehr units. Now he had no reason to fear resistance from either of those quarters. At the airport, Hitler was received by Gauleiter Wagner, who briefed him on the situation. “He was extraordinarily agitated,” aeroplane captain Baur observed. “He kept fidgeting around in the air with his riding crop, several times bringing it down on his own foot.”
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From the airport Hitler had himself sped to the Bavarian Interior Ministry. There, he summoned Munich SA leaders August Schneidhuber and Wilhelm Schmid and tore their designations of rank from their uniforms with his own hands. “You are under arrest and will be shot,” he snarled.
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Without waiting for his bodyguards in the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to arrive, Hitler ordered three cars and had himself driven to Bad Wiessee. Most of the guests in the Pension Hanselbauer, where Röhm and his men were staying, were still asleep when the cars arrived at 6:30 a.m. Accompanied by two police officers with drawn pistols and whip in hand, Hitler stormed into the SA chief of staff’s room and blurted out the words: “Röhm, you are under arrest!” Still half asleep, Röhm looked up from his pillows and replied, “Heil, my Führer.” “You are under arrest,” Hitler screamed again, turning around and leaving the room.
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One by one the SA leaders were taken into custody. Among them was Breslau Police President Edmund Heines, who was found in bed with a young man—a discovery Nazi propaganda used in the days to come to depict the Bad Wiessee guest house as a den of homosexual iniquity.
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Those arrested were held in the guest house basement before being taken to Munich’s Stadelheim prison. Hitler also returned to the Bavarian capital with his entourage, stopping the cars full of SA leaders driving in the other direction to what they thought was their meeting with the Führer and ordering them to join his motorcade. Police officers from the political crimes division stopped SA leaders in Munich’s main train station, arresting those whose names were on the lists. They, too, were taken to Stadelheim.
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Around noon, Hitler arrived at the Brown House and addressed a large number of party and SA leaders. He was still in a state of hysteria and, as one eyewitness reported, he spat out a ball of froth when he began speaking. His voice cracking with over-excitement, he accused the Röhm clique of the “greatest betrayal in world history.” He also named Röhm’s betrayer, Viktor Lutze, as the new SA chief of staff. That afternoon, Hitler ordered Sepp Dietrich to have six of the detained SA men, whose names he had marked on a list in green pencil and who included Schneidhuber, Schmid and Edmund Heines, liquidated by an SS commando. Röhm was initially spared. Apparently, Hitler was still somewhat hesitant about having his old comrade-in-arms murdered.
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That morning, Goebbels had already sent the agreed code word “Hummingbird” to Berlin, signalling to Göring that he should mobilise the execution commandos. Papen’s colleagues Herbert von Bose and Edgar Julius Jung were shot. The vice-chancellor escaped with his life but was placed under house arrest. Also executed was the leader of the religious lay organisation “Catholic Action” and ministerial director of the Transport Ministry, Erich Klausener, who had been linked with the Papen circle. Former Chancellor Schleicher and his wife were killed in their home in Neubabelsberg, and the same fate befell Schleicher’s associate General Ferdinand von Bredow a few hours later. He was taken from his Berlin apartment on the evening of 30 June and shot. At the same time, Nazi thugs throughout the Reich took the opportunity to settle old scores. Gregor Strasser was put to death in the basement of Gestapo headquarters. Gustav Ritter von Kahr and the editor-in-chief of the Catholic magazine
Der gerade Weg
(The Straight and Narrow), Fritz Gerlich, who was one of Hitler’s most passionate critics, were both put to death in the Dachau concentration camp. Otto Ballerstedt, an early political rival who had succeeded in putting Hitler behind bars for a few weeks in 1922 after being physically attacked by him, was found dead from a bullet to the back of the head in the vicinity of Dachau. Father Bernhard Stempfle, an early confidant of Hitler’s, was also executed—probably for knowing too much about the Führer’s past. Such was the murderous zeal of the SS commandos that they did not always adequately check the identities of people they took into custody. Willi Schmid, for example, a music critic for the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
, fell victim to a case of mistaken identity. Ninety people are known to have been killed in what became known as the “Night of the Long Knives”—the actual number is likely twice that.
