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This below is Chapter 3 Section 2:
2. The "Röhm Putsch" and the Assassination of Kirov in 1934
Ernst Röhm, the chief of staff of the SA, was no mere henchman of Hitler, he had once in Munich been one of the most powerful Reichswehr officers of his protectors, and the SA was not simply a “subdivision” of the NSDAP, but until January 30, 1933, it was in the eyes of the public the visible and activist party itself; its brown uniforms then formed the dominant color in the national uprising and even more so in the National Socialist revolution. But this fighting army of the ruling party did not replace the old army, as the Red Guard had done in Soviet Russia, and Hitler was far from wanting to lead an annihilation attack, following Lenin’s example, against the armed might of the state. The situation, after all, was completely different, because the Reichswehr had long since overcome the consequences of the war, and no politician in Germany could take power against their will. The SA, for its part, was not hostile to the Reichswehr from the outset, since its leadership corps, like that of the Reichswehr, consisted largely of World War officers and Freikorps fighters, only in a different proportion, and it was therefore just as much a product of the positive war experience of the representatives in Russia who had succumbed to the onslaught of the masses who hated war, or at least the war of the tsar and the landlords. Nevertheless, the SA was a force that did not consider the National Socialist revolution completed with July 14, 1933. In their ranks, therefore, there was talk of the second revolution, which would have to eliminate the still numerous reactionaries in the Wehrmacht and the economy and create the National Socialist People’s Army, whose Minister of War would be Ernst Röhm. So that, at the same time, the SA presented itself as a new manifestation of the left or socialism in the NSDAP, and it was no coincidence that Otto Straßer had many good connections to high SA leaders. Of course, none of this meant hostility towards Adolf Hitler; it was rather felt that the Führer had to be freed from the alliance with the reaction, which he had turned to in the interests of gaining power.
Nothing was more natural than that those threatened formed an informal alliance: the Reichswehr under Minister Blomberg and his chief of staff Reichenau, the German Nationalists in the cabinet headed by Papen, and the industrialists under the leadership of Krupp and Thyssen. Of the National Socialist ministers, Göring and Frick sided with the opponents of the SA, probably out of conviction; Goebbels seemed to falter. With the announcement of the “end of the revolution” in July 1933, Hitler made a preliminary decision, but he continued to seek to mediate between the two groups and reserved the office of arbitrator for himself. But while the Reichswehr initially remained in place, the SA expanded extraordinarily in 1933: it incorporated the entire “Stahlhelm,” subjugated the universities by setting up “SA university offices,” created its own “SA field police” and set up armed staff guards in many places, not infrequently in connection with SA relief camps. In July, a provisional arrangement was made between the Reichswehr and the SA: Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger was appointed chief of training, and thus the SA had become the umbrella organization for all paramilitary training. For the SA units in the East, a long-awaited goal was realized: they were given access to the border guard weapons depots. The total strength of the SA at the end of 1933 was about four million men: it thus had a starting position which the communists, when they called for civil war, could not even have dreamed of. Nevertheless, the Reichswehr was generally considered to be even stronger.
But how long would that last? After all, wouldn’t the sheer numbers carry the decisive factor in the end? Was Hitler perhaps, as was then claimed in national-Bolshevik circles, the Kerensky of the German revolution or the most important of its Girondist leaders? However, it could have been argues with better justification and with reference to Mussolini that all the analogies drawn from the previous history of revolution were wrong, because it was a question of a new and therefore different type of revolution, namely the fascist type.
