The Vengeance of Rome (50 page)

Strasser found this amusing. ‘Adolf's in love, Ernst. Give the man a break. Lovers' tiffs. You're radiating jealousy! You can't stand it because he's taken up with females! You think he's a pervert, don't you?'

Röhm took this in good part. He chuckled. ‘I won't be the only one who thinks it, if she's as good as her word. Look, I have a very clear idea of what's going on.'

‘You've been hiding under their bed, Ernst!'

‘The bed's probably the only safe place in that apartment. Believe me, I know precisely what happens. She's already told half her girlfriends. And I know what she thinks about it. It doesn't even suit her. I also know what she thinks she's going to do about it.'

‘You've got hold of some of those Soviet microphones and put them in the flower vases. You've got a two-way mirror and a film camera. God in heaven, Ernst, these are the spy fantasies of people like Himmler! Are you buggering the SS chauffeur? Is that how you're finding all this stuff out?'

Again Röhm could not help grinning broadly. He shook his head. ‘Oh, better than that, Strass,' he said. ‘I'm buggering her confessor.'

Strasser said something about preferring to see his Schiller onstage, but it was clear Röhm had made an impression.

The mood of the evening became almost sombre. Röhm suggested I retire. He said that there were important party matters he and Strasser had to discuss, and I shouldn't be burdened with them.

Major Nye was in Berlin while I was in retreat at Röhmannsvilla. He said that he had never known a city not at war in quite such a dither; it was as if there was nothing to do and everything to do. Political strategies
had grown so complex there wasn't a single individual who could be sure of anything. The best they could hope for was a wiping out of the war debt, a chance to start again. Daily the Communists and Socialists introduced increasingly radical bills into the Reichstag, which Hitler would immediately quash. Strasser, working within the system, consistently attempted, sometimes with Communist connivance, to put his socialistic ideas into law. Röhm was behind him. They were now at constant odds with Frick, Göring and Goebbels. Hitler, as usual, was in the middle, unable to make up his mind whom to support. He seemed incapable of uniting his disparate elements. Nye believed Hitler deliberately fostered this bickering between his lieutenants, but I am inclined to agree with Röhm: Hitler hated making decisions. He asked everyone's advice and then could not reconcile the opposing ideas. So he did nothing. When he was not standing in some remote forest clearing reassuring one of the captains of industry, he was utterly involved with Geli Raubal. Nye had heard this from both Strasser and Himmler. Neither man was happy with the situation.

‘Strasser was the only one I could talk to. Radical as he was, he was sane and fundamentally decent. Of course, he was obsessed with the Jewish Question, like all of them. I told him there wouldn't be a Jewish Question if there were not a German Question. That was precisely my view about Ireland and England. I mean, you can't just chuck people out after they've stopped being useful to you, can you? No decent firm would do that, let alone a nation. Well, Strasser saw what I meant, and I think he pretty much agreed with me. He didn't hate anyone, that man. He just wanted to see a bit of decent justice. I think he'd have been perfectly happy with a constitutional monarchy. Chancellor Brüning was trying for that, you know, before General von Schleicher took over.'

Major Nye shakes his head. ‘Now there was an army man I simply could not get on with. Wrong sort altogether. Dabbled in civilian issues. It just isn't done. The German Army knew that as well as the British or the Americans. But, like the Americans, the Germans always think a man who can run an army or a corporation can run a country. They are precisely the last people to run a country! Well, almost the last. Most of the Nazis were the sorts of people you find in the Blenheim Arms these days. The dropouts and seedy misfits. Imagine them suddenly put in charge of Britain.'

‘Heaven forbid,' says Colonel Pym.

‘But not the blacks and Jews,' I say.

‘Oi!' calls Mrs Cornelius from her kitchenette. ‘Are yer still talkin' abart ther War?'

‘Just the causes, Mrs C.' Major Nye is apologetic. He winks at us, but it is her approval he desires most.

‘Their allies thought antisemitism was an engine they could discard once it had driven them to power,' says Colonel Pym. ‘They didn't realise it was the movement's
raison d'être
. What? I think the War was incidental to that.'

