The Rest Is History - 404. The Nazis in Power: The Night of the Long Knives

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

“Hitler had entered Röhm’s bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him had stood two detectives holding pistols, with the safety catch removed, at the ready…” The 30th of June 1934 saw a seismic moment unfold in the early years of the Third Reich. With the Führer and his party firmly in power, a bloody faction fight takes place within the Party. The Nazis have gained control of both the streets and the democratic institutions of Germany, with Hitler made Chancellor in 1933. But the SA, the largest Nazi military faction, led by the unmistakable Ernst Röhm, have shown signs of challenging Hitler, and rumours have reached the Führer that he is facing a coup… After a bloody night of murderous terror led by Hitler and his personal guard, the SS, they are left as the strongest military wing in the Party, with the SA facing extinction. Join Tom and Dominic in the first episode of our series on the Nazis in Power, as they delve into how Hitler solidified his and his party’s control of Germany, the different right wing groups at play, the signs of uprising against Hitler’s rule, and the eventual quelling of all opposition. Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Hitler had entered at Röhm's bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him had stood two detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed at the ready. He had spat out the words, Röhm, you are under arrest! Röhm had looked up sleepily out of the pillows on his bed. Hail, mein Führer. You are under arrest. Hitler had bawled for the second time. He had turned on his heel and left the room. Meanwhile, upstairs in the corridor, things have become very lively. SA leaders are coming out of their rooms and being arrested. Hitler shouts at each one, have you had anything to do with Roms machinations? Of course,

none of them says yet, but that doesn't help them. Hitler mostly knows the answer himself. Now and then he turns to Goebbels or Lutzer with a question, and then comes his decision. Arrested. So that was Eric Kemper, who was the driver of Adolf Hitler, who was describing the morning of the 30th of June, 1934, that sees a bloody and carnivorous faction fight in the Nazi party, a faction fight that is commemorated as the Night of the Long Knives. And Dominic, this is the first kind of the as the night of the long knives um and dominic this is the first kind of the great drama really of the nazis in power isn't it and we did uh this time last year four episodes on the rise of the nazis to power and now we're going to do four episodes looking at

the nazis in power yes uh that was a slightly inspector clusoish hitler i thought there uh tom it was german he was clearly indisputably german well of course hiller had an austrian Yes. That was a slightly Inspector Clouseau-ish Hitler, I thought there, Tom. No, he's German. He was clearly indisputably German. Well, of course, Hitler had an Austrian accent. I don't know whether you were trying to give an Austrian flavour there. Yeah, of course. Were you?

Yeah. Of course you were. So for those people who haven't listened to our series on the rise of the Nazis, please do. For those of you who haven't got time to do it and just want to crack on with the night of the long knives, which as Tom says, rightly, is this seismic moment in the early years of the Third Reich. I guess we'll just give a little bit of a recap of where we got to with the Nazis and their rise to power. So as we explored last time, the roots of Nazism lie in the 1880s and 1890s, in this kind of ferment of ideas, kind of social Darwinism,

obsession with racial hygiene, obsession with national degeneracy, with war, with struggle, with anti-Semitism in particular. Those ideas were very current in germany before the first world war and there are equivalents elsewhere of course with a slightly different flavor but then they became intensified i suppose turbocharged would you say tom by the great war and the experience of the war the shattering experience for germany yeah because they lose and that's the key and the fact that so many people are starving in Germany, and then they lose. Absolutely.

They lose. Germany loses a lot of territory. There is the German Revolution in 1918, 1919. Total chaos on the streets. The Kaiser is kicked out. Fears of Bolshevism. And in this atmosphere, lots of little paramilitary parties and things flourish. One of them is the German Workers' Party, the National Socialist

Party, as it becomes. And this attracts a former corporal in the Bavarian army who had previously been born in Austria, who is Adolf Hitler, who discovers that he has this brilliant gift of the gab, that he's able to articulate all the rage and resentment of former servicemen who feel betrayed by the end of the war. And in particular, his guiding principle is antisemitism, the antisemitism that he had learned as a young man in Vienna before the First World War. And he now develops this entire worldview based on war and struggle and racism, and in particular, antisemitism. And the Nazis tried a failed putsch in 1923. Obviously, it didn't work out. Hitler was briefly imprisoned. But they profit from a couple of things. In other circumstances,

they would have remained an extreme, eccentric, radical party. But they profit from the fact that the new republic that's been set up in Germany in the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, lacks legitimacy from the start in the eyes of a lot of conservative Germans, that so many conservative Germans and middle-class Germans and whatnot are terrified of communism, of Bolshevism and disorder. It's not just that they don't believe the Weimar Republic will be a bulwark against it. They actually think the Weimar Republic is riddled with it and that anything left of center is kind of crypto-communist. And then the absolutely searing impact of the Great Depression, which is worse in Germany than

almost anywhere else in the world, massive unemployment. And against that background, the Nazis prosper as a kind of populist party. And then the terrible mistake that conservative elites employ Hitler effectively. They've run out of options. They're feuding with each other. They bring Hitler in as the hired gun, don't they, Tom? They do. And they appoint him chancellor at the end of January 1933. And Dominic, just to name check, some of those conservatives, because they will be playing a part in this drama.

Yeah. We have the Reich president, who is an enormous bloke with a kind of walrus moustache, called H hindenburg who was a great war hero paul von hindenburg yeah war hero exactly so he is very elderly he's about 183 at this point and perhaps not entirely compos mentis then we have um an effete machiavel he's described as by michael burley um von pappen yes uh who you described as looking like a Daily Telegraph leader writer. That's right. So they're kind of operating behind the scenes. And also before Hitler, there is a general, Schleicher, Trotsky.

