Garden of Beasts

spacious office in the Chancellory, looked over the carelessly formed characters in the note once again.
    Col. Ernst:
    I await the report you have agreed to prepare on your Waltham Study. I have devoted some time to review it on Monday.
    Adolf Hitler
    He cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses, replaced them. He wondered what the careless lettering revealed of the writer. The signature was particularly distinctive. The “Adolf” was a compressed lightning bolt; “Hitler” was somewhat more legible but it sloped curiously, and severely, downward to the right.
    Ernst spun around in his chair and stared out the window. He felt just like an army commander who knew that the enemy was approaching, about to attack, but not knowing when he would strike, what his tactics would be, how strong was his force, where he would establish the lines of assault, where the flanking maneuver would come.
    Aware too that the battle would be decisive and the fate of his army—indeed, of the whole nation—was at stake.
    He wasn’t exaggerating the gravity of his dilemma.Because Ernst knew something about Germany that few others sensed or would admit out loud: that Hitler would not be in power long.
    The Leader’s enemies, both within the country and without, were too many. He was Caesar, he was Macbeth, he was Richard. As his madness played itself out he would be ousted, murdered, or even die by his own hand (so astonishingly manic were his rages), and others would step into the immense vacuum after his demise. And not Göring either; greed of soul and greed of body were in a footrace to bring him down. Ernst’s own feeling was that, with the two leaders gone (and Goebbels pining away for his lost love, Hitler), the National Socialists would wither, and a centrist Prussian statesman would emerge—another Bismarck, imperial perhaps but reasonable and a brilliant statesman.
    And Ernst might even have a hand in that transformation. For, short of a bullet or bomb, the only sure threat to Adolf Hitler and the Party was the German army.
    In June of ’34, Hitler and Göring murdered or arrested much of the Stormtrooper leadership during the so-called Night of the Long Knives. The purge was felt necessary largely to appease the regular army, which had become jealous of the huge Brownshirt militia. Hitler had regarded the horde of thugs on one side and the German military—the direct heirs of the nineteenth century’s Hohenzollern battalions—on the other, and without a moment’s hesitation chose the latter. Two months later, upon President Hindenburg’s death, Hitler took two steps to solidify his position. First, he declared himself the unrestricted leader of the nation. Second—and far more important—he required the German armed forces to pledge a personal oath of loyalty to him.
    De Tocqueville had said that there would never be arevolution in Germany for the police would not allow it. No, Hitler wasn’t concerned about a popular uprising; his only fear was the army.
    And it was a new, enlightened military that Ernst had devoted his life to since the end of the War. An army that would protect Germany and its citizens from all threats, perhaps ultimately even from Hitler himself.
    Yet, he reflected, Hitler was not gone yet, and Ernst couldn’t afford to ignore the author of this note, which was as troubling to him as the distant rumble of armor approaching through the night.
    Col. Ernst: I await the report. . . . 
    He had hoped that the intrigue Göring set in motion would fade away, but this piece of onionskin paper meant that it would not. He understood that he had to act quickly to prepare for and repel the attack.
    After a difficult debate, the colonel came to a decision. He pocketed the letter, rose from his desk and left his office, telling his secretary that he would return within a half hour.
    Down one hall, down another, past the ubiquitous construction work in the old, dusty building. Workers, busy even on the weekend, were everywhere. Building was the metaphor for the new Germany—a nation rising from the ashes of Versailles, being reconstructed according to Hitler’s often-quoted philosophy of “bringing-into-line” with National Socialism every citizen and institution in the country.
    Down another hallway, under a stern portrait of the Leader in three-quarter view, looking slightly upward, as if at his vision for the nation.
    Ernst stepped outside into the gritty wind, hot from the broiling afternoon