Karl Ernst was an SA Gruppenführer (group leader). This was a high rank within the SA (and from 1930 within the SS also). Considered within the SA to be the equivalent of an army general, such an officer commanded a large number of SA units. Ernst was, from early 1933, the leader of the SA in Berlin and a senior member of the Nazi organization. But, like many in the SA, his career had a complex back-story. Before joining the Nazis, he had been a bell-boy in a hotel and a bouncer at a gay nightclub.1
Ernst was nicknamed ‘Frau Rohrbein’, due to his intimate friendship with Paul Rohrbein, Berlin’s first SA commander. Ernst had first met Rohrbein at the El Dorado, a favourite meeting place of Berlin’s homosexual community and, in 1931, Rohrbein had introduced Ernst to an old comrade: Röhm, the overall commander of the SA. By April of that same year, Ernst was promoted to a command within the SA and, by 1932, was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy. Such string-pulling gave the SA the reputation of being a homosexual fraternity.2
Ernst has been accused of being part of an SA detachment that set fire to the Reichstag building on the night of 27 February 1933. However, despite his place at the centre of Nazi politics, Ernst was not to survive the internal feud that led to the destruction of the SA leadership by Hitler and his closest associates in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934. This event saw the destruction of the power of the brutal, disorderly and scandal-dogged SA and its replacement by Hitler’s bodyguard organization, the black-uniformed SS.
On 30 June 1934, Ernst – despite his earlier homosexual associations – had just married, and was in the port of Bremen with his new wife, on his way to their honeymoon in Madeira. When an SS arrest-squad swooped, Ernst’s wife and chauffeur were wounded, and he himself was taken back to Berlin. Some 150 SA leaders, including Karl Ernst, were stood against a wall at the Cadet School at Lichterfelde and shot by SS firing squads. The death of Ernst, along with many other SA leaders who had well-known homosexual connections, removed both Hitler’s political rivals and potential sources of scandal in one violent bloodletting. Clearly, it was political rather than sexual factors that led to the execution of the one-time bell-boy and gay nightclub bouncer, along with the rest of the SA leadership. But the life and death of Karl Ernst reveals something of the complex factors that led to the Nazi revolution devouring some of its most ardent ‘children’ in June 1934.
The brown-shirted SA (short for Sturmabteilung, literally Storm Division – the Storm Troopers) had its roots in the earliest years of the Nazi party.3 Its characteristic brown uniform was the result of the purchase of a large quantity of cheap army-surplus uniforms in the early 1920s. These light-brown uniforms had originally been produced for the German army serving in the African colonies, before these were taken from Germany in 1919.
Its early members were ex-soldiers and, even though its ranks would later be flooded by a younger generation, it was these older men, with their experience of the imperial army and of trench combat (and with better educational qualifications), who would make up the highest ranks of the SA. Of these highest ranks, 76 per cent were veterans of the First World War and 73 per cent had seen combat.4 From early in the life of the Nazi party, such men were formed into a group designed to defend Nazi meetings and break up the meetings of rival organizations. In 1920, this unit began to be called the ‘Hall Defence Detachment’ and, in August 1921, it was reorganized under the misleading title of the ‘Gymnastic and Sports Division’ of the Nazi Party. From September of that year, it began to use the SA name and, after a particularly violent beer-hall brawl in November (in which a small group of SA routed opposition fighters), this became its official title. The name was derived from that of elite army units formed during the First World War and designed to storm and penetrate enemy defences. One of the early SA’s leading members was the ex-army officer named Captain Ernst Röhm.5
Following Hitler’s failed attempt to seize power in Munich in 1923, the SA was banned. While Hitler was in prison, Röhm rebranded the SA in an attempt to get around its ban but soon differences arose between him and Hitler over matters of organization and tactics. It was the start of a troubled relationship, which would eventually culminate in the execution of Röhm, on Hitler’s orders, in 1934. But all this lay in the future when, disillusioned with politics, Röhm left Germany in 1925 to work abroad as an advisor to the Bolivian army. Heinrich Himmler (later commander of the SS) temporarily took over the running of the SA but the storm troopers proved a difficult organization to control.