So let's get a description from Trotsky. He described Schleicher as a question mark with epaulettes, which I think is a great description. And he embodies an ambition perhaps on the part of of of generals for a military dictatorship yes and so is there a sense that the army as well are players in this absolutely they would quite fancy to be running the show absolutely the most plausible alternative to a nazi regime in 1933 is a right-wing nationalist army run military dictatorship or something like that,

maybe an alliance between the conservative business elites and the army. And there is a tension there right from the beginning in the Nazi regime. But to just finish up the recap, so the very last episode of our Rise of the Nazis series, we described how as soon as Hitler becomes chancellor, he unleashes this wave of violence on the streets

through his stormtroopers. We'll come to the stormtroopers in a little bit, who are his paramilitary kind of militia. Events play massively into his hands. An anarchist burns down the Reichstag, a Dutch anarchist, which is the parliament building. Hitler uses this as an opportunity to push through an emergency decree

that allows him to suspend civil liberties. He wins an election, and then he intimidates the Reichstag, the parliament, into passing an enabling act that means he can basically rule by decree outside the constitution without the Reichstag having any say in the matter. And that is then followed by a huge purge of institutions and a kind of Nazification of German life with everything from universities, I mean a university is actually leading the charge, students burning books and so on, to things like rifle clubs and hobbyist groups becoming Nazified. So already by the summer of 1933, you are well on the way to the formation of a totalitarian state. And the communists have

been banned. The other parties have kind of purged themselves, have voted themselves into liquidation. Concentration camps have been opened. The rule of law is imploding. So all in all, it's looking like springtime for Hitler and Germany, you might say, to coin a phrase. Very good. Yeah, exactly. But to sort of start to dig deeper into the story. So by the summer of 1933, for a lot of ordinary Germans, if you're not a communist or a keen social democrat or homosexual or, you know… A Jew. A Jew, exactly. Above all, a Jew.

You may well think that actually this has worked out all right. There is a sense that you have finally a stable government, a sense of energy and activity that is coming from Berlin. So from that perspective, you know, Hitler has that perspective, Hitler has got his enabling act, he's done well in the elections, things are looking good. The problem for him is that there are massive tensions, as you've alluded to, within the Nazi regime from the very beginning. So on the one hand, there's a lot of people who think the Nazis should be a radical movement, that they should utterly change german society sweep away the old order and create a new germany and kind of new men and women

um to live in it these are this is their kind of it sounds a diabolical thing to say but them almost this sort of idealistic side of nazism and then the other side of the coin is that this kind of national conservative old elites the army and so on who think well we're basically running the show and we don't like all this sort of disorder and stuff because dominic the cabinet yes although hitler's chancellor there are very few kind of nazis in it aren't there most of them are still people in wing collars and yeah all that kind of stuff if you see hitler with cabinet, I was watching a documentary last night. If you see Hitler and his cabinet

walking through the streets in January 1933 or February 1933, there are a whole load of men in top hats who look like kind of Wall Street bankers or something. And there are times when Hitler appears wearing top hats, aren't there? Absolutely.

And then the next day he'll be wearing his brown shirt. So he's kind of playing, he's riding both horses. So this riding both horses is proving increasingly difficult for Hitler. And you mentioned the brown shirt. So the brown shirts, the SA, the Sturmabteilung as they're called, they become an increasing problem for Hitler as 1933 goes on.

So what are they? They had begun as bizarrely the gym and sports section of the Nazi party. This was a kind of euphemism describing his squad of bouncers that he used at his meetings in the 1920s. And they end up with a much better name. They end up being called the storm section, which sounds much more glamorous and exciting. It's very good for attracting young men who like action and want to kind of punch up the darling storms as unity mitford called them i knew this was going to come up unity mitford's a great fan isn't she so uh sort of posh aristocrats who we did a podcast about who became infatuated with hitler and the and the storm troopers the storm troopers are the creation of a guy called Ernst Ruhm, who you mentioned right at the beginning. Ruhm is, he looks like such a bruiser, doesn't he? If you see photographs of him, he looks like a man who would be standing outside a nightclub with a shaven head.

Except in his last year where he looks like Uncle Monty from Withnail and I, which will mean nothing to you because I know you haven't seen it. I know, Richard Griffiths. Yes. Yes. Well, anyway. I think it's fair to say he puts on weight by the end. He definitely does. He's a man of size. The muscle turns to a bit of flap.

He's a man of size. So the Ruhm is a veteran. He's from Munich. He's the son of a railway official. He is a veteran of the First World War. Like so many young men, he'd gone to the Western Front with great enthusiasm. A shell had blown part of his nose off. He'd been badly injured at Verdun.

He had then joined the Freikorps, these kind of paramilitary units in the chaos of the 1920s. And then he'd been attracted to the Nazi party. And Röhm is absolutely typical of these people who are called the front generation. They absolutely romanticize and glamorize the experience of the trenches and the camaraderie.

Of course, that includes Hitler, right? Absolutely. But he is even more enthusiastic about violence and street fighting than Hitler. As far as Ruhemann is concerned, I think street fighting is Nazism and everything else, like the politics and discussing policy. He thinks that is boring, a waste of time, and actually a compromise with the old order.

He loves cracking heads and having big fights. Because we should say that the Nazis come to power adopting a double approach. One, politically, they play the democratic games incredibly well. I mean, Hitler blazes all kinds of innovations that subsequent democratic leaders will follow, but also seizing control of the streets. And they're mainly fighting communists, but the establishment of Nazi rule means that the Nazis have irrevocably seized control of the streets as well as of the democratic institutions. Exactly as you say, Tom. There's a weird paradox

at the heart of the Nazi regime in 1933. On the one hand, they're clearly fermenting disorder on the streets. The stormtroopers are running amok, beating people up, smashing Jewish shop windows, beating Jews up, strutting around real bully boy kind of behavior. So they are responsible for disorder. On the other hand, Hitler's promise to the German people is, I'm going to end disorder. I'm the person who will make Germany great again and get everything calmed down. So he's absolutely riding two horses. Now, there's been a long-running tension between the SA and the rest of the Nazi party, because the SA throughout the 1920s had become more and more a kind of party within a party. Ruhm had been in and out. So at one point, he'd actually gone off to run the...

