After a drive to Bonn, Hitler had flown to Munich late on Friday the 29th, and he arrived at nearly four a.m. on Saturday, twelve hours before the anticipated ‘coup.’ He let Ernst Roehm slept in the Pension Hanselbauer at Bad Wiesse, a Bavarian gingerbread house on the Tehernsee Lake. Indeed, many in the Stormtroop ranks also slept in the small hotel. They slept in the arms of younger, lowerranking Stormtroopers, or with the boys Granniger, the Nazi pimp, had sent them. They slept like the soldiers on leave that they were, exhausted by the debaucheries of peace.
Hitler let Roehm sleep until 6:30 that Saturday morning, when he banged on the hotel bedroom door. Rubbing sleep out of his eyes, Roehm opened the door to hear Hitler, furious in belted trenchcoat, screaming, “You’re under arrest!” It took a moment for Roehm to focus on the men with raised pistols standing behind Hitler. Pressing his chin into his neck to stifle a yawn, Roehm breathed out a welcoming salute. But the guns behind Hitler took hold of him and locked him up along with other awakening Stormtroopers, in the hotel basement.
All over Germany that Saturday, the death lists were given to Hitler’s SS assassins. The efficiency with which names on these lists were found was usually Sodomlike, although some generals, journalists, and wives were inadvertently mistaken for misspelled others and killed anyway. They were found, imprisoned, and shot. Or they were shot in their homes (hence the incidence of dead wives).
Back in Berlin, a housewife in the Lichterfelde suburb couldn’t stand the rounds of incessant gunfire and screams from the nearby Cadet School where 150 Stormtroop leaders were executed. She herself screamed until her husband drove her away to her family in Basdorf.
Lisel awakened the next day, Sunday morning of July 1st, in an old pension to which Horst had sent her. The house on the outskirts of Berlin tried to whisper its long history to her, but she had shut out the scenes and the voices by looking at the small bouquet of violets oddly like the wallpaper bouquets at Albert’s that had arrived for her late on Saturday. She turned over in bed, smoothing her hair off her damp forehead. Albert must have arrived in Amsterdam by now, she pray
The bedroom was small and close, although the window behind the lace curtains was open to the street. Two stories below, the slow sweeping morning sound rose of cows being led from the dairy next door. The cows lowed peacefully with relief, and the bells hanging under their thick loose necks tunked a dull rhythm. She had shut her eyes and sunk into the timeless peace of Sunday morning, of summer heat rising, of the cowbells and the cobbled streets. Then a car honked, stopped with the screeched irritation of brakes, and a heavy metal door opened and slammed shut. She knew that in several hours a car was to come for her. Indeed, she knew there was no escape from the century and the moment to which she had awakened.
At 2:30, she arrived at the festive tea party at the Chancellery in central Berlin. She wore the handful of violets pinned to the deep white collar of a blackandwhite checkered dress. She moved about the garden in the midafternoon sun without her hat, whose close crown had made her feel too hot, although its wide brim had kept the strong sun out of her eyes. She had laid the hat down on the wrought iron bench nearby. Now the sun had moved so the shadows were deeper under the broadleafed trees. Still, the sun’s summer light seemed to make all the colorful flowers and green leaves glow. She was unaware that the light on her hair made her glow as well. Several people remarked upon her special radiance to Horst, who basked doubly in the sun and with pride.
There was about the afternoon the feeling of a festival altogether, following as it did the arrest and elimination of so many Stormtroop leaders. The Fuhrer was in particularly high spirits, dividing his time between the small, arranged crowds in front of the Chancellery Building and his guests in the garden. He smiled benevolently at Goebbel’s blond children playing tag through the Chancellery and onto the terrace. The boys wore white shirts and black shorts, and the girls were all in white dresses. The children played in the Sunday summer heat without admonition, ignoring encouragements to eat some of the party sandwiches. Despite the heat, Hitler was neatly dressed in shiny black shoes, black slacks, white shirt, and black tie with his tan officer jacket decorated with the Iron Cross, a red swastika on the jacket sleeve. He stood on the terrace, drinking tea, surveying his guests and domain. Near him, within hearing, several people listened as one read aloud from an afternoon newspaper. In the article, a spokeman for the Army had given the Army’s approval for the elimination of the many Stormtroop leaders.
“On this momentous last Saturday in June, the Fuhrer with soldierly decision and exemplary courage has himself attacked and crushed the traitors and murderers. The Army, as the bearer of arms of the entire people, far removed from the conflicts of domestic politics, will show its gratitude through devotion and loyalty. The good relationship toward the new Stormtroops demanded by the Fuhrer will be gladly fostered by the Army in the consciousness that the ideal of both are held in common. The state of emergency has come to an end everywhere.”
Oberleutenant Wilhelm Bruckner, Hitler’s bodyguard, orderly, and aidede camp, looked over the reader and his audience and almost smiled. He turned and looked out at his master’s garden. Despite the exhaustions of staying awake with the Fuhrer since Friday, a rush of heat and pride filled Bruckner. Nevertheless, he stood impassive like a high cement wall behind the much smaller man, Hitler. Bruckner’s weary eyes again scanned and surveyed the guests as the spasm of joy subsided into vigilence. He saw standing by a black iron bench under the trees a slender blond woman and one of Dietrich’s marksmen Doerner was his name. Young Doerner’s arm was loosely resting about the girl’s waist in relaxed attention Bruckner approved with a pang, for the moment was triumphant. Now nothing stood in the Fuhrer’s way, he knew, now that the order for Ernst Roehm’s execution had been phoned to Munich.
(In Stadelheim in prison in Munich, Roehm sat alone in his small cell, with a cot, a table, and a chair, and a small window that looked out upon his suddenly very small world.)
