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Hitler had entered Rome's bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him had stood two detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed at the ready. He had spat out the words, Rome.

You are under arrest.

Rome had looked up sleepily out of the pillows on his bed.

Hail, my infura, you are under arrest.

Hitler had bawled for the second time. He had turned on his heel and left the room. Meanwhile, upstairs in the corridor, things have become very lively. SA leaders are coming out of their rooms and being arrested. Hitler shouts at each one, have you had anything to do with Rome's machinations? Of course, none of them says yet, but that doesn't help them. Hitler mostly knows the answer himself. Now and then he turns to gerbil Zalutza with a question. And then comes his decision.

Arrested.

So that was Eric Kemper, who was the driver of Adolf Hitler, who was describing the morning of the 30 June 1934 that sees a bloody and carnivorous faction fight in the nazi party, a faction fight that is commemorated as the night of the long knives. And, Dominic, this is the first kind of the great drama, really, of the Nazis in power, isn't it? And we did this time last year, four episodes on the rise of the Nazis to power, and now we're going to do four episodes looking at the Nazis in power.

Yes, that was a slightly inspector clusea ish Hitler. I thought there, Tom.

No, he was german. He was clearly, indisputably german.

Well, of course, Hitler had an austrian accent. I don't know whether you were trying to give an austrian flavor, were you? Yeah, of course you were. So, for those people who haven't listened to our series on the rise of the Nazis, please do. For those of you who haven't got time to do it, just want to crack on with the night of the long knives, which, as Tom says rightly, is this seismic moment in the early years of the Third Reich. I guess we'll just give a little bit of a recap of where we got to with the Nazis and their rise to power. So, as we explored last time, the roots of Nazism lie in the 1880s and 1890s in this kind of ferment of ideas, kind of social darwinism, obsession with racial hygiene, obsession with national degeneracy, with war, with struggle, with antisemitism in particular. Those ideas were very current in Germany before the First World War. There were equivalents elsewhere, of course, with a slightly different flavor, but then they became intensified, I suppose, turbocharged, would you say, tom, by the great war, the experience of the war, the shattering experience for Germany, because they lose.

And that's the key.

The fact that so many people are starving in Germany and then they lose. Absolutely, they lose. Germany loses a lot of territory. There is the german revolution in 1918 1919. Total chaos on the streets. The Kaiser is kicked out, fears of bolshevism. And in this atmosphere, lots of little paramilitary parties and things flourish. One of them is the German Workers Party, the National Socialist Party, as it becomes. And this attracts a former corporal in the bavarian army who had previously been born in Austria, who is Adolf Hitler, who discovers that he has this brilliant gift of the gab, that he's able to articulate all the rage and resentment of former servicemen who feel betrayed by the end of the war. And in particular, his guiding principle is anti semitism, the anti Semitism that he had learned as a young man in Vienna before the First World War. And he now develops this entire worldview based on war and struggle and racism and in particular, antisemitism. And the Nazis tried a failed putch in 1923. Obviously, it didn't work out. Hitler was briefly imprisoned. But they profit from a couple of things. In other circumstances, they would have remained an extreme, eccentric, radical party, but they profit from the fact that the new republic that's been set up in Germany in the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, lacks legitimacy from the start in the eyes of a lot of conservative Germans, that so many conservative Germans and middle class Germans and whatnot, are terrified of communism, of bolshevism, and believe it's not just that.

They don't believe the Weimar Republic will be a bullwog against it. They actually think the Weimar Republic is riddled with it, and anything left of center is kind of crypto communists. And then the absolute searing impact of the Great Depression, which is worse in Germany than almost anywhere else in the world, massive unemployment. And against that background, the Nazis prosper as a kind of populist party. And then the terrible mistake that conservative elites employ Hitler effectively, they've run out of options. They're feuding with each other. They bring Hitler in as the hired gun, don't they, Tom? They do. And they appoint him chancellor at the end of January 1933.

And, Dominic, just to name check some of those conservatives, because they will be playing a part in this drama. Yeah, we have the Reich president, who is an enormous bloke with a kind of Warren's mustache called Hindenburg, who was a great war hero.

Carl von Hindenburg. Yeah, war hero, exactly.

So he is very elderly. He's about 183 at this point, and perhaps not entirely compost mentis. Then we have an afit Machiavell he's described as. By Michael Burley von Pappen.

Yes.

Who you described as looking like a Daily Telegraph leader. Right?

That's right.

So they're kind of operating behind the scenes. And also before Hitler, there is a General Schleicher Trotsky. So let's get a description from Trotsky. He described Schleicher as a question mark with epilettes, which I think is a great description. And he embodies an ambition, perhaps, on the part of generals for a military dictatorship. Yes. And so is there a sense that the army as well are players in this?

Absolutely.

They would quite fancy to be running the show.

Absolutely. The most plausible alternative to a nazi regime in 1933 is a right wing, nationalist, army run military dictatorship or something like that, maybe an alliance between the conservative business elites and the army. And there is a tension there right from the beginning in the nazi regime. But to just finish up the recap, so in the very last episode of our rise of the Nazis series, we described how as soon as Hitler becomes chancellor, he unleashes this wave of violence on the streets through his stormtroopers. We'll come to the stormtroopers in a little bit. Who is paramilitary? Kind of militia events play massively into his hands. An anarchist burns down the Reichstag, a dutch anarchist, which is the parliament building. Hitler uses this as an opportunity to push through an emergency decree that allows him to suspend civil liberties. He wins an election, and then he intimidates the Reichstag, the parliament, into passing an enabling act. That means he can basically rule by decree outside the constitution without the Reichstag having any say in the matter. And that is then followed by a huge purge of institutions and a kind of nazification of german life, with everything from universities.

