killing a Nazi that the army high command regarded as a threat.
The most prominent target of Hitler’s purge was Ernst Rohm, the leader of one of the Nazi paramilitaries, the SA brownshirts. The SA had helped Hitler assert his personal authority, to intimidate opponents (and voters), and to come to power in 1933. The streetfighting of the SA was less useful to Hitler as chancellor than it had been for Hitler as politician. Rohm spoke in 1933 and 1934 of the need for a second revolution, an idea that Hitler rejected. Rohm also nurtured personal ambitions that ill fit Hitler’s plans to rebuild the German military. Rohm portrayed his SA as a better reflection of the Nazi spirit than the German armed forces, which he wished to control himself. His three million SA brownshirts far outnumbered the hundred thousand soldiers permitted to the German armed forces by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler meant to break those treaty obligations, but by rebuilding the German army rather than by replacing or merging it with a paramilitary.38
In late June 1934 Hitler ordered the SS to murder Rohm and several dozen of his associates, as well as other rivals within the Nazi movement and a few other politicians. The SS was led by Heinrich Himmler, who emphasized racial purity, ideological training, and personal loyalty to Hitler. In what came to be known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler was using one of the Nazi paramilitaries, the SS, to master the other, the SA. He was endorsing Himmler’s work, and putting an end to Rohm—and dozens of other people. Hitler told the parliament on 14 July 1935 that seventy-four men had been killed; the true number was at least eighty-five, several of whom were (Nazi) parliamentary deputies. He claimed, naturally, that Rohm and the others had been planning a coup against his legitimate government, and had to be stopped in advance. In addition to the SA leadership, Hitler’s blood purge had reached conservatives and former heads of government. Of the three chancellors who had preceded him, one was murdered, one was arrested, and the third fled.39
Because the SS was the chosen instrument of the murder campaign, Himmler moved closer to the center of power. The SS, now separated institutionally from the SA, became the most powerful institution within the National Socialist party. After the Night of the Long Knives, its task would be to subordinate the many German police institutions to Nazi ideology. Himmler would seek to merge his SS with Germany’s established police forces by way of rotation of personnel and institutional centralization under his personal command. In 1936 Hitler named Himmler the Chief of German Police. This placed him in charge of the uniformed men of the Order Police, the detectives of the Criminal Police, and the operatives of the Secret State Police (Gestapo). The police was a state institution (or rather comprised a number of different state institutions) and the SS was a Nazi party institution; Himmler sought to bring the two together. In 1937, Himmler established the office of Higher SS and Police Leaders, regional chiefs who in theory commanded both SS and police forces, and unified the hierarchy of command.40
Just as important as the elevation of the SS over the SA was the improvement of relations between Hitler and the generals. The execution of Rohm earned Hitler a debt of gratitude from the army high command. Until 1934, the army had been the only important state institution that Hitler had not fully mastered. Once Hitler showed that he planned to rebuild the army rather than overwhelm it with the SA, this quickly changed. When the German president died a few weeks later, the military endorsed Hitler’s elevation to head of state. Hitler would never claim the title “president”; he preferred “Leader.” From August 1934, German soldiers swore an unconditional oath of personal loyalty to Hitler, and thenceforth addressed him as “My Leader.” Later that month Hitler’s titles as “Leader and Reich Chancellor” were confirmed by national plebiscite. In March 1935, Hitler publically renounced Germany’s commitments under the Versailles Treaty, reintroduced military conscription, and began to rebuild the German armed forces.41
Like Stalin, Hitler showed himself to be the master of the organs of power, presenting himself as the victim of plots, and then ridding himself of real or imagined rivals. Simultaneously, however, Hitler was creating the kinds of instruments of coercion that Stalin had inherited from Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. The SS and the German police would never be capable of organized terror within Germany on the scale of the NKVD in the Soviet Union. The Night of the Long Knives, with its dozens of victims, was dwarfed by the Soviet purges of the party, armed forces, and NKVD, in which tens of thousands of people were executed. That was far more people than the Nazi regime would kill before the Second World War. The SS would need time and practice before it could rival the NKVD. Himmler saw his charges as “ideological soldiers,” but they would fulfill their mission of racial conquest and domination only at the backs of true soldiers: behind the lines in Poland after 1939, or in the Soviet Union after 1941.42
The logic of Hitler’s domestic terror was of a future offensive war: fought by an expanded Wehrmacht loyal to Hitler, transformed into a war of destruction by the SS and the police. In this one sense, Stalin’s fears of war were perfectly justified. The Germans, however, were not counting on help from the Soviet population in that coming war. In this respect, Stalin’s scenario of threat, the union of foreign enemies with domestic opponents, was quite wrong. Thus the still greater terror that Stalin would unleash upon his own population in 1937 and 1938 was entirely fruitless, and indeed counterproductive.
