In the Garden of Beasts

time.The three men undressed and climbed in. The water was warm and provided scant relief. No one swam. Instead the three simply sat there, talking quietly, only their heads showing above the water.
    That Dodd was a subject of this conversation seems likely. Just a few days earlier Phillips had written in his diary about Dodd’s unrelenting assault on the wealth of diplomats and consular officials.
    “Presumably the Ambassador has been complaining to the President,” Phillips groused in his diary. Dodd “always complains because of the fact that they are spending in Berlin more than their salaries. This he objects to strenuously, probably for the simple reason that he himself has not the money to spend beyond that of his salary. It is, of course, a small town attitude.”
    ODDLY ENOUGH, MOFFAT’S MOTHER , Ellen Low Moffat, was in Berlin that Friday, to visit her daughter (Moffat’s sister), who was married to the embassy secretary, John C. White. That evening the mother attended a dinner party where she sat beside Papen. The vice-chancellor was, as she later told her son, “well and in extremely high spirits.”

CHAPTER 46
Friday Night
    T hat Friday evening, July 29, 1934, Hitler settled in at the Hotel Dreesen, a favorite of his, in the resort of Bad Godesberg, situated along the Rhine just outside central Bonn. He had traveled here from Essen, where he had received yet another dose of troubling news—that Vice-Chancellor Papen planned to make good on his threat and meet with President Hindenburg the next day, Saturday, June 30, to persuade the Old Gentleman to take steps to rein in Hitler’s government and the SA.
    This news, atop the accumulation of reports from Himmler and Göring that Röhm was planning a coup, convinced Hitler that the time had come for action. Göring left for Berlin to make ready. Hitler ordered the Reichswehr on alert, though the forces he intended to deploy were mostly SS units. Hitler telephoned one of Röhm’s key deputies and ordered all SA leaders to attend a meeting Saturday morning in Bad Wiessee, near Munich, where Röhm was already comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Hanselbauer, taking his cure, which on that Friday night involved a good deal of drinking. His aide, Edmund Heines, bedded down with a handsome eighteen-year-old Storm Trooper.
    Goebbels joined Hitler at Bad Godesberg. They spoke on the hotel terrace as a parade roared below. Blue flashes of lightning lit the sky over Bonn and thunder rumbled everywhere, amplified by the strange sonic physics of the Rhine Valley.
    Goebbels later gave a melodramatic account of those heady moments before Hitler made his final decision. The air had grown stillas the distant storm advanced. Suddenly, heavy rain began to fall. He and Hitler remained seated a few moments longer, enjoying the cleansing downpour. Hitler laughed. They went inside. Once the storm had passed, they returned to the terrace. “The
Führer
seemed in a thoughtful, serious mood,” Goebbels said. “He stared out at the clear darkness of the night, which after the purification of the storm stretched peacefully across a vast, harmonious landscape.”
    The crowd on the street lingered despite the storm. “Not one of the many people standing below knows what is threatening to come,” Goebbels wrote. “Even among those around the Leader on the terrace only a few have been informed. In this hour he is more than ever to be admired by us. Not a quiver on his face reveals the slightest sign of what is going on within him. Yet we few, who stand by him in all difficult hours, know how deeply he is grieved, but also how determined he is to stamp out mercilessly the reactionary rebels who are breaking their oath of loyalty to him, under the slogan of carrying out a second revolution.”
    It was after midnight when Himmler telephoned with more bad news. He told Hitler that Karl Ernst, commander of the Berlin division of the SA, had ordered his forces to go on alert. Hitler cried, “It’s a putsch!”—though in fact, as Himmler surely knew, Ernst had just recently gotten married and was headed to the port of Bremen for the start of a honeymoon cruise.
    AT 2:00 A.M. SATURDAY , June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about