Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Sigrid Schultz set off for the central government district, watching carefully for certain license plate numbers, Papen’s in particular. She would work nonstop until four the next morning and then note in her daily appointments diary, “dead tired—[could] weep.”

One of the most alarming rumors was of massed volleys of gunfire from the courtyard of the old cadet school in the otherwise peaceful enclave of Gross-Lichterfelde.

AT THE HOTEL HANSELBAUER, Röhm got dressed in a blue suit and emerged from his room, still confounded and apparently not yet terribly worried by Hitler’s anger or the commotion in the hotel. A cigar projected from the corner of his mouth. Two detectives took him to the hotel lobby, where he sat in a chair and ordered coffee from a passing waiter.

There were more arrests, more men shoved into the laundry room. Röhm remained seated in the lobby. Kempka heard him request another cup of coffee, by now his third.

Röhm was taken away by car; the rest of the prisoners were loaded onto a chartered bus and driven to Munich, to Stadelheim Prison, where Hitler himself had spent a month in 1922. Their captors took back roads to avoid contact with any Storm Troopers seeking to effect rescue. Hitler and his ever-larger raiding party climbed back into their cars, now numbering about twenty, and raced off on a more direct route toward Munich, stopping any cars bearing SA leaders who, unaware of all that had just occurred, were still expecting to attend Hitler’s meeting set for later that morning.

In Munich, Hitler read through a list of the prisoners and marked an “X” next to six names. He ordered all six shot immediately. An SS squad did so, telling the men just before firing, “You have been condemned to death by the Führer ! Heil Hitler. ”

The ever-obliging Rudolf Hess offered to shoot Röhm himself, but Hitler did not yet order his death. For the moment, even he found the idea of killing a longtime friend to be abhorrent.

SOON AFTER ARRIVING at his Berlin office that morning, Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, tuned his radio to police frequencies and heard reports that sketched an action of vast scope. Senior SA men were being arrested, as were men who had no connection with the Storm Troopers. Gisevius and his boss, Kurt Daluege, set off in search of more detailed information and went directly to Göring’s palace on Leipziger Platz, from which Göring was issuing commands. Gisevius stuck close to Daluege in the belief that he was safer in his company than alone. He also figured no one would think to look for him at Göring’s residence.

Although the palace was an easy walk away, they drove. They were struck by the aura of utter calm on the streets, as though nothing unusual were taking place. They did note, however, the complete absence of Storm Troopers.

The sense of normalcy disappeared immediately when they turned a corner and arrived at Göring’s palace. Machine guns jutted from every promontory. The courtyard was filled with police.

Gisevius wrote: “As I followed Daluege through the succession of guards and climbed the few steps to the huge lobby, I felt as if I could scarcely breathe. An evil atmosphere of haste, nervousness, tension, and above all of bloodshed, seemed to strike me in the face.”

Gisevius made his way to a room next to Göring’s study. Adjutants and messengers hurried past. An SA man sat quaking with fear, having been told by Göring that he was to be shot. Servants brought sandwiches. Although crowded, the room was quiet. “Everyone whispered as if he were in a morgue,” Gisevius recalled.

Through an open doorway, he saw Göring conferring with Himmler and Himmler’s new Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich. Gestapo couriers arrived and left carrying white slips of paper on which, Gisevius presumed, were the names of the dead or soon-to-be dead. Despite the serious nature of the endeavor at hand, the atmosphere in Göring’s office was closer to what could be expected at a racetrack. Gisevius heard crude and raucous laughter and periodic shouts of “Away!”

“Aha!”

“Shoot him.”

“The whole crew of them seemed to be in the best humor,” Gisevius recalled.

Now and then he caught a glimpse of Göring striding around the room dressed in a billowy white shirt and blue-gray trousers tucked into black jackboots that rose above his knees. “Puss-in-Boots,” Gisevius thought suddenly.

At one point a red-faced police major burst from the study, followed by an equally enflamed Göring. Apparently a prominent target had escaped.

Göring shouted instructions.

“Shoot them!… Take a whole company…. Shoot them…. Shoot them at once!”

Gisevius found it appalling beyond description. “The written word cannot reproduce the undisguised blood lust, fury, vicious vengefulness, and, at the same time, the fear, the pure funk, that the scene revealed.”

DODD HEARD NOTHING about the cataclysm unfolding elsewhere in the city until that Saturday afternoon when he and his wife sat down for lunch in their garden. At almost the same moment, their son, Bill, appeared, having just returned from his drive. He looked troubled. He reported that a number of streets had been closed, including Unter den Linden at the heart of the government district, and these were being patrolled by heavily armed squads of SS. He had heard as well that arrests had been made at the headquarters of the SA, located just blocks from the house.

Immediately Dodd and his wife experienced a spike of anxiety for Martha, out for the day with Boris Winogradov. Despite his diplomatic status, Boris was a man whom the Nazis even in ordinary times could be expected to view as an enemy of the state.

Boris and Martha stayed at the beach all day, retreating to shade when the sun became too much but returning again for more. It was after five when they packed their things and with reluctance began the drive back to the city, “our heads giddy,” Martha recalled, “and our bodies burning from the sun.” They traveled as slowly as possible, neither wanting the day to end, both still relishing the oblivion of sunshine on water. The day had grown hotter as the ground cast its accumulated warmth back into the atmosphere.

They drove through a bucolic landscape softened by heat haze that rose from the fields and forests around them. Riders on bicycles overtook and passed them, some carrying small children in baskets over the front fenders or in wagons pulled alongside. Women carried flowers and men with knapsacks engaged in the German passion for a good, fast walk. “It was a homely, hot, and friendly day,” Martha wrote.

To catch the late afternoon sun and the breezes that flowed through the open car, Martha hiked the hem of her skirt to the tops of her thighs. “I was happy,” she wrote, “pleased with my day and my companion, full of sympathy for the earnest, simple, kindly German people, so obviously taking a hard-earned walk or rest, enjoying themselves and their countryside so intensely.”

At six o’clock they entered the city. Martha sat up straight and dropped the hem of her skirt “as befits a diplomat’s daughter.”

The city had changed. They realized it in phases as they got closer and closer to the Tiergarten. There were fewer people on the street than might be considered normal, and these tended to gather in “curious static groups,” as Martha put it. Traffic moved slowly. At the point where Boris was about to enter Tiergartenstrasse, the flow of cars all but stopped. They saw army trucks and machine guns and suddenly realized that the only people around them were men in uniform, mostly SS black and the green of Göring’s police force. Noticeably absent were the brown uniforms of the SA. What made this especially odd was that the SA’s headquarters and Captain Röhm’s home were so near.