Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

THE BLOOD PURGE 723given that which is compatible with their nature. And therefore a trulysuperior leadership of a political nation must be filled with a high socialunderstanding . . . [Social understanding means to give the lowly hispleasures, but not to desire them for oneself;] the political leadership ofa nation must seek their essential distinction from the rest of the people,not in any low pleasures, but in a harder self-discipline. They mustunderstand that only what removes them from the primitive man, raisesthem above him. And they must know that only those whom a manrightly feels to be above him will in the long run be recognized as abovehim. And those who are slaves of the most primitive physical needs can,in the long run, be no masters over the born slaves.On August 6, 1933, Hitler gathered together the civilian functionariesof the party at his residence in Obersalzberg. He led his guests ingoosestep along a narrow mountain path to one of the surroundingsummits and there addressed them in a short but violent speech of whichthe gist was more or less as follows: Below them they saw Germany,and Germany was now theirs; but they must not imagine that they coulddo with it what they pleased; giving orders implied a terribleresponsibility. Once more he tried to prove that no second revolutionwas necessary.Rohm was not among the guests. On that same August 6 — it was aSunday — he had ordered 82,000 S.A. men to march before him onTempelhof Field near Berlin and made an inflammatory speech againstthe 'reactionaries' who had suggested that the time had come for theS.A. to disappear. He could have quoted many of these reactionaries byname, and the best known of all would have been Goring. Not thatGoring wanted to dissolve the Storm Troops. S.A. leaders, however, hadbecome police chiefs and as such they were under the orders of thePrime Minister of Prussia. But Rohm insisted that they were and mustremain S.A. leaders first and foremost, and that his orders hadprecedence over any others. For a man like Edmund Heines, anObergruppenfuhrer of the S.A. who had become chief of police of thecity of Breslau in Silesia and established a reign of terror there, Goring'sorders meant nothing at all. The war between these National Socialistgovernment leaders had now almost come out into the open. As early as