The orgy of killing that spread throughout Germany during the weekend started from Göring’s headquarters. When they learned that Hitler accompanied by Goebbels was flying to Berlin from Munich, Goring and Himmler gathered their typed sheets together and drove with Frick to the Tempelhof airport to deliver an account of their stewardship. The sky was blood-red as the plane landed, and Hitler, sleepless for forty-eight hours, silently shook hands with the men, who clicked their heels as he greeted them, and then inspected a guard of honour lined up on the tarmac. The scene, unforgettably described by Gisevius who was present, had its own Wagnerian melodrama. Himmler, obsequious but officious, pressed his list of names under Hitler’s bloodshot eyes. While the others stood around at a discreet distance, the Führer ran his finger down the record of the dead or those about to die, while Goring and Himmler whispered to him. Then, with Hitler in the lead, the executioners moved off to the waiting cars, moving silently like a funeral procession in order of precedence.
Goebbels hastened to suppress reports of the mounting deaths in the German press, which was by now under his complete control. Only representatives of the foreign press, who had been hastily convened earlier that afternoon by Goring, were given a bare outline of Roehm’s alleged conspiracy by the man who had invented it. The assassinations did not stop until the following day, which was Sunday, when Frick, unburdening himself to Gisevius, finally expressed his horror at the behaviour of Himmler and Göring. He then went to warn Hitler, who had by now had some sleep, that the S.S. might well offer an even more sinister threat to his security than the S.A. But the Führer only wanted to relax at a tea-party he was giving in the garden of the Chancellery.
For Himmler and Heydrich, the provincials from the south, the massacre of 30 June was a rapid initiation into the ways of Hitler’s court. Heydrich was created a lieutenant-general of the S.S. with effect from the date the men he had listed had begun to face the firing-squad. Goring received the personal congratulations of Hindenburg, sent from his deathbed. On 26 July the S.S. was formally given its independence by Hitler. When Hindenburg eventually died on 2 August, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor and made himself Der Führer, Supreme Head of the State, and also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich. The Army was immediately required to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler in person.
On the day before Hitler’s proclamation of the independence of the S.S., their associates in Vienna murdered the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Dr Dollfuss, as part of an abortive attempt to seize Vienna for the Austrian Nazis. Hitler at once disowned any part in this plot that had failed, not because he disapproved of what had been attempted but because it had been both ill-timed and unsuccessful. As would be expected, there is no exact record that either Himmler or Heydrich were directly involved in the instructions given to the S.S. in Austria. It must at least have shaken Hitler’s confidence in the discretion of his S.S. commanders. Although they remained strictly silent at this stage, when Hitler chose to dissociate himself from the assassination, they were at a later and more favourable time after the Anschluss to hear the Austrian S.S. men who died during the course of the putsch proclaimed as martyrs by Rudolf Hess. In July 1934, however, when Hitler was still involved in the aftermath of the Roehm purge, this bloody act by his adherents in Austria compromised still further the heroic reputation he was attempting to build up in the world outside Germany. It is not known whether he reprimanded the men he had so recently promoted into the select ranks of the Nazi leadership, but at the very least, Himmler must have carried some responsibility for the indiscreet murder of the Chancellor, since the Austrian S.S. obtained their arms from the S.S. in Germany. Among the men arrested in Austria was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer whom Heydrich had employed as his agent. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was to take over the responsibilities Heydrich had exercised in Berlin.
Now that the S.S. was an entirely independent force, responsible through Himmler only to Hitler himself, Himmler became absorbed in consolidating its membership and carrying still further his growing obsession with their racial purity and their loyalty to his idea of establishing them as a special Order in the Party and the State. His concern was more for the quality of the S.S. than for their numbers. As we have seen, he had already begun, before 30 June, to remove those men who had been too hurriedly recruited after the seizure of power and who failed to pass his stringent tests. According to Eberstein at Nuremberg, during the period 1934-5 some 60,000 men were released from the S.S. Nevertheless, the S.S. was kept at a strength in the region of 200,000 men and represented a formidable force which made the Army, already divided in its attitude to Hitler, increasingly anxious. But Himmler’s natural caution always made him wary of stirring up trouble. He preferred to work in secret, though he was always prepared to make public statements about the high standards he exacted from the S.S. and its undying dedication to Hitler.
From 1934 the S.S. was forbidden to take part in any troop manoeuvres with the Army, although some of its members were Army reservists, nor did its members openly receive a specifically military training. Nevertheless they were armed with small-calibre rifles and were trained to shoot. They were now vigorously selected for their Nordic excellence. As Himmler put it, the S.S. was to be ‘a National Socialist Soldier Order of Nordic Men’.
As Gisevius said when giving evidence at Nuremberg,7 ‘The members had to be so-called Nordic types… if I am not mistaken, the distinguishing characteristics of men and women went as far as underarm perspiration.’ The moral deception involved in recruitment was, Gisevius claimed, often irreparable; men joined frequently out of an honest desire to assist a force dedicated, as it seemed, to order and decency in contrast to the degenerate hooliganism of the S.A., only to find themselves later involved in the criminal practices imposed on them by Heydrich and Himmler. Large numbers of the S.S. were part-time men who pursued their normal activities, except for special occasions and national emergencies, giving only spare time to their S.S. duties. The oath taken by every man on entering the S.S. was: ‘I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.’8