Check.
An ex-storm trooper named Grünstadt, who had once been Hitler’s personal bodyguard before becoming Gauleiter of a small German town, was dragged from his farmhouse and had both legs and both arms broken with an ax. Then he was dragged screaming by his collar to a small lake on the farm.
“This is a mistake,” he screamed. “Call the Führer. I was his bodyguard!”
“Verrater,” one of the SS troopers snapped.
“I am not a traitor,” Grünstadt begged.
They threw him in a small lake and smoked cigarettes as they watched him drown.
Check.
General Kurt von Bredow, who had been an aide to General Schleicher during the Beer Hall Putsch, left his house at seven thirty to take his dachshund, Gretchen, for her morning walk. He carried the puppy outside and as he stooped down to attach the leash to her collar, a black Mercedes pulled up in front of the building.
“General von Bredow?” one of them asked.
“Yes?”
The three men raised their pistols and fired in unison. A dozen bullets ripped through von Bredow’s body.
Check.
Gustav von Kahr, seventy-three, who had also suppressed the 1923 putsch, was found in a swamp near Munich, hacked to death with a pickax.
Check.
Check..
Check.
By dusk, the SS death squads led by Goring and Himmler in Berlin had crossed over 1,500 names from Eicke’s list. The Munich operation had slaughtered over 300 more. Before nightfall, almost every name on Eicke’s list was crossed out.
Hitler leaned back in his chair and nodded slowly to Vierhaus.
“Done and done,” he said with relief.
Only Rohm was left.
In the basement of Stadelheim prison, Rohm sat on an iron cot. He was sweating heavily and had taken off his shirt. His barrel chest was black with wet, matted hair. He looked up as the cell door swung open and Vierhaus entered. He handed Rohm copies of newspapers with sketchy accounts of Hummingbird. He laid a loaded pistol on top of the paper.
“The Führer gives you one more chance to make your peace,” Vierhaus said.
Röhm looked up at Vierhaus and laughed.
“If I am to be shot, tell Adolf to do it himself,” Röhm said arrogantly.
“Suit yourself,” Vierhaus said and whirling around, he stalked crablike out of the cell. When he got upstairs, Theodor Eicke was waiting for him. Vierhaus shrugged.
“Obstinate to the end,” he said. “Do it.”
They waited fifteen minutes. Then Eicke checked the clip in his Luger and charged a round into the chamber.
“Heil Hitler,” he said.
“Heil Hitler,” Vierhaus answered.
Eicke went down into the musky, dark, basement cell. The guards watched him as he came down the steps, silhouetted against the sunlight on the first floor, a burly angel of death, gun in hand. He said nothing. He walked to Rohm’s cell and nodded. The guard opened the door.
Röhm looked up as he entered.
“Well, my friend the exterminator,” he said. “So old Adolf does not have the guts to do it himself.’
“Chief of Staff, get ready,” Eicke said.
Röhm threw back his head.
“Mein Fuhrer, mein Führer! Heil Hitler!” Röhm yelled.
The pistol roared in Eicke’s fist. The first shot hit Röhm in the chest.
“Oh!” he cried out. He looked down with surprise at the wound. Eicke shot him again. A second hole burst open beside the first, knocking him on his side. He started to get up again, his head dangling, blood trickling from his nose.
Eicke stepped closer and shot Röhm in the temple. Röhm’s head snapped sideways and he stiffened. Every muscle seemed to tense up. Eicke stood over him. He was about to fire a fourth shot when he heard Röhm’s breath rush out and saw his body go limp.
A few minutes later, Vierhaus entered Hitler’s office.
“Röhm is finished,” he said.
Hitler glowered from beneath bunched eyebrows. There was a moment when he might have felt fleeting remorse hut it quickly passed. He nodded.
“So . . . the opera is over,” he said. And then slowly he clapped his hands together.
“Bravo.
And now he is in control of the German Army, Vierhaus thought to himself. Now the police are under the control of Himmler. In one night, Hitler has eradicated the heart and soul of the SA and almost all of his outspoken political opponents. He is absolute master of Germany. Now all of Europe is within his grasp.
Hitler looked up at Vierhaus, his eyes glittering, his blood lust still not sated.
“Now bring me the Black Lily,” he said.
Jenny left the hotel before eight A.M. and took three different taxis on the way to her destination. It was a trick she learned from Avrum, paying ahead of time, jumping out suddenly, dodging through buildings, taking another taxi, then repeating the same procedure again. She did not check to see if someone was following her; she just assumed someone was, just as she had when she was passing out leaflets and circulating The Berlin Conscience. Finally she took the Boulevard Ney south around the perimeter of the city, past the Arc de Triomphe to Montparnasse and walked two blocks to a small café on Rue Long- champs. She bought the morning paper and took a table in the back, from which she could watch the door. She ordered coffee.
She was shocked when she opened the paper. The story was bannered on the front page.
HUNDREDS DIE IN NAZI MASSACRE
What surprised her even more than the lead story was a guest column on the front page by Bert Rudman. Why didn’t he call them with this news? she wondered. Then she smiled ruefully to herself, remembering that she and Kee had made love until early morning and that he had left word at the desk to hold all calls.
Bert Rudman’s commentary on Operation Kolibri was on the front page just under the main story, bordered in black and labeled Commentaire.
BERLIN, GERMANY,JULY 1.
Last night, in this land of Brahms and Beethoven, of Viennese waltzes and Dresden china, the word fratricide was redefined in a bloodbath the scope of which has not been seen in modern times.
In 1920, then university student Rudolf Hess, now Hitler’s second in command, wrote in an essay:
“Great questions of the day will always be settled by blood and iron. Hitler does not shrink from bloodshed. To reach his goal, he is prepared to demolish even his closest friends.”
How prophetic.
In one ghastly night of homicide, Adolf Hitler turned the dagger of deceit on his friend, Ernst Röhm, and the brownshirt legions that helped propel him to power. Germany’s leader ordered his personal guards, the SS, to execute hundreds of brownshirt leaders, one of whom was Röhm, the pedophile warrior he once called friend and comrade.
It has been reported that Röhm’s last words were:
“Sieg heil! (Hail victory.) Heil Hitler.”
It is hard to spare sympathy for Röhm or his decimated legions. These storm troopers were the bullies who smashed shops, beat up and murdered innocent people and became the billboard for Hitler’s anti- Semitism, one of the tenets of the Nazi party and Hitler’s Third Reich.
But the cowardly manner in which it was done during a night and day in which friend murdered friend and brother turned on brother chills the blood.
Like rainwater after a storm, blood collected in deep pools in the courtyard of Stadelheim Prison and the SS barracks as the execution of innocent SA military cadets from the training school continued throughout the day. There are reports that many members of the SS firing squads who executed hundreds of cadets became physically ill from the terrifying spectacle and had to be replaced.