Victims of The Night of The Long Knives - Debate Over Number of Victims

Debate Over Number of Victims

The precise number of victims of the Night of the Long Knives is disputed and will probably never be known with certainty. During the Purge itself official radio and newspaper reports only gave the names of ten people killed (the six SA-leaders executed in Stadelheim Prison on June 30, Schleicher and his wife, Karl Ernst—who was wrongly reported to have been shot in Stadelheim, whereas in fact he was shot in the barracks of Hitler's Personal Guard Unit in Berlin Lichterfelde—and Ernst Röhm).

While the German newspapers avoided disclosing the names of further victims of the purge, in the weeks and months to follow, the international press would set out to detail a more comprehensive account of how many people had been killed between June 30 to July 2. They managed to present about 100 names of people allegedly killed, although a number of those eventually turned out to have survived, such as the former SA chief of Berlin Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf (who had not been bothered at all) and Adolf Morsbach, the head of the cosmopolitan-minded Akademische Austauschdienst (Academic Exchange Programme), who had instead been sent to a concentration camp.