The Hunt (aka 27)

by William Diehl

  Heydrich turned to Hitler.

  "They were beneath your effort, mein Führer, " he said.

  "Quite right, quite right," a shaken Hitler said. "Where are the others. How many are at the hotel?"

  "Half a dozen," Heydrich answered. "The rest will start coming in by train about six."

  "Good. Assign a man to the station with a detail. Arrest them as they arrive. Execute them all." He looked down at the spreading red stain on the marble floor. "And clean this mess up. Get rid of the ones that are here now."

  "Yes, mein Führer. Heil Hitler."

  Hitler raised his hand in a hurried salute as he walked out the door. Heydrich took three men and went to the conference room where the six SA officers were under house arrest. He opened the doors leading to the courtyard and grabbed a young lieutenant by the arm and shoved him out the door.

  "Heydrich, what on earth is happening?"

  "You have been condemned to death by the Führer."

  "Why, for God's sake? We are not guilty of anything!"

  "The charge is treason. Heil Hitler!" And Heydrich shot him in the chest. The lieutenant grunted as the bullet smacked into his body, knocking his wind out. He fell in a sitting position, and looked up just as Heydrich fired a second shot. It hit him in the eye. The other five were shoved through the doors and as they screamed innocence and pleaded for life, they were gunned down and shot repeatedly after they had fallen.

  Later in the day, Hitler sat behind his desk in Brown House, arms stretched out and resting on his desk. In front of him was Eicke's death list. Vierhaus had been checking off the names throughout the day.

  Himmler had ordered one hundred and fifty SA cadets and another hundred brownshirt leaders taken to the old military jail outside Berlin and the death squads went to work. Every fifteen minutes, five storm troopers or cadets were led from their cells and marched or dragged screaming to the red-brick prison wall outside. Their shirts were torn off, a circle was marked on their chests, and they were executed by ten SS sharpshooters. That grisly work done, the bodies were tossed into metal-lined meat trucks and hauled to a small village down the road from the barracks. There the bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered in the wind.

  Check . . .

  A Bavarian who had helped foil the Beer Hall Putsch eleven years before but was opposed to the annexation of Bavaria to the rest of Germany, was taken out into a swamp and beaten to death with a pickax.

  Check.

  A music critic who was an outspoken socialist was hanged in his basement and shot four times. His death was listed as a suicide.

  Check.

  An ex-storm trooper named Grünstadt, who had once been Hitler's personal bodyguard before becoming Gauleiter of a small German town, was dragged from his farmhouse and had both legs and both arms broken with an ax. Then he was dragged screaming by his collar to a small lake on the farm.

  "This is a mistake," he screamed. "Call the Führer, I was his bodyguard!"

  "Verräter," one of the SS troopers snapped.

  "I am not a traitor," Grünstadt begged.

  They threw him in a small lake and smoked cigarettes as they watched him drown.

  Check.

  General Kurt von Bredow, who had been an aide to General Schleicher during the Beer Hall Putsch, left his house at seven-thirty to take his dachshund, Gretchen, for her morning walk. He carried the puppy outside and as he stooped down to attach the leash to her collar, a black Mercedes pulled up in front of the building.

  "General von Bredow?" one of them asked.

  "Yes?"

  The three men raised their pistols and fired in unison. A dozen bullets ripped through von Bredow's body.

  Check.

  Gustav von Kahr, seventy-three, who had also suppressed the 1923 putsch, was found in a swamp near Munich, hacked to death with a pickax.

  Check . . .

  Check . . .

  Check . . .

  By dusk, the SS death squads led by Göring and Himmler in Berlin had crossed over 1,500 names from Eicke's list. The Munich operation had slaughtered over 300 more. Before nightfall, almost every name on Eicke's list was crossed out.

  Hitler leaned back in his chair and nodded slowly to Vierhaus.

  "Done and done," he said with relief.

  Only Rohm was left.