I mean, universities actually leading the charge, students burning books and so on, to things like rifle clubs and hobbyist groups becoming nazified. So already, by the summer of 1933, you are well on the way to the formation of a totalitarian state.

And the communists have been banned, the other parties have kind of purged themselves, have voted themselves into liquidation, concentration camps have been opened, the rule of law is imploding. So all in all, it's looking like springtime for Hitler and Germany. Very good to coin a phrase.

Very good. Yeah, exactly. But to sort of start to dig deeper into the story. So by the summer of 1933, for a lot of ordinary Germans, if you're not a communist or keen social democrat or homosexual or a jew. A jew, exactly. Above all, a jew, you may well think that actually this has worked out all right. There is a sense that you have finally a stable government, a sense of energy and activity that is coming from Berlin. So from that perspective, Hitler has won his. He's got his enabling act, he's done well in the elections. Things are looking good. The problem for him is that there are massive tensions, as you've alluded to, within the nazi regime from the very beginning. So on the one hand, there's a lot of people who think the Nazis should be a radical movement, that they should utterly change german society, sweep away the old order and create a new Germany and kind of new men and women to live in it. This is their kind of. It sounds the diabolical thing to say, but almost the sort of idealistic side of Nazism and then the other side of the coin is this kind of national conservative old elites, the army and so on, who think, well, we're basically running the show and we don't like all this sort of disorder and stuff.

Because, Dominic, the cabinet.

Yes.

Although Hitler's chancellor, there are very few kind of Nazis in it, aren't there? Most of them are still people in wing collars and all that kind of stuff.

If you see Hitler with his cabinet, I was watching a documentary last night. If you see Hitler and his cabinet walking through the streets in January 1933 or February 1933, there are a whole load of men in top hats who look like kind of Wall street bankers or something.

And there are times when Hitler appears wearing top hats. Absolutely. And then the next day he'll be wearing his brown shirt. So he's kind of playing. He's riding both horses.

So this riding both horses is proving increasingly difficult for Hitler. And you mentioned the brown shirt. So the brown shirts, the sA, the storm Abtailung, as they're called, they become an increasing problem for Hitler as 1933 goes on. So what are they? They had begun as, bizarrely, the gym and sports section of the nazi party. This was a kind of euphemism describing his squad of bouncers that he used at his meetings in the 1920s. And they end up with a much better name. They end up being called the storm section, which sounds much more glamorous and exciting and very good for attracting young men who like action and want to kind of punch up the darling storms.

As Unity Mitford called them.

I knew this was going to come up. Unity Mitford's a great fan, isn't she? So sort of posh aristocrats who we did a podcast about who became infatuated with Hitler and the Stormtroopers. The stormtroopers are the creation of a guy called Ernst Rum, who you mentioned right at the beginning room is. He looks like such a bruiser, doesn't he? If you see photographs of him, he looks like a man who would be standing outside nightclub with a shaven head.

Except in his last year, where he looks like Uncle Monty from. With an L. I. Which will mean nothing to you, because.

I know you haven't seen Griffiths. Yes, well, anyway, I think it's fair.

To say he puts on weight by the end.

He definitely does. He's a man of size.

Muscle turns to a bit of.

He's a man of size. So the room is a veteran. He's from Munich. He's the son of a railway official. He is a veteran of the First World War. Like so many young men, he'd gone to the western front with great enthusiasm. A shell had blown part of his nose off. He'd been badly injured at Verdum. He had then joined the Fry Corps, these kind of paramilitary units in the chaos of the 1920s. And then he'd been attracted to the nazi party. And room is absolutely typical of these people who are called the front generation. They absolutely romanticize and glamorize the experience of the trenches and the camaraderie.

That includes Hitler, right?

Absolutely. But he is even more enthusiastic about violence and street fighting than Hitler. As far as Roman is concerned, I think street fighting is Nazism and everything else, like the politics and discussing policy. He thinks that is boring, a waste of time and actually a compromise with the old order. He loves cracking heads and having big.

Fights because we should say that the Nazis come to power adopting a double approach, one politically, they play the democratic games incredibly well. I mean, Hitler blazes all kinds of innovations that subsequent democratic leaders will follow, but also seizing control of the streets. Yes, and they're mainly fighting communists. But the establishment of nazi rule means that the Nazis have irrevocably seized control of the streets as well as of the democratic institutions.

Exactly. As you say, Tom, there's a weird paradox at the heart of the nazi regime in 1933. On the one hand, they're clearly fermenting disorder on the streets. The stormtroopers are running a mock, beating people up, smashing kind of jewish shop windows beating, jews know, strutting around, real bully boy kind of behavior, so they are responsible for disorder. On the other hand, Hitler's promise to the german people is, I'm going to end disorder. I'm the person who will make Germany great again and get everything calmed down. So he is absolutely riding two horses now. There's been a long running tension between the SA and the rest of the nazi party because the SA, throughout the 1920s, had become more and more a kind of party within a party room, had been in and out. So at one point he'd actually gone off to run the. He went to Bolivia, the bolivian army, which is a very bizarre career move.

Though not the last Nazi to go to South America, of course.

Yeah, exactly. Very good. There had been a bit of a crisis in the essay, which we don't need to go into. They'd fallen out with some of the rest of the nazi party and Hitler had brought Rome back. Now, Rome was never. He's a strutting bully boy sort of man.