In 1927, the Munich SA rebelled against their leader, Franz von Pfeffer (who had been appointed its commander in 1926). Hitler spoke to the SA members concerned, shook hands with each and secured their personal loyalty. This crisis had been defused but it would be followed by others. In 1931, there was the so-called Stennes Revolt, in which SA units in eastern Germany revolted under the leadership of Walther Stennes. Reasons for this revolt included disputes over pay and problems with the local Nazi Party leaders, the Gauleiters, over control of the SA. Another factor was resentment that Hitler had recently set up a rival organization to the SA in the more disciplined and obedient SS. In Berlin, one SA unit even attacked the office of Joseph Goebbels and beat up the SS men on guard outside. In the end, these Berlin SA men had to be removed with the help of the police and Hitler rushed to Berlin to stop the revolt. He convinced the SA to return to duty by promising them more pay and more power within the Nazi movement. As a response to these problems, Hitler took over the direct SA leadership himself and, in January 1931, recalled Röhm as the SA Chief of Staff. Under Röhm’s leadership, the SA expanded rapidly. In about a year its membership grew from 70,000 to 170,000 members. By 1934, the SA membership stood at 4,500,000.
The SA had always been a difficult group to control. The revolts of 1927 and 1931 illustrated this point. The members were bred on violence and turmoil and this had become their reason to exist. During the long and violent road to power, however, this had served its bloody purpose in attacking rival groups and in undermining Weimar society. This violence on the streets had generally worked to Hitler’s favour. As a result, it had been possible to overlook the fact that the SA’s primary loyalty lay to its own interpretation of Nazism, rather than to Hitler’s supreme leadership. Furthermore, its dream of destroying the existing German society and replacing it through a Nazi revolution was a desire dear to the hearts of many rank-and-file Nazi Party members.
The accession to power of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 subtly changed this situation. At first, the explosion of SA violence that followed this event served his purposes. Political rivals were arrested or intimidated; non-Nazi organizations were brought into line with the new political realities or broken up. But soon the SA extremism began to become counterproductive. In June 1933, three members of the Berlin SA were shot as they attacked a young member of the Social Democratic party. In retaliation, the local SA rounded up some five hundred local men and tortured ninety-one of them to death. Whilst Hitler showed no concern for the fate of members of opposition parties, the extent of this SA violence was beginning to prompt criticism from those Hitler wanted to keep on-side. The Reich Justice and Interior Ministries felt that they were losing control of policing and sentencing and they also protested at the arrests of civil servants and lawyers by the SA; the Reich Economic Ministry complained that the appearance of unrest on the streets discouraged foreign investors. Even more worrying was the increased power that Röhm gained from the rampaging tactics of the SA. For him, the ‘Nazi Revolution’ had only just started and would not be complete until the radicals of the SA had been rewarded for their years of struggle. In May, he asserted that ‘Whether declarations of loyalty come every day from “co-ordinated” beekeeping or bowling clubs makes no odds’!6 What was needed was a real transformation of German society. And, increasingly, it was Röhm who felt he should decide the character of that transformation.
However, Hitler and his closest associates had no intention of allowing the SA to dictate the terms of their victory. In July, Hitler unambiguously declared that the time of upheaval was over: ‘Revolution is not a permanent condition … it must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution.’7 In August, in an attempt to roll back the policing powers of the SA, Hermann Göring stopped the enrolling of SA as auxiliary police officers in Prussia and soon other German states followed this line. In a related move, the SA lost its control of the improvised prison camps it had established. Increasingly, these came under the control of the central power of the state. This is a reminder that it was not the brutally repressive nature of the SA that was in question, rather the government’s aim was to carry this out in a more regulated manner under government control.
