The nation's security service says there is a "tangible risk" of the security situation deteriorating further.

Hitler regretted the deal he made with Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. What he actually wanted was war—his goal was to conquer all of Czechoslovakia by force as a first step toward the conquest of all of Europe.

He didn’t imagine that the British and French governments would be so craven as to give him everything he publicly asked for, including the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the occupation of the Sudetenland by the German army. When they did, Hitler found himself trapped into accepting, but he was unhappy. Within five months he ordered the military occupation of all Czechoslovakia, in violation of the Munich Agreement, and six months after that, he invaded Poland.

Today the Trump administration is offering Vladimir Putin a Munich-like settlement for Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators have offered Putin almost everything he has publicly asked for without demanding anything in return. They may assume that if they give him everything up front, he will agree to a cease-fire and some kind of deal that will save face for President Donald Trump, allowing him to claim the mantle of peacemaker, just as Chamberlain did, albeit for only a few months.

Will Putin accept? At the moment, thanks to Trump’s anti-Ukraine maneuvers, he has the luxury of watching Washington and Kyiv wrangle over terms while he pummels Ukraine’s population and energy grid and brings the country closer to collapse. But so far, Putin has been clear about the terms he is willing to accept to achieve peace. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, his offer is this: nothing.

No security guarantee; no independent, sovereign Ukraine; perhaps not even a cease-fire. Putin’s goal, as it has been from the beginning, is the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, language, and culture. He will gladly accept Ukraine’s surrender whenever Kyiv is ready to concede, but short of that he is going to keep the war going until he takes everything.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Let’s start with security guarantees. Putin has never agreed to them for Ukraine—in any form. Putin and his spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Moscow will never accept European troops on Ukrainian soil as part of a peace deal. To accept European troops in Ukraine is no different in Putin’s mind than to accept NATO—as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as recently as last week.  

Nor is Putin’s refusal hard to understand. Any deal that put Western troops on Ukrainian soil would leave Russia in an objectively worse strategic situation than before the invasion. After three years of conflict, as many as 1 million casualties, and widespread economic suffering, Putin would have succeeded only in tightening the circle of containment around Russia, including the admission to NATO of Sweden and Finland; bringing hostile forces closer to Russia’s border; and substantially increasing even peacetime defense requirements. His broader ambitions in Europe would be blocked, perhaps forever. If Trump could see past the aura of his own dealmaking genius, he would see that for Putin to end the war with European troops on Ukrainian soil for any purpose would be a colossal strategic failure.

Putin has also rejected the idea of an international guarantee of Ukraine’s security even without troops on the ground. Early negotiations in 2022 broke down precisely over that point. Ukraine wanted an international commitment to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event that Russia launched another attack—something equivalent to the Article 5 guarantee in the NATO treaty. This would not have meant foreign troops on Ukrainian soil—or even any official relationship between Ukraine and NATO—but rather a commitment by signatory states to come to a “neutral” Ukraine’s aid if it was invaded. Putin rejected this, insisting on a Russian veto over any such action.

Putin has even insisted that Ukraine should not be permitted to maintain a military capable of resisting another Russian invasion. He has demanded strict limits on the number of Ukrainian forces and rejected any notion of allowing the U.S. or Europe to continue providing weapons to help Ukraine defend itself against future attack. In short, Putin’s unwavering demand in any peace settlement has been to leave Ukraine essentially defenseless.

Further, Putin has from the beginning demanded an end to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a prior condition before any agreement. That he ever expected this demand to be met is doubtful: What nation agrees to the toppling of its government as the price for peace, except as terms of surrender? Yet he’s sticking to this demand. According to reports, Trump officials are right now working to force Zelensky from power and replace him with someone presumably friendlier to Moscow. Judging by the reaction of most Ukrainians to the ambush of their president in the Oval Office, this effort will not succeed. But the fact that Trump officials are trying shows that Putin has not budged an inch in response to Trump’s many concessions.

