Phil Carradice - Night of the Long Knives: Hitlers Excision of Rohms SA Brownshirts, 30 June – 2 July 1934

Adolf Hitler, already hell bent on destruction.

The Night of the Long Knives was a seminal moment for Hitler and the Nazis. Before that deadly weekend when Hitler destroyed the last vestiges of opposition to his regime, the Nazi Party had been comprised of thugs, vicious and violent thugs admittedly, but thugs all the same. They were men who lived by the fist and the jackboot without fear of reprisal. After the purge they were cold-blooded murderers who would stop at nothing to achieve their ends. As the 1930s progressed it was almost as if the demands of an obscene regime superseded the equally vile intentions of individuals. At its most basic level the aims and ideals of individuals were subsumed by the needs of the State.

Individuals still committed atrocities but they were approved, even directed, by the governmentin fact by Adolf Hitler. And all of the horrors of the Third Reich, the persecutions and the Holocaust, the terrible wars and the destruction, stem from Hitler and from that moment in the warm and unsuspecting early summer of 1934.

The underlying causes or motives behind the killing of several hundred potential opponents to Hitler were not just the needs of Germany or the Party; there was also a personal element for Germanys new dictator. The Night of the Long Knives was a watershed, a crucial moment when he stood poised between the pull of friendship and the desire for power, ultimate and absolute power which, as we know, corrupts absolutely. We also know which way Hitler chose to go.

There is only one purpose or aim behind studying history: to make sure that we do not make the same mistakes again. Sadly, we do not have to look far in this world to find governments and individuals who have not learned from their reading of history and continue to make the same old errors over and over again. We all of us have a duty, as strange and as abstract as it might seem, to ensure that people study history for the right reasons. If we can make that study interesting in the way that a story is interesting, holding us rapt and fascinated from beginning to end, then we have a much better chance of fulfilling that aim.

We should all read about this dire and dreadful weekend of murder and mayhem, viewing it as a terrible story at the start of an even more terrible period in human history. Asking any reader to enjoy the tale of murder and betrayal, the double dealing that makes up a large and significant part of the Night of the Long Knives, would be both facile and wrong. It would make us little better than the Nazis who committed the outrages in the first place. But that should not stop people learning from those dreadful events. It is, perhaps, not what Adolf Hitler would have wanted but, then, as Hitler and the Nazis eventually found out, we do not always get what we want in life.

Introduction Hitler and Ernst Rhm, friends but also mortal enemies.

OVERTURE

In the game of golf there is an expression used to describe that infuriating moment when a ball hit across the green comes to rest, hovering on the lip of the hole. It is called a banana republic. In other words just one more revolution is all that is needed for the ball to topple forward and finish up at the bottom of the cup.