The Vengeance of Rome

FORTY-SIX

That disgusting little Frenchman believed my beloved had betrayed him to Hermann Göring. Months ago he and she had been on the same bill at the Flashlite — he was the resident comedian — and they had not got on well. LeBrun did not know why he was arrested but was certain it was because ‘Gloria Cornish’ had said something to Göring. ‘I was too outspoken,’ he said. But he had always been careful not to attack the Nazis. No doubt ‘La Cornish’ had convinced her lover otherwise.

I told him that this was complete nonsense. Mrs Cornelius was simply Göring’s friend; she was not his mistress. Whatever else they said about him, nobody ever accused Göring of infidelity. But LeBrun claimed Gloria Cornish was an adventuress, ruthless in her jealousy, whom he had first encountered in France, where she had been involved in a famous scandal. ‘She slept her way into the movies.’ He recognised me, too, he said. He had seen me in Paris. Perhaps with her. He had worked as a waiter at Lipp’s, a restaurant I had favoured. I, of course, denied this. I thought it best to say I had never been there at all. I was still worried about Kitty’s inherited collection of press cuttings and Röhm’s ‘dossier’.

LeBrun knew he had alarmed me and pressed his advantage. After some thought he swore he had seen me at Lipp’s with Gloria Cornish. This was a complete nonsense. We were never together in Paris. Mrs Cornelius was in the United Kingdom at that time. LeBrun was doubtless terrified, flailing about for any advantage. Anything that might ingratiate him with the authorities. It was disgusting. I refused to be intimidated. I told him he was a madman and a slanderer. He was lucky I did not tear him limb from limb.

LeBrun was in his own nightmare. In his babbling panic he accused all and everyone. He could not understand the reasons for his arrest. His accusations became wilder and wilder. They were so clearly his own transference, as Helander suggested, that my anger eventually dissipated. I came to treat him with disgusted contempt. He was not, it emerged, a French citizen, but was from the Alsatian border. My cellmates disliked him as much as I did. He was a poisonous little homosexual, a natural gossip and troublemaker. We could easily imagine how he had come to be arrested. I could not bear to be in the same cell with him.

In spite of his attempts to engage them in conversation, Pottendorf and Helander did their best to ignore him. At my first opportunity I complained bitterly to the guard. We found LeBrun repellent, I said. When not moaning and groaning about his situation, he was accusing each and every one of us of some imagined crime. None of us wanted to risk going to bed. It was not fair that we should be forced to share quarters with an obvious pervert. The guard was sympathetic. As soon as a single cell was available, LeBrun would go there.

Two days passed and LeBrun was still with us. Worse, I still did not get a hearing for my own case. Obviously I had no need of ‘protective custody’. I was an honest American citizen, a taxpayer, a friend of the new Germany. I demanded the Chief of Police be notified. Others might be there for political reasons, but I should not be. I, not LeBrun, was in Ettstrasse as a result of false accusation. It was in Prince Freddy’s interest to get rid of me now that he had what he wanted. If Göring were made aware of my presence in the jail he would immediately have me released. I asked for pen, ink and paper and eventually received a few rough sheets, torn from a schoolbook, and a pencil. Doing my best with these materials, I wrote to Mrs Cornelius and to Aviation Minister Göring, but I despaired. Unless they recognised my handwriting, my notes would look like a thousand others they received every day.

Along with writing materials, tobacco and food, the only newspaper we were allowed to buy via the guards was the Völkischer Beobachter. Those guards made a handsome profit from us. Even the paper was a few more pfennigs than the published price. On the fourth day of my captivity, I was scanning its pages when I noticed a small news item which referred to foreign Bolshevist elements being rounded up for questioning. Many of these Reds were associated with the arts. Writers and actors were particularly under suspicion. They were responsible for corrupting the minds of Germans through their films and books. I asked Pottendorf if this could refer to us and he said he thought it could. I began to feel less than optimistic.

