June 30, 1934: the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's purge of those standing in his way

VA Viper ^ | 06/30/2018 | Harpygoddess

[harpygoddess]

The Night of the Long Knives was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political murders.

When Hitler rose to power in early 1933, he owed much of his success to the muscle of his Nazi Storm Troopers, the SA, a violent, ruthless army headed by Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s long-time friend. Röhm and his Storm Troopers brought Germany into submission by gaining control of the streets gangster-style and violently eliminating Hitler’s political enemies.

However, a threatening, revolutionary force was no longer useful now that Hitler was firmly in power. Hitler wanted to “go legit” and win over the regular army generals, the leaders of industry, and the German people. Most everyone in Germany disliked the SA, who were seen as the arrogant, bullying, murderous thugs that they were, and Hitler knew he needed to curtail their power to increase and solidify his own.

Hitler and the head of the German army, Werner von Blomberg, signed a secret agreement in which Hitler promised Blomberg’s army absolute control of the military (with precedence over the SA); and von Blomberg pledged the army’s backing when Germany’s 86-year-old president Paul von Hindenburg died and Hitler claimed the presidency. But von Hindenburg informed Hitler that the SA must be brought to heel ASAP, or he would declare martial law in Germany and let the army run the show.

On the night of June 30, units of the SS arrested the leaders of the SA and other political opponents. Seventy-seven men were executed on charges of treason, though historians tend to think the figure is higher. Hitler also took the opportunity to assassinate anyone that he didn’t like, or had crossed him, or looked at him the wrong way.

[GOPJ]

Al Stewart - The Last Day of June 1934 - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ip5ato4HSY

Lyrics

The morning is humming, it’s a quarter past nine
I should be working down in the vines
But I’m lying here with a good friend of mine
Watching the sun in her hair

I pick the grapes from the hills to the sea
The fields of France are a home to me
Ah, but today lying here is a good place to be
I can’t go anywhere

But as we slip in and out of embrace
Like some old and familiar place
Reflecting all of my dreams in her face like before
On the last day of June 1934

Just out of Cambridge in a narrow country lane
A bottle-green Bentley in the driving rain
Slips and skids round a corner, then pulls straight again
Heads up the drive to the door

The lights of the party shine over the fields
Where lovers and dancers watch Catherine wheels
And argue realities digging their heels
In a world that’s finished with war

And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets
Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets
And Europe lies sleeping,
You feel her heartbeats through the floor
On the last day of June nineteenth

On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out
In the rolling Bavarian hills
And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters
Grown strong like the joining of wills
Oh echoed away like a roar in the distance
In moonlight carved out of steel

Singing “All the lonely, so long and so long
You don’t know how I long, how I long
You can’t hold me, I’m strong now I’m strong
Stronger than your law”

I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine
Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time
And I know I’m a dreamer, I know I’m out of line
With the people I see everywhere

The couples pass by me, they’re looking so good
Their arms round each other, they head for the woods
They don’t care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should
Just a shadow that hangs in the air

But I thought I saw him cross over the hill
With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel
And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before
On the last day of June nineteen thirty four