Anyone with an interest in the history of political vengeance should pay a visit to the rare-book room at the Library of Congress and request the bound volume with the call number DD244.R6. Compiled by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, Dreissig Novemberköpfe, or Thirty November Heads, is the future chancellor’s political hit list as of 1927: The book profiles government officials, legislators, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, and one popular satirist targeted by Rosenberg for “poisoning the life essence” of the German people with democratic processes and ideas.
The title is a mendacious nod both to November 1918, the month associated with the founding of the Weimar Republic—“November Republic,” “November Criminals,” “November Traitors”—and to the 1789 French Revolution, when heads rolled from guillotines into the hands of the people.
While Thirty November Heads is perhaps the most public catalog of Hitler’s political enemies, the more sinister one was the list of communists, social democrats, and people within the Nazis’ own ranks that was being secretly compiled by Hitler’s Sicherheitsdienst, or “SD.” Established in 1931, this “Security Service” was run by Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious, 20-something assistant to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Working out of a spare, upper-floor office in the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters, Heydrich assiduously collected the names of—and compromising information on—potential Nazi targets on thousands of index cards, a shadow operation within the dark realm of Himmler’s black-uniformed SS protection squads.
Following the Reichstag elections, on March 5, 1933, which came on the heels of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, the Nazis seized control of state and local government with a deluge of 200,000 brown-uniformed storm troopers. Local authorities were thrown out of their offices. Swastika banners were hoisted over town halls. Citizens attempting to remove these unauthorized symbols were assailed. Some were sent to concentration camps.
In the southern state of Bavaria, two of Hitler’s closest associates, Adolf Wagner and Hans Frank, were installed as state interior minister and state minister of justice, respectively. Himmler was appointed the new chief of the Bavarian state police, known as the “Green Police” because of the color of their uniforms, while retaining his position as head of the SS. Joseph Hartinger, a Bavarian state prosecutor, immediately recognized the conflict of interest. “Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the state police,” Hartinger observed, “and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in concentration camps.”
Himmler suspended Green Police authority over the recently established network of detention facilities, transforming them into black sites in the justice system, a hellish world beyond the reach of accountability or judicial recourse. Himmler also placed his assistant Heydrich in charge of Department IV, the intelligence service of the Bavarian state police. Heydrich now had access to thousands of classified police files, including the reports of police informants who had infiltrated the Nazi Party’s ranks. For people such as Herbert Hunglinger and Sebastian Nefzger, this was a catastrophe.
Hunglinger was a 53-year-old retired police major who had joined the Nazi Party in 1920, according him the honorific Alter Kämpfer, “Old Warrior,” bestowed on those who had joined the movement in the earliest years, before National Socialism had become politically fashionable. Hunglinger helped establish the Führerschule, a special school for training party leaders, and was said to have possessed the personal trust of the Führer. But recognizing the threat Hitler posed, Hunglinger was all the while feeding intelligence to Bavarian authorities. When his cover was blown, Hunglinger was subjected to brutal interrogation. He confessed his role as a police informant and was dispatched to Dachau, along with five other moles ferreted out by Heydrich via his examination of the Department IV police files.
In Dachau, Hunglinger was placed in Barrack X, a series of single concrete cells, where he was lashed and beaten at regular intervals by SS guards. The pain was such that he begged for a revolver to shoot himself. “We don’t have revolvers,” Hunglinger was told, according to postwar testimony. “Besides, you’re not worth the bullet.” In a “charitable” gesture, he was handed a leather belt and told to hang himself. When guards discovered that Hunglinger was still alive the next day, he was given a particularly severe beating. “That should do it,” an SS guard observed. The next day Hunglinger was found dead, hanged by the neck.
Sebastian Nefzger, another police informant who had infiltrated the Nazi Party, was found dead in his cell with his wrists slit. An autopsy revealed that the 33-year-old salesman, with a wife and child, had in fact “died from asphyxiation, resulting from strangulation and beating.” The flesh on his back had been flayed to the bone.