He went to Bolivia, didn't he? The Bolivian army, which is a very bizarre career move. So not the last Nazi to go to South America, of course. Yeah, exactly. Very good. There'd been a bit of a crisis in the SA, which we don't need to go into. They'd fallen out with some of the rest of the Nazi party, and Hitler had brought Röhm back. Now, Röhm was never...

He's a strutting bully boy sort of man. He's kind of Mussolini-esque. Yes, I guess so. Without Mussolini's brains, actually, because Mussolini was a journalist, Röhm doesn't have any of that. But he's physically imposing. Absolutely.

And presumably Hitler has brought Röhm back because he needs his street fighting savvy. Yes, exactly. Even though he knows that Röhm is not happy about pursuing kind of political means, that Röhm just wants to have endless fights. Get out there and have a crack at the commies. Exactly. The shadow that hangs over Röhm is that he is very flagrantly gay.

Everybody knows this. Lots of Hitler's sort of cronies say to him, oh, Röhm is a terrible man, kind of carrying on with blonde-haired youths, all this stuff. This is not what a Nazi should do. And actually, Hitler gives him a bit of a pass on it because he needs Röhm and he knows that he has the loyalty of all these stormtroopers. So there is a slightly odd and unexpected twist. It's a bit like Mrs. Thatcher, very tolerant of her minister's foibles. Right. That's a comparison that I would expect from a lot of Twitter academics, but not necessarily from you.

There you go. Woke history. The old Hitler-Thatcher comparison again, I see. You can take the child out of the 1980s, but you can't take the 1980s out of the child, right? Yeah, right. So let's fast forward to the summer of 1933. The SA, the Storm Abtyling, the Storm Troopers, have now swollen to an enormous size. Loads of people have poured into their ranks. So they now have four and a half million people who are kind of paid up, brown shirt wearing Storm Troopers.

So they've absorbed lots of other paramilitary groups and veterans groups. And so Dominic, that must be larger than the army. Far larger, because of course the army is hidebound by the Treaty of Versailles. Yeah. So the army is a shadow of its former self, and the army are very anxious about this. There's this huge paramilitary formation kind of roaming around the streets. Hitler knows that the army commanders are very, very displeased about the existence of the SA.

But there's an urgency to this now because Paul von Hindenburg, who has the absolute loyalty of the army, I mean, he is the army's great hero. And he is the president. This is the walrus. The walrus, who looks like he's made of oak or something. He's like the personification of Prussian rigor.

He, as you said, he's actually, I think, about 85. But as you said, he appears to be 270. And he is clearly not long for this world. And when he dies, which is going to be in the next year or two, the army may well insist that one of their people becomes head of state. And that will be a problem for Hitler. It could be a rival power focus. It could be a rival power focus. It could be somebody who could act against him and undermine his regime. And so as the SA, the stormtroopers, are kind of running amok and causing all this trouble and actually turning the army against them, that makes Hitler very nervous because Hitler knows he cannot afford to alienate the army commanders.

What is worse is that Röhm, you know, what did you call him? Uncle Monty, crossed with a kind of- Scarface. Yeah. Because he is scarred, isn't he? He's got his nose and everything. Yeah, so a noseless Uncle Monty. Yeah, cross between Voldemort, Tom, and-

Yes, and Uncle Monty, yeah. He is now saying, well, actually, Nazism has lost its figure. It's lost its radical impetus. We need a second revolution, a revolution within the revolution. He says the German revolution has fallen asleep. This is all in the summer of 1933. And there's this argument, are we going to have a permanent revolution? Are the SA going to be running amok forever?

And Hitler manages to kind of dampen this down for the remainder of 1933. But then in 1934, beginning of 1934, it all kind of kicks off again. Because Ruhm, who is so restless and is always thinking that he's being sidelined and stuff, he writes a memo. I mean, it's hard to believe that he spends much time writing memos. But anyway, he writes a memo and he sends it to the army. And he says, okay, this is my plan. I think actually the SA should just be the army.

The stormtroopers could be the army. And the traditional army, they should just train our men. We should be the defense force. Okay, and so what's Hitler's take on this? The army commanders go to Hitler and they say, oh, this is totally intolerable. This strutting bully cannot squeeze us out.

Hitler agrees with them. He forces them to do a deal. And Röhm promises he'll behave himself. But then when Hitler goes out of the room, Röhm says to his men, he's overheard saying to his men, and I quote, what that ridiculous corporal declared doesn't apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and we'll have to send him on leave. And if we can't do this with Hitler, we'll do it without him. So this is extraordinary.

Hitler, who is the Fuhrer to most Nazis, who is the center of the kind of Nazi cult, here is the guy who was commanding his paramilitary formation who's saying, actually, you know what? Hitler's turning out to be an obstacle to our revolution and maybe he'll have to go. Which is foolish, isn't it? Because people who oppose Hitler within the Nazi party tend not to come off very well. So there was a guy called Gregor Strasser, wasn't there? He'd been very much on the socialist wing of the National Socialists. He had started opening negotiations with the conservatives to make himself vice-chancellor. So Hitler had elbowed him out.

