leadership. On July 20, 1934, he freed the SS “in view of its great services… especially in connection with the events of June 30” from its subordination to the SA and raised it to the rank of an independent organization directly subordinate to himself. At the same time, it was allowed to rival the army in maintaining armed fighting forces—at first of only one division.
Few acts so clearly reveal the core of Hitler’s technique as this decision. No sooner was the SA eliminated than he was promoting the building of a new power center of the same kind, in order to be able to continue his game of protecting his own rule. All those who were intimately or remotely participants in the events of June 30 naively assumed that the purge had resolved a question of power. But Hitler secured his own personal power precisely by never really settling the power conflicts within his entourage. He merely shifted them to other planes and continued playing out the game with new pieces, in altered confrontations.
Politically, as well as tactically, the SS took over many of the functions of the SA. But it markedly avoided that claim to independence which Rohm’s following had always so obtrusively made. For the SA had never wholly submitted to the principle of blind obedience; it had always emphasized its aloofness from the despised corps of party people. By contrast, the SS felt itself to be a totally loyal elite, serving as the sentinel and vanguard of the National Socialist idea, a pure instrument of the Fuhrer’s will. In this spirit it began, on June 30, its inexorable process of expansion in all directions. Soon the SA and then the party also vanished in its mighty shadow, so that there ceased to be any road to power that bypassed the SS.
The rise of the SS, which so crucially determined the history and features of the Third Reich and by no means ended with the downfall of the regime, incidentally revealed something else: that Rohm had rightfully considered himself as being, in the last analysis, of one mind with Hitler. Himmler, constantly prodded by Reinhard Heydrich restively operating in the background, tranformed the Reichsfuhrung-SS [13] into a mighty, many-branched apparatus. Ultimately, it became a genuine subsidiary government that penetrated into all existing institutions, undermined their political power, and gradually began replacing them. What Himmler thus accomplished was nothing less than Ernst Rohm’s impatient though ultimately vague vision. Rohm’s ambitious lieutenants had dreamed of an SA state. Himmler brought into being, at least in its initial phases, an actual SS state. Rohm was liquidated because he wanted to achieve by immediate action what Hitler, as he explained to intimates, sought to arrive at “slowly and deliberately, by taking the tiniest steps at a time.”
June 30 also signified the elimination of a type of personality that had been almost indispensable for the history of Hitler’s rise: the rough daredevil, usually a onetime army officer, who had fought first in the Free Corps and then as one of Hitler’s street-battle heroes, trying to carry over his wartime experiences into civilian reality and suddenly left without any assignment once the goal was reached. Machiavelli. pointed out in a famous aphorism that power is not maintained with the same following that has helped to win it. Mussolini is said to have made this comment to Hitler when they met in Venice. In the course of the conquest of power a limited degree of revolution from below had been permitted. By destroying the top leadership of the SA, Hitler choked off that limited revolution. The Rohm affair concluded the so-called period of struggle and marked the turning point away from the vague, utopian phase of the movement to the sober reality of a disciplined state. The romantic barricade fighter was replaced by the more modern revolutionary types such as the SS produced: those passionless bureaucrats who supervised a revolution whose like had never been known. Thinking not in terms of the mob but in terms of structures, they placed their explosive charges deeper than perhaps any revolutionaries before them.
But Rohm’s impatience would scarcely have been a mortal flaw had not Hitler had other things in mind besides eliminating the SA chief. As the propaganda campaign preceding the operation indicated, the events of June 30, 1934, were aimed at any opposition, at any independent position in general. For years to come there was no serious organized resistance. The dual thrust of the operation also disclosed an aspect of Hitler that one might have thought he had transcended. Strictly speaking, he charged the SA leaders only with premature haste and stupidity. But his boundless hatred, nourished by old resentments, erupted against those conservatives who had thought to “hire” and outwit him:
They’re all mistaken. They underestimate me. Because I come from below, from the “lower depths,” because I have no education, because my manners aren’t what they with their sparrow brains think is right. If I were one of them they’d call me a great man—now, already. But I don’t need them to confirm my historic greatness. The rebelliousness of my SA has cost me many trumps. But I still hold others. I’m not at a loss for resources when something goes wrong for me once in a while….
