Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (59 page)

Hitler’s motives for destroying the
SA’S
leadership and independence had meanwhile been increasing. Its brutal, open street-violence alienated Hitler’s supporters at home and was the chief source of criticism of his regime abroad. When Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden visited him on 21 February 1934, he had promised to demobilize two-thirds of the
SA
and permit inspection of the rest: ‘short of the actual dissolution of the force,’ wrote Eden, ‘… he could scarcely have gone further.’
¹³⁰
Equally important was the hostility of the army. By spring 1934 the aged Hindenburg was clearly nearing the end. Hitler wished to succeed him, uniting presidency and chancellorship in one. The army and navy commanders agreed that he should do this, provided he emasculated the
SA
and destroyed its pretensions, and it is typical of the naivety they always showed in negotiating with Hitler that they gave him something vital in return
for a ‘concession’ which he needed to make anyway, and in which army co-operation was essential.

Hitler went ahead with his purge, an act of pure gangsterism, as soon as Himmler had achieved monopoly of the political police. He determined to murder all his immediate political enemies at once (including settling some old scores), so that the ‘evidence’ of conspiracy, manufactured by Heydrich’s intelligence bureau, produced unlikely conjunctions worthy of a Stalin show-trial. Himmler and Heydrich prepared the final list, Hitler simply underlining in pencil those to be shot; Heydrich signed the warrants, which read simply: ‘By order of the Führer and Reich Chancellor, – is condemned to death by shooting for high treason.’ At a comparatively late stage Goering was brought into the plot. The Defence Minister Blomberg, together with his political assistant, General von Reichenau, were made accomplices, army units being ordered to stand by in case
SA
units resisted. Early on 30 June 1934 Hitler himself shook Roehm awake at the sanatorium of the Tegernsee, and then retired to the Munich Brownhouse. The Bavarian Justice Minister was not prepared to order mass shootings on the basis of a mere typed list, and Roehm and his associates were not actually murdered until 2 July, the political police carrying it out. In Berlin, meanwhile, according to the eye-witness account of the Vice-Chancellor, von Papen, the accused were taken to Goering’s private house in the Leipzigerplatz, where he and Himmler identified them, ticked them off the list and ordered them to be taken away and shot immediately; Goering’s private police provided the squads. Two days later, Hitler arrived from Munich at the Templehof. Himmler and Goering met him on the tarmac, under a blood-red sky, the three men then studying the lists of those already shot or about to be shot, a Wagnerian scene described by the Gestapo officer Hans Gisevius. Frick, the Interior Minister, was told to go home: the matter did not concern him. According to Gisevius, Frick said, ‘My Führer, if you do not proceed at once against Himmler and his
SS
,
as you have against Roehm and his
SA
, all you will have done is to have called in Beelzebub to drive out the devil.’
¹³¹
That shows how little he understood his master.

Many of those murdered had nothing to do with the
SA
. They included the former Bavarian Prime Minister, Gustav von Kahr, who had declined to take part in the 1923
putsch;
Hitler’s old colleague and party rival, Gregor Strasser; the slippery old brass-hat who was going to ‘contain’ him, General von Schleicher, plus his wife and his close associate, General von Bredow; the Berlin Catholic leader, Ernst Klausener, and many other inconvenient or dangerous people, probably about 150 in all.
¹³²

This act of mass murder by the government and police was a moral
catastrophe for Germany. The code of honour of the German generals, such as it was, was shattered, for they had connived at the killing of two of their friends and colleagues. Justice was ridiculed for a law was passed on 3 July, authorizing the deeds
ex post facto.
Hitler was received in state at Hindenburg’s deathbed, where the confused old man, who had once dismissed him as the ‘Bohemian corporal’, greeted him with the words ‘Your Majesty’. After the Wooden Titan died on 2 August, Hitler assumed the succession by virtue of a law he had issued the day before, making him ‘leader and Reich Chancellor’. The same day all officers and men of the army took a sacred oath to him, beginning: ‘I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people.’ The arrangement then went to a plebiscite and in August the German people rewarded the murderer-in-chief with a verdict of 84.6 per cent.
¹³³
Not the least significant aspect of this turning-point was the presentation, to the SS men who had carried out the murders, of daggers of honour. Here was the shameless symbolism of moral relativism. The ss was thus launched upon its monstrous career of legalized killing. The Roehm affair, with the state openly engaged in mass murder, with the connivance of its old military élite and the endorsement of the electorate, directly foreshadowed the extermination programmes to come.

It was the sheer audacity of the Roehm purge, and the way in which Hitler got away with it, with German and world opinion and with his own colleagues and followers, which encouraged Stalin to consolidate his personal dictatorship by similar means. Hitherto, the party élite had permitted him to murder only ordinary Russians. Even to expel a senior party member required elaborate preparations. In 1930, Stalin had been openly criticized by Syrtsov, a Politburo candidate, and Lominadze, a Central Committee member. He had wanted both of them shot but the most he managed was their expulsion from the cc. Two years later he had called for the shooting of Ryutin, who had circulated privately a two-hundred-page document criticizing his dictatorship. Sergei Kirov, who had succeeded Zinoviev as boss of Leningrad, had insisted that Ryutin be spared and sent to an ‘isolator’, or special prison for top party men.
¹³⁴
By summer 1934, Kirov’s influence was still growing, and he appeared to be the man most likely to succeed Stalin – or oust him. The success of the Roehm purge inspired Stalin to do away with internal party restraints once and for all, and in the most ingenious manner: by having Kirov murdered, and using the crime as an excuse to strike at all his other enemies.
¹³⁵

Kirov was shot in mysterious circumstances on 1 December 1934, in the middle of the Smolny Institute, the former girls’ school from which Lenin had launched his
putsch
and which had remained party
HQ
in Leningrad ever since. It was a heavily guarded place and it was
never explained how the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, got through the security cordon. What is even more suspicious is that, a few days before, Kirov’s bodyguard had been removed on the orders of Yagoda, the
NKVD
head. In 1956 and again in 1961 Khrushchev hinted strongly that Stalin was responsible, and the circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming.
¹³⁶

Stalin reacted to the news of the murder with great violence but in a manner which suggests premeditation. He took the night train to Leningrad, and as dawn was breaking he was met at the Moscow station by Medved, head of the Leningrad police. Without a word, Stalin struck him heavily in the face. He then commandeered a floor of the Smolny Institute and took personal charge of the investigations. He sat behind a table, flanked by his own flunkeys: Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov and others, with the Leningrad party officials on one side, the security men on the other. When Nikolaev was brought in, and Stalin asked him why he shot Kirov, the creature fell on his knees and shouted, pointing at the security men, ‘But they made me do it.’ They ran to him and beat him unconscious with pistol butts; then he was dragged out and revived in alternate hot and cold baths. Stalin had Borisov, the head of Kirov’s bodyguards, beaten to death with crowbars; Medved was sent to a camp and murdered three years later; Nikolaev was executed on 29 December after a secret trial. More than a hundred so-called ‘Whites’ were shot; 40,000 Leningraders put in camps. Soon, anyone who knew the facts of the Kirov case was either dead or lost for ever in the Gulag Archipelago.
¹³⁷

That was only the beginning. Two weeks after Kirov’s murder, Stalin had Zinoviev and Kamenev arrested. He formulated the charges against them in the minutest detail and revised the testimony they were to give down to the last comma. It took months to rehearse them, Stalin threatening nothing would be spared ‘until they came crawling on their bellies with confessions in their teeth’.
¹³⁸
They came up for trial in 1936, following a deal in which they agreed to confess everything provided their families were left alone and they themselves spared. In fact they were both shot within a day of their trial ending. The way in which Zinoviev begged for mercy was made the subject of a gruesome imitation, with strong anti-Semitic overtones, given at Stalin’s intimate parties by K.V.Pauker, a former theatre-dresser promoted to be head of Stalin’s personal
NKVD
guard and the only man permitted to shave him. Pauker performed this act regularly until he, too, was shot as a ‘German spy’.
¹³⁹