And so presumably Hitler is now thinking, this isn't just about the balance between the stormtroopers and the army. This is about my future. Now, here's the question though. If he's going to take on the SA, what resources does he have? Because you've talked about the army, you've talked about the SA,

but so far we haven't talked about the police. Yeah. So he's got the police. The police have generally been taken over. So, for example, in Prussia by Nazi officials. Prussia is the biggest German state. And the guy who's initially taken over is Hermann Goering. So he is in the cabinet as interior minister for Prussia, isn't he?

So there's the police. There's, of course, the army. But there's also another power centre in the Nazi regime, an emerging power centre, which is Hitler's bodyguard. And they are the SS. So they are the Schutzstaffel. So that's the protection squad, isn't it, in English? Yeah, much smaller than the strong troopers, much smaller than the SA.

They are more fanatical about Nazi ideology, less into the kind of street punch. I mean, they can be very violent, but they're less into the sort of the random street punch-ups. They're a crack squad of elite men. So there's about 50,000 of them? Yeah, and they tend to be university educated. Yeah. They spend a lot of time kind of talking about anti-Semitism. I mean, the classic sort of SS person is, I mean, obviously there's Heinrich Himmler,

who had been a previously very sickly kind of idealistic person, fascinated by the occult and stuff. There's his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich is the son of, I think, an opera singer or something like that. He's a brilliant violinist. A fencer like that. He's a brilliant violinist. A fencer as well. He's a brilliant fencer. A reservist in the Navy.

A very sinister man. But he has a very, very high voice. He does indeed. He's both sinister and I think slightly effeminate, isn't he, Heydrich, in his kind of very scary, sinister way. So he's head of the SS, which is kind of an elite paramilitary organization and Hitler's praetorian guard, basically. I mean, devoted to looking after Hitler personally. But Himmler has also been engaging in a kind of power grab.

So he's president of the Munich police, political police commander of Bavaria. So there's this process by which intelligence and political sections in the police are being sidelined off and filled with Nazis. So Goering has been doing that in Prussia. And Goering has set... So he's detached the intelligence political sections from the main body of the Prussian police. He's filled them with Nazis and he's merged them to form the secret state police, as he calls it, the Geheimstaatspolizei,

so the Gestapo, as it's abbreviated to. So you're having that in Prussia, but you're also having a similar process in Bavaria and then in the other German states. And Himmler is taking control of those, isn't he? So he's empire building, as Röhm is doing, as Goering is doing. Well, actually, Tom, what happens is that Goering hands control of the Gestapo in Prussia to Himmler.

Yeah. Because basically, lots of these Nazis hate each other. They're all rivals of the court of Hitler. Yeah. But all of Röhm's enemies basically decide it's in their interest to team up against him to make him the scapegoat it's like bullies turning on each other and they decide one of them's going to be the scapegoat and that's and so goering and himmler and all these other people they basically decide to share out power among themselves to to sort everything out so they can move against the room but just to emphasize

it's not just that they are teaming up as political figures, but as figures who have manpower behind them. Yeah, as institutional figures. Because if Hitler is going to take on the SA, he obviously needs people who can, you know, wield the guns and the lorries and do the shooting and everything. He does indeed. And are the army going to be complicit in this? I mean, will the army provide help? Hitler is very anxious about the army, because by the spring of 1934 the hindenburg issue was more pressing than ever it is very clear that there are a lot of people in the kind of national conservative elites who are close to the army who are extremely anxious that after more than a year hitler is getting more and more power

and that he is not proving to be the kind of pliant tool that they hoped. So the classic example of this is this guy, Franz von Papen, who was chancellor a couple of chancellors ago. He's now Hitler's vice chancellor. He's a man who basically wants to turn back the clock before the First World War and have a kind of arch conservative kind of regime. And on the 17th of June, 1934, Papen gives a speech which is seen as a real threat to Hitler. It's actually an extraordinary moment in the history of the Third Reich. He says, under the German revolution, under our revolution, selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry and arrogance have all flourished. He says, we can't live in a

constant state of revolution. We can't live with this constant state of unrest. And this is greatly cheered by the old order. And they say, thank God somebody's basically finally said it to Hitler. This jumped up little corporal from Austria who, you know, has got all these ghastly people running around on the streets. Hitler is furious about this. And he ends up having this summit meeting with Hindenburg and the head of the army, Furnivon Blomberg, who is his defense minister. This is on the 21st of June at Hindenburg's kind of castle, which is called Neudeck in East Prussia. And Hindenburg and Blomberg, who's the

head of the army, say to Hitler, listen, this has all gone too far now. All this squabbling must absolutely end. You must bring your party and your movement to heel, to order. And that there's an implicit threat there, right? Which is that if Hitler doesn't act, the army will. Then the army will, exactly. Now, meanwhile, Tom, as you said, the Gestapo, the intelligence organisations,

the police, which are under the control of Ernst Ruhm's enemies, people like Himmler and Heydrich. And are now operating on a national level. Yes. Because there'd been no national police force under the Weimar Republic, had there? So again, this concentration of police power and of SS power on a kind of federal level is giving Hitler the opportunity to strike, presumably.

They go to Hitler and they say, we have evidence that Ruhm, the SA, the stormtroopers, are planning a coup against you, that you are going to be kicked out. They maybe are in league with the French and, you know, the hour is dark. It could happen any moment now. You have to move. And is this true? No, it's not true. Right. The SA were never planning a coup. There was no deal with the French. The idea that RUUM was seriously going to launch a coup, he's actually not really organized enough to do it. And I don't think he has the will to do it, Tom. But on the 27th of June, the army chiefs, Wernher von Blumberg and Walter von Reichenau, who's a very keen Nazi, they go to see Hitler and they say,

look, you've got to move against him. You've got to do something about this. And Hitler says, fine, I've got an idea. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get all the stormtroopers, the SA leaders, I'll meet with them. There's a lot of spa towns in this story, bizarrely. At a place called Bad Wiese, which is on Lake Tegensee, which is southeast of Munich. That's where Rome is hanging out at the moment. Rome's always going to spas with kind of blonde young men.

