One of Adolf Hitler's most brutal and dramatic exterminations came before the Holocaust. The SA was Hitler's army of thugs, but the head of the SA, Ernst Roehm, was threatening Hitler's rule. On June 29th 1934, Hitler ordered the SA leadership to appear for a meeting at the Hotel Hanselbauer. Without warning, the SS burst in, beginning 48 hours of bloodshed in which 1000 of the leading SA, including Roehm, were rounded up and slaughtered. This murderous deed became an omen of what was to come.
The historian and author of The Shanghai Massacre presents an in-depth chronicle of Hitler’s plot to eliminate political rivals and his own SA Brownshirts. In the summer of 1934, Adolf Hitler conducted a ruthless purge of his own fascist colleagues, many of whom had helped the Nazi Party rise to power. The brawling street thugs of the SA had bludgeoned Hitler’s political opposition into submission and played a significant role in transforming Germany into a dictatorship. But in order to safeguard his absolute authority, Hitler chose to eliminate any potential rivals. And it was the SA that he feared most. Officially called Operation Hummingbird, the swift and merciless “blood purge” came to be known as The Night of the Long Knives. Among Hitler’s victims were personal friends like SA co-founder Ernst Röhm, former German Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and even former party comrades like Gregor Strasser. Breaking the back of the SA and settling political scores, the operation took somewhere between three hundred and a thousand lives
How do you bring down a President who will stop at nothing to stay in power? Ruslan Shanidza sets out on his most ambitious and most dangerous quest, a campaign to depose the strongman who rules his post-communist homeland. He quickly assembles a fractious coalition of rivals and former enemies. But they must confront some very dangerous people: men with blood on their hands who know they can never allow their grip on power to slip. Ruslan soon discovers that he has placed himself and his family in the firing line in an increasingly desperate fight to the finish. It is a case of destroy or be destroyed, and both sides know it. Praise for the previous Ruslan Shanidza novels The Price of Dreams ‘…will keep you turning the pages…Prepare to be sucked in with gripping characters and political intrigue until the very end.’ OnlineBookClub.org Official Review ‘Highly enjoyable, gripping page turner, solid story and characters, political intrigue; what’s not to like?’ E.P. Goodreads reviewer ‘I simply could not put down this fast-paced thriller - from well-developed characters to an intrigue-filled plot…’ E. Kobo reviewer ‘Gripping, atmospheric and convincing.’ T.C. Amazon UK reviewer A Long Night of Chaos ‘Few novels start as savagely and alarmingly as this…The place is the northern Caucasus; the time the murderous period of chaos left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the contest of small, fanatical nationalities to establish their own independent states…not only a guide to the recent past but – unhappily – to the bloodshed and intrigue of the likely future.’ Neal Ascherson, author of Black Sea and The Polish August ‘The characters come alive and it quickly draws you in.’ BJ Amazon.Com Reviewer ‘…melds themes of conflict, loss, and love in this politically charged thriller that arrests the reader’s attention from the first page…solid characters…the book was an exhilarating read’ OnlineBookClub.org Official Review ‘Political intrigue, peril and recognisable characters, only a step away from true figures from fairly recent east European history, makes the book that much more enjoyable.’ PWB Amazon UK Reviewer
Following the events of A TRACE OF SMOKE, journalist Hannah Vogel has been in hiding in Bolivia with her young ward, Anton, for the past three years. She believes she has outwitted Ernst Röhm, the head of the Nazi Party’s Storm Troopers who believes himself to be the boy’s father, so she seizes the offer from a newspaper to cover the journey of a zeppelin from South America to Switzerland, particularly as it will allow her a rare opportunity to meet with her lover, Boris Krause. When the zeppelin is diverted to Germany, she knows she’s walked straight into a trap. Röhm, facing expulsion from the party as a result of rumors of his homosexuality, has decided to claim his alleged son, and marry Hannah as a beard. Unfortunately for him, his solution has come too late. Hitler has supplanted the Storm Troopers with the SS, headed by Himmler, and the resulting purge, forever known as The Night of the Long Knives, has begun. Hannah manages to escape in the melee, while Röhm faces a firing squad. Unfortunately, she and Anton were separated, and