“Traffic,” she managed to say. “Trucks and soldiers and SS everywhere. What’s going on? Has there been a coup?”
“Schleicher has been shot and killed.” Bill led her into the green reception room. “We don’t know what’s happening. Martial law has been declared in Berlin.”
For a moment she turned over the name in her thoughts without recognition, until suddenly she remembered—General Kurt von Schleicher, Adolf Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, well regarded as an officer and a gentleman and a shrewd politician. Though he had resigned months before, he retained a great deal of influence in the Reichswehr and was feared by the Nazis, who saw in him a potential rival to Hitler.
“Why did they shoot him?” Mildred sank into a soft chair away from the window, distressed. “What has he done? Hitler can’t shoot everyone who opposes him or there won’t be anyone left to run the country.”
“They killed Schleicher’s wife too.” Bill’s words came in a rush, strained and harried. “From what I’ve been told, several of Göring’s police appeared at their front door and demanded to speak with him. When a servant said he was out in the garden, the police stormed into the house, through his office, and out the back door. They found Schleicher walking with his wife in the garden, facing away from the house. The police didn’t even call out a warning before firing multiple times into their backs.”
“Oh my God.” Mildred pressed a hand to her mouth, head spinning. It was cold-blooded murder, and for what? Schleicher was a potential political rival even in retirement, but what crime had he committed? And Frau von Schleicher—how could anyone justify killing her?
Just then Martha’s mother rushed into the room. “Martha, dear,” she exclaimed tearfully. “Thank God you’re home! Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” said Martha, rising to embrace her. Her thoughts flew to Boris. She hoped he had made it safely to the Soviet embassy, and she wondered what he had learned there.
After shutting the door firmly against eavesdropping servants, Martha’s mother said that her father was in his office preparing telegrams for the State Department and fielding phone calls from anxious diplomats. Then Bill explained what he had learned from his friends in the press and the diplomatic corps of the events of the day and the previous night.
It was a harrowing tale. The Schleichers were only two of at least twenty-five and perhaps as many as several hundred people killed by the Nazis that day, and at that very moment the death toll continued to rise as assassination squads prowled the country carrying out peremptory executions. Karl Ernst, the chief of the Berlin SA, had been dragged off a ship in Bremen as he prepared to embark on his honeymoon. Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action and an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, had been murdered in his office. Many Jews had been shot simply for being Jews. Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, who only days before had infuriated Hitler by making a speech in Marburg denouncing authoritarianism and calling for greater democracy in government, had been arrested. His speechwriter and press secretary had been killed outright. Captain Röhm, apprehended at a resort in Munich while in bed with a young SA paramour, had been arrested and dragged off to prison still declaring his loyalty to Hitler even as the insignia was torn from his uniform. His fate was unknown.
At three o’clock, Hermann Göring had given a press conference at the Reich Chancellery, where he had announced that the strike’s purpose was to quash an imminent putsch by the SA, plotted by Captain Röhm with the complicity of an unnamed foreign power.
“Everyone presumed he meant France,” added Bill. “When the reporters asked what connection people like Schleicher and Klausener could possibly have to an SA putsch, Göring grinned and claimed they had plotted against the regime.”
“This is all too horrible,” their mother murmured. “Where will it end—”
They started as the door opened and Fritz entered, paler than usual, to announce more phone calls and letters received. Bill quickly got rid of him and shut the door again, but the obsequious butler frequently returned, interrupting their hushed conversation with new messages or to inquire after their needs. Other servants too entered the room on any pretext, their faces white and scared. Martha suspected they were afraid and yet eager to learn what the Nazis had done, but her family dared not trust them with their secrets.
As notes and phone calls flooded the residence in the tense hours and anxious days that followed, the horrifying extent of the purge gradually sank in. One of Bill’s friends in the diplomatic corps came by the house, visibly shaken, and after conferring privately with the ambassador, he told Bill and Martha that Lichterfield, a prison in a Berlin suburb, had been turned into a veritable shooting gallery, with human bodies as targets.
“Why doesn’t the army fight back?” Martha asked in a whisper, glancing over her shoulder for Fritz, who seemed to be perpetually lurking about. “So many officers in the Reichswehr have been murdered. Why doesn’t the army avenge them?”
“The army hates the Brownshirts more than they resent the insult to their own,” Bill’s friend said. “They may be willing to sacrifice a few of their officers if it means the utter destruction of the SA.”
Martha shook her head, sickened. Even if only a few of those killed were army officers, how could that not be enough to compel their leadership to intervene? The official death toll released by the German government was less than 100, but the reports Martha’s father received from American consulates in other German cities put the total at 235, although an SS officer had told the consul in Brandenburg that 500 had been killed and 1,500 arrested. It was impossible to know for certain.
By Sunday evening, Martha’s father had confirmed that Captain Röhm was dead. Röhm had been confined at Stadelheim Prison since his arrest, as Hitler had struggled to give the order to execute his old friend. Eventually Röhm had been given a loaded gun, a newspaper describing recent events in order to crush his last vestiges of hope, and time alone in his cell, but he had refused to oblige his captors by taking his own life. According to one account, when the impatient SS men checked in on him, Röhm had declared, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.” The officers relieved him of the gun and shot him on the spot.
Early the next morning, the Dodds learned that Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had scheduled a radio address for that evening. “We expect him to offer an official account of the events of the past forty-eight hours,” said Martha’s father, his voice thin with strain, his face gray, his hands trembling from exhaustion. He had hardly slept since the purge began. “Although how anyone can justify such brutality, the outright murder of men and women who have been neither charged with a crime nor proven guilty is beyond my comprehension.”
As word of Goebbel’s radio address spread, another flurry of messages and phone calls arrived from American expatriates and foreign diplomats who urgently wished to listen to the speech at the American embassy. Perhaps they felt safer there, more able to speak freely. Martha certainly did. She had come to loathe and fear the Nazis as much as she had once admired them. How could she have been so blind?
The guests included several of her own friends, whom she hoped would have information about mutual acquaintances yet unaccounted for. As twilight fell, she welcomed friends with the new greeting that Berliners had swiftly adopted during those shocking, harrowing days—spoken ironically, with a slight smirk or an arched eyebrow to mask one’s fear: “Lebst du noch?”
Are you still among the living?
Chapter Twenty-four
July 1934
Mildred
On the afternoon of July 4, Mildred and Arvid were among the three hundred Americans, embassy and consulate staff, members of the press, German officials, and foreign diplomats invited to attend the American embassy’s annual Independence Day celebration.
“One might have expected Mr. and Mrs. Dodd to cancel the party in the aftermath of such horror,” said Arvid as they dressed.
“They wouldn’t.” Inspecting herself in the mirror, Mildred tucked a loose strand of golden hair back into her chignon. “It’s not just a party anymore but a reminder of American democracy and freedom, of the refuge our country offers to those fleeing oppression.”
“And the refuge it offers expatriates.” He took her hand and raised it to his lips, his gaze warm and understanding. “Whatever turmoil goes on outside the embassy doors, for a few hours you’ll be on American soil among your own people. Perhaps... perhaps you should enjoy that sense of belonging and security every day.”