I have a soft spot for these old English eccentrics.

Röhm admired the English. They were good soldiers, he said, and about as honourable as you could get in the real world, South Africa aside. The best Englishman, he always said, was what the best German aspired to be. He did not by this intend to denigrate his own people. He was a dedicated patriot. He meant that the English were Germans who had had certain historical and geographical advantages. Needless to say, Cromwell was his great hero. I have noticed how all the Continental radicals admire Cromwell (presumably for his stand against the Catholics) while the British show virtually no interest in him at all. To them the Roundheads and Cavaliers are the stuff of Romance alone. ‘The English are self-disciplined in a way which we must educate the Germans to be,' Röhm said. ‘But what became second nature to John Bull over the course of centuries must be drummed into our honest Michael in a decade. That's the only way to get real lasting social change. The Russians have made a mess of the whole thing. They are hysterical. It is their weakness.'

He was a little vague as to the precise means of force-marching an entire nation through five hundred years of social change. The joke used to be that the Nazis got rid of the class system by getting rid of the classes. But it was only after 1931 that the killings began in earnest. And after 1934 Stabschef Ernst Röhm, Father of the SA, patriot and friend, had no further interest in the world.

I often reflect on the irony of a people who so consistently punish the best and advance the worst.

Major Nye has to get back to Kent. Colonel Pym needs to catch a bus to Fulham. They rise and put on their identical raincoats, buttoning and belting in precise, familiar ways, as if they only truly come to life when they are adjusting their uniforms.

I was never a prisoner at the Villa Röhm. I had simply become nervous of leaving. When transport was available I would go into Munich, perhaps to see the latest films. Röhm never kept much cash, but he would give me enough for my simple pleasures. I no longer felt vulnerable to Frau Oberhauser's threats. The problem with Mussolini could easily be cleared up once the international situation had settled down. I must admit I had become rather lazy, even euphoric. I had never rested for so long and not had to rely on my own wits. I luxuriated in my situation. I could not return Röhm's affections in the same measure, but one cannot help feeling warm towards a person who calls you his ‘Latin angel', his ‘dark-eyed ideal' and offers you the world if you will stay just a few more days, a few more weeks.

I had the impression that I was to some extent hiding in the lion's cage. Röhmannsvilla was probably the safest place in Germany at that time. My patron was without question his country's single most powerful man. I considered it a tribute to his modesty and dedication that he hardly realised it. Even when he boasted of the numbers he commanded, I don't think he really believed them. Five million is an almost impossible figure to contemplate. The only problem was the isolation. Röhm's radio did not get good signals because of the surrounding trees.

Unable to find a
Völkischer Beobachter
on any news-stand I finally had to make do with a
Telegramm Zeitung
. There, on an inside page, I read of a tragedy which had taken place at an apartment house in Prinzregentenstrasse. A young woman who lived with her mother had shot herself. She had not left a note. The young woman was the eldest daughter of Frau Angela Raubal, a housekeeper.

I did not, even for a second, believe the story.

Geli Raubal had made her last threat, engineered her last scene,
attempted her last blackmail. Someone, either Hitler or a friend, had finished off the ‘yowling alley cat' at last. The Führer was free.

I hold no brief for murder. There are few excuses for taking another human life. The Lutherans and the Catholics were wholly agreed on that. In times of war or during certain national crises the taking of life could be condoned, said the pastors and the priests. Well, whoever killed Geli Raubal might claim those precise reasons. My own view was that it would not have mattered had she lived or died. The important thing would have been to find any incriminating papers and get rid of them. Her word was worthless without some kind of proof.

Had someone shot her while trying to find those pictures? I knew Röhm would probably enlighten me to a degree. He might even know whether Hitler himself had done it or not. If Hitler had killed her, it had probably been an accident. I felt rather sorry for her. She had seemed an ordinary, silly Bavarian
Mädchen
. As Mrs Cornelius's youngest son Frank said the other day, she must have felt like Lois Lane being fucked by Superman! The reality was a little bit more than she bargained for. A superhuman, after all, has superhuman needs. This must have seemed very bizarre to a typical little girl from the country! The two of them could never have known anything close to ordinary life. She was, after all, also his niece. The whole thing was perverse, why so many of Hitler's people had begged him to give her up. They saw nothing but disaster in the situation. One way or another she would not have lasted.