The situation at the beginning of 1934 was not easy for Hitler. The millenarian hopes of the national uprising were far from being realized, unemployment had fallen only relatively slowly and largely through extension measures, and the beginnings of the church struggle and the travel ban against Austria created much concern. Real wages fell rather than rose. Goebbels had to launch a propaganda campaign against “whiners and defeatists” who were obviously able to move quite freely. If the SA was restless, wide conservative circles were dissatisfied. The fact that Röhm, together with Hess, was appointed Reich Minister without portfolio on December 1, 1933, was to be seen only as a consolation prize. However, Röhm now also developed diplomatic activities, e.g. met with the French Ambassador François-Poncet and on April 18 gave a big speech to the diplomatic corps and the foreign press in Berlin, in which he said: “…The SA stands as an unshakable bulwark against reaction, bourgeoisie and sycophants—because it embodies everything that makes up the concept of revolution!...The National Socialist revolution in Germany is the breakthrough of a new world view. The racial conditionality of its core problem, the national community (volksgemeinschaft), proves that the new German idealistic nationalism has no desire for conquest, but turns his energies inward…”
Here was the crucial point. Röhm was nowhere near as feared by foreign diplomats as by German conservatives, because the transformation of the Reichswehr into a militia army would delay, if not prevent, serious rearmament. The reaction was also attacked in the Horst Wessel song, which was now part of the national anthem, and the peace-loving, domestic-political interpretation of racial theory was often expressed by Hitler himself, but rapid and efficient rearmament was Hitler’s most important program point at the moment, and he would not let anyone jeopardize it. But even if he had not seen himself under time pressure, he would hardly have sided with Röhm, for his party as a whole was by no means revolutionary in Röhm’s sense, and he himself was not unaware that numerous Communists had flocked to the SA and possibly hoped to push an SA revolution to an even more complete upheaval. He could count on the support of Röhm’s Unterführers Himmler and Lutze, and Göring and the Gestapo were on his side anyway. Disturbing reports of alleged SA preparations for insurrection were being circulated by the Reichswehr, and at the center of the network was Hitler’s most trusted supporter among senior officers, General von Reichenau. But Hitler seemed to be slow in coming to a final decision.
At the beginning of June he had another long conversation with Röhm, during which he apparently suggested that he go on vacation. Röhm did so and even ordered a general SA leave, but he issued a threatening daily order on June 8 in which—incomprehensible folly—he did not mention Hitler’s name. But he did speak of the enemies of the SA and their vain hopes, and he ends with the pathetic sentence: “The SA is and will remain Germany’s destiny.”
On June 17, independently of Hitler, an important counterpoint was set. At the invitation of the University Association, Vice-Chancellor von Papen gave a speech in Marburg in which he spoke of the “dross” of the revolutionary state, once again opposed an anti-Christian claim to totality, and warned against dividing the people into Spartans and Helots. The decisive sentences are the following: “Anyone who irresponsibly plays with such thoughts (of the second revolution) should not hide from himself that a second wave can easily be followed by a third, that whoever threatens the guillotine is most likely to fall under the guillotine…There is much talk of the coming socialization. Have we seen an anti-Marxist revolution to carry out the program of Marxism?...No people can afford perpetual revolt from below if they want to stand before history…You cannot shape things with eternal dynamism. Germany must not be in a trek into the blue, that nobody knows when it is going to stop…”
Hitler took this speech not as support but as a challenge. Its distribution was forbidden, and its author Edgar Jung, once a prominent champion of the conservative revolution, is arrested. Hitler decides for an two front fight.
On June 28, he had an SA leaders’ conference convened in Bad Wiessee and announced his attendance. On June 30, after a visit to Essen, he flew from Hangelar to Munich together with Goebbels and Lutze. A lot of sensational news had reached him immediately beforehand, e.g. about the planning of an assassination attempt against him by the Standartenführer Uhl and about preparations for an uprising by the Berlin SA-führer Ernst (who in truth was going on his honeymoon). To what extent Hitler took them seriously and let them determine his actions is still unclear. In any case, several SA leaders were arrested as soon as they arrived in Munich, and in Wiessee the completely surprised Röhm, is taken into custody with his most important followers. The prisoners are taken to Stadelheim prison by bus. On the way, other SA leaders who are on their way to Wiessee are arrested. The Bavarian Minister of Justice, Frank, initially reassured Röhm by saying that he was, after all, in a courthouse, but on a note signed by Hitler he handed over 19 men to the SS, who were immediately shot. Röhm is given the opportunity to commit suicide, and when he fails to take it, he is killed on July 1 by Theodor Eicke, the second in command of Dachau and later inspector of the concentration camps. In the meantime in Berlin, Göring and Himmler are independently expanding their orders, and Gregor Straßer and Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow are also shot. The victims also include Papen’s associates von Bose and Jung, and the Vice Chancellor himself is placed under house arrest.
