Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices
down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. How did you get 30, 30, how did you get 30, how did you get 20, 20, 20, how did you get 20, 20, how did you get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. It's June the 14th, 1934.
A large silver transport plane descends from an azure sky. It banks out over the Adriatic, before coming in low on its approach towards the island city of Venice. At the airfield of the Venice Lido, the plane touches down and bounces along the grass. A glorious summer's day? One of the world's most spectacular locations? A nice little excursion, you'd have thought. But this is nothing of the sort.
This is the final part of Hitler's rise to power, and this is real dictators. As the plane taxis to a halt, its passenger, Adolf Hitler, is in a deep dark funk. Despite his extensive aerial election campaigning, he's still not a comfortable flyer that never helps his mood. Plus, his host today, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini,
has been overheard describing the new German leader as a muddle-headed fool. But it's more than that. It's the sheer indignity of the trip. Going cap in hand to another? This is something that just doesn't happen in the Hitler universe. Since Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Nazi state is fast becoming an international pariah. The old foes are getting flustered.
Hitler can play the gentleman all he likes, sending a congratulatory telegram to the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He can hold a convivial lunch with Britain's League Minister, Anthony Eden, but he isn't kidding anyone. The American Jewish Congress, amongst others, is flabbergasted at the direction this new Nazi Germany is taking. Adolf Hitler is giving the world a major headache.
France, meanwhile, has been making overtures to countries in Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, floating the idea of an anti-Nazi bloc. Hitler has since bought off Poland with a meaningless non-aggression pact. But the threat for Germany remains one of tactical encirclement. It's the same old two-step that led Europe to war in 1914.
It will put a dent in Hitler's plans to lead his people, his folk, into the promised land of conquered Slavic territory, the living space, Lebensraum. Unlike Germany, Italy was one of the First World War's victors and found a member of the League of Nations. But Mussolini's now having some troubles himself. The League hasn't cared much for his military adventuring in Libya or his naval bombardment of Corfu.
He seems bent on making mischief in Albania and Ethiopia. Fascist Italy will help provide a counterweight to the French, Hitler believes. He and Il Duce, as Italy's leader is known, must present a united front. Mussolini will be his useful idiot. If you discount Hitler's war service and his earlier shuttling between Austria and Bavaria, this excursion to Venice is his very first trip abroad.
For an aspiring world leader, one now aged 45, this is surprising. Hitler's people have chosen the perfect spot for the meeting with Mussolini: the Palazzo Vendramin Calegi on the Grand Canal. It's where Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, spent his final days. But they've misjudged the rest of it. Hitler, already in a grump, alights in his crumpled suit and oversized raincoat.
He's confronted by the sight of a stiff-armed, saluting Mussolini, replete with black uniform and gold braid. Behind him stands a guard of honor dolled up to the nines. Mussolini has been something of a pin-up for Hitler. Fascists have been in power in Italy for a full 12 years. He even has a bust of Il Duce in his office. And doesn't Mussolini know it? As Hitler approaches, the Italian whispers to an aide, «Ave imitato!»
Hail, imitator! In the macho face-off, Mussolini embarrasses the Fuhrer further by making him lead an inspection of his troops. Hitler shuffles down the ranks, sweaty, disheveled. Hitler climbs gingerly into the motorboat that will take them across the lagoon. Virile Mussolini stands, strident at the prow. The tin-pot posturing soon descends into farce.
As they cruise past a row of naval destroyers, closer inspection of a display of flags reveals it to be the sailors' underwear flapping on the line. In the Piazza San Marco, Venice's great square, Il Duce subjects Hitler to a marching parade as an off-key band plays. But the goose-stepping Italian troops cut across each other, bumping into one another. Rival regiments start squaring up. The odd couple push on regardless.
Hitler barks at Mussolini in his impenetrable Bavarian dialect. Mussolini and his schoolboy German shouts back. Neither is able to understand a single word the other is saying. Nothing is settled, nothing is achieved. At the official reception, when Hitler embarks on a two-hour rant, a yawning Mussolini sneaks off early. In Berlin, in Rome, the meeting is reported as a tremendous success.
