Himmler called to see his parents whenever he could and sent them for drives in his official car, carefully noting that the cost of the fuel should be deducted from his salary.
Himmler’s removal to Berlin preceded by barely a month Hitler’s sudden and savage assault on Roehm and his associates at the head of the S.A. We know that the decision to undertake this purge was not taken lightly, for Roehm, in spite of his threatening ambitions and his moral corruption, was a man towards whom Hitler still felt loyalty and even friendship. It is possible that he was afraid of him. At this early stage in his career as dictator he disliked taking any violent, widespread and public action which might lead to consequences he could not wholly foresee and which he feared he might be unable to control. But Himmler and Goring were determined to be rid of Roehm and break the influence of the S.A., and they joined together in the common cause to persuade Hitler that the commander of the S.A. and his dissatisfied forces were planning a coup d’état.
Roehm had made difficulties for himself by using the place he had won in Hitler’s Cabinet to urge that the S.A. (which now numbered 3 million men) and the regular Army should be merged under a single command that he clearly wanted to assume himself. Hitler, who had his own eye fixed on Hindenburg’s Presidency now that the old man was within a few months of his death, had struck a secret bargain with the High Command of the Army and Navy, agreeing that he would disband the S.A. if they would acquiesce to his becoming President. The S.A., in fact, was no longer of use to him, and its unruly presence in the state was a constant embarrassment now that the campaigns in the streets were won and the sureties of power lay in gaining final control of the armed forces themselves. He had in any case promised Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden, when they had visited Germany on 21 February as Ministers of State, that he would demobilize two-thirds of the S.A. and permit an Allied inspection of the rest.
Heydrich’s files were gutted for evidence that would blacken Roehm and the commanders of the S.A. in the eyes of Hitler, and prove they were conspiring with other acknowledged dissidents, such as the subtle and devious Schleicher, whom Hitler had displaced as Chancellor, and Gregor Strasser, who had in 1932 attempted to draw a radical section of the Nazi party away from Hitler’s authority and was now living in retirement. According to an affidavit made by Frick, Hitler’s Minister of the Interior, and filed at the time of the Nuremberg Trial, it was Himmler rather than Goring who finally determined Hitler to take action.3
Himmler had spent the first weeks of the new phase in his command touring the principal centres where his S.S. detachments were stationed and addressing them on the subject of loyalty to the Führer. In Berlin, Heydrich was preparing for Goring the lists of those members of the S.A. who should be seized. On 6 June, Heydrich’s S.D. was proclaimed by Hitler the official Intelligence office of the Party, from whom no information they required should be withheld. S.A. leaders in Berlin and the south were kept under constant watch.
The pace of events that led to the bloody climax of 30 June began to quicken. Hitler ordered Roehm to give all his storm-troopers a month’s leave from July 1st, and Roehm himself, with Hitler’s agreement, went on a nominal sick-leave to Bavaria on 7 June. He maintained a formal contact with Hitler, who even promised to visit him for further discussions on 30 June. After a conference with Hitler in Berlin on 20 June, Himmler claimed he was shot at while driving in his car to the interment of the body of Carin, Goring’s first wife, in the mausoleum Goring had built at his great country estate of Carinhall, named after her.4
At the Nuremberg Trial, Eberstein described how ‘about eight days before 30 June’ he was summoned and told that Roehm was planning a coup d’état. Himmler ordered him to hold his S.S. men ‘in a state of quiet readiness’ in their barracks. Eberstein also gave an account of how the local executions were conducted under orders from Heydrich:
‘In the course of that day, 30 June, a certain S.S. Colonel Beutel came to me from the S.S. with a special order which he had received from Heydrich. He was a young man, this Beutel, and he did not know what he should do; he came to obtain advice from me, an older man. He had an order in which there were approximately twenty-eight names and a postscript, from which it appeared that some of these men were to be arrested and others were to be executed. This document had no signature on it and therefore I advised this S.S. Colonel to get positive clarification as to what should take place, and warned him emphatically against any rash action.
‘Then, as far as I know, a courier was sent to Berlin and brought back eight orders of execution which came from Heydrich. The order read somewhat as follows: “By order of the Führer and Reich Chancellor…” then followed the name of the person concerned, “so-and-so is condemned to death by shooting for high treason”.
‘These documents were signed by Heydrich… On the basis of these documents eight members of the S.A. and the Party too were shot by the political police of Saxony in Dresden… That’s what I know about it, at least in my area.’5
Himmler during the period immediately preceding the purge kept in touch with the War Office, and in particular with Walter von Reichenau, a general in Army Administration who was prepared to work with the Nazis.
Between 21 and 29 June, Hitler toured restlessly from place to place on a variety of official duties, while in Berlin Himmler held a conference of the S.S. High Command on 24 June, while the Army was put on an alert on 25 June. On the same day Heydrich began, with the help of a few chosen officers of the S.D., to prepare the final lists of marked men both in the S.A. and outside it. In the middle of the wedding-feast of Gauleiter Terboven of Essen, for whom both Hitler and Goring acted as witnesses, Himmler arrived from Berlin with urgent news that action must be taken with as little delay as possible. This was no doubt part of Göring’s and Himmler’s scheme to keep Hitler in a state of alarm; after further conference, they left Hitler and returned to Berlin to carry out the final preparations for the purge.
Hitler was finally goaded into action during the small hours of 30 June, when he flew to Munich before dawn and drove by car to the sanitorium at the Tegernsee, where he roused Roehm from sleep, accused him of treachery and had him arrested. Himmler’s special detachment of guards commanded by Sepp Dietrich, the Leibstandarte, whose duty it was to protect Hitler, had been sent south to give all necessary aid, but Hitler, unable or unwilling to face the summary executions that were due to follow, retired to the Brown House, the Party headquarters in Munich. Confusion followed, for Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, was unwilling to execute men in the mass without trial merely because their names were on a typed list provided by Goring and Himmler and underlined in pencil by Hitler. Roehm himself was not finally shot until 2 July.
In Berlin, Goring and Himmler had neither time nor desire to observe the formalities of justice. They had their lists, they had their prisoners, and the executioners, squads of Göring’s private police, stood waiting to shoot their victims at Gross-Lichterfelde. The scene in Göring’s private residence at Leipzigerplatz, where he and Himmler identified the prisoners as they were brought in, accused them of treason and summarily ordered them to be shot as soon as their names had been ticked on the lists, has been described by eye-witnesses — in particular by Papen who, as Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, Goring thought it wise to protect. He sent his adjutant, Bodenschatz, to bring him to the Leipzigerplatz, where he could be placed under guard. As soon as Papen arrived, Himmler gave the signal by telephone that the Vice-Chancellery could be raided. Bose, Papen’s press counsellor, was shot and his personal staff arrested. When Papen was finally given permission to leave, he found his office occupied by S.S. men and a state of violent confusion existing between them and Goring’s own police. Finally Papen was put under house arrest with an S.S. guard, whose captain said he was responsible to Goring for the Vice-Chancellor’s safety. Without doubt Himmler and Heydrich, new to the exercise of such absolute power, would have had him shot. Goring was more diplomatic.6