Hitler's Bodyguard Regiment

A crucial development was the setting up in Berlin in March 1933 of a new, élite grouping within the SS under the command of one of Hitler's old henchmen from Munich. Josef "Sepp" Dietrich was an old party crony of Hitler, whom he trusted implicitly (he had been appointed commander of Hitler's bodyguard in 1928). The new group was initially only 120 men strong and was dubbed the SS Stabswache Berlin. Its job was to guard Hitler and his official residence in the Reich Chancellery. Two months later it was renamed SS Sonderkommando (Special Commando) Zossen, but this was a short-lived title. In September 1933 it became the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (SS Bodyguard Regiment Adolf Hitler) and in November that year members of this new "life guard" swore an oath of loyalty unto death to their new Führer. Under the leadership of Dietrich, the Leibstandarte would later rise to be Germany's premier armoured division. However, in its early days the unit would gain infamy for its role in one of Hitler's first extra-legal acts as he moved to establish his dictatorship.

Night of the Long Knives

By June 1934 Hitler had outwitted most political opponents, banned all parties except for the Nazis and placed his supporters in key positions in the German Government (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 1933 - civil liberties suspended; Enabling Law, March 1933 - established Hitler's dictatorship; May 1933 - destruction of trade unions and arrest of labour leaders). The SA remained the last bastion of potential opposition to Hitler, and he was soon to neutralize this threat. He had decided to remove the socialist elements from the party.

He carefully concocted a bogus coup plot involving Röhm and other SA leaders. The "plotters" were then ordered to be placed under arrest. The Leibstandarte and SS units provided the force for the operation. Hitler himself led the raid in Munich that caught Röhm and several of his key lieutenants. "Sepp" Dietrich then oversaw their execution in Stadelheim prison by a Leibstandarte firing squad. Röhm was shot by a rising SS star, Theodor Eicke, the inspector of concentration camps, after he refused to commit suicide. In Berlin, other SS units arrested some 150 SA leaders. They were then shot four at a time by a Leibstandarte firing squad in Berlin's Lichterfelde barracks.

The total number of people killed in the so-called "Blood Purge" or "Night of the Long Knives" is still unclear, but it probably ran to nearly 200. Most were SA cronies of Röhm, but some were leading political opponents of Hitler, such as General Kurt von Schleicher, the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic. The audacious nature of the killings and the lack of response from Hindenburg confirmed Hitler's place as the supreme political power in Germany. Within weeks the president was dead and Hitler assumed the powers of his office, declaring himself to be the German Führer. He then forced army officers to take an oath of loyalty to himself rather than to the German constitution.

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