Hitler Purges Rivals: Night of the Long Knives

SS death squads fanned out across Germany in the early hours of June 30, 1934, and by nightfall Adolf Hitler had murdered his way to absolute power. The Night of the Long Knives was a coordinated purge that eliminated the leadership of the SA, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, along with conservative critics, political rivals, and personal enemies, killing at least 85 people and possibly more than 200 over three days. The primary target was Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA, whose three-million-strong force of Brownshirts had been instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power but now threatened to destabilize the regime. Röhm demanded a "second revolution" that would absorb the regular army into the SA under his command, a proposal that terrified the German officer corps and alarmed industrialists who had backed the Nazis. Hitler needed the army’s loyalty to consolidate power after the aging President Hindenburg died, and the generals made clear their support was conditional on the SA’s destruction. Hitler flew to Munich on the morning of June 30 and personally arrested Röhm at a lakeside hotel in Bad Wiessee, where SA leaders had gathered for a conference. Simultaneously, SS squads under Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich executed SA commanders across Germany. The purge extended well beyond the SA: former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were shot in their home, conservative critic Edgar Jung was murdered, and Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi leader who had challenged Hitler, was killed in his cell. The purge was retroactively legalized by a one-paragraph law declaring the killings "emergency self-defense of the state." The army, having gotten what it wanted, swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler rather than the constitution when Hindenburg died on August 2. The Night of the Long Knives demonstrated that Hitler would use murder as a routine instrument of governance, a lesson that every potential opponent in Germany absorbed immediately. No serious internal challenge to his authority would arise for another decade.