The Wooden Shepherdess (44 page)

“Schleicher too had been plotting against the State with a Foreign Power: he was foolish enough to resist arrest, and lost his life in the mêlée.”

So that was that.... But word had arrived that Hitler was shortly expected back, so Göring hadn't got time to answer any more questions and left them—stunned.

*

Göring and Himmler were both on the tarmac to meet their master at Tempelhof Airfield. But Hitler's plane was delayed; and before it a tiny Junkers landed from Bremen. Out of it stepped Karl Ernst.... That made the onlookers rub their eyes: Karl Ernst was arriving late for his own execution—announced three hours ago! This the prisoner didn't know, of course: he took his arrest as some sort of nonsense of Göring's which Röhm and Hitler between them would soon iron out.... Indeed he died convinced that this was the Rightist coup he'd foreseen—an Army coup, which Göring had joined (which is just what it was, in a way); and shouted “Heil Hitler!” straight in the teeth of the firing-squad.

So what had Ernst really been guilty of (no one believed the official line)? Had Göring, people wondered, wanted him silenced for knowing the truth of the Reichstag Fire?

“
Heil Hitler!
” At last the Chancellor's plane was announced, and came in to land.

If Hitler had looked a bit under the weather in Munich, he now looked a great deal worse with his puffy and pallid features lit up by an almost Wagnerian blood-red sunset. To save his voice he greeted the group in silence, shaking their hands; and the only sound as the sun went down was the Guard of Honor clicking their heels.

Then Hitler started towards his car with Göring and Himmler, Göbbels limping behind with a terrible haunted face; and once out of earshot of lesser fry, Himmler pulled out his own list of names—most of them ticked already—a lengthy list, and thoroughly dog-earned by now. Hitler took it and ran his finger down it, asking them questions with Göring and Himmler each side excitedly whispering one in each ear.
What about Papen, first?
Göring smiled: he had tricked the tricky Vice-Chancellor nicely, luring him round to his private apartments while Himmler was seizing his office.... The fool had tried to pull the “Vice-Chancellor” over him, claiming command in the Chancellor's absence—wanting to phone the President—wanting the Army called out! But Göring had soon put a stopper on that tommy-rot....
So where was he now?
Papen was shut in his home surrounded by armed S.S., cut off from the world—unharmed, but equally harmless. Meanwhile Heydrich was having his office files gone through with a tooth-comb, looking for something juicy enough to hold over his head....

Hitler nodded approval.
And Schleicher?
Ah, the intriguing Field-gray Eminence now lay dead as a doornail, and so did his wife. Hitler nodded approval again.
And Strasser?
Now Himmler chipped in: his former patron was lodged under lock and key in Prinz Albrechtstrasse Jail, awaiting....

What! Strasser was still alive?
From fifty yards off folk saw the Führer jerk back his head in a paroxysm of rage: though only Göring and Himmler himself knew why.

*

Strasser had first been lodged in the crowded jail with a group of others, then moved to a cell alone. Late that night, while Hitler was getting at last some well-earned sleep, his erstwhile Fisher of Men saw a gun-barrel poked through the grille in the door. He moved, and the first shot missed: so he dashed to a corner the gun couldn't reach. But then the door opened, and Heydrich and Eicke themselves came in to finish the job.

A lowlier jailer followed with bucket and mop to clean up the mess, for Strasser had bled like a pig. But he wasn't allowed: the blood must remain, a useful exhibit for showing the world what “GESTAPO” henceforth meant.

Sunday dawned. As yet the public at large knew little of any “Röhm-Strasser Plot,” nor how narrow the margin by which the Führer's heroic action (and Göring's) had saved the State; and Göbbels grew restless. Soon the whole propaganda machine must be thrown into gear, justifying the Purge by blackening Röhm and polishing Hitler's (and Göring's) haloes to shine like the noonday sun; and instinct urged him to go on the air at once. But Himmler's Gestapo begged for the black-out of news to go on for a bit since the killing program had got behind schedule (some unmethodical victims who failed to be found where they ought to have been still had to be hunted down).

At noon the Führer at last got dressed and appeared. In the eyes of his Court he had played his essential part: he should now sit back and relax, leaving them to play theirs without any overwrought Führer under their feet; but that wasn't to be. He was nervous and over-excited, as if working up to one of his dangerous
crises-de-nerfs
.

