Certainly at that moment I was more nervous of meeting Frau Röhm than I was of being the victim of Hitler’s vengeance. A servant girl shuffled in wearing a somewhat ill-fitting uniform, as if she had only recently taken the job and inherited the previous incumbent’s clothes. With a peasant’s heavy-handedness she brought in a coffee tray and a cake stand while an older, rather stooped woman followed her, carefully carrying some plates. Like the maid, the woman was dressed in black, but hers were familiar widow’s weeds of the kind worn by so many women in those days. Behind this matron came a woman only a little older than Röhm himself, I guessed. She, too, wore a simple black dress with a black jacket. Her expression was amiable, on a broad, glowing Bavarian face. I detected no close family resemblance. Röhm’s features were altogether finer than his relatives’ and suggested that his father’s had been the dominant genes. Neither woman wore much make-up. Frau Röhm had a healthy, rather scrubbed appearance. These plain women somehow looked out of place in that austere, masculine room. They needed the comforts of their class, their floral prints and chintz and china, to give them any colour at all.
They arrived like strangers and arranged stiff-backed Empire chairs around the coffee and the cakes, smiling and nodding at me vaguely, as if they were not sure I could speak. I clicked my heels and bowed in the Prussian fashion. They seemed impressed by this. We exchanged greetings. As we did so, Röhm came hurrying back into the room. He kissed his mother’s hand, patted his sister on the arm, asked after his brother, who was not at home, and announced me as Herr Max Peters, the American film actor. Then I suddenly guessed he was fulfilling a promise to them. His mother and sister already knew who I was and had probably seen some of my films. Like most women, they were curious about celebrity. A hint of Hollywood engaged even the least imaginative Hausfrau.
While the clumsy servant handed us our plates and offered elaborate cream pastries, I made conversation in my rather old-fashioned German. I had learned more Yiddish than German when I had worked for the Jew in Odessa, but I think I succeeded in answering their enquiry I was not planning to go back to Hollywood immediately. I had fallen in love with Bavaria. But, of course, I was still an employee of Il Duce. This was another personality who interested them, so we chatted a little about Mussolini whom, naturally, I was not particularly well disposed towards just then. I told them what a wonderful woman Signora Rachele Mussolini was and what lovely children she had, how Signor Mussolini took a personal interest in his sons and, no matter how busy with affairs of state, was still able to give them the attention and discipline they needed from a father. I mentioned that Signora Mussolini had personally asked me to teach her son Bruno to fly. Like their father they already rode very well. The boys would grow up as true Italian gentlemen.
This news was greeted with considerable approval by the women and caused Röhm to murmur some remark into his coffee cup which had both of us smiling. But I recovered myself. I had no intention of letting Röhm down. He clearly had considerable affection for his mother yet addressed her in that familiar, faintly mocking, slightly hectoring way his generation had with older people. I think that, too, had something to do with the War. You became impatient with their sentimentality. You could not tell them of the horrors you had seen.
Frau Röhm asked me what I thought of the Vatican. Had I been received by the Pope? I told her that the Vatican did something to my soul. I would soon be granted an audience with the Pope. She said that she hoped the Pope would now be able to do something about the political situation. Mussolini had kept his word and restored the Vatican’s power. She was a woman of sharp intelligence. She spoke of the crisis in the Reichstag, the threat to Brüning’s chancellorship. Rather than correct her misunderstanding of the situation, Röhm chuckled and said there seemed little hope of the Chancellery now, but perhaps next time. We were trying to run before we could walk. ‘Alf’s temporarily lost his powers. All we can do for the moment is keep him up there in general view. It would be fatal if he lost his position with the public now.’
Frau Röhm had listened without hearing him. When he had finished she turned to me with a pleasant smile. ‘You are a famous American cowboy star, I understand, Herr Peters. But all Americans are from somewhere else, I know!’
