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 Rohm. Rohm 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 Rohm’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.
The public’s uneasiness soon gave way to a certain relief that the SA’s revolutionary activities—which had revived deep-seated fears of disorder and mob rule—had at last been brought to an end. Official propaganda tried to pretend that the public reaction had been one of “incredible enthusiasm.” There was nothing of that kind, which explains Hitler’s often-repeated charge against the middle class: that it was obsessed with constitutionality and always raised a loud outcry “when the government renders a noxious menace to the nation harmless, for example by killing him.” But the public did tend to interpret the two-day orgy of killing in terms of its traditional antirevolutionary feelings. The movement was at last “overcoming its adolescence”; the moderate, order-oriented forces around Hitler were triumphing over the chaotic energies of Nazism. This notion was supported by the fact that among those liquidated were notorious murderers and sadistic ruffians. Actually, the whole operation against Rohm presents itself as a paradigm of Hitler’s trick of striking in such a way that reaction would be split, so that those who were most outraged had reason to thank him. How well he had put it across can be seen in the telegram from President Hindenburg expressing his “profoundly felt gratitude.” “You have saved the German people from a grave peril,” the President wired. He also bestowed the ultimate accolade: “He who wishes to make history must also be able to shed blood.”
The reaction of the army was perhaps even more decisive in alleviating the public’s doubts and premonitions. Feeling itself the real victor of those three days, the army blatantly expressed its satisfaction at the elimination of the “brown trash.” On July 1, while the killing was going on unabated, the Berlin Guards Company goose-stepped down the Wilhelmstrasse, past the chancellery, to the tune of Hitler’s favorite Badenweiler March. Two days later Defense Minister von Blomberg congratulated Hitler for the successful completion of the “purge.” And, contrary to his policy of earlier years, Hitler now made a point of reinforcing the Reichwehr’s sense of triumph. In his Reichstag speech he not only named it the sole bearer of arms in the state but also declared that he would preserve “the army as an unpolitical instrument.” He assured the officers and soldiers that he could not “demand from them that as individuals each should take up a clear-cut position towards our Movement.”
By these unusual and never-to-be-repeated concessions Hitler expressed his gratitude to the army leadership for having remained loyal to him in the recent critical hours, when his fate lay in their hands. Once again, everything had hung in the balance after the SS squad had killed General von Schleicher, his wife, and General von Bredow. If at this moment the army had insisted on a legal investigation, the theory of a conspiracy would have been exploded and the blow against the conservatives exposed as the murderous coup it was. The bourgeois Right would not have been permanently paralyzed; it might possibly have emerged from the affair with increased confidence. It would have preserved moral standing. In any case, Goring would not have gone uncontradicted when he concluded the Reichstag session of July 13 by declaring that the entire German people, “man by man and woman by woman,” was united in a single outcry: ‘We always approve everything our Fuhrer does.’ ”
Hitler, with his intuition for power relationships, had realized that if the army would stand for the murder of army men, he had achieved the breakthrough to unlimited control. An institution that accepted such a blow could never again effectively oppose him. At the moment the army leadership was still gloating, and Reichenau was commenting complacently that it had not been a simple matter to have the whole thing appear as a purely internal party dispute. But Hitler had not intended to give the army a large enough part in the elimination of Rohm to put him under obligation to it. He involved it just far enough to corrupt it. It was an unequal alliance that these dilettantes in uniform, who were dabbling in politics, struck up with Hitler. Defense Minister von Blomberg had made the unforgettable statement that henceforth the German officer’s honor must consist in being cunning. But, as has been trenchantly pointed out,50 the military were guided by political incompetence and arrogance.
If the public order was actually threatened by rebels and conspirators, as von Blomberg later represented the situation, then the army probably had the duty to intervene. If that were not the case, then it should have called a halt to the killing. Instead, it had waited, had made weapons available, and in the end its leaders had congratulated themselves on their acuteness at emerging with clean hands and nevertheless as victors. They succumbed not to the “nemesis of power,” as the English historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett has asserted, but to their failure to recognize how short-lived this victory would be. At the height of the killing former State Secretary Planck urged General von Fritsch to intervene. The commander in chief of the army replied that he had no orders to do so. Planck warned him: “If you, General, stand by idly watching, sooner or later you will suffer the same fate.” Three and a half years later, Fritsch, together with Blomberg, was dismissed under a dishonoring cloud. The charge, as in the cases of Schleicher and Bredow, was based on forged documents, and now it was the turn of the SA to rejoice over the “revenge for June 30.”
This aphorism was totally borne out by subsequent events. It is true that June 30 dealt a fatal blow to the SA. Its formerly rebellious self-assertive profile henceforth almost vanished behind petty bourgeois features. Brass knuckles and rubber truncheons gave way to collection boxes. But the army did not assume the place vacated by the storm troopers. Three weeks later Hitler coolly took advantage of the manifest weakness of the army
