Historians have long recognized the significance of Adolf Hitler's “Night of the Long Knives,” when he ordered the execution of a number of high-ranking officers in his party's so-called Storm Detachments (Sturmabteilung, or SA) and signed off on the murder of a number of former government officials and opponents of his regime, including former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, two members of Franz von Papen's staff in the Vice Chancery, and the one-time Reich Organization Leader (Reichsorganisationsleiter) of his own Nazi party, Gregor Strasser. The executions lasted from midday on June 30, 1934, until Reich President Paul von Hindenburg intervened to have them stopped in the early morning hours of July 2, 1934. Hitler himself placed the number of those who had been killed at seventy-seven, while other estimates have placed the number of victims as high as two hundred.

Details of the circumstances surrounding Hitler's two-pronged strike against the SA leadership and political conservatives who were plotting his removal as head of the government have remained obscure. Much of the original documentation related to the alleged putsch has been lost, either on Hitler's orders once he realized that it would not have confirmed the existence of a far-flung conspiracy that he had been led to believe existed, or because relatives of those who had been arrested rushed to destroy any evidence that might have implicated others. What is so remarkable about Rainer Orth's magnum opus on the conservative resistance in the first years of the Third Reich is that he was able to compensate for this lacuna in the historical record through exhaustive research in a wide array of primary sources that include not just what he found in the German Federal Archives and other public archives in Germany, Switzerland, and the Russian Federation, but also in private archives, postwar trial records, and even the records of the mortuary to which the bodies of those who had been murdered in Berlin on the first day of the purge were taken. This has to be one of the most thoroughly researched books on the history of the Third Reich that has ever been published. And yet, this is all pulled together in a carefully constructed narrative that is compelling, extraordinarily well written, and eminently readable for anyone who has the time and energy to wade through more than 880 pages of text and another 300 pages of footnotes. In short, Orth's monograph is a tour de force of historical research that more than succeeds in its goal of illuminating the personalities, aspirations, and shortcomings of those who conspired in the first years of the Third Reich to force Hitler's removal from office.

The principal focus of Orth's study is a small group of dedicated anti-Nazis who conspired under the protective wing of Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, who, in his own naïveté, never seemed to grasp exactly what his subordinates were up to. Assembled in the spring of 1933, the group consisted first and foremost of young Catholic aristocrats who had been initiated into the conspiracy by Carl von Jordans, a reclusive private scholar whose Berlin apartment served as a meeting point for many of those who subsequently found their way into von Papen's vice chancery. To this group were added the two men who would become the driving force in the secret struggle to drive Hitler from office: the well-known but impulsive neoconservative publicist Edgar Julius Jung, and the hard-nosed former intelligence officer Herbert von Bose. Their plan, as it came together in the spring of 1934, was to use the growing strain in Hitler's relationship with the SA, as well as the uneasiness that the agitation of the SA for a “second revolution” was causing within the ranks of Germany's conservative elites, to enlist the support of key Reichswehr leaders for a coup that would end in Hitler's removal as chancellor and the arrest of other prominent Nazis. At the same time, Jung began to reach out to other conservative leaders in the hope that they, too, could be persuaded to throw their support behind the coup. Among those he contacted were two former chancellors—Heinrich Brüning and Kurt von Schleicher—and the one-time leader of the veterans organization known as the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, as well as Otto Schmidt-Hannover, Edmund Forschbach, and other functionaries of the now defunct German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei).

The operation was to be set in motion by a speech that von Papen was scheduled to deliver at the University of Marburg on June 17, 1934. The speech, written by Jung in a collaborative effort with other members of the conspiracy, denounced the specter of a “second revolution” associated with Ernst Röhm and the SA leadership, drew attention to the discrepancy between the promise and the practice of Hitler's national revolution, and called for the transformation of the German revolution into a “conservative revolution” that would represent the consummation of all that had been accomplished since January 30, 1933. Von Papen would then follow up his speech with a visit to Hindenburg, whom he would implore to declare a military state of emergency replete with the arrest of Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials. In all of this, however, there were three critical choke points: Papen, Hindenburg, and the German military. As it turned out, von Papen did not visit Hindenburg and became so apologetic to Hitler about the embarrassment his speech had caused the chancellor that he failed to act altogether. Hindenburg, for his part, was in failing health at his estate in Neudeck and was never fully apprised of what was going on in Berlin and Munich. And lastly, Germany's military leadership was never fully initiated into the details of the conspiracy and would only act against the regime on a direct order from Hindenburg—an order that was never forthcoming. In the meantime, Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Göring had gotten wind of what was afoot, although the scale of the actual conspiracy was never as far-reaching as they had imagined. By the last week of June, they had finally convinced Hitler of the threat that the conspiracy in the Vice Chancery posed to Nazi rule and persuaded him to authorize a counter-strike before it was too late to do so.

Orth's book goes a long way in establishing the legitimacy of an organized resistance against Hitler and Nazism that has often been overlooked in the standard histories of the German resistance. It is not just that it reminds us that there was a resistance against Hitler a decade or so before the more celebrated attempts on Hitler's life toward the end of World War II: it is the richness of the detail and insight with which Orth constructs his narrative of that resistance that sets his study apart from most other histories of the men and women who risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives in the struggle against Nazism. It is an extraordinary work that does not merely fill a major gap in the existing body of historical literature on the German resistance, but also sets a standard for empirical research, careful argumentation, and historical acumen that is not likely to be easily surpassed.