Hannah must enlist all her allies—and a few of her enemies—to track him down before the Gestapo can. With nowhere else to turn, Hannah finds herself at Boris’ door in a wedding dress. She expects a safe haven, but she learns that her presence and search for Anton are putting Boris at risk. During her absence he has been helping Jews escape and he is already under suspicion. Finally she traces Anton to the home of Röhm’s mother, who offers a deal—her son's body in exchange for Anton. Traveling to Berlin, Hannah is caught up in the Nazi’s continuing purge and must learn to trust—and protect—those she has loved, and hated, in order to survive. Praise for the novel: “Cantrell knows suspense, and in Hannah Vogel she has created a compelling character. The first person narration draws you right into the action, and pairing that with graphic, visceral descriptions makes this book a hard one to put down…emphasizes the chilling dehumanization of the Third Reich.” — Susan Engberg at Bust “A Night of Long Knives, Rebecca Cantrell’s second novel featuring journalist Hannah Vogel, again flawlessly captures Germany’s descent into darkness under growing Nazi power. Can Hannah survive—and can she protect her adopted son Anton from his murderous Nazi father, Ernst Röhm?” — jewishjournal.com “Rebecca Cantrell has written another exciting thriller and with Hannah Vogel’s sometimes frenetic first person narrative she gives the reader a feeling of what it must have been like to be in Germany during those terrible years. She has cleverly blended her fictional story in with real life events and real life characters, such as British journalist Sefton Delmer, while cleverly imparting snippets of information that add to the atmosphere.” — CrimeScraps
Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed “undesirable,” suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new preface by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity.
The highly-anticipated second instalment in the CRIME trilogy, now a hit TV Series In Edinburgh, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is investigating a brutal crime... Ritchie Gulliver MP is dead. Castrated and left to bleed in an empty Leith warehouse. Vicious, racist and corrupt, many thought he had it coming. But nobody could have predicted this. After the life Gulliver has led, the suspects are many - corporate rivals, political opponents, the countless groups he's offended. And the vulnerable and marginalised, who bore the brunt of his cruelty. As Lennox unravels the truth, and the list of shocking attacks grows, he must put his personal feelings aside. But one question refuses to go away: who are the real victims here? 'Sharp, fearless, passionate and brilliant' Independent 'An ingeniously plotted and propulsive thriller' Literary Review
The Sturm Abteilung der NSDAP (SA, assault battalion of the Nazi party) created in August 1920 were squads of strong arms intended to protect the Nazis meetings, to provoke disturbance, to break up other parties meetings, and to attack and assault political opponents as part of a deliberate campaign of intimidation. After 1925 the name Braunhemden (Brownshirts) was also given to its members because of the colour of their uniforms. Under the leadership of Hitlers close political associate, Ernst Rhm, the SA grew to become a huge and radical paramilitary force. This book answers several questions concerning the SA. How did the SA become a national movement? What was the relationship between Rhm and Hitler? What role did the SA play in providing Hitler with the keys to power? After the seizure of power by the Nazis on January 30, 1933, what was the function of the Brownshirts? Why did the brutal and scandalous Ernst Rhm stand in Hitlers way? What became of the SA after the bloody purge of June 1934, the notorious Night of the Long Knives?
The first full history of the Nazi Stormtroopers whose muscle brought Hitler to power, with revelations concerning their longevity and their contributions to the Holocaust Germany’s Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these “ordinary” men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler’s orders. In this deeply researched history, Daniel Siemens explores not only the roots of the SA and its swift decapitation but also its previously unrecognized transformation into a million-member Nazi organization, its activities in German-occupied territories during World War II, and its particular contributions to the Holocaust. The author provides portraits of individual members and their victims and examines their milieu, culture, and ideology. His book tells the long-overdue story of the SA and its devastating impact on German citizens and the fate of their country.
