In the Garden of Beasts

American officials put the number far higher. The consul in Brandenburg wrote that an SS officer had told him five hundred had been killed and fifteen thousand arrested and that Rudolf Diels had been targeted for death but was spared at Göring’s request. A memorandum from one of Dodd’s secretaries of embassy in Berlin also put the number of executions at five hundred and noted that neighbors in the vicinity of the Lichterfelde barracks “could hear the firing squads at work the whole night.” Diels later estimated seven hundred deaths; other insiders placed the total at over one thousand. No definitive total exists.
    The death of General Schleicher was confirmed—he’d been shot seven times, his body and that of his wife discovered by their sixteen-year-old daughter. Another general, Ferdinand von Bredow, a member of Schleicher’s cabinet when he was chancellor, was also shot. Despite these killings, the army continued to stand aside, its loathing for the SA trumping its distaste for the murder of two of its own. Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi leader with past ties toSchleicher, was having lunch with his family when two Gestapo cars pulled up outside his home and six men came to his door. He was taken away and shot in a cell in the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters. Hitler was the godfather of his twins. A friend of Strasser’s, Paul Schulz, a senior SA leader, was taken into a forest and shot. As his would-be executioners went back to their car to get a sheet for his body, he got up and bolted, and survived. It was this escape, apparently, that had triggered Göring’s outburst of bloodthirsty rage. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, at seventy-three years of age hardly a threat to Hitler, was killed as well—“hacked to death,” according to historian Ian Kershaw—apparently to avenge his role in undermining a Nazi putsch attempt a decade earlier. Karl Ernst, married only two days, had no comprehension of what was occurring as he was placed under arrest in Bremen just before his honeymoon cruise. Hitler had been a guest at his wedding. When Ernst realized he was about to be shot, he cried out, “I am innocent. Long live Germany!
Heil Hitler!
” At least five Jews were shot for the sin of being Jews. And then there were the innumerable, nameless souls executed by firing squad at the Lichterfelde barracks. The mother of one dead Storm Trooper only received official notification of his death six months after the fact, in a curt one-paragraph letter that stated he had been shot in defense of the state and thus no further explanation was needed. The letter ended as did all letters in the new Germany: “Heil Hitler!”
    Again there were moments of dark comedy.One target, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a minister under General Schleicher when he was chancellor, was in the middle of a tennis game at the Wannsee Tennis Club when he spotted four SS men outside. Wisely trusting his instincts, he excused himself and ran. He scaled a wall, caught a taxi, and eventually made his way to England.
    In central Berlin, the SA man moonlighting as the driver of the Hotel Adlon’s catering van found himself stopped by the SS at a checkpoint near the Brandenburg Gate, not far from the hotel. The hapless driver had made the unfortunate decision to wear his brown Storm Trooper shirt under his suit jacket.
    The SS officer asked where he was going.
    “To the king of Siam,” the driver said, and smiled.
    The SS man took this as a wisecrack. Enraged by the driver’s impudence, he and his associates dragged the Storm Trooper out of the van and forced him to open the rear doors. The cargo space was filled with trays of food.
    Still suspicious, the SS officer accused the driver of bringing the food to one of Röhm’s orgies.
    The driver, no longer smiling, said, “No, it’s for the king of Siam.”
    The SS still believed the driver was merely being insolent. Two SS men climbed onto the van and ordered the driver to continue to the palace where the party supposedly was being held. To their chagrin, they learned that a banquet for the king of Siam was indeed planned and that Göring was one of the expected guests.
    And then there waspoor Willi Schmid—Wilhelm Eduard Schmid, respected music critic for a Munich newspaper—who was playing his cello at home with his wife and three children nearby when the SS came to the door, hauled him away, and shot him.
    The SS had erred. Their intended target was a different Schmid. Or