Night of the long knives

In the summer of 1934 Adolf Hitler planned and conducted the most ruthless purge of his 13-year period as leader of Germany.

The victims were not political opponents but friends, colleagues and fellow fascists who had helped the Nazi Party in its rise to power.

The Night of the Long Knives broke the back and the will of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the brawling street thugs who had bludgeoned political opposition into submission.

The SA's ruthless bullyboy tactics played no small part in Hitler's establishment of a dictatorship that was to influence affairs in Germany - and the world - throughout the 1930s and beyond.

The Night of the Long Knives was a cull that eliminated somewhere between 300 and a thousand victims, the exact number has never been clear, many of them innocent of any intention to rival Hitler.