Since January 1933, when he became Chancellor, Hitler's power grab has proceeded with a speed and ruthlessness that has taken even his most fanatical followers by surprise. Not long after getting his feet under the desk came the Reichstag fire. The suspicious burning down of the German Parliament building gifted Hitler an excuse to implement draconian emergency legislation. Within mere weeks, Hitler's rivals were crushed.
Communists, Social Democrats and Liberals now languish in work camps. Freedom of the press has been abolished. Trade unions are no more. Jews are banned from public life. Hitler as Chancellor now wields executive dictatorial authority, though he still has one final task to fulfill before his totalitarian project is complete. Since the very beginning,
Hitler's rise has been backed by the muscle of his street army, the Sturmabteilung, the SA. In their brown shirt uniforms, these paramilitaries have been Hitler's boots on the ground, the fists in the face, the enforcers of Nazi rule. But, of late, there has been trouble brewing. Dr. Chris Dillon.
In early 1934, on paper, there's three million SA men, another one and a half million men in associated coordinated groups. And these men are very much aware of the power that the collective presence of their bodies performs on the German streets. So they maraud through towns throughout Germany, thumbs in buckles, disdainful and arrogant,
And they sing of a second revolution that would overthrow the aristocratic remnants of the Kaiser's Germany who were still in charge of the army and of the state bureaucracy. This second, or brown revolution that they proclaim must return Nazism to its roots. Hitler's pact with the establishment, with big business, not to mention his trampling of the trade unions, is a betrayal of the cause.
This, after all, is the National Socialist German Workers Party. That was the prospectus. Dr. Paul Moore.
Power has been won, but the SA feel that the regime hasn't gone far enough, that Hitler's getting bogged down in evolution rather than revolution. And they're also dissatisfied on a personal level. They don't feel that they've been sufficiently rewarded for their hard work and their struggle before Hitler had come to power. There aren't enough leading stormtroopers being rewarded with positions in government. With no more communists to beat up either, they're at a bit of a loose end.
And there's a jealousy of the others now vying for Hitler's affections. Those preening pretty boys, the SS, in their puffed-up Hugo Boss outfits. There's a kind of a class element to it too. The SA in general has a more sort of working class background than the SS, which tends to draw from more affluent middle-class members of society. So we have a very clear image of the SS now as the elite of the Nazi regime and the baddest of the bad guys, essentially, in the Nazi movement.
There's also the Reichswehr, the regular German army. While Hitler woos them too, the SA regard the present military setup as a bit of a joke. With a mere 100,000 personnel, limited by the Treaty of Versailles, they pale into insignificance compared to the sheer scale of the SA. We, the SA claim, are the true Nazi warriors.
The land down under has never been easier to reach. United Airlines has more flights between the U.S. and Australia than any other U.S. airline, so you can fly nonstop to destinations like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Explore dazzling cities, savor the very best of Aussie cuisine, and get up close and personal with the wildlife. Who doesn't want to hold a koala? Go to united.com slash Australia to book your adventure.
Ernst Rohm, the SA's chief of staff, is especially unhappy. The old bruiser, with his shut-up face and gung-ho attitude, was brought back by Hitler to lick the SA into shape. And as far as he's concerned, he's done a sterling job. At Tempelhof airfield, when Rohm addresses 80,000 of his baying brethren, he echoes their view: that the SA, as he puts it, are the guarantors of the German revolution.
"We must clean up the pigsty." Rome's sentiments do not go unnoticed. He's even suggested that the regular army be folded into the SA, becoming a dangerously communist sounding "people's army."
Now all of this understandably horrified the Reichswehr High Command and not least the Reichs-President Paul von Hindenburg who was of course an army man through and through. Hindenburg still has the constitutional power to dismiss Hitler and he also has the loyalty of the top brass of the army. In 1934 Hindenburg warns Hitler he needs to bring Rome to heel. Hitler's already tried to buy off Rome
He is given a seat in his cabinet and a beautiful residence on the same Munich street as himself, stuffed full of antique Florentine mirrors and French furniture, but their horns are soon locked. At a meeting with Rome in February, Hitler puts his foot down. Germany is about to embark on a war of conquest. Invasion of the East cannot be achieved without a swift, devastating blow delivered to the West. Lightning war. A blitzkrieg. These are serious military operations.
to be conducted with the utmost skill and professionalism, deploying the latest weapons of war. This is way too sensitive an operation to be left to an army of street thugs, and one with a leadership inclined to drunken debauchery. Hitler has a dual motive here. The old conservatives in the regular army have made no secret of their desire to restore the monarchy once President Hindenburg dies. He's got to keep them on side too.
