In the Garden of Beasts

personal relationship and knew that Hindenburg had telegraphed Papen to congratulate him on his speech.
    Papen now told Hitler he would go to Hindenburg’s estate, Neudeck, and ask Hindenburg to authorize full publication of the speech.
    Hitler tried to mollify him.He promised to remove the propaganda minister’s ban on publication and told Papen he would go with himto Neudeck, so that they could meet with Hindenburg together. In a moment of surprising naïveté, Papen agreed.
    THAT NIGHT, SOLSTICE REVELERS ignited bonfires throughout Germany. North of Berlin the funeral train carrying the body of Göring’s wife, Carin, came to a stop at a station near Carinhall. Formations of Nazi soldiers and officials crowded the plaza in front of the station as a band played Beethoven’s “Funeral March.” First, eight policemen carried the coffin, then with great ceremony it was passed to another group of eight men, and so on, until at last it was placed aboard a carriage pulled by six horses for the final journey to Göring’s lakeside mausoleum. Hitler joined the procession. Soldiers carried torches. At the tomb there were great bowls filled with flame. In an eerie, carefully orchestrated touch, the mournful cry of hunters’ horns rose from the forest beyond the fire glow.
    Himmler arrived. He was clearly agitated. He took Hitler and Göring aside and gave them unsettling news—untrue, as Himmler surely was aware, but useful as one more prod to get Hitler to act against Röhm. Himmler raged that someone had just tried to kill him. A bullet had pierced his windshield. He blamed Röhm and the SA. There was no time to waste, he said: the Storm Troopers clearly were on the verge of rebellion.
    The hole in his windshield, however, had not been made by a bullet. Hans Gisevius got a look at the final police report. The damage was more consistent with what would have been caused by a stone kicked up from a passing car. “It was with cold calculation that [Himmler], therefore, blamed the attempted assassination on the SA,” Gisevius wrote.
    The next day, June 21, 1934, Hitler flew to Hindenburg’s estate—without Papen, as certainly had been his intent all along. At Neudeck, however, he first encountered Defense Minister Blomberg. The general, in uniform, met him on the steps to Hindenburg’s castle. Blomberg was stern and direct. He told Hitler that Hindenburg was concerned about the rising tension within Germany. If Hitler could not get things under control, Blomberg said, Hindenburg would declare martial law and place the government in the army’s hands.
    When Hitler met with Hindenburg himself, he received the same message. His visit to Neudeck lasted all of thirty minutes. He flew back to Berlin.
    THROUGHOUT THE WEEK DODD heard talk of Vice-Chancellor Papen and his speech and of the simple miracle of his survival. Correspondents and diplomats made note of Papen’s activities—what luncheons he attended, who spoke with him, who shunned him, where his car was parked, whether he still took his morning walk through the Tiergarten—looking for signs of what might lie ahead for him and for Germany. On Thursday, June 21, Dodd and Papen both attended a speech by Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht. Afterward, Dodd noticed, Papen seemed to get even more attention than the speaker. Goebbels was present as well. Dodd noted that Papen went to his table, shook hands with him, and joined him for a cup of tea. Dodd was amazed, for this was the same Goebbels “who after the Marburg speech would have ordered his prompt execution if Hitler and von Hindenburg had not intervened.”
    The atmosphere in Berlin remained charged, Dodd noted in his diary on Saturday, June 23. “The week closes quietly but with great uneasiness.”

CHAPTER 44
The Message in the Bathroom
    P apen moved about Berlin seemingly unperturbed and on June 24, 1934, traveled to Hamburg as Hindenburg’s emissary to the German Derby, a horse race, where the crowd gave him a spirited ovation. Goebbels arrived and pushed through the crowd behind a phalanx of SS, drawing hisses and boos. Both men shook hands as photographers snapped away.
    Edgar Jung, Papen’s speechwriter, kept a lower profile. By now he had become convinced that the Marburg speech would cost him his life. Historian Wheeler-Bennett arranged a clandestine meeting with him in a wooded area outside Berlin. “He was entirely calm and fatalistic,” Wheeler-Bennett recalled, “but he spoke with