I told her that my parents were from Madrid. Until recently my great-uncle had been Archbishop of Sta Maria. I did not really lie so much as use a code, letting her know how I was ‘one of us’. This stopped any barrier forming between us. She was, as a Catholic, clearly reassured by my response. That I held to the true Eastern Church was unimportant. That we both worshipped Jesus Christ was what bound us. I was telling her that I accepted her value system. It is often a mistake to accuse someone of telling a lie. Often they are telling the truth disguised by a lie.
I brought up the Jewish Question in relation to their domination of Hollywood. Contrary to later distortions, Röhm and his family were not rabidly anti-Semitic.
‘I’ve nothing against an honest Jew making a living,’ said Röhm. ‘Though usury’s the bane of modern economics. My complaint is that he then has to give his fifteen brothers and brothers-in-law a living — which means equally honest Germans are in the soup queues because Jews give jobs to Jews. You can’t blame them. We shall have a quota system so that Jewish businesses can only employ so many non-Aryans. At least it will give us a level battlefield.’ (A far cry, I think you will agree, from Treblinka!)
‘A few heads might have to roll in the present government.’ He laughed. He was using conventional phrases. These were the years of strong language, of newspaper hyperbole, where the vocabulary of war had infected all aspects of everyday life, just as military language translated through sport infects modern English. He never meant literally that people’s heads should be chopped off. He simply meant that Sozis and Nationalists would have to be replaced with National Socialists so that they had a large enough majority to pass such laws. He did not anticipate the punitive so-called Nuremberg Laws which Röhm had absolutely nothing to do with, of course, and which Hitler borrowed from America.
Fräulein Röhm seemed to wish to change the subject. As Röhm’s mother talked to him about a relative who had recently fallen ill, his sister moved to sit comfortably beside me on the lumpy couch and asked if I understood that cats had a religion.
‘Do you keep cats, Herr Peters?’ she asked rather diffidently.
‘No, madam. I fear I am away from home too often. You have cats of your own?’
‘Not at present, Herr Peters. Do you know what cats’ religion is? They believe that when they die they become humans. They live for seven or ten or fifteen years, as some cats do, and then they die and turn into humans. That is a sweet idea, don’t you think?’
‘Very, Fräulein. Extremely. Touching. And who are these people who were once cats? Can we recognise them or do they move secretly among us?’
‘Babies,’ she said. ‘They go from kitten, to cat, to baby and eventually to human maturity.’
‘What then?’
‘They become kittens again, I suppose.’ She smiled playfully. It was odd to see such imagination sparkling from such unremarkable features. ‘It is not a very complicated religion!’ She laughed again with unexpected, girlish spontaneity. She loved cats, she said, but it was impossible at the moment. The significance of her expression escaped me even as I nodded in sympathy.
Röhm had the soldier’s ability to relax in any circumstances. He seemed the only one actually comfortable on those chairs. Looking at his short military haircut and the way he held his coffee cup, I was suddenly reminded of a tonsured priest, and for a moment saw my friend, the leader of a great military force, as a monk on a visit home from the monastery. Many of the Nazis had the same puritanical rhetoric which had driven the Normans and helped them hold a conquered England, so I took it sometimes with a pinch of salt. The rhetoric was useful stuff, a kind of sustaining fuel, but it was not realistic. I am always pleasantly surprised by originality in the apparently unexceptio
nal and warmed rather strongly to Fräulein Röhm. I could see that we might have a good, platonic friendship if I stayed longer in Munich. I think I had made a friend I would be able to see again. It occurred to me that while I waited for my opportunity to visit England, I could return temporarily to Vienna, which seemed a good place to be to test the waters, but once again I had no employer, no money and no certainty of being able to keep myself in the necessities of life. At some stage I would have to prevail upon Röhm for funds.
As Fräulein Röhm chatted to me, I must admit these anxieties went through my mind. She asked me if I planned to take any acting roles here in Munich. I told her that I was first and foremost an engineer. It seemed that the sooner I was in contact with some German manufacturer, who would buy my patents and offer me a royalty, the better. I was, I said, at present obliged to her brother, but that situation was, of course, untenable. She seemed disappointed when I remarked that, should I stay in Germany, I might find myself a flat in Berlin. I had privately formed the opinion that Bavaria was something of a backwater, its predominantly peasant culture both narrowly religious and prudent, glad to welcome tourists who, even in the darkest days, supplied many towns with their main trade. Munich, while delightful to look at, and full of the old, good-hearted spirit of those poets and painters attracted by the largesse of the Wittelbachs, themselves great patrons of the arts, was not at the heart of things, only at the heart of the NSDAP, which had started there. Even the party’s centre of gravity was shifting to Berlin.
