Night of the Long Knives

On June 30, 1934, "Operation Hummingbird (German Kolibri) began. It was the systematic murder of Hitler's opponents. While most historians put the total at about 116, others claim that the total could have been over one thousand. An excerpt from the article:

"...SS murder squads fanned out in search of the victims on Himmler’s hit list. To avoid attracting attention, the squads were kept small—two to five men each. There was no need for more men; their unarmed victims weren’t expecting them anyway. Because of a hasty order from Hitler to immediately destroy all records of their actions, only the most prominent of the purge’s victims are known: General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, Elizabeth, shot dead in their home on the outskirts of Berlin; Dr. Erich Klausener, director of the Ministry of Transport, killed in his home in Berlin; General Ferdinand von Bredow, Schleicher’s top assistant, gunned down on his doorstep in Berlin; Gustav von Kahr, a key prosecution witness in Hitler’s 1924 treason trial, hacked to death with pickaxes in a swamp near the newly opened Dachau concentration camp outside Munich; Father Bernhard Stempfle, a family friend of Hitler’s, shot three times through the heart after his neck was broken, found in a forest near Harlaching; Herbert von Bose, aide to Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, shot 11 times at his desk in the ministry building in Berlin; Gregor Strasser, brother of Hitler’s arch political rival, Otto Strasser, shot dead in a cell in the Gestapo prison in Berlin as Reinhard Heydrich looked on. “Isn’t he dead yet?” Heydrich asked. “Let the swine bleed to death.”

Most of Kolibri’s victims were executed at Stadelheim Prison in Munich. At Hitler’s order, Sepp Dietrich personally supervised the executions, which took place, four at a time, in the prison courtyard, beginning with SA members Edmund Schmidt, Hans von Spreti-Weilbach, Hans von Heydebreck, and Hans Hayn. Outside each man’s cell, Dietrich stood and bellowed the same fatal message: “The führer has condemned you to death for high treason. Heil Hitler!” At Cell No. 504, August Schneidhüber, whom Hitler had arrested mere hours before at Munich police headquarters, pressed his face against the bars. “Comrade Sepp!” he cried. “This is madness. We are innocent.” Wordlessly, Dietrich moved on to the next cell. The executions continued every 20 minutes throughout the day.

At Lichterfelde Barracks, 20 miles southeast of Berlin, another 150 SA members were thrown into a cellar at the cadet school. As in Munich, men were brought out four at a time to be shot. In full view of his fellow captives, each man was led before a red-brick wall in the school courtyard, his shirt was ripped off, and a circle drawn with charcoal around his left nipple before a squad of eight SS sharpshooters blasted away at a killing range of five or six yards. The executions were so brutal that the unnerved firing squads had to be changed frequently. At his desk at Gestapo headquarters, the punctilious Heydrich tirelessly fielded telephone calls reporting the progress of the executions and filled out index cards bearing each victim’s name and fate: “arrested,” “in process,” “shot.” These he forwarded to Himmler and Göring.

In all, as many as 1,000 “enemies of the state” were killed in Operation Kolibri. One of the last victims, perhaps appropriately, was Ernst Röhm. For two days Hitler vacillated over his old comrade’s fate. He was inclined at first to spare him, but his malign hive of advisers—Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Heydrich—eventually wore him down. In the midst of a grotesquely ill-timed tea party in the garden of his Berlin chancellery, Hitler excused himself to phone the Interior Ministry. Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau concentration camp and the de facto leader of the executions in Munich, answered the phone. Röhm was to be offered the opportunity to kill himself, said Hitler. If he refused, Eicke knew what to do.

Eicke grabbed SS officer Michael Lippert and hurried to Stadelheim Prison. Proceeding to Cell No. 474, they found Röhm, sweating and stripped to the waist, slumped on an iron cot. “You have forfeited your life,” Eicke told him. “The führer gives you one more chance to draw the right conclusions.” He placed a pistol loaded with a single bullet on a table in the cell. Fifteen minutes later Eicke and Lippert returned. Röhm stood in the center of the cell. “If Adolf wants to kill me,” he said, “let him do the dirty work.” Opening the cell door, Eicke shouted, “Röhm, make yourself ready!” Lippert, his hand shaking, fired two bullets into Röhm’s chest, then a third after he had slumped to the floor. “Mein führer, mein führer,” Röhm gasped. “You should have thought of that earlier,” Eicke replied, dismissing Röhm’s dying pledge of loyalty. “It’s too late now.”"