By 1934 the SA — the Sturmabteilung, the party's paramilitary — numbered somewhere between two and three million men. The German army numbered a hundred thousand, limited by the Treaty of Versailles. Ernst Röhm, the SA's chief and one of Hitler's oldest associates, wanted the SA to absorb the army and become a people's militia with himself at its head.
The army's officer corps found this intolerable, and Hitler needed the army — for rearmament, and because President Hindenburg was dying and the succession would require military acquiescence.
Between 30 June and 2 July 1934, Röhm and the SA leadership were arrested and shot. So were a large number of other people who had nothing to do with the SA: Gregor Strasser, a Nazi rival; Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor, killed at home with his wife; Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had opposed Hitler in 1923, beaten to death and left in a swamp; Erich Klausener, a Catholic Action leader; two of Franz von Papen's associates. Estimates of the dead run from eighty-five to several hundred.
On 3 July the cabinet passed a law declaring the killings to have been lawful measures of state self-defense. On 13 July Hitler told the Reichstag that in that hour he had been the supreme judge of the German people.
The purge accomplished two things, and the second is the one this chapter is about.
It removed a rival power base and bought the army's loyalty. Within a month Hindenburg was dead, Hitler had combined the offices of chancellor and president, and the entire officer corps swore a personal oath to him.
And it demonstrated, to every official in Germany, that rank conferred no protection. Röhm had been with Hitler since 1919. Schleicher had been chancellor. Neither survived, and the killings were arbitrary in the sense that mattered: nobody could derive from them a rule about how to be safe.
That is the operative feature. Predictable danger can be avoided by compliance, and compliance is a strategy. Unpredictable danger removes the relationship between behavior and outcome, which is the condition Seligman and Maier identified as producing learned helplessness — the organism stops generating attempts, not from cowardice but because attempts have been shown to be uncoupled from consequences.
Applied to an elite, this does something specific: it prevents coordination. Resistance requires people to identify allies and act together, and both require an assessment of who is safe. After the Night of the Long Knives, no such assessment was possible, and the German conservative establishment did not attempt organized resistance again until 1944.
The retroactive legalization added the last element. It let judges, ministers and generals process a massacre as a state action rather than as a crime, which is the legitimacy heuristic of chapter 188.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Fear Conditioning and Purge Logic