The Vengeance of Rome (51 page)

He was genuinely shocked by the accident. Murder was not his style and everyone knew it, which was why so few people ever mentioned his name in connection with Geli Raubal's death. Those who believed Hitler had somehow sneaked back and killed her, those who thought Himmler was the murderer or that her mysterious lover Zeiss had done it, or that it actually was suicide, never even brought up Röhm's name casually. He was highly respected in the movement. Only later did Hitler have some suspicion.

‘Nobody was a saint in those days,' I remind Mrs Cornelius. We are happy to be alone together. She has her scrapbooks out. We see our own youthful, painted faces meeting in a faded embrace while behind us Fokkers and Camels clash in a stunning dogfight. I hardly remember making it. We did so many in such a short time. I find an advertisement cut from one of her film magazines. ‘Ace Peters and Gloria Cornish.
The Air Knights
. A DeLuxe Serial.' Who cares for romance and glamour any longer? Every print that went around the world has crumbled to brown powder. We are a mere step away from Wolfit and Irving, whose theatrical performances are now only hearsay, whose records are so disappointing. People cannot believe it, but in our golden years Mrs Cornelius and myself were people of some substance and influence. Stabschef Röhm was proud to be seen with me. People asked for my autograph. Schoolboys pointed me out to their parents. Of course, all this gradually went away as the fashions changed, but that is not to say that we did not once have position and respect. For a while we knew fame again, but those films I made in Germany, while I have no reason to be ashamed of them, were not of my personal conception!

Röhm was especially demanding of my time and strength in the next few days. I was a comfort to him, he said. He had never dreamed of knowing such comfort. A boon he scarcely deserved. He was always saying such things about himself. He once described himself as a ‘cruel and wicked man' no good for civilian life. But that, I know, was his way of simplifying himself. He was far more complex than that. I believe he was uneasy about Geli Raubal's death for quite a while after the event. He insisted on playing
nothing but Strauss and Lehár on the gramophone. He became sentimental in unfamiliar ways. Offenbach produced an almost wolfish glee in him. He all but wore out the grooves of ‘The Nuns' Chorus' in an orgy that happily did not involve me in very much activity.

Soon, however, Strasser's car was at the gates. The big deputy, no longer jovial, was hurrying through the villa, averting his eyes from the things he didn't want to look at and talking urgently to Röhm. Clearly there was an unusual crisis, since Strasser was making only his second visit to the villa. He didn't want to have to answer his wife's questions, he said. He was one of the few in the Nazi hierarchy who did not have scandal attached to him.

I heard Röhm. ‘Well, he was cracking up before it happened.'

Strasser was adamant. Hitler was worse than he had ever known him. ‘I've seen that bastard go down on his knees beside his desk and start chewing at the carpet, beating on the floor with his fists and squealing that he is going to kill himself unless we do what he wants, and that was normal compared to the way he is now, Ernst. Believe me, I've been with him for almost a week. I'm going crazy myself out there in Tegernsee. Angela's been there for a bit, but she's had to go back. You know the funeral's in Vienna, and Alf isn't allowed to go to Austria. Too dangerous, anyway, to risk a challenge to his German nationality. We can't trust anyone else. Even his sister's beginning to wonder, since he keeps wailing that it's his fault and that he killed her. He didn't kill her. That's one thing I am sure about. Göring or Himmler had her killed. They had the most to lose. Some SS goon, no doubt.'

From Röhm's troubled expression I understood the problem he was facing. He was a man who hated secrets. Even if the secret protected him, he still hated it. But he controlled himself.

‘Well, what does he need to pull him out of it? You know Alf. He's all self-pity and blithering needs one minute. The next he's barking orders and throwing his weight around.'

‘It's the second Alf we're going to need for Hindenburg,' said Strasser significantly. ‘I don't think the old boy will be much impressed by the first. We need our Führer at his brilliant best.'

‘We'll send someone else.'