Sensing my despair, Count Pottendorf reassured me. Even LeBrun was clearly not a Red. If we were suspected of such affiliations we would be with the other musicians and entertainers in Stadelheim and Dachau. I was a victim of bureaucratic thinking, nothing else. Rather than distinguish between us, the Nazis had decided to arrest all foreign artists and writers on the suspicion that they were communists. Slowly, as they investigated us, they would discover who was and who was not guilty and I would be released. My confidence temporarily restored, I determined to make the best of things. I would soon be back in my flat. I prayed that the carefully hidden documents and personal possessions in Corneliusstrasse had not meanwhile been discovered and stolen.

I next began to worry what would happen if, just as I was on the point of being released, LeBrun might bear false witness against me. He was spiteful enough to do so. Did he really remember me from Paris? Certainly I did not remember him from Lipp’s. At that time, Mrs Cornelius and myself had moved in different circles. If she had been in Paris at all, she would have been with Trotsky or her mysterious Persian playboy who had brought her to Constantinople. That was before I had driven from Rome to begin my career in Paris. She had been in London. I had received a letter from her, posted from Whitechapel. From there, inspired by my letters, she had gone with an English touring company to the USA. I did not remember the details, but certainly I had not met her again until we were both in the United States where, to our mutual benefit, Mucker Hever had fallen in love with her. We could never have been together in Paris.

So detached from reality had I become that I even thought of killing LeBrun while he slept. He could ruin me. Of course my instincts would not permit it. I value human life. I would not willingly spill his blood, even though he was loathed by all. Moreover, if he was stifled in his sleep, I was sure to be subject to an inquiry.

My fears were groundless, as it happened. Within a day LeBrun had lost his flashy suit and was wearing only a striped prison shirt which went down to his knees. The guards were amused by this. They said he looked better in a dress. They even took his shoes. We found a spare pair in Bach’s suitcase that were too big for him, but better than nothing. The guards said he would be issued with some sturdier clothes when he got to Dachau. There he would learn what it was to work like a man.

Happily, LeBrun soon gave up his accusatory mode and spoke to us less and less, snivelling himself to sleep every night. I came close to pitying him. He had bruises all over him where he had been kicked and punched by passing SA. If he had not accused my angel, I would have done more to try to help him. Even when he began to bleed from the nose, I sensed something disgusting about him. Helander, like me, avoided him, but the little pervert became pathetically grateful when Count Pottendorf, a Christian gentleman to the marrow, bathed his face, wiping the dried blood off his nose and lips. Pottendorf spoke in a low tone about Paris, which he had loved, her boulevards, her parks, her quays, calming LeBrun to silence so that we could all sleep.

They say that in monetary terms a barrel of good human gore is worth infinitely more than a barrel of crude oil. Tens of thousands of pounds are needed to buy a few gallons of blood. Plasma is, of course, worth even more. I heard this on the BBC the other day. Not that I believe everything the BBC tells us. Buggers Broadcasting Communism, as Miss Brunner, the schoolteacher I see at the pub, would have it. Blood is literally the most valuable liquid on the planet. Is it because we spill it so liberally, I wonder? The Americans used albumin first at Pearl Harbor. It had astonishing properties. Yet it is also the most easily contaminated substance. Oil, the most contaminating of liquids, kills anything it touches. Our oceans and beaches are forever ruined by it, yet we value oil far higher than blood.

The oil had dried on LeBrun’s head and his hair was a spiked mess, giving him an insane, inhuman appearance. Struwwelpeter, indeed! How quickly he had lost his veneer. The rest of us used whatever means we could to keep up our standards, but in a matter of hours the Alsatian went from posturing dandy to slovenly wretch.

The SA began to call for LeBrun regularly. He was gone for hours. He said they were questioning him about French communists he knew. He did not know any communists, he said, whether French or otherwise. He had never had anything to do with politics. He had been beaten up but he would not tell us details. While he was away, we wondered if he was being persuaded to act as a witness against us. Every time he returned he had a fresh bruise and was weeping. Pottendorf said he thought it unlikely they were asking LeBrun about us. Horrible though it was to contemplate, the SA men were beating him for their own pleasure, out of disgust for his kind. He had encouraged them in their prejudice, almost advertised himself.

One afternoon Helander proposed that LeBrun was being used by the brutal homosexual element of the SA. After all, Röhm was notorious.

Naturally I defended my patron. Röhm’s enemies had employed his sensitive letters against him. That Spartan love was a very different thing from LeBrun’s limp-wristed mincing. Helander and Pottendorf seemed surprised by the intensity of my defence, which made me realise it was unwise of me to continue. I could do no good for Röhm or help my own cause.

Nursing his bruises, LeBrun confined himself to his miserable bunk. The rest of us tried to make conversation. The other two prisoners were interested in my scientific ideas, and it took my mind off my situation to talk about such things. In America I had invented a very successful steam-car, but my interest remained mostly in aeronautics. I described my one-man observation airship and asked if they had ever heard of the giant airship the Americans planned to build. I was about to tell them a little of my involvement with such a ship, which, as far as I knew, was still in its shed outside Akron, when Pottendorf gave a bitter laugh. ‘Don’t tell me about airships. Poor LeBrun has already reminded me too much! I lost half my fortune to that miserable confidence trick that was all over the papers a few years ago. I was living in Paris at the time. I invested heavily. I was an idiot. I thought it was the coming thing. Do you remember that scandal? Some ten years or so ago? They used a Russian nobleman to front it. He was a convincing rogue. What was his name? Count something. He married a Parisian banker’s daughter, I think, then ran off with some little whore from Constantinople. The scheme itself was cooked up by a bunch of Jewish fraudsters. I haven’t a prejudiced bone in my body, but I should have known better than to trust them. They made millions from it, of course, but left the rest of us high and dry. Some Russian charlatan claimed to be the inventor. Another Jew. If you’re involved in aeronautics, you might remember him, Mr Peters. Did that news ever reach America? I heard the chief villains fled there, but America is a large country. It is full of defaulting financiers and fleeing criminals. You must have encountered plenty.’

I was shocked to hear this version of my wholly idealistic Parisian experiment. I longed to enlighten him but, in the circumstances, could not.

‘I would not have had to resort to journalism,’ Pottendorf continued, ‘if it had not been for those rogues. And if I had not become a journalist, I would no doubt not be here at all!’

I was relieved that I had shown forbearance and denied any association with Paris. It seemed impolitic to mention my involvement with the airship company or to try to defend my friend Kolya, for Count Nikolai Feodorovitch Petroff was the man Pottendorf referred to. In reality, of course, I, too, had been a victim of the scheme. Indeed, I had been made the chief scapegoat. My name had not then been Peters, but Pyatnitski. If my friend Kolya had not warned me in time I would even now, no doubt, be in a worse prison on Devil’s Island. Yet the real villains remained at large, still free and respected. Only by a whisker had I had been able to get to America, forced to leave my little Esmé behind in Kolya’s safekeeping. Doubtless she was the ‘little whore from Constantinople’ Pottendorf mentioned.

Not times I liked to remember. I found it unbearable to think of the vast consequences arising from French Jewry’s betrayal of my best ideals. I, too, had lost much. I wish that I could have told Pottendorf the truth but found myself reminding him I had never been to Paris. I agreed that we lived in terrible times, when Russian charlatans were able to deceive even those of us with considerable common sense. Avoiding the subject of large airships, I spoke instead of my other American ventures, of my great Land Cruiser, my fleet of experimental aircraft built for the Sultan of Marrakech, the various projects I had begun with Signor Mussolini. I had rather expected, I said, to interest the New Germany in my scientific ideas. I had much to offer the Third Reich. But this business had soured me. The sooner I could get back to Italy, the better.

Helander was surprised I had never visited the City of Light. ‘Such a sophisticated world traveller,’ he said, ‘and yet —’

Sadly circumstances had never taken me to the French capital. As a race, the French were unattractive, too volatile and unserious. Bismarck had rightly described France as a feminine nation, as compared to masculine Germany. The whole nation had sunk into decadence. One only had to look at M. LeBrun.

