In the Garden of Beasts

and lushly beautiful Elmina Rangabe, but there was a hitch this night—Tommy brought his wife. There was heat, champagne, passion, jealousy, and that background sense of something unpleasant building just over the horizon.
    Bella Fromm chatted briefly with Hanfstaengl and recorded the encounter in her diary.
    “I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl said. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”
    “Dr. Hanfstaengl,” Fromm said, “we’ve discussed this before. You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”
    “All right. Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”
    At the moment Fromm was not feeling particularly solicitous of Nazi goodwill. Two weeks earlier her daughter, Gonny, had left for America, with Messersmith’s help, leaving Fromm saddened but relieved. A week before that, the newspaper
Vossische Zeitung—
“Auntie Voss,” where she had worked for years—had closed. She feltmore and more that an epoch in which she once had thrived was coming to an end.
    She said to Hanfstaengl, “Of course if you’re going to do away with right and wrong, and make it Aryan and non-Aryan, it leaves people who happen to have rather old-fashioned notions about what is right and wrong, what is decent and what is obscene, without much ground to stand on.”
    She turned the conversation back to the subject of Messersmith, whom she described as being so revered by his colleagues “that he is practically regarded as having ambassadorial rank,” a remark that would have irritated Dodd no end.
    Hanfstaengl softened his voice. “All right, all right,” he said. “I have lots of friends in the United States, and all of them side with the Jews, too. But since it is insisted on in the party program—” He stopped there in a kind of verbal shrug. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag of candy fruit drops.
Lutschbonbons
. Bella had loved them as a child.
    “Have one,” Hanfstaengl said. “They are made especially for the
Führer
.”
    She chose one. Just before she popped it into her mouth she saw that it was embossed with a swastika. Even fruit drops had been “coordinated.”
    The conversation turned to the political warfare that was causing so much unease. Hanfstaengl told her that Röhm coveted control not only of the German army but also of Göring’s air force. “Hermann is in a rage!” Hanfstaengl said. “You can do anything to him except fool around with his Luftwaffe, and he could murder Röhm in cold blood.” He asked: “Do you know Himmler?”
    Fromm nodded.
    Hanfstaengl said, “He was a chicken farmer, when he wasn’t on duty spying for the Reichswehr. He kicked Diels out of the Gestapo. Himmler can’t stand anybody, but Röhm least of all. Now they’re all ganged up against Röhm: Rosenberg, Goebbels, and the chicken farmer.” The Rosenberg he mentioned was Alfred Rosenberg, an ardent anti-Semite and head of the Nazi Party’s foreign bureau.
    After recounting the conversation in her diary, Fromm added,“There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.”
    IT WAS A MEASURE of the strange new climate of Berlin that another dinner party, wholly innocuous, should prove to have profoundly lethal consequences.The host was a wealthy banker named Wilhelm Regendanz, a friend of the Dodds, though happily the Dodds were not invited on this particular occasion. Regendanz held the dinner one evening in May at his luxurious villa in Dahlem, in the southwestern portion of greater Berlin known for its lovely homes and its proximity to the Grunewald.
    Regendanz, father of seven, was a member of the Stahlhelm, or Steel Helmets, an organization of former army officers with a conservative bent. He liked bringing together men of diverse position for meals, discussions, and lectures. To this particular dinner Regendanz invited two prominent guests, French ambassador François-Poncet and Captain Röhm, both of whom had been to the house on past occasions.
    Röhm arrived accompanied by three young SA officers, among them a curly-headed blond male adjutant nicknamed “Count Pretty,” who was Röhm’s secretary and, rumor held, his occasional lover. Hitler would later describe this meeting as a “secret dinner,” though in fact the guests made no attempt to disguise