I said nothing of this to Röhm’s sister. I had no wish to end my relationship with him. However, as the duties of party and army consumed him, he would be spending more and more time in Berlin. I merely told his sister that Berlin was where one had to be if one wished to get things done. She understood this. She said how hard all the travelling was for Ernst, with his arthritis being so painful. She darted him a sympathetic smile. Laughing, he assured her that these days he travelled first class on the best trains and in the finest cars. He had come quite a way from when he was reduced to selling encyclopaedias door to door like so many ex-servicemen. His mother pooh-poohed this as something he should not talk about, and I was reminded of Röhm’s respectable background. This was the man who had called himself a wicked, brutal creature. Yet, of course, that was far from being the whole individual, as he proved when, at his mother’s request, he played some Schubert songs for her on the piano.
Frau Röhm made me eat more cake but did not press her son. She said that Ernst had to watch his figure now that he was a great public man. He had always loved stories of the American wilderness, she said. Was I familiar with the work of Karl May? I told her that Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Apache Prince were my constant companions as a boy. I almost made reference to old Professor Lustgarten, who had lent me the stories in Kiev, before I realised it would contradict her impression of my having been born in America. I found myself hesitating, at a loss for words. Röhm, believing me to be in trouble, made an excuse for us. He sprang up. We had a meeting, he said. Suddenly we were putting on our coats.
In the hall the women asked me to sign their friendship books and with simpering grace hoped that I would stay in Germany to make some films for them. They were both delightful. As we left, Frau Röhm gave my friend a large, awkward-looking parcel tied up in newspaper. ‘For the dog,’ she whispered.
I kissed hands. I hoped I would see the ladies again. Röhm was now in a hurry and bustled me and the parcel down the drive to the ordered taxi which would take us back to central Munich. He was a little embarrassed by the package of bones. ‘She loves my Griselda.’ He often left his Alsatian bitch with them when he went away. He felt better when she was there to protect them. Griselda was currently guarding Röhmannsvilla. I had rarely seen the animal.
He put the bones on the floor of the cab and instructed the driver to take us to the Königshof. I reminded him that I was being thrown out of that hotel. He nodded at this, but his attention was on our surroundings. He looked right and left, craning his head to peer through the small back window. ‘Just a precaution,’ he said. ‘If the cops are checking on us, they won’t get much, and if it’s one of Himmler’s new overzealous Boy Scouts, they’ll tell him I took you home to Mother.’
‘Won’t that add to his suspicions?’ I asked, but he laughed happily at this suggestion.
‘Not a bit! That’s the beauty of it. Alf knows I never even let my special friends meet her. You’re very privileged, Mashi.’
‘I appreciate that,’ I said. I again reminded him that privileged as I was, I needed a roof over my head.
He nodded, frowning, something else on his mind. He looked at his watch several more times. ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll speak to the manager. No, no. That would be stupid. We’ll find you somewhere to hide out for a while, don’t worry. Be a good idea for you to move. But I might have to get someone else to help you. I can’t even spare an adjutant. I’ve got to fly up to Berlin tonight. God in heaven, Mashi, have you been whoring up in that room?’
I was offended, and he apologised. I knew of no reason why the management was taking its attitude unless certain enemies I had made in Soviet Russia had succeeded in exerting their influence. He agreed it was a strong possibility. If there was another file, like the one he had received from Frau Oberhauser, it could put me in an awkward position. ‘You always think you’ve covered your angles and then comes the one you haven’t anticipated,’ he said. ‘All the more reason for you to move out of the limelight. Anyone’s limelight.’ Deep in thought, he began to hum to himself, tapping his fingers on the seat rest.