He's kind of Mussolini esque.

Yes, I guess so. Without Mussolini's brains, actually, because Mussolini was a journalist. Rome doesn't have any of that, but he's physically imposing. Absolutely.

And presumably Hitler has brought Rome back because he needs his street fighting savvy.

Yes, exactly. Even though he knows that Rome is not happy about pursuing kind of political means, that rum just wants to have endless fights, get out there and have.

A crack at the comics.

Exactly. The shadow that hangs over Ruim is that he is very flagrantly gay. Everybody knows this. Lots of Hitler's sort of cronies say to him, oh, the Ruhm is a terrible man, kind of carrying on with blonde haired youths, all this stuff. This is not what a Nazi should do. And actually, Hitler gives him a bit of a pass on it because he needs Rome and he knows that he has the loyalty of all these stormtroopers. So there is a slightly odd and unexpected twist.

It's a bit like Mrs. Thatcher, very tolerant of her minister's foibles.

Right. That's a comparison that I would expect, Tom, from a lot of Twitter academics, but not necessarily from you.

There you go, woke history.

The old Hitler Thatcher comparison again. I see. You can take the child out of the 1980s, but you can't take the 1980s out of the child. Right? Yeah. Right. So let's fast forward to the summer of 1933. The essay the storm abtiling. The stormtroopers have now swollen to an enormous size. Loads of people have poured into their ranks, so they now have four and a half million people who are kind of paid up, brown shirt wearing stormtroopers. So they've absorbed lots of other paramilitary groups and veterans groups.

So, Dominic, that must be larger than the army.

Far larger, because, of course, the army is hideband by the Treaty of Versailles.

Yeah.

So the army is a shadow of its former self. And the army are very anxious about this. There's this huge paramilitary formation kind of roaming around the streets. Hitler knows that the army commanders are very, very displeased about the existence of the SA, but there's an urgency to this now because Paul von Hindenburg, who has the absolute loyalty of the army, I mean, he is the army's great hero, and he's the president, the walrus who looks like he's made of oak or something. He's like the personification of prussian rigor. He, as you said, is. He's actually, I think, about 85, but as you said, he appears to be 270, and he is clearly not long for this world. And when he dies, which is going to be in the next year or two, the army may. Will insist that one of their people becomes head of state, and that will be a problem for Hitler. It could be a rival power focus. It could be somebody who could act against him and undermine his regime. And so as the SA, the stormtroopers are kind of running amok and causing all this trouble and actually turning the army against them.

That makes Hitler very nervous, because Hitler knows he cannot afford to alienate the army commanders. What is worse is that. Know, what did you call him? Uncle Monty. Crossed with a kind of scarface.

Yeah, because he is scarred, isn't he?

Lost his nose and everything.

So a nose plus Uncle Monty, cross.

Between Voldemort, Tom and Uncle Monty. Yes. He is now saying, well, actually, Nazism has lost its. It's lost its figure, it's lost its radical impetus. We need a second revolution, a revolution within the revolution. He says. The german revolution has fallen asleep. This is all in the summer of 1933. And there's this argument, are we going to have a permanent revolution? Are the SA going to be running amok forever? And Hitler manages to kind of dampen this down for the remainder of 1933. But then in 1934, beginning of 1934, it all kind of kicks off again because Rum, who is so restless and is always thinking that he's being sidelined and stuff, he writes a memo. I mean, it's hard to believe that he spends much time writing memos, but anyway, he writes a memo and he sends it to the army and he says, okay, this is my plan. I think actually the SA should just be the army.

Let's.

Stormtroopers can be the army and the traditional army, they should just train our men. We should be the defense force.

Okay, and so what's Hitler's take on this?

The army commanders go to Hitler and they say, oh, this is totally. This. This strutting bully cannot squeeze us out. Hitler agrees with them. He forces them to do a deal and Rome promises he'll behave himself. But then when Hitler goes out the room, Rome says to his men, he's overheard saying to his men, and I quote, what that ridiculous corporal declared doesn't apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and we'll have to send him on leave. And if we can't do this with Hitler, we'll do it without him. So this is extraordinary. Hitler, who is the furor to most Nazis, who is the center of the kind of nazi cult here is the guy who is commanding his paramilitary formation, who's saying, actually, you know what? Hitler is turning out to be an obstacle to our revolution and maybe he'll.

Have to go, which is foolish, isn't it? Because people who oppose Hitler within the nazi party tend not to come off very well. So there was a guy called Gregor Strasser, wasn't there, who'd been very much on the kind of socialist wing of the National Socialists, and he had started opening negotiations with the conservatives to make himself vice chancellor. And so Hitler had elbowed him out. And so presumably Hitler is now know, this isn't just about the balance between the stormtroopers and the army. This is about my future. Now, here's the question, though. If he's going to take on the SA, what resources does he have? Because you've talked about the army, you've talked about the SA, but so far we haven't talked about the police.

Yeah, so he's got the police. The police have generally been taken over, say, for example, in Prussia, by nazi officials. Prussia is the biggest german state and the guy who's initially taken them over is Herman, who is.

So he is in the cabinet as interior minister for Prussia, isn't he?

So there's the police, there's, of course, the army. But there's also another sort of power center in the nazi regime, an emerging power center, which is Hitler's bodyguard. And they are the SS, so they are the Schutztaffel.

So that's the protection squad, isn't it? In English, yeah.

Much smaller than the stormtroopers, much smaller than the essay. They are more fanatical about nazi ideology, less into the kind of street punch. I mean, they can be very violent, but they're less into the sort of the random street punch ups.

