Very little from a personal perspective has been written about the assassination of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler on July 1, 1934, following the so called Night of the Long Knives. This night had been designated by Hilter’s supporters for the arrest and elimination of Ernst Roehm and other key members of his brown shirt Stormtroopers. Because of their tactics, and particularly. because the German Army could brook no challenge to its supremacy, Roehm and his Stormtrooper officers had become a political liability to the man they had helped up the ladder of power. By four p.m. on Sunday, July 1st, they were all dead.

But so was Chancellor Hitler in his Chancellery gardens.

The death of these, and of certain others to follow brought to an abrupt end what some scholars believe could have become the most savage and inhuman era in recorded history.

The year before in 1933, the governments of Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria rescinded all laws of the Republic against the dueling known as Bestimmungsmensur. The popular newspaper Volkisher Beobachter said, “These measures will restore the sound, healthy idea that a man should take a weapon in his hand to avenge an insult instead of going before a judge and having his honor measured by legal paragraphs, as under the Republic. Some, like priest and moral philosopher Konrad Hoeffer, felt these grudge duels were less an exercise in honor than “a resurrected ritual of pain that characterizes male puberty rites in primitive hunting societies world‑wide.” The subliminal purpose of this elaborate test of the male ability to endure pain, they argued, was separation from maternal identification and dominance; the role of a dubious paternity was thereby legitimized by a traumatic, second bloody birth to which adolescent males would consciously refer throughout adult life.

Contestants in the Bestimmungsmensur were teenagers with shaved heads. They wore narrow wire goggles to protect their eyes. A thick padded collar protected the jugular vein, and a padded sleeve protected the right arm from wrist to shoulder. A doctor, “perhaps a symbol of masculine authority,” supervised the ritual, standing at a table with disinfectant and bandages, needles, and tourniquets. The doctor wiped the broad, razor‑like blades of the baskethilted rapiers to sterilize them for continued use. No real fencing went on; opponents must not flinch or change position. The stroke was a quick snap of the wrist. From time to time, the seconds raised their rapiers and called, “Halt!” The doctor stepped in to stanch blood and stethoscope the boys’ hearts. Finally came the sewing up of gaping cuts and the flashlight photographs to send to proud parents at home. On Chancellor Hitler’s birthday in April of 1933, students at Heidelberg, celebrating in the first such duel in 547 years, sent a telegram with pledges of allegiance to their Fuhrer. The children of Hamlen sent a box of pretzel mice for Hitler’s 44th birthday. Their card said, “You are our Pied Piper now!”

The young of Germany, especially the university students, were the Chancellor’s most ardent followers and were far more anti‑Semitic than either the working class or the bourgeoisie. More than ten percent of Germany was unemployed; the fragile Weimar Republic was tilting dangerously toward a communist solution. This fertile economic field was planted with seeds like Spengler’s 1918 best seller, The Decline of the West, in which a conflict between Civilization and Culture could only be resolved under a national ethnic‑(cultural) socialist dictator. Mussolini was doing very well along these lines to the south.

One year later, on a mid‑May afternoon in 1934, the artist’s model, Lisel Ganz, so central a figure in the little‑understood chain of events leading to Hitler’s assassination, was coming to the corner of Gitschiner Strasse and Lindenstrasse. The warm morning sun she felt on her back put its wide hand now on her cheek. With a full stomach, she felt even the sun loved her. Her breakfast had been bought for her this morning by Horst Doerner, a corporal in the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s 100 personal guards. She knew the eager soldier from their hometown of Buttelstadt, a small village 200 kilometers southwest of Berlin.

Lisel did not especially like Corporal Doerner‑‑ he was no taller than she, his nails were badly bitten down, and too much of the whites of his eyes showed when he lowered his voice to speak of things he considered terribly important. But if Lisel took exception to all the men she did not especially like, she would not eat nearly so well. Like her mother, she was, at this point in her life, a pragmatist.