Hitler received telegrams of thanks from Blomberg and Hindenburg. On July 3, a “Law on the Measures of State Emergency Defense” is published, which states that the measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress high and national traitorous attacks were “lawful” as state emergency defense. And in his Reichstag speech of July 13, Hitler gave the following explanation: “If, however, three high traitors in Germany arrange and hold a meeting with a foreign statesman, which they themselves describe as ‘official,’ holding it while keeping the staff away and conceal from me by the strictest orders, then I will have such men shot dead, even if it should be true that during a consultation that was so hidden from me, only the weather, old coins and the like were said to have been discussed.”
That was an incredible justification for an incredible event. All states have treason laws, and they often have death as the penalty, but only after a trial! The SA had killed several hundred of its opponents since January 30, but there was talk of excesses, and most of the time the judiciary took action. In the Soviet Union, millions of enemies had been annihilated, but a revolutionary right was invoked and found various infestations even in the old constitutional states of the West. But there had never been such a massacre within a state leadership in modern history, not even within the Soviet Union. The accusations of gluttony and homosexuality, prepared to infuriate the general public and moreover insincere, carried even less weight than that of conspiracy, which in regard to General von Schleicher was at least not entirely implausible. And there were still immensely aggravating circumstances. A number of men had been shot out of revenge or as a warning, although they had no connection to the SA or possible planning by conservative circles: 73-year-old Gustav von Kahr and the chairman of the Catholic Action, Klausener, were among them, and von Schleichers’ wife had met her death alongside him. There was no fundamental difference to the mass shootings after the assassination attempts of Lenin and Uritzki, and not even an acute civil war situation could be cited as an excuse. Thus, in the center of Europe, a regime had come into being that not only shot its political opponents without sparing family members and without legal proceedings, but also destroyed the opposition within its own leadership in a mass bloodbath. It could now also be said of the National Socialist regime that shooting was the be-all and end-all of its governing wisdom.
If one does not want to be satisfied with the term “gang of criminals,” as the Russian emigres had done for years in relation to the Bolsheviks, only one serious justification can found, and it was put forward by Hitler himself in that Reichstag speech: “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thus the supreme judge of the German people. Mutiny divisions have always been called to order by decimation. Only one state has not made use of its articles of war, and this state has also collapsed for it: Germany. I did not want to hand over the young Reich to the fate of the old one.”
But even if one wrongly assumes that the leaders of the SA actually wanted to refuse obedience, the premise of the argument was that a state of war prevailed. Therefore, by Hitler’s own words, the regime revealed itself to be in a state of war in peacetime.
And precisely at that moment, following the death of Reich President von Hindenburg, Hitler was able to establish the autocracy that Mussolini was never able to achieve and that even Stalin did not yet have, formally or factually, at that point in time. In addition, the Reichswehr Minister von Blomberg eliminated the internal independence of the Wehrmacht through a coup d’état-like amendment by changing the oath of allegiance.
As early as August 1, 1934, the day before Hindenburg’s death, the Reich government decided that the office of Reich President should be combined with that of Reich Chancellor, although even the Enabling Act gave no basis for this. More importantly, Blomberg introduced by decree the new oath swearing the Wehrmacht to personal loyalty to the “Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler.” This change, too, was unlawful and, to that extent, revolutionary. But taking the personal oath meant a connection to the monarchical tradition, and it was therefore gladly accepted by the officers. That it was a kind of barter transaction became evident when Hitler sent a letter of thanks to Blomberg on August 20, in which he gave the solemn assurance that “in fulfillment of the will of the immortalized Field Marshal,” he would always regard as his highest duty “to enshrine the Army as the nation’s sole bearer of arms.”
In doing so, Hitler gave the Wehrmacht a kind of guarantee against certain tendencies of his own party, but he himself had become an autocrat such as the history of the German Reich had never known: not a substitute monarch, as Hindenburg allegedly was during the Weimar period , but to a supreme-monarch, in addition to “the Führer of the German Reich and people” with unlimited powers.