Nevertheless, while these actions reduced the role of the SA, they did not reduce its size or its potential for causing trouble. Whereas in May 1933 recruitment to the Nazi Party had been stopped, as a response to the flood of opportunists who had joined the party since January 1933, recruitment to the SA continued and was increased when the First World War veterans’ association – the Steel Helmets – was incorporated into the SA. By early 1934, the total strength of the SA and associated groups stood at 4,500,000; this was in stark contrast to the regular army with its cap of 100,000 men set by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). This huge group of paramilitaries expected jobs and perks as a reward for their efforts and resented attempts to resist their demands. They also resented the way in which jobs went to more respectable right-wing politicians who now threw in their lot with the Nazis. From early 1934, street violence involving drunken and bored SA men increased. And, at the same time, Röhm made a number of speeches at SA rallies in which he criticized the leadership of the Nazi Party and the conservative and upper-class leadership of the army. Secret reports for the Sopade (the name of the Social Democratic Party in exile in Prague, 1933–38, in Paris 1938–40, and in London until 1945) recorded grumbles within the SA ‘that Hitler does not want any socialism’.8 Röhm also continued to demand that the SA should be regarded as a national militia, which would eventually replace the army. Evidence mounted that he had ambitions on the post of Minister of Defence, a job held by the army representative, General von Blomberg.
Threatening the independence of the army was a mistake. Although the military had gone a long way towards accommodating the Nazis – for example, using the swastika in army insignia and banning Jews from the armed forces – it still regarded itself as relatively independent. The head of the army, General von Fritsch, was a Prussian officer of the old school and regarded the Nazis as vulgar upstarts. He was supported by President Hindenburg who, as President and army Commander-in-Chief, still had the power to dismiss Hitler as Chancellor if he so chose. In February 1934, in an attempt to keep the army happy and muzzle the SA, Röhm was forced to sign a declaration promising to respect the independence of the army. Röhm clearly had no intention of keeping to the agreement, which had been forced on him by that ‘ridiculous corporal’ (Hitler), as he admitted to his men following the signing of the agreement. Furthermore, if the Chancellor proved inflexible, Röhm boasted: ‘We’ll manage the thing without Hitler’.9 Some SA units began seizing army weapons as if preparing for a coup. There is no evidence that this was more than local initiatives by some disgruntled SA leaders but it further increased the impression that the SA were planning to seize power. Whilst Röhm never went so far as actually saying this was his aim, other SA leaders were less discreet. In April, Hitler, Blomberg and other senior army officers went on a four-day cruise off the Norwegian coast and it seems that some kind of deal was done to reduce the power of the SA. Overall though, the evidence suggests that, as spring turned to summer in 1934, there was no ‘SA revolution’ being planned: Röhm went on holiday to Bad Wiessee, near Munich, and the SA were sent on leave for the whole of July. If a revolution was being planned it was a rather inept one. Instead, it seems clear that, although tensions were rising, the SA leadership had no coherent plan for where its restlessness was heading.
The SA might have lacked a clear plan of action but others were stirring the pot and would soon bring it to the boil. Vice-Chancellor von Papen still seems to have deluded himself that he could influence events and this sense of self-importance was encouraged by the fact that President Hindenburg was clearly gravely ill – von Papen clearly hoped to benefit from any crisis following his death. Consequently von Papen became the centre of complaints against the government and members of his inner circle were in contact with disgruntled army officers. In June 1934, von Papen made a speech at Marburg university in which he attacked the idea of a ‘second revolution’. Hitler was furious at von Papen’s criticism and denounced him as a ‘little worm’. But the attack could not be ignored because it resonated with too many important people. When Hitler met the dying Hindenburg four days after von Papen’s speech it was clear that Hindenburg was considering putting the country under military rule and removing Hitler if the crisis over the SA was not swiftly resolved. And this was not the only incentive to take decisive action; leading Nazis were also encouraging Hitler to act. Goebbels confided in his diary that Hitler must act or risk being removed from office. In Prussia, the Nazi leader, Göring, handed over control of the police to the leader of the SS, Himmler. Although still nominally a part of the SA, the SS was fast developing into a separate police organization of the Nazi state, which was unquestioningly loyal to Hitler. Göring’s action meant that, from this point, the ex-chicken farmer was in charge of the political police for the whole of Germany. Whilst this countered the threat posed to Göring by militant SA in the areas under his control, it also encouraged Himmler to further free himself and the SS from SA interference and influence. Himmler’s political police, in close collaboration with the SS Security Service (the SD) under Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, began the manufacturing of evidence to accuse Röhm of treason. It was an example of the vicious infighting between the big beasts of the Nazi leadership jungle that would so characterize the government of the Third Reich. Looking back after 1945, Field Marshall von Kleist described how, in 1934, warnings of SA preparations caused the army to go on alert, which caused the SA to feel themselves under threat. It was a mutual suspicion, which was being encouraged by the SS. To senior army colleagues, he confided at the time: ‘I have the impression that we – the army and SA – are being egged on against each other by a third party’, by which he meant the SS.10
As the campaign against Röhm mounted, the army expelled him from the Officers’ League and put the army on full alert. Hitler next ordered the SA leadership to meet him at Bad Wiessee (where Röhm was on holiday) on 30 June. That night, alarmed members of the SA went on the rampage in Munich, threatening to meet any attempt to crush the SA with violence.