My anxiety was returning. Pottendorf’s bitter outburst had again reminded me of the materials in Röhm’s and Prince Freddy’s possession. If someone like Pottendorf saw those cuttings he would turn against me. I might never be released. The Parisian Airship Company scandal was notorious at the time, especially after my name was linked to that of my fellow Ukrainian Stavisky. Yet this uncomfortable reference also came as a revelation! Again I wondered if Kitty von Ruckstühl was actually responsible for my arrest. Did she really still blame me for her mother’s death? Did she believe me to be the father of her half-brother? In her morphine fever could she have turned on me, deciding to take up her mother’s baton?

I shuddered at how those films might now affect my fate. Masks could not entirely disguise me. There were the distinctive marks on my buttocks. These, in turn, reminded me of Grishenko and my Ukrainian adventures. My thoughts went again to Brodmann, the only witness of my humiliation. Unless the Bolshevist agent had deceived them completely, it was unlikely the Nazis would take his word for anything. Hanfstaengl had no reason to hate me. My association with Otto Strasser could not be known unless someone had been watching him for a long time. Was that possible? Who else? Göring, perhaps? Out of jealousy of my relationship with Mrs Cornelius? Again unlikely. The Fraus had no reason to take against me. No, the most obvious enemy was Prince Freddy. If I escaped from this trap, I would ask Röhm to have him killed. I was furious with him and what he had done.

I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the company, especially, of course, LeBrun. I feared he would remember something more from when I had been in Paris and reveal my association with Kolya and his friends. The next time I had the opportunity, I begged the guard to change my cell. He was especially sympathetic when I said I feared molestation from LeBrun.

Two days later, while LeBrun was as usual absent, Helander and Pottendorf were playing chess and I was sitting reading the VB. Suddenly there came a loud shout from outside and the door was flung back. ‘Hurry yourself, Peters. Get your things together. At the double, man. We’re leaving.’ It was an SA guard I knew called Fischer.

‘Leaving? I’m released?’

‘At the double. Quick now.’

Rapidly I gathered up my few possessions, said a hasty goodbye to my cellmates and stood before Warder Fischer. The massive SA man had never treated me particularly badly.

‘Am I free?’

‘You wanted to be free of your nancy boy, didn’t you? Come on. Hurry up.’

I was marched along the corridor to cell 40, which the warder unlocked and opened. Bewildered, I stumbled into it. ‘What’s this?’

‘Solitary,’ the warder said. Then the door was shut and locked.

The bunk had no mattress, only a straw-filled sack and a pillow. At its foot was a water closet. The cell was freezing. The radiator was not turned on. It allowed me six paces back and forth and was about two paces wide. High above, the window was impossible to reach. Almost immediately I began to feel claustrophobic. By way of self-comfort I lay down on the sack and closed my eyes, determined to enjoy my privacy, if nothing else. Soon, however, the cold made me get to my feet. As rapidly as I could I walked the length of the cell, leaping up and down in order to keep warm. Eventually I wore myself out and stretched out on the pallet again. I had nothing to read, having left the VB with the others. I was depressed. My common sense told me I had been foolish to believe I was escaping this place. None of the prisoners had gone out before they had received some sort of hearing. Yet more than one had been released after being put in solitary. Did this mean I could now expect my hearing?

This hope sustained me for at least another week. Occasionally on my way to the washroom, I caught glimpses of my former cellmates, but had no chance to talk to them. They had another companion now, a bald, emaciated-looking fellow I remembered from my film-star days, which felt extraordinarily remote to me. He had been a cameraman’s assistant, I recalled, a Greek or a Turk. The cosmopolitan nature of our cell was being maintained. After a while I saw nothing of LeBrun, the reason for my being put in solitary. He had been replaced by a pallid, squat fellow who seemed to have nothing to wear but a pair of extremely garish pyjamas. I never did discover who he was.

The radiator in my cell remained cold. I became obsessed with keeping warm. I constantly begged the warders to have something done. Shortly after I ran out of sneg, whose properties were so useful in protecting against disease, I developed terrible influenza. I began to sweat and tremble badly. Obviously I was catching pneumonia. The guards asked me if I wished to see the doctor. They warned me that anyone taken to the doctor would, these days, usually be passed on to Dachau where they had hospital facilities. I insisted I was not as sick as I seemed.

The best of the guards were genuinely sympathetic. Regulations demanded that prisoners be kept in reasonable comfort, and the original staff of Ettstrasse did their best to stick to the rules. The SA men were less reliable, though some were kindly enough. I could afford a few small luxuries, including the daily paper and a variety of chemist-shop medications, but it took me some time to recover. Still the radiator was not turned on. I longed for something to distract me and begged for a Bible, anything to read. One guard did eventually pass me a book, in English, which I read several times over, relishing the adventures of a slick, American detective who lived in the penthouse of a gleaming white modern apartment building and drove a supercharged roadster. With his barking automatics and sultry lady friends, Dick Dutton helped me escape from my gloom and reminded me of a time when I had also lived the life of a playboy, envied by all. I wished that I could have read some tales by Sexton Blake, Britain’s greatest living detective. His courage in adversity was an example which even now I attempted to follow.

My natural vitality got me through my ordeal. I longed for a little ‘snow’ to put me back on my feet, but even without it I was soon able to stand steadily and feed myself. Was I in a state of shock? How had I descended so suddenly from fame and fortune? One moment I had been a highly paid public figure, the next I was a mere number. Whatever happiness I could achieve was entirely dependent on the mood of my jailers. Every day I asked about my hearing. Every day I begged someone to get word to Röhm or Hanfstaengl, Göring or Mrs Cornelius. I was afraid I would die there.

I had been abandoned. I knew Mrs Cornelius would never have let me rot in Ettstrasse. She was either back in London or on location with no notion of what had happened to me. Göring was horribly overworked. Hugenberg had important Cabinet duties. Röhm was probably still in Berlin struggling to reorganise the army, while Hanfstaengl could already have left for the United States, as he had been threatening. Possibly Putzi was himself a prisoner.

I enjoyed one or two breaks in my confinement. At one stage I was taken downstairs and photographed. I had to fill in forms, giving the details of my arrest. I wrote that I was in ‘temporary protective custody’ in the hope this would attract the attention of whatever bureaucrat was in charge of the documents. I complained about my cell and was told they were having difficulty finding plumbers. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest they arrest some plumbers and release some journalists and actors, who were an impractical bunch at best. After a brief medical examination I was interviewed by a young man who warned me this was not a hearing. He had been assigned merely to verify the truth of my written statement. He was almost apologetic. When I complained that my cell had no heat, he immediately tried to sort the matter out, assuring me the police were not attempting to torment me. Ettstrasse, he told me, was never designed for so many people. They were already beyond their capacity.

The prison was becoming more and more crowded. Increasingly, from all parts could be heard the yells, screams and imploring sobs of the prisoners. Fewer regular guards were on the corridors. The SA seemed to be taking over. Some of these were decent enough, especially the older ones who had served in the War. It was the younger, less experienced SA who gave us the most trouble. They were a rougher element, probably ex-communists and worse, who had jumped on the Nazi bandwagon after the election successes of 1933.

I believe the young man who interviewed me meant well, but his intervention scarcely improved matters. After a month I was taken out of my cold single cell and put back with a group. But now I was with well-known Jewish entrepreneurs! Powerful in the outside world, they were in a state of shock. They assumed I was of the same persuasion as themselves. After I politely but firmly told them the truth, they tended to ostracise me. I must admit their action was not entirely disagreeable. However, when I complained to the SA guards about being identified with these people, they laughed and told me that I had better get used to it.

And then one morning in early June the entire cell was ordered into the corridor. There was to be a clear-out. The prison was beyond capacity. Did this mean my release at last? Perhaps they had decided to keep only the prisoners accused of identifiable crimes. With our poor little bundles of possessions, we were marched downstairs and out into the courtyard where lorries were waiting. My anxieties immediately increased. Earlier I had glimpsed from above prisoners being herded aboard these transports. Shouted at, confused and frightened, we climbed into the overburdened vehicles. Where were we bound? Stadelheim? Dachau? My voice joined those of many trying to convince the guards that we had been wrongfully arrested. In the end I realised it was pointless. I was just another scream in the general cacophony.

I decided very quickly that I would rather retain my dignity. I fell silent. I entertained some idea of climbing out from under the lorry’s’ canopy when we stopped and slipping away into the street. Had I any friends left in Munich? An opportunity of escape never presented itself. Having been institutionalised for so long, I had lost all initiative. Eventually I managed to reach a corner of the lorry where I could at least keep my balance and so made the journey in relative comfort. With relief we disembarked. My spirits rose when I saw guards in conventional uniform. From the high, stone walls and the general old-fashioned appearance of the place, I realised I was in Stadelheim. Amid further yelling, we tumbled out on to the cobbles of the castle. I looked around me. The castle’s walls were set at regular intervals with the barred windows of dozens of cells. It had been rebuilt and extended since Hitler’s time. I had seen it, of course, from the Tegernsee road. For such an old building, it had always seemed a rather agreeable place. From within, however, it had a bleak, hopeless atmosphere.

Blinking in the bright summer light, I must have looked a wretch. My only shirt was worn and torn. My trousers were greasy and my jacket not in much better shape. Over my arm was my winter overcoat. I carried a parcel containing the few possessions I had managed to keep. Yet the warders were not unkind. They spoke to us with that rough good humour I had come to expect from the best of them. One warder even helped me into the building. Nobody shouted at us. We eventually reached the reception office and stood in line before a wide, low desk where officials checked off our names.

‘Wankel? Discharge 12th August. Sentence begins at noon today. Jungerer? Release in a year. Sentence began noon yesterday.’ When it came to my turn I had to give my own particulars. They had no room in their ledgers for those of us under protective custody and seemed uncomfortable with the idea. I was sent to another desk with a smart SA man, as cordial as the others. He wrote down everything I told him, including my understanding that I had nothing to fear in the outside world, into a brand new leather-bound book, dipping his pen into his inkwell and wiping the nib carefully on a blotter. Then I was marched into the next room.

Here we were told to strip to our shirts. Anything we carried, be it pencils, money, cigarettes, hats and ties, were listed on the outside of a bag which was then sealed. Those with conventional sentences were given prison clothes and told to keep them on, unless they had sentences of only a few weeks, in which case they could keep their clothes. I, too, was allowed to keep my own clothes. This gave me some hope, indicating that I might, after all, only be spending a short time in Stadelheim. Before I moved on to the next stage, I asked the SA man if he knew whether I had received any letters. I had written, I said, to his chief, Ernst Röhm, a friend of mine, and also to Göring and my wife, Mrs Cornelius. He looked at me as if I was touched and shook his head, smiling. If any letters came from Staff Chief Röhm or Air Minister Göring, he would be sure to let me know. Was my wife by any chance also an office holder in the government?

Consoling myself that he would not be smiling quite so widely if my friends in the Nazi hierarchy found out where I was, I allowed myself to be directed into the medical room, decorated with terrifying posters depicting various forms of venereal disease. Here a prison doctor looked me over. Pronouncing me fit, he signalled for my SA escort to lead me away down a long corridor. The wooden floor was evidently maintained by prisoners and was so highly polished it almost dazzled me. I could look down and see my gaunt, sickly features staring back. Moments later a cell door was thrown open.

I found myself in a long, gloomy room lined on both sides with tiers of bunks. A shaft of sunlight pierced through a dusty window above the WC, seeming to increase the depth of surrounding shadows. The cell was occupied only by two young men. One of them was short and fat, the other long and lean. They reminded me of the comic characters from the English magazines of my childhood, Phil May’s Weary Willy and Tired Tim. In spite of wearing prison uniform, they were both good-humoured but rather startled by my appearance.

‘You’re not Jewish, are you?’That was the lean young man’s first question. He did not seem dismayed by the idea.

I took no offence. I shook my head wearily. ’No. I am American. My father is of English extraction and my mother’s family was originally from Madrid. Papa could trace his ancestry back to the Danes, and Mama’s family was in Galicia since before the Arab Conquest. Believe me, I’m used to the question.’ I had learned to offer this level of detail. Otherwise, I knew, I would not be believed.

Because of my wounded penis, bequeathed to me by my ‘clinical realist’ father, many officials in Ettstrasse had also assumed I was a Jew. The truth was too complicated for them. It made no sense to tell them I was actually related to the Russian aristocracy or that I was from South Russia, which in some minds was associated with the Pale of Settlement. As I unpacked my few belongings, I added that I had made it my business, both in my native America and elsewhere, to point out the dangers of the aliens in our midst. Until its takeover by cynical interests, I was a recruiting spokesman for the Ku Klux Klan. If Germany had adopted the same racial laws enacted in Alabama and elsewhere, she would not need to be taking such radical measures now. The American people had a clearer idea what liberalism led to.

This relieved them. They were, they told me, both National Socialists. They shook my hand and introduced themselves. The lean one was Adolf Harben. He was from Karlsfeld. The fat one was an SA sergeant, Christian Weymayer, originally from Pfaffenhofen. Like me, neither had been charged with any specific crime. Unlike me, they were not in protective custody. Harben said he believed he had been accused of some minor treason by his cousin, who disliked him, and Sergeant Weymayer had upset a local official who had had him arrested as a communist. Both expected to be freed soon. They commented on my seedy, hangdog look. Had someone been beating me up? Having arrived in Stadelheim recently, they lacked my experience of the worst prison could deliver.

The rest of their comrades were off on work parties and would be back soon. I looked forward to meeting them, I said. Which was my bunk? I stumbled forward. The two cheerful lads helped me put my parcel and coat on a top bunk at the far end of the cell, but when I attempted to get into it, I was warned that this was forbidden. ‘The SA won’t allow it during the day. We can sit at this table or walk about. There is no smoking either. They look in on us at random, and if they catch us, we get punished.’ Weymayer indicated the peephole in the door. ‘On the other hand, if you need a breath of air at night or want to look out into the courtyard, you can stand on the can and get a bit of a view. At least you can sometimes see who’s coming and going. It’s best to do that in the early morning or evening, before the warders come round. It’s about our only entertainment.’

I sat on my stool and read the VB for a while. My new friends wanted to know what it had been like in Ettstrasse, so I spent a while telling them until we heard a rap on the door. We stood to attention when the door opened to reveal a trustee in a clean overall, a bucket of soup over one arm, a basket of bread on the other. Compared to what I had grown used to this was Ritz-quality service. The guard doled out soup and bread and moved on down the corridor. The food was surprisingly good, containing a reasonable amount of sausage and fresh vegetables. My life was already improving!

After lunch we played noughts and crosses until our other two companions joined us in the cell. Their faces were bright from their exercise. The pair were as good-humoured as my other cellmates. Pale-haired, grey-eyed, well muscled and bronzed, they were almost identical twins. The Grote brothers. Though on good terms with the others, they were Social Democrats, trade union railwaymen from Vaterstatten who had fallen foul of the Gestapo when they had complained about the closure of their headquarters. Not exactly radicals, they were astonished when they were suddenly thrown into jail. They, too, did not expect to be incarcerated for long. More from boredom than anything, they had joined a work party repairing the walls of the old section and had been promised an early release by the SA man in charge.

The food that evening was barley soup and some tough rye bread. We were also given jugs of fresh drinking water. My comrades told me it was now all right to lie down. We took our bunks. They saw me as someone rather exotic, who had travelled widely, and they wanted to know all about America. I told them stories of my adventures, of my career as a film actor and also as an inventor. They were incredulous, finding my tales almost unbelievable, but enjoying them, they said, whether I told the truth or not. Hearing me was as good as listening to the radio. Now, if I could only produce some music for them . . .

I soon became known as ‘the American’. They demanded more stories. They said I should write a book. I laughed. I had known people who wrote books. These days it probably wasn’t the safest profession. Even the SA laughed at this. They were as irreverent about Hitler as the socialists. In spite of my situation, I enjoyed that brief period of comradeship. It quickly ended, of course, when the Grote brothers were transferred to Dachau in the middle of June, and shortly afterwards the two SA lads were released.

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.