From then on he did not even have a vice chancellor at his side: despite the deep humiliation he had suffered, von Papen took over the post of extraordinary envoy in Vienna to mitigate the consequences of the National Socialist assassination attempt on Chancellor Dollfuss on July 25, 1934, which consisted mainly in a serious conflict with Mussolini. The behavior of the Reichswehr can only be explained by the fact that they saw Hitler as “their man” who guaranteed them the realization of their highest wish: the achievement of “military freedom.” In fact, there was no longer any force that could have opposed an increased and efficient rearmament. The increase in the army to 300,000 men, which Schleicher had planned to complete only in 1938, was brought forward by Hitler to autumn of 1934. However, it took some time before the leadership of the Wehrmacht understood that the exorbitant fulfillment of wishes is dangerous for those who wished them: the concept of the National Socialist People’s Army had been done away with, but under the influx of the masses the Wehrmacht itself changed its face and lost the old solidity. In addition, contrary to the promise, the formation of armed SS units was now beginning, and it was probable that the Wehrmacht would face new competition in the foreseeable future.
Among the German people, Hitler’s measures against the SA had been surprisingly well received, apparently because the party army was seen as a menacing and revolutionary force. Nevertheless, there was no lack of feeling of what it meant that, after a year and a half, the National Socialist revolution had taken total control of the top leadership of the state and thus become practically uncontrollable: when the successor law was presented to the people for decision on August 19, despite various tricks and manipulations, 4.5 million voted “No,” which was more than 10% of the electorate. This was a result without parallel in the absence of any legal counter-propaganda in a totalitarian state.
It was not surprising that numerous observers around the world viewed the Röhm affair as a serious shake-up of the National Socialist regime, probably even as the beginning of its end. Stalin, however was not among them. According to the report of Walter Krivitsky, who later became the head of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe, Stalin was “deeply impressed by the manner in which Hitler exterminated his opposition. He studied down to the minutest detail every report our agents from Germany related to the events that night.” His superior, General Bersin, the head of the intelligence service, came out of the Politburo meeting dealing with the events with Stalin the guiding principle that the events in Germany in no way indicated the collapse of the Nazi regime; on the contrary, they must lead to a consolidation of the regime and a strengthening of Hitler. At least since Khrushchev’s revelations at the XXth Party Congress, there can hardly be any doubt that the assassination of Kirov on December 1, 1934, goes back to Stalin himself and that this created the conditions for a party purge which was intended to shrink Hitler’s model to an almost microscopic size.
Yet things had started very differently in the Soviet Union than in Germany. If the triumphant unity of the national uprising was revealed in a bloody explosion as a quarrel of irreconcilable concepts and tendencies, then in 1934 in the Soviet Union something like reconciliation finally seemed to want to emerge from a long dispute, the reconciliation between the party majority and the opposition, which had for so long wrestled with each other about the right attitude towards socialism in a country, towards the international revolution, towards the peasants and above all towards the industrialization of the country. A high point of this struggle was the so-called “Ryutin’s platform” in 1932, which saw in Stalin the sole culprit for the country's catastrophic situation and to which Stalin would have gladly responded with death sentences if he could have prevailed. But Lenin’s legacy was still too keenly heard, namely that the Bolsheviks must on no account repeat the mistake of the Jacobins and engage in a war of extermination among themselves; therefore, in all the violent disputes with Trotskyites and Zinovievites, no death sentence had ever been pronounced, and when a party member was executed, such as Blumkin the murderer of Count Mirbach, who had played an important role again for a long time, then there had to be facts that could be interpreted as “treason” or something similar. Even Trotsky had merely been expelled. Ryutin, meanwhile, seemed to represent only the tip of the iceberg. The GPU had reported time and again that tendencies were spreading among young people who wanted to continue the tradition of the Narodnaya Volgya and other terrorist organizations. In 1934, in a penal camp in the far north, Ivan Solonevich met students of this type, sons of high Party officials, who openly told him about their attempt to assassinate Stalin while visiting the theater. It seems that Kirov was among those who spoke most strongly against the death penalty for intellectual authors which Stalin had called for, although he was undoubtedly a true supporter of Stalin and had earned great merit as Zinoviev’s successor in Leningrad in the Secretary-General’s mind . From the summer of 1933 onwards, however, the situation eased considerably, not least because a good harvest was expected. No one could any longer doubt that the first Five-Year Plan had actually been brought to a successful conclusion in four years, and confidence grew that in the future millions of people would no longer have to die of starvation in order to achieve the great goals of the party and the state. Rather, a slowdown in the pace and tangible relief for the people now seemed to be possible. It seemed that Stalin himself did not want to escape this mood, and at the XVII. Party Congress, some former members of the opposition were allowed to speak, including Kamenev. At the same time, Maxim Gorky, who had a lot of influence with Stalin at the time, made great efforts to bring about reconciliation with the party intelligentsia and to support Kirov’s “liberalism.” On the other hand, Stalin’s immediate circle, led by Kaganovich and Yezhov, opposed this tendency and sought to strengthen the suspicion that showed Stalin everywhere the activity of enemies. It is probable that this suspicion was aroused again when the plenary session of the Central Committee decided in November 1934 to speed up the transfer of Kirov from Leningrad to Moscow, which had already been envisaged by the Party Congress, in order to take up the post of Party Secretary alongside Stalin.
