The Night of the Long Knives, in June 1934, saw the wiping out of the SA’s leadership and others who had angered Hitler in the recent past in Nazi Germany. After this date, the SS lead by Heinrich Himmler was to become far more powerful in Nazi Germany.

For all the power the Enabling Act gave Hitler, he still felt threatened by some in the Nazi Party. He was also worried that the regular army, von Blomberg   had not given an oath of allegiance. Hitler knew that the army hierarchy held him in disdain as he was ‘only ‘ a corporal in their eyes. The Night of the Long Knives not only removed the SA leaders but also got Hitler the army’s oath that he so needed.

By the summer of 1934, the SA’s numbers had swollen to 2 million men. They were under the control of Ernst Julius Röhm,  a loyal follower of Hitler since the early days of the Nazi Party. The SA had given the Nazi’s an iron fist with which to disrupt other political parties meetings before January 1933. The SA was also used to enforce law after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. To all intents, they were the enforcers of the Nazi Party and there is no evidence that Röhm was ever planning anything against Hitler.

However, Röhm had made enemies within the Nazi Party – Himmler, Goering and Goebbels were angered by the power he had gained and convinced Hitler that this was a threat to his position.

By June 1934, the regular army hierarchy also saw the SA as a threat to their authority. The SA outnumbered the army by 1934 and Röhm had openly spoken about taking over the regular army by absorbing it into the SA. Such talk alarmed the army’s leaders.

By the summer of 1934, Hitler had decided that Röhm was a ‘threat’ and he made a pact with the army. If Röhm and the other SA leaders were removed, the rank and file SA men would come under the control of the army but the army would have to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The army agreed and Röhm’s fate was sealed.

On the night of June 29th – June 30th 1934, units of the SS arrested the leaders of the SA and other political opponents. Men such as Gregor Strasser , Kurt von Schleicher and Ferdinand von Bredow  were arrested and none of them had any connection with Röhm. The arrests carried on for 2 more nights.

The Night of the Long Knives

Seventy seven men were executed on charges of treason though historians tend to think the figure is higher. The SA was brought to heel and placed under the command of the army. Hitler received an oath of allegiance from all those who served in the army. Röhm was shot in his prison cell by Theodore Eicke   Others were bludgeoned to death.

The first the public officially knew about the event was on July 13th 1934, when Hitler told the Reichstag that met in the Kroll Opera House, Berlin, that for the duration of the arrests that he and he alone was the judge in Germany and that the SS carried out his orders. From that time on the SS became a feared force in Nazi Germany lead by Heinrich Himmler . The efficiency with which the SS had carried out its orders greatly impressed Hitler and Himmler was to acquire huge power within Nazi Germany.

The Dutch famine of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter (“Hunger winter”) in Dutch, was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944–1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. As many as 22,000 may have died because of the famine one author estimated 18,000.  Most of the victims were reported to be elderly men

The famine was alleviated by the liberation of the area by the Allies in May 1945. Prior to that, bread baked from flour shipped in from Sweden, and the airlift of food by the Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air force, and the U.S Army Air force – under an agreement with the Germans that if the Germans did not shoot at the mercy flights, the Allies would not bomb the German positions – helped to mitigate the famine. This was Operations Manna and Chowhound. Operation Faust also trucked in food to the area and food droppings..

Towards the end of World War II, food supplies became increasingly scarce in the Netherlands. After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day, conditions grew increasingly worse in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The Allies were able to liberate the southern part of the country, but their liberation efforts came to an abrupt halt when Operation Market Garden, their attempt to gain control of the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, failed. The seizure of the approaches to the port of Antwerp (the Battle of the Scheldt) was delayed due to Montgomery’s preoccupation with Market Garden.

After the national railways complied with the exiled Dutch government’s appeal for a railway strike starting September 1944 to further the Allied liberation efforts, the German administration, under Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Friedrich Christiansen retaliated by placing an embargo on all food transports to the western Netherlands.
By the time the embargo was partially lifted in early November 1944, allowing restricted food transports over water, the unusually early and harsh winter had already set in. The canals froze over and became impassable for barges.

