The Röhm Purge, also called Operation Hummingbird, took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Many of those killed in the purge were leaders of the SA, the best-known being Ernst Röm. At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds.
About Night of the Long Knives in brief
The Röhm Purge, also called Operation Hummingbird, took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Adolf Hitler ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power. Many of those killed in the purge were leaders of the SA, the best-known being Ernst Röm. At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds, with high estimates running from 700 to 1,000. The purge strengthened and consolidated the support of the military for Hitler, writes Michael Schulder. It also provided a legal grounding for the Nazis, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extrajudicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime, he writes. The Night of the Long Knives was a turning point for the German government, he says, and established Hitler as the supreme administrator of justice of the German people, as he put it in his July 13 speech to the Reichstag. As chancellor, Hitler did not command the army, which remained under the formal leadership of field marshal Hindenburg, a highly respected veteran fieldMarshal. While many of Hitler’s promises, a return to foreign policy, and a more aggressive foreign policy were kept, the army continued to guard its traditions of independence during the early years of the Nazi regime. The army remained somewhat autonomous within the party, but there was a lack of a large enough force to deal with the threat of a Communist revolution when it appeared that there was no sign of a revolution.
The Freikorps movement evolved out of the remnants of the post-World War I years and was composed of disaffected, disenchanted, and angry German veterans. It was primarily composed of nationalistic, disaffected veterans who were mainly unhappy with the Nazi government and its policies. The organization was founded by the government in January 1919 to deal to the problem of the lack of combat veterans in the war-torn area of the Rhineland, where the Nazis were then in charge of the army. It later became known as the Sturmabteilung, a Nazi paramilitary organization that was very loyal to the government and the Nazi Party, and had a large number of members. The group was responsible for the defeat of the Allied invasion of Afghanistan in June 1941. It became known for its brutal tactics, including the use of machine guns, machine guns and machine-gun fire to kill Allied troops, and for the murder of thousands of POWs and POWs in the aftermath of the war. In the early 1930s, it was one of the most successful paramilitary groups in the world, but it fell out of favor with the Nazis after the Second World War. The SA evolved from the FreikOrps movement, which was formed in the wake of World War I, and was led by a former member of the Fuhrer’s party, Heinrich Himmler, who was later to become Hitler’s prime minister.
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This page is based on the article Night of the Long Knives published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
