The Cannibals of History: Why Fascists Always Consume Their Faithful

What the Night of the Long Knives teaches us about America today

Today marks ninety-one years since the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934. On that night, Hitler ordered the execution of his own SA commander Ernst Röhm and dozens of other rivals within the Nazi party. It was elite infighting taken to its logical, brutal conclusion: the point where ambitious men stop maneuvering in boardrooms and start settling disputes with bullets.

In the summer of 2007, I walked through the quiet streets of Munich's Old Town, feeling the connection to history. Tourists love Munich for its beer halls and Christmas markets, but a dark history lies beneath. Modest plaques marked where the Beer Hall Putsch began in 1923, there are buildings where Hitler first addressed party rallies and routes where SA stormtroopers once marched.

Munich has done a careful job of not glorifying this history. What strikes you most isn't grand monuments but rather how ordinary these places look. A restaurant here, an office building there. Evil rarely announces itself with gothic architecture.

Standing in those Munich streets eighteen years ago, I couldn't have imagined I'd be writing about how authoritarian movements devour their own supporters, watching those same patterns play out in real-time in America today.

When Rivals Become Enemies

The story of the Night of the Long Knives is, at its core, about what happens when authoritarian movements turn on their own supporters. Ernst Röhm had been Hitler's street fighter, leading the brown-shirted SA paramilitaries who intimidated opponents and brawled with communists in the early days. But by 1934, Röhm wanted more power. He envisioned the SA absorbing the German army, with himself as its leader.

Hitler faced a choice: back his old ally or appease the traditional military elite who despised Röhm's working-class thugs. He chose the generals. On June 30, SS troops arrested Röhm at a Bavarian resort and shot him in his cell. Across Germany, other SA leaders and political enemies were hunted down and killed. The official death toll was 85, though historians suspect it was much higher.

The German establishment breathed easier. The radical street fighters were gone, replaced by the more "respectable" SS. Hitler had demonstrated his method for dealing with internal opposition. The SA had spent years brutalizing communists, Jews, and political opponents, never imagining they might one day become targets themselves. They assumed their loyalty would protect them. They discovered that fascism always needs fresh victims, and yesterday's enforcers can easily become tomorrow's enemies.

I think about that lesson when I watch what's happening in American politics today.

The American Version

There aren't midnight executions in America, obviously. But the underlying dynamic of factions within an authoritarian movement being unable to coexist feels familiar.

Look at what happened within Trump's inner circle between 2016 and 2025. Trump didn't shoot his rivals, but he systematically purged anyone who challenged him. John McCain died before Trump could fully ostracize him, but the former president still managed to attack a war hero's memory. Jeff Sessions, once Trump's earliest Senate supporter, was humiliated and discarded. Steve Bannon, who helped architect Trump's 2016 victory, fell from grace after criticizing the Trump family. Even Elon Musk, despite his massive financial support, found himself on the outs after questioning some of Trump's decisions. The list goes on: Chris Christie, Bill Barr, and Mike Pence, all former allies who found themselves exiled once they showed insufficient loyalty.

The January 6th hearings revealed just how close America came to its own version of factional violence. When Mike Pence refused to overturn the election results, Trump supporters literally chanted "Hang Mike Pence" while constructing a gallows outside the Capitol. A mob was ready to execute the Vice President for insufficient loyalty to Trump. The Proud Boys, who had operated as Trump's street muscle during rallies and protests, found themselves facing federal prosecution while Trump initially distanced himself from their actions. However, on January 20, 2025, Trump issued sweeping pardons for over 1,500 January 6th participants, including all convicted Proud Boys leaders like Enrique Tarrio, demonstrating how authoritarian leaders use selective mercy to maintain loyalty among their enforcers.

What An Elderly German Woman Taught Me

I recall a lengthy conversation I had with an 80-year-old woman I met in Germany several months ago. She had arrived in the world when Nazism crumbled in March 1945. I remember her saying that the most dangerous moment wasn't when the extremists took power. It was when the respectable people decided they could work with them.

