DOSSIER ESPECIAL NAZIS: The Night of the Long Knives

In June 1934, saw the wiping out of the SA's leadership and others who had angered Hitler in the recent past in Nazi Germany. After this date, the SS lead by Heinrich Himmler was to become far more powerful in Nazi Germany.

On the night of June 29th - June 30th 1934, units of the SS arrested the leaders of the SA and other political opponents. Men such as Gregor Strasser, von Schleicher and von Bredow were arrested and none of them had any connection with Röhm. The arrests carried on for 2 more nights.
Official records tally the dead at 77, though some 400 are believed to have been killed.

The SA was brought to heel and placed under the command of the army. Hitler received an oath of allegiance from all those who served in the army. Röhm was shot. Others were bludgeoned to death.

DOSSIER ESPECIAL NAZIS: The Night of the Long Knives: The purge

With all these groups aligned against Röhm, Hitler decided to act. He ordered all SA leaders to attend a meeting at the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee near Munich.
On June 30 Hitler took personal command of Röhm's arrest. He then ordered Göring's Landespolizeigruppe General Göring and Himmler's Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler into action.

Alfred Rosenberg's diary provides an account:
With an SS escort detachment the Führer drove to Bad Wiessee and knocked softly on Röhm's door: “Message from Munich,” he said with disguised voice. “Well come in,” Röhm called to the supposed messenger, “the door is open.” Hitler tore open the door, fell on Röhm as he lay in bed, seized him by the throat and screamed, “You are under arrest, you swine.” Then he turned the traitor over to the SS. At first Röhm refused to get dressed.
The SS then threw his clothes in the Chief of Staff's face until he bestirred himself to put them on. In the room next door, they found young men engaged in homosexual activity. “And these are the kind who want to be leaders in Germany,” the Führer said trembling. (Spielvogel, 78)
In the following hours other SA leaders were also arrested, and many were shot out of hand.

Apparently Hitler intended to pardon Röhm, but eventually decided to have him executed. It is believed that Röhm was offered a chance of suicide but was eventually shot.
Hitler also used this purge of the SA to settle old scores: Third-Positionist, Gregor Strasser, former Bavarian Commissar and Triumvir Gustav von Kahr, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Conservative Revolutionary figure Edgar Jung, among others, were all murdered. The current Vice Chancellor, Franz von Papen, was put under house arrest.

On July 3, the Reich government decided upon the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense, consisting of a single article simply declaring the "measures taken" to be "legal State self-defense."

Hitler announced the purge on 13 July, claiming 61 had been executed, 13 shot while resisting arrest, and 3 had committed suicide. In announcing the purge he stated, "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge (oberster Gerichtsherr) of the German people". - from William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1959.

As a result of the purge, Hitler gained a measure of gratitude and support from the Reichswehr. On July 26th, the SS was made independent of the SA, with Himmler as its Reichsführer, answerable only to Hitler. Victor Lutze became the new leader of the SA, and it was soon marginalized in the Nazi power structure.

In Nazi-propaganda the purge was disguised as the suppression of a fictitious Röhm-Putsch, i. e. a coup d'etat of SA-leader Röhm against Hitler.