The Soviet purges within the army, party, and NKVD were the prelude to Stalin’s Great Terror, which in 1937 and 1938 would take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for reasons of class and nation. The interrogations of tens of thousands of people during the purges generated a multitude of “organizations,” “plots,” and “groups”—categories into which more and more Soviet citizens could fall. The executions of communist party members no doubt gave rise to fears within the communist party; but the party would generally be spared, if its members followed Stalin’s lead in summer 1937 and agreed to pursue the true enemies within the mass of Soviet society. The purges also tested the loyalty of the NKVD, as its leadership was changed at the whim of Stalin, and its officers were forced to watch as their colleagues were purged. Yet in summer 1937 the besieged NKVD would be turned against social groups that many of its officers were ready to define as enemies. For months the top leadership of the Soviet Union had been plotting a blow against a group that they perhaps did fear: the kulaks.43
The kulaks were peasants, the stubborn survivors of Stalin’s revolution: of collectivization and famine, and very often of the Gulag. As a social class, the kulak (prosperous peasant) never really existed; the term was rather a Soviet classification that took on a political life of its own. The attempt to “liquidate the kulaks” during the first Five-Year Plan had killed a tremendous number of people, but it created rather than destroyed a class: those who had been stigmatized and repressed, but who had survived. The millions of people who were deported or who fled during collectivization were forever after regarded as kulaks, and sometimes accepted the classification. What Soviet leaders had to consider was the possibility that the revolution itself had created its own opponents. At the plenum of the central committee of the communist party in February and March 1937, several speakers drew the logical conclusions. “Alien elements” were corrupting the pure proletariat of the cities. The kulaks were “impassioned enemies” of the Soviet system.44
To be a kulak was not only to have suffered, it was to have survived movement across vast distances. Collectivization had forced millions of kulaks into the Gulag or into the cities. This meant journeys of hundreds or even thousands of miles. Some three million peasants, at least, had become paid laborers during the first Five- Year Plan. That, after all, was the Plan: that the Soviet Union would be transformed from an agrarian to an industrial country. Perhaps two hundred thousand people who would have been stigmatized as kulaks had made for the cities before they could be executed or deported. About four hundred thousand kulaks had managed to flee the special settlements, some for the cities, more for the countryside. Tens of thousands more had been allowed to leave concentration camps and the special settlements after serving their terms. Five-year Gulag sentences in 1930, 1931, and 1932 meant mass releases of Gulag survivors in 1935, 1936, and 1937.45
The optimistic assumption had been that the movement and the punishment would strip the kulak of his harmful social origins, and make of him a Soviet person. By the second half of the 1930s, Stalinism had shed any such expectations of progress. The very social mobility intrinsic to his policy of industrialization was now unsettling. Kulaks were rejoining the collective farms: perhaps they would lead rebellions, as other peasants had done in 1930. The kulaks were returning to a social order that was traditional in many ways. Stalin knew, from the 1937 census that he suppressed, that a majority of adults still defied the atheism of the Soviet state and believed in God. Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, religious faith was perplexing, and perhaps unnerving. Could the kulaks rebuild the society that once had been?46
The kulaks sentenced later or to longer terms in the Gulag were still in exile in Siberia or Kazakhstan, in Soviet east or central Asia: might not such people support a Japanese invasion? The NKVD reported in June 1937 that exiled kulaks in Siberia constituted a “broad base on which to build an insurgent rebellion.” Surely, given the