As Friedrich and Brückner knew, yesterday's strong-arm stuff is only a tithe of a proper adjutant's job: the rest is more like a kind of running psychiatry, reading and soothing the master-mind. So Brückner got busy arranging a Chancery Garden Party with tea, and ladies, and plenty of sweet sticky cakes; but this couldn't come off till the afternoon, so the problem of how to avoid any Führer-explosion meanwhile devolved upon Friedrich.

Granite-faced Friedrich was not such a fool as his fine physique had made Ernst suppose, but even he found it hard to divine the cause of his Master's near-hysterical state. Given the Führer's solipsist Weltanschauung (whereby the rest of the universe human and otherwise equally ranked as inanimate “things”), yesterday's slaughter of awkward old friends should have roused in him no more compunction than bulldozing buildings which stood in the way of development schemes; and yet he seemed strangely obsessed by his yesterday's doings, retelling them over and over again. In somebody lesser—some mere Macbeth—you'd have thought it was Conscience; but Conscience was right out of character....

Something, however, had to be done about it at once; and Friedrich had often found it surprisingly easy to switch this solipsist mind from that artist's material we distinguish as “men” to some other and rather less sentient form of clay. So he phoned the Führer's young architect: “Speer—for God's sake hurry and bring us round anything new you have in the way of models or drawings.”

At first the treatment seemed to succeed: Speer's elevations and plans for an eighty-feet-high flight of steps, flanked by vast megalithic abutments and topped by a long colonnade, seemed to have a remarkably calming effect. But all of a sudden the Führer straightened his back, exclaiming: “Approved: start building at once.” And then he was off again, pouring the story of yesterday's deeds into this new pair of ears—as if yesterday's coup was a
chef-d'œuvre
in human relations surpassing anything Speer could devise in stone.

He began with his dawn arrival at Wagner's Ministry: “There stood a group of the traitors, Speer, not even disarmed....” (Not a word about Banquo's Ghost on the stairs, noted Friedrich, nor corpses laid out on the Minister's floor.) “These men had plotted my murder—yet none of them dared raise a finger against me. I walked towards them unarmed and alone, and tore off their epaulets.” Next he described his descent on Wiessee, “with no means of knowing if Röhm had machine-guns trained on me through the windows. Everything rested on me, as alone and unarmed I rushed the swine before they could fire a shot.” Then he suddenly stopped, and turned his embarrassing clear blue glare on their blank uncomprehending faces.

What Friedrich read in those eyes was despair at their incomprehension: could none of these fools hoist in.... Then Friedrich at last understood: “Hoist in” that
he
might have been killed! For after all nothing on earth can equate with a solipsist losing his life, since that is the End of the World itself: so this was simply the after-effect of an
eschatological
class of fright unknown to mere mortals!

More than ten years had passed (reflected Friedrich) since Hitler had faced those unexpected Residenzstrasse bullets in Munich; and those had given the man his bellyful, judging by “Adolf Légalité” since! The solipsist's role is to sit up aloft like a Caesar signaling life or death with a thumb, not plunge in the bloody arena himself.

Just before luncheon, disturbing news reached Himmler: the “suicide” Röhm was still alive. Well, if Röhm still refused to do the decent thing he would have to be helped; and Eicke was just the man, so he telephoned Eicke.... So long as Röhm lived the Führer might still revoke and use Röhm against them!

At luncheon itself the Führer was still on the subject of Wiessee; but now he dwelt on the nauseous orgies that bourgeois respectable inn had been forced to witness half Friday night (and even Friedrich was taken aback by his master's inventive powers). “Those brawny transvestite dancers, those naked boys we saw kept locked in a scented room till needed to satisfy Röhm's unnatural lusts”: he made it all sound like the late Fritz Krupp's notorious orgies in Capri, rather than poor old Röhm's rather shame-faced Consenting Adults—and anyway, why all this fuss? Half of the old Imperial High Command had been perverts (or pseudo-perverts) as part of their cult of manliness, like the Spartans. Early this century General Count von Hasler—the man who demanded “a mountain of corpses,” etc. on which to build a temple to German Kultur: it was dancing before his Kaiser in pink ballet-shirt and a wreath of roses that made him drop dead of a heart-attack....

