Night of the Long Knives

Over three days, from 30 June to 2 July 1934, Adolf Hitler had the leadership of the Nazi Party's own street army, the SA, murdered along with a range of conservative critics and old enemies. The purge, carried out mainly by the SS and the Gestapo, removed Ernst Röhm as a rival, won the army's backing for Hitler and showed that the new regime regarded itself as above the law. At least 85 people were killed; some estimates run as high as 700 to 1,000.

The Sturmabteilung, or SA, the brown-shirted stormtroopers led by Ernst Röhm, had helped bring the Nazis to power by intimidating opponents and fighting communists in the streets. By early 1934 it had more than three million members, dwarfing an army limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles. Many stormtroopers wanted a "second revolution" that would bring radical economic change, and Röhm wanted the SA to absorb the regular army under his command. The generals, largely drawn from the Prussian nobility, despised the SA, while its rowdy violence was embarrassing the government at home and abroad.

In February 1934 Hitler made Röhm sign a pledge accepting the army's primacy, but Röhm privately scorned the agreement. Göring, Himmler, Goebbels and Rudolf Hess each had reasons to fear Röhm. In April Göring handed the Prussian secret police, the Gestapo, to Himmler, who placed Reinhard Heydrich in charge. Conservatives also pressed Hitler: Benito Mussolini rebuked him over the SA's conduct when they met in Venice in mid-June, and Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen publicly criticised talk of a second revolution in a speech at Marburg on 17 June. Days later the defence minister, Werner von Blomberg, warned that President Hindenburg might declare martial law and hand power to the army unless Hitler acted. Himmler and Heydrich assembled fabricated evidence that Röhm was planning a coup with French money.

Early on 30 June Hitler flew to Munich and went on to Bad Wiessee, where he personally arrested Röhm and other SA leaders in their hotel. Several were shot that day at Stadelheim prison. In Berlin Göring and Himmler unleashed execution squads on lists of targets. Those killed included the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, General Ferdinand von Bredow, the former Nazi Gregor Strasser, and Gustav von Kahr, who had helped crush Hitler's 1923 Munich putsch. Two of Papen's close associates, Herbert von Bose and Edgar Jung, were murdered, and Papen himself was briefly held. At least one man, a music critic, was killed by mistake. Röhm was offered a pistol to kill himself and, when he refused, was shot in his cell on 1 July.

On 3 July the cabinet passed a law declaring the killings legal acts of state self-defence. In a speech to the Reichstag on 13 July Hitler claimed to have foiled a treasonous plot and cast himself as the supreme judge of the German people, and in that speech he publicly used the name "Night of the Long Knives", a phrase Nazi songs and speeches had long employed. A congratulatory telegram in Hindenburg's name was, as Göring later admitted at Nuremberg, written by the Nazis. The legal scholar Carl Schmitt defended the purge in print.

The army welcomed the purge, even though two of its generals were among the dead, and in standing by Hitler it bound itself more closely to his regime. Many Germans accepted the official story that Hitler had saved the country from chaos; those who were appalled mostly kept silent. Under Viktor Lutze the SA lost its independence, and its membership fell from 2.9 million in August 1934 to 1.2 million by April 1938, while Himmler's SS emerged as an independent force. Prosecutors who tried to act against the killers were quickly stopped. The purge came barely a year and a half after the Reichstag fire had opened the way to dictatorship.

Our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany four years after the purge; the Germany page covers the country's later history.