In an ongoing love-in, Hitler finds two army allies: Major General Werner von Blomberg, his defense minister, and the new army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter von Reichenau. Hitler offers Rome's SA an important role nonetheless. They will become Germany's border force, but Rome takes the proposition as a slight. Whether accurately reported or not, no one knows.
But over dinner with some allies, Röhm makes a remark that will work its way back to Hitler, courtesy of a snitch. The essay's number two, "Victor Lutzer." What that ridiculous corporal says means nothing to us. I have not the slightest intention of keeping this agreement. Hitler is a traitor, and at the very least must go on leave. If we can't get there with him, we'll get there without him. Heinrich Himmler has long had Röhm's card marked.
In secret, his SS underling, Reinhard Heydrich, has been compiling a dossier, just waiting for the moment to take Röhm down. Röhm doesn't let up. On June 4th, Hitler summons him to the Chancellery for a private meeting. It lasts five hours, during which time Hitler implores Röhm for his own good to stop being a loose cannon. From outside the room, the pair can be heard yelling at each other.
They've been brothers in arms since 1919, Röhm reminds Hitler. In the thick of it at the Beer Hall Putsch, co-defendants at the trial, there has been no greater servant. But to take the heat out of the situation, Röhm agrees that the SA will down tools for a month. He himself is afflicted by a chronic fatigue syndrome not uncommon in combat survivors. It isn't exactly helping his temper. He needs a break. They all do.
When heads have cooled, they will reconvene. Unfortunately for Hitler, Rome and the SA are not the only problem. When Hitler returns from Venice, he finds that his vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, has also been going off script. With a flush of self-importance, he's been using the Fuhrer's absence to do a little grandstanding. On June 17, Papen gives a speech at the University of Marburg.
In it, he makes an extraordinary attack on the control of the press by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister for propaganda. And he publicly urges the Fuhrer to distance himself from the troublemaker. Rome. Goebbels is furious. He scrambles to stop publication of the Vice-Chancellor's remarks. The Frankfurter Zeitung is the only newspaper to slip through the net. Goebbels has it impounded.
The guilty Vice Chancellor goes skulking to the Führer and offers his resignation, which Hitler refuses. Papen, like Röhm, must be kept in play. They have been designated crucial roles in this final savage act. Papen had been appointed Vice Chancellor to supposedly keep Hitler in check, to be the eyes and ears of President Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg is still, nominally, the German head of state. But the President is no longer in Berlin,
Age, illness and stress have not been kind to the old Field Marshal. For the summer, he's taken to Neudeck, his family's ancestral home, way out in East Prussia. When Hitler travels out to see him, ostensibly to give a report on the Mussolini meeting, but in reality, just checking up on the old boy's health, he finds his president in a wheelchair. It's now just a matter of timing. Back in the capital,
The pile-on against Ernst Röhm continues. Heydrich's report has been filed. It's full of lurid allegations. Of plotting with foreign contacts, of scheming with former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. There can be no doubt, it declares, Ernst Röhm has been planning a coup against Hitler. An overthrow of the existing Nazi leadership. The vaunted second revolution. The fact that Röhm has been laid up in bed at a health spa seems by the by.
He's currently recuperating at Bad Wiese on the Tegernsee, a picturesque lake 30 miles south of Munich. There are ominous noises being made. Rudolf Hess takes to the radio, warning against anyone contemplating plotting against the Fuhrer. Hermann Goering adds that anyone undermining Hitler will pay with his head. The German Officers League, meanwhile, setting an appropriate distance, expels Rome from its ranks. Then, on June the 27th,
The SS are instructed to take up arms for a secret and very important commission of the Führer. On Thursday, June 28th, Hitler is away again. As he likes to do from time to time, he is accepted an invitation to the wedding of a Gauleiter in Essen in the Ruhr. Goering is tagged along too, as has the SA turncoat, Victor Lützer. Their attendance is serving a purpose, presenting a facade of calm that all is well.
