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

THE BLOOD PURGE 733designated, not as a penalty, but as a disciplinary measure. It happenedthat prisoners employed in road-building were 'for fun' thrown into therotating barrel of a concrete-mixing machine and kept there until theirbones were crushed. It happened that one torturer with a sense of humorburned, with a cigarette, holes in the bare chest of his victim to makethem look like uniform buttons. To throw prisoners into sewers ordrains 'by oversight' was also considered a permissible pastime. Themost gruesome tortures were often those in which outwardly nothingseemed to happen. Prisoners were compelled to stand erect for manyhours under a torrid sun; they were forbidden to make the slightestmotion, not even a quiver of a limb. Cases were reported of this torturebeing inflicted on hundreds of people for as long as eighteen hours. Ithappened that people were locked up in boxlike wooden closets, fedwith salted herrings, and left without water or any other drink; of coursedeath was the result.These atrocities revealed the depravity of the 'old fighters,' and gavethe more cool-headed National Socialist leaders food for thought. Frickand Epp occasionally tried to stop the horrors or call their perpetratorsto account. Now and then even Goring intervened, and Hitler himselfdoubtless realized the injury caused to his own popularity by thesecrimes. After the initial noisy enthusiasm over the magnificence andenergy of the new government had somewhat subsided, the cries of themartyred were heard more distinctly. Rohm admitted publicly that thesethings seemed unbearable to many people, but said that he saw noreason for stopping them. 'Many complaints are being lodgedconcerning the alleged excesses of S.A. men,' he declared in a statementwhich probably seemed witty to him; but 'if the supreme leadership ofthe S.A. investigated each individual complaint, its staff would have tobe increased tenfold and a skyscraper erected over the Brown House'(August, 1933).A curious thing happened: the S.A. began to feel afraid in theGermany they dominated. The brown figures in the streets still seemedto behave like conquerors and masters who could say, strike, shoot, and,in general, act as they pleased; but the limit had been reached wherepride turned into doubt and brutality into cow-