They're a crack squad of elite men, as your brother was, my brother would say. So there's about 50,000 of them.

Yeah. And they tend to be university educated. They spend a lot of time kind of talking about antisemitism. I mean, the classic sort of SS person is. I mean, obviously, there's Heinrich Himmeler, who had been a previously very sickly, kind of idealistic person, fascinated by the occults and stuff. There's his deputy, Reinhardt Heidrich. Heidrich is the son of, I think, an opera singer or something like that.

He's a brilliant violinist, a fencer as well. He's a brilliant fencer, a reservist in.

The navy, a very sinister man.

But he has a very high voice.

He does indeed. He's both sinister and, I think, slightly effeminate, isn't he? Heidrick in his kind of very scary, sinister way.

And Himmler. So he's head of the.

Yeah.

Which is kind of an elite paramilitary organization, and Hitler's praetorian guard, basically. I mean, devoted to looking after Hitler personally. But Himmler has also been engaging in a kind of power grab. So he's president of the Munich police, political police commander of Bavaria. So there's this process by which intelligence and political sections in the police are being sidelined off and filled with Nazis. So Gerring has been doing that in Prussia, and Gerrin has said. So he's detached the intelligence political sections from the main body of the prussian police. He's filled them with Nazis, and he's merged them to form the secret state police, as he calls it, the Gehaim. So the Gestapo, as it's abbreviated to. So you're having that in Prussia, but you're also having a similar process in Bavaria and then in the other german states. And Himmler is taking control of those, isn't he? So he's empire building, as Rhirm is doing, as guerring is doing.

Well, actually, Tom, what happens is that hands control of the Gestapo in Prussia to. Yeah, because basically, lots of these Nazis hate each other. They're all rivals at the court of Hitler, but all of Ruhm's enemies basically decide it's in their interest, team up against him to make him the scapegoat. It's like bullies turning on each other, and they decide one of them's going to be the scapegoat. And that's ruum and so gurring and Himmler and all these other people, they basically decide to share out power among themselves, to sort everything out so that they can move against the room.

But just to emphasize, it's not just that they are teaming up as political figures, but as figures who have manpower.

Behind as institutional figures.

Because if Hitler is going to take on the SA, he obviously needs people who can wield the guns and the lorries and do the shooting and everything he does.

Indeed.

And are the army going to be complicit in this? I mean, will the army provide help?

Hitler is very anxious about the army because by the spring of 1934, the Hindenburg issue is more pressing than ever. It is very clear that there are a lot of people in the kind of national conservative elites who are close to the army, who are extremely anxious that after more than a year, Hitler is getting more and more power and that he is not proving to be the kind of client tool that they hoped. So the classic example of this is this guy, Franz von Parpen, who was chancellor a couple of chancellors ago. He's now Hitler's vice chancellor. He's a man who basically wants to turn back the clock before the First World War and have a kind of arch conservative kind of regime. And on the 17 June 1934, Parpen gives a speech which is seen as a real threat to Hitler. It's actually an extraordinary moment in the history of the Third Reich. He says, under the german revolution, under our revolution, selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry and arrogance have all flourished. He says, we can't live in a constant state of revolution. We can't live with this constant state of unrest.

And this is greatly cheered by the old order. And they say, thank God, somebody's basically finally said it to Hitler. This jumped up little corporal from Austria who's got all these ghastly people running around on the streets. Hitler is furious about this, and he ends up having this summit meeting with Hindenburg and the head of the army, Fernando von Blumberg, who is his defense minister. This is on the 21 June at Hindenburg's kind of castle, which is called Noidek in East Prussia. And the Hindenburg and Blomberg, who's the head of the army, say to Hiller, listen, this has all gone too far now. All this squabbling must absolutely end. You must bring your party and your movement to heal, to order, and that there's an implicit threat there, right? Which is that if Hitler doesn't act, the army will. Then the army will. Exactly. Now, meanwhile, Tom, as you said, the Gestapo, the intelligence organizations, the police, which are under the control of Ernst Ruhlum's enemies, people like Himler and Heidrich, and.

Are now operating on a national level. Yes, because there'd been no national police force under the Weimar Republic, had there? So again, this concentration of police power and of SS power on a kind of federal level is giving Hitler the opportunity to strike.

Presumably they go to Hitler and they say, we have evidence that the Ruhm, the SA, the stormtroopers are planning a coup against you, that you are going to be kicked out. They maybe are in league with the French and the hour is dark. It could happen any moment now. You have to move.

And is this true?

No, it's not true.

Right.

The essay, were never planning a coup. There was no deal with the French. The idea that Ruham was seriously going to launch a coup, he's actually not really organized enough to do it and I don't think he has the will to do it, Tom. But on the 27 June, the army chiefs Verna von Bloomberg and Valta von Reich, now who's a very keen Nazi, they go to see Hitler and they say, look, you've got to move against him. You've got to do something about this. And Hitler says, fine, I've got an idea. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get all the stormtroopers. Here's the essay leaders. I'll meet with them. There's a lot of spa towns in this story. Bizarrely, at a place called Bad Visay, which is on Lake Tegenze. Tegenze, which is southeast of Munich. That's where Rome is hanging out at the moment. Rome's always going to spas with kind of blonde young men.

Yes, it is sinister because these spa towns are kind of very dull, very bourgeois, aren't they? Faint hint of sulfur hanging in the air and you can imagine room absolutely enormous, sweating with a tower sweating away, absolutely bright red and very, very kind of creepy context for the drama that.

