The Vengeance of Rome (82 page)

I was soon the oldest occupant of the cell, which began quickly to fill up with an entirely different class of prisoner, the scum of Jewish Munich, drug addicts, perverts and criminals of the lowest kind. The worst sort of Jew, as we used to say.

I begged the warders to let me go out on work parties, anything to keep me away from the cell as long as possible, and for a while I was employed painting doors and woodwork in the new wing. But this did not last. They were unsatisfied with my work. I said that I was a trained mechanic. What if I worked on the transport? But they were contemptuous. Somehow they seemed to think because I was not a good house painter, I could not possibly make a reasonable engineer. I thought of telling them how their leader was allegedly a good house painter, if not necessarily Germany's best choice of Chancellor, but of course I kept my mouth shut rather than jeopardise my release.

My letters were not being forwarded, but I continued to write to my friends in the outside world. I fell into a deep depression, keeping increasingly to myself. While they did not like me much, the Jewish lowlifes scarcely seemed to mind. Most of them brought the foulest habits with them. They had no manners at all. They talked constantly in corrupted Yiddish. They told disgusting stories and revealed obscene desires. They hated everyone, especially any fellow Jews who had made something of themselves. They hated each other. Eventually I developed a habit of deafness, dumbness and daydreaming, which saved me the worst of their noise. I could not entirely block them out. Their smell was dreadful. They belched and farted and left food scraps everywhere. It was like sharing a room with a pack of rats.

Because I complained, they attempted to put hands on me. But they left me alone when I told them of my powerful connections. The experience was terrifying, nonetheless. Almost the whole corridor was now filled with this riff-raff. As the SA and the regular warders were gradually replaced with the more disciplined but less humane SS, I had no one to whom I could complain. When I did make mild protests to an SA man, I narrowly escaped a beating. He told me that he had nothing against me, but anyone else would have used a club or a whip on me. The SS habitually carried dog whips and long truncheons. According to one guard, they had been trained in their use at Dachau, which had become a centre where all SS prison guards learned their trade. I wondered if the camp were quite the wholesome place the newsreels had described.

Inevitably I sank deeper and deeper into self-pity. Still the worst was to come. I had rarely known such a sense of dread. No point in my asking
to see the prison governor or, indeed, the doctor. Any attention from them would prove unwelcome. My fellow prisoners would show their disapproval with violence and curses. That raucous, foul-mouthed riff-raff would know they were the reason for my complaints. Perhaps the worst irony, of course, was that I was branded a Jew by association, suffering not only humiliation from the other prisoners but additional cruelty from the guards.

Only in the dead of night did I know any kind of peace, and even this could be broken by the screams of those who had gone insane or were being punished for some transgression. I lost track of time.

It only dawned on me how much time had passed when I read in the
VB
that the SA leadership was taking its annual leave. It was 29 June 1934. I had been a prisoner for some three months.

It would be misleading to say the events heralded my release, though this was to some degree true. At first I merely thought my luck had changed. Certainly it was a crossroads for Germany and for Adolf Hitler, that night of the 29th/30th, which became known as the Night of Shame for the Nazi Party, the Night of the Long Knives …

The summer darkness was warm and rather sticky. The rest of the cell was snoring heartily, grunting, farting, mumbling, a susurration I had come to find almost relaxing, since the noise of sleeping brutes was more reassuring than the noise of wakeful brutes. Our little window was open to let in whatever air there was.

I lay on my bunk enjoying the nearest I could come to solitude, the breeze from the window cooling my skin, when, in the early hours of the morning, I heard a sudden commotion from below.

From past experience I knew the gates to the courtyard were being swung open. Motor vehicles were driven rapidly through. Shouts, screamed orders, as a new batch of prisoners was brought in. I was used to the prison's routine. No inmates were ever transferred at night. The staff went back to their quarters at five o'clock and did not return until seven the next morning. Yet this was clearly a huge shipment of new arrivals!

My curiosity whetted, I got up and stood carefully on the toilet, peering down squarely on to the floodlit cobbles of the courtyard. What I saw astonished me.