‘Me? You have to go—you have to reassure him about the army. He'll respond well to you. Frick or Göring? He'll see through them immediately. Goebbels? Hindenburg can't stand the little dwarf. Nobody has Hitler's authority. We can't start changing leaders now. It has to be him.'

‘Fine. Then it will be him.'

‘But he's a gibbering mess.'

‘Then we have to straighten him out.'

They began a long argument, referring to many things meaningless to me, so I went to have a bath.

When I next went by the room, I heard Röhm say, ‘Well, we'll get him a whore. These girls know what to do.'

‘Not that specific. And he'd guess what she was immediately. If we trained her, we'd have to let her in on too much. The story would travel faster than a dose of clap in a dugout. It would be all over Germany in three days.'

I heard Röhm murmur something.

‘Oh, certainly!' Strasser was contemptuous. ‘And what do we do then? Take her into the woods and shoot her? The Munich police are already watching us. They would love us to make a slip like that. I don't think even Hess or Putzi will be able to keep another dead girl out of the picture.'

Again something from Röhm. Strasser's reply: ‘I agree with the cure, but I don't agree on the doctor.'

Soon afterwards Strasser left, cursing the situation and begging his old friend to come up with some ideas. Röhm explained a little to me. Hitler had taken the death of his niece far worse than anyone might have expected. He was utterly devastated and saw his politics as the cause of his loss. His only reason for driving himself as hard as he did was so that eventually he would be able to marry Geli. She was his muse and his inspiration. Without her he was incapable of going on. Let someone else lead the Nazi Party.

‘Alf's like his mother. She always responded the same way to a setback. A lot of melodrama and then a total refusal to face the issue. That's why we could never promote him in the army. Strasser's staying with him night and day. He keeps making half-hearted attempts to kill himself. They're out at Tegernsee now. Amann's place. It's remote. Nobody will bother them. Alf always goes there to restore himself.'

‘Did Geli live there, too?' I asked.

Röhm said it wasn't far from there. Obersalzberg. It probably wasn't the best place to forget, but Hitler would not agree to go anywhere else and now he was refusing to leave his room. He would not get out of bed except to find Strasser and run endlessly over the events: what he could have done to stop it, what he should have done, how he loved her, how he would do anything for her, how it was all his fault and so on. Then Hitler would start weeping again, swallow some more pills and return to bed. He had pictures of her, notes she had written him. He stank. The Führer had not bathed since he heard the news. He had scarcely eaten and had taken a good many
sleeping powders, but they had not worked. Strasser thought they had made him talk all the more volubly and exhausted him even further. He was thin and haggard. His hands shook. He could hardly keep himself from drooling. He wept constantly. He moved like an old man. He was like a drug addict deprived of his morphine. If Hindenburg saw him in that state it would confirm his every prejudice about this ‘seedy little Bohemian corporal', as he always called Hitler.

‘It's typical of the swine to falter at the last hurdle!' Röhm was ferocious. ‘Him and his fucking guilt. He didn't kill the bitch after all!' This was a little insensitive. While I did not know Hitler, the man's affection seemed to have been genuine enough. It was not in Röhm's nature, unfortunately, to go over old ground.

‘What Göring told me,' says Mrs Cornelius, who enjoyed a brief liaison with the Reichsmarschall a short while after his wife died, ‘was that Geli's lover did it. The SS boy she was going to go to Vienna with. Zeiss? They were terrified of Hitler. When she told the boy Hitler wouldn't let her go, he shot her in a lovers' quarrel. Himmler had Zeiss shot later, but a lot of people still think it was Hitler himself.'

‘It was neither,' I insist. ‘The killer was Röhm. He told me so.'

‘Well,' she says, ‘there you go.'

She always says such things when she believes I am lying or exaggerating.

‘Study the facts,' I say. ‘It is all there. You only have to read between the lines—anyone can. The case is so obvious once you know.'

‘I don't need to do any studying, Ivan,' she says. ‘I got it from the horse's mouth, didn't I?'

‘Stupid horse. Big mouth.' But Göring had his good points. I have no wish to confirm the stereotype.

