The Night of Long Kaives

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 6

The Night of Long Kaives

By

FRANCIS

WEST

HERE was a blood-red sky, a Wag- ‘~ nerian setting, at Tempelhof airfield on the night of June 30, 1934, when Hitler returned from Munich where, in the Stadelheim prison, Roehm and other high S.A, Leaders had been shot. In his entourage came Sepp Dietrich, who now, twenty-three years after, has been convicted of those murders in Stadelheim. Dietrich pleaded not guilty to murder, although he was present at the scene of the execution, but his lawyers have also tried to demonstrate that in carrying out his orders, Dietrich | played his part in thwarting a plot to seize power. The ghosts which rise, phoenix-like, from these stirred ashes, remind: us of events which passed into ‘the body of Nazi mythology and which can ‘still stir passions and resentments in Germany. When Hitler, pale, unshaven, sleepless, climbed out of his plane on that June night, he was greeted by Goering and Himmler with a list of the plotters who had been killed in Berlin. They included Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s former rival in the Nazi party, General von Schleicher, a former Chancellor, and Klausener, Leader of Catholic Action. A strange plot, this, which embraced revolutionaries and reactionaries, con- PS See OK. Die Si de LE ne meee»

servatives and liberals, Prussian officers and Catholic priests. According to Hitler,

speaking in the Keichstag on July 13, Roehm, von. Schleicher, and Strasser, assisted by "a Foreign Power," were bent upon'‘a second revolution which would remove the regime, although apparently retaining Hitler, and unite the Army and the S.A. in a single band. He stigmatised the Roehm group as sexual perverts, men bent on revolution for its own sake; nihilists whose activities could not be tolerated because they were poisoning the well of .German national life. The revolt was supposed to begin at four o’clock on the afternoon of June 30, when the S.A. mustered in Berlin preparatory to attacking the chancellery. A similar action was to be taken by the S.A. in Munich. "If anyone reproaches me," cried Hitler, "and asks why I did not resort to the regular Courts of Justice for the conviction of the offenders, then all I can say to him is this! In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the Supreme Justiciar of the German people." Sepp Dietrich was tried for Hitler’s course of action.

Such was the official version of the Plot, and the justification for the blood-

bath of June 30: the Night of Long Knives. The Reichstag subsequently passed a bill legalising the action taken. Hitler declared that he had acted at the last minute to thwart an imminent tevolution; but was there really a Plot? Six months earlier Hitler had’ written: At the close of the year of the National Socialist revolution, therefore, I feel compelled to thank you, my dear Ernst Roehm, for the imperishable services which you have rendered to the National Socialist Movement and the German people, and to assure you how very grateful I am to fate that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow combatants, His gratitude led to Roehm’s being pulled out of his bed in the hotel at Wiesee on June 30, and shot in Stadelheim. Only 26 days before, Hitler and Roehm had met and had arranged a Conference at Wiesee for June 30, at which the future of the S.A. was to be discussed. Hitler kept the appointment, and Roehm died. Why? For some months before that day, Berlin had been full of rumours of purges and plots. By, June-the tension had assumed an almost physical quality which played on the nerves of those who lived through it,