Is to come with a suspiciously young youth at his side. Tom, I think, is the Ernst room vibe. So Hitler says, I'm going to basically beard him in his debt.

In his lair, as it were.

Yeah. Spartan. Then the very next day, the 20 eigth of June, bizarrely, Hitler goes to a wedding in a place called Essen, well known now, Tom, to fans of board games because they have a big. The world's biggest board game convention takes place in Essen, which is nice anyway.

War by other means dominant.

Hitler goes to this wedding reception at Essen, a galite who's getting married, and at the wedding reception he is told Hindenburg and Parpen, your vice chancellor, the spokesman for the kind of national conservative old order. They're actually plotting to have a secret meeting but without you in a couple of days. And Hitler thinks, oh, my God, they're about to move against. Know the urgency is greater than ever before. I absolutely must take this opportunity to crush all my enemies in one go. So, room and the stormtroopers on one hand, and the representatives, the conservatives, the conservatives on the other, and he rushes off from the wedding reception. He'd be a rubbish person to have at wedding reception anyway, because of course he doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke.

And he likes to be the center of attention.

Like you, Tom, he's a vegetarian. So basically, if they're all eating sausages and beer and drinking beer and having a final time, he's a real misery to have at your wedding.

He's nibbling on some spinach. But presumably, I mean, he must hate weddings because he's not the focus.

Yeah, of course, he'd be the last person I'd invite to my wedding. Tom, I'll be frank. I mean, I had you to my wedding.

I'm glad you've got that wedding.

But I didn't have Hitler and I wouldn't have had him.

But, Dominic, to be fair, when you invited me, I didn't then go storming off and order a bloodthirsty putch.

No, you didn't.

So I think the comparison can only be pushed so far, is what I'm saying. I just want that on the record.

That well known, that comparison has dogged you all your career. Anyway, so, yes, Hitler races away from the wedding. He goes back to his hotel, he says, put the army on alert, we're going to move. He says to Guerring, who's also at the wedding, presumably been stuffing himself with sausages. He says to guerring, go back to Berlin, prepare to deal with the conservatives. I will handle the stormtroopers in Munich, you deal with the conservatives in Berlin. The night of the long knives. Tom is about to get started, so.

Let'S take a break there. And when we come back, spa action. Hello. Welcome back to the rest is history. We are looking at the night of the long knives. And Dominic, the night of the long knives is approaching. But before it gets launched, we go to another spa, don't we?

Yeah.

So we promise listeners spas, and we are absolutely fulfilling that promise.

Enormous amount of this podcast is Hitler just checking into and out of various hotels. So he's been to the wedding in Essen, and now he races to a town called Bad Goldersburg in Westphalia, because he's gone to look at some labor camps. He's gone to inspect some labor camps in Westphalia, and then he goes to this hotel, the Rein hotel in Bad Godesburg, where Goebbels comes to meet him. So, Gurbals, who we haven't talked about, PhD in, what is it? Sort of theater, romantic theater or something. The propaganda minister, malignly genius at propaganda.

And.

Exactly. And because he writes a diary, we know loads about the Third Reich through Goebbels'diaries.

So he's come to this hotel, and I imagine a hotel with white tablecloths.

Absolutely.

Little bit shabby and very elderly waiters.

I would almost certainly, Tom.

And again, the faint smell of sulfur. So just. That's the scene.

And gerbils pitches up and Goebbels says, great, we're going to do this coup, this coup within our own regime. And Hitler says, yes, Goebbels thinks it's going to be against the conservatives. And Hitler says it's not just against the conservatives, it's also going to be against Ruhm and the stormtroopers. Because I now have evidence that Ruham is plotting with the French and he know heads are going to roll, blood will be shed. I remember when we were researching this, Tom, we were on a flight to Australia. You said you'd been reading all about it and you'd come to the conclusion that Hitler was a very terrible man. Hitler behaved very poorly.

I really mean, I had that vague impression. But when you get up close, he's a terrible man. Mean, if you're in a spa, you wouldn't want him turning up. That's what I'm saying.

No, because, I mean, his violence against his enemies, horrendous, obviously, but sort of with Hitler's twisted worldview. Explicable, I suppose, but he's now using that violence and that sort of sadistic ruthlessness against people who have been at his side for more than a know, partners in his movements.

Well, because presumably he is Germany. He's the embodiment of Germany, and so therefore, people who rub him up the wrong way are rubbing Germany up the wrong way. That would be his justification, I guess.

Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. And I also think there's a histrionic side to Hitler. And when he is challenged, he can't take it. And because there's an enormous amount of him working himself up into a fury and kind of spitting and foaming at the mouth in this story, isn't it? So this is what he's doing in this hotel?

Well, I think that's what I conveyed in the opening passage.

Absolutely. With the cluso voice.

Yeah, it wasn't cluso, it was austrian.

Austrian, okay. Overnight, 29 June, 30 June, Hitler flies to Munich and he takes a whole load of adjutants and bodyguards, and he also takes gurbals with him and they land in Munich. Rumors of this have obviously traveled around Germany, that something is coming, some kind of confrontation between the stormtroopers and the rest of the party. And some of the stormtroopers have gone berserk already. And I've kind of been rampaging around the city demonstrating. I mean, they've apparently been shouting in Munich, the is against us, the reichs fair, the army is against us essay come out on the know. Show your defiance. Now, it's not so much a challenge to Hitler as an expression of their fear and frustration, I think. But Hitler interprets this as the beginning of the coup and he says, right, we have to absolutely act immediately. So he goes to the bavarian ministry of the interior, which is in Munich, and he summons the local leaders of the SA, who think of themselves, of course, as loyal to Hitler's. They think of themselves as his keenest, most devoted servants.