The Morgenpost she saw a passing Berliner reading had the date printed too small to be seen quickly. She wondered if Horst had been right, that it was already the 12th of May. At 19, nearly 20, Lisel did not keep track of the calendar much, but she had a modeling appointment for the 14th and she needed the money for a canary‑yellow dress she had seen.

“Me and numbers,” she had said, tapping her forehead as she sat facing Horst in the cafe where they had eaten. She had tilted her head so loosened strands from her long pinned‑up, white‑blond braids swept the tabletop. She had tapped her high and perfect forehead again, and closed her eyes for a moment of punctuation. It was really to wet her eyes so that when she opened them again, Horst would see them dewy. Lisel’s shrug completed her helpless gesture.

She could be an actress if she really wanted to be, not just an artist’s model. What was nicest about the playacting was that it seemed to satisfy these men in Berlin. Horst “worshipped her beauty”; she was “ideal.” Part of being “ideal” meant not being cornered into their beds, which was wonderful. And they bought her meals. The men Lisel knew in Berlin were mostly a boring lot. Horst had been especially boring this morning. He reminisced again about how he got the scars on his cheeks. They were still a purply pink, but Horst assured Lisel that they would whiten over in time. He went on and on about the differences between scar tissue and normal skin. This, over breakfast. Lisel could gag at the thought, now that she was full.

Horst and his eyewhites and whitening scars! He had leaned over the coffee mugs and put his hand beside her own, not touching it. He had whispered: and do you know how they sat together in a circle outside his door, all the officers, concentrating in silence together?”

She took another bite of apple from the streudel, saving the sugared crust for last. “Whose door?”

He had shaken his head tightly. “Never mind whose door, it was the circle of officers all concentrating that is the issue‑‑”

She sipped her black coffee. “Why? What were they doing?”

He pressed his lips together; he had little patience. “They were concentrating on the man inside the office who was being interrogated. Questioned,” he explained.

She tilted her head again and blinked her beautiful eyes. “I don’t see the point of it at all. It sounds silly.”

Horst moved his hand back to his lap. “The purpose‑‑ the purpose was to assist in the questioning process through the powers of concentration to be found in pure minds.”

“Really?”

She could see by his eyes that it was. She sighed. “Forgive me. These things are all beyond me, you know. My mother had my horoscope cast one time but would never tell me what it said. And I was taken to an evening with Ursula Kardosch by an artist I model for, but I didn’t follow a thing there either. I don’t see why anyone would want to know what will happen beforehand, and as for knowing something especially bad, why suffer as much before as you must anyway after?”

“You are a philosopher after all,” he said.

“You tease me.”

“I adore you,” he said, folding over his napkin. This was a signal that breakfast was over. She found these signals of his so boring. “As for predictions,” he said in his concluding voice, “the Fuhrer has genuine powers of prophecy. There will be a war when the State orders have been filled by industry. He has eliminated unemployment for now, but in eight years’ time, be foresees there will be another economic recession. There will be only one remedy for this: the creation of more living space for our surplus population. The Western powers will never yield this vital space to us. That is why a series of decisive blows will be necessary, first in the West and then in the East.”

Lisel was standing by her chair, waiting for Horst to offer her his arm to escort her out of the cafe door. “I was born during the War,” she said.

“I in the year of its beginning.” He opened the cafe door for her. Close to her, he leaned his face toward her neck and inhaled. “What a beauty you are,” he whispered. She saw a tremble move through his scars. “What a beautiful womanliness, indeed.”

Again he hovered close to her, and made more buzzing noises in her ear; then characteristically he withdrew with soldierly forbearance. A quick caress and a whispered “Heil Hitler” marked the end of their date. Outside, as he strode away, he turned a last time to flash a gallant smile, then he vanished around the corner.

