Hitler (90 page)

Among the murdered were also one of General von Schleicher's associates, General von Bredow, and former General State Commissioner von Kahr, whose “treachery” on November 9, 1923, Hitler had never forgiven. Another victim was Father Stempfle, who had been one of the editorial readers of
Mein Kampf
but had since moved far from the Nazi party. Another was the engineer Otto Ballerstedt, who had crossed Hitler's path during the period of the party's rise. An utterly innocent music critic, Dr. Willi Schmid, was killed because of a confusion with SA Gruppenführer Wilhelm Schmidt. The rage for murder seemed to have been most violent in Silesia, where SS leader Udo von Woyrsch lost control over his units. Significantly, the liquidations frequently took place wherever the victim was found, in offices, in homes, on the street, with utterly brutal casualness. Many corpses were not found until weeks later, in woods or rivers.

June 30 was not a good day for any of Röhm's followers, even if they were engaged in praiseworthy actions against Jews. Three SA men who happened to demolish a Jewish cemetery on that day were expelled from the SA and given a year's prison term.
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At a press conference held that very day, Göring actually boasted that he had stretched his assignment on his own initiative. We do not know how many of these arbitrary executions Hitler approved of. The purge represented a break with his tactical imperative of strict legality, and every additional victim made that break all the more obvious. For years Hitler had practiced all the arts of dissimulation, had abstained from the old wild poses and carefully built up the image of himself as a temperate, if also imperious, politician. Now, so close to his goal of total power, he was risking the loss of his painfully earned credit in a single act of self-unmasking. Suddenly he and his cronies had dropped their disguise and appeared in all the harshness of their nature. If Hitler intervened, as several accounts have claimed, to moderate the course of events, it must have been from such considerations.

Still, Hitler let the killing take on the miscellaneous quality that it did. By shooting in all directions he would deprive all sides of any hope of profiting from the crisis. Hence the barbarous insouciance of the killings anywhere and everywhere, the corpses left where they dropped, the ostentatious traces left by the murderers; and hence, also, the abandonment, for once, of any pretence of justice. There were no trials, no weighing of evidence, no verdicts; there was nothing but an atavistic slaughter. Later, Rudolf Hess tried to justify the indiscriminate killing: “During those hours when the very existence of the German nation was at stake, it was not permissible to judge the amount of guilt borne by individuals. Despite the harshness there is a profound meaning in the practice of the past, in which mutinies among soldiers were punished by a bullet for every tenth man, without the slightest inquiry into guilt or innocence.”

Once again Hitler had acted wholly in terms of the ends of power. The contemporary polemicists were surely mistaken when they pictured him as a sadist decking out his blood lust by references to pitiless Renaissance princes.
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The other view of him is equally mistaken: that he was emotionally indifferent, cold and unfeeling as he eliminated comrades, followers, and intimate friends of many years' standing. In fact, the first view applies more accurately to Göring, the second to Himmler; both went about their murderous business efficiently—with total lack of scruple. Unlike them, Hitler seemed to feel considerable inner pressure. All those who met him during this period noted his extraordinary agitation. The strain on his nerves was evident in all his movements. In his speech of justification to the Reichstag he himself spoke of the “bitterest decisions” of his life. And unless all indications are deceptive he was haunted for months afterward by memories of his murdered friends and followers—for example, in that highly secret conference of January 3, 1935, when he hastily summoned the heads of the party and the army and in a dramatic scene exhorted them to achieve unity. On this, as on many other occasions, it turned out that his nerves were not as armored as his conscience. In keeping with his maxim that one must always strike faster and harder than the enemy, the smooth course of the June 30 purge was based largely on a surprise assault. How conspicuous, therefore, is Hitler's hesitation before he ordered the first execution of seven SA leaders, and his hesitation again before the killing of Röhm. In both cases, Hitler's conduct can be adequately explained only on grounds of sentimentality. He was obeying the reflex of an emotional tie which at least for a few hours proved stronger than the cold rationale of power.

By Sunday, July 1, Hitler had overcome the previous day's uncertainties and was once more in firm control of his own reactions. Toward noon he appeared repeatedly at the historic window in the chancellery to greet a crowd rounded up by Goebbels, and in the afternoon he actually gave a garden party for the party bigwigs and members of the cabinet, to which their wives and children were also invited. While the firing squads were still at work in Lichterfelde, a few miles away, he moved about among his guests in excellent humor, chatting, drinking tea, showing affection for the children—all the while breathless and in flight from reality. There is an element of high drama in this scene; what comes to mind is the physiognomy of one of those Shakespearean villains who are not fully up to the requirements of evil. And from the midst of this sham that he had so hastily set up he evidently gave the order to kill Ernst Röhm, who was still waiting in his cell in Stadelheim. Rudolf Hess had for hours tried in vain to obtain instructions for the execution. Shortly before six o'clock, Theodor Eicke and SS Hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert entered Röhm's room. Together with the latest edition of the
Völkische Beobachter,
which carried a lengthy account under banner headlines of the events of the previous day, they laid a pistol on Röhm's table and told him he had ten minutes in which to use it. Nothing disturbed the quiet; prison guards were told to fetch the weapon. When Eicke and Lippert entered the cell, shooting, Röhm was standing in the middle of the room, his shirt histrionically ripped open exposing his chest.

