An Honourable Defeat by Anton Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

lugubrious conservative opposition. By now, of course, Hitler had neutralised any other opposition in Germany, and it is of interest to remember that Blomberg and Fritsch had accepted their appointments from a man whom they knew to have unconstitutionally outlawed the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, to have dissolved trade unions and all other political parties, and to have taken oppressive measures against the Jews.
    From the beginning, the Resistance (and at this stage it could barely be called that yet) had to be one stemming from the Establishment. The present plan was a desperate one.
    Events seemed to be moving too fast even for Hitler, who, as he often did when overtaxed by the occasion, dithered. He did not feel confident enough to throw in his lot with the Army against the SA, much as he wanted to; on the other hand, the longer he delayed, the greater became the perceived threat from Röhm. Once again, Germany was in political turmoil. This time, a blood-letting was inevitable.
    It was triggered on 17 June 1934. At the University of Marburg Franz von Papen, a vain Prussian aristocrat and a favourite of Hindenburg, who had been Chancellor briefly and disastrously in the dying days of the Weimar Republic and was now Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, gave a speech to the students. The speech was an attack on the National Socialists in general and Goebbels in particular, but it took the form of an appeal to Hitler’s conscience. By now everyone knew that Hindenburg’s days were numbered (he was in his eighty-seventh year), and that when he died Germany would be bereft of the father figure which was all that was holding it together. By now the National Conservatives were aware that they were well in sight of their last chance of controlling Hitler, and that the SA had to be neutralised at all costs.
    The speech was written by Papen’s assistant, the young lawyer Edgar Jung, who was shortly to pay with his life for putting too much faith in the power of his chief. At the time Papen was making the speech, Hitler was at a Nazi conference in Gera, a small town to the south of Leipzig. When news of the Marburg speech reached him, he rushed to Berlin in a panic, to find that Röhm had retreated to Munich, his stronghold since the old days of the Party, and that Blomberg had gone to Neudeck, Hindenburg’s estate in East Prussia. Goebbels meanwhile had made every effort to suppress the text of Papen’s speech, and was pouring out a torrent of invective against the Establishment Right, and Papen especially. Papen, together with his political kindred spirits the Foreign Minister and the Finance Minister, offered their resignations to Hitler, but he refused to accept them. He was not yet so powerful as to be able to defy the outside world, and he still needed the cloak of respectability provided by the Army and the Government. The SA was three million strong. It was a Party organisation, not national; but Hitler was not confident of his control over it. His own leadership was not yet absolutely secure, and the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, might have turned out to be a powerful rival.
    Only by the sacrifice of the SA could Hitler survive, and once he had decided on his course of action, he moved with characteristic speed and ruthlessness.
    But not immediately. The SA was very powerful, and would have to be taken by surprise. In the ten days of planning with Göring and Himmler which followed, the plot to remove all the SA leaders from the board at a stroke was extended to include other enemies of the NS State, from religious troublemakers to dissident Nazis and National Conservatives.
    On 30 June the SS, secretly drilled and organised, struck. There were three days of intense slaughter. Röhm and his principal henchmen were gunned down immediately, in circumstances which showed that they, at least, were not on the verge of launching a coup against the government — Röhm himself was pulled squealing from the bed of