Goering (18 page)

On Friday, June 29, Hitler and Goering, again according to Gritzbach, kept in direct touch with each other by means of dispatches sent by air over the three hundred miles that separated them. Even so, Hitler distracted himself with a tour of some local labor camps, returning afterward to his hotel in Godesberg. There he was joined in the evening by Goebbels, who brought the news that Karl Ernst had placed his Berlin S.A. men on the alert, in spite of Hitler's order that they should go on leave on July 1. Hitler had also heard that a specialist had been summoned to attend Hindenburg. The men with Hitler now were, apart from Goebbels, Viktor Lutze, a reliable S.A. leader, and Otto Dietrich. Meanwhile Goering waited in Berlin for the final order from the Führer and took close counsel with Himmler and Blomberg.

Later, Hitler was to claim that he received alarming messages from Goering by telephone announcing that an S.A. putsch was about to take place in both Berlin and Munich. In the small hours he sent a telegram to Roehm to say he was on his way to join him and then hastened into a plane on an airfield near Bonn for the two-hour journey to Munich. When he landed with Goebbels, Lutze and Dietrich at four in the morning, he found that the local S.A. leaders had already been placed under arrest by the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. With the help of Army transport, Sepp Dietrich's S.S.
Leibstandarte
special detachment, some seven hundred strong, had been brought from Berlin to provide the necessary gunmen. Then Hitler and his supporters and a detachment of Sepp Dietrich's men left Munich in a fleet of cars that drove in swift formation down the road to the lakeside forty miles away. There Roehm was sleeping unguarded in the Hanslbauer sanatorium. In the room next to him lay Heines, embracing a boy. Hitler's convoy sped along the autobahn that cut through the shadowy forests in which misty shafts of light from the early morning sun were beginning to slant; then the cars turned south to reach the shores of the Tegernsee.

Hitler's self-control was by now uncertain; he had been virtually without sleep for a considerable time, and the moment was approaching when he had to face Roehm. The cars drew up, and the avengers, led by their Führer, crept silently in. Heines, according to Otto Dietrich, presented “a disgusting scene”; he and the boy with him were taken out, hustled into the back seat of one of the cars, and there shot. Dietrich describes Hitler pacing up and down in front of Roehm with huge strides, “fiery as some higher being, the very personification of justice.” Roehm, still dazed with sleep, would not speak. Hitler took his prisoners back to Munich, where they were put into the Stadelheim prison. There they were kept while Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, did what he could through the rest of the day to save their lives. Hitler left them and shut himself away in the Brown House. Eventually Sepp Dietrich's men complained that it would soon be too dark for the firing squads to shoot, and urgent phone calls to Berlin for instructions as to who should be shot among those whose names appeared on the hastily prepared lists led finally to confirmation that nineteen of the two hundred men held should be killed at once. They were hurried out to be shot in the gathering dusk, and others were assassinated the following day. Roehm was not among them; two days later, on July 2, he was invited to commit suicide. When he refused, he was shot down in his cell by two S.A. officers while, stripped to the waist, he stood contemptuously to attention.

There was none of this inefficient, squeamish uncertainty of action about the proceedings in Berlin. There, like the generals in
Julius
Caesar
, Himmler and Goering had their death lists ready and in proper order.

Goering was determined on immediate action against the proscribed without any reference to the formalities of justice, which might have caused the same unfortunate delays as were happening in Munich once Hitler's back was turned. The Ministry of the Interior was bypassed. Arrests and examinations began during the night on the direct instructions of Goering, who conducted the purge from his personal residence in the Leipzigerplatz, assisted by Himmler and Heydrich and by his aide Paul Koerner, who belonged to the S.S. Liveried footmen served sandwiches while men taken from their houses or from the streets and dragged to Goering's house under guard stood about in anterooms in a state of apprehension. As the names of the latest arrivals were called, Goering could be heard shouting, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” With their names pricked on Goering's lists, they were hastened away for death at the cadet school of Lichterfelde, where men attached to Goering's Landespolizei stood by to provide the firing squads.