They sit, well-wishing, glad-handing, laughing politely at the speeches, tucking into the wedding breakfast. During the festivities, Goering is called away to take a phone call. It's Himmler. Yet more rumour. Rome has been colluding with the French ambassador. They've offered him 12 million marks. He's been hobnobbing too, with Gregor Strasser, it is said, Hitler's old Nazi bête noire. And now, Papen is in on the act.
He has sought a private audience with President Hindenburg. What more evidence is needed? That's it. The Fuhrer has had enough. He telephones Rome personally. The SA leader must assemble his lieutenants for a full and frank discussion. They have 48 hours to join Rome at his hotel in Bad Wiese. They will be addressed by Hitler at 11 am on Saturday. For a man supposedly about to lead a revolution, Rome seems quite unconcerned.
He looks forward to the powwow, he replies. That night, after playing cards, he has his doctor give him an injection and settles in for a good night's sleep. The next day, Friday, June 29th, Hitler is staying near Bonn. From there, he orders the commander of his SS bodyguard, Sepp Dietrich, to descend on Bad Wiese and prepare for action. Throughout the day, further intelligence comes in.
The head of the Berlin stormtroopers, Karl Ernst, is poised to lead an assault on the capital, it is said. In actual fact, Ernst is miles away, in Bremen, about to embark on a cruise. It's his honeymoon. Hitler rants and raves into the night. At 2am on Saturday, June 30th, he's driven to his plane. He will lead the counter-offensive personally, he says, to destroy this nest of traitors.
An hour later, his pilot is touching down on a military airfield in Munich. He orders local SA leaders there to be rounded up. At 7 o'clock, with the church bell chiming, Hitler's Mercedes, ahead of an SS convoy, is pulling up outside Rome's hotel, the Pension Hanselbauer. The beautiful lakeside setting seems an unlikely seat of a revolution. There's no one up, but the SA arrivals, the excesses of the night before, are still being slept off.
The landlady setting the tables in the dining room seems discombobulated by the sight of Adolf Hitler strutting into the lobby, demanding to be shown to Ernst Rohm's room. As indeed is Rohm himself, who strains up through bleary eyes to see the Fuhrer standing over him, Luger in hand, flanked by a couple of SS men. "Ernst, you are under arrest," barks Hitler. "What on earth for?" asks Rohm. Hitler tells him, but being a traitor,
Hitler bangs on the door opposite. It belongs to an SA officer named Heines. He is in bed with a young stormtrooper. While Rome's homosexuality is openly acknowledged, its prevalence among the recruits has only been whispered. As SS men hammer on further doors, more naked young men are dragged out. This will be another stick with which to beat the SA. Professor Helen Rosch.
It's like, shock horror, we've discovered all of this corruption and we've cleaned out the audience stables. Look, you know, Hitler had to do this. And that got a load of people on site. There was so much support.
It really burnished the Hitler myth later on in the sense that people were like, oh, well, he can't know about all this other bad stuff that's going on because when he does know, he really acts. Look at what happened with the SA. So that was kind of a propaganda coup in a sense. Two buses roll up outside. The prisoners are bundled in and driven away. A truckload of SA men turn up. More invitees for the supposed 11 a.m. meeting.
They are instructed to turn around and follow the SS back to the Braunhaus, the Nazi HQ in Munich. At 9.30am, with the SA now decapitated and the sizeable number of Braunshirts in custody, Hitler tells Goebbels to call Goering and issue the code word: "Kolibri, hummingbird". The purge is now on. In Munich, Ernst Romm sits around the Braunhaus wondering what the hell is going on.
No one's made clear any specific charge. But soon he's joining the other SA luminaries, thrust into a cell in Stadelheim prison. Up in Berlin, Goering is not so soft. On this scorching hot Saturday, the SS are out with machine guns, summarily executing anyone connected with SA authority. In the Lichterfelder Kadett-School, they're hauled in and lined up against the wall.
