Product Details
The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-Eight Hours That Changed the History of the World

The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-Eight Hours That Changed the History of the World
By Paul R. Maracin

List Price: $14.95
Price: $11.66 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

38 new or used available from $0.98

Average customer review:

Product Description

The story of how Hitler seized control in Germany during his ruthless quest for world domination.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #650952 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-07-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 240 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Hitler's June 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers (the SA)—known as the Night of the Long Knives—did indeed change the world, eliminating SA head Ernst Röhm and other "enemies of the party" and consolidating Hitler's power. But the events of that night take up only a few chapters of Maracin's account. Much of the rest of the book describes the background of the Nazi Party's key players—Hitler, Göring, Himmler, for example—whose lives are already well known. The final section of the book details the last days of WWII. Maracin, a freelance writer who relies exclusively on secondary sources, is accurate in his account of events—as he points out, the Nazis were probably responsible for the Reichstag fire that later served as their excuse to launch the purge—but he fails to provide any new information or perspective, and his analysis is too often superficial. For example, the leading Nazis, he writes, "were essentially all losers" none of whom could "satisfactorily earn a living as a civilian for a sustained period of time." B&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"historical bits" and " recommended for larger World War II and German history collections."--Library Journal

From the Back Cover

Many wonder how an entire nation could allow Adolf Hitler—a mediocre army corporal and failed landscape painter—to become the architect of the most calamitous events of the twentieth century. But few know that Hitler’s fateful transition from ambitious demagogue to Europe’s most vicious tyrant occurred on an ordinary Saturday—June 30, 1934—through a little-known event that would come to be called “The Night of the Long Knives.”
 
In The Night of the Long Knives, Paul R. Maracin has painstakingly pieced together the scattered and intentionally obscured elements of this fascinating story of deceit, intrigue, and mass murder that has as yet received little attention from historians.
 
First came the burning of the Reichstag—Germany’s parliament—an event that Hitler’s government blamed on subversives. Hermann Göring appeared on the scene with an arrest list containing the names and addresses of every “enemy of the state,” a list that Hitler and his cronies had been preparing for months.
 
Hitler himself arrested the principal victim at Bad Wiessee when he burst into the hotel room of Ernst Röhm, revolver in hand. Röhm was the head of the brownshirts—the Nazis’ three-million-member private army—and thus one of Hitler’s most dangerous rivals in the Nazi party. Soon after, Reinhard Heydrich—a chief architect of the Final Solution—and Hermann Göring began a massacre in Berlin, while Hitler sat by the phone, checking names off the list as they were killed.
 
This is the story of the events leading up to that awful night and its most horrifying effects.

 

Customer Reviews

Hitler murders his enemies.3
A rather basic book about Hitler and the Night of the Long Knives. First, most of the victims were SA, and the method of execution was by firing squad. Second, most of the detentions and murders took place during the day. The reason why I gave this only a three star was Maracin's spending half the book giving short biographies of the power elite of the Third Reich. He spends little time on the actual episodes of violence. In these short biographies, you learn a little, but that can be picked up elsewhere.

This is an introduction book on how Hitler murdered his enemies on this one night. The author got it right when he stated Hitler started his long reign of killings on this one night. An OK read.

Fascinating, but not enough about the Night4
In this fascinating little book, author Paul R. Maracin tells the story of the Nazi destruction of the SA (Brown Shirts) on June 30, 1934. The book begins by telling the story of the rise of the Nazi party, through a series of biographies of the prominent Nazi leaders. Over the course of more than half the book, these biographies take the reader from World War I, though the ruthless activities of the Nazis, and on to the squabble between Hitler and Rohm (the leader of the SA), and the orgy of violence that was the Night of Long Knives.

After taking so long to reach the Night, the activities of those two days are covered in a surprisingly quick and almost perfunctory manner. After that, the story moves on to cover the rest of the history of the Nazi party, finally ending with Nuremburg, and the fate of the surviving plotters of the Night.

OK, what can I say about this book? First of all, I must say that I really enjoyed reading it. I have not read much about the Nazi leaders, and the crimes that they committed. This book did an excellent job of introducing me to them, and showing me what they were actually like. That alone was worth my time in reading the book.

On the other hand, though, so little of this book is actually given over to the events of those "forty-eight hours that changed the history of the world" that the title seems almost misleading.

But, that said, I found this to be a fascinating and enlightening book that told me a lot about the Nazis and the Night of Long Knives that I have never read before. So, I would say that if you already know a lot about the Nazis and are interested in the events of that Night, then you might be rather disappointed. If, like me though, you do not know a lot about the Nazis, then you will enjoy this book.

Synopsis of Nazi Infighting3
This book is a very quick and easy read. It starts with a few pages of biography on several of the key early Nazis. The events of the actual night in question, when the bloodletting happened, is relatively brief. However, if you are trying to connect the dots of where and when things happened, this book does offer several tidbits of interesting information - like the exact location of Ernst Roehm with photos of the current hotel and room location.