Yeah. So it is sinister because these spa towns are kind of very dull, very bourgeois, aren't they? Faint hint of sulphur hanging in the air. And you can imagine Röhm absolutely enormous. Sweating. Sweating like a pig.

Sweating away. Absolutely. Bright red. And a very, very kind of creepy context for the drama that is to come. With a suspiciously young youth at his side, Tom, I think is

the Ernst Röhn vibe. So Hitler says, I'm going to basically beard him in his lair. As it were. Yeah. Then the very next day, the 28th of June, bizarrely Hitler goes to a wedding in a place called Essen. Well known now,

Tom, to fans of board games because they have the world's biggest board game convention takes place in Essen, which is nice. Anyway, Hitler goes to this wedding reception at Essen, a Gauleiter is getting married. And at the wedding reception, he is told Hindenburg and Papen, your vice-chancellor, the spokesman for the kind of national conservative old order, they're actually plotting to have a secret meeting without you in a couple of days. And Hitler thinks, oh my God, they're about to move against me. You know, the urgency is greater than ever before. I absolutely must take this opportunity to crush all my enemies in one go.

So the Ruhm and the stormtroopers on one hand hand and the representatives, the conservatives on the other. And he rushes off from the wedding reception. He'd be a rubbish person to have at a wedding reception anyway, because, of course, he doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke. And he likes to be the center of attention. Like you, Tom, he's a vegetarian. Yeah. So basically, if they're all eating sausages and beer and drinking beer and having a final time. He's a real misery to have at your wedding. He's nibbling on some spinach.

But presumably, I mean, he must hate weddings because he's not the focus. Yeah, of course. Of course. He'd be the last person I'd invite to my wedding, Tom. I mean, I had you to my wedding. I'm glad you've got that on there. You came to my wedding, but I didn't have Hitler and I wouldn't have had him. But Dominic, to be fair, when you invited me, I didn't then go storming off and order a bloodthirsty putsch.

No, you didn't. So I think the comparison can only be pushed so far, is what I'm saying. I just want that on the record. That well-known, that comparison has dogged you all your career. Anyway, so yes, Hitler races away from the wedding. He goes back to his hotel. He says, put the army on alert.

We're going to move. He says to Goering, who's also at the wedding, presumably been stuffing himself with sausages. He says to Goering, go back to Berlin, prepare to deal with the conservatives. I will handle the stormtroopers in Munich. You deal with the conservatives in Berlin. The knight of the long knives, Tom, is about to get started. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, spa action. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening,

bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are looking at the Night of the Long Knives and Dominic, the Night of the Long Knives is approaching. But before it gets launched, we go to another spa, don't we? So we promised listeners spas, and we are absolutely fulfilling that promise. An enormous amount of this podcast is Hitler just checking into and out of various hotels. So he's been to the wedding in Essen, and now he races to a town called Bad Gordesberg

in Westphalia, because he's gone to look at some labour camps. He's gone to inspect some labour camps in Westphalia. And then he goes to this hotel, the Rhein Hotel in Bad Godersberg, where Goebbels comes to meet him. So Goebbels, who we haven't talked about, PhD in what is it? Sort of theatre, romantic theatre or something. The propaganda minister.

Malignly genius at propaganda and all that kind of thing. Exactly. And because he writes a diary, we know loads about the Third Reich through Goebbels' diaries. So he's come to this hotel, and I imagine a hotel with white tablecloths. Absolutely. A little bit shabby and very elderly waiters. I would almost certainly, Tom. And again, the faint smell of sulphur. So that's the scene.

And Goebbels pitches up, and Goebbels says, great, we're going to do this coup, this coup, you know, within our own regime. And Hitler says, yes. Goebbels thinks it's going to be against the conservatives. And Hitler says, it's not just against the conservatives. It's also going to be against Ruhm and the stormtroopers, because I now have evidence that Ruhm is plotting with the French. And he says, you know, heads are going to roll.

Blood will be shed. I remember we were researching this, Tom. We were on a flight to Australia. You said you'd been reading all about it and you'd come to the conclusion that Hitler was a very, Hitler was a terrible man. Hitler behaved very poorly. He did. I really did.

I mean, I had that vague impression. When you get up close, he's a terrible man. He is. I mean, if you're in a spa, you wouldn't want him turning up. That's what I'm saying. No, because I mean, his violence against his enemies, horrendous, obviously, but sort of with Hitler's twisted worldview, explicable, I suppose. But he's now using that violence and that sort of sadistic ruthlessness

against people who have been at his side for more than a decade, partners in his movement. Because presumably he is Germany. He is the embodiment of Germany. And so therefore, people who rub him up the wrong way are rubbing Germany up the wrong way. That would be his justification, I guess. Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. And I also think there's a histrionic side to Hitler. And when he is challenged, he can't take it. And because there's an enormous amount of him working himself up into a fury and kind of spitting and foaming at the mouth in this story. So this is what he's doing in this hotel. I think that's what I conveyed in the opening passage.

Absolutely. With the Clouseau voice. Yeah. It wasn't Clouseau. It was Austrian. It was Austrian. Okay. Overnight, 29th of June, 30th of June,

Hitler flies to Munich and he takes a whole load of adjutants and bodyguards and he also takes Goebbels with him. And they land in Munich. Rumors of this have obviously traveled around Germany that something is coming. Some kind of confrontation between the stormtroopers and the rest of the party. And some of the stormtroopers have gone berserk already. And have kind of been rampaging around the city, demonstrating. I mean, they've apparently been shouting in Munich, the Fuhrer is against us, the Reichswehr, the army, is against us. SA, come out on the streets. Show your defiance.

