The next event occurred just about as the witness Körner described it here, and therefore I can skip it. I was given the order to proceed immediately against the implicated men of the Röhm group in northern Germany. It was decided that some of them were to be arrested. In the course of the day the Führer ordered the execution of the SA leader of Pomerania, Ernst, and two or three others. He himself went to Bavaria where the last meeting of a number of Röhm leaders was taking place and personally arrested Röhm and these people in Wiessee.
At that time this matter presented a real danger, as a few SA units, through the use of false passwords, had been armed and called up. At one spot only a very short fight ensued and two SA leaders were shot. I deputized the police, which in Prussia was then already under Himmler and Heydrich, to make the arrests. Only the headquarters of Röhm, who himself was not present, I had occupied by a regiment of the uniformed police subordinated to me. When the headquarters of the SA leader Ernst in Berlin were searched, we found in the cellars of those headquarters more submachine guns than the whole Prussian police had in its possession.
After the Führer, on the strength of the events which had been met with at Wiessee, had ordered who should be shot in view of the state of national emergency, the order for the execution of Ernst, Heydebreck, and some of the other Röhm collaborators was issued. There was no order to shoot the other people who had been arrested. In the course of the arrest of the former Reich Chancellor Schleicher, it happened that both he and his wife were killed. An investigation of this event took place and it was found that when Schleicher was arrested, according to the statements of the two witnesses, he reached for a pistol, possibly in order to kill himself, whereupon the two men raised their pistols and Frau Schleicher threw herself upon one of them, to hold him, causing his revolver to go off. We deeply regretted that event.
In the course of that evening I heard that other people had been shot as well, even some people who had nothing at all to do with this Röhm Putsch. The Führer came to Berlin that same evening. After I learned this, later that evening or night, I went to him at noon the next day and asked him to issue an order immediately, that any further execution was under any circumstances forbidden by him, the Führer, although two other people who were deeply involved and who had been ordered by the Führer to be executed, were still alive. These people were consequently left alive. I asked him to do that because I was worried lest the matter should get out of hand—as, in fact, it had already done to some extent—and I told the Führer that under no circumstances should there be any further bloodshed.
This order was then given by the Führer in my presence, and it was communicated at once to all offices. The action was then announced in the Reichstag, and it was approved by the Reichstag and the Reich President as an action called for by the state of national emergency. It was regretted that, as in all such incidents, there were a number of blunders.
The number of victims has been greatly exaggerated. As far as I can remember exactly today, there were 72 or 76 people, the majority of whom were executed in southern Germany.
DR. STAHMER: Did you know about the development of the attitude of the Party and the State toward the Church, in the course of time?
GÖRING: Certainly. But as a final remark on the Röhm Putsch I should like to emphasize that I assume full responsibility for the actions taken against those people—Ernst, Heydebreck, and several others—by the order of the Führer, which I carried out or passed on; and that, even today, I am of the opinion that I acted absolutely correctly and with a sense of duty. That was confirmed by the Reich President, but no such confirmation was necessary to convince me that here I had averted what was a great danger to the State.
As to the attitude towards the Church—the Führer’s attitude, was a generous one, at the beginning absolutely generous. I should not like to say that it was positive in the sense that he himself was a positive or convinced adherent of any one confession, but it was generous and positive in the sense that he recognized the necessity of the Church. Although he himself was a Catholic, he wished the Protestant Church to have a stronger position in Germany, since Germany was two-thirds Protestant.
The Protestant Church, however, was divided into provincial churches, and there were various small differences which the dogmatists took very seriously. For that reason they once in the past, as we know, fought each other for 30 years; but these differences did not seem so important to us. There were the Reformed, the United, and the pure Lutherans—I myself am not an expert in this field.