Scores of SA men, many of them half clad, as if roused unexpectedly from their beds, were stumbling out of closed, unmarked trucks and cars. They were surrounded by SS officers, evidently prepared for them with truncheons, dog whips and guns, shrieking to confuse them even further. Some prisoners were high-ranking SA officers and they were remonstrating with
their captors. Others were drugged or drunk, barely able to stand up. They stood staring stupidly, giving the Hitler salute, some of them grinning as if they believed themselves victims of a comradely practical joke.

And then, from a car, glaring at his guards and murmuring what were evidently threats and oaths, stepped my friend and mentor the great Stabschef Ernst Röhm himself, the Commander General of the SA and, after Hitler, the most powerful man in Germany. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only his uniform trousers and boots. I was tempted to call out to him before I realised this was an inappropriate time. Röhm stood glaring at the SS men, and although I could make out few words I recognised his tone. He approached the SS commander, giving the Hitler salute, demanding to know the meaning of this outrage.

The SS man was not at all cowed. In fact, he began to yell. ‘Traitor. Wretch. Assassin. Pervert!' These words were very distinct. My heart sank as I saw my protector shrug his naked shoulders in resignation and stride towards the admission door.

That was the last I saw of him. A number of his men fell in behind and followed him, but others were made to wait outside. I saw them kicked and belaboured as they were arranged in ranks against the far wall while the waiting machine guns were uncovered by the SS. Were mine the only sympathetic eyes observing that scene? I would never know. The guns began to rattle, mowing down brave men who had fought for their nation in the trenches and the streets. They had been prepared to die for their Führer. Now, as they fell, they cried out his name, saluting him, still believing they were sacrificing their lives because of their loyalty to his cause. ‘Heil Hitler!' they cried as the bullets tore into their flesh and vitals. ‘Heil Hitler!' I felt sick. Clothes were shot to ribbons; blood and entrails smeared the cobbles.

The noise became so great it woke my cellmates. I jumped down and returned to my bunk. I knew in my bones that what I had seen endangered me. The men began to wake, too frightened to look out of the window, yet asking one another questions. I pretended to sleep, but I was very much awake and alert. What on earth was happening?

I would, of course, learn later that Hitler, Himmler and the rest had struck like vipers at their own comrades, taking them as they slept, relaxing at Bad Wiessee, the popular lakeside resort, for their annual vacation.

Röhm and his officers had stood no chance against the vicious SS. Hitler himself had led the attack, wakening Röhm and feigning disgust at what he found. The rest is a matter of record. As my cellmates returned to sleep, I listened to the muffled sounds of gunfire as one brave soul after
another fell to the bullets of Himmler's murderers. It went on all night and into the morning. Routines were forgotten. We were neither roused from our bunks nor offered breakfast until around nine o'clock, when we received hunks of bread and nothing else. Not one of us, including myself, had the courage to ask what was going on. But I had seen it.

Later I learned how Röhm held out, refusing to take his own life, refusing to sign a confession. Gregor Strasser did the same, until they shot him through the bars of his cell, not even daring to look him in the eye. Otto Strasser had already escaped into exile. Dozens of others, not even attached to the SA, were murdered in a variety of ways. Father Stempfle, who had written the bulk of
Mein Kampf
, was shot and tortured in the forests outside Munich but would eventually die in Dachau. Von Papen escaped by a whisker, as did a whole variety of patriots whose only crime was to put the well-being of the German nation before that of the Nazi Party. Even UfA's boss Hugenberg lost all significant power. Not one dared resist the Hitler faction.

Thereafter, all their words and deeds became so much play-acting for the benefit of the American press and those ordinary German citizens who had placed their faith in Hitler. They had stepped irrevocably on the road leading to Armageddon, the triumph of communism and the wretched, unheroic death of a leader who had lost his immortal soul on that last day of June 1934.

I had witnessed the death of Nazi chivalry.

Ironically, the betrayal of the SA was to bring me temporary good fortune. Stadelheim and Dachau became so overcrowded their staff were refusing more prisoners. Those accused of nothing could at last be released.

