In the Garden of Beasts

scared,” Martha wrote.
    The story Bill told was a chilling one. Although a fog of rumor clouded every new revelation, certain facts were clear. The deaths of the Schleichers were just two of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of official murders committed so far that day, and the killing continued. Röhm was said to be under arrest, his fate uncertain.
    Each new telephone call brought more news, much of it sounding too wild to be credible. Assassination squads were said to be roaming the country, hunting targets. Karl Ernst, chief of Berlin’s SA, had been dragged from his honeymoon ship. A prominent leader in the Catholic Church had been murdered in his office. A second army general had been shot, as had a music critic for a newspaper. The killings seemed haphazard and capricious.
    There was one perversely comical moment. The Dodds received a terse RSVP from Röhm’s office, stating that “to his great sorrow” he could not attend a dinner at the Dodds’ house set for the coming Friday, July 6, “because he will be on vacation to seek a cure for an illness.”
    “In view of the uncertainty of the situation,” Dodd wrote in his diary, “perhaps it was best he did not accept.”
    ADDING TO THE DAY’S sense of upheaval was a collision that occurred just outside 27a when the embassy chauffeur—a man named Pickford—struck a motorcycle and broke off the rider’s leg.A wooden leg.
    In the midst of it all, there lingered for Dodd a particularly pressingquestion: what had happened to Papen, the hero of Marburg, whom Hitler so loathed? Reports held that Edgar Jung, the author of Papen’s speech, had been shot and that Papen’s press secretary likewise had been killed. In that murderous climate, could Papen himself possibly have survived?

CHAPTER 49
The Dead
    A t three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Berlin’s foreign correspondents gathered at the Reich chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse for a press conference to be given by Hermann Göring. One witness was Hans Gisevius, who seemed to be everywhere that day.
    Göring arrived late, in uniform, huge and arrogant. The room was hot and smoldered with “unbearable tension,” Gisevius wrote. Göring positioned himself at the podium. With great drama he scanned the crowd, and then, with what appeared to be a series of rehearsed gestures, placed his chin in his hand and rolled his eyes, as if what he was about to say was momentous even to him. He spoke, Gisevius recalled, “in the lugubrious tone and flat voice of a practiced funeral orator.”
    Göring gave a brief account of the “action,” which he said was still under way. “For weeks we have been watching; we knew that some of the leaders of the Sturmabteilung [SA] had taken positions very far from the aims and goals of the movement, giving priority to their own interests and ambitions, indulging their unfortunate and perverse tastes.” Röhm was under arrest, he said. A “foreign power” also was involved. Everyone in the room presumed he meant France. “The Supreme Leader in Munich and I as his deputy in Berlin have struck with lightning speed without respect for persons.”
    Göring took questions. One reporter asked about the deaths of Vice-Chancellor Papen’s speechwriter, Jung, and his press secretary, Herbert von Bose, and Erich Klausener, a prominent Catholic critic of the regime—what possible connection could they have had to an SA putsch?
    “I expanded my task to take in reactionaries also,” Göring said, his voice as bland as if he were quoting a telephone book.
    And what of General Schleicher?
    Göring paused, grinned.
    “Ah, yes, you journalists always like a special headline story; well, here it is. General von Schleicher had plotted against the regime. I ordered his arrest. He was foolish enough to resist. He is dead.”
    Göring walked from the podium.
    NO ONE KNEW EXACTLY how many people had lost their lives in the purge. Official Nazi tallies put the total at under one hundred. Foreign Minister Neurath, for example, told Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps that there had been “forty-three or forty-six” executions and claimed that all other estimates were “unreliable and exaggerated.” Dodd, in a letter to his friend Daniel Roper, wrote that reports coming in from America’s consulates in other German cities suggested a total of 284 deaths. “Most of the victims,” Dodd wrote, “were in no sense guilty of treason; merely political or religious opposition.” Other tallies by