Now, it's not so much a challenge to Hitler as an expression of their fear and frustration, I think. But Hitler interprets this as the beginning of the coup. And he says, right, we have to absolutely act immediately. So he goes to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, which is in Munich, and he summons the local leaders of the SA, who think of themselves, of course, as loyal to Hitler. As his servants. Yes. They're Hitler's, they think of themselves as his keenest, most devoted servants. And I suppose in many cases they are, because lots of them have been with Hitler since the

very beginning. Absolutely. Absolutely they have. This is Hitler's terribleness as a man, Tom, That they come in, you know, Mein Führer, you know, all this kind of meek and mild. And he grips the badges off their tunics and shouts at them, you're under arrest and you're going to be shot. And do you think there's spittle flying in their faces? There's all kinds of spittle, Tom. This is very spittle and spa rich story.

Yeah. They don't understand. They're terrified and they're dragged off to prison. So then Hitler goes off. He's got another spa town to visit. Yeah, of course he has. He drives off to yet another spa town. This is Bad Wiese on the Lake Degensee.

Which is where Röhm has been staying. Where Röhm has been sweating. With his towel and his young lads. Hitler arrives at 6.30 in the morning with a load of SS bodyguards and police. So there's your sign, Tom, that you were talking about in the first half, the institutions that are backing Hitler, the SS and the police.

And presumably, so Himmler is now, I mean, he is joined in a bond of blood with Hitler. Yes. Because he's providing Hitler with the means to take the SA out. And hasn't the army given the SS the wherewithal, the weaponry and the trucks and everything? Yes, exactly. The army know this is happening and they're happy with it.

So the army also, their fingers are going to be dabbled in the blood. It's a good point. That from this point onwards, it's not just that they have all, there's a kind of pact of blood against their internal enemies, the communists and the social democrats and so on, but against their own movement that will kind of bind them together. Anyway, Hitler arrives at this Hansel Bauer Hotel, yet another of these kind of spa hotels. Faded, white tablecloths, ticking clock, elderly waiters. As you described in your reading, he bursts him. The first person he goes to is this is this book uh sa senior group leader highness now highness is a very predatory man and he's dragged out of his

room and he's with this 18 year old boy a blonde haired boy and they're both locked up in a laundry room so this is obviously very bad publicity for the stormtroopers. Then Hitler goes in to see Rome. Rome is kind of, as you described, Rome is a bit bewildered by it, but he's kind of taken out. Kind of sleepy. What's going on? And he just sort of sits in the foyer of the hotel in the reception area, smoking a cigar, like placidly unconcerned, so it appears,

while all this bustle of people being arrested all around him. Because I think Rome just thinks, well, this is probably, who knows what's going on. This is going to sort itself out. Meanwhile, Hitler is kind of rampaging around this spa hotel, bursting into people's bedrooms and shouting, arrested, arrested. That's the worst kind of spa break, isn't it?

People are being dragged out. They're all locked in the laundry room, which is also kind of the basement. They're being locked in the basement. Shambolically, loads more SA people are arriving because they think there's going to be a big meeting with Hitler. So as they're getting out of their cars, all sorts of smiles and handshakes, Hitler has them arrested.

His men have to charter a coach, I think from Bad Wiese, so it must be the only coach firm in Bad Wiese, to take them all to Munich because they're so kind of ill-prepared. Eventually, Hitler goes back to Munich. He's absolutely frothing at the mouth. People actually do describe spittle flying from his mouth as he talks, Tom. He says, Röhm is guilty, he says, of the worst treachery in world history,

which is a big claim. He says he's been givenachery in world history, which is a very big claim. Yeah. He says he's been given 12 million marks by the French and he was going to hand Germany over to the French. We must kill all the him and his conspirators. And actually, all Hitler's cronies say, oh, I'd like to kill Röhm, please. I mean, Rudolf Hess, who's like Hitler's poodle, begs him, can I please have the privilege of shooting Röhm? I mean, again, this paints the Nazis in a very bad light, Tom,

because these are their own comrades. I mean, they're their own partners in evil that they want to turn on. They go through lists and Hitler's kind of crossing them off. But actually, at first, he doesn't order that Röhm be shot. He hesitates. Because presumably it's embarrassing for him. It's incredibly embarrassing.

Because he's personally invited Röhm back from... Bolivia....La Paz or whatever. Yeah hesitates. Because presumably it's embarrassing for him. It's incredibly embarrassing. Because he's personally invited Ruhm back from La Paz or whatever to run the SA. Exactly. So it reflects badly on his choice of personnel. Hitler is not a sentimental man. I don't think he's going to be sentimental about shooting Ruhm, but I think he knows it's a big step.

So this has been happening in Munich and most of the targets are the SA. But meanwhile in Berlin, the man in charge there has been Goering. So Goebbels had run Goering that morning with a password, Tom. The password was Colibri, which is hummingbird. And when Goering heard that, he knew that it was time to move. Goering, also an absolutely disgraceful man. He got dressed up, especially in a white tunic, white boots.

I mean, a white boots on a man, I think, is never a good look. And sort of blue trousers. So he cuts a very peacock-like figure. And then he's striding up and down his office, going through lists of people. It's very kind of Julius Caesar, Tom. Well, it's the prescriptions. It's the tram for it. He's saying they're going through lists and he's saying, shoot him.