He has also not budged from his broader demand for “de-Nazification,” by which he means the suppression of Ukrainian as the official language of Ukraine, to be replaced by Russian, and of Ukrainian culture and nationalism, which Putin sees as tantamount to resistance to Moscow’s domination. If anyone wants to know what Putin hopes to do with Ukraine once he has control, they have only to look at what he is already doing in the territories Russia occupies, where Ukrainians are being forced to become Russian citizens, and any resistance leads to imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Everyone in the West seems to agree that there will be a cease-fire in Ukraine at some point. But one person who never talks about a cease-fire is Vladimir Putin. He does not talk about a cease-fire with his own people. He has at no time offered a cease-fire to the Ukrainians or the Americans. People assume he wants a cease-fire because his losses are staggering and his economy is suffering. But, as I and others have argued, Putin has to believe only that Ukraine is closer to collapse than he is, and that though he is suffering, the Ukrainians are suffering more. Trump’s latest moves to paralyze Ukraine’s defenses against missile and drone attacks by denying vital U.S. intelligence sharing can only bolster that assessment.

Putin might be tempted to strike a Munich-like deal with Trump just to strengthen an American president who seems determined to give Putin what he may never have imagined possible—a complete American capitulation in the global struggle, the destruction of the NATO alliance, the isolation of a weak Europe, and an open field for further actions to fulfill Putin’s overarching goal, which is the reconstitution of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern and Central Europe. This is where the Munich analogy breaks down, because whatever else Chamberlain’s appeasement was, it did not include changing sides in the ongoing European crisis and joining Hitler to carve up the continent.  

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Yet Putin may calculate that he is getting that for free already. The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable. The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least. But Trump is mercurial and could reverse course, at least partially, at any time. That’s a reason for Putin to seek victory as quickly as possible. He may never have a chance as good as this one to complete the task he set out to achieve when he launched his invasion three years ago.  

One thing is certain: Trump is no poker player. Thanks to his actions so far, Putin hasn’t had to reveal any of his cards. Trump claims to know what Putin wants, but his own actions show that he actually has no clue. One day Trump says Russia wants peace for reasons “only I know.” The next, he warns Putin that he’ll impose more sanctions. Putin must be laughing up his sleeve. He’s weathered American sanctions for the better part of three years now; more of the same is not much of a threat. If that’s the only card Trump intends to play, Putin will soon be cashing in, and Ukraine will soon be doomed. Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler wouldn’t violate the Munich deal because Hitler respected him. Trump shares that delusion about Putin. We may all pay the price.

Sweden and Finland's defence sectors are benefiting from their countries joining Nato.

What’s the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment.

A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. “No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,” write the report’s authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country’s woes as well as “the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board.

Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

[Read: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]

The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country’s railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; “green belts” were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.

The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. “There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,” Bowman told me.

But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the ’70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher’s head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home.

Housing is, as I’ve written, the quantum field of urban policy, touching every station of urban life. Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. “I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,” Bowman said.

[Read: The urban family exodus is a warning for progressives]

Constrictive housing policy in Britain has also arguably prevented other great cities from being born. If the University of Cambridge’s breakthroughs in biotech had happened in the 19th century, Bowman said, the city of Cambridge might have bloomed to accommodate new companies and residents, the same way Glasgow grew by an order of magnitude around shipbuilding in the 1800s. Instead Cambridge remains a small city of fewer than 150,000 people, its potential stymied by rules all but prohibiting its growth.

The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. “On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,” Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. “This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.” Despite Thatcher’s embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain’s energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.

Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it’s behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania.

What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and ’80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country’s renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven’t increased nearly enough to make up the gap.

The comparison with France makes clear Britain’s policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France.

There is an inconvenient subcurrent to the U.K.’s scarcity crisis—and ours. Sixty years ago, the environmentalist revolution transformed the way governments, courts, and individuals thought about their relationship to the natural world. This revolution was not only successful but, in many ways, enormously beneficial. In the U.S., the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act brought about exactly that. But over time, American environmental rules, such as those in the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, have been used to stop new housing developments and, ironically, even clean-energy additions. Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.” Last year, Britain’s high-speed-rail initiative was compelled to spend an additional £100 million on a shield to protect bats in the woods of Buckinghamshire. Finding private investment is generally difficult for infrastructure developers when the path to completion is strewn with nine-figure surprise fees.