And I suppose in many cases they are, because lots of them have been with Hitler since the very.

Absolutely, absolutely they have. This is Hitler's terribleness as a man, Tom, that they come, you know, all this kind of meek and mild, and he grips the badges off their tunics and shouts at them, you're under arrest and you're going to be shot.

And do you think there's spittle flying in their faces?

There's all kinds of spittle, Tom. This is very spittle and spa rich story. They don't understand. They're terrified and they're dragged off to prison. So then Hitler goes off. He's got another spa town to visit. Yeah, of course he has. He drives off to yet another spa town. This is bad Visay on the lake.

Degenesa, which is where Rome.

Where Rome has been sweating with his towel.

And young.

Exactly.

Young lads.

Hitler arrives at 630 in the morning with a load of SS bodyguards and police. So there's your sign, Tom, that you were talking about in the first half, the institutions that are backing Hitler, the SS and the police, and presumably so.

Hitmler is now, I mean, he is joined in a bond of blood with Hitler. Yes, because he's providing Hitler with the means to take the SA out. And hasn't the army given the SS the wherewithal, the weaponry and the trucks and everything?

Yes, exactly. The army know this is happening and they're happy with it.

So the army also. Their fingers are going to be dabbled in the blood.

It's a good point that from this point onwards, it's not just that they have all. There's a kind of pact of blood against their internal enemies, the communists and the social democrats and so on, but against their own movement that will kind of bind them together.

Yeah.

Anyway, Hitler arrives at this, the Hanselbauer hotel, yet another of these kind of spa hotels.

Faded white tablecloths, ticking clock, elderly waiters.

As you described in your reading, he bursts in. The first person he goes to is this essay se senior group leader Highness. Now, Highness is a very predatory man and he's dragged out of his room and he's with this 18 year old boy, a blonde haired boy, and they're both locked up in a laundry room. So this is obviously very bad publicity for the stormtroopers. Then Hitler goes in to see Rome. Rome is kind of as you described. Rome is a bit bewildered by it, but he's kind of taken out, kind of sleepy.

What's going on?

And he just sort of sits in the foyer of the hotel and the reception area smoking a cigar like placidly unconcerned. So it appears while all this bustle is people are being arrested all around him. Because I think Rome just thinks, well, this will probably, who knows what's going on, that this is going to sort itself out in trouble. Meanwhile, Hitler is kind of rampaging around this spa hotel, bursting into people's bedrooms and shouting, arrested, arrested.

And it's the worst kind of spa break, isn't it?

People are being dragged out. They're all locked in, like the laundry room, which is also the kind of the basement. They're being locked in the basement. Shambolically, loads more SA people are arriving because they think there's going to be a big meeting with Hitler. So as they're getting out of their cars, all the sort of smiles and handshakes, Hitler has them arrested. His men have to charter a coach, I think, from bad Visay, so must be the only coach firm in bad Visay to take them all to Munich because they're so kind of ill prepared. Eventually, Hitler goes back to Munich. He's absolutely frothing at the mouth. People actually do describe spittle flying from his mouth as he talks, tom. He says Ruham is guilty, he says, of the worst treachery in world history, which is a very big claim. He says he's been given 12 million marks by the French and he was going to hand Germany over to the French. We must kill all him and his conspirators. And actually all Hitler's cronies say, oh, I'd like to kill Rome, please. I mean, Rudolph Hess, who's like Hitler's poodle, begs him virtually on bended knee, can I please have the privilege of shooting Rome?

I mean, again, this paints the Nazis in a very bad light, Tom, because these are their own comrades. I mean, they're all their own partners in evil that they want to turn on. They go through lists and Hitler's kind of crossing them off. But actually, at first, he doesn't order that Ruhan be shot.

He hesitates because presumably it's embarrassing for him, incredibly embarrassing, because he's personally invited Ruhan back from Bolivia, la Paz or whatever, to run the SA.

Exactly.

So it reflects badly on his choice of personnel.

Hitler is not a sentimental man. I don't think he's going to be sentimental about shooting Ruhan, but I think he knows it's a big step. So this has been happening in Munich and most of the targets are the SA. But meanwhile in Berlin, the man in charge there has been gerring. So gurbals had run Gerring that morning with a password, Tom. The password was colibri, which is hummingbird. And when Gerring heard that, he knew that it was time to move. Gerring also an absolutely disgraceful man. He got dressed up specially in a white tunic, white boots. I mean, a white boots on a man, I think is never a good look, and sort of blue trousers. So he cuts a very peacock like figure and then he's striding up and down his office, going through lists of people. It's very kind of Julius Caesar, Tom.

Well, it's the prescriptions, it's the tramv.

He's saying they're going through lists and he's saying, shoot him. Yeah, shoot him. And he's kind of bursting into loud laughter at the thought of all these shootings and all this kind of thing. But all the people who end up being shot, or not all the people, but a lot of the people who end up being shot in Berlin are the national conservatives, kind of old order people.

Right. And the most significant is General Schleicher.

Who we mentioned, the previous chancellor, the.

Previous chancellor and his wife.

Yeah. An SS squad arrive at the house. Open the door. You General Schleicher? Yes, you are. Bang, bang. And his wife, and they're both killed.

Pappen is not shot, is he? Because that would be too embarrassing.

