History is repeating itself. Night of the Long Knives = Bush CIA Purge

AnIndependentTexan

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Tue Nov-16-04 08:46 PM
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History is repeating itself. Night of the Long Knives = Bush CIA Purge

commongroundcommonsense online forum has already started research on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

The Night of the Long Knives, also known as Reichsmordwoche or "the Blood Purge" (German, Nacht der langen Messer) was a purge ordered by Adolf Hitler of potential political rivals in the Sturmabteilung, or S.A. The Night of the Long Knives took place during the late night of June 30 and the early morning of July 1 in 1934. Official records tally the dead at 77, though 400 are believed to have been killed.

By the summer of 1933, the S.A. had grown discontent with the progress of the Nazi regime. Many had taken seriously the "socialism" of "National Socialism", and were angry that Hitler and the other party leaders had not. As a result, they grew increasingly distant from the Nazi leadership and believed further steps needed to be taken to achieve substantive social and economic change. They also wanted to become the core of a new German army.

By 1934, Hitler dominated Germany's government, but still feared losing power in a coup d'état. To maintain complete control, he allowed political infighting to continue among his subordinates. As a result, a political struggle grew, with Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich on one side and Ernst Röhm, the leader of the S.A., on the other. The S.A. was the only remaining viable threat to Hitler's power.

The power of Röhm and his violent organization frightened his rivals. Goering and Himmler asked Heydrich to assemble a dossier of manufactured evidence to suggest that Röhm had been paid 12 million marks by France to overthrow Hitler. Himmler presented the "evidence" to Hitler, fuelling his suspicion that Röhm intended to use the S.A. to launch a plot against him. At the time, Himmler was also organizing his own Nazi paramilitary group, which later came to be known as the SS (Schutzstaffel).

Hitler had always liked Röhm; he was one of the first members of the Nazi Party, participating in the Beer Hall Putsch. But Hitler was under increasing pressure to reduce the S.A. influence. German military leaders were unhappy with Röhm's proposal that the German army be absorbed into the larger S.A., and the industrialists that supported Hitler were concerned over the S.A.'s socialist leanings. The regular army was also alarmed by the size of the S.A. — in early 1934 it numbered 2.5 million, while the army was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000. Members of the Nazi party also viewed Röhm and some other S.A. leaders with distaste because they frequently practiced homosexual acts.

With all these groups aligned against Röhm, Hitler decided to act. He ordered all S.A. leaders to attend a meeting at the Hanselbauer Hotel in Wiessee near Munich. On June 30 Hitler took personal command of Röhm's arrest. Alfred Rosenberg's diary provides an account: