In the Garden of Beasts

CHAPTER 36

Saving Diels

The fear Diels felt grew more pronounced, to the point where in March he again went to Martha for help, this time in hopes of using her to acquire assistance from the U.S. embassy itself. It was a moment freighted with irony: the chief of the Gestapo seeking aid from American officials. Somehow Diels had gotten wind of a plan by Himmler to arrest him, possibly that very day. He had no illusions. Himmler wanted him dead.

Diels knew he had allies at the American embassy, namely Dodd and Consul General Messersmith, and believed they might be able to provide a measure of safety by expressing to Hitler’s regime their interest in his continued well-being. But Dodd, he knew, was on leave. Diels asked Martha to speak with Messersmith, who by now had returned from his own leave, to see what he could do.

Despite Martha’s inclination to view Diels as overly dramatic, this time she did believe he faced mortal peril. She went to see Messersmith at the consulate.

She was “obviously in a greatly perturbed situation,” Messersmith recalled. She broke down in tears and told him that Diels was to be arrested that day “and that it was almost certain that he would be executed.”

She composed herself, then pleaded with Messersmith to meet with Göring at once. She tried flattery, calling Messersmith the only man who could intercede “without being in danger of his own life.”

Messersmith was unmoved. By now he had grown to dislike Martha. He found her behavior—her various love affairs—repugnant. Given her presumed relationship with Diels, Messersmith was not surprised that she had come to his office in “this hysterical state.” He told her he could do nothing “and after a great deal of difficulty was able to get her out of my office.”

After she left, however, Messersmith began to reconsider. “I began thinking about the matter and realized that she was correct in saying one thing, and that is that Diels after all was one of the best in the regime, as was Göring and that in case anything happened to Diels and Himmler came in, it would weaken the position of Göring and of the more reasonable element in the party.” If Himmler ran the Gestapo, Messersmith believed, he and Dodd would have far more difficulty resolving future attacks against Americans, “for Himmler was known to be even more cold-blooded and ruthless than Dr. Diels.”

Messersmith was scheduled to attend a luncheon that afternoon at the Herrenklub, a men’s club for conservatives, hosted by two prominent Reichswehr generals, but now, recognizing that a talk with Göring was far more important, Messersmith saw that he might have to cancel. He called Göring’s office to arrange the meeting and learned that Göring had just left for a luncheon of his own—at the Herrenklub. Messersmith hadn’t known until then that Göring was to be the guest of honor at the generals’ lunch.

He realized two things: first, that the task of speaking with Göring had suddenly become much simpler, and second, that the luncheon was a landmark: “It was the first time since the Nazis came to power that the highest ranking officers of the German Army … were going to sit down to a table with Göring or any high ranking member of the Nazi regime.” It struck him that the lunch might signal that the army and government were closing ranks against Captain Röhm and his Storm Troopers. If so, it was an ominous sign, for Röhm was not likely to jettison his ambitions without a fight.

MESSERSMITH ARRIVED AT THE CLUB shortly after noon and found Göring conversing with the generals. Göring put his arm around Messersmith’s shoulders and told the others, “Gentlemen, this is a man who doesn’t like me at all, a man who doesn’t think very much of me, but he is a good friend of our country.”

Messersmith waited for an appropriate moment to take Göring aside. “I told him in very few words that a person in whom I had absolute confidence had called on me that morning and told me that Himmler was bent on getting rid of Diels during the course of the day and that Diels was actually to be bumped off.”

Göring thanked him for the information. The two rejoined the other guests, but a few moments later Göring offered his regrets and left.

What happened next—what threats were made, what compromises struck, whether Hitler himself intervened—isn’t clear, but by five o’clock that afternoon, April 1, 1934, Messersmith learned that Diels had been named Regierungspräsident, or regional commissioner, of Cologne and that the Gestapo would now be headed by Himmler.

Diels was saved, but Göring had suffered a significant defeat. He had acted not for the sake of past friendship but out of anger at the prospect of Himmler trying to arrest Diels in his own realm. Himmler, however, had won the greatest prize, the last and most important component of his secret-police empire. “It was,” Messersmith wrote, “the first setback that Göring had had since the beginning of the Nazi regime.”

A photograph of the moment when Himmler officially took control of the Gestapo, at a ceremony on April 20, 1934, shows Himmler speaking at the podium, his aspect bland as ever, as Diels stands nearby, facing the camera. His face seems swollen as if from excess drink or lack of sleep, and his scars are exceptionally pronounced. He is the portrait of a man under duress.

In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.”

APRIL BROUGHT STRANGELY LITTLE RAIN but a bumper crop of fresh secrets. Early in the month, Hitler and Defense Minister Blomberg learned that President Hindenburg had become ill, gravely so, and was unlikely to survive the summer. They kept the news to themselves. Hitler coveted the presidential authority still possessed by Hindenburg and planned upon his death to combine in himself the roles of chancellor and president and thereby at last acquire absolute power. But two potential barriers remained: the Reichswehr and Röhm’s Storm Troopers.

In mid-April, Hitler flew to the naval port of Kiel and there boarded a pocket battleship, the Deutschland, for a four-day voyage, accompanied by Blomberg; Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the navy; and General Werner von Fritsch, chief of the army command. Details are scarce, but apparently in the intimate quarters of the ship Hitler and Blomberg crafted a secret deal, truly a devil’s bargain, in which Hitler would neutralize Röhm and the SA in return for the army’s support for his acquisition of presidential authority upon Hindenburg’s death.

The deal was of incalculable value to Hitler, for now he could go forward without having to worry about where the army stood.

Röhm, meanwhile, became increasingly insistent on winning control over the nation’s armed forces. In April, during one of his morning rides in the Tiergarten, he watched a group of senior Nazis pass by, then turned to a companion. “Look at those people over there,” he said. “The Party isn’t a political force anymore; it’s turning into an old-age home. People like that … We’ve got to get rid of them quickly.”

He grew bolder about airing his displeasure. At a press conference on April 18, he said, “Reactionaries, bourgeois conformists, we feel like vomiting when we think of them.”

He declared, “The SA is the National Socialist Revolution.”

Two days later, however, a government announcement seemed to undercut Röhm’s declarations of self-importance: the entire SA had been ordered to go on leave for the month of July.

ON APRIL 22, Heinrich Himmler appointed his young protégé Reinhard Heydrich, newly thirty, to fill Diels’s job as chief of the Gestapo. Heydrich was blond, tall, slim, and considered handsome, save for a head described as disproportionately narrow and eyes spaced too closely. He spoke in a near falsetto that was perversely out of step with his reputation for being coolly and utterly ruthless. Hitler dubbed him “the Man with the Iron Heart,” and yet Heydrich was said to play the violin with such passion that he would weep as he executed certain passages. Throughout his career he would battle rumors that he was in fact Jewish, despite an investigation by the Nazi Party that purported to find no truth to the allegation.

With Diels gone, the last trace of civility left the Gestapo. Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, recognized at once that under Himmler and Heydrich the organization would undergo a change of character. “I could very well venture combat with Diels, the unsteady playboy who, conscious of being a bourgeois renegade, had a good many inhibitions holding him back from foul play,” Gisevius wrote. “But as soon as Himmler and Heydrich entered the arena I should have prudently withdrawn.”

TOWARD THE END OF APRIL the government at last revealed to the public the grave state of Hindenburg’s health. Suddenly the question of who would succeed him became a matter of pressing conversation everywhere. All who were aware of the deepening split between Röhm and Hitler understood that a new element of suspense now propelled the narrative.