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

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

*Includes pictures *Explains Hitler's rise to power and the roles played by the SA and other paramilitary groups like the SS *Includes eyewitness accounts of the purge *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents Germany's Nazi Party was remarkably implacable in the hostility it showed to the outside world, staunchly opposing both Communism and liberal democracy from the moment of its inception to that of its violent dissolution. The Nazis likewise showed steely, unwavering resolve in their lethal hatred of the Jews, the Slavs, and many others whom they labeled as "untermenschen," subhumans unworthy of rights, cultural standing, or life itself. They pursued their dark vision of "Aryan" superiority with a terrifying clarity and zeal, and they were willing to incur the enmity of the entire world in the process. At the same time, despite this fanatic dedication to their overall vision, the Nazis had their own share of factional strife, and perhaps not surprisingly, the internecine struggle often led to violence, executions, and assassinations, byproducts of a totalitarian environment in which power appeared in its most undisguised and aggressive form. The firing squad, the bomb, the torture chamber, the extermination camp, the crematorium, and the noose of piano wire took the place of debate and persuasion in Hitler's Germany. Like other totalitarian regimes, the leader of the Nazis kept an iron grip on power in part by making sure nobody else could attain too much of it, leading to purges of high-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Of these purges, the most notorious was the Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the summer of 1934 that came about when Hitler ordered the surprise executions of several dozen leaders of the SA. This fanatically National Socialist paramilitary organization had been a key instrument in overthrowing democratic government in Germany and raising Hitler to dictatorial power in the first place. However, the SA was an arm of the Nazi phenomenon which had socialist leanings and which was the private army of Ernst Rohm, which was enough for Hitler to consider the organization dangerous. Rohm was a challenger to the Fuhrer's position with his mushrooming SA ranks, which were more loyal to him than to the nominal head of Nazi Germany. Though the SA as a whole survived Hitler's purge, its star was eclipsed by the rise of the newly favored Schutzstaffel (SS), which was instrumental in implementing the Night of the Long Knives. Additionally, the SA's senior leadership was decimated, leading to a loss of cohesion and focus. Even its overall commander, Ernst Rohm, fell victim to Hitler's violence, and Hitler himself later spoke words which summed up the calculated ruthlessness he used to deal with his enemies, both domestic and foreign: "The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally." Several other factions were also involved. The German Army, or Reichswehr, was theoretically limited to a total of 100,000 men by the treaties ending World War I, but the German military was one of the major keys to power. Rohm dreamed of subsuming it totally into the SA, a nightmare from the point of view of the highly conservative and aristocratic officer corps. A man who championed the cause of the Reichswehr and kept it free of subordination to the SA could likely win its loyalty for years to come regardless of his own political and cultural agenda, which Hitler managed to accomplish with the purge. The Night of the Long Knives chronicles the history of the Nazis' most notorious purge. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Night of the Long Knives like never before, in no time at all.

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.

Many wonder how Adolf Hitler, a mediocre army corporal and failed landscape painter, could have become the architect of the most calamitous events of the twentieth century. But fewer know that Hitler's fateful transition from ambitious demagogue to Europe's most vicious tyrant occurred on an ordinary Saturday--June 30, 1934--in a little-known event that would come to be called "The Night of the Long Knives." This is the story of the events leading up to that awful event, and its most horrifying repercussions.

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.