He's put under house arrest because he's the vice chancellor. It'd be incredibly embarrassing. But his press chief and his speechwriter. So Herbert von Boser and Edgar Jung, who are the people who've been writing his speeches, saying an end to the nazi revolution. Let's all calm down. Things have gone too far. They are shot. A load of other kind of old Hitler rivals are killed in various ways.

Gregor Strasser.

Yeah. The guy who was a kind of populist Nazi who had walked out, the.

Rival who'd stepped down, he'd gone off to become a chemist and he gets killed.

And a guy who had. For people who listen to the rise of the Nazis, to the episode about the Beerhall Putch, there was a guy who was the big cheese in Munich in those days who was a guy called Gustav Rito von Carr. He's actually hacked to death. He's cut into pieces by the SS, which very poor form.

Tom, and you mentioned roman history after the murder of Julius Caesar. Famously, a Poet called Sinner is killed in the mistaken belief that he is one of the conspiracies. And a very similar thing happens with this, doesn't it? So a music critic called Schmidt, who has the wrong name, gets killed because.

They think he's another Schmidt. And there's also a guy, I mean, a guy who'd actually helped him to produce, to edit mine camp, a guy called Bernard Stemfla. He is killed as well, by a complete accident. So in all, about 85 people are killed. There's a lot of score settling.

Poetic justice, one might say.

Poetic justice, very good. It's the settling of old scores. It's faction fighting, feuding, but it's also a message to two groups. One is the know, you'll get back in line, get back in your box. And the other is to conservatives and to the army. Yes.

And presumably to the whole german people.

Absolutely. So the room just to tie up his fate, Hitler waits for another day. But while he's deciding what to do with him, there's some talk of a show trial. But actually on the Sunday, the 1 July at a garden party, would you believe.

The weird way in which there is this sense of faded gentility behind it?

Yeah.

You know who I'd like to see make a film about this? Unexpected would be Wes Anderson.

I knew you were going to say Wes Anderson.

He loves a kind of faded spa town, doesn't he?

Yeah. Like the Grand Budapest hotel. Something like that, yeah. Well, it's the sort of death of know the Armando Mnucci film. It's not a comedy because obviously a lot of people die, but there is a kind of blackly comic, grotesque side to all this. It's a grotesque story in a very grim way. Anyway, at the garden party, Hitler says, fine room's got to go. So a load of blokes go to the prison in Munich, ssmem, and they leave room with a pistol. They say he should take his own life and they leave him with a newspaper where he can read about his own treachery. And hopefully this will encourage him to take his own life. After ten minutes, there's been no shot, no sound. They come back in. Right. No good. Ian Kershaw says in his book, whether Ruham had used the ten minutes to read the newspaper is not known. They take the pistol away and then they come back in. Rome, by this stage, rather bizarrely, has taken his top off and is standing there sort of topless, kind of in a sort of strutting pose. It's not clear whether this is a challenge or whether he thinks it's better to greet his death.

Well, it's a kind of bearing of the chest for a sword, I guess so, yeah. Maybe again, it's a kind of echo of a Roman. Yes.

Although rather pathetically.

Run me through.

Yeah, rather pathetically. Rather like Indiana Jones shooting that bloke in raids as the lost star. They just shoot him and then that's the end of him. He's dead. So the whole thing is done and dusted that day.

Hitler's announcement on this is very. The former chief of staff, worm, was given the opportunity to draw as a consequences of his treacherous behavior. He did not do so. And was thereupon shot.

Yeah, very. That's all he says.

Branding him with infamy.

Yes. So Hitler then goes to his cabinet on the 3 July and he says, yeah, I didn't have any recourse to the galaxy. We've killed all these people. And the cabinet, they draft a law, law for the emergency defense of the state. And this law is obviously a total joke because the law says everything Hitler did in the last few days is illegal. Yeah, that's literally the law.

So it's a kind of retrospective legal justification for murder, for mass murder.

Hitler is clearly anxious about it because it takes him ten days, another ten days before he goes to the ReichStag.

To the parliament, because presumably there are lots of people in the nazi party who've lost friends.

Yeah, of course.

And who are worried that Hitler has gone mad and is turning on his own. And so HItleR must know this and must worry, do I still have what it takes to command the mass of the party?

I guess I totally agree with, you know, the idea of camaraderie and brotherhood. RuhAn, by the way, had incarnated that as part of that front generation, the idea that we are a sort of brotherhood of steel formed in the furnace of the trenches.

But the irony of it is that these are people who have absolutely propagated that idea of behaving with steel, of mercilessly crushing enemies, and also have fostered all kinds of grotesque and hideous conspiracy theories. And they have now been monumentally hoist by their own patard. Yeah, they've been brutally crushed. And Hitler is kind of alleging all kinds of dark conspiracies against them.

Yes, absolutely. But he's still very, as you say, he's very anxious. So you said people lost friends. 13 members of the Reichstag have been killed in this purge.

Yeah, right.

And there are people who were really close friends with some of the SA men who are in the Reichstag. When Hitler gives the speech and Hitler speaks for 2 hours and he's completely unrepentant, and he says, sure, I broke the law. I took the law into my own hands. But he says, all I can say is, in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the german nation, and I was the supreme judge of the german people. I gave the order to shoot those guilty of this treason, and I gave the order to burn down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well poisoning and the poisoning from abroad. Can you have an ulcer of an internal well poisoning?

I think you can if you're the fury.

Yeah, I suppose you probably can, because.

You can do what you like.

Make any mixed metaphor.