but it was by no means clear who was to be purged’ and by whom. Speculation asserted different things. In the spring of 1934 General von Brauchitsch, later C-in-C of the Army, visited Danzig and spoke of his fears. In the interests of the State, the Army could. tolerate it no longer and would seek unqualified changes. A little earlier a group. of industrialists in Essen complained that Hitler was leading them to ruin, And Roehm and the radicals within the party were saying: "Adolf is a’swine. He will give us all away. He only associates with the reactionaries now. His old friends aren’t good enough for him. . . Are we revolutionaries or aren’t we?" Rather more ominous was -the sentiment: "Hitler dead would be more valuable to the movement than Hitler alive." With such pressure from the Right and the Left, Hitler had a thorny path to walk. "Irresponsible elements are at work to destroy all my constructive labours," he said. "But I shall not allow’: my work to be shattered either by the Right or by the Left." On June 30 he destroyed the Left and by the violence of his solution, he frightened the Right into submission. The political background to ‘the tension which rose to an almost unbearable climax in June, was the conflict between the Army and the S.A. Hitler achieved power in Germany, and at first retained it, by promising that the Army should be the sole bearer of arms in the State, a promise which conflicted with Roehm’s view that the S.A. should be the revolutionary Army. In February, 1934, Roehm formally proposed to the Cabinet that the S.A. should be used as the basis for the expansion of the-German Army. In April Hitler went on a cruise with the Army leaders. In May it became known that he had offered to cut down the numbers of the S.A. by two-thirds. In June he sent the S.A. on leave. There was a similar rivalry within the Party. Goering, recently made a general, was on the side of conservatism. Himmler, — Reichsfuehrer, S.S., disliked his rivals in the S.A. Goebbels straddled uneasily between the S.A., to which he was drawn by his radical temperament, and Hitler, to whom he had given his loyalty. The personal rivalries and antagonisms within the party were coming to a head, with Gregor Strasser, who might at one time have been leader instead of Hitler, waiting in the background. The common element in all of Hitler's embarrassments was the S.A."For yourselves you make things easy, but for me you make them hard." It is easy to see what Hitler had to gain by eliminating Roehm and the revolutionaries: support of the Army, and mastery within the Party. In the rising tension, a plot- against him was a reehie: story, but meee is no doubt ¥ yf oe %y BF al rats, &.

that Hitler’s Reichstag speech which described the plot is.a complete fabrication. If Roehm was thinking of a.coup d’état or putsch, it was certainly not arranged for June 30. The loose revolutionary talk in the S.A. was the emotfonal outpouring of frustrated men, long accustomed to tub-thumping in the beer halls of South Germany. On June 30, Roehm was leisurely waiting for Hitler to arrive at Wiesee, and so far from being a vigilant conspirator was quietly arrested while in bed. Karl Ernst, the leader of the Berlin S.A., who was supposed to make a surprise attack on the Chancellery at five o'clock in the afternoon of June 30, was, in fact, in Bremen

preparing to sail on his honeymoon. He _was shot against a wall of the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin, believing that he was the victim of a Right wing conspiracy against Hitler. Other high S.A. leaders were travelling to Wiesee to meet Hitler in conference; all quite open and above board, and not at all conspiratorial. There was no imminent coup, prevented at the last moment. Goering himself let the cat out of the bag when he told the Press on July 1. "Some days ago he’(i.e., Hitler) ordered me to strike as soon as. he gave the word, and he entrusted me with summary powers for the purpose." The. discrepancy between this and the official account was never explained.

Ee BETTS | Nor was another remark of Goering’s at the same conference. "I extended my orders," he said. The extension took in. many -people who were not connected with the S.A., but who, for one reason and another, were dangerous or hated. Such were Strasser, von Schleicher, von Bredow, von Kahr, Fr. Stempfle. Many private feuds and grudges were settled; some mistakes were made. In Munich, on June 30, Willi Schmidt, the music critic of the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, was playing the cello in his flat. The S.S. came and took him away, and his body Was . subsequently _ returned to his wife. The

S.S. had been looking for another man with the same name, and Frau Schmidt was told to think of. her husband as a "martyr for a great cause." And the great cause? It was the succession to Presidént von Hindenburg. Referring to the. S.A. Hitler said to some of his intimates: With the old gentleman at death’s door, these criminals make such difficulties for me. At a time when it is important to decide on the successor to the Reich. presidency, when the choice lies between. my-~ self and one of the reactionary crowd! For _ this alone these people deserve to be shot. a uae Anyone who gets out of step will be- , ot. " ste "Y m :

To obtain the succession, to combine in hig own person the office of President and Chancellor, Hitler promised the generals to suppress the revolutionary wing of his own party. This is the significance of the Night of Long Knives. But the Army’s victory was a Pyrrhic one. Hitler had outwitted them, "Externally I end the revolution. But internally it goes on." And he wept tears for those whom he *had just murdered, the "framed" men of the S.A‘, "because they too have died for the — of our movement,"