Röhm putsch

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Ernst Röhm (center) shortly after his appointment as minister without portfolio in the Hitler cabinet (SA group leader Karl Ernst on the right, Franz von Stephani on the left ; December 1933)

The events at the end of June / beginning of July 1934 in which the leadership of the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler had the executives of the SA including the chief of staff Ernst Röhm murdered are referred to as the Röhm Putsch . The Nazi propaganda presented the killings falsely as a preventive measure against an impending coup of the SA under Roehm - the so-called Putsch -. Is a result of the term was Putsch of Hitler and the Nazi propaganda not only for the alleged coup but used for all events including the Hitler-ordered murders.

In what would later become known as the “Night of the Long Knives” (June 30 / July 1, 1934), Ernst Röhm and other functionaries of the SA leadership summoned on Hitler's instructions at Tegernsee were arrested and - in some cases on the same night - by members of the SS murdered. More murders followed over the next few days. About 90 murdered people have been identified by name, but some researchers assume that around 150–200 people were murdered. In addition to SA members, this included other people who were considered hostile by the National Socialist leadership, including well-known personalities such as B. Kurt von Schleicher , Hitler's predecessor as Reich Chancellor , and Major General Ferdinand von Bredow , the former Deputy Reich Defense Minister , and Gregor Strasser as Reich Propaganda Leader and Reich Organizational Leader until 1932 due to the Strasser crisis . There were also random victims due to mix-ups.

The "cleansing wave" , which had been prepared for a long time , primarily at the instigation of Hitler and Hermann Göring , was carried out by SS commands with the support of the Gestapo and the Reichswehr . The murder was based on internal Nazi ideological differences and political power tensions between the SA and parts of the NSDAP , on whose side Hitler stood.

After the murders, the SA lost its political importance, the SS became independent and assumed an important role. After the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, the leadership of the Reichswehr had the Reichswehr sworn in on Hitler .

term

In addition to the term Röhm Putsch, which was widely used by Nazi propaganda , the expression Röhm revolt was initially predominant. The murders were thus presented as a preventive measure against an allegedly imminent putsch by Röhm. In this way they should be given the appearance of legitimation . Although there were no putsch plans on the part of Röhm, the propaganda term "Röhm-Putsch", which was used at the time in German history, has survived. Alternative terms are June murders or the elimination of the SA . The contemporary names Night of the Long Knives and German Bartholomew's Night were critical .

prehistory

The SA had contributed significantly to the seizure of power . On December 31, 1933, Hitler thanked Röhm in a particularly warm letter for his "undying service" and assured him of his friendship for the new year. To the annoyance of Goering and Goebbels, Röhm was able to see himself as the second man in the state and enjoyed (probably enforced by himself) public privileges in Hitler's environment. Röhm is also said to have brought extensive claims to power - such as the appointment as Minister of War - against Hitler and blackmailed Hitler with compromising information. But the status of the SA in relation to the NSDAP and the “interpretative sovereignty” over the National Socialist movement initially remained unclear. While Röhm and the SA leadership saw the SA as the actual bearer of the movement , the NSDAP superiors wanted to grant it only the position of an order force of the party. After the "seizure of power" by the National Socialists in 1933, tensions intensified. On the one hand, the indiscriminate riots of the SA did not help the NSDAP to secure rule, on the other hand, the SA wanted to inherit the Reichswehr in the medium term. According to the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the Reichswehr comprised 100,000 men. The SA, which had considerably fewer than 500,000 members at the time of the takeover of government, had grown to around four and a half million members by mid-1934, with many new additions being made through the incorporation of national military associations such as the Stahlhelm . In addition, the SA leadership attached great importance to the socialist aspect and wanted a reorganization of society as well as expropriations according to the 25-point program of the NSDAP of 1920.

Ernst Röhm (right) with Kurt Daluege and Heinrich Himmler in August 1933

Röhm pursued far-reaching political goals. In January 1934, for example, a contribution by Röhm appeared in the National Socialist monthly magazine and in the Völkischer Beobachter , in which he announced that the goal of the National Socialist revolution had not yet been achieved. The SA and SS would, if they had to, die for the idea of ​​the swastika .

In the same edition of the National Socialist monthly issue, however, there was also a contribution by Rudolf Hess in which he declared that the SA and other sub-organizations did not have the slightest need to lead an independent existence. At this time the head of the Prussian Secret State Police Office , Rudolf Diels , received the order to collect material against the SA. After Röhm had sent the Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg a memorandum on February 1, 1934 , according to which the future function of the Reichswehr should be limited to a pure training army, Blomberg stated at a commanders' meeting that the attempt to reach an agreement with the SA had failed. Reichswehr agencies were also given the task of collecting material against the SA.

In a speech to Gauleiters on February 2, 1934 in Berlin, Hitler rejected Röhm's statement that the revolution was not yet over. He wanted to give up his reputation as a street fighter because, because of his planned arming of the Wehrmacht , he was dependent on cooperation with business and the Reichswehr, whose weapons monopoly he had confirmed. This was in conflict with Röhm's will to convert the SA into a regular army. On February 28, Hitler announced to the heads of the SA and Wehrmacht that a militia was unsuitable for his plans, that only a Wehrmacht with general conscription was possible . The main task for the storm departments is political education. He expressly warned the SA not to cause him difficulties in this matter.

For Röhm, Hitler's decision was a bitter defeat. After the event he said to the SA leaders who were present: “What the ridiculous corporal said does not apply to us. If not, we will do the thing without Hitler. ”A listener, SA- Obergruppenführer Viktor Lutze , informed Hess about this statement. Then Lutze was received by Hitler at the Berghof for a discussion lasting several hours.

The SS spread rumors about an allegedly impending putsch by Röhm as well as about his homosexual tendencies , the latter at that time a serious blemish and a criminal offense ( § 175 StGB ), which had not bothered Hitler before (“The party is not a boarding school for higher daughters, but a fighting organization. "). Röhm's homosexuality was even an open secret, highlighted by Fritz Gerlich in the newspaper “ Der direkt Weg ” . Nonetheless, an ideological conflict about Röhm's homosexuality had been fermenting for some time, which led to the first failed murder plot in 1932. SS and Gestapo boss Heinrich Himmler , who was largely responsible for the elimination of Roehm, saw homosexuality as a threat to the state, which he in the sense of the philosopher Hans Blüher regarded as a male domain. In his eyes, homosexual men strive to subvert state structures, which, however, does not strengthen them, as Blüher said, but on the contrary leads to the “destruction of the state”. Himmler was finally able to assert himself with this point of view. In Röhm, who had actually installed some homosexual SA functionaries in his immediate environment, Himmler saw a kind of key witness to his conspiracy theory. The murder of Röhm was legitimized to the public as a defense against a coup attempt by a homosexual clique.

In April 1934, the Reichswehr launched a military propaganda campaign in which the army was declared the nation's sole bearer of arms. In May the military authorities were instructed again to report violations by the SA of the agreement concluded in February.

SA marching exercise, May 1932

Meanwhile, Röhm continued to give speeches in which he placed the SA and the National Socialist Revolution at the center. In the spring of 1934 he organized large-scale field exercises and mobilizations. In May, Röhm issued an order to collect reports on hostilities against the SA.

On May 11, 1934, Goebbels started an action against Miesmacher and Criticismasters , which he had been preparing for weeks , which he expanded considerably in June. On May 11 of that year, however, he explicitly defended the SA.

On June 4, 1934, there was a five-hour discussion between Hitler and Röhm, whereupon Röhm took a cure in Bad Wiessee because of a rheumatic disease and on June 8, the SA ordered a general leave of absence for July.