Yeah, shoot him. And he's kind of bursting into loud laughter, the thought of all these shootings and all this kind of thing. But all the people who end up being shot, or not all the people, but a lot of the people who end up being shot in Berlin

are the National Conservatives kind of old order people. Right. And the most significant is General Schleicher, who we mentioned. The previous chancellor. The previous chancellor and his wife. Yeah. An the most significant is General Schleicher who we mentioned. The previous Chancellor. The previous Chancellor

and his wife. Yeah. An SS squad arrive at their house open the door you General Schleicher yes you are bang, bang

and his wife and they're both killed. Papen is not shot is he? Because that would be too embarrassing. He's put under house arrest because he's the Vice Chancellor.

It would be incredibly embarrassing but his press chief and his speechwriter so Herbert von Bosa and Edgar Jung, who are the people who've been writing his speeches saying, and end the Nazi revolution, let's all calm down. You know, things have gone too far. They are shot. A load of other kind of old Hitler rivals are killed in various ways.

Gregor Strasser. Yeah. The guy who was a kind of populist Nazi who had walked out of the... Yes, the rival who'd stepped down. He'd gone off to become a chemist. Yeah. And he gets killed.

And a guy who had... For people who listened to the rise of the Nazis, to the episode about the Beer Hall Putsch, there was a guy who was the big cheese in Munich in those days, who was a guy called Gustav Ritter von Kahr. He's actually hacked to death. He's cut into pieces by the SS, which is a very poor form, Tom.

And you mentioned Roman history. After the murder of Julius Caesar, famously a poet called Sinner is killed in the mistaken belief that he is one of the conspirators. And a very similar thing happens with this, doesn't it? So a music critic called Schmitt, who has the wrong name yes gets killed because they think he's another schmidt and there's also a guy i mean a guy who'd actually helped him to produce to edit mein kampf a guy called um bernard stemfler he is killed as well by a complete accident so in all about 85 people

are killed. There's a lot of score settling. Poetic justice, one might say. Poetic justice, very good. It's the settling world scores. It's faction fighting, feuding. But it's also a message to two groups. One is the SA.

You know, you'll get back in line, get back in your box. And the other is the conservatives. And to the army. Yes. And presumably to the whole German people. Absolutely. absolutely so the room just to tie up his fate hitler waits for another um another day but while he's deciding what to do with him there's some talk of a show trial but actually on the sunday the first of july at a garden party would you believe so it's the whole i mean it's the weird way in which there is this sense of faded gentility behind it yeah you know who i'd like to see make a film about this unexpected

would be uh wes anderson i knew you're gonna say wes anderson he loves a kind of faded spa yeah like the grand budapest hotel something like that yeah well it's a sort of death of stalin you know the armando and uchi film yes there's sort of it's not a comedy because obviously a lot of people die but there is a kind of blackly comic side grotesque side to all this it's a grotesque story in a very grim way anyway at the garden party hitler says fine room's got to go so a load of blokes go to the prison in munich ss mem and they leave room with a pistol they say he should take his own life And they leave him with a newspaper where he can read about his own treachery. And hopefully this will encourage him to take his own life. After 10 minutes, there's been no shots, no sound.

They come back in. Right, no good. As Ian Kershaw says in his book, whether Ruhm had used the 10 minutes to read the newspaper is not known. They take the pistol away and then they come back in. Ruhm by this this stage rather bizarrely has taken his top off and is standing there

sort of topless kind of in a sort of strutting pose. It's not clear whether this is a challenge or whether he wants to he thinks it's better

to greet his death. Well it's a kind of bearing of the chest for a sword. I guess so, yeah. Maybe again it's a kind of echo of a Roman. Yes.

Although rather pathetically. Run me through. Yeah, rather pathetically, rather like Indiana Jones shooting that bloke in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They just shoot him and then that's the end of him.

He's dead. So the whole thing is done and dusted that day. Hitler's announcement on this is very, the former chief of staff, Worm, was given the opportunity

to draw the consequences of his treacherous behaviour. He did not do so and was thereupon shot. Yeah, very. That's that's all he says branding him with infamy yes so he then goes to his cabinet on the 3rd of july and he says yeah i i didn't have any recourse to legality we've killed all these people and the cabinet they draft a law law for the emergency defense of the state and this law is obviously a total joke because the law says everything Hitler did in the last few days is legal.

That's literally the law. So it's a kind of retrospective legal justification for murder, for mass murder. Hitler is clearly anxious about it because it takes him 10 days, another 10 days before he goes to the Reichstag, to the parliament. Because presumably there are lots of people in the Nazi party who've lost friends. Yeah, of course. And who are worried that Hitler has gone mad and is turning on his own. And so Hitler must know this and must worry, do I still have what it takes to command

the mass of the party? I guess. I totally agree with you, Tom. You know, the idea of camaraderie and brotherhood, Ruhm, by the way, had incarnated that as part of that front generation. The idea that we are a sort of brotherhood of steel formed in the furnace of the trenches. But the irony of it is that these are people who have absolutely propagated that idea of behaving with steel, of mercilessly crushing enemies, and also have fostered all kinds of grotesque and hideous conspiracy theories. And they have now been monumentally hoist by their own petard. They've been brutally crushed and Hitler is kind of alleging all kinds of dark conspiracies against them. Yes, absolutely. But he's still very, as you say, he's very anxious.

So you said people lost friends. 13 members of the Reichstag have been killed in this purge. And there are people who were really close friends 13 members of the Reichstag have been killed in this purge. Yeah, right. And there are people who were really close friends with some of the SA men who were in the Reichstag when Hitler gives the speech. And Hitler speaks for two hours. And he's completely unrepentant. And he says, sure, I broke the law. I took the law into my own hands.

