Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

AT 2:00 A.M. SATURDAY, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise. One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the morning light.”

Soon after landing, Hitler received a final bit of incendiary news—the day before, some three thousand Storm Troopers had raged through Munich’s streets. He was not told, however, that this demonstration had been spontaneous, conducted by men loyal to him who were themselves feeling threatened and betrayed and who feared an attack against them by the regular army.

Hitler’s fury peaked. He declared this “the blackest day of my life.” He decided that he could not afford to wait even until the meeting of SA leaders set for later that morning at Bad Wiessee. He turned to Kempka: “To Wiessee, as fast as possible!”

Goebbels called Göring and gave him the code word to launch the Berlin phase of the operation—the innocent-sounding “Kolibri.”

Hummingbird.

IN BERLIN, THE LAST of the late northern dusk lingered on the horizon as the Dodds settled in for a peaceful Friday night. Dodd read a book and consumed his usual digestif of stewed peaches and milk. His wife allowed her thoughts to dwell for a time on the grand lawn party she and Dodd planned for July 4, less than a week away, to which they had invited all the embassy staff and several hundred other guests. Bill Jr. stayed at the house that night and planned to take the family Buick for a drive the next morning. Martha looked forward to the morning as well, when she and Boris planned to set off on another countryside excursion, this time to picnic and sunbathe on a beach in the Wannsee district. In six days she would set out for Russia.

Outside, cigarettes twinkled in the park, and now and then a large, open car whooshed past on Tiergartenstrasse. In the park, insects speckled the halos cast by lamps, and the brilliant white statues in the Siegesallee—Avenue of Victory—gleamed like ghosts. Though hotter and more still, the night was very much like Martha’s first in Berlin, peaceful, with that small-town serenity she had found so captivating.

The next morning, Saturday, June 30, 1934, Boris drove to Martha’s house in his open Ford and soon, armed with picnic larder and blanket, the two set out for the Wannsee district southwest of Berlin. As a setting for trysts it had a turbulent history. Here, on a lake named Kleiner Wannsee—Little Wannsee—the German poet Heinrich von Kleist shot himself in 1811, after first shooting his terminally ill lover. Martha and Boris were headed for a small, uncrowded lake well to the north called Gross Glienicke, Martha’s favorite.

The city around them was sleepy with nascent heat. Though the day would be another difficult one for farmers and laborers, for anyone intent on lakeside sunbathing it promised to be ideal. As Boris drove toward the city’s outskirts, everything seemed utterly normal. Other residents, looking back, made the same observation. Berliners “strolled serenely through the streets, went about their business,” observed Hedda Adlon, wife of the proprietor of the Hotel Adlon. The hotel followed its usual rhythms, although the day’s heat promised to compound the logistical challenges of catering a banquet for the king of Siam to be held later that day at the Schloss Bellevue—Bellevue Palace—at the northern edge of the Tiergarten, on the Spree. The hotel would have to shuttle its canapés and entrees in its catering van through traffic and heat, amid temperatures expected to rise into the nineties.

At the lake, Boris and Martha spread their blanket. They swam and lay in the sun, entangled in each other’s arms until the heat drove them apart. They drank beer and vodka and dined on sandwiches.

“It was a beautiful serene blue day, the lake shimmering and glittering in front of us, and the sun spreading its fire over us,” she wrote. “It was a silent and soft day—we didn’t even have the energy or desire to talk politics or discuss the new tension in the atmosphere.”

ELSEWHERE THAT MORNING, three far larger cars raced across the countryside between Munich and Bad Wiessee—Hitler’s car and two others filled with armed men. They arrived at the Hotel Hanselbauer, where Captain Röhm lay asleep in his room. Hitler led a squad of armed men into the hotel. By one account he carried a whip, by another, a pistol. The men climbed the stairs in a thunder of bootheels.

Hitler himself knocked on Röhm’s door, then burst inside, followed by two detectives. “Röhm,” Hitler barked, “you are under arrest.”

Röhm was groggy, clearly hungover. He looked at Hitler. “Heil, mein Führer,” he said.

Hitler shouted again, “You are under arrest,” and then stepped back into the hall. He advanced next to the room of Röhm’s adjutant, Heines, and found him in bed with his young SA lover. Hitler’s driver, Kempka, was present in the hall. He heard Hitler shout, “Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes I’ll have you shot on the spot!”

Heines emerged, preceded by, as Kempka put it, “an 18-year-old fair-haired boy mincing in front of him.”

The halls of the hotel resounded with the shouts of SS men herding sleepy, stunned, and hungover Storm Troopers down to the laundry room in the hotel basement. There were moments that in another context might have been comical, as when one of Hitler’s raiding party emerged from a hotel bedroom and reported, crisply, “ Mein Führer! … The Police President of Breslau is refusing to get dressed!”

Or this: Röhm’s doctor, an SA Gruppenführer named Ketterer, emerged from one room accompanied by a woman. To the astonishment of Hitler and his detectives, the woman was Ketterer’s wife. Viktor Lutze, the trusted SA officer who had been in Hitler’s plane that morning, persuaded Hitler that the doctor was a loyal ally. Hitler walked over to the man and greeted him politely. He shook hands with Mrs. Ketterer, then quietly recommended that the couple leave the hotel. They did so without argument.

IN BERLIN THAT MORNING, Frederick Birchall of the New York Times was awakened by the persistent ring of the telephone beside his bed. He had been out late the night before and at first was inclined to ignore the call. He speculated, wishfully, that it must be unimportant, probably only an invitation to lunch. The phone kept ringing. At length, acting on the maxim “It is never safe to despise a telephone call, especially in Germany,” he picked up the receiver and heard a voice from his office: “Better wake up and get busy. Something doing here.” What the caller said next captured Birchall’s full attention: “Apparently a lot of people are being shot.”

Louis Lochner, the Associated Press correspondent, learned from a clerical worker arriving late to the AP office that Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where the Gestapo was headquartered, had been closed to traffic and now was filled with trucks and armed SS, in their telltale black uniforms. Lochner made a few calls. The more he learned, the more disturbing it all seemed. As a precaution—believing that the government might shut down all outbound international telephone lines—Lochner called the AP’s office in London and told its staff to call him every fifteen minutes until further notice, on the theory that inbound calls might still be allowed through.