Some of Britain’s problems echo across the European continent, including slow growth and high energy prices. More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union. This month, Social Democrats were punished at the polls with their worst defeat since World War II. Bowman offered a droll summary: “Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both.”

These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth. “Few leaders in the U.K. have thought seriously about the scale of change that we need,” Bowman said. Comprehensive reform is necessary to unlock private investment in housing and energy—including overhauling the TCPA, reducing incentives for anti-growth lawsuits, and directly encouraging nuclear and gas production to build a bridge to a low-carbon-energy economy.

Effective 21st-century governance requires something more than the ability to win elections by decrying the establishment and bemoaning sclerotic institutions. Progress requires a positive vision of the future, a deep understanding of the bottlenecks in the way of building that future, and a plan to add or remove policies to overcome those blockages. In a U.S. context, that might mean making it easier to build advanced semiconductors, or removing bureaucratic kludge for scientists while adding staff at the FDA to accelerate drug approval.

[Read: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]

In the U.K., the bottlenecks are all too clear: Decades-old rules make it too easy for the state to block housing developments or for frivolous lawsuits to freeze out energy and infrastructure investment. In their conclusion, Bowman and his co-authors strike a similar tone. “Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more,” they write. “To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.”

Anyone with an interest in the history of political vengeance should pay a visit to the rare-book room at the Library of Congress and request the bound volume with the call number DD244.R6. Compiled by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, Dreissig Novemberköpfe, or Thirty November Heads, is the future chancellor’s political hit list as of 1927: The book profiles government officials, legislators, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, and one popular satirist targeted by Rosenberg for “poisoning the life essence” of the German people with democratic processes and ideas.

The title is a mendacious nod both to November 1918, the month associated with the founding of the Weimar Republic—“November Republic,” “November Criminals,” “November Traitors”—and to the 1789 French Revolution, when heads rolled from guillotines into the hands of the people.

While Thirty November Heads is perhaps the most public catalog of Hitler’s political enemies, the more sinister one was the list of communists, social democrats, and people within the Nazis’ own ranks that was being secretly  compiled  by Hitler’s Sicherheitsdienst, or “SD.” Established in 1931, this “Security Service” was run by Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious, 20-something assistant to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Working out of a spare, upper-floor office in the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters, Heydrich assiduously collected the names of—and compromising information on—potential Nazi targets on thousands of index cards, a shadow operation within the dark realm of Himmler’s black-uniformed SS protection squads.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Following the Reichstag elections, on March 5, 1933, which came on the heels of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, the Nazis seized control of state and local government with a deluge of 200,000 brown-uniformed storm troopers. Local authorities were thrown out of their offices. Swastika banners were hoisted over town halls. Citizens attempting to remove these unauthorized symbols were assailed. Some were sent to concentration camps.

In the southern state of Bavaria, two of Hitler’s closest associates, Adolf Wagner and Hans Frank, were installed as state interior minister and state minister of justice, respectively. Himmler was appointed the new chief of the Bavarian state police, known as the “Green Police” because of the color of their uniforms, while retaining his position as head of the SS. Joseph Hartinger, a Bavarian state prosecutor, immediately recognized the conflict of interest. “Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the state police,” Hartinger observed, “and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in concentration camps.”

Himmler suspended Green Police authority over the recently established network of detention facilities, transforming them into black sites in the justice system, a hellish world beyond the reach of accountability or judicial recourse. Himmler also placed his assistant Heydrich in charge of Department IV, the intelligence service of the Bavarian state police. Heydrich now had access to thousands of classified police files, including the reports of police informants who had infiltrated the Nazi Party’s ranks. For people such as Herbert Hunglinger and Sebastian Nefzger, this was a catastrophe.

Hunglinger was a 53-year-old retired police major who had joined the Nazi Party in 1920, according him the honorific Alter Kämpfer, “Old Warrior,” bestowed on those who had joined the movement in the earliest years, before National Socialism had become politically fashionable. Hunglinger helped establish the Führerschule, a special school for training party leaders, and was said to have possessed the personal trust of the Führer. But recognizing the threat Hitler posed, Hunglinger was all the while feeding intelligence to Bavarian authorities. When his cover was blown, Hunglinger was subjected to brutal interrogation. He confessed his role as a police informant and was dispatched to Dachau, along with five other moles ferreted out by Heydrich via his examination of the Department IV police files.