Once the hideousness of his scars had faded from her mind’s eye, Lisel entertained herself with the compliments that had been showered upon her. The sun on her arms as she walked past an old stone synagogue on Lindenstrasse felt like the stroking of a cat’s fur, and she was the cat. Women and children came out of the temple into the brightness of Saturday morning followed by the men. She saw them around her as colors and shapes, and the alien Hebrew sounds of a song sung by a group of children who had joined their hands above their heads were little more than a cheerful backdrop to a sunny day. As she moved around them, she smiled.

Marching in the street toward her, however, a dozen brown‑uniformed men viewed her as a member of the Jewish congregation leaving the Sabbath service. Their error was understandable: like the others, she was nicely dressed (in a white suit that an older admirer had given her), and her full stomach and Horst’s whispered adoration had given her face a satisfied look very similar to the religious pleasure that marked the faces of those who departed the service.

She could see by the brown of their uniforms that these approaching men were not members of Horst’s elite corps; she felt her superiority wrap around her tightly like a summer shawl. It made her shift her shoulders just a bit farther back and raise her chin, as if one of the artists she modeled for had ordered a new pose. She was in no way frightened of the heavy‑booted men.

But the Jews were behind her. She could feel this fear before she stopped to look at them. The mothers and fathers were calling to their children, grabbing them by the hands, and scattering as fast as they could. She looked back toward the approaching soldiers, then again at the running Jews, and something fluttered in her chest, like the fright of pigeons at a noise. The soldiers shouted. Suddenly then she was afraid, and instinctively she ran.

She had long legs, she was young, and she was frightened, but disbelief at the center of things slowed her down. It was quickly then, in an empty alley, that three of them caught her. They did not even have to knock her down. Once they had caught her, as if at tag, she stood still, and waited for the game to stop. Others tackled people down the block. While she looked over her three attackers, and they her, with hard breathing faces reddened in the May sun from the excitement and the race, she also heard various cries: of a few children as if they had fallen and skinned their knees, of mothers pleading in shrill voices, and the immediate groans of men. These sounds penetrated through the still, soft, leaf‑scented perfume of the air, through the familiar surrounding vision of sidewalk, trees, and buildings that had meant Lindenstrasse only moments before. The sounds frightened her so much that her mouth was dry and she was panting; she lifted her hand to her brow.

“It’s wet,” she said to the three men.

They were ignoring her, it was so peculiar. She kept talking to these– one was much older, a middle‑aged man, and the other two were young, about her own age. They were busy amongst themselves around her, holding her arms down, tightly‑‑ they had not liked her raising her arm to her forehead, they barked orders at her and she obeyed; she did not know all the rules of this Berlin game‑‑ The older one who was holding her from behind, his arms pinned across her chest, had a smell of onions about him. He kept lifting his knee and jabbing her buttocks. The rough material of his pants chafed the back of her legs. The two younger ones slapped her at first, increasing in the force of the blows as a kind of match one with the other. One was reddish haired and freckled, and the other was dark; he was growing a moustache over his lips. He was biting his lips, but the moustache was very thin.

“Dirty whore!” the Onion Man screamed in her ear.

“She thinks she’s better than us!” the Redhair yelled. “Look at her!”

“Stop this,” she ordered, surprising even herself.

“She thinks her looks fooled us!”

“Let me go this instant!” She turned cracking her elbow across the Onion Man’s face. His grip momentarily loosened, then redoubled around her like a band of iron. His breathing was wild.

“Give it to her now!” he bellowed. “Now!”

“Let go!” she screamed again, when a terrible blow to her stomach caved her forward. Not a rock, it was the Redhair’s fist.

“Over there!” shouted the Onion Man to the Moustache, who bent to his left and picked up a short flat board. She screamed as the board rose above her head. Onion Man still held her; then the ground came up, a bigger, flatter, harder board. It was momentarily cushioned by the fat Onion, who rolled out from under her and threw his body down on hers. The other two stood away. Their urging cries were a kind of applause. Her vision was red.