I remember hoping that Hitler's political ambitions would not be threatened by any scandal. I did not think it his fault, after all, that the strain of being the mistress of a great politician had told on the weaker type of girl.

Since Röhm had arranged to pick me up there, I went down to the Bratwurstglockl where I expected to find an acquaintance who knew me from the villa. Becker was already installed at a table with some of his Hitler Youth chums. The place was alive with gossip. Everyone had their stories to add. The details were often incredibly gory and related with great relish! Eventually I pieced together the account which Hess gave me later. Hess apparently believed that after one of her canaries had died, Geli had quarrelled with her ‘Uncle Alf'. She still wanted Hitler to let her go to Vienna to become an opera singer. Suspecting she intended to keep a liaison, Hitler refused. Geli had threatened to ‘talk to the papers', let some of his ‘big friends' in on a few of their secrets. With harsh humour he had reminded her of the fate of Mata Hari. He was busy with intense cattle-trading politics in Berlin. They were on the brink of victory, with a real presence in the
Reichstag, backed by an SA now larger than the regular army. Later he would discuss the matter reasonably. For now she must be patient. A subsequent screaming match had aroused the entire apartment house. Witnesses were clear from her urgency that she had another agenda. She planned to embarrass him so badly he would give in. Hess believed she had an arrangement with some SS man she knew, the mysterious Zeiss. She, of course, had denied this. A car called for Hitler. Her uncle had meetings of the deepest importance and secrecy. He left. As he got into his car, she appeared on the balcony. ‘Won't you let me go to Vienna?' she cried, for all the world to hear. He answered abruptly, and the car drove away.

The next morning the housekeeper found her in her bedroom. She had been shot through the heart with Hitler's Walther PPK 38. The gun was near her hand, suggesting suicide. She had been beaten. Her mother's first thought was that Geli had been murdered by Himmler. She called Hess who had good connections with the Munich police. He arranged for an inconspicuous investigation, a verdict of suicide. Geli had been a good Catholic. No note was found.

‘The strange thing was,' said Röhm as we drove back to the villa, ‘that all that day she'd been carrying Kutzi around. Like a sort of warning—like fate. Don't you find that a bit spooky, Mashi? A dead canary? The bird was still there when she died.'

Of course, he said, he had not intended to kill her. She was still hysterical when he arrived. He thought she might have been expecting someone else. They both knew Hitler would not be back. He had gone there to warn her off and collect any letters and other material she might be hiding.

‘I tried to calm her down. She'd go quiet and then start screaming again, and I'd have to slap her. Oh, you know. She was like a mad animal. She never had much reason to begin with. She wouldn't tell me where the stuff was, so I started looking for myself. I was pissed off with her, I'll admit.'

While he was looking through her purse for her keys, she had threatened him with Hitler's automatic.

‘She didn't even know about the thumb safety,' said Röhm. ‘You can't pull the trigger without pressing down the safety at the same time. I took it away from her. I told her she was in a game whose stakes were far too high for her. She should go back to Obersalzberg or wherever she's from. She was dragging the Chief down. I don't know. She got hysterical again, and she got shot. She'd made me so jumpy. My own nerves were on edge. I'm not a bastard. I don't go around killing civilians. I only meant to warn her off. But at least it's over now, and Hitler can get on with his work.

‘We've got less than a month to go. Schleicher wanted to introduce Strasser to Hindenburg, but we have to be sure it's Hitler. Strasser can't get the votes in the country. He can't talk the way the Chief can. That meeting will get Hitler the Presidency or at very least show how Hindenburg is taking him seriously. That alone is worth millions of votes. This is the big moment, Mashi. With that bitch out of the picture we've a clear run at it. Still, as you know, I never had anything against her.'