On December 1, 1934, Kirov was shot dead in his Leningrad official residence, the Smolny, by a young communist named Nikolayev. Stalin immediately traveled to Leningrad to personally direct the investigation. It quickly became apparent that the men of the NKVD (as the GPU was recently called) had neglected their duties, i.e. protecting Kirov, in a most conspicuous way. Despite this, they were only sentenced to light sentences, or they fell victim to traffic accidents. Nikolayev himself was a deserving party member, but he had long been one of the dissatisfied because he took offense at the increasing bureaucratization and bemoaned the loss of those personal and vital relationships within the party that had been a hallmark of the fighting years of the civil war and the first years that followed. He, too, had then turned back to the more distant past and immersed himself in the literature of nineteenth-century Russian terrorists. To all appearances he had had no accomplices, but, as his diary shows, he had frequently spoken to former members of the opposition, who made no secret of their critical attitude towards the current policies of the party leadership. It had been Kirov himself, however, who had treated the remnants of the Zinovievite opposition leniently, wanting to draw them back into the regime; for example, he had allowed one of the oldest and most stubborn opposition figures, David Ryazanov, the former editor of the Complete Edition of Marx and Engels, to stay in Leningrad again. Should Zinoviev’s successor nevertheless have been one of the traitors to the revolution for the disappointed old communist? Who then could have had an interest in leaving the champion of Stalinist liberalism (as one might put it) unprotected and, so to speak, exposed to his opponent’s revolver? Was it really the critical members of the opposition, or was it not actually Stalin himself who wanted to have a reason to thoroughly clean up with his old opponents? Today there can hardly be any doubt, although some things remain puzzling about the matter, which also in this respect shows unmistakable similarities with the Reichstag fire affair.
Admittedly, a third explanation was possible, namely that a foreign power had guided Nikolayev’s hand, and Radek in particular advocated the thesis of the “hand of the Gestapo,” which offered the advantage of bringing the former oppositionists out of the line of fire, and above all not getting close to all too dangerous questions. In fact, the thaw did end immediately, although inner-party polemics against the opposition intensified and even a first trial was conducted against Zinoviev and Kamenev, which ended with the defendants being sentenced to prison terms. The party directive, which went out on the day of the assassination and ordered the immediate acceleration of the trials of all those accused of preparing or carrying out terrorist acts, remained secret and was initially applied only to arrested “White Guards” as a true “charter of lawlessness.”
More importantly, Stalin gained reason to suspect that Kamenev had concealed many things from him in a personal conversation which ended in complete submission, and it seems that Stalin regarded such concealment as a crime worthy of death as much as Hitler did with respect to Röhm. But in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Kirov, Stalin only set the conditions for the great purge; for the time being, however, the policy of mitigation and reconciliation appeared to be going on. The first preparations were made for the adoption of a new constitution, which was to be “the most democratic in the world,” with the substantial cooperation of Bukharin. Bukharin was even allowed to travel to Paris, where he held the long talks with Boris Nikolayevsky, which resulted in the “Letter from an Old Bolshevik” to which most of the information about the Soviet scene associated with the Kirov assassination is owed. Stalin had just finally made the change in foreign policy which implied cooperation with the Western powers, and much negative publicity in the Western press would have been highly detrimental to the attainment of this goal.