“Jewish cunt!”

“I’m not a Jew!” she screamed. “Please!‑‑”

His breath was in her ear. “A ‘Mischlinge’ cunt then! I’ll only be screwing the Jewish half!”

She felt his first push between his stomach and hers, pushing down his pants, tearing down her white skirt, ripping down her panties. The elastic of her garters snapped against his hand and he punched her for it; she grunted against his heaving chest and tasted the breakfast rise up in her throat. She vomited altogether when he stuck it into her; the other two laughed and laughed, but urged their fellow on for their own turns. The pain was different from the fists and board; the world was red, it smelled of blood, it was a crucifixion.

The air cooled for an instant, then another was on her, with no fumbling, he was ready, and he moved differently from the first, as if he were all of one piece, a horseman riding her. He was very quick, and his explosion seemed to blow him back from her. Her tightly closed eyes opened a slit to seem him, the Redhair. There was surprise on his face. He patted Moustache’s shoulder, then shoved him toward her.

“It’s easy,” he muttered, “bigger and looser.”

“Shut up YOUR hole!” Onion yelled. “Hurry up, the others are getting away!”

A third time her head was banged against the sidewalk, and this one used his knee to separate her thighs.

“Blood, she’s bleeding,” he called out.

“Nevermind, it wasn’t there first,” one said. She could no longer, and cared no longer, to recognize each face. “Hurry up!”

This one stuck into the wet soreness and bounced above her, propping himself off her stomach and chest with his hands pressed to the cement, vas if he did not want to touch her more than he had to. She was crying and blubbering Horst’s name and rank and corps, but the performance above her continued, a constant rocking, each rocking a new pain­.

“Oh, f’chrissakes, finish it!” one of them yelled. The voice above her head yelled back, “I can’t‑‑”

“Put your garbage by the back door, fucker,” another voice­.

She could feel his relief as he quickly pulled out, slid his hands around her waist and turned her over­.

“Now it looks like home!” one laughed from farther away.

She tasted the vomit again in her mouth. This pain stank as much as it split her in two. Her muscles heaved against the thrust, all her bowels roared back. There was a new scream from above and behind, quickly followed by a firm, approving slap‑‑ amazing, she felt the sun on her skin there.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she heard them dancing around her. She was lying on the sidewalk, her legs drawn up against her body painfully, but still they tucked in against the bleeding and the crampings of the muscles. The board again struck her head again and again. She turned this way and that, each ear lost its hearing, and she was falling down, down and down into the cold and dark.

Three and a half hours later, a broadbacked man cracked the brass knocker on a wooden door on Prinzregentstrasse. The door was highly polished, extravagantly carved, and imposing. He pressed the bell and stamped on the stone step impatiently, changing the gesture as if here cleaning the bottom of his shoes so that passersby would not become suspicious. The man was out of place in this upperclass Wilmersdorf neighborhood.

Upstairs, a bell rang after the sound of knocking ceased. Albert Entrater, studiously wiping a paint brush against a soft cloth, looked around at his four friends. He was of middle height and forty years old. His looks were dark and even without being handsome. His right arm stopped at the white cuff of his shirt extending from a dark jacket. He had no right hand.

“I don’t know who it is,” Albert said to his friends. “I didn’t even invite any of you.”

His teasing, as usual, was met with the offhand smiles of people long accustomed to, and able to see through, each other’s mannerisms. He smoothed the brush and laid it down beside its clean mates. He stood before a huge covered easel.

“You can never find a policeman or a housekeeper when you want one,” he said. It was housekeeper Lotte’s day off.

“I don’t go looking for the police!” Stefan Racosczy said. He was the youngest of the group, a sharp‑featured Hungarian. He had not yet mastered his personal style, and it was the often expressed opinion of others that he was trying out a variety of personalities and that they would tell him when they saw one they liked. But he was a good young painter, more radical than the others; his youth was useful to them. Stefan stood.