The very morning of the anti-Röhm putsch, we were marched down to the discharge room. The place was in total confusion. Some of us received our bundles of clothes and other personal possessions but many did not. I was given the bag belonging to a Jew who I knew for certain had died of a heart attack a few days earlier. Only by demanding my own, when I saw it in the hands of another inmate, could I get what was mine, including my precious American passport. Then I was rushed with a dozen others past blood-spotted walls to one of the trucks which earlier had carried SA men to their deaths.

After an uncomfortable ride back into central Munich, we were deposited outside police headquarters and told to report there. But I did what many others did. I drifted into the side streets and cautiously made my way home. The main roads seemed to be full of speeding cars with darkened windows. I had to assume this was associated with what I had already witnessed in Stadelheim. Some terrible business was afoot. Had Hitler and his people been overthrown by Goebbels and Himmler? Certainly the SS seemed very much in control.

Instinct told me to avoid my flat. Instead, I huddled in my unseasonable overcoat, which at least presented an appearance of respectability, then I headed for Corneliusstrasse, for which I still had the keys. I desperately hoped the SS had not preceded me.

I arrived as the market was waking up, slipped through the gathering, incurious shoppers, hearing to my astonishment the sound of Signor Frau's barrel organ, as sweet and clear as I had last left it. Was my Zoyea
still dancing for the crowds? I wanted so much to see her. Thoughts of her, as well as of Mrs Cornelius, had sustained me through those terrible nights. But it was dangerous. If my protector was imprisoned, who else might they be rounding up?

Curbing the impulse to reacquaint myself with friends, I at last found myself standing outside the door of my old apartment in Corneliusstrasse. It had, of course, been used by the SA and was a likely target for the SS. There was no need for my key. The door had been bashed in, and I could pass through easily. I saw no SS men here now, only evidence of a hasty search everywhere. I climbed the stairs like a sleepwalker. Still no guards. I had been so happy in that little flat. I had rarely felt safer. Today I was only frightened. The flat's door was broken down, pulled shut but hanging on one hinge. I saw signs of violent struggle. Gunshot holes in the walls. The whole place was in disarray. A brooding stillness hung over it. For a while I had to pause to gather my wits. I suspected the SS had done all they were going to do, but it would still be wise to leave as soon as possible. I went directly to the hiding place under the sink and there, to my relief, was everything I had left. I took a little ‘coca' to steady myself, hid the rest in the lining of my overcoat and then packed everything into a Gladstone bag. On the floor of the closet, still on their hangers, were my summer clothes. The pockets had been turned inside out, but the suits were still in good condition.

I was able to bathe and shave in cold water, and soon I was fully restored. A human being again. I looked my old, dapper self, thoroughly urbane. I turned my wide-brimmed hat at a tilt, put a light overcoat over my shoulders, even twirled a cane. My papers, plans and pistols were in the bag, together with some changes of clothes. I had money in my pocket. And I had one thought paramount in my mind: to get out of Germany while I could. Everything in me shrieked to make that escape.

Driven more by instinct than reason, I slipped from the flat and made my way to the station, taking side streets wherever possible. I had no plan and very little sense of what I was doing except following old impulses. I did not dare take a bus, certainly not a taxi. I was in a kind of trance, not sure I was really free, still ‘in the nightmare', that state of refined terror which I had felt in Odessa, in Oregon and later in Cairo. I felt I had a target painted on my back.

I believed I was liable to random attack at any time from bloodthirsty, savage men. Men without reason who would howl after me, throwing stones and bricks at me, hunting me down until they caught me then tearing me to pieces. I had seen them do it in the past, during the Civil War in Russia
and to those who would not conform in the United States. I remembered the pogroms in Odessa when I had seen anonymous Jews hunted to their deaths by overzealous Cossacks. I had already been mistaken for a Jew more than once in Stadelheim and could not risk it happening again. The only difference was that my face was well known to hundreds of thousands. I was a famous film star. I was even more vulnerable.