Papen is shocked at what he's hearing. The vice chancellor appeals directly to President Hindenburg to put a halt to this madness, this anarchy. But Hindenburg is a lost cause now. Before long, armed SS are storming Papen's own offices in the vice chancellery. Finding the only person of significance to be Papen's press secretary, Herbert von Bosa, they lead him into a room to be interviewed, sit him down, and shoot him ten times in the back.
Edgar Jung, the writer of Papen's controversial Marburg speech, is later found dead in a ditch. Papen himself is at home. He finds his phone line cut. He's placed under house arrest. At another residence in the Babelsberg district, two plain-clothes Gestapo men show up. The door is answered by the cook. They ask if this is the home of Kurt von Schleicher. "It is," she replies.
She helpfully shows them in, leading them straight to the study, where the General, Hitler's predecessor as Chancellor, is working at his desk. When they ask him to confirm his identity, Schleicher looks up and issues a solitary "Ja", at which point they shoot him dead. Schleicher's wife rushes in, screaming. They dispatch her too. And so it continues. General von Bredau, a friend of Schleicher's, is shot dead on his porch.
the police president of Breslau is gunned down in his home. Meanwhile, Gregor Strasser, Hitler's Nazi nemesis, is seized and thrown in a basement cell in the Gestapo headquarters. He's machine-gunned through the window, hopping around like a wounded animal, desperately seeking cover, till someone finally comes in to finish the job. In Bremen, as he's about to step onto his cruise liner, the newly-wed Karl Ernst is called aside, assuming it to be a wedding prank.
He helpfully climbs into the waiting Gestapo car. When he's dragged out a short while later to be added to the number of the terminated, he's utterly mystified. His last words are Heil Hitler. Just six weeks ago, the Führer had been his best man. For Hitler, there is no statute of limitations. Back in Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who thwarted the Munich Putsch in 1923, is dragged away to a swamp and butchered with a pickaxe.
There are early exits for Fritz Gerlich, the crusading journalist who'd been probing the Geli Raubel suicide, and Father Bernhard Stempler, the Catholic priest who'd helped Hitler edit Mein Kampf. A man, it is rumoured, who knew rather too much about Hitler's affair with Mitzi Reiter. It's all for Germany's moral well-being.
Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy. The SA seemed to be turning communist. You can see why they did it. But to cover it all in the king film of homophobia, the idea that the SA were a gay organization who had to be eliminated for Germany's moral health, which was nothing to do with the reason at all. They don't seem to have been unduly worried about the homosexuality of Major Röhm or the other SA leadership.
They had actually killed two generals. They killed Kurt von Schleicher, who was a former general. They killed Major General von Breda. And this was actually the beginning of the anti-Hitler conspiracy within the army.
It's one thing to eliminate six stormtrooper generals, but quite another to kill these more orthodox figures. Quite an extraordinary thing to do and to get away with it and to sell it to the German people as the thwarting of revolution, you know, like the Reichstag-Fahrt-Decree. Again, another false flag. In perhaps the most tragic instance of all, the Gestapo burst in and shoot dead Dr. Willi Schmidt, a well-known music critic.
He was in his parlor playing the cello. They had him mixed up with Wilhelm Schmidt, a local SA commander. That evening, Hermann Göring gives a press conference for the International Press Corps, though he's made sure the phone lines remain cut off till they get the message straight. "An English speaker?" Göring addresses them with mischievous public school diction. "I know you boys always like to have a story," he scoffs. "Well, I've got a story for you, all right."
A coup against the Nazi government has been successfully put down, he tells them, and reels off a list of the casualties, before making a swift exit. There is confusion in the room, shock. Have all these people just been killed? Did he just say Schleicher, the former chancellor? Goering re-enters, beaming. It's been suggested to me that I didn't make myself quite clear about General von Schleicher.