We were rounding the corner, running into the busy evening traffic of Prinzregentenplatz, when he slapped me on the arm. He had a solution. ‘That loony von Schirach’s in town, and he’s bound to know somewhere. He looks after all the students, the Hitler Youth. He’s your man. Great favourite of the Führer’s.’
‘Then is it wise —?’
‘Of course. That’s the whole point. The closer to the danger you are, the safer you are. Another thing you learn in the trenches!’
He seemed delighted with himself. He had solved my problem. Unfortunately it did not seem solved to me. Again, I had reason to doubt my friend’s grasp on reality. Whenever I tried to raise practical matters he simply shook his head and asked me questions. Had I liked his mother? Did I find his sister attractive?
The taxi drew up outside the hotel. A quick squeeze of my hand, a word of reassurance and he pressed something upon me. Then, rather bewildered, I was in the street watching Röhm speeding away towards his destiny. Thoughtfully I turned and slipped through the revolving doors. I wondered if I would ever see Fräulein Röhm again. In the lobby I looked down at what Röhm had presented me with before I left the cab. Grease was beginning to seep through on to my hands. He had given me the parcel of bones his mother had offered him for his bitch Griselda.
* * * *
THIRTY-FOUR
At eight the next morning I was again awakened by Frau Socking, but this time her manner was far less severe. She seemed her old self. I smiled at her pleasantly. Perhaps someone had spoken to the manager and I was to be reinstated?
She expressed only relief at my leaving. ‘Some boys are in the lobby to help you move,’ she announced. ‘Grüss Gott, Herr Peters.’ She was already making off.
I called after her that I would be down shortly. A porter could collect my luggage in an hour. Having so little with me, it did not take long to pack. Plans, pistols and my dwindling supply of ’cocoa’ were the most important items and these went into my locked case, which I took with me. I left the bones in my room. As soon as my bags were ready, I strolled down to the lobby to meet the emissary Röhm had sent in his place.
I knew both the Stabschef and Hitler thought highly of this young man. In his pictures Baldur von Schirach had seemed the very model of the modern, clean-cut German lad. In the flesh he gave the same impression, though his movements were somewhat awkward. Round-headed,
blond, slightly plump, with almost a rosebud mouth, pink-and-white skin, smiling pale blue eyes and an eager, friendly manner, he was a typical Teuton. He offered me that increasingly common Ben-Hur salute, a Heil Hitler followed by his enthusiastic-pumping of my hand. He was dressed in expensive lederhosen, picturesquely decorated with full Bavarian floral flourishes. Over this he had thrown a large leather military coat. I was a little amused. He gave me the impression of a large chorus girl who had left the theatre in too much of a hurry to change.
Von Schirach spoke in the softly articulated educated accent associated with the old North German upper classes. The modern Nazi style was rough and coarse, whether you had started life with it or not. Röhm was a perfect example of this. His motto among his men, who worshipped him, was ‘the lewder the better’. He had been well educated and was, of course, from a good Munich family. I have described the Stabschef at home. When he wished, he could revert to his old, civilised way of speaking as he had during that visit.
As I have said, the experience of the trenches was determining the tone of the language. The new style was considered more authoritative, tougher, down-to-earth, practical, showing mocking impatience with the old institutions. It reached its dubious zenith in Berlin, where it became the only language you heard in the theatre, unless you attended an operetta. Newspaper journalists adapted the style for their pages. Novelists copied it. Films by Pabst and Lang employed it with relish. It appeared in poetry and fiction by Brecht and operas by Berg. Elsewhere, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were adding their cacophony to the general din. I found it impossible to enjoy a concert without one of these gentlemen introducing the wails and clatters of the synagogue and mosque into the event. If one wished to see a modernist film, the chances were that members of the audience would be hurt in clashes between Commies and Nazis objecting to what they perceived as political bias. Gangster writers spread their harsh, Yiddish-enriched rhetoric among office boys and students. Thus, by aping Berlin street language, the Jews helped proliferate a vocabulary ultimately employed in their own destruction. Everything I had been made to say to Hitler that night was available in some form to those who sought it out. Berlin was awash with aggressive filth.