The Central Committee was holding a plenum, the first such full meeting since the party congress, devoted to meat supply and livestock.309 Early on the morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrested Captain Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the street-fighting SA (Sturmabteilung), in a Bavarian resort town; as many as 2,000 more arrests ensued. Surly and overweight, with a prominent scar on his left cheek, and openly homosexual, Röhm was one of the few who used the familiar du (“thou”) with Hitler. He led some 3 million SA members, poorly armed and disorganized, but more than were in the Nazi party, and nearly thirty times the size of the Reichswehr (limited by the Versailles Treaty).310 His Brownshirt militia sought a permanent place in the Nazi order as a reward for helping bring Hitler to power and targeting Nazi enemies (leftists, Jews), but he had toned down his rhetoric of a continuing revolution and accepted Hitler’s request to go on medical leave and send the Brownshirts on leave as well (most were due to return in August). But Reichswehr generals—who reported to Hindenburg, not the chancellor Hitler—were adamant that the paramilitary SA be neutered. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS (Heinrich Himmler), Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Reinhard Heydrich), and Gestapo (also Heydrich) had no love for their SA rivals, either. Rumors of a pending crackdown against the SA had spurred the latter to yet another drunken rampage in Munich on the evening of June 29.311 At the same time, Hitler had been told that President Hindenburg was ready to declare martial law and receive the former conservative prime minister Franz von Papen on June 30. In the end, after much stalling, the Führer felt compelled to move against both the SA and the traditional conservatives.
The army brass put its resources in SS hands, and left the latter to fabricate the damning evidence of a supposed SA “putsch” with the aid of an unnamed foreign country.312 Still, it was awkward: the SA had been just as crucial (and just as dispensable) to the Nazi revolution as the Kronstadt sailors had been to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In a two-hour, radio-broadcast speech to the Reichstag (twelve of whose members would be among those to be executed), Hitler highlighted storm trooper moral laxity and Röhm’s homosexuality and declared that he had acted patriotically to preempt a planned SA “Night of the Long Knives.”313 Stalin was said to have badgered his newly arrived envoy in Berlin for details of the “bloodbath.”314 Izvestiya dedicated four columns on its front page to Hitler’s Reichstag speech about the Night of the Long Knives.315 “What a guy [molodets],” Stalin exclaimed to his inner circle, according to Mikoyan’s later recollections. “Well done. Knows how to act!”316 A Comintern instant analysis, clueless about the dynamics of the Nazi regime, wrote that the “monopolist big bourgeoisie” had crushed the “petit-bourgeois strata.”317 Pravda (July 2, 1934) editorialized that “German fascism once again revealed itself as the agent of finance capital.” British intelligence did little better, misperceiving a triumph of the Reichswehr over the party and a “return of the Rapallo line” of closeness to the Soviet Union.318 In fact, the episode solidified a Nazi accord with the army and large-scale industry on Hitler’s terms, while clearing the way for him to merge the chancellorship with the presidency upon Hindenburg’s passing. The SS would be even more radical, ideologically, than the SA.
If the hearsay about Stalin’s enthusiastic reaction is correct, he was also wrong. This was the first (and would be the sole) violent regime purge of Hitler’s rule. The Führer had agreed to dispatch Röhm only under pressure from Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich, yet he still hoped Röhm could be persuaded to do the deed himself. (The Brownshirt fighter did not touch the pistol left for him in his prison cell and had to be executed.)319 For all the sensation, a mere eighty-five known people were summarily executed without legal proceedings, and just fifty of them even belonged to the SA. Some individual scores were settled.320 What Stalin and British intelligence most failed to grasp was the consolidation of the Nazi regime’s anti-Bolshevism.321
