Garden of Beasts

London in early 1937; the organization ultimately became Interpol.Sachsenhausen concentration camp officially replaced the old camp at Oranienburg in the late summer of 1936. For the next nine years more than 200,000 political and racial prisoners were held there; tens of thousands were executed or died from beatings, abuse, starvation and illness. The occupying Russians in turn used the facility as a prison to house some sixty thousand Nazis and other political prisoners, of whom an estimated twelve thousand died before the camp was closed in 1950.
    As for Otto Webber’s favorite gin mill: The Aryan Café permanently closed its door shortly after the Olympic Games ended.
    A brief note here regarding the fate of several characters appearing in the story: In the spring of 1945, as Germany lay in ruins, Hermann Göring came to the mistaken belief that Adolf Hitler was abdicating control of the country and asked to succeed him. To Göring’s shame and horror, Hitler was incensed and labeled him a backstabber, casting him out of the Nazi party and ordering his arrest. At the Nuremberg war crimes trial Göring was sentenced to die. He killed himself two hours before his scheduled execution in 1946.
    Despite being the supreme sycophant, Heinrich Himmler made independent peace overtures to the Allies (the head of the SS and architect of the Nazis’ mass-murder programs actually suggested that Jews and the Nazis should forget the past and “bury the hatchet”). Like Göring he was labeled a traitor by Hitler. As the country fell, he tried to escape justice by fleeing in disguise—but for some reason the persona he chose to assume was that of a Gestapo military policeman, which meant automatic arrest. His real identity was immediately discovered. He killed himself before he could stand trial at Nuremberg.
    Toward the end of the war, Adolf Hitler grew increasingly unstable, physically debilitated (it is believed he had Parkinson’s disease) and despondent, planning military offensives with divisions that no longer existed, calling upon all citizens to fight to the death and ordering Albert Speer to institute a scorched-earth plan (which the architect refused to do). Hitler spent his last days in a bunker complex beneath the Chancellory garden. On April 29, 1945, he married his mistress, Eva Braun, and soon after they both committed suicide.
    Paul Joseph Goebbels remained loyal to Hitler until the end and was appointed his successor. Following the Führer’s suicide, Goebbels attempted to negotiate peace with the Russians. The efforts were futile and the former propaganda minister and his wife, Magda, also took their own lives (after she had murdered their six children).
    Earlier in his career Hitler said of his military expansion that led to the Second World War, “It will be my duty to carry on this war regardless of losses. . . . We shall have to abandon much that is dear to us and today seems irreplaceable. Cities will become heaps of ruins; noble monuments of architecture will disappear forever. This time our sacred soil will not be spared. But I am not afraid of this.”
    The empire that Hitler claimed would survive for a thousand years lasted for twelve.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
    With heartfelt thanks to the usual suspects, and a few new ones: Louise Burke, Britt Carlson, Jane Davis, Julie Deaver, Sue Fletcher, Cathy Gleason, Jamie Hodder-Williams, Emma Longhurst, Carolyn Mays, Diana Mackay, Mark Olshaker, Tara Parsons, Carolyn Reidy, David Rosenthal, Ornella Robiatti, Marysue Rucci, Deborah Schneider, Vivienne Schuster and Brigitte Smith.
    Madelyn, too, of course.
    For those interested in reading more about Nazi Germany, you’ll find the following sources as interesting as I found them invaluable in my research: Louis Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich; Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler; John Toland, Adolf Hitler; Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley; Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History; Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust; William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and 20th Century Journey, Volume II, The Nightmare Years; Giles MacDonogh, Berlin; Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider and My German Question; Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday; Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny; David Clay Large, Berlin; Richard Bessel, Life in the Third Reich; Nora Waln, The Approaching Storm; George C. Browder, Hitler’s Enforcers;