The last trigger for the targeted murder of numerous people, which took place over several days, was possibly the Marburg speech by Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on June 17, 1934 at the University of Marburg . Papen turned against the rigid press control , against the domination of a single party and especially against the supporters of a second National Socialist revolution.

On the same day, at a rally by the Thuringian NSDAP district in Gera , Hitler threatened that the “clenched fist of the nation” would crush anyone who dared to even make the slightest attempt at sabotage . The spread of Papen's speech was suppressed by Goebbels; Papen's efforts to speak to Reich President Paul von Hindenburg about this matter were able to delay Hitler.

On June 21, 1934, Hitler visited Hindenburg at Gut Neudeck . The events during this visit are presented differently. The British historian John Wheeler-Bennett argues that both Blomberg and Hindenburg himself, who were present, ultimately urged Hitler to do what was necessary for Germany's internal peace. Otherwise the Reich President would declare a state of emergency and thus oust Hitler. Similar representations can be found in the white paper on the shootings of June 30, 1934 (Paris 1935) and in the representation of the American journalist William L. Shirer . In this context, the historian Kirstin A. Schäfer speaks of "rumors" for which there is not a single evidence in Blomberg's own records. Hitler himself told Alfred Rosenberg, according to his diary entry from June 28, 1934, that Hindenburg had never been so friendly to him as he was during this visit.

On June 22nd, Hitler called Viktor Lutze, who was devoted to him, and ordered him not to obey any orders from Munich, but only to follow his own. On that day, Himmler announced to the leader of the SS Upper Section Middle, Friedrich Karl von Eberstein , that Röhm wanted to put on a coup with the SA and that he - von Eberstein - should therefore put his SS units on silent alert and contact the Reichswehr. On June 23, the head of the General Arms Office of the Reichswehr, Colonel Friedrich Fromm , informed his officers of the SA's intentions to put forward. The SS was on the side of the Reichswehr, they could be given weapons.

In the 48 hours that followed, Hitler informed Reichswehr Minister Blomberg that he would intervene personally on June 30, 1934 and settle accounts with the putschists. Thereupon the chief of the army command , General Werner von Fritsch , put the entire Reichswehr on alert. On June 25, Rudolf Hess spoke on the Reich broadcaster in Cologne and criticized “provocateurs” who tried to incite fellow nationals against one another and to disguise this criminal game with the honorary name of a second revolution.

Assassination of Röhm

List of the penal institution Stadelheim in Munich with the persons admitted there on June 30, 1934. The six people shot on that day on Hitler's orders were ticked off with crosses by the management.

Around June 25, 1934, the SS and SD leaders were called to Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich told them that a revolt of the SA was imminent and that defensive measures had to be prepared. At around the same time, the Reichswehr was informed of an impending coup, whereupon weapons, transport space, accommodation and intervention reserves were made available for the SS and SD. Papen's speechwriter Edgar Jung was arrested at this time and murdered on the night of June 30th to July 1st. Hitler, Göring and other heads of the regime finally agreed on a “Reich list” of those to be murdered and arrested.

On June 27, 1934, the commander of the SS-Leibstandarte , Sepp Dietrich , appeared at the Reichswehr Ministry and asked the staff officer responsible for additional weapons and ammunition for a secret and very important assignment from the Führer, whereupon everything requested was made available. The technical preparations were completed on June 28th. On this day, Röhm was expelled from the Association of German Officers without him or the public knowing anything about it. On that day Hitler went to Essen with Göring and Lutze to attend the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven . During the celebration the news arrived that Hindenburg would presumably receive Papen on June 30th, whereupon Hitler was immediately brought to his hotel.

In response to a call from Himmler, who reported that the Berlin SA wanted to strike in 48 hours, Goring flew back to Berlin on Hitler's instructions to initiate the planned actions. Röhm's adjutant received an order by telephone to ensure that all SA leaders were present at a meeting with Hitler in Röhm's holiday resort Bad Wiessee in the late morning of June 30th. Röhm himself was pleased with this announcement to his adjutant. On June 29th, an unusual article by Blomberg appeared in the party official Völkischer Beobachter , in which he assured that the Reichswehr was behind the leader of the Reich Adolf Hitler. In the morning Hitler visited the labor camp, on the afternoon of June 29 he drove to Bad Godesberg and met Goebbels at the Rheinhotel Dreesen and around 8 p.m. with SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, who had previously organized weapons from the Reichswehr. Dietrich had to fly to Munich and should call him from there to receive further orders. At the same time, 220 men from the Leibstandarte were brought to Upper Bavaria by train.

Goebbels, who had actually expected action against the "reaction" around Papen, now learned that the main attack was to be carried out against Röhm and the SA. Hitler justified this with the fact that there was evidence that Röhm was conspiring with François-Poncet , Schleicher and Strasser for the purpose of high treason and treason .

On the night of June 29 to 30, 1934, SA men rioted in various parts of Germany after hearing rumors of action against the SA. In Munich, called by anonymous flyers, about 3,000 SA men marched loudly through the city that night. However, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner managed to calm the men down. The local SA commanders August Schneidhuber and Wilhelm Schmid assured them that the SA stood wholeheartedly behind the Führer. The authors of the handouts remained unknown.

Sepp Dietrich arrived in Munich at midnight. He was instructed by telephone to pick up two companies of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and to be in Bad Wiessee by eleven o'clock at the latest. On June 30, 1934, around two in the morning, Hitler's plane took off from the Hangelar airfield and arrived in Munich at around four, accompanied by Goebbels and Lutze.

He and his entourage immediately went to the Ministry of the Interior there and summoned the local SA commanders, Schneidhuber and Schmid. Hitler reproached them for the nightly action of the SA, accused them of treason and personally degraded them by tearing off their shoulder pieces. Both were arrested on the spot and taken to Stadelheim prison.

Around five o'clock Hitler left the Ministry of the Interior and, without waiting for the arrival of Dietrich and his two companies, accompanied by Goebbels and Lutze and selected SS men to Bad Wiessee. Shortly after half past six the three cars stopped in front of the Hotel Hanselbauer.

Hotel Lederer am See (formerly Kurheim Hanselbauer) in Bad Wiessee shortly before the planned demolition in 2017.

Hitler's driver Erich Kempka : “With a whip in hand, Hitler entered Röhm's bedroom in the 'Hanselbauer' guesthouse in Bad Wiessee, behind him two detectives with an unlocked pistol. He uttered the words: 'Röhm, you are under arrest!' Rohm looked sleepily from the pillows of his bed and stammered: 'Heil, mein Führer!' 'You are under arrest!' Shouted Hitler for the second time, turned and walked out of the room. “The same happened to the other SA leaders. Only Edmund Heines , police chief in Breslau , who was surprised in bed with Erich Schiewek , offered resistance.

When a truck with the heavily armed staff guard of the highest SA leadership appeared, a critical situation arose for Hitler. However, Hitler succeeded in urging Röhm's bodyguard to withdraw by issuing sharp orders while their boss Julius Uhl was a prisoner in the cellar. On the way back the guard between Wiessee and Gmund turned back, but by then it was already too late because the prisoners had meanwhile been transported in the opposite direction via Rottach-Egern towards Munich.

In the meantime, the SA leaders who had traveled to the scheduled conference on the night express trains from all parts of Germany were arrested at Munich Central Station by officers of the Bavarian Political Police , including Georg von Detten , Manfred von Killinger , Peter von Heydebreck , Fritz von Kraußer , Hans-Joachim von Falkenhausen , Hans Hayn and many others.

