In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

(photo credit p7.1)

CHAPTER 47

“Shoot, Shoot!”

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 canapes 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 Rohm 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 Rohm’s door, then burst inside, followed by two detectives. “Rohm,” Hitler barked, “you are under arrest.”

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

Hitler shouted again, “You are under arrest,” and then stepped back into the hall. He advanced next to the room of Rohm’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 Fuhrer! … The Police President of Breslau is refusing to get dressed!”

Or this: Rohm’s doctor, an SA Gruppenfuhrer 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.

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, Rohm 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. Rohm remained seated in the lobby. Kempka heard him request another cup of coffee, by now his third.

Rohm 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 Fuhrer! Heil Hitler.”

The ever-obliging Rudolf Hess offered to shoot Rohm 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 Goring’s palace on Leipziger Platz, from which Goring 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 Goring’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 Goring’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