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Headline: German Blood Bath Washes Out 200 Lives
Sub-Headline: Brown Shirts, Leaderless, Helpless Under Hitler Iron Rule

Publication Date: Tuesday, July 3, 1934
Historical Event: Hitler Purges Storm Troopers, Executes Opponents
This database includes 2,331 articles about this event
Tags: Gannett full page downloadable
Article Type: News Article
Newspaper: Fremont News-Messenger
Location: Freemont, Ohio
Page Section and Number: 2
Author/Byline: H. R. Knickerbocker (INS)
Article Text: BERLIN, July 3.—(INS) — The blood bath that washed Germany clean of brown shirt storm troopers, officially ended Saturday night but an eye-witness participant in the executions reported today that 20 more officers of the storm troopers were shot in Munich yesterday.

This authority estimates the total number of dead at 200.

This figure may be taken as a minimum and the fact that shootings were still reported Monday leaves the question open whether they are ended now.

Off the Streets

Pistol fire of Hitler's black-jacketed bodyguard and Premier Goering's police has swept the brown shirts from the streets of the Reich as the wind blows leaves away.

Almost no shooting took place actually in the streets but echoes of revolver fire were effective. The terrors the brown shirts had for so long imposed on others has turned against them with a fury that has left them paralyzed.

As your correspondent traveled to Berlin over the Austrian frontier not a brown shirt could be seen. The streets of Munich and Leipzig and Berlin, ordinarily alive with uniforms of the stormers, today show only the civilian populace with a sprinkling of black shirt Hitler guards.

No Uniforms

Officially on vacation and ordered not to wear uniforms, forbidden to meet together, prohibited from discussing politics, the brown stormers for the most part have taken to cover.

But not all of them.

Confused and bewildered groups of common storm troopers now headless since their highest officers have been shot or imprisoned, are here and there breaking out in futile and perilous demonstrations.

An eye-witness reports that hundreds of storm troopers yesterday cast off their uniforms and went out into the streets of Schoenberg, in Berlin, shouting:

"Our leader has betrayed us!"

Riot squads of state police surrounded them and led them off to a concentration camp.

Hitler is Master

In Chemnitz, Brunswick and Nueremberg [sic], sporadic attempts by storm troopers to manifest their dissatisfaction, were crushed.

Against Hitler's 200,000 heavily armed black shirt bodyguards and Goering's more than 100,000 police, the leaderless stormers, even with all their 2,000,000 or more men, are helpless today, even if they desired to continue the mutiny. Hitler is master.

How Capt. Ernst Roehm, storm troop leader, met his death, is still a subject of heated but terrified private discussions.

The latest version from a Munich officer has it that the commandant of a concentration camp at Munich personally shot Roehm in his cell with the revolver he had offered Roehm so that the storm troop leader might shoot himself.

Frightened whisperings tell how first this man and then another of Hitler's old comrades met death. Many, according to a Munich authority, wept and died protesting they didn't know why,

August Schmeidhuber, Munich storm troop leader, took it standing and cried: "Heil—" but the bullets cut short his cry of loyalty.
History Unfolded Contributor: Carol S.
Location of Research: Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)