But he says, all I can say is, in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation. And I was the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot those guilty of this treason and i gave the order to burn down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well poisoning and the poisoning from abroad can you have an ulcer of an internal well poisoning i think you can if you're the fuhrer i suppose you probably can because you can do what you like make You can make any mixed metaphor. Because also in that speech, it is not my responsibility to ascertain whether, and if so, which of these conspirators,

agitators, nihilists, and well-poisoners of German public opinion has been dealt too hard a lot. Rather, my duty is to make certain that Germany's lot is bearable. So basically, in other words, I can do what I like because I am German. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Les tassez-moi.

And you know what? The public like it i am germany exactly exactly and you know what the public like it the german people by and large i think it's fair to say are pretty happy because a lot of people are deeply resented yeah the essay the bullying the street violence they thought they were thugs football like jumped up football hooligans and finally the fuhrer has cracked down on them good Good for him. Maybe Rome was plotting with the French. Great. No one liked him. Get rid of him. I mean, the thing about the SA is that violence is seen as legitimate. And so if you are, I don't know, an average citizen going out for your Saturday shopping or whatever, and you have gangs of pot-bellied guys in brown shirts

waving flags and shouting slogans, it's menacing and intimidating. Yeah, exactly. And you want to see it come to an end. Exactly. It's perfectly judged, actually, to appeal to those middle-class people who basically want a quiet life.

They want order. They want Germany to be great again. They want an end to unemployment and inflation and all the things that they associate with the Weimar Republic. And the fewer strutting bully boys in their little town, as far as they're concerned, the better. So they're delighted. And what about the army? The army are absolutely... I mean, there are lots of winners. So the SS are big winners, of course. Himmler will now accumulate more and more power. He's begun as a bodyguard,

now becomes the kind of, as you said, the Praetorian Guard, unchallenged Praetorian Guard of the Nazi regime, but the army in particular. Wernher von Blumberg, the defense minister, the guy who's supposedly speaking up for the Reichswehr, for the army, he had led the vote of thanks to Hitler in the cabinet meeting. So with all this settled, a month later, the big development development Hindenburg is on his deathbed the president Hitler flew to see him on the 1st of August there's a castle in East Prussia Hindenburg was so far gone that he mistook Hitler for the Kaiser and addressed him as Kaiser I mean what a symbolic moment Tom Hitler goes back to Berlin knowing that Hindenburg only has hours left. And he has all his ministers put their names to a law that says when Hindenburg is dead, to honour him, it's like

retiring the shirt of a footballer. The office of Reich president will be retired. But Dominic, am I right in thinking that the idea for that actually comes from the army, not from Hitler? Well, the idea for the oath comes from the army. So the office is retired, Reich president. There will now just be a Führer, a leader and Reich chancellor. We always say Führer, but actually Richard Evans in his books on the third Reich calls him the leader because, you know, let's sort of demystify the word and think of it as Germans would have thought of it. There is just going to be one leader. And Blomberg and Reichenau, the army chiefs, exactly as you just said, they think, let's bind Hitler to us. And the way we'll do that is we will make everybody in the army

swear an oath of unconditional loyalty to the leader as supreme commander. And of course, what they don't realize is instead of binding Hitler to the army, they are binding the army to Hitler. Because everything that follows, all the crimes in the Second World War come from this. So it's exactly repeating the mistake that the conservatives have made. Yeah. And thinking that they could use Hitler, they could ride this particular tiger. Yes.

Later in this series, we will explore a bit more why the army thought that because so much of it is about Hitler's foreign policy ambitions and how much at first it appears that they dovetail with the army commander's ambitions to have a strong army to make Germany great again, all this kind of stuff. But just for the time being, there's a plebiscite, a referendum to approve this change. That happens in the middle of stuff. But just for the time being, there's a plebiscite, a referendum to approve

this change. That happens in the middle of August. 90% of the public approve that Hitler is head of state, head of government, leader of the Nazi party. So it's still not quite kind of North Korean levels. Not quite. There's an awful lot of intimidation and whatnot. I mean, Hitler loves a referendum. This is a great series of Spartans and referendums. This is what he's all about. Absolutely. So there's already a cult of Hitler in their brilliant books on the Third Reich. Both Sir Ian Kershaw and Sir Richard Evans talk a lot about this, about the poems, about the Hitler trees, about the Hitler squares and streets.

That started in 1933, but in 1934, it really becomes embedded and gathers momentum and it becomes what people call a kind of Fuhrer state. Everything is about the leader. The Fuhrer is the state. Absolutely. He is Germany. It's not that he's representing Germany. He is Germany.

He is Germany. Exactly, exactly. The Fuhrerprinzip, the idea of working towards the Fuhrer, all of these ideas. And all of this reaches its kind of symbolic apotheosis. Just a few weeks later, there is an assembly, Tom, of the Nazi party in a great city in southern Germany. And many of our listeners would have seen the extraordinary cinematic images of Hitler walking through the parade grounds, very Star Wars,

past the serried ranks of stormtroopers and Nazi party members and soldiers. Now, what that moment is, we will discuss next time, because I know you're very excited because you're going to be taking us through this story of what happens at Nuremberg in 1934 and the window that that offers us into the world of Nazism, Nazi ideology, Nazi behaviour, Nazi propaganda, all of that stuff. The way, Dominic, that the Nazis set about brainwashing a nation. Brilliant. So that's all very exciting. Now, the great news, we love to brainwash a nation ourselves. In fact, brainwash the world, Tom.

Well, we love to brainwash a podcast audience, don't we? So if you're in the mood for a little bit more brainwashing, you can hear the rest of this series right now by signing up at therestishistory.com. Now, just to give you a sense of what the series is going to be, there will be episodes on Nazi propaganda and Nazi ideology. There will be two episodes on Hitler's road to war, his plans for war, and also on the Anschluss with Austria, with Hitler's native land. And there will also be an episode about the Nazis and the Jews, and in particular, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. And Tom, on that bombshell, we will see you all at Nuremberg. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

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