Ernst Röhm was sent to prison in Munich-Stadelheim on the same day, together with the rest of the SA leadership . On Hitler's orders, SA leaders Wilhelm Schmid, August Schneidhuber, Hans Hayn, Peter von Heydebreck, Hans Erwin von Spreti-Weilbach and Edmund Heines , who were ticked on the “Reichsliste”, were shot dead by a commando under Sepp Dietrich in Stadelheim. At Röhm, Hitler initially had scruples. Roehm was but then on Sunday, 1 July 1934 18 o'clock in Stadelheim on Hitler's orders by Theodor Eicke and hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert asked, with a gun in ten minutes suicide to commit. When everything remained calm, Eicke instructed a law enforcement officer to fetch the pistol from Röhm's cell. When Eicke and Lippert shot into the cell, Röhm was standing in the middle of the cell with his shirt torn across his chest. Eicke shot him.

More arrests and murders

Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Finckensteinallee 63-87 in Berlin-Lichterfelde , the site of the former SS barracks in Lichterfelde, where the majority of the Berlin victims of the Röhm putsch were shot.
Berlin memorial plaque on Neuchateller Strasse 8 in Berlin-Lichterfelde for Herbert von Bose who was murdered in the course of the action.

As part of the action, numerous other SA members and other people who were viewed as potentially dangerous or unwelcome were arrested throughout Germany. In addition to those people who were shot after their arrest or who were killed on the spot without bothering to arrest them, according to the arrest lists that have been preserved, 1,124 people came into " protective custody " in the course of the action “Taken but not killed.

At around ten o'clock, Hitler arrived at the “ Brown House ”. On his instructions, Goebbels called Berlin and gave Hermann Göring, who was entrusted with the supervision of the implementation of the action in northern Germany, the keyword "Kolibri". Göring and the head of the Secret State Police Office, Reinhard Heydrich, who was subordinate to him, thereupon set up grab squads of the SS, the security service of the SS (SD), the Gestapo and (despite his name) the SA- (despite his name) belonging to Göring's domain of power. Feldjägerkorps on the march, arresting the higher SA leaders listed in the "Reichsliste" (as well as on special lists of individual higher Nazi leaders) as well as some persons not belonging to the SA who were viewed as dangerous or unpopular. In addition, numerous subordinate SA men - not specifically listed on the Reich list - were arrested, especially members of the staff guards of Ernst Röhm, Karl Ernst and Edmund Heines. In total, more than 1,000 people had been detained by July 3. The people arrested in the capital were initially housed in the house prison of the Secret State Police Office, in the Columbia House, in the Berlin Police Headquarters and in the Lichterfeld cadet institute. In the days that followed, numerous detainees were gradually transferred to foreign concentration camps such as the Lichtenburg concentration camp due to the exhaustion of the accommodation capacities of these facilities . People arrested in other cities were usually placed in the local police and / or SS offices. Extensive shootings were carried out in the barracks of Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in Berlin-Lichterfelde (at least 17 people), in the Stadelheim prison in Munich (at least 7 people), in the Dachau concentration camp (at least 14 people), in the Dresden barracks of the "Political Readiness Saxony ”by the SS (at least 5 people) and in a forest area outside of Wroclaw (at least 7 people).

Some of the arrested SA leaders in the Berlin area - especially the inner circle of employees of the Berlin SA chief Karl Ernst - were taken to the SS barracks in Lichterfelde. There they were brought before a court martial, which met in the headquarters of the barracks and was chaired by Police General Walther Wecke , who conducted mock court hearings in which the result of the investigation (guilty) and the sentence (death penalty) had already been determined (in the SA the mocking rhyme then circulated : "If you come to wake up, then go crazy!" In addition to Wecke, the Lichterfeld Tribunal, which formally imposed the death sentences, also included the commander of the SA Feldjägerkorps Walter Fritsch and Adolf Hitler Konrad Leroux, the head of administration of the Leibstandarte . The death tribunal received its instructions from Wecke's boss Hermann Göring. The individual "procedures" were completed within a few minutes. The convicts were then housed in a coal cellar in the Leibstandarte hospital, from which they were gradually taken out one by one and shot in the courtyard in front of the hospital under military ceremony (drum roll etc.). The firing squads consisted of members of the Leibstandarte.

Apart from some SA leaders arrested in Berlin (such as the Ernst adjutants Daniel Gerth , Walter von Mohrenschildt , Ernst's legal advisor Gerd Voss and the SA doctor Erwin Villain, who belonged to Ernst's entourage, and the SA pioneer leader Krause; also those who were not from Ernst's environment SA press functionary Veit-Ulrich von Beulwitz ), this fate befell some high-ranking SA leaders who had been arrested in other parts of the country and then taken to Berlin in special aircraft. So the head of the political office of the OSAF, Georg von Detten and his chief of staff Hans-Joachim von Falkenhausen , the department head in the OSAF and Röhm deputy Fritz von Kraußer and Ernst's employee Wilhelm Sander , who was arrested on June 30, 1934 in Munich and in On the night of July 1st, Göring's orders were flown to Berlin to be shot in Lichterfelde on July 1st and 2nd. The SA Chief Financial Officer Karl Schreyer was brought with them from Munich to Berlin , who survived, however, as Hitler's order to stop the shootings was just arriving when the SS had him in the courtyard of the Berlin prison Columbia-Haus, where the SA- Fuehrer had first been brought, was put on a bucket car, and from there he was driven to the Lichterfeld barracks to be shot, as she had done earlier with the other men.

The first SA leader to be shot in Lichterfelde was the Berlin SA chief Ernst, who was shot at around 9:30 p.m. on the evening of June 30, 1934, after he had been arrested at noon on the same day in Bremerhaven, from where he was attacking him Tag had wanted to embark on a vacation trip to Madeira with his wife, and then had been brought to Berlin on a special plane.

On the afternoon of June 30, three SS members ( Joachim Hoffmann , Gustav Fink , Fritz Pleines ) had been shot in a side courtyard of the Lichterfeld barracks. The background to this was that , in Heinrich Himmler's opinion, these had damaged the reputation of the SS through the mistreatment of prisoners in the Bredow concentration camp in Szczecin (or through the discovery of these events in a trial that took place in March and April 1934). In addition, with these "alibi" shootings of some disagreeable SS members outwardly, one wanted to soften the impression among the mass of SA members that the action of June 30th / January 1st. July 1934 directed unilaterally against the SA.

The following SA leaders were flown in from other parts of the Reich to Berlin and then shot in the SS barracks in Lichterfelde: Hans-Karl Koch (SA commander of Koblenz and member of the Reichstag; actually pardoned by Hitler when he was arrested in Bad Wiessee and released again, but arrested again after his return to Koblenz), Konrad Schragmüller (SA group leader and police president of Magdeburg), Hans Walter Schmidt and Willi Klemm (both members of the entourage of the Silesian SA group leader Heines).

Apart from the Lichterfeld shootings, nine other people who did not belong to the SA were shot in Berlin. These were placed in their homes or workplaces by rolling commandos of the SS and SD and either shot on the spot or taken to other locations and murdered there. In detail these were:

Very few of those murdered in this way had close political or personal ties to Ernst Röhm. In many cases, old opponents, critics and those who knew about it were also murdered, such as Gustav von Kahr , who had refused to support Hitler in his 1923 putsch . He was abducted from his Munich apartment on June 30th and shot immediately after arriving at the Dachau concentration camp . The same applies to Schleicher and Strasser.