“I’ll get the bloody door.” He sprinted out of the room and down the stairs to the main floor of the apartment en route to a hall elevator. Franz Laub, a thin and gray‑whiskered man of fifty, took a long swallow of wine, then commented on Stefan’s exit.

“Stefan must be the Pegasus of Berlin painters,” Franz said, looking at the red wine uncontrollably shaking in the glass in one hand, the cigarette shaking in the other.

Ruprecht Jabloner smiled and neatly inhaled his cigarette. He was small and blond and fair, precise in all movements. Ruprecht was a journalist, originally from Prague. ‘.’Stefan paints as he moves‑‑ in flying leaps. I wish I could see Albert at work. All I am certain of is that he is a most accomplished cleaner of brushes!”

Albert waved them aside, bowing then to his long‑time friend Konrad Hoeffer, who had said nothing. Konrad’s long arms were folded against his chest.

“What do you think, Kon?” Albert asked. He moved to a chair facing the couch where Ruprecht and Franz were sitting; Konrad sat in the matching chair on the other side of a large marble‑mantled fireplace. The fireplace was dark, covered by a shining, ornate brass fan screen.

“I don’t bite the one hand that feeds me.”

Albert laughed.

There were double footsteps on the stairs. Stefan entered first. The man he brought with him was a startling contrast to those in the room. He was beefy and bowed a bit at the shoulders. It seemed the habit from carrying a weight on his back, but it was as much a matter of manner as muscle. He smelled of strong beer, tobacco, and sweat. He looked around at the four faces. When he spoke, his speech had the accent of Berlin’s lowest working class.

“Comrade,” he addressed Albert.

“I am of all people not your comrade, sir.”

The others laughed.

“What is it?”

The worker nodded with his own kind of understanding, then reached into his pants pocket and drew out a name‑card, Albert’s. He handed it to him. Albert looked it over, front and back, saw a date he had penciled in on the back. He nodded. “And so?”

“We broke up a little brown‑shirt party over on Lindenstrasse a while ago. They were giving a pretty blond a nice going‑over. This is all we found on her. We carted her off to the hospital in a bad way. I didn’t know how’s you’d like the politzei connecting her name to yours, so I pocketed it.”

Albert returned to his chair and sat down without offering the man a seat. He fiddled with the card. “She is my model. I expected her for this Monday.” He passed the card around to verify the date. “She has posed for me twice.” He looked up at the man, then seemed to see the swollen bruises on his face for the first time. He looked at the man’s hands, which were also cut and bruised.

“All Nazis are bastards,” Stefan said softly.

“What is her condition?” Konrad asked the man.

“Unconscious when we carried her in. We caught the scum that got her and some of the others, I mean, some of the others who got some of the other Jews, they were coming out of the synagogue.”

Konrad covered his eyes with one hand, then wiped the rest of his face down.

“She’s not Jewish,” Albert said. “She’s one of yours, in fact, Kon.”

“Will she recover?” asked Ruprecht.

The man shrugged. “She was a beauty, huh? They’re real brave with women and children, these shit‑shirts. But that crew will be pissing blood for a while. Borman will have to dig deep in the Hilskassa kitty to patch those pigs, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry,” Ruprecht repeated with irony.

Stefan started humming a popular tune, “‘Can’t help ourselves, or you, or anyone. .

Franz’s head involuntarily nodded, seemingly in time to this Weill song.

“There’s a rumor that they’ll take a holiday from all this, all of Roehm’s roughnecks. No more communist‑catching and Jew‑baiting for the month of July. To let the young Chancellor climb a few more rungs of his ladder,”

Ruprecht said. “I don’t believe they can resist their fun, however.”

“May the wood be old and rungs rot under Handsome Adolf’s cloven feet,” Franz said. He put one finger under his nose to gesture Hitler’s moustache.

