Winter, p.40
Winter, page 40
For a few minutes the two men sat there chewing in silence, but they watched the road constantly.
‘Here they come now,’ said Koch. It was 6.30 a.m. He opened the car door to tip away his untouched cup of hot soup. Pauli could cheerfully have killed him.
Pauli turned his head towards the road but saw nothing. ‘Where?’
‘They won’t have their lights on,’ said Koch. ‘There!’
He could see them now, three vehicles coming slowly down the final stretch of road.
‘Where’s Dietrich and his Leibstandarte?’ said Koch anxiously. ‘Oh my God! Where is he? How the hell can we protect the Führer if he goes in there now?’
The three cars rolled on right to the front door of the Pension Hanslbauer. Someone there must have been expecting the visitors, for the door opened immediately. Men tumbled out of the cars. Besides the Führer and his associates, there were six broad-shouldered, reliable men from the Political Police department in Munich.
‘Come along!’ said Koch. ‘This is us.’
Pauli swigged down the rest of his soup, even though it burned his throat, and clambered out of the car into the colder air that came off the lake. Koch in the lead and Pauli chasing after him, they ran across the yard and entered the hotel building along with Hitler and the rest of them.
The proprietors – a man and wife – were up and dressed. Perhaps they were preparing breakfast for the fully occupied hotel. The woman hurriedly took off her apron and started to welcome the Führer formally. She even held the guest book ready for signing. Someone elbowed her aside roughly, Lutze grabbed the visitors book and they raced up the stairs. By now everyone had pistols drawn, even Hitler.
There was a banging of doors: they were looking for Röhm. There were shouts and screams. ‘No, not there!’ More shouts. ‘He’s not there, either!’ A thump was heard as something or someone was knocked to the floor. Many of the SA leaders were in bed with young men. Lutze shouted the number of Röhm’s bedroom – he’d read it from the visitors’ book he’d snatched from the old woman. Now Lutze’s role was clear: Lutze was Judas.
Someone was knocking at Röhm’s door and shouting that he had something urgent to discuss. There was a delay, and then the door opened very wide. Röhm was dressed in pyjamas. He stood in the doorway, heavy with sleep and blinking in the light. Hitler called him a traitor and Röhm shouted ‘No.’ Hitler said, ‘Get dressed. You’re under arrest.’ His voice cracked with emotion. Röhm was his oldest friend, an associate and a supporter right from the very beginning, and still almost the only man who used the familiar du to the Führer.
Röhm, his scarred face flushed with anger, stared at him until Hitler turned away and banged on the door opposite Röhm’s. SA Obergruppenführer Edmund Heines opened the door; behind him a young nude man was sitting on the bed, wide-eyed, and searching amongst the rumpled sheets for something to wear. Lutze pushed past Heines into the room. He opened the chest of drawers and wardrobe, looking for weapons, but there were none. Whatever the SA leaders had been doing, there was no evidence of armed revolt.
In the absence of Hitler’s comments, Goebbels – the Führer’s mouthpiece – was shouting ‘Nauseating!’ and ‘Revolting!’ from the other end of the corridor. Pauli stood watching. Otto Dietrich, the press secretary, caught his eye and shrugged. The two men had something in common. Pauli Winter was going to be asked to justify this madness in legal terms, and the press secretary would have to make it into something the public might swallow. Hitler croaked, ‘Take him out and shoot him,’ but no one was sure who was meant to be shot.
Heines heard it, however. He turned to Lutze and said, ‘Lutze, I’ve done nothing. Can’t you help me?’ Lutze, still rummaging through the wardrobe, said, ‘I can do nothing. I can do nothing.’
Koch pushed his way along the corridor. ‘Come, Pauli.’ He seemed to know where he was going. He kicked open the unlocked door of a room and went inside. Pauli followed, pistol ready. There was no SA man to be seen in this bedroom, only a boy in bed: skinny, very young, little more than a child. Koch pulled the sheets from his naked body and the boy flinched, shielding his face with his hands, as if expecting a blow. Koch turned away from the bed and pulled open the wardrobe. At first there seemed to be only clothes hanging there. Then Koch shouted, ‘Out! Out, you bastard!’ and a small hunched figure stepped out from the hanging garments.