Loyalty was the sine qua non of service to Hitler and his movement. SS men swore blood allegiance to their Führer: “Treue ist mein Eid,” “Loyalty is my oath.” Treue was reciprocated with Treue, betrayal with unspeakable savagery. The pervasiveness of this blood credo throughout the National Socialist hierarchy, including among Hitler’s closest associates, is evidenced by an inscription in Hitler’s copy of November Heads now held at the Library of Congress. “To Adolf Hitler in loyal subservience!” reads the handwritten dedication.
The author of that dedication was Gregor Strasser, who—in addition to being co-owner of Kampf Verlag, the publishing house that had brought out Thirty November Heads—was in the early 1930s considered equal to Hitler by many in the Nazi Party and superior to him by some. Karl Lüdecke was a Hitler disciple who knew Strasser well. “Within Nazidom, Gregor Strasser was, next to Hitler, the most powerful man and the most effective speaker,” Lüdecke recalled. According to Lüdecke, Strasser was also the most articulate and ardent voice of “the socialist wing” of the Nazi movement, “strong-willed, independent, creative, with a mind of his own—ambitious, but unwilling to sell his soul for the sake of advancement.” Hitler was the fanatical nationalist. Strasser was the committed socialist. Together, the two men lent credence to the National Socialist Party name.
Strasser possessed a pragmatism that Hitler lacked. “The visionary genius of this man is singular,” Strasser said of Hitler. “But what good is genius that is not anchored in reality, whose brilliant ideas cannot be implemented in the real world.” Implementation became Strasser’s job. The two men had met in the summer of 1921, and across the next decade Strasser assumed growing control over the party’s evolution. It was Strasser who managed the surge in party membership from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 by 1931. He quadrupled the number of party chapters, from 71 to more than 270, and, most important, restructured party administration to align with voting precincts, helping drive the Nazis’ stunning electoral successes in the early ’30s. As evidence that he considered himself the chancellor’s peer, Strasser never addressed Hitler as Mein Führer, only Herr Hitler.
Hitler and Strasser divided Germany into respective political realms. Hitler commanded the south. Strasser, along with his younger brother, Otto, oversaw the north. Hermann Rauschning was a prominent Nazi in the port city of Danzig. “Hitler’s nature was incomprehensible to the North German,” Rauschning observed. North Germans preferred a man like Strasser, who was “practical, clearer headed” and “quick to act without bombast and bathos, with a sound peasant’s judgment.” When Hitler visited the Ruhr industrial region, he was annoyed by the predominance of Strasser posters.
The left-wing weekly journal Die Weltbühne took the measure of both men: “It doesn’t require much prophetic skill to be of the opinion that in the not-too-distant future Strasser will press his lord and master Hitler into a corner and take the reins of the party.” Within senior party ranks, Strasser was commonly known as “Gregor the Great.”
Despite his near-equal position within the party, Strasser placed loyalty to Hitler above all else. Rosenberg recalled that Strasser invariably ended his speeches with the declaration “I fought as a Hitler man, and I will go to my grave as a Hitler man.” But when Hitler clashed with Otto Strasser over the direction of the National Socialist movement, Gregor was forced to choose between Hitler and his brother. One day in the spring of 1928, while Gregor was away, Hitler appeared in the Strasser brothers’ Berlin office and threatened to dispatch 10 storm troopers to pull Otto into line. Otto drew a revolver from his desk. “I have eight shots, Herr Hitler,” he said. “That means eight fewer storm troopers.” Hitler stormed out of the office. But Gregor would side with Hitler over his brother. “Thank God we did not lose Strasser,” Hitler said at the time. “Loyal subservience”—treue Gefolgschaft—indeed.