General Von Schleicher was shot this morning upon resisting arrest. Back in Munich, Hitler suddenly seems to have developed a conscience. At 11:30 a.m., he had issued an order that the SA officers in Stadelheim prison were to be executed, but he then reversed it. It's not until 5 p.m. that he hands a list of names to Hesse's assistant, a young man named Martin Bormann,
Dietrich, Hitler's SS commander, is instructed to take six of his men over to Stadelheim and execute the ones with ticks marked against them. And so, the sad remnants of the SA leadership are dragged out into the courtyard. One, a friend of Dietrich's, simply asks, "'Sepp, what on earth is happening?' The sentence is read out as it has been for all the others. "'You have been condemned to death by the Führer, Heil Hitler.'"
At 10pm, Hitler's plane touches down at Berlin's Tempelhof airport. He's pale, gaunt, and shaking. The Reichstag fire and the spurious communist uprising had given Hitler the opportunity to exert his grip on power. Now, the trumped-up notion of a right-wing coup has given him the excuse in one fell swoop to murder his remaining rivals. Over June 30 to July 1, 1934,
More than 200 people are killed without trial, some say up to a thousand. Many gunned down in their own homes, in front of their families. This passage in Nazi infamy will soon be given a name: The Night of the Long Knives. Yet there is one man whom Hitler simply cannot bring himself to execute. The one name on the list that remains unticked: Ernst Röhm.
They've long been very close. Hitler and Rome had long worked together and trusted each other. And Hitler does seem to momentarily hesitate here. In his cell, Rome is still convinced he'd be given a trial, a chance to clear his name. But Goering gives it to the Führer straight. You just can't rub out everybody else and let the leader go free. It makes no sense.
The next day, Sunday July 1st, Hitler hosts a tea party in the Reich Chancellery garden for the families of his staff. It's a delightful affair. The sun is out, there is laughter, children play. Against this idyllic backdrop, Hitler issues the order. Rome will be afforded the chance of an honorable exit. At around 6pm, in Munich's Stadelheim prison, SS Brigade Fuhrer Theodor Eicher arrives with two subordinates.
They proceed to cell 474. They find Rome lying on his bed with his shirt off, sweating away in the stifling heat. Eike thrusts the day's newspaper at him, detailing the suppression of the coup Rome had supposedly been leading. "You have forfeited your life," he announces. "The Führer gives you one more chance to draw the right conclusions." He places a loaded Browning pistol on the table, with a single round in its chamber, and leaves.
After 15 minutes, no gunshot has been heard. They re-enter. Rome isn't playing ball. "If I am to be killed," he shouts, "let Adolf do it himself." They pull their weapons out and shoot Rome dead. There's a real sense, I think, that Hitler passes the point of no return after the merger of Rome. And it's bound to leave Hitler a little more isolated also.
He's turned his back on a core part of his support, and the SA as an organization is clearly going to be riven with some doubts and some anger after the killing of Röhm. Why has this happened? Why has Hitler seemingly turned on the very people who have built his revolution? So there's a real moment of Shakespearean drama for the regime.
Professor Thomas Weber: Hitler was selling this as attempted revolution, as an attempted coup, and that is certainly untrue. However, there are various reasons to believe that Ernst Röhm had been speaking to, for instance, monarchists at that time on how to set up a different kind of Third Reich.
I mean, maybe from Röhm's perspective, this was not meant against Hitler, but Hitler would have certainly seen this as a challenge to his power. Hitler was very good at presenting himself as the person who wasn't really responsible for the violence of the Third Reich.
And through the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler really played into this expectation because supposedly he was trying to kind of put violence down and to create a less violent Third Reich. Of course, the opposite is the case, but that was kind of the perception. Hitler will shortly make an announcement. A cessation of the weekend's cleansing action.
General Blomberg lavishes praise on Hitler for the soldierly determination and exemplary courage he's shown in crushing the traitors and mutineers. Blomberg should be thrilled. Within a year, the SA will have been halved in size, its duties restricted to overseeing sports activities and basic training. They will have a new leader, the duplicitous Victor Lützer.
The Night of the Long Knives was greeted almost with universal horror overseas as being evidence that this was a gangster state. But in Germany, there's a very, very large amount of schadenfreude, a mixture of surprise, gratitude, relief, and not a little gloating. This reflected, I think, the idea that Ernst Worm had gotten too big for his boots, and there was a chance now to restore some public decorum to Germany.