Now Brückner chipped in, with shocking accounts of Röhm's Standartenstrasse Berlin headquarters: the opulent tapestries, crystal mirrors and thick pile carpets reminding one more of a millionaire's whorehouse than Army barracks. Menus the searchers had found of Lucullan banquets on frog-legs, shark-fins, nightingale-tongues and the finest vintage champagnes: the kinky cabaret-programs....

“There” cried Hitler “you have these ascetics who found my revolution too tame for their tastes, and were plotting to kill me and plunge our country in blood in the name of Social Equality!”

Hitler was still in full spate when Brückner's welcome summons arrived to tea, and Society ladies, and sweet sticky cakes.

*

Tea, and chit-chat, and wonderful summer hats....

That garden-party was still in full swing in Berlin when Eicke reached Stadelheim jail, fresh from the killing of Strasser and anxious to score a double in twenty-four hours. Michael Lippert, also from Dachau, was with him.

They found Röhm stripped to the waist, for the heat in his cell was intense; and his barrel-like body glistened with sweat. “Protocol calls for distinguished heads to fall to distinguished headsmen,” said Eicke by way of explaining his mission. Röhm gave him a look of contempt such as even Eicke would never forget, then stood to attention while Eicke and Lippert riddled his body with lead.

At the back of the Schloss in which Walther and Adèle lived, where high unscalable cliffs overhung the stripling Danube, the room which had once been Mitzi's was now her mother's boudoir. Directly beneath its windows projected an inaccessible ledge, where the rock was crowned by a stretch of ruinous rampart which Walther declared was original Roman. Once she took over the room, Adèle had steep wooden stairs built down from the window to reach it: then she had baskets of soil and afterwards vines and plants carried through the house, to make it her private garden—a miniature Eden grown in an eyrie. Enough of the ancient walls remained for protection from wind and to stop you falling over the edge; and for shade she had them re-roof a roofless watch-tower, turning it into a summerhouse.

That had been ten years ago; and for all these years an Adèle decked in yellow gardening-gloves had tended her plants like gems. But alas, she had made her lovely private garden too lovely and now it was private no longer. This Sunday morning—as often, in summer—the whole Kessen Clan was gathered in “Grossmutter's Garden” for breakfast, trampling her rock-plants and even bringing their dogs. The whole of the Clan, because though nowadays Franz and his family lived on their own on the floor above his parents this was a Sunday, and Walther adored his grandchildren.

Tables were there already; but everything else must be carried down outside stairs that were narrow and steep as a fire-escape. Franz's little Leo could manage alone, by crawling down backwards on hands and knees; but Ännchen had got to be carried, and so had the wriggling dachshunds. Then came the coffee-urn with its antique spirit-stove (for Walther insisted always on coffee at boiling-point): the basins of hard-boiled eggs, the ham, the numerous kinds of sausage, the crocks of butter straight from the icehouse, the long loaves of bread, the china and knives and forks, the sugar, the jugs of cream—and of course the Baron's own Dundee Marmalade. Meanwhile, as Lies trapesed up and down those ladder-like steps with her loads like a giant spider climbing its thread, Leo and Ännchen stood at the bottom and peered unashamedly up her skirts. For those puppy-fat knees which had once caught Augustine's eyes were now at least three times their former girth; they were thicker than Leo's waist.

Franz was there at the breakfast: still lean and athletic, except for a small round paunch as if he were newly enceinte (his wife was a wonderful cook). Trudl was just twenty-one, and engagingly plump: Irma was two years younger, and almost gaunt. Trudl's betrothed (this young Hungarian diplomat seemed to be always on leave) kept trying to hold his sweetheart's hand, confirming Irma's belief
she
never wanted a husband. Soon the twins came in from an early-morning ride, for both were passion-ate horsemen: two handsome young adolescents in pipe-clayed breeches with hair bleached almost as white as that by the sun, and their skins tanned almost as black as their boots. The only family absentee was Uncle Otto, away at Kammstadt on business: the only outsider present was Father Petrus the Parish Priest, who had just been saying Mass in the family chapel.