In the Garden of Beasts

far larger cars raced across the countryside between Munich and Bad Wiessee—Hitler’s car and two others filled with armed men. They arrived at the Hotel Hanselbauer, where Captain Röhm lay asleep in his room. Hitler led a squad of armed men into the hotel. By one account he carried a whip, by another, a pistol. The men climbed the stairs in a thunder of bootheels.
    Hitler himself knocked on Röhm’s door, then burst inside, followed by two detectives. “Röhm,” Hitler barked, “you are under arrest.”
    Röhm was groggy, clearly hungover. He looked at Hitler. “Heil, mein Führer,” he said.
    Hitler shouted again, “You are under arrest,” and then stepped back into the hall. He advanced next to the room of Röhm’s adjutant, Heines, and found him in bed with his young SA lover. Hitler’s driver, Kempka, was present in the hall. He heard Hitler shout, “Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes I’ll have you shot on the spot!”
    Heines emerged, preceded by, as Kempka put it, “an 18-year-old fair-haired boy mincing in front of him.”
    The halls of the hotel resounded with the shouts of SS men herding sleepy, stunned, and hungover Storm Troopers down to the laundry room in the hotel basement. There were moments that in another context might have been comical, as when one of Hitler’s raiding party emerged from a hotel bedroom and reported, crisply, “
Mein Führer!
… The Police President of Breslau is refusing to get dressed!”
    Or this: Röhm’s doctor, an SA
Gruppenführer
named Ketterer, emerged from one room accompanied by a woman. To the astonishment of Hitler and his detectives, the woman was Ketterer’s wife. Viktor Lutze, the trusted SA officer who had been in Hitler’s planethat morning, persuaded Hitler that the doctor was a loyal ally. Hitler walked over to the man and greeted him politely. He shook hands with Mrs. Ketterer, then quietly recommended that the couple leave the hotel. They did so without argument.
    IN BERLIN THAT MORNING , Frederick Birchall of the
New York Times
was awakened by the persistent ring of the telephone beside his bed. He had been out late the night before and at first was inclined to ignore the call. He speculated, wishfully, that it must be unimportant, probably only an invitation to lunch. The phone kept ringing. At length, acting on the maxim “It is never safe to despise a telephone call, especially in Germany,” he picked up the receiver and heard a voice from his office: “Better wake up and get busy. Something doing here.” What the caller said next captured Birchall’s full attention: “Apparently a lot of people are being shot.”
    Louis Lochner, the Associated Press correspondent, learned from a clerical worker arriving late to the AP office that Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where the Gestapo was headquartered, had been closed to traffic and now was filled with trucks and armed SS, in their telltale black uniforms. Lochner made a few calls. The more he learned, the more disturbing it all seemed. As a precaution—believing that the government might shut down all outbound international telephone lines—Lochner called the AP’s office in London and told its staff to call him every fifteen minutes until further notice, on the theory that inbound calls might still be allowed through.
    Sigrid Schultz set off for the central government district, watching carefully for certain license plate numbers, Papen’s in particular. She would work nonstop until four the next morning and then note in her daily appointments diary, “dead tired—[could] weep.”
    One of the most alarming rumors was of massed volleys of gunfire from the courtyard of the old cadet school in the otherwise peaceful enclave of Gross-Lichterfelde.
    AT THE HOTEL HANSELBAUER , Röhm got dressed in a blue suit and emerged from his room, still confounded and apparently not yetterribly worried by Hitler’s anger or the commotion in the hotel. A cigar projected from the corner of his mouth. Two detectives took him to the hotel lobby, where he sat in a chair and ordered coffee from a passing waiter.
    There were more arrests, more men shoved into the laundry room. Röhm remained seated in the lobby. Kempka heard him request another cup of coffee, by now his third.
    Röhm was taken away by car; the rest of the prisoners were loaded onto a chartered bus and driven to Munich, to Stadelheim Prison, where Hitler himself had spent a month in 1922. Their captors took back roads to avoid