Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives was a purge in Nazi Germany in which Adolf Hitler had his regime kill a number of people he saw as threats, mainly leaders of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Nazi party's paramilitary wing. The SA chief Ernst Rohm, who wanted his organisation to take over the regular army, was arrested and shot, and the SS and Gestapo also murdered political opponents who had nothing to do with the SA, such as the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and the Nazi dissident Gregor Strasser. Hitler justified the killings as the suppression of a coup plot, and the army accepted them. The president, Hindenburg, died a month later, and Hitler combined the offices of chancellor and president.

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