President Hindenburg, it is said, takes word of the killings most calmly. This nasty attempt to overthrow the German state. It's a mighty good job this Hitler fellow had the presence of mind to stamp it out. Adding a sickening signature to the slaughter, Hitler sends Rudolf Hess on a mission to comfort the widows and families of the deceased. They died as martyrs, he tells them.
Gregor Strass's wife and Ernst Rohm's mother are offered generous financial compensation. The elderly Frau Rohm refuses hers. She'll take no blood money from her boy's murderers. The SS officers responsible for the killing are all commended and given honorary daggers. Military officers are forbidden from attending Schleicher's funeral. Hitler makes amends with Papen. The house arrest, the killing of his press officer, his speechwriter,
It was all a dreadful mistake. Papa knows he's lucky to be alive. His continued existence is now at Hitler's personal whim. On July 13, when the Reichstag reconvenes, Hitler makes an impassioned speech about how the fatherland was saved from destruction. "In this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the supreme judge of the German people.
If 13 members of the Reichstag were murdered in the process, no one seems too bothered. The announcement is greeted ecstatically in the chamber and across the nation. Few anywhere object, and anyone who does is dismissed as an agent of Bolshevism or the Jewish press. As we know from Hitler's book Mein Kampf, it's been the author's deep-seated ambition to unite the German-speaking peoples into a single realm.
There are millions of ethnic Germans currently living under the jurisdiction of others, most notably within the Polish Corridor and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. More immediately, there is Hitler's homeland, Austria. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had overseen a vast patchwork quilt of nationalities extending across Central Europe and the Balkans. But since the end of the First World War, Austria has been reconstituted as a republic.
much smaller in territory, but now identifiably Germanic. Those who desire a merger with Germany, and there are many within Austria who do, now have a much stronger claim. Right there in Mein Kampf's opening paragraph, Hitler had declared his wish to fold Austria into Germany as a single entity via a political union, an Anschluss. This notion is gaining momentum, championed by the Austrian National Socialists.
The sister Nazis south of the border seem even more fanatical than the ones in Germany. Austrian Nazis have been mounting terrorist attacks against the state and murdering supporters of the Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Dollfuss is no liberal, far from it. For the past year, the pint-sized politician has been ruling as a right-wing dictator himself. But on July 25th, 1934, the Austrian Nazis storm the Vienna Chancellery and attempt to kidnap Dollfuss and his advisors.
In the ensuing scuffle, Dollfuss is shot in the throat. The Nazis there broadcast the news that he's resigned. He will be dead by the evening. When the news reaches Hitler, he's overjoyed. "An unbelievable thing has happened!" he exclaims. "The German people in Austria have risen against their oppressors." But Hitler has not done due diligence. Dollfuss is a friend of none other than Benito Mussolini. Turns out, at the moment of his death,
The Austrian Chancellor's wife and children were guests at Mussolini's villa. It's perhaps fortunate for Hitler that this attempted coup is over before it's begun. Mussolini is furious. And again, Hitler must extend an olive branch, dispatching Papen as an emissary. Il Duce is none too impressed. He dismisses Germany completely. "It would mean the end of European civilization if this country of murderers and pederasts were to overrun Europe," he says.
It is Hitler, he declares, who is the murderer of Dollfuss. Hitler is a horrible sexual degenerate, he adds, a dangerous fool. He moves four army divisions to the Austrian border. At this point, any notion of a Rome-Berlin axis is a long way off. President Hindenburg has barely left Neudeck these past months. It's all just too much to take. Frail and pushing 87,
He's armed with the knowledge that he was the one who signed Germany over to Hitler. He takes to his bed. On August 1st, Hitler again rushes out to East Prussia. Greeted by Hindenburg's son, Oskar, Hitler is led into the bedchamber. The delirious president thinks Hitler is Pappen. He later calls Hitler "Majesty". Hitler wastes no time. He dashes back to Berlin and assembles his cabinet.
"Hindenburg is not long for this world," he says. "It's only a matter of days, maybe even hours." Hitler dresses up his next proposal with faux sincerity. As a president, he says, "Hindenburg is irreplaceable. It would be impossible, nay disrespectful, for anyone to attempt to fill his shoes." To that end, the presidency itself should be discontinued, combined instead with that of the chancellor. The cabinet passes the vote unanimously.