But subservience did not mean permanent blindness. In 1932, when the party radicals—Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm—pressed Hitler on a “rule or ruin” strategy, Strasser spoke his mind to Hitler, urging accommodation and restraint. When the Nazis took a beating at the polls in the November 6, 1932, Reichstag election, shedding 2 million votes and 40 Reichstag seats, the party was thrown into crisis. “The Führer had misplayed his cards” was the line circulating among senior Nazi Party ranks. The game was up. Karl Lüdecke recalled that Hitler, “with his own chances diving towards zero, was rushing feverishly with his aides from place to place, fighting desperately to fend off a complete Nazi collapse.”
Strasser calmly took matters in hand. He told Hitler that the time had come for accommodation. The party should enter into a coalition with Berlin’s ultimate power broker, Kurt von Schleicher, who was a confidant of German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler waffled, then dug in. “Strasser argued that Schleicher had to be tolerated,” Goebbels reported to his diary. ”The Führer clashed as fiercely with him as I have ever seen.”
Hitler was furious when he learned that Strasser had met with Schleicher to explore potential cooperation. He accused Strasser of betrayal. Strasser was reportedly dumbfounded. “Herr Hitler, do you really believe me capable of such a dirty trick?” Strasser asked.
“Yes,” Hitler replied.
Strasser was “deeply wounded” by Hitler’s accusation. Hans Frank met with Strasser shortly afterward. Frank knew Strasser to be one of the most “confident and pragmatic men” he had ever met. But he found Strasser completely undone, despairing that Hitler was now in the clutches of the party radicals. “Frank, this is horrific,” Strasser said. “Göring is a brutal egotist who could care less about Germany, Goebbels is a club-footed devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer’s guards.” Strasser resigned his party posts, as well as his Reichstag seat, but retained his party membership, ostensibly so as not to damage the already faltering political movement he had helped build.
Strasser departed Berlin for a six-week vacation in Italy. Goering and Goebbels, as Lüdecke later recalled, “struck while the iron was hot.” By the end of January 1933, Hitler was chancellor, Göring was a cabinet minister and the chief of police of Prussia, and Goebbels would soon be minister of propaganda. Strasser withdrew from political life, devoting himself to his business interests.
Hitler spoke of bringing Strasser back into the party, but no one took him seriously. Hitler had always seen Strasser as a threat and seemed to be relieved to have him out of the way. Some thought Hitler’s talk of reengaging with Strasser was tactical, to keep Ernst Röhm, who had succeeded Strasser as the second-most-powerful man in the party, off-guard. In the early summer of 1934, when Hitler feared a possible coup by Röhn and his army of storm troopers, Hitler decided to resolve any doubts about who held absolute authority.
On Saturday, June 30, he flew to Munich and dispatched Himmler and SS men on a blood purge of senior storm-trooper ranks—a killing spree code-named Operation Hummingbird. Röhm was taken into custody, handed a pistol, and told to shoot himself. “If I am to be killed,” he said, “let Adolf do it himself.” Röhm was shot dead on the spot. Dozens of senior Röhm associates were summarily executed.
That same day, the SS paid a visit to the Berlin residence of Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. When he opened the door, he was asked whether he was von Schleicher. “Yes, I am General von Schleicher,” he said, and was shot dead on the spot. Schleicher’s wife, hearing the gunfire, rushed into the foyer and was gunned down as well. Another former chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, also received a knock on the door of a Berlin address where he was thought to be residing, while, in fact, he had already fled the country.
That same afternoon, Gregor Strasser was having lunch with his family at his home in Berlin. At 1:30 p.m., five Gestapo officers entered the house and informed Strasser that he was suspected of “treasonous activities” and that his office in Munich was to be searched. This must have come as a surprise to Strasser. On February 1 of that year, Strasser had been awarded the Golden Party Pin, one of the Nazi Party’s highest honors, inscribed with Strasser’s founding-membership rank, Number 9. Upon arrival at his office, Strasser was handed over to a waiting SS detachment. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but the most credible has him being placed in a cell at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albrecht Palace, where on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders he was shot—in the neck rather than the head, to prolong the agony. He bled to death on the concrete floor over the course of an hour.