In addition, as high-ranking Nazi leaders exclaimed, it came about "because of circumstances", to the murder of bystanders like Schleicher's wife or the music critic Wilhelm Eduard Schmid in Munich. The murderers mistook him for SA leader Wilhelm Schmid . In Silesia, SS leader Udo von Woyrsch murdered dozens of SA leaders as well as some local SS rivals.

The actions were carried out primarily by the SS, including the SD , supported by the Gestapo , the state police group "General Göring" and some members of the Reichswehr.

A special fund administered by SS-General Franz Breithaupt was set up for the survivors of the murdered , from which they were provided for at state expense. The widows of the SA leaders who were killed received between 1,000 and 1,600 marks a month, depending on the rank of the murdered. Kurt von Schleicher's stepdaughter received 250 marks a month until she was 21 and Carl-Hasso von Bredow (1925–2011), the son of General von Bredow, received a monthly education allowance of 150 marks.

Number of those murdered

The exact number of those murdered in the course of the Röhm affair, the exact course of the decision-making processes and preparatory measures in the run-up to the action, the course of many arrests and executions, the personal details of a large number of the perpetrators and many other details have not yet been clarified. The reason for this was that immediately after it had ended, the Nazi government began to systematically cover up the traces of the action: The members of the SS who carried out the shootings were given an honorary oath not to speak to anyone about the action. Some sources also speak of the threat that anyone who illegally disclosed their knowledge to third parties would be shot themselves. Hermann Göring ordered the burning of all files related to the Röhm affair after Hitler ordered the murder to be stopped on July 1.

The judicial authorities were only allowed to investigate the murders carried out from June 30 to July 2 in exceptional cases, as in the case of Kuno Kamphausen . The basis for the decision as to which murders were allowed to be investigated and which not was an official death list with 77 names compiled at the beginning of July 1934 by the Detective Inspector Franz Josef Huber in the Secret State Police Office based on reports from the subordinate Gestapo and SD agencies . After Heinrich Himmler had presented this list to Hitler and approved it, the investigation into the murders of all persons on it was withdrawn from the judiciary, which was therefore only allowed to investigate the murders of people who were not on the 77 list. It can be assumed that the 77 people whom Hitler gave in his Reichstag speech of July 13 as the total number of those killed are identical to the 77 people on the list drawn up by Huber.

During the Nazi party rally in 1934, Himmler was able to convince Hitler to put six more killed people on the list of officially approved murders, which thus increased to 83 people.

Due to the requirements of the Propaganda Ministry, only a few victims were allowed to be known by name in the German press : These were the six SA leaders shot in the Stadelheim prison , as well as Ernst Röhm , the group leader Karl Ernst and General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. The publication of the wording of Hitler's Reichstag speech on July 13 also made Standartenführer Julius Uhl known to have been killed.

The foreign press, which tried to find out the actual number of people killed in the following months, was only able to provide very vague information due to the distance to the crime scenes and the difficulty of finding witnesses from Germany who would be willing to give evidence. The international press reports from the weeks immediately after the shootings presented extremely high numbers of victims, which were largely rejected by later research. In addition, they falsely claimed that numerous people had been killed whose survival could later be determined, such as Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff , Count Guttenberg and Walther Schotte . The Manchester Guardian of October 26, 1934 , for example , put the number of people killed at "around 1000", while the Neue Wiener Journal estimated it at "1184". The authors of the white book on the shootings of June 30, 1934 , published in Paris in autumn 1934 , claimed to be certain that more than 1,000 people had been killed during the Röhm affair, of whom they name only 113, including those too some could later be determined as definitely not murdered. The historian Wolfgang Sauer called the high number of victims published abroad in the 1950s fantasy. It is unclear to what extent the various excessive numbers of victims that were launched abroad were honest misunderstandings and errors or whether in some cases it was not deliberate misstatements that Nazi opponents put into the world for political reasons for propaganda purposes were to further dramatize the already dubious conditions in the German Reich in the perception of foreign countries in order to strengthen the foreign country in its disgust and opposition to the Nazi regime.

During the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals in 1945 and 1946, the number of those killed in the action was estimated at "no more than 150 to 200 people [who] died" based on a testimony from Gisevius , the official of the Reich Ministry of the Interior .

The information on the number of fatalities has been controversial in scientific research since the 1950s: Hermann Mau estimated the number at the beginning of the 1950s to be 150 to 230 deaths. Wolfgang Sauer then “only” assumed a number of 150 to 200 people killed in 1960. Karl Martin Graß said in 1968 that, as "a detailed analysis of all cases shows, [...] the number of those murdered was 85". In his monograph on the Röhm affair, published in 1970, Charles Bloch assumed, like Sauer 1960, 150 to 200 people murdered during the action. Peter Longerich estimated the number of victims in his book about the SA published in 1989 at 191 murdered people. In 1993 Otto Gritschneder was able to name 90 murdered people in his book "Der Führer has sentenced them to death ..." after revising the official list. In 2012, Rainer Orth identified eighty-nine people who were definitely killed, as well as two other potential victims (Heimsoth and Krause) whose killing has not been proven in the context of the Röhm affair. He crossed out one person (Theodor Schmidt) from Gritschneder's list as definitely not killed and two others as not decidable, but at the same time added two other victims (Mosert and Oppenheim) who were still missing from Gritschneder's list. With reference to the files of the Ministry of Finance on the survivors' pensions of the relatives of the victims, in which no other dead persons appear, he assumes that the number of dead people only marginally exceeds the number of 89 identified dead.

In most of the more recent works that treat the topic marginally and not as a central object of consideration, such as in Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, the number of those killed is given as around 90 people known by name and a presumed total of around 150-200 dead.

In his overall history of the SA, published in 2017, Daniel Siemens takes the view that the number of unreported cases of those killed in addition to the 90 so far named victims of the murder who have not yet been identified - if there have been any other victims at all - is probably not over a handful of people are likely to go out.

Justification and Consequences

Not least because of the fact that the victims came from politically diverse groups, the public was confused. In addition, the government's information policy was designed to cover up the circumstances. Hitler relied on the effect of sexual denunciation, which was intended to arouse moral indignation instead of raising political questions. Hitler stated that he had been forced to depose him because of "the most serious misconduct" by Röhm. The next "Declaration of the Reich Press Office of the NSDAP" named Röhm's "well-known unfortunate disposition" as the cause of the "heaviest burdens" to which the Führer was exposed. If that was not enough for you, you should be morally indignant by the description of the arrest scenes. The classic pattern of sexual denunciation, namely homosexuality , was used in the further statements. “The conduct of the arrest showed pictures that were morally so sad that any trace of pity had to disappear. Some SA leaders had taken pleasure boys with them. One was startled in the most disgusting situation and arrested. "

Law on State Emergency Defense Measures of July 3, 1934

In official reporting, Hitler was portrayed as the victim of a devious coup. On July 3rd, that is, retrospectively, the measures were formally legalized by a law passed by Hitler (according to the provisions of the Enabling Act ), the Law on Measures of the State Emergency Defense (Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 529) . The only article of the law read: "The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and July 2, 1934 to crush attacks on treason and treason are legal as state emergency." Germany had thus become a state with arbitrary rule in which opinion of the Führer was law and the rule of law no longer applied retroactivity . Hitler made by the shooting without trial judge of life and death and, as he put it himself, the "supreme court gentlemen" openly visible so that the judiciary into line was. Legally less demanding, the processes in the propaganda were also referred to as "purges" against homosexual practices that were widespread beyond Röhm in the SA. For example, Hitler explained the murders before the Reichstag by saying that “a sect gradually began to form in the SA based on a certain common disposition that was the core of a conspiracy not only against the normal views of a healthy people, but also against state security This connection between Röhm's alleged putsch intentions and a homosexual conspiracy was not just a matter of “propaganda”, but rather a threat scenario seriously represented by Himmler that initiated a massive policy of persecution against homosexuals. The later Gestapo administration chief Werner Best reported that shortly after the murder, Himmler had already told the assembled SS leaders that they had "only just escaped the danger of getting a state from Urningen [homosexuals]".

