We tell the story of one of Hitler’s most brutal and dramatic purges, which occurred half a decade before the sins of the Holocaust. This hideous episode failed to raise the alarm it should have done regarding Hitler’s capacity for murder.

By 1934 Hitler’s hold over Germany was not as complete as it appeared. He had risen to power on the fists and truncheons of the SA – the three million man strong Brown Shirt army of thugs who had supplied the brutality to hammer down his opposition. The trouble was that its sadistic and murderous leader - the rapaciously homosexual Ernst Rohm - could just as easily remove Hitler when it suited him.

Hitler was likely to become a victim of his own tactics of divide and rule, by which he encouraged the likes of Rohm, Goering and Goebbels to compete for senior positions. Because Rohm could have eliminated any of them, Hitler had his other henchmen arrayed against the SA leader.

Rohm collaborated in his own death with an arrogant intemperate comment: "Hitler can’t walk over me as he might have done a year ago ... Don’t forget that I have three-million men, with every key position in the hands of my own people...If Hitler is reasonable, I will settle the matter quietly. If he isn’t I must be prepared to use force". Then, ominously, he decreed a month of rest for his SA forces to prepare for the battles ahead.

Hitler decided that Rohm had to die, and the high Brown Shirt leadership with him. He felt that the job had to be done swiftly and with the acclaim of the German people. Hitler’s tool would be his praetorian guard, the SS. Under Heinrich Himmler, the force had been formed and trained to be loyal to the Fuhrer no matter how high the crime. Carefully trumped-up charges of an impending coup were formulated to implicate not just the SA leadership, but anyone who Hitler needed to die.

Hitler ordered the SA leadership to appear for a meeting on June 29th, 1934, at the Hotel Hanselbauer. With the killing ground had been set, it was Hitler himself who burst in on Rohm and his men. The Fuhrer was outraged to find the hotel rife with homosexual trysting, and his puritanical streak guaranteed a furious response. During the next 48 hours, fists pounding on doors and gunshots were heard all across Germany.

The leading SA were rounded up and slaughtered. The claim of 61 executed and 13 "shot while resisting arrest" is a joke wildly downplayed the figure of 1000 men who lost their lives. Rohm’s long fellowship in Hitler’s rise to power meant nothing, and the Brown Shirt chief was shot after refusing to commit suicide.

Hitler characterized the Night of the Long Knives, named by him from a popular German song, as a narrowly averted coup meant to bring deadly totalitarians to power. He announced proudly, "I become the supreme judge of the German people". This murderous deed, executed long before the thrust into Poland, became an ominous warning of what was to come. It is the single most significant – and deadly – episode in Hitler’s rise to absolute power, and the set the stage for the Second World War and the Holocaust.