The Night of the Long Knives : 48 hours that changed the history of the world

Many wonder how anyone could ever allow Adolf Hitler-a mediocre army corporal and failed landscape painter-to rise to such power as to become the architect of the most calamitous events of the twentieth century.

It is a story of ambition, betrayal, brutality, and vengeance that spanned a number of years.

But Hitler's fateful transition from ambitious demagogue to Europe's most vicious tyrant occurred on an ordinary Saturday-June 30, 1934in a little-known event that would come to be called "The Night of the Long Knives." Shortly afterward, Hitler's notorious SS chief Heinrich Himmler began to systematically erase all traces of the operation from official records in a program that would include mysterious disappearances so that no one could bear witness to what is arguably the most crucial turning point in Europe's modern history.

Author Paul Maracin has painstakingly pieced together the scattered and intentionally obscured elements of this fascinating story of deceit.