He was completely naked. A pale, wrinkled body contrasted oddly with hands and head darkened by sunlight. It was Graf. Without his spectacles, he had to screw up his eyes to see Koch and Pauli more clearly. ‘Winter,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘I thought it might be you.’
Pauli said nothing. For a moment the two men looked at each other. There would be no pleas from Graf. Even now, humiliated and vanquished, he wouldn’t ask for help. ‘You’d better get dressed,’ said Pauli. He handed the old man his gold-rimmed spectacles.
Koch watched the exchange with interest. He’d known all along, of course. And Lothar Koch couldn’t resist telling you he knew. In a policeman it was a failing – perhaps Koch’s only failing as a policeman.
From outside in the corridor someone said, ‘Lock them in the cellars. We’ll take them to Stadelheim.’ It wasn’t clear who said it. Hitler was overcome with emotion and seemed almost incapable of speech. Perhaps it was Goebbels.
Pauli Winter and Lothar Koch drove behind the truck that took the arrested men to Stadelheim Prison. They went the long way, right round the southern end of the lake, through Rottach-Egern and Tegernsee, having heard that the men of Röhm’s HQ Guard were waiting on the direct route back, hoping to rescue their charges.
By the time they got to Munich, the city was awake and at work. Armed men were in evidence everywhere. Nazi Party HQ in Briennerstrasse was completely sealed off – not by brownshirts or SS men but by armed soldiers of the Reichsheer. There were soldiers at the railway station, too, and plainclothes policemen were meeting every train and arresting SA leaders as they arrived for the scheduled SA conference with Hitler at 11:00 a.m.
At the prison, Pauli recognized most of the brownshirt leaders detained. Some of the most famous names in Germany were that day written into the prison records, for the SA had found supporters in high places. Ritter von Krausser, Manfred von Killinger, Hans-Peter von Heydebreck, Hans Heyn, Georg von Detten, Hans Joachim von Falkenhausen . . . Rumours abounded throughout the city, everyone was confused, and fear could be seen in almost everyone’s eyes.
At the SD office, Pauli Winter was given a list of names and addresses. He would serve the warrant – no more than a typed note – and Koch would make the arrest. There were no police cars to spare, so they had to take a taxicab. They had found and arrested six wanted men before they stopped for a quick lunch. They went to the big Bierkeller opposite the prison. It was crowded with policemen, most of them on the same task as Pauli and Koch. By this time Stadelheim Prison in central Munich was full. Prisoners were being taken up the road to where the old Royal Bavarian Gunpowder Factory buildings were now being used as a camp for ‘enemies of the state’. Dachau concentration camp, they called it. Koch cursed their luck long and heartily. Dachau was seventeen kilometres away, the extra journeying was going to make much more work.
Pauli sat back, exhausted. His influenza had weakened him so that every exertion was too much. He drank his ‘soup with egg yolk’ in the hope that it would give him more strength. It wasn’t like Inge’s. Inge’s home-made soup – like everything else she did – was perfect. He loved Inge, and needed her, especially when he wasn’t well. He was lucky to have such a wonderful, beautiful wife. She grumbled sometimes, but Inge did everything just the way he liked it.
Koch, who seemed to enjoy the excitement that the day had brought, was at the next table swapping stories with plainclothesmen from the Political Police desk. Someone said that Viktor Lutze had been declared the new Chief of Staff of the SA, so things didn’t look too rosy for Röhm. There was a story going round that the Stadelheim Prison authorities had put Röhm back into the same cell that he’d occupied when arrested for marching alongside Hitler after the attempted putsch in 1923. If true, it was a grim sort of joke, but it was the type of black humour that policemen enjoyed. Koch and his cronies howled with merriment at the idea of it.
An even better story was that the team sent to arrest Dr Ludwig Schmitt, an ally of Hitler’s old enemy Strasser, had come back with Dr Wilhelm Eduard Schmid, the well-known music critic of the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten. ‘And,’ said the policeman telling the story, ‘once inside Dachau the poor old bastard was executed, so it’s too late to do anything about it now.’ The other men drank their beer and exchanged self-conscious smiles. No one knew if it was true; there were many such stories going the rounds. And it was not only in Munich. Summary executions – officially sanctioned murders – were taking place everywhere. The news just in said that in Berlin Dr Erich Klausener – a director of the Reich Transport Ministry and onetime head of the Police Section of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior – had been shot dead in his office by a uniformed SS man.