  In the basement of Stadelheim prison, Röhm sat on an iron cot. He was sweating heavily and had taken off his shirt. His barrel-chest was black with wet, matted hair. He looked up as the cell door swung open and Vierhaus entered. He handed Röhm copies of newspapers with sketchy accounts of Hummingbird. He laid a loaded pistol on top of the paper.

  "The Führer gives you one more chance to make your peace," Vierhaus said.

  Röhm looked up at Vierhaus and laughed.

  "If I am to be shot, tell Adolf to do it himself," Röhm said arrogantly.

  "Suit yourself," Vierhaus said and whirling around, he stalked crablike out of the cell. When he got upstairs, Theodor Eicke was waiting for him. Vierhaus shrugged.

  "Obstinate to the end," he said. "Do it."

  They waited fifteen minutes. Then Eicke checked the clip in his Luger and charged a round into the chamber.

  "Heil Hitler," he said.

  "Heil Hitler," Vierhaus answered.

  Eicke went down into the musky, dark, basement cell. The guards watched him as he came down the steps, silhouetted against the sunlight on the first floor, a burly angel of death, gun in hand. He said nothing. He walked to Röhm's cell and nodded. The guard opened the door.

  Röhm looked up as he entered.

  "Well, my friend the exterminator," he said. "So old Adolf does not have the guts to do it himself."

  "Chief of Staff, get ready," Eicke said.

  Röhm threw back his head.

  "Mein Führer, mein Führer! Heil Hitler!" Röhm yelled.

  The pistol roared in Eicke's fist. The first shot hit Rohm in the chest.

  "Oh!" he cried out. He looked down with surprise at the wound. Eicke shot him again. A second hole burst open beside the first, knocking him on his side. He started to get up again, his head dangling, blood trickling from his nose.

  Eicke stepped closer and shot Röhm in the temple. Röhm's head snapped sideways and he stiffened. Every muscle seemed to tense up. Eicke stood over him. He was about to fire a fourth shot when he heard Röhm's breath rush out and saw his body go limp.

  A few minutes later, Vierhaus entered Hitler's office.

  "Röhm is finished," he said.

  Hitler glowered from beneath bunched eyebrows. There was a moment when he might have felt fleeting remorse but it quickly passed. He nodded.

  "So . . . the opera is over," he said. And then slowly he clapped his hands together.

  "Bravo . . ."

  And now he is in control of the German Army, Vierhaus thought to himself. Now the police are under the control of Himmler. In one night, Hitler has eradicated the heart and soul of the SA and almost all of his outspoken political opponents. He is absolute master of Germany. Now all of Europe is within his grasp.

  Hitler looked up at Vierhaus, his eyes glittering, his blood lust still not sated.

  "Now bring me the Black Lily," he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jenny left the hotel before eight A.M. and took three different taxis on the way to her destination. It was a trick she learned from Avrum, paying ahead of time, jumping out suddenly, dodging through buildings, taking another taxi, then repeating the same procedure again. She did not check to see if someone was following her; she just assumed someone was, just as she had when she was passing out leaflets and circulating The Berlin Conscience. Finally she took the Boulevard Ney south around the perimeter of the city, past the Arc de Triomphe to Montparnasse and walked two blocks to a small café on Rue Longchamps. She bought the morning paper and took a table in the back, from which she could watch the door. She ordered coffee.

  She was shocked when she opened the paper. The story was bannered on the front
page.

  HUNDREDS DIE IN NAZI MASSACRE

  What surprised her even more than the lead story was a guest column on the front page by Bert Rudman. Why didn't he call them with this news? she wondered. Then she smiled ruefully to herself, remembering that she and Kee had made love until early morning and that he had left word at the desk to hold all calls.

  Bert Rudman's commentary on Operation Kolibri was on the front page just under the main story, bordered in black and labeled Commentaire.

  Berlin, Germany, July 1. Last night, in this land of Brahms and Beethoven, of Viennese waltzes and Dresden china, the word fratricide was redefined in a bloodbath the scope of which has not been seen in modern times.

