Full Description

A purge carried out by the Nazi regime between 30 June and 2 July 1934, in which Hitler ordered the killing of SA (Stormtrooper) leader Ernst Röhm and dozens of other perceived rivals. The operation eliminated the SA as an independent political force and was justified to the German public as the suppression of a coup plot. It also saw the killing of conservative politicians and former chancellors who had underestimated Hitler.

Critical Perspective

The Night of the Long KnivesNight of the Long Knives night-of-the-long-knives The purge conducted by Hitler on 30 June–2 July 1934, in which the SS and Gestapo killed at least 85 people, including SA leader Ernst Röhm and his principal associates. It eliminated the SA as a political force, secured the army’s support for Hitler, and demonstrated that political murder was a legitimate instrument of Nazi governance. By 1934, the SA (Sturmabteilung) — the Nazi paramilitary organisation led by Ernst Röhm, which had been central to Hitler’s rise to power — had become a problem rather than an asset. The SA’s 3 million members were demanding a ‘second revolution’ that would redistribute wealth and replace the old aristocratic military with a people’s army led by Röhm. The regular army (Reichswehr), whose support Hitler needed for the presidential succession after Hindenburg’s imminent death, viewed the SA with contempt and saw Röhm’s ambitions as an existential threat. The SS under Himmler and Göring provided Hitler with a fabricated dossier alleging an SA coup plot. On the night of 30 June 1934, SS squads arrested Röhm and other SA leaders across Germany; Röhm was shot in prison when he refused to kill himself. The purge extended beyond the SA: it was used to settle old scores and eliminate potential rivals, including former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, the conservative publicist Edgar Jung, and Gregor Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who had rivalled Hitler for party leadership. The German cabinet legalised the killings retroactively as ’emergency defence measures.’ The army pledged personal loyalty to Hitler within weeks; he assumed the Presidency in August. The Night of the Long Knives established several norms of Nazi governance that would prove consequential. It demonstrated that the rule of law — the constitutional protections, the judicial processes, the requirement of lawful authority for state killing — could be suspended by executive decision and legalised after the fact. It demonstrated that the loyalty of the traditional establishment — the army, the conservative elite — could be secured by killing their rivals rather than by respecting their values. And it demonstrated the primacy of the SS over all other power structures within the Nazi system: the organisation that had carried out the purge emerged from it with dramatically enhanced power and legitimacy, positioning Himmler’s empire as the primary instrument of the regime’s coercive authority. The German public’s largely passive acceptance of the killings — most were relieved that the SA thugs had been removed — illustrates how quickly a population can accommodate to state murder when the victims are people they already feared or despised. did not simply eliminate a rival faction — it demonstrated to the German army, the conservative establishment, and the world that the Nazi regime would murder its own without legal constraint. The German judiciary’s subsequent exoneration of the killings showed that the rule of law had already ceased to function in Germany by mid-1934.