In Dachau, Hunglinger was placed in Barrack X, a series of single concrete cells, where he was lashed and beaten at regular intervals by SS guards. The pain was such that he begged for a revolver to shoot himself. “We don’t have revolvers,” Hunglinger was told, according to postwar testimony. “Besides, you’re not worth the bullet.” In a “charitable” gesture, he was handed a leather belt and told to hang himself. When guards discovered that Hunglinger was still alive the next day, he was given a particularly severe beating. “That should do it,” an SS guard observed. The next day Hunglinger was found dead, hanged by the neck.

Sebastian Nefzger, another police informant who had infiltrated the Nazi Party, was found dead in his cell with his wrists slit. An autopsy revealed that the 33-year-old salesman, with a wife and child, had in fact “died from asphyxiation, resulting from strangulation and beating.” The flesh on his back had been flayed to the bone.

Loyalty was the sine qua non of service to Hitler and his movement. SS men swore blood allegiance to their Führer: “Treue ist mein Eid,” “Loyalty is my oath.” Treue was reciprocated with Treue, betrayal with unspeakable savagery. The pervasiveness of this blood credo throughout the National Socialist hierarchy, including among Hitler’s closest associates, is evidenced by an inscription in Hitler’s copy of November Heads now held at the Library of Congress. “To Adolf Hitler in loyal subservience!” reads the handwritten dedication.

The author of that dedication was Gregor Strasser, who—in addition to being co-owner of Kampf Verlag, the publishing house that had brought out Thirty November Heads—was in the early 1930s considered equal to Hitler by many in the Nazi Party and superior to him by some. Karl Lüdecke was a Hitler disciple who knew Strasser well. “Within Nazidom, Gregor Strasser was, next to Hitler, the most powerful man and the most effective speaker,” Lüdecke recalled. According to Lüdecke, Strasser was also the most articulate and ardent voice of “the socialist wing” of the Nazi movement, “strong-willed, independent, creative, with a mind of his own—ambitious, but unwilling to sell his soul for the sake of advancement.” Hitler was the fanatical nationalist. Strasser was the committed socialist. Together, the two men lent credence to the National Socialist Party name.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Strasser possessed a pragmatism that Hitler lacked. “The visionary genius of this man is singular,” Strasser said of Hitler. “But what good is genius that is not anchored in reality, whose brilliant ideas cannot be implemented in the real world.” Implementation became Strasser’s job. The two men had met in the summer of 1921, and across the next decade Strasser assumed growing control over the party’s evolution. It was Strasser who managed the surge in party membership from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 by 1931. He quadrupled the number of party chapters, from 71 to more than 270, and, most important, restructured party administration to align with voting precincts, helping drive the Nazis’ stunning electoral successes in the early ’30s. As evidence that he considered himself the chancellor’s peer, Strasser never addressed Hitler as Mein Führer, only Herr Hitler.

Hitler and Strasser divided Germany into respective political realms. Hitler commanded the south. Strasser, along with his younger brother, Otto, oversaw the north. Hermann Rauschning was a prominent Nazi in the port city of Danzig. “Hitler’s nature was incomprehensible to the North German,” Rauschning observed. North Germans preferred a man like Strasser, who was “practical, clearer headed” and “quick to act without bombast and bathos, with a sound peasant’s judgment.” When Hitler visited the Ruhr industrial region, he was annoyed by the predominance of Strasser posters.

The left-wing weekly journal Die Weltbühne took the measure of both men: “It doesn’t require much prophetic skill to be of the opinion that in the not-too-distant future Strasser will press his lord and master Hitler into a corner and take the reins of the party.” Within senior party ranks, Strasser was commonly known as “Gregor the Great.”

