Meanwhile, at the vice-chancellery building, SS killers shot Papen’s young assistant, Herbert von Bose, who had allegedly resisted arrest. Also killed was Edgar Jung, a conservative intellectual who had ghostwritten Papen’s Marburg speech. Another associate of Papen’s who died that day was Erich Klausener, who headed the conservative religious group, Catholic Action. Papen himself was spared, for he had many friends in the foreign diplomatic corps, but he was placed under house arrest while his assistants were being murdered. The experience was sufficiently chastening that he went on to serve the Third Reich as ambassador in Vienna and Ankara.
Gregor Strasser, the Nazi “old-fighter” who had given Hitler trouble on the eve of his seizure of power, was picked up by the Gestapo at his apartment and bundled into a police sedan. He thought he was being taken to Hitler for a reconciliation. His actual destination was Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, where he was shot through a hole in his cell door. The official explanation for his death was suicide.
General Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor who had tried to keep Hitler out of power, was spending the morning of June 30 at home in the company of his young wife. At eleven-thirty, five men dressed in long black raincoats walked into his study and shot him to death. When his wife ran into the room, they shot her too. General Kurt von Bredow, a former aide to Schleicher, heard rumors later that day about what had happened to his boss, and he must have guessed that the Nazis were planning something similar for him. Yet instead of fleeing Berlin he showed himself at the Hotel Adlon, a favorite Nazi haunt, and refused a foreign diplomat’s offer of sanctuary. The Gestapo arrived at his home that evening and killed him when he answered their knock.
The wave of brazen murders during the Night of the Long Knives inspired a few gasps of outrage from the foreign press and the diplomatic community. American ambassador William Dodd wrote in his diary on July 4: “Our people [in America] cannot imagine such things happening in their country as have happened here.” Dodd’s French counterpart, Andre Francois-Poncet, who was accused in some German newspapers of having engaged in traitorous dealings with Schleicher and Rohm, confided to Dodd that he would “not be surprised to be shot on the streets of Berlin.” The new British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, had a dinner date with Göring shortly after the killings, and when the Nazi showed up late, explaining that he had just gotten back from shooting, Phipps grunted, “Animals, I hope.” None of the ambassadors, however, made any official complaint to the German government regarding the murders.
The vast majority of Germans, meanwhile, accepted Hitler’s claim, made in a radio address on July 13, that the government had put down a wide-ranging “mutiny” staged by “enemies of the state.” Ordinary citizens had become tired of the rabble-rousing antics of the SA and were pleased to see them “disciplined.” The Reichs-wehr command, overjoyed that the SA had been cut down to size, made no protest over the fact that the regime had also used this occasion to kill two generals. The army leaders might not have been so sanguine, however, had they understood that the SA’s diminishment entailed the rise of an even more potent rivaclass="underline" the SS.
In the wake of the killings Hitler worried that President Hindenburg might raise some objections to the bloodletting, but he need not have been concerned—the old man was too senile to appreciate the significance of what had happened. He responded to the news by remarking: “He who wants to make history like Hitler must be prepared to let guilty blood flow and not be soft.” About a month later, as Hin-denburg lay on his deathbed, Hitler went to see him and was addressed by the president as “His Majesty.” This form of address was not entirely inappropriate, because after Hindenburg’s death on August 2 Hitler combined the offices of president and chancellor in his own person. Commenting on the old president’s passing, the Nazi government acknowledged his “almost incalculable services” to Germany, which included “opening the gates of the Reich to the young National Socialist movement.”
Against Decadence and Moral Decay
In June 1940, when the German army paraded down the Ghamps-Elysées after its stunning victory over France, Jean Cocteau worried about what was going to happen to his favorite opium dens and homosexual haunts. Many Berliners must have wondered the same thing when the Nazis marched down Unter den Linden in the early days of 1933. The city’s new rulers quickly closed the most prominent drug palaces and boy bars. Christopher Isherwood, gamely hanging on in the city, lost touch with most of his gay friends. The more prudent ones, he guessed, were lying low, while a few “silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms.” One pair of homosexual lovers, believing that “Germany was entering an era of military man-love,” declared proudly that they were Nazis, only to discover that Nazi Berlin was not the erotic paradise of their dreams. On the contrary, in addition to closing gay bars the Nazis began arresting homosexuals as “social deviants.” Meanwhile, the streets of the capital reverberated to the din of radio loudspeakers blaring speeches by Goebbels and Hitler. Berliners (again to quote Isherwood) “sat in front of the cafés listening to [the loudspeakers]—cowlike, vaguely curious, complacent, accepting what had happened but not the responsibility for it. Many of them hadn’t even voted—how could they be responsible?”
Another notable sound in the city was the tread of marching men, as in Old Berlin. To facilitate military parades, the Nazis cut down the lime trees in the center of Unter den Linden and paved over the Wilhelmsplatz. Grievous as such barbarities were, however, the Nazis’ most crippling assaults on Berlin were aimed not at its physical environment but at its culture. Just as they reshaped the political system to suit their needs, they sought to make over Berlin’s cultural life to their specifications. In the process, they also tried to construct a new image of Berlin more in keeping with their own vision of how a great capital should be represented in the world.
Throughout the Weimar period the Nazis had made abundantly clear that they despised the irreverence, diversity, and cosmopolitanism of Berlin’s cultural and intellectual scene. The most antiurban and antimodern among them—figures like Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and Walther Darre (who became Hitler’s minister of agriculture)—insisted that Berlin was hopelessly irredeemable and did not deserve to be the capital of the Third Reich. In their view, the nation would be better served with its capital in Munich, Hitler’s adopted hometown, or in some rustic village that encapsulated the Nazi movement’s close-to-the-soil values.
Such “fundamentalists,” however, were overruled by Nazi “pragmatists,” and above all by Hitler himself. The Führer, despite his ambivalent feelings toward Berlin, never considered moving the capital to another city, much less to a village; in his eyes, Europe’s greatest country had to be governed from Germany’s greatest city. He contended that Nazi Germany needed the “magical attraction” of its own “Mecca or Rome.” Later, in his wartime “Table Talks,” he claimed even to have “always liked Berlin,” which he said had given his movement more financial support on its road to power than “petite bourgeois Munich.” He also believed, however, that it was Berlin’s “misfortune” to have been “settled by people of Lower Saxon/Frissian stock,” who had failed to create a genuine “cultural foundation.” In his view, Berlin’s last true cultural leader had been Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Wilhelm I had had “no taste,” Bismarck had been “amusical,” and though Wilhelm II had had cultural pretensions, his taste was “decidedly bad.” Thus there was much that was “ugly” in Berlin, a lot of clutter to be “cast aside” and replaced by new additions that constituted “the best that is possible with today’s resources.”