In the summer of 1934 Adolf Hitler planned and conducted the most
ruthless purge of his thirteen-year period as leader of Germany. The
victims were not political opponents but friends, colleagues and fellow
fascists who had helped the Nazi Party in its rise to power.
The Night of the Long Knives broke the back and the will of the
Sturmabteilung, the SA, the brawling street thugs who had bludgeoned
political opposition into submission. The SA's ruthless bullyboy tactics
played no small part in Hitler's establishment of a dictatorship that
was to influence affairs in Germany - and the world - throughout the
1930s and beyond.
In some respects the purge was inevitable. Hitler had to eliminate all
potential rivals if he was to consolidate his position of power. And
that meant that friends like Ernst Röhm, former German Chancellor Kurt
von Schleicher, and even former party comrades like Gregor Strasser were
summarily shot without trial. Above all it was the SA that the army, the
industrialists and, more than anyone else, Adolf Hitler feared. Röhm
enjoyed a popularity that almost rivaled Hitler's and so he had to go.
It was also an opportunity to settle personal scores. The Night of the
Long Knives was a cull that eliminated somewhere between 300 and a
thousand victims, the exact number has never been clear, many of them
innocent of any intention to rival Hitler. It remains one of the most
significant killings of modern times.
