Many wonder how an entire nation could allow Adolf Hitler—a mediocre army corporal and failed landscape painter—to become the architect of the most calamitous events of the twentieth century. But few know that Hitler’s fateful transition from ambitious demagogue to Europe’s most vicious tyrant occurred on an ordinary Saturday—June 30, 1934—through a little-known event that would come to be called “The Night of the Long Knives.”

 

In The Night of the Long Knives, Paul R. Maracin has painstakingly pieced together the scattered and intentionally obscured elements of this fascinating story of deceit, intrigue, and mass murder that has as yet received little attention from historians.

 

First came the burning of the Reichstag—Germany’s parliament—an event that Hitler’s government blamed on subversives. Hermann Göring appeared on the scene with an arrest list containing the names and addresses of every “enemy of the state,” a list that Hitler and his cronies had been preparing for months.

 

Hitler himself arrested the principal victim at Bad Wiessee when he burst into the hotel room of Ernst Röhm, revolver in hand. Röhm was the head of the brownshirts—the Nazis’ three-million-member private army—and thus one of Hitler’s most dangerous rivals in the Nazi party. Soon after, Reinhard Heydrich—a chief architect of the Final Solution—and Hermann Göring began a massacre in Berlin, while Hitler sat by the phone, checking names off the list as they were killed.

 

This is the story of the events leading up to that awful night and its most horrifying effects.