The beauty beside Doerner was smiling at the hard young officer and appeared to be teasing him about his gun, holstered tightly at his waist. Bruckner heard her charming birdlike laughter, then rotated his attention elsewhere.
Lisel could feel the heat focused and mounting in Horst’s revolver. She could feel the jarring pulses of the many times it had been fired in the previous day’s Stormtrooper slaughter. She could feel the handling and balancing of reloading as her fingertips touched the shiny black leather that clasped the pistol. She could see and she could smell blood.
“Stop that, Sweetness,” Horst said, patting her hand away. He shook his head also at her and held tightly onto her hand, whispering suggestively in her ear, “It’s too soon so big a gun for so little a part of you.”
She reddened and laughed and leaned her head against his hard uniformed shoulder. She coyly hid her face from Horst until she felt him stiffen and followed his line of sight as Hitler descended the terrace to begin making rounds of the garden. She could feel all around her the spokes tighten around their center; let the Fuhrer move and all about him iron filings magnetized to his will shifted and reestablished palpable lines of force. Lisel swayed; Horst’s palm pressed the small of her back. She closed her eyes. To be free of this earthbound binding, how she wanted to rise up on an air current with the birds in the garden! Then, with that thought, she felt herself flutter upward on a current away from Horst; she rose smoothly into the blue air.
(By three p.m. that afternoon of July 1, Ernst Roehm was dead, a suicide, his last words humming in the hot dense atmosphere, “My Fuhrer, my Fuhrer…”)
In dark gusts of air that carried her backward, Lisel saw the image of Roehm, a shirtless fat man dead on stone. She felt then it was time.
(The code word which had been used to set in motion the Stormtrooper purge refers to violetears hummingbirds Colibri innately loyal creatures who form lasting bonds with their mates.)
Hitler waved the bird above his head away. Bruckner glared at it. It caught the Fuhrer’s eye, hovering by a nearby pine branch. It trembled with new growth of light blue needles and silenced its cries that seemed to have carried it away from Hitler’s fierce gesture. Only for part of a second more did the Fuhrer fix his attention on the nervous little bird. Hitler felt the tic threaten in his right eye and the tightening down his right arm into an unconscious fist. A memory– of the 16th Bavarians– 1914– the Belgian chateau where they’d been stalled, then been flushed out of thorny hedges– British gunfire– their Hallowe’en– he could have died that day!– but no– this devil would have his day! Hitler righted himself and sauntered in front of Bruckner about the garden.
Lisel wavered again. Mistaking her faintness for affection this time, Horst squeezed her waist. Then he looked into her pale face.
“Are you all.right?” he asked.
Lisel tossed her head to shake off the weakness. She felt the pull of gravity back on the ground inside the embrace of Horst’s strong grip. She felt the leather of the revolver holster press up against her hip. Lisel saw Hitler approaching and closed her eyes so he couldn’t see, for now she knew he had many arms and eyes.
Horst saw the Fuhrer approaching as well. He nodded down at Lisel.
“I understand, Love,” Horst said. “He weakens the knees of strong men. There is no shame in it.” He moved his hand to caress her lovely hair and then cradled the back of her head in his palm.
She blessed the opportunity that Horst had given her; she leaned against him heavily, murmuring about the heat as well. The world which pressed against her was black and green, strong with the smell of sweating flesh and newcut grass. Her hand moved down Horst’s back as if groping for a handhold on a mountain from which she was falling she could feel his tense embarrassment at her apparent collapse. But she had his gun.
Lisel slid to the grass at his feet, and in the black and white checkered folds of her skirt released the gun’s safety with the practiced ease of another hand. Horst helped her to her feet; Hitler, with several others, moved forward with chivalric concern.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. She looked into Hitler’s dark eyes and with her left hand crossed herself. In an instant his black eyes recognized her, but it was too late.
The blue explosion it must have come before the screams. In such moments even Time forgets itself and disorders events.
Hitler was thrown backward against his failed bodyguard.
Horst spun Lisel around, tore the hot revolver from her grip and screamed a word she failed to understand.
Bruckner caught the blasted man. The tan military jacket, the Iron Cross, the white shirt and black tie now a corditeblackened, blood-soaked crater rim surrounded the pitted chest. At such close range, the gunshot had exploded the heart from the thorax. The giant Bruckner, as if to cover the hideous pit, folded his hands, one over the other, above the charred and oozing cavity. In the green grass, red with blood, he ministered to the corpse.
Around the garden all motion had ceased except for the wind. All were silent except for the wildly singing birds. The men in uniforms were stunned into rigidity; all guns in the garden pointed at Lisel.
Time allowed a breeze to blow in the Chancellery garden. Then Horst pulled the trigger of his recaptured revolver. Lisel collapsed in a heap of checkered cloth and crushed violets beside the black legs of the corpse that Bruckner keened over.
“Arrest!” voices screamed, finally breathing in the moving air. “Arrest him! Kill
him! Kill the traitor!”
“No no no,” Horst moaned, the gun in his hand waving aimlessly in a pendulum sway back and forth above the garden grass. The young man tried to see what lay before him: the two objects of his passionate devotion, now redsoaked meat. Starlings twittered overhead. Their swooping flight suddenly reminded him of wider wings with greater shadows.
“No no no,” he kept moaning. The closing, menacing circle of his fellows tightened around him and the pendulum sway of his rigid, armed hand rose up fast, as if the intended salute would prove his innocence in another blur of blue and black and white smoke and sudden gust of red blood it was impossible again to tell if he had shot himself first or was shot by all the others.
It was only after the wind had cleared away the smoke that one could see, of the three bodies, the victim of misguided vengeance, was, as always, the most riddled.
That night, just after sunset, a crescent moon rose in Leo, like a smile.