During those same hours, Strasser’s private attorney was shot in his office after refusing to surrender documents “concerning Strasser’s conflict with Hitler,” and Strasser’s former chief of staff was also shot from behind outside his Munich apartment. Strasser’s right-hand man, the Nazi military officer Paul Schulz, was seized and taken for a ride by the Gestapo before being thrown out on the road with the words “Now run, you swine!” Schulz was shot five times and left for dead, but he miraculously survived. (After dragging himself down the road, he was found by a passing car and eventually escaped to Switzerland.) In all, the Night of the Long Knives officially claimed 84 victims, but the actual number was probably much higher.
By June, all but one of Rosenberg’s 30 November heads were either dead, imprisoned, or living in exile. The first November head to go down, before Rosenberg even published his book, was Walther Rathenau, the Weimar-era foreign minister who insisted that Germany respect the “war guilt clause” in the Treaty of Versailles and adhere to the onerous war-reparation payments. In Thirty November Heads, Rosenberg observes that this “racial Jew and liberal esthete” received his just desserts when he was assassinated, in June 1922, by right-wing extremists. Another November head, Matthias Erzberger, who helped negotiate the November 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War, was also assassinated by a far-right group before Rosenberg’s book was published. Including Rathenau and Erzberger in the book was Rosenberg’s not-so-subtle way of nodding to the fate that awaited the remaining 28.
A few others had by 1934 already died of old age or natural causes. These included Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who, according to Rosenberg, had as “chancellor of capitulation” and “foreign minister of subservience politics” helped subjugate all of Europe to the “reign of Jewish high finance.” Others, like the Social Democratic Party’s leader, Otto Wels, and the popular satirist Kurt Tucholsky (Hitler “has a mustache like Chaplin though hardly as funny”), had fled into exile before dying—Wels to France, where he succumbed to a heart attack, and Tucholsky to Sweden, where he committed suicide. On August 23, 1933, Robert Weismann, “a Jew and a Jurist,” was one of the first 33 Germans to be “denationalized,” their citizenship legally stripped, and deported as an undesirable alien. By 1934, most of the other remaining November heads were in concentration camps.
The lone member of Rosenberg’s list to still be alive and free in Germany as of June 1934 was November head No. 18, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht was, according to Rosenberg, a central banker who learned the “dark arts” of high finance from Jewish bankers—“Goldschmidts, Mendelssohns, Wassermanns”—and brought ruin to the German economy with inflationary practices while pocketing for himself an annual, inflation-proof salary of “250,000 Goldmarks.” But while Schacht was, according to Rosenberg’s book, a “criminal abuser of the German people and the “father of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the German people,” he would emerge six years later as one of Hitler’s most important facilitators, introducing him to financiers, hosting election fundraisers, and urging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. For these efforts, Hitler rewarded him with a cabinet post and the presidency of the Third Reich’s central bank.
Yet Schacht soon found himself dismayed by the government in which he was now complicit. “How could you ever take upon yourself the responsibility of determining the fate of human beings without any judicial proceedings?” Schacht asked Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives. “No matter what the circumstances, you should have allowed the trials to take place, even if they had only been summary trials.” Schacht continued to quarrel with Hitler, and in 1938 went so far as to publicly rebuke him for what happened to Jews on Kristallnacht. Eventually, like the other surviving November heads, Schacht would find himself dispatched to a series of concentration camps, ending up at Dachau. Hitler reciprocated Treue with Treue. Until he didn’t.
After the bloody 1934 purge, Hitler gave a speech justifying his actions. “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this,” he said. “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.” Hitler was as explicit as he was unapologetic. “I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason,” he said, before going on to dismiss the killing of others, such as Strasser and Schleicher, as collateral damage. “I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life,” Hitler continued. “Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”