Because also in that speech, it is not my responsibility to ascertain whether and if so, which of these conspirators, agitators, nihilists and well poisoners of german public opinion has been dealt too hard. A lot, rather. My duty is to make certain that Germany's lot is bearable. So basically, in other words, I can do what I like because I am Germany.

Exactly.

Le Tasseimois.

And you know what? The public like it. The german people, by and large, I think it's fair to say, are pretty happy because a lot of people have deeply resented the essay, the bullying, the street violence. They thought they were thugs, like jumped up football hooligans. And finally the furor has cracked down on them. Good for him. Maybe Rome was plotting with the know. Great that he got. No one liked him. Get rid of him.

I mean, the thing about the SA is that violence is seen as legitimate. And so if you are, I don't know, an average citizen going out for your Saturday shopping or whatever, and you have gangs of pot bellied guys in brown shirts waving flags and shouting slogans, it's menacing and intimidating.

Exactly.

And you want to see it come to an end.

Exactly. It's perfectly judged, actually, to appeal to those middle class people who basically want a quiet life. They want order, they want Germany to be great again. They want an end to unemployment and inflation and all the things that they associate with the. And, you know, the fewer strutting bully boys in their little town, as far as they're concerned, the better. So they're delighted.

And what about the army?

The army are absolutely. I mean, there are lots of winners, so the SS are big winners. Of course, Himmler will now accumulate more and more power. He's what had begun as a bodyguard now becomes the kind of, as you said, the praetorian guard, unchallenged praetorian guard of the nazi regime. But the army in particular, Werner von Bloomberg, the defense minister, the guy who's supposedly speaking up for the rice fair for the army, he had led the vote of thanks to Hitler in the cabinet meeting. So with all this settled a month later, the big development. Hindenburg is on his deathbed. The president, Hitler flew to see him on the 1 August, did his castle in East Prussia. Hindenburg was so far gone that he mistook Hitler for the Kaiser and addressed him as Kaiser. I mean, what a symbolic moment, Tom. Hitler goes back to Berlin knowing that Hindenburg only has hours left, and he has all his ministers put their names to a law that says when Hindenburg is dead, to honor him. It's like retiring the shirt of a footballer. The office of Reich president will be retired.

But, Dominic, am I right in thinking that the idea for that actually comes from the army, not from Hitler?

Well, the idea for the oath comes from the army. So the office is retired Reich president. There will now just be a furor, a leader and Reich chancellor. We always say furre, but actually, Richard Evans, in his books on the Third Reich, calls him the, you know, let's sort of demystify the word and think of it as Germans would have thought of it, there is just going to be one leader. And Blomberg and Reichenaur, the army chiefs, exactly as you just said, they think, let's bind Hitler to us. And the way we'll do that is we will make everybody in the army swear an oath of unconditional loyalty to the leader as supreme commander. And, of course, what they don't realize is instead of binding Hitler to the army, they are binding the army to Hitler, because everything that follows, all the crimes in the second world war, come from this.

So it's exactly repeating the mistake that the conservatives have made and thinking that they could use Hitler, they could ride this particular tire.

Later in this series, we will explore a bit more why the army thought that, because so much of it is about Hitler's foreign policy ambitions and how much, at first, it appears that they dovetail with the army commander's ambitions to have a strong army, to make Germany great again, all this kind of stuff. But just for the time being, there's a plebiscite, a referendum, to approve this change that happens in the middle of August. 90% of the public approve that Hitler is head of state, head of government, leader of the nazi party.

So it's still not quite kind of north korean levels.

Not quite. There's an awful lot of intimidation and whatnot. I mean, Hitler loves a referendum. This is a great series for spartans and referendums.

This is what he's all about.

Absolutely. So there's already a cult of Hitler in their brilliant books. On the third right, both Serene Kershaw and Sir Richard Evans talk a lot about this, about the poems, about the Hitler trees, about the Hitler squares and streets that started in 1933. But in 1934 it really becomes embedded and gathers momentum and it becomes what people call a kind of Fuhrer state. Everything is about the leader.

The Fuhrer is the state.

Absolutely. He is Germany.

It's not that he's representing Germany.

He is Germany. Germany. Exactly. The fjora prinzep. The idea of working towards the fjure all of these ideas, and all of this reaches its kind of symbolic apotheosis. Just a few weeks later, there is an assembly Tom of the nazi party in a great city in southern Germany. And many of our listeners will have seen the extraordinary cinematic images of Hitler walking through the parade grounds, very star wars, past the serid ranks of stormtroopers and nazi party members and soldiers. Now, what that moment is, we will discuss next time, because I know you're very excited, because you're going to be taking us through this story of what happens at Nuremberg in 1934 and the window that that offers us into the world of Nazism. Nazi ideology, nazi bEhavior, nazi propaganda, nazi propaganda, all of that stuff.

The way, Dominic, that the Nazis set about brainwashing a nation.

Brilliant. So that's all very exciting. Now, the great news, we love to brainwash a nation ourselves. In fact, brainwash the world. Tom?

Well, we love to brainwash a podcast audience, don't we?

So if you're in the mood for a little bit more brainwashing, you can hear the rest of this series right now by signing up at the rest is history. Now, just to give you a sense of what the series is going to be, there will be episodes on nazi propaganda and nazi ideology. There will be two episodes on Hitler's road to war, his plans for war, and also on the Anschlus with Austria, with Hitler's native land. And there will also be an episode about the Nazis and the Jews, and in particular Kristencht, the night of broken glass. And Tom, on that bombshell, we will see you all at Nuremberg. Goodbye.