Early the next morning, Hitler and units of the SS and police headed to the hotel where Röhm and other SA leaders were staying.11 The SA leaders were still asleep and the first SA leader to be dragged out of bed was still in the company of his eighteen-year-old blond boyfriend. Similarly unprepared was Röhm, who clearly had not yet grasped the seriousness of his situation, as he ordered coffee from the barman when escorted into the hotel vestibule by two detectives.12 Shortly afterwards, all the SA leaders were hauled off to nearby Stadelheim prison. Hitler meanwhile, went to the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich where he announced that Röhm had been in the pay of the French. Hitler’s loyal follower Rudolf Hess volunteered to personally shoot the SA leader. Instead, Röhm was given a revolver and told to kill himself. He declined. An SS delegation was sent to give him a second opportunity but, on returning to the cell, found that he had still not shot himself. Consequently they shot him dead. Other SA leaders were killed at the same time.
While matters were being brought to their bloody conclusion in Munich, Göring had been sent to Berlin to oversee the killing there, assisted by the SS and Secret State Police (the Gestapo). The killing in Berlin and across Germany had the code-name ‘Hummingbird’. Clearly enjoying himself immensely, Göring strode about his room in white tunic and white high-boots, shouting ‘shoot, shoot’ in a grotesque caricature that one police officer described as looking like a murderous ‘Puss in Boots’.13 It was a settling of scores that ranged beyond the SA. Indeed, in Berlin, the killing particularly targeted conservative rivals and both von Papen’s secretary and speech writer were murdered by SS and Gestapo units. Von Papen himself was considered too high profile to kill. General von Schleicher – who had been Chancellor before Hitler, had opposed Hitler’s appointment and whose addiction to conspiracy had caused him to engage in communications with both the French ambassador and Röhm since January 1933 – was gunned down, along with his wife. Similarly repaid for past rivalry was Gregor Strasser, who had once led the Nazis in northern Germany, had proposed a more left-wing version of Nazism than Hitler and had negotiated with von Schleicher for a post in the government in late 1932. He had long been bitterly at odds with Himmler and Göring – and so was another victim of the Nazi leadership jungle.
Across Germany, SA leaders and old political rivals were murdered. Memories were long. In Bavaria, the old conservative politician von Kahr was hacked to death with axes for suppressing Hitler’s Munich Putsch of 1923. For successfully prosecuting Hitler in 1921 and for breaking up a meeting at which he was speaking,14 another old Bavarian politician, Ballerstedt, was gunned down. A defrocked priest, Father Bernhard Stempfle, was found near Munich with a broken neck, almost certainly because he knew too much about the suicide of Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, who had been driven to despair by the obsessive control of her uncle. Then there were personal vendettas: two senior SS officers took the opportunity to have rivals killed and at least five Jews were murdered. And there were mistakes, such as the Munich music critic Willi Schmid, who was killed because his name was confused with that of a local SA commander. And there were those whose category defies definition, such as a Waldenberg municipal engineer who had proved uncooperative on the subject of building licenses. Many of the SA who died did so without knowing why they were being shot. Karl Ernst – the ex bell-boy and gay nightclub bouncer – died calling out, ‘Heil, Hitler’.