  In 1920, then university student Rudolf Hess, now Hitler's second in command, wrote in an essay: "Great questions of the day will always be settled by blood and iron. Hitler does not shrink from bloodshed. To reach his goal, he is prepared to demolish even his closest friends."

  How prophetic.

  In one ghastly night of homicide, Adolf Hitler turned the dagger of deceit on his friend, Ernst Röhm, and the brownshirt legions that helped propel him to power. Germany's leader ordered his personal guards, the SS, to execute hundreds of brownshirt leaders, one of whom was Röhm, the pedophile warrior he once called friend and comrade.

  It has been reported that Röhm's last words were: "Sieg heil! (Hail victory.) Heil Hitler."

  It is hard to spare sympathy for Röhm or his decimated legions. These storm troopers were the bullies who smashed shops, beat up and murdered innocent people and became the billboard for Hitler's anti-Semitism, one of the tenets of the Nazi party and Hitler's Third Reich.

  But the cowardly manner in which it was done during a night and day in which friend murdered friend and brother turned on brother chills the blood.

  Like rainwater after a storm, blood collected in deep pools in the courtyard of Stadelheim Prison and the SS barracks as the execution of innocent SA military cadets from the training school continued throughout the day. There are reports that many members of the SS firing squads who executed hundreds of cadets became physically ill from the terrifying spectacle and had to be replaced.

  Nor was the butchery confined merely to Röhm and his henchmen. Dozens of Hitler's political opponents were murdered, some as they slept. The SS was given carte blanche in its murderous forays. Mistakes were made during this Night of the Long Knives. Several people were killed because of mistaken identity.

  We have managed to compile only a partial list of those murdered during the night of terror. Estimates range from two hundred or three hundred to as many as three thousand. The actual number of people murdered in Germany in the last twenty-four hours may never be known.

  One thing is obvious. With the destruction of the Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted storm troopers who helped elevate him to dictator, Hitler's power is unchallenged. His personal elite guards, the Schutzstaffel, known as the SS, which number fifty thousand to sixty thousand, are now the undisputed rulers of the streets. The Gestapo, the secret police, has replaced the civilian police.

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "Racism gives the Germans blood and soul. It identifies the enemy and gives the People a sense of self-identity and self-confidence." Racism has now become the law in Germany.

  But this was different. This was not Nazi against Jew, this was German against German, soldier against soldier, comrades killing comrades. This was power through mass murder. This was an outrageous violation of contemporary morality.

  Those of us who have watched the frightening malignancy of Nazism grow within this nation recognize this purge as the prelude to the nightmare. Germany has bowed to the law of terror and Hitler has once again proven himself the master of treachery.

  She folded the paper and stuffed it in her bag. As always, she was proud of Bert for being so outspoken. But she was also humiliated by the horrible news—another humiliation she as a German had to endure. The leader of their country had sanctioned mass murder, like some psychotic despot from medieval times.

  She hurried to the corner and turned into Rue Fresnel; a short, bright street lined with gay shops. A flower stand dominated the center of the block. She went to the stand and looked over the freshly watered bundles of flowers, glistening in the morning sunlight.

  "M'amselle?" the stand keeper said pleasantly.

  "I am looking for something special," she said in French.

  "Perhaps I can help."

  "I am looking for a black lily," she said.

  His expression changed only slightly, a shift in the eyes, a tightening of the jaw.

  "I am sorry," he said. "Try deux cent cinq. "

  "Merci. "

  He tipped his hat and turned to another customer.

  She went on down the street, checking the numbers; 205 was near the middle of the block. It was a tiny tailor and cleaning shop, cramped and hot and smelling of steam and cleaning fluid. It was empty except for a young man in his shirtsleeves pressing pants on a steam machine. He smiled as she entered.

  "Picking up or leaving off?" he asked pleasantly.

  "I came to see Uncle," she said quietly.

  "Uncle?"

  He was tall and slender with long, shaggy hair and soft brown eyes. He looked out the window, quickly perused the street.

  "Uncle Eli," she said. "I brought a flower for him, a rare flower."

  His smile grew more cautious.

  "Oh? An orchid perhaps?"

