Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Göring thanked him for the information. The two rejoined the other guests, but a few moments later Göring offered his regrets and left.

What happened next—what threats were made, what compromises struck, whether Hitler himself intervened—isn’t clear, but by five o’clock that afternoon, April 1, 1934, Messersmith learned that Diels had been named Regierungspräsident , or regional commissioner, of Cologne and that the Gestapo would now be headed by Himmler.

Diels was saved, but Göring had suffered a significant defeat. He had acted not for the sake of past friendship but out of anger at the prospect of Himmler trying to arrest Diels in his own realm. Himmler, however, had won the greatest prize, the last and most important component of his secret-police empire. “It was,” Messersmith wrote, “the first setback that Göring had had since the beginning of the Nazi regime.”

A photograph of the moment when Himmler officially took control of the Gestapo, at a ceremony on April 20, 1934, shows Himmler speaking at the podium, his aspect bland as ever, as Diels stands nearby, facing the camera. His face seems swollen as if from excess drink or lack of sleep, and his scars are exceptionally pronounced. He is the portrait of a man under duress.

In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.”

APRIL BROUGHT STRANGELY LITTLE RAIN but a bumper crop of fresh secrets. Early in the month, Hitler and Defense Minister Blomberg learned that President Hindenburg had become ill, gravely so, and was unlikely to survive the summer. They kept the news to themselves. Hitler coveted the presidential authority still possessed by Hindenburg and planned upon his death to combine in himself the roles of chancellor and president and thereby at last acquire absolute power. But two potential barriers remained: the Reichswehr and Röhm’s Storm Troopers.

In mid-April, Hitler flew to the naval port of Kiel and there boarded a pocket battleship, the Deutschland , for a four-day voyage, accompanied by Blomberg; Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the navy; and General Werner von Fritsch, chief of the army command. Details are scarce, but apparently in the intimate quarters of the ship Hitler and Blomberg crafted a secret deal, truly a devil’s bargain, in which Hitler would neutralize Röhm and the SA in return for the army’s support for his acquisition of presidential authority upon Hindenburg’s death.

The deal was of incalculable value to Hitler, for now he could go forward without having to worry about where the army stood.

Röhm, meanwhile, became increasingly insistent on winning control over the nation’s armed forces. In April, during one of his morning rides in the Tiergarten, he watched a group of senior Nazis pass by, then turned to a companion. “Look at those people over there,” he said. “The Party isn’t a political force anymore; it’s turning into an old-age home. People like that… We’ve got to get rid of them quickly.”

He grew bolder about airing his displeasure. At a press conference on April 18, he said, “Reactionaries, bourgeois conformists, we feel like vomiting when we think of them.”

He declared, “The SA is the National Socialist Revolution.”

Two days later, however, a government announcement seemed to undercut Röhm’s declarations of self-importance: the entire SA had been ordered to go on leave for the month of July.

ON APRIL 22, Heinrich Himmler appointed his young protégé Reinhard Heydrich, newly thirty, to fill Diels’s job as chief of the Gestapo. Heydrich was blond, tall, slim, and considered handsome, save for a head described as disproportionately narrow and eyes spaced too closely. He spoke in a near falsetto that was perversely out of step with his reputation for being coolly and utterly ruthless. Hitler dubbed him “the Man with the Iron Heart,” and yet Heydrich was said to play the violin with such passion that he would weep as he executed certain passages. Throughout his career he would battle rumors that he was in fact Jewish, despite an investigation by the Nazi Party that purported to find no truth to the allegation.

With Diels gone, the last trace of civility left the Gestapo. Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, recognized at once that under Himmler and Heydrich the organization would undergo a change of character. “I could very well venture combat with Diels, the unsteady playboy who, conscious of being a bourgeois renegade, had a good many inhibitions holding him back from foul play,” Gisevius wrote. “But as soon as Himmler and Heydrich entered the arena I should have prudently withdrawn.”

TOWARD THE END OF APRIL the government at last revealed to the public the grave state of Hindenburg’s health. Suddenly the question of who would succeed him became a matter of pressing conversation everywhere. All who were aware of the deepening split between Röhm and Hitler understood that a new element of suspense now propelled the narrative.

While all this was occurring, another nation’s spies became interested in the Dodds. By April, Martha’s relationship with Boris had caught the interest of his superiors in the NKVD. They sensed a rare opportunity. “Tell Boris Winogradov that we want to use him to carry out a project that interests us,” one wrote in a message to the agency’s Berlin chief.

Somehow—possibly through Boris—Moscow had come to understand that Martha’s infatuation with the Nazi revolution was beginning to wane.

The message continued: “It has to do with the fact that, according to our information, the sentiments of his acquaintance (Martha Dodd) have fully ripened for her to be recruited once and for all to work for us.”

What most troubled Dodd during his leave was his sense that his opponents in the State Department were growing more aggressive. He became concerned about what he saw as a pattern of disclosures of confidential information that seemed aimed at undermining his standing. A troubling incident occurred on the night of Saturday, April 14, as he was leaving the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington. A young State Department officer, whom he did not know, approached him and began a conversation in which he openly challenged Dodd’s appraisal of conditions in Germany, citing a confidential dispatch the ambassador had cabled from Berlin. The young man was much taller than Dodd and stood very close in a manner Dodd found physically intimidating. In an angry letter that Dodd planned to hand in person to Secretary Hull, he described the encounter as “an intentional affront.”

Most distressing to Dodd, however, was the question of how the young man had gotten access to his dispatch. “It is my opinion,” Dodd wrote, “… that there is a group somewhere in the Department who think of themselves and not the country and who, upon the slightest effort of any ambassador or minister to economize and improve, begin consorting together to discredit and defeat him. This is the third or fourth time entirely confidential information I have given has been treated as gossip—or made gossip. I am not in the service for any personal or social gain and/or status; I am ready to do anything possible for better work and co-operation; but I do not wish to work alone or become the object of constant intrigue and maneuver. I shall not resign, however, in silence, if this sort of thing continues.”