Despite his near-equal position within the party, Strasser placed loyalty to Hitler above all else. Rosenberg recalled that Strasser invariably ended his speeches with the declaration “I fought as a Hitler man, and I will go to my grave as a Hitler man.” But when Hitler clashed with Otto Strasser over the direction of the National Socialist movement, Gregor was forced to choose between Hitler and his brother. One day in the spring of 1928, while Gregor was away, Hitler appeared in the Strasser brothers’ Berlin office and threatened to dispatch 10 storm troopers to pull Otto into line. Otto drew a revolver from his desk. “I have eight shots, Herr Hitler,” he said. “That means eight fewer storm troopers.” Hitler stormed out of the office. But Gregor would side with Hitler over his brother. “Thank God we did not lose Strasser,” Hitler said at the time. “Loyal subservience”—treue Gefolgschaft—indeed.

But subservience did not mean permanent blindness. In 1932, when the party radicals—Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm—pressed Hitler on a “rule or ruin” strategy, Strasser spoke his mind to Hitler, urging accommodation and restraint. When the Nazis took a beating at the polls in the November 6, 1932, Reichstag election, shedding 2 million votes and 40 Reichstag seats, the party was thrown into crisis. “The Führer had misplayed his cards” was the line circulating among senior Nazi Party ranks. The game was up. Karl Lüdecke recalled that Hitler, “with his own chances diving towards zero, was rushing feverishly with his aides from place to place, fighting desperately to fend off a complete Nazi collapse.”

Strasser calmly took matters in hand. He told Hitler that the time had come for accommodation. The party should enter into a coalition with Berlin’s ultimate power broker, Kurt von Schleicher, who was a confidant of German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler waffled, then dug in. “Strasser argued that Schleicher had to be tolerated,” Goebbels reported to his diary. ”The Führer clashed as fiercely with him as I have ever seen.”

Hitler was furious when he learned that Strasser had met with Schleicher to explore potential cooperation. He accused Strasser of betrayal. Strasser was reportedly dumbfounded. “Herr Hitler, do you really believe me capable of such a dirty trick?” Strasser asked.

“Yes,” Hitler replied.

Strasser was “deeply wounded” by Hitler’s accusation. Hans Frank met with Strasser shortly afterward. Frank knew Strasser to be one of the most “confident and pragmatic men” he had ever met. But he found Strasser completely undone, despairing that Hitler was now in the clutches of the party radicals. “Frank, this is horrific,” Strasser said. “Göring is a brutal egotist who could care less about Germany, Goebbels is a club-footed devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer’s guards.” Strasser resigned his party posts, as well as his Reichstag seat, but retained his party membership, ostensibly so as not to damage the already faltering political movement he had helped build.

Strasser departed Berlin for a six-week vacation in Italy. Goering and Goebbels, as Lüdecke later recalled, “struck while the iron was hot.” By the end of January 1933, Hitler was chancellor, Göring was a cabinet minister and the chief of police of Prussia, and Goebbels would soon be minister of propaganda. Strasser withdrew from political life, devoting himself to his business interests.

[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Hitler spoke of bringing Strasser back into the party, but no one took him seriously. Hitler had always seen Strasser as a threat and seemed to be relieved to have him out of the way. Some thought Hitler’s talk of reengaging with Strasser was tactical, to keep Ernst Röhm, who had succeeded Strasser as the second-most-powerful man in the party, off-guard. In the early summer of 1934, when Hitler feared a possible coup by Röhn and his army of storm troopers, Hitler decided to resolve any doubts about who held absolute authority.

On Saturday, June 30, he flew to Munich and dispatched Himmler and SS men on a blood purge of senior storm-trooper ranks—a killing spree code-named Operation Hummingbird. Röhm was taken into custody, handed a pistol, and told to shoot himself. “If I am to be killed,” he said, “let Adolf do it himself.” Röhm was shot dead on the spot. Dozens of senior Röhm associates were summarily executed.

That same day, the SS paid a visit to the Berlin residence of Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. When he opened the door, he was asked whether he was von Schleicher. “Yes, I am General von Schleicher,” he said, and was shot dead on the spot. Schleicher’s wife, hearing the gunfire, rushed into the foyer and was gunned down as well. Another former chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, also received a knock on the door of a Berlin address where he was thought to be residing, while, in fact, he had already fled the country.