The area round Goering's palace was cordoned off by S.S. guards armed with machine guns. Through this display of armed force, Papen was led by Bodenschatz, who had been sent by Goering to fetch the Vice-Chancellor from his office, to which he had been summoned early in the morning by his anxious staff. Goering told him the situation and bluntly refused to let him take any action or even to inform President von Hindenburg of what was happening. He was, he said, in complete control. Meanwhile Himmler had stolen out of the room to give the signal for a raid on Papen's Vice-Chancellery, where the principal members of his staff were either shot or arrested. Goering, his desk covered by a flood of incoming messages, ordered Papen out; he was placed under house arrest with his telephone cut off. Papen admits that by doing this Goering undoubtedly saved his life, and that both Goebbels and Himmler had wanted to have him assassinated. Goering, sensible of the effect Papen's murder would have had on public opinion, prevented it; Papen was, after all, still Vice-Chancellor and a close friend of the President.
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Goering broke away from his bloody assize to conduct a foreign-press conference in the late afternoon at the Chancellery. He spoke briefly and brutally about the purge to an agitated gathering of journalists. When the name of Schleicher was mentioned, Goering smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I know you journalists like a headline. Well, here it is. General von Schleicher had plotted against the regime. I ordered his arrest. He was foolish enough to resist. He is dead.” With that he left the conference.
⁴

The arrests and killings went on throughout the day and the night. Schleicher and his wife had already been shot in their house at Neu Babelsberg; Karl Ernst, who may well have known more than was wanted about the Reichstag fire, was captured on the road to Bremen while traveling with his bride on their honeymoon, taken to Berlin and shot as he cried the words “Heil Hitler!”; Papen's advisers Herbert von Bose and Edgar Jung were shot; Kahr, who had defied Hitler in 1923, was killed now, at the age of seventy-three, and his hacked and mutilated body thrown into a swamp near Dachau; Erich Klausener, the leader of the Catholic Action, was shot; Gehrt, in spite of his former position as Air Force captain in Goering's squadron and holder of the Pour le Mérite, was, according to Heiden, ordered to wear his decorations so that Goering might strip them from his uniform before sending him to the shooting wall. Other victims were General Kurt von Bredow, a friend of Schleicher's, Willi Schmid, a music critic (killed in error for Willi Schmidt, an S.A. leader), and Father Bernhard Stempfle, who was said to know too much about the death of Geli Raubal. Quickly the circle widened and private feuds were being settled in many parts of Germany by men supposed to be carrying out the process of the purge. Gregor Strasser was flung into the Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison, where the bullets fired into him burst an artery and splashed the walls of his cell with blood. The bodies of the men shot were cremated.

During the evening Hitler flew to Berlin from Munich with Dietrich and Goebbels. Gisevius watched the scene at Tempelhof airport, the blood-red sky from which the plane descended, the pale, unshaven face of Hitler, who had not slept for forty hours, the “diabolic” grinning face of Goebbels, the ghostly formalities as Goering, Himmler and Frick stood in line to greet the Führer, the ominous silence broken only by the sound of their clicking heels. Behind them a guard of honor presented arms. Himmler took from his pocket a long, tattered list of names, and in the angry twilight Hitler, Goering and Himmler stood on the runway. The Führer stared at the list with dull eyes and a gray face while the others whispered at him with insistent gestures. Hitler ran his finger down the list and then stopped at one name, probably that of Strasser; then he silenced the whispering of his subordinates with a savage toss of his head. No more was said, and he went at once to his car.

The shooting and the killing and the suicides, real or induced, went on through the following day, and Hitler, rested now, gave a garden party at the Chancellery. The streets of Berlin seemed quiet when Ambassador Dodd, anxious about the fate of his friend Papen, drove slowly by his house but could see nothing untoward. The names of the dead were coming through, but the papers were filled with the most pedestrian news. Only the foreign journalists were trying to penetrate the rumors and reach the full story of the night of the long knives.

