The Führer said that the most crucial task at the moment was the selection of people who on the one hand are competent, on the other hand can carry out the measures of the administration in blind obedience. The party must act as a kind of monastic order, assuring the necessary stability for the entire future of Germany…. The first Leader had been chosen by Destiny; the second must from the start have a loyal, sworn community behind him. No one may be selected who has a private power base!
Only one man can be the Leader…. An organization with such a hard core and strength will endure forever; nothing can overthrow it. The community within the movement must be incredibly loyal. There must not be any internecine struggles; we must never allow differences to be bared to outsiders! The people cannot trust us with blind faith if we ourselves destroy this trust. Even if wrong decisions are made, the effects can be mitigated by our unconditionally sticking together. We must never allow one authority to be played off against the other.
Therefore: no superfluous discussions! Problems which the various headquarters have not yet clarified may under no circumstances be discussed in public, for that would entail involving the masses of the people in the decisionmaking process. That was the insanity of democracy, whereby the value of all leadership is lost.
We must never engage in more than a single fight at a time. Fights in single file. Not “Many enemies, much honor,” but “Many enemies, much stupidity.” Moreover, the people cannot wage or understand twelve struggles going on at once. Consequently we must always present the people with only a single idea, make them concentrate on one single idea. In questions of foreign policy it is crucial to have the entire people hypnotically behind one; the whole nation must be literally filled with a sporting spirit, be following this struggle with the passion of gamblers. This is essential. If the whole nation takes part in the struggle, the whole nation is the loser. If it is indifferent, only the leadership loses. In the one case the people are roused to fury against the opponent, in the second case only against the leader.41
These principles were in fact to obtain deep into the war years. The practical conclusions were not long in coming. As early as February 21, 1934, Hitler confided to Anthony Eden that he intended to reduce the SA by two thirds and insure that the remaining formations received neither weapons nor military training. A week later he summoned the commanders of the army and the leaders of the SA and SS, headed by Röhm and Himmler, to the Ministry of Defense, on Bendlerstrasse. In a speech that the army officers received with applause and the SA leaders heard with horror, he sketched the basic lines of an agreement between the Reichswehr and the SA. The duties of the brown-shirted storm troops would be limited to a few minor military functions; their chief assignment was to be the political education of the nation. Hitler begged the SA leadership not to obstruct him in such grave times—and added menacingly that he would crush anyone who tried to.
Röhm failed to note these warnings or regarded them as mere verbal maneuvers. For the time being he kept his composure and invited everyone present to a “reconciliation breakfast.” But as soon as the generals had left, he freely vented his anger. He is said to have called Hitler an “ignorant corporal” and declargd bluntly that he “had no intention of keeping the agreement.” He is also alleged to have said that Hitler was “disloyal and badly in need of a vacation.” Subsequently SA Obergruppenführer Lutze went to see Hitler at Obersalzberg and in a conversation lasting several hours reported Röhm’s insults and veiled threats.
In all this Röhm was actuated not just by defiance and the arrogance of knowing that, as he declared, he had the power of thirty divisions behind him. Rather, he understood only too well that Hitler was confronting him with an unacceptable alternative. To tell him that he must either educate the nation or quit was the equivalent to giving him the sack. For no one could seriously imagine that those “bandylegged” SA men were the right people to instruct the Aryan master race.
Convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, Röhm seems to have called on Hitler early in March and proposed a “little solution”: that the army take in several thousand SA leaders. This would at least provide for some of Röhm’s people. But both Hindenburg and the army leadership would not hear of this. Röhm found himself driven by an outraged and increasingly impatient following, and by his own craving for status, to take once more the path of revolt.
From the spring of 1934 on, the slogans of the second revolution were again in currency. But although there was talk of putsch and rebellion, there is no indication of a specific plan of action. In keeping with the rough-and-tough stance of these blusterers, they were satisfied with bloodthirsty phrases. Röhm himself had spells of resignation, occasionally considered returning to Bolivia, and at one point told the French ambassador that he was sick. Nevertheless, he kept trying to break out of the ever more tightly closing ring of isolation and to make contact with Schleicher and probably with other oppositional circles. He organized a new wave of giant parades and, in general, tried by incessant triumphant marches to make a show of the SA’s unbroken vigor. At the same time, he obtained sizable quantities of arms—partly by purchases abroad—and stepped up the militarytraining program of his units. Of course, all this may only have served to keep his disappointed and irritably loafing storm troopers occupied. But such activities were regarded by Hitler and the army leadership as a challenge. Certainly they provided a disquieting background to the rebellious bluster.
It appears that by the spring Hitler stopped trying to settle matters amicably with Röhm and instead steered toward a solution by violence. On April 17, at a spring concert given by the SS in the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler appeared in public with Röhm for the last time. Extending the assignment given to Diels, he now directed several party bureaus—by his own later testimony—to look into the rumors about a second revolution and to track down their sources. It is tempting to associate the build-up of the Sicherheitsdienst (the security service of the SS, the notorious SD), which began simultaneously with this assignment, and likewise Heinrich Himmler’s take-over of the Prussian Gestapo. Obviously there was a connection with the fact that the judicial authorities at this point began to prosecute SA crimes for the first time. Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau concentration camp, supposedly received instructions to draw up a “Reich list” containing the names of “undesirable persons.”
It was a veritable roundup that Röhm could scarcely misconstrue. Plainly they were out to get him. His principal enemies were the functionaries of the Political Organization (PO), above all Göring, Goebbels, and Hess, who envied the SA chief of staff his enormous power base and the position of second man in the state that went with it. Heinrich Himmler soon joined them; as commander of the SS, then still a subdivision of the SA, he stood to profit by Röhm’s fall. Alongside these party people, cautiously operating in the background but more and more making its presence felt, was the army leadership. By skillfully peddling information about Röhm and by playing up its own docility, it hoped to draw Hitler over to its side. In February, 1934, the corps of army officers voluntarily set aside one of its dearest traditions, the principle of drawing its members from a special stratum of society. Instructions were issued to the effect that henceforth “origin in the old officer caste” was not to be the basic requirement for a military career, but rather “consonance with the new government.” Shortly afterward, the Reichswehr introduced political education for the troops. On Hitler’s birthday, April 20, Minister of Defense Blomberg published an extravagant article in praise of the Führer. Simultaneously, he renamed the Munich barracks that housed the List Regiment, in which Hitler had once served, the Adolf Hitler Barracks. The army’s strategy was to stir up the ill-feeling between Hitler and Röhm until an open quarrel ensued from which the army generals would emerge the victors. They reasoned that Hitler would not realize that by stripping Röhm of power he was disarming himself and placing himself at the mercy of the army.