Night of the Long Knives

New York: Ballentine Books, 1972. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. 159, [1] pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. This is one of the Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. Politics in Action No. 7. Cover has a tear at the top front near the spine. Slightly cocked. Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky[a] (born 23 June 1935) is an English-Russian author who writes under the name Nikolai Tolstoy. A member of the Tolstoy family, he is a former parliamentary candidate of the UK Independence Party. He has written about World War II and its immediate aftermath. In 1977 he wrote the Victims of Yalta, which criticized the British forced handover of Soviet citizens to Joseph Stalin in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. In 1986 he wrote The Minister and the Massacres which criticized British repatriation of collaborationist troops to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government, it received much critical praise, as well as criticism by Macmillan's authorized biographer. The Night of the Long Knives, also called Operation Hummingbird or, in Germany, the Röhm Putsch, was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934, when the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazis, carried out a series of political executions to consolidate Adolf Hitler's absolute hold on power in Germany. Many of those killed were leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization. The best-known victim of the purge was Ernst Röhm, the SA's leader and one of Hitler's longtime supporters and allies. Leading members of the Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party, including its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were also killed, as were establishment conservatives and anti-Nazis, such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Bavarian politician Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed Hitler's Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The murders of SA leaders were also intended to improve the image of the Hitler government.