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.
* * * *
FORTY-SEVEN
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.
I tried to console myself. My privations had changed my appearance considerably. I had lost weight. The shaving mirror had shown me gaunt, hollow-eyed and exhausted. Nobody, I told myself, could possibly know me now. But I certainly did not much look like a confident and prosperous citizen.
Using such a circuitous route, avoiding any street with a policeman or SS man in it, I did not reach the main railway station for some time. Slowly I formed a plan. I was not a wanted man in Italy. I must try to make it back to Rome. There I could either throw myself on the mercy of Signora Sarfatti or hope to explain myself to Il Duce. I was sure he would at least give me his protection if he heard what had happened to me. And if nothing else, I was in a position to let him know what was going on in Germany. Mussolini could be cruel to those he took against, but he could be generous even to his enemies.
On the great concourse I went straight to the foreign desk and purchased a ticket to Rome, via Innsbruck and Milan. The man at the desk seemed surprised but gave me no problem. He seemed nervous, even ill. I tried to chat to him. He would not reply. His eyes were everywhere but on his job. When I turned to find the appropriate platform, I was astonished. The station was teeming with black uniforms. The SS were out in strength, inspecting documents, searching no doubt for those who had escaped them the night before. My SA credentials were less than useless to me. The sooner I got rid of them, I thought, the better it would be.
I looked to see if the Rome Express was in. Then I realised it made no difference. I could not afford to be caught and have my bag searched. Even as I looked, more and more SS troops piled out of trucks and buses into the station. Children and women were as liable to receive their attention as adult men. Feeling strangely invisible, like a ghost, I quietly melted again into the busy backstreets. This was not the right time for me to leave the city, but I no longer knew what to do. I could not seek out Mrs Cornelius. She was already, by many accounts, in Berlin. She would help me. But how could I get to Berlin? There must be more than one SA man out there wearing civilian clothes and wondering how he could escape to his home town or village. Anxious not to attract attention, I walked slowly back the way I had come. Every so often a car might slow down, and I even heard men cursing at me, but they had other prey that day and drove on.
Back at the Viktualienmarkt the sound of the barrel organ grew louder, reminding me that I might find help there. The warm bustle of the shoppers around me was a comfort. I saw no SS people, just the occasional ordinary Bavarian policeman, stolid, friendly and as reassuring as always. Here was the old, familiar Munich. Everything appeared exactly as it had been for centuries. Sure enough my friend Signor Frau was turning the crank of his organ, his son was rattling the box through the audience and little Zoyea was dancing like an angel along the kerb. If anything she was more beautiful. Tears welled in my eyes as I knew a tremendous surge of relief.
My bag at my feet, I stood on the edge of the pavement watching her. For three months she had been a memory, a fantasy. So powerful was the reality of her presence that I did not trust myself to approach her. For half an hour I stood there, hoping she would see me. I was now completely clean-shaven. Every so often her brother would come by with the wooden collecting box, and I would slip a coin in. He frowned at me once or twice but did not recognise me. It was not until Zoyea’s eyes met mine that I knew she remembered. She paused in her steps and blinked. Yet almost immediately her expression hardened. No doubt she blamed me for abandoning her without a word. Perhaps she knew I had been in prison and suspected me of being a criminal. I had never found an opportunity to tell anyone what was happening to me. After all, I had left my flat thinking I would be away for an hour at most. She could not have known anything. Wishing to avoid any sort of scene, I ignored Zoyea and her brother and went up instead to her father, raising my hat.
‘Signor Frau? Do you remember me?’
The Italian recognised my voice first. His eyes widened in amazement as he recalled my face. ‘Herr Peters! We heard you had gone to Hamburg
and returned to America! We were rather surprised.’ He stopped himself. I think he was going to say that he would have expected me to let him know. Instead he asked, ’Did you enjoy your visit?’
‘I was never there. I was abducted. Only today did I manage to get free. It’s a long story, my friend. You must know I would have got word to you all if that were possible. I’ll be glad to tell you everything, but at present I have nowhere to live. Perhaps you could see your way to letting me sleep in your organ shed for a while? A mattress on the floor is all I would need.’
‘You have money?’ He felt in his pocket.
I raised my hand. ‘I have no money problems. But I do not want to stay in a hotel . . .’
He seemed to understand. Without another word he signalled to his daughter. She came over reluctantly, scowling at me. He told her to take me back to their house and not to ask questions. She was to show me his bed and allow me to rest there. He would be home at the usual time.
She objected. He refused to hear her. ‘I know you think Herr Peters has done you a wrong, Heckie, but I know he will explain himself. I want you to be a good Christian girl and do as I ask.’
She obeyed with poor grace. Lips pursed, eyes hard, she jerked her head for me to follow her and stamped off in the direction of their home. As we walked I talked to her. ‘I did not desert you, my dear, I promise you that. I had no chance to speak to you before I left.’