In all this Rohm was actuated not just by defiance and the arrogance of knowing that, as he declared, he had the power of thirty divisions behind him. Rather, he understood only too well that Hitler was confronting him with an unacceptable alternative. To tell him that he must either educate the nation or quit was the equivalent to giving him the sack. For no one could seriously imagine that those “bandylegged” SA men were the right people to instruct the Aryan master race.
Convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, Rohm seems to have called on Hitler early in March and proposed a “little solution”: that the army take in several thousand SA leaders. This would at least provide for some of Rohm’s people. But both Hindenburg and the army leadership would not hear of this. Rohm found himself driven by an outraged and increasingly impatient following, and by his own craving for status, to take once more the path of revolt.
From the spring of 1934 on, the slogans of the second revolution were again in currency. But although there was talk of putsch and rebellion, there is no indication of a specific plan of action. In keeping with the rough-and-tough stance of these blusterers, they were satisfied with bloodthirsty phrases. Rohm himself had spells of resignation, occasionally considered returning to Bolivia, and at one point told the French ambassador that he was sick. Nevertheless, he kept trying to break out of the ever more tightly closing ring of isolation and to make contact with Schleicher and probably with other oppositional circles. He organized a new wave of giant parades and, in general, tried by incessant triumphant marches to make a show of the SA’s unbroken vigor. At the same time, he obtained sizable quantities of arms—partly by purchases abroad—and stepped up the militarytraining program of his units. Of course, all this may only have served to keep his disappointed and irritably loafing storm troopers occupied. But such activities were regarded by Hitler and the army leadership as a challenge. Certainly they provided a disquieting background to the rebellious bluster.
It appears that by the spring Hitler stopped trying to settle matters amicably with Rohm and instead steered toward a solution by violence. On April 17, at a spring concert given by the SS in the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler appeared in public with Rohm for the last time. Extending the assignment given to Diels, he now directed several party bureaus—by his own later testimony—to look into the rumors about a second revolution and to track down their sources. It is tempting to associate the build-up of the Sicherheitsdienst (the security service of the SS, the notorious SD), which began simultaneously with this assignment, and likewise Heinrich Himmler’s take-over of the Prussian Gestapo. Obviously there was a connection with the fact that the judicial authorities at this point began to prosecute SA crimes for the first time. Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau concentration camp, supposedly received instructions to draw up a “Reich list” containing the names of “undesirable persons.”
It was a veritable roundup that Rohm could scarcely misconstrue. Plainly they were out to get him. His principal enemies were the functionaries of the Political Organization (PO), above all Goring, Goebbels, and Hess, who envied the SA chief of staff his enormous power base and the position of second man in the state that went with it. Heinrich Himmler soon joined them; as commander of the SS, then still a subdivision of the SA, he stood to profit by Rohm’s fall. Alongside these party people, cautiously operating in the background but more and more making its presence felt, was the army leadership. By skillfully peddling information about Rohm and by playing up its own docility, it hoped to draw Hitler over to its side. In February, 1934, the corps of army officers voluntarily set aside one of its dearest traditions, the principle of drawing its members from a special stratum of society. Instructions were issued to the effect that henceforth “origin in the old officer caste” was not to be the basic requirement for a military career, but rather “consonance with the new government.” Shortly afterward, the Reichswehr introduced political education for the troops. On Hitler’s birthday, April 20, Minister of Defense Blomberg published an extravagant article in praise of the Fuhrer. Simultaneously, he renamed the Munich barracks that housed the List Regiment, in which Hitler had once served, the Adolf Hitler Barracks. The army’s strategy was to stir up the ill-feeling between Hitler and Rohm until an open quarrel ensued from which the army generals would emerge the victors. They reasoned that Hitler would not realize that by stripping Rohm of power he was disarming himself and placing himself at the mercy of the army.
