Hitler’s Killing of Followers Seen as Holocaust Prelude

In a world which has seen its share of murderous dictators in the past 90 years, historians – and film makers—are still fascinated by the singular figure of Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi regime launched World War II and perpetrated the Holocaust.

One crucial date in the gory tale of the Führer’s reign was the night of June 30 to July 1, 1934, when Hitler proved that there was no limit to his blood thirst as he ordered the murder of up to one thousand old comrades and once devoted followers.

For post World War II generations, the horror story will be retold by the PBS television network on Nov. 24 under the title “Night of the Long Knives,” the name usually attached to the blood bath of the 1930s,

Despite the façade of unity facing the outside world, the top echelon of the Nazi regime was riven by suspicions and rivalries.

One power player was Ernst Röhm, an early Hitler devotee, who commanded the notorious Brown shirts of the SA (for Sturmabteilung or Storm Unit), numbering some three million men and the face (and enforcer) of the Nazi regime in every German city and village.

Röhm thus commanded the most formidable force in Germany since the regular army, which disliked the SA, was limited to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty ending World War I.

On the political side, Röhm represented the left wing of the Nazi party. He actually believed in the supposed platform of the party, whose full name -– National Socialist German Workers Party—was seen by many as a counterweight to the Communists in in representing the working class.

On the Night of the Long Knives, Röhm and his staff were vacationing at a rural hotel when Hitler’s SS bodyguard troops broke in, found him in bed with a young man, and killed both of them.

In the subsequent blood bath of Hitler’s supposedly disloyal followers throughout Germany, “officially” 85 men were killed, but historians believe that the figure was in the hundreds and up to one thousand.

Afterwards, the Nazi propaganda machine proclaimed that the killing represented the elimination of a dangerous nest of homosexuals, whose sexual preference was prohibited under German law. Ironically, Röhm had maintained for a long time that Hitler himself was queer.

In another odd sidelight, many German Jews, who had suffered under the undisciplined hooliganism of the SA men, applauded Hitler’s mass killing as putting the Brown shirts in their place.

As historian Daniel Pinner noted on the 85^th anniversary of the Night of the Long Knives “It is one of the supreme ironies of the Shoah that the Röhm purge, the Nazis’ first murderous pogrom, directed against their own people in an internal power struggle, appeared to the Jews of the Reich as their rescue.  Little could anyone have known at the time what unspeakable and unbridled savagery yet lay a few short years ahead.”

Film director Julian Jones of the “Night of the Long Knives” told the Jewish Journal that the 1934 purge “paved the way for the rise of the SS and its leader Heinrich Himmler, who would go on to be one of the main architects of the Holocaust… Hitler had openly murdered people and there was no of disapproval (in Germany) from any quarter.

“Of course, Hitler had also shown what might happen to anyone who dared to speak out, using a level of violence that discouraged any meaningful opposition to Nazism.”

That said, back in 1934 even the keenest Hitler opponent could not have foreseen the Holocaust to come, to which Jones added, “That’s why it’s so incredibly important to look back at this period of history – to learn from it, to see the warning signs, to remind people of what happened and to make sure it can never happen again.”

“Night of the Long Knives” will air Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. on PBS SoCal1, and repeat on Nov. 25 at 2 a.m. and 11 p.m.  It will also be shown on PBS SoCal2 on Nov. 27 at 7 p.m.