Pauli closed his eyes listening to Koch and his pals and tried to clear his blocked sinus. He was suffering. Koch told him to eat up, but Pauli just couldn’t bear to. Once they were in the car again, Koch looked down at the paper and said, ‘The next on the list is SA Obersturmbannführer Heinrich Brand!’
Pauli almost jumped out of his skin. ‘What? Brand?’
‘Just a joke, Pauli, old friend. No, your Brand is far too smart to get caught in the mangle. Brand is to be on Lutze’s new staff, from what I hear.’
Koch looked at his watery-eyed, red-nosed friend and smiled. Koch knew about Pauli’s court-martial, and his time with the Punishment Battalion. Koch had a spy in the army records office who checked up on everyone Koch needed to know about, but he never revealed that knowledge to Pauli, and had arranged the SD personnel files so that Pauli Winter’s army record was unblemished. Koch regarded such little favours as the sort of thing any comrade would expect of another.
They arrested four more SA leaders that afternoon. The elderly brownshirts went meekly and with only mild complaints. It was the journey to Dachau that was so tiring. By 6:00 p.m. the two men reported back to the SD office in Zuccalistrasse 4. Pauli sank down behind his desk while Koch found for him the bottle of schnapps they kept in the filing cabinet. ‘What a day!’ said Pauli, but just as he was signing out, a clerk told him that a lawyer was required at Stadelheim Prison. He was to report to SS-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich.
He found the well-known Leibstandarte commander in the courtyard of the old prison. The cobbled yard was dark, the low evening sun making the rooftops golden and the enclosed yard blue in the summer-evening light. Dietrich, forty-two years old, was a broad-shouldered man who’d been a manual worker for most of his life: farm labourer, petrol-pump attendant, customs officer, factory worker. Hitler had chosen him as a personal bodyguard back in the days when he needed physical protection at his meetings. Now Dietrich was an SS general, but he’d not lost the common touch. When Pauli found him, he was smoking a cigarette and chatting in Bavarian dialect with six of his black-uniformed soldiers and a tall young subaltern with shiny new officer’s badges.
‘Hello, Pauli,’ said Dietrich, still speaking in his strong Bavarian accent. He prided himself on his informality. ‘It looks like we’re ready to go.’ He threw down his cigarette and ground it under the heel of his polished boot. The firing squad picked up their rifles. ‘I want it all neat and tidy,’ said Dietrich. He put an arm round Pauli’s shoulder and walked him away from the soldiers and the young officer.
‘Yes, Gruppenführer,’ said Pauli.
‘You’re the legal expert. I want it all neat and tidy.’ He looked into Pauli’s watery eyes and, to be sure that it was clear, said, ‘We’re executing these SA people. Not Röhm: he stays in custody while the Führer thinks it over. What’s the normal procedure?’
‘A trial and a verdict,’ said Pauli.
Dietrich was a simple man, and now he smiled as if Pauli had made a subtle joke. ‘The Führer has tried them and found them guilty,’ he said.
Pauli wiped his nose and his eyes. Dietrich was staring at him as if he might be crying. He felt a fool. ‘Do you have orders?’
‘I don’t want the Public Prosecutor chasing me,’ said Dietrich, turning his back and lowering his voice. With remarkable bravery, the Munich Public Prosecutor had persuaded the Ministry of Justice to file cases for ‘incitement to murder’ against the Dachau camp commandant and two of his officials.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Pauli. ‘The Minister of the Interior told the Cabinet that any investigation of Dachau must be refused for reasons of state policy. This will come under the same heading.’
‘But the camp commandant was sacked,’ said Dietrich, scowling. He didn’t want to risk the same fate.
‘It will be all right,’ said Pauli, who wanted only to go home and go to bed. ‘But, for legal reasons, your officer had better read the sentence to each man before the execution takes place.’ Pauli felt a sneeze building up and had his handkerchief ready for it. He sneezed.
‘Gesundheit!’ said Dietrich politely, and beckoned the young officer over to them. ‘Tell him what to say,’ he instructed Pauli.
