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Ersatz. Of the hour and a half speech which followed, during which Orator Hitler slowly worked himself up to normal platform frenzy, a half hour was devoted to a labored introduction rehearsing events "since the abdication of the Kaiser," for "fairness requires that our results be judged by what would have happened if we had not conquered!" Bolshevism would have happened, according to Chancellor Hitler, but he admitted with truly brutal frankness that what is happening now is a boycott of Germany such that her people face having to return this winter to eating Ersatz, the substitute foods they grew to loathe in wartime. Seemingly bowed at this point by Germany's woe the Chancellor wandered off into strange digressions: "Among countless documents I have been obliged to read this week I found the diary of a man who in 1918 was thrown into a course of resistance to the laws and now lives in a world wherein law per se seems to incite to resistance. A moving document! . . . A glimpse at the mentality of humans who, without knowing it, have found their last confession of faith in Nihilism."
Knife Night. For the next hour Chancellor Hitler's address rambled darkly among the alleged plots of the men shot by his orders. Tears streamed down his face as he told of a five-hour soul struggle between himself and Storm Troop Chief of Staff Ernst Roehm. "I adjured him for the last time voluntarily to abandon this madness. . . . The result of our conversation, however, turned out to be that Roehm, realizing he in no circumstances could count on me for his scheme, started preparations to eliminate me personally." The scheme (and Herr Hitler's allusions to it were maddeningly vague) was apparantly to get the German Army out from under control of its seasoned generals and into Nazi hands with Captain Roehm as Defense Minister.
According to Chancellor Hitler he was and is the champion of the career Reichswehr generals and President von Hindenburg. The nefarious plotters, he said, included onetime Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, Reichswehr careerist par excellence, Captain Roehm and "a foreign diplomat." Simple Storm Troopers, declared the Chancellor, knew nothing of this plotted coup against the Reichswehr. They naively supposed that what was wanted was a "new and in this case a bloody uprising—'The Night of the Long Knives'—as it was gruesomely described."