That same afternoon, Gregor Strasser was having lunch with his family at his home in Berlin. At 1:30 p.m., five Gestapo officers entered the house and informed Strasser that he was suspected of “treasonous activities” and that his office in Munich was to be searched. This must have come as a surprise to Strasser. On February 1 of that year, Strasser had been awarded the Golden Party Pin, one of the Nazi Party’s highest honors, inscribed with Strasser’s founding-membership rank, Number 9. Upon arrival at his office, Strasser was handed over to a waiting SS detachment. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but the most credible has him being placed in a cell at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albrecht Palace, where on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders he was shot—in the neck rather than the head, to prolong the agony. He bled to death on the concrete floor over the course of an hour.

During those same hours, Strasser’s private attorney was shot in his office after refusing to surrender documents “concerning Strasser’s conflict with Hitler,” and Strasser’s former chief of staff was also shot from behind outside his Munich apartment. Strasser’s right-hand man, the Nazi military officer Paul Schulz, was seized and taken for a ride by the Gestapo before being thrown out on the road with the words “Now run, you swine!” Schulz was shot five times and left for dead, but he miraculously survived. (After dragging himself down the road, he was found by a passing car and eventually escaped to Switzerland.) In all, the Night of the Long Knives officially claimed 84 victims, but the actual number was probably much higher.

By June, all but one of Rosenberg’s 30 November heads were either dead, imprisoned, or living in exile. The first November head to go down, before Rosenberg even published his book, was Walther Rathenau, the Weimar-era foreign minister who insisted that Germany respect the “war guilt clause” in the Treaty of Versailles and adhere to the onerous war-reparation payments. In Thirty November Heads, Rosenberg observes that this “racial Jew and liberal esthete” received his just desserts when he was assassinated, in June 1922, by right-wing extremists. Another November head, Matthias Erzberger, who helped negotiate the November 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War, was also assassinated by a far-right group before Rosenberg’s book was published. Including Rathenau and Erzberger in the book was Rosenberg’s not-so-subtle way of nodding to the fate that awaited the remaining 28.

A few others had by 1934 already died of old age or natural causes. These included Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who, according to Rosenberg, had as “chancellor of capitulation” and “foreign minister of subservience politics” helped subjugate all of Europe to the “reign of Jewish high finance.” Others, like the Social Democratic Party’s leader, Otto Wels, and the popular satirist Kurt Tucholsky (Hitler “has a mustache like Chaplin though hardly as funny”), had fled into exile before dying—Wels to France, where he succumbed to a heart attack, and Tucholsky to Sweden, where he committed suicide. On August 23, 1933, Robert Weismann, “a Jew and a Jurist,” was one of the first 33 Germans to be “denationalized,” their citizenship legally stripped, and deported as an undesirable alien. By 1934, most of the other remaining November heads were in concentration camps.   

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

The lone member of Rosenberg’s list to still be alive and free in Germany as of June 1934 was November head No. 18, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht was, according to Rosenberg, a central banker who learned the “dark arts” of high finance from Jewish bankers—“Goldschmidts, Mendelssohns, Wassermanns”—and brought ruin to the German economy with inflationary practices while pocketing for himself an annual, inflation-proof salary of “250,000 Goldmarks.” But while Schacht was, according to Rosenberg’s book, a “criminal abuser of the German people and the “father of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the German people,” he would emerge six years later as one of Hitler’s most important facilitators, introducing him to financiers, hosting election fundraisers, and urging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. For these efforts, Hitler rewarded him with a cabinet post and the presidency of the Third Reich’s central bank.

Yet Schacht soon found himself dismayed by the government in which he was now complicit. “How could you ever take upon yourself the responsibility of determining the fate of human beings without any judicial proceedings?” Schacht asked Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives. “No matter what the circumstances, you should have allowed the trials to take place, even if they had only been summary trials.” Schacht continued to quarrel with Hitler, and in 1938 went so far as to publicly rebuke him for what happened to Jews on Kristallnacht. Eventually, like the other surviving November heads, Schacht would find himself dispatched to a series of concentration camps, ending up at Dachau. Hitler reciprocated Treue with Treue. Until he didn’t.

After the bloody 1934 purge, Hitler gave a speech justifying his actions. “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this,” he said. “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.” Hitler was as explicit as he was unapologetic. “I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason,” he said, before going on to dismiss the killing of others, such as Strasser and Schleicher, as collateral damage. “I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life,” Hitler continued. “Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”

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