Night of the Long Knives

 

Hitler with Röhm in 1933

"Le nuit des longs couteaux" is a 2020 French TV documentary about the so-called Night of the Long Knives, a Nazi purge that took place in Germany from 30 June to 2 July, 1934. The purge was ordered by Adolf Hitler and many of its victims were themselves Nazis, the most prominent being Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary force connected to the Nazi Party. The official death toll was 85 people, but the actual number was probably much higher. 

In 1933-34, Hitler was heading an increasingly unstable coalition of forces. Röhm and the SA wanted a far-reaching National Socialist "revolution" directed against the old bourgeois and aristocratic establishments. Röhm also demanded that the German army unite with the SA. At the time, the SA had more volunteers than the army had soldiers! Unsurprisingly, the military opposed the plans. Meanwhile, Hitler also had problems with his conservative allies to the right: President Paul von Hindenburg and Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen being the most important. The conservatives had aided and abetted Hitler´s rise to power in 1933 in the hope that they could control him and the Nazi Party. On June 17, 1934, Papen had given a speech at the Marburg University criticizing the excesses of the Nazi regime. Thus, Hitler was challenged by forces both to his "left" and to his right. In the end, he chose to strike at both. 

The "Night of the Long Knives" was carried out by the Schutzstaffel (SS) together with the Gestapo. The SS was a paramilitary force led by Hitler´s close associate Heinrich Himmler, and competed with the SA for power within the Nazi regime. The murders and executions were extrajudicial even by Nazi standards, but were (of course) legalized in retrospect. I didn´t know that Hitler personally attacked and arrested Röhm at the hotel where the SA leader was staying on June 30, 1934. The whole thing sounds like an absurd episode from some bad movie, with Hitler bursting into Röhm´s hotel room in the dead of night, with a gun in his hand! Another SA leader was found in bed with a teenage boy (many SA leaders, including Röhm, were homosexual). After being imprisoned, Röhm was "allowed" to commit suicide, but refused, instead being shot point blank in his prison cell. Meanwhile back in Berlin, many of Papen´s associates were killed by the SS. (Papen was demoted but never killed, and managed to survive the Nazi period, while Hindenburg died a natural death already on August 2.) 

Although Hitler and the Nazi leadership had purged the back-sliding conservatives around Papen, the Night of the Long Knives was nevertheless a conservative victory in the sense that the army got rid of the Sturmabteilung in return for remaining loyal to Hitler. It was also a victory for the German industrialists, since capitalism (while perhaps controlled by the Nazi regime) was never abolished. When Nazi Germany was losing ground during World War II ten years later, however, the old Nazi-conservative conflict returned, however, in the form of Operation Valkyrie, the military conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

A curious oversight in "Le nuit des longs couteaux" is that it never mentions Gregor Strasser, one of the most famous "left" Nazis, who was killed during the purge (his brother Otto had already left Germany a year earlier). Most of the documentary concentrates on Röhm, his friendship with Hitler, and Hitler´s base betrayal. 

If you live in Sweden, available at SVT Play. Recommended.