On July 3, Reichswehr Minister Blomberg congratulated Hitler on behalf of the Cabinet on the successful completion of the campaign. On July 4th, during a ceremony in Berlin, those involved were awarded an “ honor dagger ”.

Hitler himself only went public about two weeks after the massacre , which until then had to rely on incoherent and sometimes contradicting reports from the radio and newspapers. Despite its length and tenacity, the Reichstag speech of July 13, 1934, which was broadcast on the radio, received a lot of attention. Hitler ended the speech as follows:

“If someone accuses me of why we did not use the ordinary courts for the judgment, then I can only tell him: at this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thus the highest court lord of the German people. Mutinous divisions have at all times been brought back to order by decimation. […] I gave the order to shoot the main culprits in this betrayal, and I also gave the order to burn out the ulcers of our internal well poisoning and the poisoning of foreign countries down to the raw meat. [...] The nation must know that its existence [...] is not threatened by anyone with impunity. And everyone should know for all future that if they raise their hand to strike the state, certain death is their lot. "

Formal legal justification

A short time later, the prominent constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt provided the formal legal justification for murders and breaches of law in a short essay entitled "The Führer Protects Law" in the German Juristen-Zeitung, which was switched on.

Reichswehr

The Reichswehr leadership promoted the appointment of Hitler as Reich President and thus also their Commander-in-Chief for the price of disempowering the SA and the (later not kept) assurance that the Reichswehr would remain the only armed forces in the Reich. The generals did not see that Röhm's claim to integrate the Reichswehr into the SA and thus to become Commander-in-Chief was a greater challenge to Hitler than to themselves . Ultimately, they paid Hitler for something he should have done anyway. Some of the executors were officially equipped with weapons from the Reichswehr stocks. The official reason given by Hitler that he had acted as the “supreme judge of the nation” in an emergency was accepted, although Hitler had two generals (von Schleicher and von Bredow ) murdered on flimsy pretexts.

Declaration by the "Reich Association of German Officers"

The Reichswehr supported the murder, because with the SA a dangerous and at the same time despised competition was eliminated. For many citizens the acceptance of the murders by the Reichswehr was an important reason to accept Hitler's declarations.

Hitler's assertion that Schleicher and Bredow had committed treason aroused the entire generals. The military district commanders and the commanders presented to Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg and complained that he was not doing anything against this defamation. The two generals would never have committed treason; the generals demanded an immediate investigation. Blomberg promised to provide documentation on the incidents but did not do so. Only one of the generals, Lieutenant General Wolfgang Fleck , was permanently not satisfied. When he did not receive the documents, he submitted his departure because he could no longer place any trust in the Reichswehr leadership. He literally wrote to Blomberg: "[...] it has not been customary in the Prussian army until now for the Wehrmacht Minister to lie to his military district commanders [...]".

But there was also another storm against the murder of Schleicher. The aged Field Marshal August von Mackensen and a friend of Schleicher, Colonel General z. V. Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord , tried in vain to reach Hindenburg during the murder days, who was hermetically sealed off by his two adjutants, Oskar von Hindenburg and Wedige von der Schulenburg . Thereupon they hoped to enlighten the Reich President by means of a memorandum, but the paper never reached him. After Hindenburg's death, the memorandum was copied and distributed to all senior officers. In the meantime, the two constantly urged Blomberg and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Colonel General Werner von Fritsch , to advocate the rehabilitation. They created such a tense atmosphere in the officer corps that Blomberg considered it advisable to go to Hitler himself, otherwise a dangerous split in the officer corps was to be feared.

Hitler had more serious worries at the time and couldn't use tension within the army. At the end of his speech in a closed meeting of the heads of government, party and Reichswehr devoted to foreign policy, Hitler announced that investigations had shown that Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow had been mistakenly shot. In order to do justice to the memory of the two innocent shot dead, they should be placed on the plaques of their regiments. However, this declaration was not allowed to be published, but this did not prevent Mackensen from reading out the rehabilitation at the annual meeting of active and former general staff officers on Schlieffen's birthday and calling the "shooting" a murder.

Despite Hitler's promise that the Reichswehr should keep the military monopoly, the SS received permission to set up their own armed units just a few weeks after the murders.

conservative

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
Rolle Papens, his co-workers and v. a. Hindenburg's (which “message”?) Appears unprofessional and presented in an essayistic manner and is unconfirmed; note u. a. also this FAZ review of a new book by Rainer Orth .-- Jordi ( discussion ) 21:38, April 15, 2017 (CEST)

The conservatives, above all the former Chancellor Franz von Papen , took office in 1933 with the claim to "frame" Hitler. They had little success with it. In the spring of 1934, when Hitler's difficulties with the SA became known and Hindenburg's imminent death seemed certain, they made another attempt. In his much-noticed Marburg speech , von Papen found clear words against the arbitrary rule of the National Socialists and called for reflection. The action to murder the SA leadership was a welcome opportunity for Hitler to settle accounts with his conservative opponents. Among other things, he had the speechwriter von Papens, the publicist Edgar Julius Jung , murdered. Because of his popularity with Hindenburg, he did not dare to murder von Papen himself; he was deported to Vienna as ambassador. Of course, a message of appreciation from Hindenburg could not be missing. It is unknown whether Hindenburg wrote this message himself and what he even heard of the events.

The actions surrounding the alleged Röhm putsch thus also meant Hitler's victory over the conservatives. Hitler himself valued this success higher than the loss of prestige he had suffered as a result of the affair.

Röhm and Hitler

Röhm was one of the few people with whom Hitler was on a duel. Röhm's services to the movement were significant in Hitler's eyes. Hitler therefore hesitated for a long time until he had him murdered, and even afterwards did not tolerate any derogatory talk about Röhm in his presence.

Assessments

The contemporary foreign press - especially in Great Britain, France, Switzerland and the United States - judged the events of June 30th and the following days for the most part in an extremely sharp manner. For the most part, the commentators in the major newspapers interpreted the "purge" as an act of self-exposure through which Hitler and the other leaders of National Socialist Germany unequivocally demonstrated their own criminal nature and the criminal character of their regime in the eyes of the entire world. The British cartoonist David Low used the events of June 30th - as well as the murder of Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss by Austrian National Socialists a few weeks later - as an opportunity to publish a cartoon in the Evening Standard on July 27th, 1934 with the title Gang War ( "Gang war"), in which he portrayed the National Socialist government as a gang of criminals that had come into the possession of state power by portraying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels in the archetypal guise of Chicago "gangsters" of the Prohibition era who were pulled over their foreheads Felt hats and revolvers in their jacket pockets, leaving the scene of their crimes - marked by a corpse lying on the floor - while the ghost of the bank robber and murderer John Dillinger, who was shot by the police in the USA at the same time, comments on the scene with the comment that he should have gone into politics.