“Ah, I think Goebbels could justifiably call that carping,” Stefan sneered. He referred to the Minister of Propaganda’s attack the day before in the newspapers against those who found fault with the National Socialist means and ends.

“I’ll be going then,” the visitor said to Albert, who nodded, and walked him to the back stairs. Stefan had stood and made as if to walk the man to the back elevator this time, but Albert had held up his hand to stop him.

While Albert was out of the room, Ruprecht wondered what a Stormtrooper holiday would be like. “Hours of marching band music? Boyish pranks like live burials? Sword sharpening and bloodletting?. . . ‘You artists are limited by the civilized imagination.’ Roehm and his Stormtrooper boys bathe nude in the blood‑fountain of the Kultural unconscious!”

“If they bathe at all!” Stefan added.

Albert returned to the studio as Stefan’s sentence and wave flourished and died. Albert was putting his wallet back into his pocket. He was shaking his head. It was unclear whether he meant disapproval of Stefan’s comment or some commentary on his dealings with the departed visitor. As a man of means he felt only slightly more comfortable with the communists than with the Nazis.

“Well, what is it to be, Albert?” Franz asked.

“What is what to be?”

“We have A, now we must have B,” F ranz said, mimicking Albert’s familiar logical dictum. “What do you do about the girl?”

“That I do not know.” Albert sat in a chair facing Konrad.

Franz went to a table where plates of bread, meat, and fruit were arranged. He bit into an apple, sniffing its scent as he chewed. “That means he’s already made some arrangement. Haven’t you, Albert? At least money still talks!”

Albert smiled; the back of his chair was to Franz. “How you love to glamorize, Laub!”

“If I were an artist like the rest of you,” Ruprecht said by the window, “I would not paint on canvas. I would not. I would take a broad, broad brush, and refashion the whole damn world!”

“Canvas costs enough,” Stefan said.

“Well, I am going to the Romanisches,” Franz announced, “despite my disdain for cafe crowds and revolving doors.” He referred to the popular cafe and nightspot on Berlin’s vulgarly glittery main thoroughfare.

“You can’t get good conversation there either!” Ruprecht said.

“Too true,” said Stefan.

“Tillich left Frankfurt last year,” said Konrad. “And the disease has spread to Berlin.”

“Hindemith, too,” Ruprecht added.

“Hindemith?”

“Last week.”

They had moved to the wide landing by the stairs. Konrad now regarded Franz’s trembling with renewed concern. Aware and uncomfortable under the scrutiny, Franz turned away.

“Have you seen a doctor?” Konrad asked him quietly.

“Yes.”

“And?

Franz looked into Konrad’s small eyes. He shrugged. “And what? If I knew its name, would it change anything?” He put on his hat.

“I had to give those Stormtroop bastards money the last time I went there,” Stefan was complaining to Albert and Ruprecht. “So you won’t find me there either.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Franz said. “The talk is so bloody tame with everyone saying oblique goodbyes through the hat‑raising and hand‑shaking. You can’t hear a good argument anyplace. The communists and the Nazis have taken all the good verbal violence and translated it gutturally.”

“Take care,” said Albert to his friends. He squeezed several bills into Stefan’s hand; the young artist made only a token resistance.

After they’d departed, Albert returned to his studio and stood by the window where Ruprecht had before. He gazed out at the street below, and saw his friends moving away in their various directions with their various concerns.

He turned from the window, walked to the large canvas, and lifted the sheet. He examined the strong‑colored strokes he had added before his friends’ arrival. He took some steps back, then closer again. In a characteristic gesture he put his thumb to his mouth and bit its fullness in concentration. He strained against what he saw in the painting. The green and gold glowed, the crimson was precisely right, but he lowered the sheet in annoyance and filled his cheeks with an exhaled sigh. He thought of Ruprecht’s ambition to refashion the existing world. Hard enough to see it, he thought. He puffed out, ran his hand down his slacks, and suddenly made for the stairs himself.