"They thought they could control the radicals," she told me. "Use them, then discard them. They were wrong."

Her words reminded me of what I witnessed during Trump's first presidency, watching Republican senators and governors who privately despised him publicly defend his most outrageous behavior. They thought they could use his popularity with their base while maintaining their own power. Some of them learned otherwise, and others still have that lesson to learn.

This pattern repeats throughout history where authoritarian movements consume their own supporters once they consolidate power. Stalin's purges decimated the Communist Party's old guard, including loyal revolutionaries like Nikolai Bukharin who had helped bring the Bolsheviks to power. Mao's Cultural Revolution turned on party veterans. The pattern repeats: revolutionary movements need enemies, and when external enemies are defeated, they create internal ones.

The Billionaire Factor

There's another element that makes the current moment particularly dangerous: the concentration of wealth among a tiny elite. Hitler needed the support of German industrialists and financiers to consolidate power. In America today, there are tech billionaires and hedge fund managers who can single-handedly fund political movements, buy social media platforms, and reshape public discourse.

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into a right-wing echo chamber, it demonstrated the potential for a political power play by one man with sufficient financial resources to influence how millions of Americans receive their news. When other billionaires fund think tanks, super PACs, and media outlets, they're not just exercising free speech; they're trying to shape the ideological landscape.

In today's America, MAGA factions are defined as much by wealth as by ideology. And when the people with the most money start viewing democracy as an obstacle to their goals, the country is in dangerous territory.

Walking Through History

If you are ever in Berlin, you can visit the Topography of Terror museum, built on the site where the SS and Gestapo headquarters once stood. The exhibits trace how ordinary Germans gradually accepted increasingly authoritarian measures. Each step seemed reasonable at the time: emergency powers, restrictions on the press, purges of "unreliable" civil servants.

Many Germans convinced themselves they were protecting democracy even as they dismantled it. The conservative politicians who enabled Hitler genuinely believed they could control him and preserve constitutional government. The business leaders who funded the Nazis thought they were preventing a communist revolution.

They were all wrong, of course. But their mistakes weren't obviously stupid at the time. They were the kind of miscalculations that smart, successful people make when they prioritize short-term advantage over long-term consequences.

Sound familiar?

The Warning Signs

I'm not saying America is on the verge of its own Night of the Long Knives. The United States has different institutions, traditions, and civil society than Germany in 1934. However, there are also warning signs that would have been recognizable to anyone watching the collapse of Weimar Germany.

Violence, including political violence, is increasingly normalized. Wealthy individuals wield unprecedented influence over public discourse. And too many people in positions of power are more interested in defeating their enemies than preserving democratic norms.

The lesson from June 30, 1934, isn't that America will inevitably follow Germany's path. It's that authoritarian movements inevitably consume everything in their path: first targeting "others," then turning on their own most loyal supporters. The fascists who celebrated others' misery in 1933 found themselves trapped in bunkers by 1945 as their thousand-year dream collapsed after just twelve years. Even the winners lose when democracy dies.

The Path Forward

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. The challenge for Americans today is learning from the past without being paralyzed by it. Authoritarian movements are dangerous from the moment they begin, but they become particularly destructive when they start consuming their own supporters, creating cycles of purges and paranoia that devastate everything in their path.

That means protecting voting rights, defending press freedom, and maintaining the rule of law even when it's inconvenient for preferred candidates. It means choosing leaders who view political opponents as fellow Americans rather than enemies to be destroyed. And it means remembering that democracy is fragile; a lesson Germans learned too late in 1934.

Standing in those Munich streets eighteen years ago, I tried to imagine how ordinary Germans convinced themselves that extremism was temporary, that things would return to normal once the crisis passed. I don't have to imagine anymore. I see the same self-deception happening now, among people who should know better.

The Night of the Long Knives was ninety years ago, but its lessons remain painfully relevant. When authoritarian movements start devouring their own supporters, and when violence becomes the answer to internal dissent, that's when democracies die.

America isn't there yet. But the country is closer than it should be.

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