The writer Thomas Mann rated the bloodbath these days in his diary as an act by which the Hitler regime unmasked itself:

“One could sometimes waver internally [up to this point]. Well, after all, after a little more than a year, Hitlerism is beginning to show itself as what it has always been seen, recognized, and pervasively felt as: as the last of the baseness of degenerate stupidity and bloody shame - it becomes clear that it will safely and infallibly continue to do so. "

Contemporaries and retrospective viewers have at various occasions the acceptance, largely without contradiction, of the murders committed by the National Socialist leadership in the context of the “Röhm Putsch” by the organs of the regular judiciary and their representatives, by the army and by the mass of the German people as a whole taken to bring allegations against one or more of these groups of people. The reasoning on which this allegation is based was usually that the above-mentioned groups of people, because they did not revolt against the National Socialist regime and overthrow it despite this first obvious major crime by the National Socialist leadership, all other crimes of the National Socialists took place in the following years and that because of this sin of omission to fall into the arms of the Nazi leadership, after they had proven their criminal character on June 30, 1934, they would have made themselves morally complicit in all these further crimes. The leadership of the German army and those responsible for the judicial and administrative apparatus, but also the bulk of the German people, therefore shared responsibility for all further acts of murder by the National Socialists, because they continued to be in power after this first large-scale murder in front of the public would have left, although precisely because of this event they should have known better.

This is how the lawyer Werner Pünder , who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 for his protests against the murder of the Catholic leader Erich Klausener on June 30, 1934, wrote after the war:

“June 30, 1934, I have repeatedly [...] described in writing and orally a turning point in world history. At that time it would still have been possible to put National Socialism back in its place if the majority of the German people had had the courage not only to quietly condemn the unlawful acts of violence of the regime, but to resist. "

The journalist Joachim Fest also found in his biography of Hitler from 1973 with a view to the Röhm affair that the German population had failed to draw the necessary and obvious conclusions from the actions of the state leadership. In Fest's words, on June 30, 1934, “the claim to political error expired. The murder as a means of state policy destroyed the possibility of good faith. " The publicist Sebastian Haffner came because of the fact that this first major murder by the National Socialists was accepted" by and large by the broad German public and by the old upper classes in Germany ", to the assessment that: "If you want to look for the guilt of the entire German people for Hitler's crimes, then you have to look for it here."

In the same way, the historian Hermann Mau had already made the verdict in the 1950s,

“That the whole regime changed its nature on June 30th: Since Hitler made cold-blooded murder the legal instrument of his policy, he has no longer escaped the curse of evil. From now on in National Socialist politics it is as if certain fuses had blown. Power and violence are irrevocably linked. "

This larger overall development was symbolically expressed in the development of the SS that began (or became visible) on June 30, 1934: Due to its role during the murder of June 30, 1934, it was initially increased to an independent organization and from this Position finally - as a result of the course taken with the Röhm action - grew into one of the most powerful organizations in the Nazi state, which like no other "gave the further course of the history of the National Socialist regime its characteristic face".

Legal processing

During the Nazi era, there was only one criminal prosecution of a murder committed during the Röhm affair. Requests to the Reich Ministry of Justice, the Reich Court and similar bodies to investigate the legality of individual killings were rejected by the responsible state authorities with reference to the law of July 3, 1934. The only exception was the trial of those involved in the murder of Kuno Kamphausen . He was a town planning officer in Waldenburg (Silesia) and was the victim of an unauthorized action by local SS leaders who used the events of June 30 for a private vengeance. One SS man was sentenced to five years in prison, others were acquitted (more in the corresponding article ).

Under pressure from the SS leadership, everyone involved was released from prison by 1937. Proceedings due to seven further unauthorized murders of apolitical persons, as announced by Hitler in his Reichstag speech of July 13, 1934, were put down in autumn 1934 after preliminary investigations had begun, after Hitler had apparently changed his mind.

After the Second World War , the events of the Röhm Putsch were thematized in their overall context as part of the Nuremberg Trials . However, a systematic investigation of individual cases was only carried out by the Federal German courts: The first such trial was the trial against the former SS leader Kurt Gildisch , who by accident happened to be murdered on June 30th in his office in the Reich Ministry of Transport on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich's shot ministerial director Erich Klausener could be identified: Gildisch was sentenced to 15 years in prison on May 24, 1951 by a judgment of the jury court in Berlin, citing the Allied Control Council Act No. 10 for crimes against humanity . After this ruling was overturned by the Federal Court of Justice on February 5, 1953 - which justified this decision by stating that after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany , German courts were no longer empowered to apply the Control Council Act - Gildisch was again tried by the jury on May 18, 1953 for murder Sentenced to 15 years in prison, which the BGH confirmed on December 15, 1953. In the judgment of May 18, 1953, the jury came to the - the legal foundation for all subsequent proceedings - determination of the legal inadmissibility or ineffectiveness of the law of July 3, 1934:

“Contrary to the view of the defense that the illegality of the act is no longer valid because the law on measures of the state emergency of July 3, 1934 legalized the shootings in connection with the Rohm revolt, the jury is of the opinion that this law [...] is irrelevant. This law is itself illegal as it is in contradiction to any constitutional principles. "

The jury also took the position - in continuation of the line begun in the Nuremberg trials - that the argument of having carried out homicides "on orders" or from a subordinate relationship, the executors of the murder orders from June 30 to 2 July 1934 did not release her from her guilt of having carried out unlawful homicide, and thus could not justify any claim to impunity, a view that had precedent character for the further proceedings:

“The jury does not fail to recognize that the defendant found himself in a certain difficult situation. But he had voluntarily committed himself to the SS, an organization that demands blind obedience. So he had to take the risk of getting into such a difficult situation. Anyone who voluntarily submits to the will of others remains criminally responsible. The fact that the defendant only acted on orders does not excuse him. The criminal law also knows no excuse for blind obedience and cannot recognize it because it would thereby give up the basis of the responsibility of man as a person. "

In addition to the trial against Gildisch, there were other trials in the 1950s against subordinate SS leaders and SS men who were involved in the organization and execution of the murders: For example, in 1954, the former SS standard leader Hans Himpe was tried by the jury at the regional court Berlin for aid indicted for murder. In 1934, as head of the Hirschberg SS Standard, he passed on his superior's order to shoot four Jewish citizens of Hirschberg "on the run" to his SS men, who then actually carried out the murders. After he was found guilty, Himpe was initially sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, which was reduced to six years in prison after a revision hearing by judgment of September 12, 1955. The former SS-Obertruppführer Erich Böttger and the former SS-Unterscharführer Otto Gasse had already been sentenced as perpetrators of this act in 1951 by the jury court at the Schweinfurt regional court to sentences of eight and four years respectively (file number KS 2/51). The former SS member Herbert Bischoff had to answer before the jury court in Kassel for the murder of the doctor Erich Lindemann in Glogischdorf in Silesia. He was found guilty of murder on October 10, 1952 and sentenced to life in prison (file number 3 KS 5/52). The former SS-Obersturmbannführer Josef Makosch , leader of the SS-Standarte in Frankenstein, and his subordinate, the Untersturmführer Erich Moschner , were sentenced in 1953 by the jury court at the Hanover regional court for the shooting of the SA member Enders near Schweidnitz (file number 2 Ks 1/53). The SS leader Richard Skarabis was sentenced in 1956 by the jury at the Braunschweig regional court to four years imprisonment for the shooting of the communists Reh and Köppel, of which more than two and a half years were served as a remand while the remaining 486 days in a three-year suspended sentence were converted (file number 1 KS 1/56).

The most widely noticed Röhm Putsch trial came about after the public prosecutor's office at the Munich Regional Court I charged the former commandant of the security guards in the Dachau concentration camp, Michael Lippert, and the commander of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Sepp Dietrich , on 4 July 1956 for the Murder of Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders during the days of the "Röhm Putsch" (file number 3 Ks 4/57). The main trial took place in May 1957 and ended with Lippert and Dietrich being sentenced to 18 months in prison for a "jointly committed crime of aiding and abetting manslaughter". The Federal Court of Justice upheld the Munich judgment on May 20, 1958.