I’ve spoiled their plans. They thought I wouldn’t dare, that I’d be too cowardly. They could already see me thrashing in their nets. They thought I’d become their tool. And behind my back they made jokes about me, said I no longer had any power, that I’d thrown away my party. I saw through it all long ago. I’ve taught them a lesson they’ll remember for a long time. What I lost in passing judgment on the SA I’ll regain in bringing judgment down on these feudal gamblers and professional card-sharpers, the Schleichers and their crew.
If I call upon the people today, they’ll follow me. If I appeal to the party, it will stand as solid as ever…. Come on, Messrs. Papen and Hugenberg—I’m ready for the next round.51
What he knew, and really meant, was that there would be no next round for these opponents.
To sum up, the challenge facing Hitler before June 30 required the simultaneous solution of no fewer than five problems. He had to quash Rohm and his rebellious band of SA permanent revolutionists definitively. He had to satisfy the demands of the army. He had to dispel public dissatisfaction with the rule of the streets and visible terrorism. He had to head off the conservatives’ counterplans. All this had to be done without becoming the prisoner of one side or the other. He took care of it all by means of a single limited operation and at a cost of relatively few victims. With this behind him, he could move directly to his principal aim, which would complete the process of seizing power. That aim was to succeed Hindenburg as President.
From the middle of July on, the President’s condition was visibly deteriorating. His death was expected any day. On July 31 the government for the first time issued an official bulletin on the state of his health. And although on the following day the news sounded somewhat more optimistic, Hitler irreverently anticipated the event by presenting to the cabinet a law concerning the succession. The new law was to take effect on Hindenburg’s death. It provided for combining the office of President with that of the Fuhrer and Chancellor, a measure that could be justified by evoking the law of January 30, 1934, which gave the administration powers to alter the Constitution. But since this authority derived from the Enabling Act, any action based on it should have taken into account the guarantees explicitly set forth in that act. Inviolability of the office of the President was one of the guarantees. But the “law concerning the head of state” boldly ignored that limitation—once more violating Hitler’s principle of legality—and thus broke through the last barrier to Hitler’s dictatorship. Hitler’s exuberant highhandedness is further shown in his affixing the signature of ViceChancellor von Papen to the new law, though Papen was not even present at the cabinet session.
That same day Hitler went to Neudeck to visit Hindenburg on his deathbed. But the old man was only conscious for moments and addressed Hitler as “Your Majesty.” In spite of his imposing stature he had always felt comfortable only in relationships of dependency or feudal homage. He died on the following day, in the morning hours Of August 2. In a government proclamation he was hailed as a “monumental memorial of the distant past,” whose “almost incalculable services” culminated in the fact that “on January 30, 1933… he opened the gates of the Reich for the young National Socialist Movement,” that he led the Germany of yesterday to “profound reconciliation” with the Germany of tomorrow and became in peace what he had been in war, “the national myth of the German people.”
The death of Hindenburg made no tangible break. In the plethora of obituaries and testimonials of grief, the legal measures went almost unnoticed. But those carefully prepared measures sealed the new situation. A decree of Hitler’s instructed the Minister of the Interior to prepare a plebiscite in order to give the union of chancellorship and presidency—which was presented as already “constitutionally valid”—the “explicit sanction of the German people.” For Hitler declared he was “firmly permeated with the conviction that every state power must proceed from the people and be confirmed by the people in free and secret elections.” To disguise the absolute power that would now center in himself he announced that the “greatness of the departed” did not permit him to claim the title of President for himself. He therefore wished, “in official as well as in unofficial communication to continue to be addressed only as Fuhrer and Chancellor.”