In the Garden of Beasts

their presence. They parked their cars in front of the house in full view of the street, with their tell-all license plates fully exposed.
    The guests were an odd match. François-Poncet disliked the SA chief, as he made clear in his memoir,
The Fateful Years
. “Having always entertained the liveliest repugnance toward Röhm,” he wrote, “I avoided him as much as possible despite the eminent role he played in the Third Reich.” But Regendanz had “begged” François-Poncet to come.
    Later, in a letter to the Gestapo, Regendanz tried to explain his insistence on getting the two men together. He laid the impetus for the dinner on François-Poncet, who, he claimed, had expressed frustration at not being able to meet with Hitler himself and had askedRegendanz to speak with someone close to Hitler to communicate his desire for a meeting. Regendanz suggested that Röhm might prove a worthy intermediary. At the time of the dinner, Regendanz claimed, he was unaware of the rift between Röhm and Hitler—“on the contrary,” he told the Gestapo, “it was assumed that Röhm was the man who absolutely had the confidence of the
Führer
and was his follower. In other words one believed that one was informing the
Führer
when one informed Röhm.”
    For dinner, the men were joined by Mrs. Regendanz and a son, Alex, who was preparing to become an international lawyer. After the meal, Röhm and the French ambassador retired to Regendanz’s library for an informal conversation. Röhm talked of military matters and disclaimed any interest in politics, declaring that he saw himself only as a soldier, an officer. “The result of this conversation,” Regendanz told the Gestapo, “was literally nothing.”
    The evening came to an end—mercifully, in François-Poncet’s opinion. “The meal was dismal, the conversation insignificant,” he recalled. “I found Röhm sleepy and heavy; he woke up only to complain of his health and the rheumatism he expected to nurse at Wiessee,” a reference to Bad Wiessee, where Röhm planned a lakeside sojourn to take a cure. “Returning home,” François-Poncet wrote, “I cursed our host for the evening’s boredom.”
    How the Gestapo learned of the dinner and its guests isn’t known, but by this point Röhm most certainly was under close surveillance. The license plates of the cars parked at Regendanz’s house would have tipped any watcher off to the identities of the men within.
    The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain’s Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp.
    Phipps wrote, “The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.”
    AND THERE WAS THIS:
    On Thursday, May 24, Dodd walked to a luncheon with a seniorofficial of the foreign ministry, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, whom Dodd described as being “what amounts to Assistant Secretary of State.” They met at a small, discreet restaurant on Unter den Linden, the wide boulevard that ran due east from the Brandenburg Gate, and there they engaged in a conversation that Dodd found extraordinary.
    Dodd’s main reason for wanting to see Dieckhoff was to express his dismay at having been made to seem naive by Goebbels’s Jews-as-syphilis speech after all he had done to quiet Jewish protests in America. He reminded Dieckhoff of the Reich’s announced intent to close the Columbia House prison and to require warrants for all arrests and of other assurances that Germany “was easing up on the Jewish atrocities.”
    Dieckhoff was sympathetic. He confessed to his own dim view of Goebbels and told Dodd he expected that soon Hitler would be overthrown. Dodd wrote in his diary that Dieckhoff “gave what he considered good evidence that the Germans would not much longer endure the system under which they were drilled everlastingly and semi-starved.”
    Such candor amazed Dodd. Dieckhoff spoke as freely as if he were in England or the United States, Dodd noted, even to the point of expressing the hope that Jewish protests in America would continue. Without them, Dieckhoff said, the chances of overthrowing Hitler would diminish.
    Dodd knew that even for a man of Dieckhoff’s rank such talk was dangerous. He wrote, “I felt the deep concern of a high official who could thus risk his