The Night of the Long Knives

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 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 Nazi’s 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.

Author : Paul R. Maracin
ISBN-13 : 9781599210704
Publisher : Globe Pequot Press
Publication date : 01/07/2007

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publishers Weekly

Hitler's June 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers (the SA)-known as the Night of the Long Knives-did indeed change the world, eliminating SA head Ernst Roehm and other "enemies of the party" and consolidating Hitler's power. But the events of that night take up only a few chapters of Maracin's account. Much of the rest of the book describes the background of the Nazi Party's key players-Hitler, Gering, Himmler, for example-whose lives are already well known. The final section of the book details the last days of WWII. Maracin, a freelance writer who relies exclusively on secondary sources, is accurate in his account of events-as he points out, the Nazis were probably responsible for the Reichstag fire that later served as their excuse to launch the purge-but he fails to provide any new information or perspective, and his analysis is too often superficial. For example, the leading Nazis, he writes, "were essentially all losers" none of whom could "satisfactorily earn a living as a civilian for a sustained period of time."

Library Journal - Library Journal

The title refers to the night of Saturday, June 30-Sunday, July 1, 1934, when members of the SS and the Gestapo killed Ernst Roehm and other leaders of his Sturmabteilung (SA) "Brown Shirts," which was the Nazi Party's private army. Other high-ranking officials and civilians were also eliminated during this bloody purge, removing any serious rivals to Adolf Hitler and to the military, which soon pledged itself to the German Chancellor. This event was thus the culmination of Hitler's consolidation of power. Longtime criminal investigator Maracin provides another analysis of this incomprehensibly brutal event that seems somewhat unfocused; more space is given to descriptions of the main protagonists than to the actual operation. Interesting historical bits, such as a near-meeting between Hitler and Churchill in April 1932, seem like filler. A more extensive discussion of the actual event is in Max Gallo's The Night of the Long Knives. Maracin's book is suitable for larger World War II and German history collections.-Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Meet the Author

Paul Maracin became a freelance writer after retiring from a twenty-seven-year career as a criminal investigator with the San Diego County District Attorney's Office. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, World War II magazine, and Baseball Digest. He lives in San Diego.