The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer) was a purge in which the Nazi regime executed at least 85 people for political reasons. This took place in Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934. Most of those killed were members of the Storm Division (SA) (German: Sturmabteilung), a Nazi paramilitary organization.
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The precise number of victims of the Night of the Long Knives is disputed and will probably never be known with certainty. During the Purge itself official radio and newspaper reports only gave the names of ten people killed (the six SA-leaders executed in Stadelheim Prison on June 30th, Schleicher and his wife, Karl Ernst - who was wrongly reported to have been shot in Stadelheim, whereas in fact he was shot in the barracks of Hitlers Personal Guard Unit in Berlin Lichterfelde - and Ernst Röhm).
Whilst the German newspapers hummed and hawed when it came to disclosing the names of further victims of the purge the international press in the weeks and months after the purge set out to get a more comprehensive picture of how many people had been killed during the bloody days of June 30th to July 2nd. In the end they managed to present about 100 names of people allegedly killed, although a number of those eventually turned out to have survived, such as the former SA-chief of Berlin Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf (who had not been bothered at all) or Adolf Morsbach, the head of the cosmopolitan-minded Akademische Austauschdienst (Academic Exchange Programme), who was "merely" put in a Concentration Camp.
Immediately after the events of the purge the Gestapo compiled an "official" list of those killed at the order of Hitler himself who wished to gain an overall view on the number and identity of those killed in order to prepare the Reichstag speech in which he intended to present his interpretation of the occurences of June 30th to July 2nd to the German public and the world in general, and which he finally delivered on July 13th. This "Gestapo List" comprised a total of 77 names.
In his Reichstag speech Hitler sub-divided those into 61 persons who had been shot during "the action", 13 who had (allegedly) died resisting arrest and 3 who had (allegedly) committed suicide. In his speech Hitler only divulged the names of 11 of those 77 (Ferdinand von Bredow, Georg von Detten, Karl Ernst, Hans Hayn, Edmund Heines, Hans Peter von Heydebreck, Ernst Röhm, Kurt von Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and Julius Uhl).
However, the list of 77 was far from being complete: Hitler himself admitted that some excesses had taken place and stated that he had handed over the cases of several people who had been killed as part of unauthorized actions by subordinate organs to the authorities, who were supposed to implement a regular prosecution of the perpetrators. Among those cases who were at first subject to regular investigation and preosecution by the locally responsible Attorney Offices were those of the city clerk Kuno Kamphausen who was murdered at the order of an SS-officer who was bearing a grudge on him for refusing to give a construction permission to his brother and the cases of vour Jews and two Communists who were killed without permission from Berlin in the course of arbitrary actions by lower SS-echelons in the province of Silesia. In September 1934 Heinrich Himmler - eager to shield his SS-men from legal prosecution - managed to convince Hitler to change his mind on the latter six people, whose names as a consequence, were subsequently added to the official list whose killing was to be considered rightful and which now encompassed 83 names.
The list of 77 or 83 names respectively was kept in several copies - which were stored under lock and key - in the Ministry of Justice and the Gestapo Headquarters. After a law entitled "Gesetz über Maßnahmen der Staatsnotwehr" ("Law pertaining to the Measures of Self-Defence of the State") had been passed by the Reich Cabinet on July 3rd, which declared: "Die zur Niederschlagung hoch- und landesverräterischer Angriffe am 30. Juni, 1. und 2. Juli 1934 vollzogenen Maßnahmen sind als Staatsnotwehr rechtens" ("The measures taken to clamp down on the treasonous attacks of June 30th, July 1st and 2nd are rightful, due to having been acts of self-defence of the State.") it was decided that the killing of everybody on that list was to be considered lawful and that therefore the Police and Attorney Offices were prohibitted from investigating and prosecutiong anyone for those killings. The lists thus were used by the Ministry and the Gestapo as a referential tool which could be consulted to decide, whether requests of relatives and friends of those killed to be given information on the circumstances of death of their beloved ones, or requests to prosecute those responsible for their killing would be answered in the affirmative (people killed and not mentioned on the Gestapo list) or in the negative (people whose names were to be found on the list). The same applied to requests of other state authorities (especially Police Departments and Attorney Offices) who inquired at the Ministry of Justice or the Gestapo Headquarters whether they should open and or continue investigation of a specific killing that had taken place on the three days from June 30th to July 2nd.
The official list of those killed was first published in 1964 by the former Reichstag Deputy Heinrich Bennecke in the appendix of his book Die Reichswehr und der „Röhm-Putsch“.
Later research by historians has shown that on top of those listed in the Gestapo list a number of other people had been killed. Heinrich Bennecke complemented the names of the city clerk Kuno Kamphausen from Waldenburg and the music critic Willi Schmid to his reprint of the official Gestapo list, whereupon he reached the conclusion that at least 85 people were killed during the purge. Later on Hans Günther Richardi in his study on the Dachau Concentration Camp added the names of four inmates of Dachau (Julius Adler, Erich Gans, Walter Häbich and Adam Hereth), whom the SS murdered on the occasion of the Purge, to . In 1993 Otto Gritschneder published a book on the post-"World War II" prosecution of those involved in the killings which lists 90 names of people killed (adding the doctor and Röhm-associate Karl Günther Heimsoth to the list).[1]
Richard J. Evans, whose books on the subject have been called "the definitive study for at least a generation," states that at least 85 people were killed, and more than 1,000 were arrested.[2] Ian Kershaw also cites the number of deaths at 85. Kershaw also notes that "some estimates...put the total number killed at between 150 and 200."[3] William L. Shirer writes in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, that "The White Book of the Purge, published by émigrés in Paris claims 401 deaths, but lists only 116 of them. At the 1957 trial in Munich the figure 'more than 1,000' was used."[4] Both of those figures are much higher than the ones most historians of the period rely on, and that Shirer himself was not necessarily citing the figures as accurate, but was simply relaying them in his book. Finally, many—but not all—of the victims had some role in bringing Hitler to power.
The list of victims was retrieved from the German Wikipedia unless otherwise stated.[5]