An Honourable Defeat by Anton Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

his latest SA boyfriend. In the slaughter that followed — the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — many members of the early opposition learned what it meant to cross Hitler. Gregor Strasser was arrested, taken to Gestapo cells, shot in the lungs and left to bleed to death. General Schleicher, answering his doorbell, was shot dead together with his wife. His housekeeper, unable to live with the memory, later committed suicide. General von Bredow, Schleicher’s loyal assistant, met the same fate as his master on the evening of the same day.
    Now for the first time no clear-sighted person could pretend that the new regime in Germany was not a criminal one. This was still an internal affair, and foreign reactions could be managed as the government wished. Foreign correspondents were concentrated in Berlin, a city where Nazism deliberately kept a low profile in its early years: Hitler had no wish to start alarm bells ringing abroad until he was good and ready. Intelligence gathering was rudimentary and espionage was still an unsophisticated science. But at home, the Army had mortgaged its good name for the sake of losing an unworthy rival.
    The Army saw itself as the guardian of German security at home and abroad, and of German honour. Hypocritical as it may have been in the past, nevertheless it had remained true to this function. It had suffered emasculation and humiliation, but it had kept its integrity until now. It had seen a dangerous and criminal rival removed in the shape of the SA, but it had done so not only by connivance, but by actively aiding the SS — an organisation more akin to the Army than the SA in its structure and physical appearance, but none the less a Party organisation. The SS was still relatively small, and lacked its own full complement of matériel . It had carried out the butchery; but the Army had provided the transport. This was the first, but very far from the last time that the Army would stand by and/or provide the arena for the SS to do its dirty work. Admittedly, it did not always do this without protest; but the protests were few and went unheard.
    The cynical postscript to Hitler’s illegal purging of his enemies with the Army’s help — Stalinist techniques which Prussian officers ought to have been appalled at, but who really perceives himself? — was the obtaining of Hindenburg’s imprimatur. Hindenburg was by now a sick man, whose mind had almost completely decayed. He did not have a completely unblemished record himself, but he was at core an honourable man who, if he had been in full possession of his faculties, would have condemned such actions. But his son and his secretary were in the Nazis’ pocket. It is to his credit that the one appeal which reached him did not fail completely.
    The landowner Elard Kammerherr von Oldenburg-Januschau was as old as Hindenburg. He was a neighbour, and a political and personal friend. It was to him that Hindenburg had confided that he would never make Hitler Chancellor, a decision which Januschau approved. Since the Nazis had come to power nevertheless, Januschau had tried to maintain his influence with his old friend. During the June 1934 purge, Hitler intended to eliminate Franz von Papen along with his assistants. To this end the SS surrounded the Vice-Chancellery on 30 June; but one of Papen’s men, Wilhelm von Ketteler, managed to escape, and drove hell for leather from Berlin to East Prussia, where he intended to appeal to Hindenburg, who was in semi-retirement on his Neudeck estate there. Ketteler managed to avoid all SS road-blocks, but found Hindenburg’s grounds cordoned off. In desperation he drove on to Januschau, and told him what was going on. Papen was a great favourite and protégé of the President.
    The eighty-year-old former cavalry officer listened carefully to what Ketteler had to say, and made his decision fast. Calling for his horse to be saddled, he was soon mounted and riding across country to Neudeck, able to avoid