The
Night of the Long Knives (
German: ), sometimes called
Operation Hummingbird or in Germany, the
Röhm Putsch (German spelling: ) or sometimes mockingly (Reich's murder week), was a
purge that took place in
Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934, when the
Nazi regime carried out a series of political ex-judicial executions. Leading figures of the left-wing
Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), along with its figurehead,
Gregor Strasser, were killed, as were prominent conservative anti-Nazis (such as former Chancellor
Kurt von Schleicher and
Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed
Adolf Hitler's
Beer Hall Putsch in 1923). Many of those killed were leaders of the
Sturmabteilung (SA), the
paramilitary Brownshirts.