  The roads outsite the big cities were full of people searching for food at the local farms.

Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine. She suffered from anemia, respiratory illnesses, and edema as a result. Also, her clinical depression later in life has been attributed to malnutrition. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother’s pregnancy, found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children. Also increased among them were the rates of schizotypal personality and neurological defects.

From September 1944 until early 1945 the deaths of 18.000 Dutch people were attributed to malnutrition as the primary cause and in many more as a contributing factor.

Max Heiliger was a fictional name created during the Nazi era under authority of Reichsbank president Walter Funk in a secret arrangement with leader of the Schutzstaffel Heinrich Himmler. It was a false identity used to establish bank accounts to launder valuables stolen from those killed in the Nazi system of concentration camps and extermination camps,  Stolen banknotes and jewelry along with Holocaust victims’ dental gold, wedding rings, and even scrap gold melted down  from spectacles-frames flooded into the Max Heiliger accounts, completely filling several bank vaults by 1942. Heiliger accounts were also sometimes used to fence valuables at Berlin’s municipal pawn shops.

Other code phrases associated with bank-processing of camp victims’ property included Melmer, Besitz der umgesiedelten Juden (“property of resettled Jews”), and Reinhardtfonds. The latter was a veiled reference to Aktion Reinhardt. The word “umgesiedelten” cloaked the true nature of the goods, since victims were usually “resettled” to a Nazi concentration camp or an early grave.

Using the name “Heiliger” was a cynical Nazi joke, since the word means saint, from the word heilig (holy). Such “humour” was not unusual in Nazi circles. For example, the one-way path to the gas chamber at Sosibor extermination camp was called Himmelstrasse, meaning “Heaven Street” –the road to Heaven.

Funk was held at Spandau prison along with othersenior Nazis.. He was released on 16 May 1957 because of ill health. He made a last-minute call on Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach before leaving the prison. He died three years later in Düsseldorf of diabetes..

There were 37 confirmed pairs or trios of brothers assigned to USS Arizona on December 7, 1941. Of these 77 men, 62 were killed, and 23 sets of brothers died. Only one full set of brothers, Kenneth and Russell Warriner,

  survived the attack; Kenneth was away at flight school in San Diego on that day and Russell was badly wounded but recovered. Both members of the ship’s only father-and-son pair, Thomas Augusta Free age 50 and his son  William Thomas Free  age 17, were killed in action.

Edward Heidt, F1c and Wesley Heidt, MM2c served and died as brothers aboard the USS Arizona.

  John Anderson was born in 1917 with twin brother, Delbert “Jake” Anderson. Both served on the USS Arizona

.     John after the attack searched for his brother. He never found his brother, but would later learn that Jake almost certainly perished in the early moments of the attack. Jack was 24 and John died old age 98.

Thomas D. Murdock wasn’t at his post on the USS Arizona on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 when waves of Japanese bombers decimated the fleet at Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack. His two brothers – Charles and Melvin – were.

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• Of the 37 sets of brothers on the USS Arizona, 23 sets were lost.
• This amounted to a total of 79 individual brothers serving on the USS Arizona, of which 63 died as a result of the attack.
• There were three sets of three brothers: the Beckers, the Dohertys, and the Murdocks. One from each set survived.
• Of the 63 brothers who died, only four were recovered and identified: George Bromley, Donald and Joseph Lakin, and Gordon Shive. The remaining 59 brothers remain unaccounted.

In addition to the 37 sets of brothers, there was a father and son on the USS Arizona.They were killed in action. The father was Thomas Augusta Free, MM1c, and his son William Thomas Free, S2c. Both men were from the state of Texas, but son William is memorialized at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Hawai’i, under the state of California.

Though family members often served on the same ship before World War II, U.S. officials attempted to discourage the practice after Pearl Harbor. However, no official regulations were established, and by the end of the war hundreds of brothers had fought—and died¬—together. The five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, for instance, jointly enlisted after learning that a friend, Bill Ball , had died aboard USS Arizona; Their only condition upon enlistment was that they be assigned to the same ship. In November 1942, all five siblings were killed in action when their light cruiser, USS Juneau, was sunk during the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.