The official death toll stood at seventy-four, but Göring alone had arrested over a thousand people and the final number killed remains a matter of debate. To the cabinet and to the Reichstag, Hitler explained that his actions had been necessary to foil a treasonable plot. Goebbels broadcast to the nation that the plot had involved the SA and dissident members of the old conservative elites who were unreconciled to the Nazi government. Using his control of the press (see Chapter 14), Goebbels went on to record the gratitude of Hindenburg and the army for the removal of the SA leadership. It seems they were willing to overlook the fact that the victims of the purge had included two senior army officers. Public opinion was further appealed to by lurid tales of the homosexual excesses of the SA. The complete illegality of the action was soon remedied by the passing of a retrospective law.
Public reactions to the purge were initially mixed. There were expressions of concern as many members of the public struggled to understand what the bloodletting meant. Over time, though, this seems to have been replaced by general approval of the events. The SA violence had been unpopular and their disorderly conduct had alarmed many ordinary Germans as well as the army. Their destruction seemed to promise a greater stability. And it was this, after all, that had been the reason for many Germans voting Nazi in the first place.
Some, such as Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor at the University of Dresden who, not surprisingly, opposed Hitler, hoped it might weaken the Nazis. He wrote in his diary in July that: ‘No sympathy at all for the vanquished, only delight, a) that they are eating one another up, b) that Hitler is now like a man after his first major heart attack.’ But he had to admit disappointment too that the crisis did not escalate: ‘I was depressed when everything remained calm during the days that followed.’ He was quick to note with dismay that other Germans approved of the events and supported Hitler. Furthermore, he noted how much prominence was given to the sexual activities of the SA leadership and how this further encouraged approval, ‘as if Hitler were a moral cleanser. But after all he knew what the inclinations of his intimate friend and chief-of-staff were …’15 The future failed assassin of Hitler – Claus von Stauffenberg – likened the purge to the lancing of a boil. A secret Gestapo report from Harburg-Wilhelmsburg noted, in July 1934, that ‘Among the population at large, confidence in the Führer has been consolidated by his energetic action.’ It went on to report that many in the population wanted the purge to go further in the Nazi Party and root out the petty dictators found there.16 A report based on comments made at Bavarian labour exchanges in July noted the admiration expressed regarding Hitler and condemnation of Röhm. A Gestapo report from Cologne mentioned ‘a massive increase in the confidence in the Führer’.17
The same mixed interpretations can be seen in foreign responses. The British cartoonist David Low, on 3 July 1934, pictured terrified SA men with hands raised in surrender, before Hitler who was holding a smoking gun and Göring, in barbarian Germanic costume, holding a spear dripping with blood. His satirical caption read, in a parody of the well-known Nazi salute, ‘They salute with both hands now’. But the Daily Mail presented a more approving account in its earlier report of 2 July 1934:
Herr Adolf Hitler, the German Chancellor, has saved his country. Swiftly and with exorable severity, he has delivered Germany from men who had become a danger to the unity of the German people and to the order of the state. With lightning rapidity he has caused them to be removed from high office, to be arrested, and put to death.
The names of the men who have been shot by his orders are already known. Hitler’s love of Germany has triumphed over private friendships and fidelity to comrades who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in the fight for Germany’s future.18
The events of the Night of the Long Knives had other implications too within the Nazi Party. Röhm was replaced as Chief of Staff of the SA by Victor Lutze. Under Lutze, the SA lost its power and many members were eventually absorbed into the army. Indeed, its membership dropped dramatically after June 1934 as many disillusioned brown shirts left the organization. On the other hand, the SS, under Himmler, replaced the SA as the armed wing of the Nazi Party and it was officially separated from the SA following the death of Röhm. Its loyalty and usefulness had been proved on 30 June. Ahead of it lay eleven years of increasing power as it came to control the police forces within Germany and eventually within the occupied countries after 1939. Such would be its influence that Nazi Germany would eventually become, in many respects, an SS state. Its black-uniformed forces would develop many roles and agencies in a virtual empire of racially motivated repression, exploitation and mass murder. As such, Himmler was one of the main beneficiaries of the destruction of Röhm. But it was Hitler himself who would gain most in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
Hindenburg remained President until his death, aged 86, from lung cancer at his home at Neudeck in East Prussia, on 2 August 1934.19 The day before Hindenburg died, Hitler flew to Neudeck and visited him. Hindenburg, old and senile, thought he was meeting the old Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and called Hitler ‘Majesty’. With Hindenburg dead, Hitler declared the office of President to be permanently vacant and, in effect, united it with the office of Chancellor under the title of Der Führer. Hitler held a plebiscite on 19 August 1934, in which the German people were asked if they approved of Hitler merging the two offices of state. The national ‘Yes’ vote was 84.6 per cent. Given the state of Nazi intimidation, it is noteworthy that the vote dropped to this level and in some working-class areas the ‘Yes’ vote dropped as low as 66 per cent. Clearly not everyone approved of increasing Hitler’s power.