Immediately Zinoviev and Kamenev were dead, Stalin ordered Yagoda to execute more than 5,000 party members already under arrest. This was the beginning of the Great Terror. Soon after this
was done, Stalin sent from Sochi, where he was on holiday, the sinister telegram of 25 September 1936: ‘We deem it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite block. The
OGPU
is four years behind in this matter.’
¹⁴⁰
This was followed by a systematic purge of the secret police, carried out by teams of two to three hundred party zealots secretly recruited by Yezhov.
¹⁴¹
Next Stalin eliminated his old Georgian friend Ordzhonikidze, the last Politburo member allowed to call him by his nickname ‘Koba’ or to argue with him: he was given the choice of shooting himself or dying in the police cells. After February 1937 Stalin could kill anyone, in any way he wished. At the
CC
plenum at the end of the month, it ‘instructed’ Stalin to arrest Bukharin and Rykov. Bukharin pleaded tearfully for his life. Stalin: if you are innocent, you can prove it in a prison cell!’ The cc: ‘Shoot the traitor!’ The two men were taken straight off to prison and death; Yagoda was later heard to mutter, ‘What a pity I didn’t arrest all of you before, when I had the power.’
¹⁴²
(It made no difference: of the 140 people present, nearly two-thirds would shortly be murdered.)

From the end of 1936 to the second half of 1938, Stalin struck at every group in the regime. In 1937 alone he killed 3,000 senior secret police officers and 90 per cent of the public prosecutors in the provinces. He had been in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1935. The following year he persuaded the Nazi government to concoct forged evidence of secret contacts between the Soviet army commander, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and Hitler’s generals; it was done by the Gestapo and transmitted by one of its agents, General Skoblin, who also worked for the
NKVD
.
¹⁴³
Stalin’s first military victim was a cavalry general, Dmitry Shmidt, who had apparently abused him in 1927; Shmidt was arrested on 5 July 1936, tortured and murdered. Tukhashevsky and seven other senior generals followed on 11 June 1937, and thereafter 30,000 officers, about half the total, including 80 per cent of the colonels and generals.
¹⁴⁴
Most officers were shot within twenty-four hours of arrest. In every group, the aim was to kill the most senior, especially those who had fought in the Revolution or who had known the party before Stalin owned it. The purge of the party itself was the most prolonged and severe. In Leningrad, only two out of its 150 delegates to the seventeenth Party Congress were allowed to live. The losses in the Moscow party were as great. About one million party members were killed in all.
¹⁴⁵

The crimes committed in these years have never been atoned for, properly investigated or punished (except by accident), since the successive generations of party leaders who ruled after Stalin were all
involved in their commission. Yezhov, the principal assassin, was murdered himself by Stalin after the purges were over. His successor as head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, was gunned down by his Politburo colleagues immediately after Stalin’s own death. Georgi Malenkov, who ruled Russia 1953–6, was the chief purger in Belorussia and Armenia. Khrushchev, who succeeded him and ruled 1956–64, was in charge of the purge both in Moscow and (together with Yezhov himself and Molotov) in the Ukraine. The Leningrad purge was under Zhdanov, one of his assistants (and one of the very few survivors) being Aleksei Kosygin, Prime Minister in the 1970s until his death. Kaganovich, who held high office until the 1960s, was the destroyer of the party in the Smolensk region. Leonid Brezhnev, an abetter and survivor of the Ukraine purge, ruled Russia from 1964 until his death in 1982.

All these men, who governed Russia in the thirty years after Stalin’s death, worked from a blend of self-aggrandizement and fear, under Stalin’s direct and detailed instructions. An
NKVD
man who had been in Stalin’s bodyguard testified that Yezhov came to Stalin almost daily in the years 1937–9, with a thick file of papers; Stalin would give orders for arrests, the use of torture, and sentences (the last before the trial). Stalin carried out some interrogations himself. He annotated documents ‘arrest’; ‘arrest everyone’; ‘no need to check: arrest them’. At the 1961 twenty-second Party Congress, Z.T.Serdiuk read out a letter from Yezhov: ‘Comrade Stalin:
I
am sending for confirmation four lists of people whose cases are before the Military Collegium: List One, general; List Two, former military personnel; List Three, former
NKVD
personnel; List Four, wives of former enemies of the people. I request approval for first-degree condemnation
(pervaia kategoriia
, i.e. shooting).’ The list was signed ‘Approved, J.Stalin, V.Molotov’. Stalin’s signature is appended to over 400 lists from 1937 to 1939, bearing the names of 44,000 people, senior party leaders, officials of the government, officers and cultural figures.
¹⁴⁶