Thinking quickly, Pauli said, ‘Something like “You have been condemned to death by the Führer.”’ He blew his nose.
‘Is that enough?’ said Dietrich doubtfully.
‘They only have to be told the sentence,’ said Pauli. ‘That’s the law.’
‘“Heil Hitler” at the end,’ said Dietrich. ‘“You have been condemned to death by the Führer. Sentence to be carried out herewith. Heil Hitler.” Got it?’
‘Yes, Gruppenführer,’ said the subaltern.
Crack! The sound of the rifles echoed round and round the narrow prison courtyard. The small barred windows were silent and dark, with bright-orange rust marks disfiguring the grey bricks. Yet Pauli could not get over the feeling that he was being watched by many eyes.
Next! Next! Next! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Cold and wet from a quick drenching under a cold shower, the SA leaders arrived one by one in the yard doorway, frightened and bewildered. The young SS officer’s face was impassive, but he gabbled too quickly through the sentences and sometimes stumbled over the words.
More than one of the prisoners stood erect and met the bullets with a Nazi salute and a shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ believing that they – and their Führer, too – were the victims of an SS coup.
Pauli had qualms when Edmund Heines crumpled under the bullets. As well as being SA-Obergruppenführer, Heines was the Police President of Breslau. And even Dietrich’s iron nerve seemed to go as SA-Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber faced the firing squad. Schneidhuber was Police President of Munich.
But the shooting went on. Pauli watched it dispassionately. Better men than this had died alongside him in the war, he reminded himself. If the truth was known, some of the British and Frenchmen he’d killed were more to be pitied. Only when Captain Graf came into the courtyard did Pauli feel like turning his eyes away. But he didn’t. He watched Graf standing erect in front of the wall that was now chipped and broken with rifle fire. The dust of the broken brickwork hung in the air like smoke, and mingled with the cordite to make a unique stink that he never forgot.
Graf refused a blindfold. He looked at Pauli right to the end. And Pauli stared back at him. Graf didn’t shout ‘Heil Hitler’ or give the Nazi salute. He had never been a great admirer of Hitler, or of the men around him. Graf was one hundred per cent soldier; the Freikorps and the SA were just ways of holding on to a soldier’s mode of life. When the volley came Graf was torn in two and the blood spurted like a fountain. His death seemed bloodier than the others. Perhaps because a chance bullet clipped an artery – or perhaps because Pauli felt it more. Graf had been a comrade, a good comrade, and a man does not lightly lose a friend. But Graf was a soldier; it was a good enough way for a soldier to go.
‘Leave the presidency vacant, what a great idea’
It wasn’t turning out to be the successful dinner party that Inge had planned and she was unhappy. It was the first time that they had had guests in this new Berlin apartment that had been redecorated to their own wishes, and she’d had her dress made specially for the occasion. It was a long slinky bias-cut gold satin gown that hugged her figure. Sleeveless, with a plunging neckline, it revealed her wonderful skin. Inge had invited her sister Lisl with her husband, Erich Hennig. The guest of honour was to be Reichsminister Fritz Esser, now one of the party luminaries, a member of the cabinet, and a close associate of the Führer. But Fritz Esser had sent a huge bunch of flowers and a note that said he was delayed in meetings at the Reichskanzlei and wouldn’t arrive until after dinner.
‘It’s because the President is so sick,’ Inge explained to Erich, her brother-in-law, as if she was well informed about the state of President Hindenburg’s health. ‘I feel so concerned about the Führer. He looks tired.’ The two sisters always spoke of Hitler as a couple of starry-eyed schoolgirls might speak of an adorable hockey coach. It was a competition between them, a contest in which a curiously large proportion of Germany’s female population also participated.
‘I know,’ said Lisl Hennig. ‘We’re hoping Erich will play before the Führer next year at the Bach Festival in Leipzig.’
Lisl was always saying that her husband would be playing at one of the concerts Hitler attended. It would be impetus enough to put Erich Hennig far ahead of his rivals. But Adolf Hitler did not attend many such musical events, and Erich’s career was at present in the doldrums. Hennig’s piano recitals, and his occasional performances with large orchestras, were to be heard in far-off German provinces, while Berlin’s concert halls were monopolized by more famous performers of a previous generation.