In 1957, a case against Udo von Woyrsch and Müller-Altenau took place before the jury court of the Osnabrück regional court "Suppression" of the alleged coup were entrusted. The subject of the proceedings was the shooting of twenty people in the cities of Breslau, Hirschberg, Landeshut, Leobschütz, Glogau and Waldenburg, which belong to their area of ​​responsibility, from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Woyrsch was declared on August 2, 1957 for aiding and abetting Sentenced to ten years imprisonment in six cases of manslaughter; in one case he was acquitted for proven innocence and in the remaining cases for lack of evidence. Müller-Altenau was acquitted in all cases for lack of evidence. On the initiative of Woyrsch, following the judgment, there were numerous public prosecutor's investigations into perjury against persons who had testified in the trial. All of these proceedings were discontinued during the 1960s.

The SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski , who had been responsible for the SS Upper Section Northeast (East Prussia region) since February 1934, was arrested after lengthy preliminary investigations in January 1961 in Nuremberg because of the killing of Anton von Hohberg on July 2, 1934 and Buchwald indicted. The court concluded that the act was under his orders and sentenced him to four years and ten months in prison.

SS leader Heinz Fanslau , who shot SA member Bläsner near Tilsit on July 1, 1934 , was sentenced to three years imprisonment for this act in July 1963 by the Munich jury court for aiding and abetting murder.

At the end of the 1960s, the public prosecutor's offices in Munich and Berlin initiated investigative proceedings into the murder of the former Reich Chancellor Schleicher and the opposition member Herbert von Bose , who were both shot on June 30, 1934 in the Berlin area. These proceedings ultimately had to be discontinued without indictments being brought because the perpetrators could not be identified and the likely clients had died.

Scientific processing

A comprehensive scientific monograph on the Röhm affair is not yet available. Instead, the corpus of the existing works is limited to a number of essays and specialized works on certain aspects.

For this reason, the historian Wolfram Pyta characterized the Röhm affair in 2016 as one of the remaining "white spots in the investigation of the SA" and stated that a "source-based overall view" of the process is still a desideratum research.

The most important study on the topic is still the book Mordsache Röhm by the journalist Heinz Höhne from 1984. Jost Dülffer attests to this work that, despite a popular (“not scientifically based”) writing style, it “exhausts the topic a treatise and a work that satisfies scientific requirements ”.

Cinematic approaches

Documentations :

  • Hitler's Night of the Hummingbird , BBC documentary (directed and presented by Hugh Greene , first broadcast on the BBC on June 30, 1981; German version under the title Die Nacht der Lange Messer , first broadcast on June 28, 1984 on ARD)

Dramatizations :

literature

Contemporary writings

  • Anonymous: White book on the shootings of June 30th , Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1934. (Foreword by Georg Branting ).
  • Anonymous: The German people are accusing . Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany. A book of facts. editions Carrefour, Paris 1936. (As a facsimile reprint by Katharina Schlieper, Laika Verlag, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-942281-20-1 ).
  • Klaus Bredow [= Konrad Heiden ]: Hitler is racing. June 30th. Procedure, history and background , Volksstimme Verlag, Saarbrücken 1934.
  • Otto Strasser: The German Bartholomew's Night, Reso Verlag, Zurich 1934.

Research literature

Overview displays:

  • Heinrich Bennecke : The Reichswehr and the "Röhm Putsch". Olzog, Munich 1964, DNB 458753270 .
  • Charles Bloch : The SA and the crisis of the Nazi regime in 1934. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1970, DNB 456137343 .
  • Real estate von Fallois : calculation and illusion. the power struggle between the Reichswehr and SA during the Röhm crisis in 1934. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-07975-2 (= contributions to political science, 75th)
  • Karl Martin Graß : Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhm crisis 1933/34 . Heidelberg 1966.
  • Otto Gritschneder : "The Führer has sentenced you to death ...", Hitler's "Röhm Putsch" murders in court. Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37651-7 (contains a list of 90 murdered people and an alphabetical overview of the victims and actors in the appendix).
  • Eleanor Hancock : Ernst Röhm. Hitler's Chief of Staff. Palgrave Macmillan London 2008, pp. 141-166. ISBN 978-0-230-12050-1 .
  • This: "The Purge of the SA Reconsidered: 'An Old Putschist Trick'", in: Central European History 44 (2011), pp. 669–683. ( Digitized version )
  • Heinz Höhne : Mordache Röhm: Hitler's breakthrough to sole rule, 1933–1934. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-499-33052-0 .
  • Ian Kershaw : Hitler. Volume 1: 1889-1936 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 978-3-421-05131-8 , pp. 627-662.
  • Helmut Krausnick : "June 30, 1934, meaning, background, course", in: From politics and contemporary history. Supplement to the weekly newspaper “Das Parlament” from June 30, 1954, B XXV / 54, pp. 317–324.
  • Peter Longerich : The brown battalions. History of the SA. Beck, Munich 1989, pp. 206-219. ISBN 3-406-49482-X .
  • Hermann Mau : The «Second Revolution» - June 30, 1934. In: Quarterly books for contemporary history. Volume 1 (1953), Issue 2, pp. 119-137. (online) (PDF; 1.0 MB).
  • Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialist. On the genesis and establishment of a stereotype. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997.
  • Alexander Zinn: "Removed from the people's body"? Homosexual men under National Socialism . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 9783593508634 .

Specifically about the events in Munich:

  • Ulrich Herbert : Best. Biographical studies on radicalism, worldview and reason. 1903-1989 . Bonn 1996, pp. 143-147.
  • Hans-Günter Richardi / Klaus Schumann: Gerlich / Bell secret files. Röhm's plans for a Reich without Hitler . Munich 1993, pp. 168-182.
  • Wolfram Selig : “Murdered in the name of the Führer. The victims of the Röhm putsch in Munich ”, in: Winfried Becker / Werner Chrobak (eds.): State, culture, politics. Contributions to the history of Bavaria and Catholicism. Festschrift for Dieter Albrecht's 65th birthday , Kallmünz / Opf. 1992. pp. 341-356.

Publications about individual murders during the Röhm affair:

  • Theodor Eschenburg : On the murder of General Schleicher. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Issue 1, 1953, pp. 71-95. Online (PDF; 1.3 MB)
  • Lothar Gruchmann (editor): Werner Pünder's report on the murder of Klausen on June 30, 1934 and its consequences. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 19th year (1971), pp. 404–431. ( Digitized version )
  • Bernhard Sauer: Othmar Toifl (1898–1934) - Kurt Dalueges mysterious newsman. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 64, 2016, pp. 833–853 ( digitized version ).
  • Bernhard Sauer: On Heydrich's behalf: Kurt Gildisch and the murder of Erich Klausener during the "Röhm Putsch" . Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-373-9 .