The rising tension was palpably communicated to the public mind. For a year Hitler had continued to keep the population breathless by fireworks, speeches, appeals, coups, and histrionics. Now both the public and the producer seemed equally exhausted. The pause for reflection offered the nation a first opportunity to take account of its real condition. Not yet completely overwhelmed and corrupted by propaganda, it noted coercion, pressure and regimentation, persecution of defenseless minorities, concentration camps, difficulties with the churches, the specter of inflation caused by reckless spending, terrorism and threats from the SA, and growing distrust on the part of the rest of the world. The result was a reversal of sentiment that even a noisy “campaign against gripers and criticasters,” launched by Goebbels, was unable to stem. What emerged in the spring of 1934 was not a massive mood of dissatisfaction that found vent in any broadly based oppositional spirit; but unmistakably a sense of skepticism, of uneasiness, of suspicion, was spreading, and along with it an intimation that something was rotten in the state of Germany.
The spreading disenchantment suggests that we glance once more at the conservative stage managers of the events of January, 1933. And, in fact, although they now had forfeited all power to act, they seemed to feel that something should be done. In June, 1934, when Hindenburg was about to leave for his summer vacation at Neudeck, his parting words to his Vice-Chancellor were: “Things are going badly, Papen. Try to straighten them out.” Since, however, there was no question of the President’s intervening himself—the old man was visibly failing—the conservatives took up the idea of a monarchist restoration. Hitler had rejected this idea in no uncertain terms, the last time in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1934. But Hindenburg now, on Papen’s urging, promised to add a passage to his testament recommending a return to the monarchy. After all, the monarchist faction reasoned, under pressure of events Hitler would sooner or later have to accept a good many things he did not like.
In view of the reports of Hindenburg’s condition, a rapid decision on Hitler’s part was all the more urgent. His own plans assumed he would take over the office of President. This would assure him supreme command of the army and would thus form the concluding act in the seizure of power. On June 4, therefore, he once more met Rohm in order—as he explained in his later self-justifying speech—“to spare the Movement and my SA the shame of such a disagreement, and… to solve the problem without severe conflicts.” In a discussion lasting for some five hours he pleaded with Rohm “of his own accord to oppose this madness” of a second revolution. But Rohm was far from ready to capitulate and gave him only the customary empty assurances.
The propaganda campaign against the gripers was screwed to a higher pitch of intensity. In addition to the SA, the conservative positions of the old bourgeoisie, of the nobility, of the churches, and above all of the monarchy came under the fire of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. But Rohm, evidently unsuspecting, went on vacation. In an order of the day he informed his followers that he was suffering from a rheumatic complaint and had to go to Bad Wiessee for a cure. To ease the tension somewhat, he sent the majority of the SA formations on leave for the month of July. His order warned “the enemies of the SA” against harboring any false hopes that the storm troopers would not return from their leaves, and in grimly ambiguous terms he threatened those enemies with an “appropriate answer.” Interestingly enough, the order of the day did not mention Hitler’s name.
Contrary to all his subsequent asseverations, it appears that Hitler could not have believed that Rohm, however recalcitrant, had plans for occupying the capital, seizing control of the government, and, in the course of a “conflict of the bloodiest kind, lasting several days,” removing him personally.
Nine days later, Hitler went to Venice for his first trip abroad. He looked nervous, distracted and ill-humored as, wearing a light-colored raincoat, he walked forward to meet the Italian dictator. According to a political joke that went the rounds in Germany, Mussolini allegedly murmured,
There were other threats, however. Concerned that the obviously impending death of Hindenburg would destroy the last chance to steer the regime onto a more moderate course, conservative backers of Franz von Papen urged him to take some sort of stand. On Sunday, June 17, while Hitler was meeting with his assembled party leaders in Gera, the Vice-Chancellor delivered a speech at Marburg University. It had been ghosted for him by the conservative writer Edgar Jung and had far more bite than anything Papen himself might have produced. In a sensational fashion he came out strongly against the National Socialist revolution for its violence and unbridled