  "A lily."

  "Lilies are not so rare."

  "The black lily is."

  He nodded, still staring intently at her.

  "So it is. And who should I say is calling?"

  "Jenny Gould. I am Avrum's sister."

  His eyes brightened.

  "Ah, yes," he said warmly. "This way."

  He led her past the steam machine into a back room. They edged their way through racks of fresh-smelling clothes to a stairway at the back of the shop.

  "My name is Jules Loehman," he said, leading her up a narrow staircase to the second floor. "Uncle Eli is my father."

  "Thank you for helping me, Jules."

  "A pleasure and an honor. I met Avrum a few months ago when he was here. A very courageous fellow."

  "He would be pleased to hear you say that."

  "Good. Then tell him I said so."

  They reached a small hallway at the top of the stairs and Jules knocked softly on a door and then opened it and ushered her into a small, incredibly cluttered sitting room. An elderly man was seated at a rolltop desk, writing in a ledger book. Every cubbyhole in the desk was jammed with papers and envelopes. A small dining room table was also stacked with books, papers, file folders. There were even files stacked on the chesterfield and easy chair that occupied one side of the room. In sharp contrast to the litter, the room itself was a bright and cheerful space, lit from above by a large skylight.

  The old man was thin to the point of being frail, his white hair wisping from under a black yarmulke. His skin had the soft, almost translucent look that comes with old age and he had a shawl thrown over his shoulders even though the room was quite warm. He looked up as they entered, squinting over his half-glasses.

  "Uncle, you have a guest. This is Jenny Gould. She is Avrum Wolffson's sister."

  "Half sister," she said.

  He stood with some effort and took her hand.

  "Well, well," he said with a wan smile. "What a pleasant way to start the day." He kissed her hand then waved at the sofa. "Jules, make a space, please."

  He led her to the sofa as Jules stacked several piles of litter on the floor.

  "I had to leave Germany rather abruptly," Old Eli said, gesturing around the room. "This is the sum total of my possessions. I have been going over these things for almost a year and I am still on the first pile."

  "I must get back to the shop," Jules said, excusing himself.

  "You are German then?" Jenny asked.

  "Ja, "Old Eli said sadly. "I taught at
the university with Reinhardt and Sternfeld. I got out." He stopped for a moment and then added: "Unfortunately they were not so lucky."

  "Yes, I know. I am so sorry."

  He studied her through gentle eyes, wise with age and faded with time.

  "You have this look of . . . surprise," Old Eli said.

  She laughed. "I am sorry. For some reason I expected you to be younger."

  "Oh? Subterfuge is a young person's game, is that it?"

  "I suppose that's exactly what I was thinking. A ridiculous prejudice."

  "Most prejudice is ridiculous," he said with a shrug. "Anyway, my dear, it takes an old head to keep young hands steady. Besides, who would have thought that at the age of seventy-nine I would become the traffic director for a subversive organization. I find it all quite invigorating. So, what can we do for you?"

  "I must talk to Avrum."

  His face clouded up. He made a pyramid of his fingers and stared across the tip at her. "Very difficult, my dear. In fact, quite impossible at this moment. Have you heard what's happening? Things are insane in Berlin right now. They are saying as many as three thousand of the Sturmabteilung and many others may have been killed since two nights ago."

  "I just read the paper. My God, what is happening?"

  "On a very basic level, it means that Hitler's power now is absolute."

  "How can we keep putting up with this? How can the people put up with it?"

  "The people?" Old Eli said with great sadness. "Why they ignore it, my dear. They look the other way. Their attitude is simple: they cannot do anything about it so they make believe it is not happening. That is why Avrum's work is so important. He has literally become the voice of Germany's conscience. He keeps reminding them that what is happening is morally repugnant. Not just legally wrong, morally wrong."

  He leaned back and stared up through the sunlight at the bright summer morning.

  "He was one of my students, you know," Old Eli said rather wistfully. "I'm quite proud of that. To have been a mentor to a voice of dissent, what a sweet accomplishment."