The reaction of the army was perhaps even more decisive in alleviating the public’s doubts and premonitions. Feeling itself the real victor of those three days, the army blatantly expressed its satisfaction at the elimination of the “brown trash.” On July 1, while the killing was going on unabated, the Berlin Guards Company goose-stepped down the Wilhelmstrasse, past the chancellery, to the tune of Hitler’s favorite Badenweiler March. Two days later Defense Minister von Blomberg congratulated Hitler for the successful completion of the “purge.” And, contrary to his policy of earlier years, Hitler now made a point of reinforcing the Reichwehr’s sense of triumph. In his Reichstag speech he not only named it the sole bearer of arms in the state but also declared that he would preserve “the army as an unpolitical instrument.” He assured the officers and soldiers that he could not “demand from them that as individuals each should take up a clear-cut position towards our Movement.”
By these unusual and never-to-be-repeated concessions Hitler expressed his gratitude to the army leadership for having remained loyal to him in the recent critical hours, when his fate lay in their hands. Once again, everything had hung in the balance after the SS squad had killed General von Schleicher, his wife, and General von Bredow. If at this moment the army had insisted on a legal investigation, the theory of a conspiracy would have been exploded and the blow against the conservatives exposed as the murderous coup it was. The bourgeois Right would not have been permanently paralyzed; it might possibly have emerged from the affair with increased confidence. It would have preserved moral standing. In any case, Göring would not have gone uncontradicted when he concluded the Reichstag session of July 13 by declaring that the entire German people, “man by man and woman by woman,” was united in a single outcry: ‘We always approve everything our Führer does.’ ”
Hitler, with his intuition for power relationships, had realized that if the army would stand for the murder of army men, he had achieved the breakthrough to unlimited control. An institution that accepted such a blow could never again effectively oppose him. At the moment the army leadership was still gloating, and Reichenau was commenting complacently that it had not been a simple matter to have the whole thing appear as a purely internal party dispute. But Hitler had not intended to give the army a large enough part in the elimination of Röhm to put him under obligation to it. He involved it just far enough to corrupt it. It was an unequal alliance that these dilettantes in uniform, who were dabbling in politics, struck up with Hitler. Defense Minister von Blomberg had made the unforgettable statement that henceforth the German officer’s honor must consist in being cunning. But, as has been trenchantly pointed out,50 the military were guided by political incompetence and arrogance.
If the public order was actually threatened by rebels and conspirators, as von Blomberg later represented the situation, then the army probably had the duty to intervene. If that were not the case, then it should have called a halt to the killing. Instead, it had waited, had made weapons available, and in the end its leaders had congratulated themselves on their acuteness at emerging with clean hands and nevertheless as victors. They succumbed not to the “nemesis of power,” as the English historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett has asserted, but to their failure to recognize how short-lived this victory would be. At the height of the killing former State Secretary Planck urged General von Fritsch to intervene. The commander in chief of the army replied that he had no orders to do so. Planck warned him: “If you, General, stand by idly watching, sooner or later you will suffer the same fate.” Three and a half years later, Fritsch, together with Blomberg, was dismissed under a dishonoring cloud. The charge, as in the cases of Schleicher and Bredow, was based on forged documents, and now it was the turn of the SA to rejoice over the “revenge for June 30.” Les institutions périssent par leur victoires.
This aphorism was totally borne out by subsequent events. It is true that June 30 dealt a fatal blow to the SA. Its formerly rebellious self-assertive profile henceforth almost vanished behind petty bourgeois features. Brass knuckles and rubber truncheons gave way to collection boxes. But the army did not assume the place vacated by the storm troopers. Three weeks later Hitler coolly took advantage of the manifest weakness of the army leadership. On July 20, 1934, he freed the SS “in view of its great services… especially in connection with the events of June 30” from its subordination to the SA and raised it to the rank of an independent organization directly subordinate to himself. At the same time, it was allowed to rival the army in maintaining armed fighting forces—at first of only one division.
Few acts so clearly reveal the core of Hitler’s technique as this decision. No sooner was the SA eliminated than he was promoting the building of a new power center of the same kind, in order to be able to continue his game of protecting his own rule. All those who were intimately or remotely participants in the events of June 30 naïvely assumed that the purge had resolved a question of power. But Hitler secured his own personal power precisely by never really settling the power conflicts within his entourage. He merely shifted them to other planes and continued playing out the game with new pieces, in altered confrontations.
Politically, as well as tactically, the SS took over many of the functions of the SA. But it markedly avoided that claim to independence which Röhm’s following had always so obtrusively made. For the SA had never wholly submitted to the principle of blind obedience; it had always emphasized its aloofness from the despised corps of party people. By contrast, the SS felt itself to be a totally loyal elite, serving as the sentinel and vanguard of the National Socialist idea, a pure instrument of the Führer’s will. In this spirit it began, on June 30, its inexorable process of expansion in all directions. Soon the SA and then the party also vanished in its mighty shadow, so that there ceased to be any road to power that bypassed the SS.
The rise of the SS, which so crucially determined the history and features of the Third Reich and by no means ended with the downfall of the regime, incidentally revealed something else: that Röhm had rightfully considered himself as being, in the last analysis, of one mind with Hitler. Himmler, constantly prodded by Reinhard Heydrich restively operating in the background, tranformed the Reichsführung-SS[13] into a mighty, many-branched apparatus. Ultimately, it became a genuine subsidiary government that penetrated into all existing institutions, undermined their political power, and gradually began replacing them. What Himmler thus accomplished was nothing less than Ernst Röhm’s impatient though ultimately vague vision. Röhm’s ambitious lieutenants had dreamed of an SA state. Himmler brought into being, at least in its initial phases, an actual SS state. Röhm was liquidated because he wanted to achieve by immediate action what Hitler, as he explained to intimates, sought to arrive at “slowly and deliberately, by taking the tiniest steps at a time.”
13
Himmler enjoyed the unique and personal title of Reichsführer-SS. The Reichsführung was the central office of the SS, his personal headquarters.