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Goebbels was satisfied that everything had gone to plan, noting: “No mistakes other than Frau Schleicher also going down. A shame, but there’s no changing that.”
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Hitler returned to Berlin on the evening of 30 June. A delegation led by Göring, Himmler and Frick greeted him at Tempelhof Airport. “The sight of him was ‘one-of-a-kind,’ ” reported one eyewitness. “Brown shirt, black tie, dark brown leather coat, high, black military boots, everything dark upon dark. Above it all, bare-headed, a chalk-white, sleepless, unshaven face which seemed to be sunken and swollen at the same time and from which a pair of extinguished eyes stared through some clotted strands of hair hanging down.”
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After the murderous release of the previous twenty-four hours, Hitler began to regain his inner balance. Christa Schroeder, who encountered him late at night in the Reich Chancellery, recalled him sitting next to her, breathing heavily and saying: “I’ve just had a bath and feel like I’ve been born again.”
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The following day, a Sunday, Hitler was already playing the role of the congenial, good-humoured host at a garden party in the Chancellery. That afternoon, he ordered the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp to call upon Röhm, who was imprisoned in Stadelheim, to shoot himself. When Röhm refused, he was executed.
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“All revolutions devour their own children,” the former SA chief of staff had told Hans Frank, who visited him a few hours before.
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Berlin was abuzz with the wildest rumours on 1 July. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened. That evening, Goebbels gave a radio address in which he talked about a “small clique of professional saboteurs” who had deserved no mercy. “We’re cleaning house,” he said. “A herd of pestilence, a herd of corruption and pathological symptoms of moral barbarism that appear in public life will be smoked out and eradicated down to the bone.” The propaganda minister dwelt at length on the homosexuality of Röhm and his circle, accusing them of being about to “bring the entire party leadership under the suspicion of a contemptible and disgusting sexual abnormality.”
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At a cabinet meeting on 3 July, Hitler also used Röhm’s “unhappy predilection” as an explanation for both “the inferior personnel in SA leadership positions” and his “wilful conflict with the Wehrmacht.” Then he proceeded on to the heart of the conflict. Röhm wished to make the SA a “state within a state,” Hitler explained. In a four-hour conversation, he, Hitler, had implored the former chief of staff to desist from this, but to no avail. Röhm had given him every assurance under the sun, but behind Hitler’s back, he had done exactly the opposite. Hitler did not shy away from spinning a fairy tale about a coup d’état Röhm was planning with Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and the French embassy. With that, the condition of “high treason” had been fulfilled, Hitler claimed, and he had been forced to act immediately in order to “prevent a catastrophe.” Hitler brushed aside any legal objections by arguing that this had been a “military mutiny” that did not admit of any trials or similar procedures. Although he had not personally ordered all the executions, he took full responsibility for them. They had “saved the lives of countless others,” Hitler asserted, and “stabilised the authority of the Reich government for all time.”

Hitler then presented the cabinet with a draft law that would legalise the series of murders
ex post facto
. “The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to put down treasonous acts against the nation and states are a legal form of emergency government defence,” the draft read. Justice Minister Franz Gürtner hastened to add that this was not tantamount to creating a new legal code, but merely confirmed the validity of the existing one. In the name of his cabinet colleagues, Werner von Blomberg thanked Hitler for his “decisive and courageous action, which has spared the German people a civil war.”
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While the cabinet meeting was still in session, Papen, whose house arrest had just been lifted, appeared. “Completely broken,” noted Goebbels. “Asked for leave to speak. We all expected him to resign.”