Papen is absent, but his signature is attached by proxy. It will soon be approved by a referendum, passed with 90% of the vote. The very next day, August 2nd, at 9am, Hindenburg breathes his last. He dies, it is said, with the words "My Kaiser, my fatherland" on his lips. In the moment of his passing, Adolf Hitler ascends to his newly designated role.
Even though technically he becomes German president, he's never using this title. He's kind of saying, look, I'm merging the office of chancellor and president, but he calls it that he's the chancellor and the leader of Germany. And from that moment onwards, Hitler's total control
He is, with it, now the supreme commander of Germany's armed forces. Hitler summons General Blomberg to confirm the position. He finds there has been a subtle change to the oath of allegiance that the military men must swear. They are no longer pledging themselves to king, country, constitution, president, even chancellor. They are pledging themselves to Adolf Hitler personally. It was their own suggestion.
Another naive move by the powers that be to try and bring Hitler under their control. He can scarcely believe his luck. On the very afternoon of Hindenburg's death, a mass army swearing-in ceremony takes place. The soldiers of the Fatherland declare as one: "I swear before God to give my unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Reich and its people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,
And I pledge my word as a brave soldier to observe this oath always, even at the risk of my own life.
That is something that is more significant than we may think. From a 21st century perspective, we think, "Eh, an oath of allegiance, it's just something symbolic." Not so in the 1930s. In the 1930s, people thought that an oath of allegiance is an oath made to God. A lot of these officers initially kind of admire Adolf Hitler, but once the first star turned against them, the oath of allegiance is really a problem.
In 1943, 1944, in the run-up to the attempt on Hitler's life, there are endless discussions whether it is religiously and morally and ethically acceptable for them to violate their oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. We'll come to all that. Hitler, as he always did, will give Hindenburg the full show. He will accord him a send-off equal to any Kaiser and more.
On August 6th, the funeral procession commences at the Kroll Opera House. Born on a gun carriage, the coffin is wheeled past row after row of grim-faced, black-clad SS men. Hindenburg had wanted to be buried at his ancestral home, but Hitler will have none of it. The Field Marshal is spirited off to Tannenberg instead, the site of his greatest military victory.
There he's interred in the middle of the grand monument, with its huge 70-foot towers and flames shooting into the sky. At the end of the funeral, Hitler, as head of state, is passed an envelope. It is Hindenburg's last will and testament, his parting wishes for his people. But the Fuhrer is displeased with the contents and rips it up. The old Germany, the Germany of Weimar, is over.
The most precious possession on this world, however, is our own people. And for this people, we want to fight and never be discouraged, never be tired, never give up, never despair. Long live our movement! Long live our German people!
Under Adolf Hitler's absolute control, the Fatherland will now face the world in its new guise: a totalitarian state of the most pure and brutal kind. An arrangement its Fuhrer declares will last a thousand years. It will cause untold devastation, the deaths of tens of millions, and an attempted genocide of an entire people. Its actions still scar the world today.
The first German Reich or realm had been that of the Holy Roman Empire. The second Reich was that of the Kaisers. This Adolf Hitler's Germany, Nazi Germany, would be the Third Reich. This marks the end of Hitler's rise to power. We'll return to the Hitler story in the coming months, taking in the horrors of the Third Reich and the Second World War, before witnessing Hitler's dramatic downfall. But for now,
We're turning our attention elsewhere, taking a journey back into the mists of time. In the next episode of Real Dictators, we're in the Mongol lands on the steppe of Central Asia in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. This is a land of tough nomadic herders and warriors, a region divided between tribes. But soon, one man will emerge to unite them. In the year 1162,
A baby boy is born into a mid-ranking Mongol clan. By sheer force of will and armed with the greatest military mind of his or perhaps any age, he will bring the Mongol peoples under his command. A terror to his enemies, he builds a reputation unmatched for cruelty and barbarism. So how does a boy from such humble origins come to rule an empire twice the size of ancient Rome's? The Genghis Khan story.
That's next time on Real Dictators.
