Night of the Long Knives

The historian and author of The Shanghai Massacre presents an in-depth chronicle of Hitler's plot to eliminate political rivals and his own SA Brownshirts.

 


In the summer of 1934, Adolf Hitler conducted a ruthless purge of his own fascist colleagues, many of whom had helped the Nazi Party rise to power. The brawling street thugs of the SA had bludgeoned Hitler's political opposition into submission and played a significant role in transforming Germany into a dictatorship. But in order to safeguard his absolute authority, Hitler chose to eliminate any potential rivals. And it was the SA that he feared most.


 


Officially called Operation Hummingbird, the swift and merciless "blood purge" came to be known as The Night of the Long Knives. Among Hitler's victims were personal friends like SA co-founder Ernst Röhm, former German Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and even former party comrades like Gregor Strasser. Breaking the back of the SA and settling political scores, the operation took somewhere between three hundred and a thousand lives