NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
In the chilly dawn of June 30, 1934, two black Mercedes-Benz automobiles wound their way around the misty western edge of Tegernsee Lake in the rolling Bavarian foothills roughly 30 miles south of Munich. The picturesque countryside had been a favorite vacation spot of weary city dwellers since the late 19th century, but the occupants of the dust-trailing vehicles were not going on vacation—far from it.
The man in the passenger seat of the lead car, pale faced and puffy eyed after more than 24 hours without sleep, sat silently, glowering, arms folded impassively across his chest. He had lowered the window to let in a reviving breeze. His name was Adolf Hitler, the duly elected chancellor of Germany, and he was in the midst of the biggest gamble of his career. If he succeeded, he would stand virtually unchallenged as the de facto ruler of Germany. (Only Paul von Hindenburg, the aged and essentially impotent president, outranked him.) If he failed, he faced the prospect of a full-blown revolt by three million street-fighting thugs he had brought up alongside him in his 15-year rise to power. The stakes could not have been higher—a fact Hitler, a compulsive gambler, knew only too well.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, jabbered incessantly from the backseat of the car. The ferret-faced Goebbels was doing what he did best: twisting, parsing, and mauling the truth. His subject this morning was the black-hearted perfidy of Hitler’s closest ally and perhaps only personal friend: Ernst Röhm, the barrel-chested, battle-scarred commander of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the private army within an army whose members across Germany in fearsome brown shirts and black leather jackboots. Goebbels ranted on, but Hitler tuned him out. He had already made up his mind about Röhm. He didn’t need Goebbels to tell him what to do.
Adolf Hitler had made up his mind about Ernst Röhm, once his closest ally.
The SA, like Hitler and the metastasizing Nazi Party it served, had come to power in the streets of postwar Munich, springing from the ruins of the Imperial German Army. The first official storm troop unit was formed in 1915 to test experimental weapons and develop new tactics to break the deadly stalemate on the Western Front of World War I. Commanding General Erich Ludendorff soon ordered all German armies in the west to form their own battalion of storm troops. During the lastgasp Ludendorff Offensive in March 1918, SA storm troops spearheaded an initially successful breakthrough before the startled Allies, with decisive help from the newly arrived American Expeditionary Forces, could stabilize their lines.
Oddly enough, the man who would come to be most associated with the SA, Munich-born Röhm, was not an original storm trooper but a twice-wounded army staff officer. When the war ended, he was serving behind the lines, still recovering from a serious wound he’d received at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, when a bullet tore away the bridge of his nose and sliced a deep gash on his left cheek. Röhm’s SA debut would come