Base and repellent as were the circumstances surrounding this murder of a friend, we must nevertheless ask whether Hitler had any alternative. No matter how far Röhm might have been willing to go in bringing about the SA state, his real goal was the primacy of the ideological soldier. In his proud sense that he had a following of millions pressing behind him, he was incapable of recognizing that he was being overambitious. For he would necessarily encounter bitter opposition from both the Political Organization and the army, and at least passive resistance on the part of the general public. It is true that he thought he was still being loyal to Hitler. But it was only a question of time before the objective contradictions would lead to personal antipathy. With his keen tactical sense, Hitler had instantly realized that Röhm's aims also threatened his own position. After the elimination of Gregor Strasser from the party, the SA chief was the only remaining individual who had preserved personal independence of Hitler and who resisted the hypnotic spell of Hitler's will. Hence he was Hitler's only serious rival, and it would have flouted all the principles of tactics to grant him as much power as he wanted. Certainly Röhm had not planned a putsch. But he embodied, for a suspicious Hitler, the permanent threat of a potential putsch.

On the other hand, Röhm could not simply be deposed or isolated. He was not just any lieutenant; he was a popular generalissimo. An attempt to strip the chief of staff of his powers would indeed have sparked some sort of uprising. And even if Röhm could have been deposed, he would have remained a permanent threat, for he had many connections and influential friends. A court trial was virtually out of the question. After the unsatisfactory outcome of the Reichstag fire trial, Hitler had little confidence in the judiciary. But above and beyond that, Hitler's own secrecy complex made it unthinkable to give an intimate friend, and one who was driven to the wall, the opportunity to defend himself in public. Too much would have come out. It was precisely their many years of friendship that made Röhm so strong, but also left Hitler no other way out. A bare three years later Hitler declared that to his “own sorrow” he had been forced “to destroy this man and his following.” And on another occasion, speaking to a group of high-ranking party leaders, he remarked upon the decisive share that this greatly gifted organizer had had in the NSDAP's rise and conquest of power. When the time came to write the history of the National Socialist movement, he said, Röhm would always have to be remembered as the second man, right beside himself.
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In view of this situation, Hitler had no choice but a “vigilante killing on a grand scale.”
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Röhm, too, could not simply give up his position. He had obligations to the dynamism and the unsatisfied cravings of his millions of followers. Both rivals were governed by objective necessities. Perceiving this, we cannot fail to see in the bloody affair of June, 1934, a measure of tragedy—the only instance of tragedy in Hitler's career.

 

The consequences at home and abroad made June 30, 1934, the decisive date, after January 30, 1933, in the Nazi seizure of power. Hitler immediately set about concealing the importance of the event by a great show of restored normality. As early as July 2 Göring instructed all police stations: “All documents concerning the action of the past two days are to be burned... Word went out from the Propaganda Ministry forbidding the press to publish the death notices of those killed or “shot while trying to escape.” And at the cabinet meeting of July 3 Hitler had the crimes sanctioned by slipping in among some twenty decrees of rather secondary importance one consisting of only a single paragraph: “The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State.”

But Hitler seemed to realize quickly that all efforts to hush up the affair were a waste of time. For a while he seemed perplexed and was evidently haunted by the murders of Röhm and Strasser. Otherwise his ten days of silence, breaking all the rules of psychology and propaganda, can hardly be explained. On July 13 he at last delivered to the Reichstag his speech of self-justification. But its verboseness, its lapses in logic, the gaps in the explanations, and its one imperious gesture mark it as one of his poorer oratorical achievements.

After a rambling introduction summing up his own cares and merits, and once more resorting to the most reliable theme in his rhetorical stock, the Communist peril—which, he promised, he would combat in a war of extermination if it took a hundred years—he heaped all the blame on Röhm. Röhm had repeatedly confronted him with unacceptable alternatives, had admitted corruption, homosexuality, and excesses into his circle, had encouraged all these vices. Hitler spoke of the destructive, rootless elements who had “completely lost sympathy with any ordered human society” and who “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.” But the revolution, Hitler continued, “is for us not a permanent condition. When a fatal check is imposed by force upon the natural development of a nation, this artificially interrupted evolution may be set free by an act of violence so that it can resume its free natural development. But periodically recurring revolts... cannot lead to salutary development.”

Once again he rejected Röhm's concept of a National Socialist army, and, referring to a promise he had given the President, he reassured the Reichswehr: “In the State there is only one bearer of arms, and that is the army; there is only one bearer of the political will, and that is the National Socialist Party.” It was only toward the end of his speech, which lasted several hours, that Hitler became aggressive.

 

Mutinies are suppressed in accordance with laws of iron which are immutable. If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not turn to the regular courts of justice for 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 judge of the German people!... I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life.... Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the state, then certain death is his lot.

 

Hitler's uncharacteristic wavering from justification to aggression reflected the profound shock that the events of June 30 had been to the public. Instinctively, the public seemed to sense that on this day a new phase had begun and that other frightening adventures, might lie ahead. Up to then, illusions about the nature of the regime had still been possible; it might have been argued that injustice and terrorism were the inevitable concomitants of a revolution, that they would cease with time', and that on the whole the new regime was aiming at orderliness. But no such belief in a happy ending could survive the massacre.

Hitler had openly claimed for himself the role of the “supreme judge,” who could dispose over life and death without let or hindrance. Henceforth, there were no longer any legal or moral guarantees against arbitrary acts by Hitler or his cohorts. As if in explicit corroboration of these tendencies, all the accomplices in the crime, from Himmler and Sepp Dietrich down to the low-ranking SS bullies, were rewarded and praised. On July 4 at a ceremony in Berlin they were all presented with an “honorary dagger.” It is by no means a fabrication of hindsight to see a direct connection between the killings of June 30 and the subsequent practice of mass murder in the camps of the East. In fact, Himmler himself in his famous Posen speech of October 4, 1943, established this link and thus confirmed that “continuity of crime” which permits of no distinctions between a purportedly constructive initial period of Nazi rule, inspired by passionate idealism, and a later period of self-destructive degeneration.