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But although two of his closest associates had been murdered, Papen did not consider for a moment breaking with Hitler. In a conversation with the Nazi leader on 4 July, the two men agreed that Papen would continue in the office of vice-chancellor until September and then join the diplomatic corps. In the days that followed, Papen complained that the situation was “completely unbearable” as long as he and his team were not rehabilitated and the confiscated files from his office returned. And he announced once again that he intended to travel to Neudeck to tender his resignation to Hindenburg. But he does not seem to have meant these very serious threats, and when Otto Meissner informed him that the Reich president was “very much in need of peace and quiet,” he abandoned his plans. When Hitler told him in another conversation on 11 July that he intended to take public responsibility for everything associated with putting down the SA revolt, Papen replied: “You will allow me to say to you how great I find that in both a manly and human sense.”
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From a moral standpoint, Papen could not have sunk any lower.

Nor did Hindenburg—even though he had been on familiar terms with Kahr and had thanked him the preceding October for his “loyal birthday wishes”—have any qualms about sending Hitler a congratulatory telegram, in which he wrote, “You have saved the German people from a serious threat.”
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On the afternoon of 3 July, Hitler travelled to Neudeck where he gave Hindenburg a private half-hour lecture about the alleged “Röhm revolt.” Hindenburg reiterated his blessings for the crimes being committed by the German government: “That’s the right way to go. Nothing will happen without bloodshed.”
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After returning to Berlin, Hitler told Goebbels: “Hindenburg was smashing. The old man is really something.”
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The initial uncertainty people felt when they heard the news of the murders on 30 June soon gave way to relief. The SA men, who had been so welcome when suppressing the political Left in early 1933, had used up all of their credit among the general populace with their disorderly conduct. The bloody excesses of the SS were excused because they had helped remove an unwanted source of disruption. Goebbels was probably exaggerating when he noted: “A limitless enthusiasm is passing through the country.”
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But it is true that, far from losing prestige, Hitler’s reputation had improved. This is reflected in a number of Nazi Party reports on the mood within the population. Among the broad masses, and particularly among those who took a wait-and-see attitude towards the movement, Hitler has achieved a great victory with his decisive action—he is “not only admired; he is deified,” read one report from a small industrial town in Upper Bavaria.
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Immediately after the Night of the Long Knives, Luise Solmitz noted in her diary: “The personal courage, the decisiveness and effectiveness [Hitler] showed in Munich, that’s unique.”
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Neither Solmitz nor the majority of the German people were bothered by the state planning and carrying out acts of murder—a clear indication of how dulled people’s sense of right and wrong was after only one and a half years of Nazi rule.

In the first few days after 30 June, Hitler avoided appearing in public, although his propaganda minister urged him to in order to combat negative foreign press headlines. “Everywhere we’re coming into discredit,” Goebbels noted on 7 July. “High time for the Führer to speak.”
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The previous day Hitler had flown to Berchtesgaden to rest on the Obersalzberg. But by 9 July, he was already back in Berlin announcing that he wanted to issue an explanation in front of the Reichstag. He discussed the details with Goebbels the following day.
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On the evening of 13 July, when Hitler approached the Reichstag podium, he initially seemed inhibited. “Pale as a corpse with tired facial features and a voice that was still hoarse,” was how François-Poncet recalled him.
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The atmosphere was tense. After all, there had been thirteen Reichstag deputies among the executed SA men. Papen, who had asked Hitler to be excused, was missing from the government bench,
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and SS men in pith helmets had been posted next to the speaker’s lectern and throughout the hall. In his two-hour speech, Hitler repeated the lies about a conspiracy between Röhm, Schleicher and Strasser he had told to his cabinet on 3 July, and he did not neglect to mention that “certain shared predilection” of the Röhm clique as a main motive for their “high treason.” He talked about the “bitterest decisions” of his life, for which he assumed responsibility “before history.” Hitler told his audience: “Mutinies are broken according to never-changing laws. If someone tries to criticise me for not enlisting the regular courts, I can only say: in that hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people.”
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