Hitler had become both Germany’s head of state and its head of government. He also became supreme commander of the military, which now swore an oath not to the state, or the constitution, but to Hitler personally. With the SA’s power broken, the military were prepared to offer Hitler their personal loyalty. The leader of the army and Defence Minister, Colonel-General Blomberg, took the initiative in this; it did not originate with Hitler. Later, Blomberg would claim, ‘We swore the oath on the flag to Hitler as Führer of the German people, not as head of the National Socialist Party.’ However, far from making Hitler dependent on the army, ‘the army chained itself to the Führer’.20 Soon the Nazi badge of the eagle grasping a wreathed swastika would appear on military uniforms and swastikas would appear on medals, flags and equipment. In addition, there was no military opposition to anti-Jewish legislation affecting the armed forces after 1935, or the establishment of a military high command for the armed forces (the OKW) under Hitler’s direct authority in 1938.21 Blomberg himself was rewarded when, in 1935, he became Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and, in 1936, the first field marshal appointed by Hitler. Not for nothing would those in the military who wanted to stand up to the Nazis call him Hitler’s ‘rubber lion’. The greatest potential threat to the Nazi dictatorship – the army – had been reconciled to the government. The process of ‘bringing Germany into line’ had taken another huge step forward.
1. Shirer, William, L, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 220.
2. See Machtan, Lothar ( John Brownjohn, trans), The Hidden Hitler, Basic Books, 2001.
3. Fischer, Conan, Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic, and Ideological Analysis, 1929–35, Allen & Unwin, 1983, provides an overview of the nature of the SA.
4. Campbell, Bruce, The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism, University Press of Kentucky, 2004, pp. 142–3.
5. Hancock, Eleanor, Ernst Röhm: Hitler’s SA chief of staff, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, provides a modern biography of the SA leader.
6. Evans, Richard, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005, p. 21.
7. Minuth, Karl-Heinz (ed.), Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Regierung Hitler, 1933–1934, Boppard, 1983, pp. 630–1. in Evans, Richard, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005, p. 20.
8. Sopade report, 26 June 1934, in Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 65.
9. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, Penguin Books, 1999, p. 505.
10. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. I, The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 2nd edn, 1998, p. 177.
11. Gallo, Max, The Night Of The Long Knives: June 29–30, 1934, Da Capo Press, 1997, provides a detailed account of the destruction of the SA. A shorter examination can be found in, amongst other places, Benz, Wolfgang and Dunlap, Thomas (trans.), A Concise History of the Third Reich, University of California Press, 2006, pp. 53–57.
12. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., pp. 178–9.
13. Ibid., p. 181.
14. Kershaw, Ian, 1999, op. cit., p. 175.
15. Klemperer, Victor, The Klemperer Diaries, 1933–1945, Chalmers, Martin (trans.), Phoenix Press, 2000, pp. 71–2.
16. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., pp. 186–7.
17. Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 86.
18. www.historylearningsite.co.uk/night_of_the_long_knives.htm
19. Von der Goltz, Anna, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis, Oxford University Press, 2009, provides a detailed examination of the life and significance of Hindenburg.
20. Kershaw, Ian, 1999, op. cit., p. 525.
21. Beaumont, Roger A., The Nazis’ March to Chaos: The Hitler Era Through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory, Praeger Publishers, 2000, p. 102.