Page 103

“Sorry, Peter,” said the officer. “It’s not personal.”

That, of course, is what Helldorff had told himself when he’d betrayed Thomas Bauer and Fritz Gerlich. It isn’t personal. Now it had come full circle. The incriminating information Helldorff had turned over to the Nazis to obtain his promotion was the same information that now made him a liability.

He should have seen it coming. He’d prepared for it, saving money for his wife, Rebecca, and their infant son, Franklin. He’d never told her what he’d done to get promoted. He’d never told her that he’d blocked good people from trying to stop Adolf Hitler’s rise. He didn’t tell her of his overwhelming shame. He didn’t tell her that she had married a coward.

And Helldorff didn’t tell her about the reel of film he took from Thomas Bauer’s backpack the night he robbed Hitler’s safe.

He’d placed the film inside a small metal box and taped it shut, leaving his wife with only this instruction: If anything happened to him, she was to deliver the box to Thomas Bauer.

But now Bauer was nowhere to be found. He was either dead, on the run, or living abroad. Rebecca would not know what to do with the box.

“March forward,” said the officer holding the gun.

He walked toward the sound of the prisoners’ orchestra in the woods. The song they were playing was lively, a foxtrot. It reminded him of his wedding two years earlier. That was one of the last times he remembered feeling right.

92

July 1, 1934

Food pantry

Kaufingerstraße

Munich

SOPHIE GERLICH SPENT THE morning at the volunteer food pantry that her husband, Fritz Gerlich, had founded years ago when the Depression first hit. She’d thrown herself into the work since his arrest, sick with worry for her husband, unable to sit at home. She spent her afternoons and evenings working as a typist at a private hospital in Munich. Anything to avoid her empty, lonely home.

Her love for Fritz, she found, had only grown since his detention thirteen months ago. Before then she had scolded him for thumbing his nose defiantly at Hitler, all but daring the Nazis to come for him. But in the months since his arrest, Sophie had seen so much cowardice around her. She’d lost many friends, people who now sided with the regime. The sheer spinelessness and opportunism of the “March Violets” who’d eagerly embraced Nazi ideology since Hitler became dictator in March 1933 only highlighted Fritz’s courage.

At noon, she walked two blocks away to a café run by a woman whose husband had likewise been taken into protective custody, in June 1933. Over time, Sophie had found a community among women like her, whose loved ones had been detained. They met to share information, tidbits of gossip and rumor, any information they had gleaned from letters they received from their loved ones at Dachau. They consoled each other. They gave each other hope. They prayed together.

Now, after more than a year had passed, the general tone of the meetings had moved from urgent and horrified to more funereal, a sense of resignation replacing desperation.

But this day, a Sunday, the café was so full of people that the crowd spilled onto the cobblestone streets, buzzing with the rumors they were hearing. A mass murder yesterday, they said. A purge. The Nazis had killed hundreds of political dissidents and opponents.

Some of the names rumored to be casualties were shocking. Like Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary unit. Had the group grown too powerful, its leader too arrogant? Or was it due to Röhm’s homosexuality, which was an open secret? Röhm’s top aides were also said to have been rounded up and executed in various locations throughout Germany.

Political opponents, too, like Gregor Strasser, who’d once fought for control of the National Socialists and now headed its opposition. And General Kurt von Schleicher, the chancellor who’d preceded Hitler. As well as several of the remaining opposition leaders in the Reichstag—Georg von Detten, Karl Ernst, and Hans Hayn, among others.

Sophie took the first tram toward home, jumping off and sprinting through the Konigsplatz to her flat on Richard-Wagner-Straße. As her door at No. 21 came into view, she saw two black-uniformed SS officers walking away and jumping into a truck. They had left behind a box on her front stoop.

She arrived at the stoop, breathless. The box was almost weightless, something rattling inside. She ripped off the tape.

Inside were Fritz’s steel-rimmed eyeglasses, slightly bent, and spattered with blood.

Part Four

“I believe we Germans make a serious mistake inasmuch as we are measuring the political adversary by our own decent yardsticks.… This chivalrous attitude, however, must be seen as madness if applied to Jewry or to Bolshevism, which have immorality, fraud, and lies as a prerequisite… we Germans must at long last learn that the Jew and any organization trained by Jews should not be viewed as humans of our species or exponents of our way of thinking.”

—Heinrich Himmler, confidential speech, spring 1936

93

December 1936

Nuremberg

TWO AND A HALF years after Unternehmen Kolibri (Operation Hummingbird), better known as the Nacht der langen Messer or Night of the Long Knives, Thomas Bauer and Erich von der Haas stood together at the window of a hotel room in downtown Nuremberg, trading a pair of binoculars while they surveyed the train station a block away.