Web links

Commons : Röhm-Putsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ian Kershaw : Hitler. Volume 1: 1889-1936 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-421-05131-3 , p. 650.
  2. ^ A b Peter Longerich: Heinrich Himmler: A biography . Siedler Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88680-859-5 , p. 183.
  3. ↑ so for example Carola Stern , Thilo Vogelsang , Erhard Klöss and Albert Graff (eds.): Dtv-Lexikon zur Geschichte und Politik im 20. Century. dtv, Munich 1974, p. 691; Wolfgang Wippermann : The consequent madness. Ideology and Politics of Adolf Hitler. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh / Munich 1989, p. 125; Klaus Hildebrand : The Third Reich. 6th edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2003, p. 16; Heinz Höhne : "Give me four years". Hitler and the beginnings of the Third Reich. Ullstein, Berlin 1996, p. 6; Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml , Hermann Weiss (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, p. 703 f; Frank Gutermuth and Arno Netzbandt: The Gestapo. Nicolai, Berlin 2005, p. 68.
  4. ↑ Peter Longerich: The brown battalions. History of the SA. CH Beck, Munich 1989, p. 183 f.
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Michael Grüttner : Brandstifter und Biedermänner. Germany 1933–1939 . Stuttgart 2015, p. 50.
  6. ↑ Biography of Roehm on rosa-winkel.de , accessed on April 5 2017th
  7. ↑ Alexander Zinn: "Removed from the people's body"? Pp. 243-265.
  8. ^ Kristin A. Schäfer: Werner von Blomberg. Hitler's first field marshal. A biography . Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, p. 138 f.
  9. ↑ Ian Kershaw: Hitler. Vol. 1, Stuttgart 1998, p. 659.
  10. ↑ Zdenek Zofka: The emergence of the Nazi repression system. BLZ-Report 01/04, Bavarian State Center for Political Education , Call of February 2, 2007, km.bayern.de ( Memento of January 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Konrad Repgen; Karl-Heinz Minuth: files of the Reich Chancellery. Part: Hitler government: 1933–1945; Vol. 2 September 12, 1933 to August 27, 1934: Documents Nos. 207 to 384 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1983, ISBN / cover: 3-7646-1839-6, p. 1391, footnote 10.
  12. ↑ Lothar Gruchmann : Justice in the Third Reich 1933–1940: Adaptation and Submission in the Gürtner Era 2002, p. 437 refers to a list of the Prussian State Ministry from July 1934 with the names of 1124 people who had not been shot and were arrested in the Secret State Archives (Geh .StArch. Berlin, Sign. Rep. 90 P No. 114).
  13. ↑ On the shootings in Dachau, Dresden and Breslau see Günther Kimmel: “The Dachau Concentration Camp. A study on the National Socialist violent crimes ”, in: Martin Broszat (Ed.): Bavaria in der NS-Zeit , Vol. 2 (“ Rule and Society in Conflict ”), Munich / Vienna 1979, p. 366; Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933–1940: Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era 2002, pp. 440–442; Daniel Schmidt: “The SA leader Hans Ramshorn. A life between violence and community (1892–1934) ”, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 60th vol. (2012), issue 2, pp. 201–235.
  14. ↑ Höhne: Mordsache , pp. 283 and 286; Information that he received during his imprisonment reproduces Theodor Düsterberg: Der Stahlhelm und Hitler , p. 78.
  15. ↑ On the shooting of the men from Karl Ernst's "surrounding clan" see Karl Martin Grass: Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhmkrise 1933-34 , Heidelberg 1966, 293 and notes on p. 88; conditionally also corresponding statements with Hans Bernd Gisevius: Until the bitter end: from the Reichstag fire to July 20, 1944. Special edition brought up to date by the author , 1960, p. 155.
  16. ↑ Heinz Höhne: Mordsache Röhm. Hitler's breakthrough to total power , Reinbek 1984, p. 295 f.
  17. ^ Heinz Höhne: Mordsache Röhm , 1984, p. 283.
  18. ^ Fritz Peters: Bremen Between 1933 And 1945 , p. 58.
  19. ↑ Heinz Höhne: Mordsache Röhm. Hitler's breakthrough to total power , Reinbek 1984, p. 286.
  20. ↑ Irene Strenge: Ferdinand von Bredow: Notes from February 20, 1933 to December 31, 1933. Daily records from 1.1.1934 to 28.6.1934 , 2009, p. 238.
  21. ↑ So far from fear, so close to death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1957, pp. 20 ff ( online ).
  22. ↑ a b c d Reichstag speech of July 13, 1934 in the minutes at reichstagsprotocol.de
  23. ↑ Weissbuch , p. 69 states that the authors “succeeded in identifying 115 people [who were murdered] by name”. When counting, one comes to 113 named persons as well as two persons named with their occupation (waiter and tap master).
  24. ↑ International Military Tribunal, Vol. XII, p. 278.
  25. ↑ Wolfgang Sauer in The National Socialist Seizure of Power: Studies z. Establishment of the totalitarian system of rule in Germany in 1933/34 . Karl Dietrich Bracher; Wolfgang Sauer; Gerhard Schulz, Cologne 1960, p. 963.
  26. ^ Karl Martin Graß: Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhmkrise , p. 292.
  27. ↑ Charles Bloch: The SA and the Crisis of the Nazi Regime 1934 , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 104.
  28. ↑ Peter Longerich : The brown battalions. History of the SA , Beck, Munich 2003, p. 219.
  29. ↑ Otto Gritschneder: "The Führer has sentenced you to death ...", Hitler's "Röhm Putsch" murders in front of a court , Munich 1993, p. 60 f.
  30. ^ Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-2872-8 , pp. 102-111.
  31. ^ Daniel Siemens: Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts , 2017, p. 169 f.
  32. ↑ documentarchiv.de
  33. ↑ Biography of Roehm on rosa-winkel.de , accessed on April 5 2017th
  34. ↑ Alexander Zinn: "Removed from the people's body"? Pp. 265-279.
  35. ^ Adolf Hitler, speech to the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, quoted from: Norbert Frei : Der Führerstaat. 7th edition. 2002, ISBN 3-423-30785-4 , p. 37.
  36. ↑ Carl Schmitt: "The leader protects the law." In: Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung. 39, 1934, pp. 945-950.
  37. ↑ Wolfgang Benz : German Resistance 1933-1945, information on political education. Extract from issue 243 ( online ).
  38. ↑ HF Berndorff: General between East and West. Hamburg 1953, p. 312.
  39. ↑ Ian Kershaw : Hitler. 1889-1936 . Stuttgart 1998, p. 650. Reinhard Mehring: Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall . 2009, p. 351.
  40. ^ Evening Standard, July 27, 1934. ( Digitized version available in the British Cartoon Archive )
  41. ↑ Quoted from: Hans-Ulrich Thamer: Seduction and violence. Germany 1933–1945. The Germans and their Nation , 1986, p. 302.
  42. ↑ Werner Pünder : Werner Pünders report on the murder of Klauseners on June 30, 1934 and its consequences . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 19, 1971, p. 429.
  43. ↑ Joachim Fest: Hitler . 1973, p. 644.
  44. ^ Haffner: Von Bismarck zu Hitler , p. 245 f.
  45. ^ A b Hermann Mau: "The Second Revolution". June 30, 1934 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 1st year, issue 2, 1953, p. 137.
  46. ↑ Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science . Harnack, Munich 1983, p. 14.
  47. ↑ Did the SA act on its own initiative? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 8, 2016 ( digitized version ).
  48. ↑ Jost Dülffer: The German question in world politics, 1986 , p. 155; see also Larry Eugene Jones: From Weimar to Hitler. Germany's conservative elites and the establishment of the “Third Reich” 1932–1934. In: Dietrich Papenfuß / Wolfgang Schieder (eds.): Deutsche Umbruch im 20. Jahrhundert , Cologne et al. 2000, p. 204, who rated Höhne's book as the "still [...] most detailed study on the Röhm affair".
  49. ↑ Written by Maximilian Scheer , with the help of two employees whose names remained unknown, but were probably Erich Birkenhauer and Bruno Meisel .