Goering ordered all papers and any other evidence connected with the purge to be destroyed. The German press was silenced by Goebbels. In the version of what happened presented by Hitler himself to the Reichstag on July 13, Roehm's name was blackened and the essential details were veiled. “Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand against the State, then certain death is his lot,” said Hitler. He, and he alone, had been the supreme justiciar of the German people during this period of national danger, and that was why trials in the courts of justice had been put aside. The events in any case were hallowed by the telegrams sent from Hindenburg to both Hitler and Goering on July 2; that addressed to Goering read: “Accept my approval and gratitude for your successful action in suppressing the high treason. With kind regards and greetings. von Hindenburg.” Hindenburg was too old and ill by now to know what he was saying or what was being said for him. The reward to Himmler was more substantial than kind thoughts or telegrams: the S.S. was made a force in its own right independent of the S.A., which was immediately disarmed and reduced in status to a civilian athletic organization. Papen, released after a few days from his detention, vehemently protested his innocence and resigned as Vice-Chancellor. At the end of July Hitler told him he was to become the German minister to Austria, and he accepted in spite of what had happened.

Goering was well satisfied with his organized liquidation of the men he considered guilty, until, rather late in the weekend, his instinct for moderation began to assert itself and he felt that the massacre had gone far enough. At Nuremberg he claimed that he intervened with Hitler at noon on Sunday and arranged for him to issue an order to stop all further executions. “I was worried that the matter would get out of hand as, in fact, it had already done to some extent . . .” He then claimed that only seventy-two people had been executed, the majority of these in southern Germany. No final figure for the number of murders that took place is ever likely to be known. Hitler's total, as given in the Reichstag, was fifty-eight executed and nineteen killed; Gisevius at Nuremberg made his estimate between one hundred and fifty and two hundred persons and said that, in addition to the official list of numbered names compiled by Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, there were other secret, subsidiary lists of men whom Himmler and Heydrich wanted to have removed under the cover of the purge. In the provinces there were many local assassinations, which one estimate puts at almost a thousand.

In August, when Hindenburg died, Hitler took over the power of the Presidency and so secured control of the Army, every member of which took an oath of allegiance to him. Goering called the officers of the Luftwaffe together in the large hall at the Air Ministry and told them of Hindenburg's death in a subdued voice, speaking like an actor in a tragedy. He added that the powers of the Reich President would devolve on the Reich Chancellor, and he drew his sword and told them all to swear the new oath of allegiance. Milch stepped forward and put his hand on the sword, and while an adjutant read out loud the words of the oath every man present raised his hand and repeated it solemnly. The oath made no mention, as in former times, of the constitution of the nation; the allegiance of all fighting men was to be paid without reserve to the person of Adolf Hitler.
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These first years of control were a period during which Goering's character was shaped in its final mold. As he adjusted his bulk to the seat of power, as he took stock of what was good for him, as he changed from the combination of impoverished flat-dweller, petty businessman and political demagogue to a man accustomed to the life of palaces and ministries, as he leaned back on the cushion of servants and secretaries and contemplated the endless perspective of his subordinates, as he experienced the unlimited resources of wealth that came to him without having to be earned, Goering in fact became more vulnerable precisely because he had much more to lose. Power developed his weakness of character rather than his strength. The uncomplicated physical courage of the fighter pilot, the rock climber, or the aerobat was not a moral courage; now that Goering had great possessions he became more than ever subservient to Hitler. Displacement could lead to ruin and the loss of everything he had labored hard to come by. From this time he did everything that Hitler told him, glorying in his subordination and compensating for it by indulging in displays of self-glorification that were to become increasingly childish and by developing an unreliable and exacting nature when dealing with his staff. Expediency, the commonest of motives in the conduct of an authoritarian society, became the key to Goering's character. He was Hitler's principal organization man, his spokesman, his shadow. “If the Führer wants it, two and two make five,” he said.