‘Oh!' She shakes with affectionate laughter. ‘And you was so bloody clever yourself!'

‘I think you could at least acknowledge my experience,' I say.

‘I believe what you boys got up to,' she says. ‘It's just what yer make of it, you know. I ‘ave to larf.'

‘What I did was not important? Strasser or Göring would have been the new Führer and everything would have gone along exactly the same?'

‘Well,' she says, ‘there you go.'

But I know every detail. Every detail. If it had not been for me, the party would have self-destructed. The communists would have won. I made a sacrifice I will never admit to. Hitler's guilt kept him in that condition, and his guilt had to be grounded.

In early October with only a few days left before the arranged meeting with Hindenburg, Strasser telephoned Röhm at the villa. Father Stempfle, who had been Geli's confessor, was with him now, trying to convince him that Geli had always had suicidal tendencies while at the same time assuring Hitler his niece had deserved her full Catholic burial. This might be confusing the Chief all the more. Strasser said that both he and Stempfle had tried talking Hitler round, but he would begin to weep silently and refuse to respond. He was turning into a melancholy vegetable.

Röhm repeated what he had said before. They should try the known solution. It had always produced a catharsis in the past and clearly functioned as an act of absolution.

‘I told Strasser that it had to be one of us,' said Röhm that night as we prepared for bed. ‘Someone who is already in on it. That's Rudolf Hess, you, me, Gregor Strasser, little Bernhard Stempfle.'

‘To do what?' I asked.

‘To do what you do best,' he said. ‘I could make only one choice in the end. You. Will you do this for us, Mashi? For me? For Germany? Believe me, you're the last damned card we can play.' He explained what they wanted me to do.

‘That's not a natural rôle for me,' I said. ‘There would be difficulties, also, in the anatomical respects.'

Röhm explained how my costume would overcome those problems.

I was sure that it was possible for someone else to perform the ritual he described, however. While I understood the urgency of the situation, I simply did not have the heart for the rôle. Indeed, the thought terrified me. I could not play it with any kind of conviction. I did not tell them that the rôle was in some respects familiar from my Egyptian days when I had been a witness and a participant.

Pausing, with profound pain in his eyes, Röhm mentioned the file he had taken from Frau Oberhauser, the former Baroness von Ruckstühl. Clearly he had deliberated for a long time. He knew he was threatening something rare that we had built between us. ‘Then we would have to investigate these claims and discover how you, a suspected Jew, managed to inveigle your way into the holiest shrines of National Socialism.'

I grew a little sad at that moment and was deeply shocked. ‘A suspected what? My dear Ernst, whatever else you accuse me of, do not call me that. It is a disgusting slander. You yourself have said how you know for certain I am not a Jew.'

Röhm was silent. He turned away in shame.

I understood him well and was even sympathetic. The struggle he must be having with himself! His whole body was shaking. This was tearing him apart. For the love of his Fatherland and all he held dear, Stabschef Ernst Röhm was prepared to blackmail his ‘sweetest love' and destroy almost everything honest and pure between us.

‘Only you could pull it off, Mashi. You have the skills, the physique, the actor's gift …'

‘You want me to pose as some dirty little whore—'

‘A game, Mashi. Just a game. We've played it before.'

‘I have not played that rôle for you, Ernst. Never.' My heart was sinking. I knew what this meant. Our idyll was drawing to a close. Yet still I resisted the inevitable. ‘Why not get some girl from the street? She needn't know—'

‘We can't risk it. Just as we can't risk any more killing. Half the cops in Germany are waiting for a chance like this. That's why you, at least, are guaranteed your life, Mashi.' He turned, red-faced, with tears in his eyes. And then I realised the full horror of what had been contemplated.

‘You'll lose nothing, Mashi. And the Fatherland will gain everything!'

I still wasn't sure I could do what he wanted. ‘He would realise the deception, Ernst. You know he would.'

‘You haven't seen the shape he's in. Believe me, the pills have taken every ounce of judgement.'

‘Then how will this work?'

‘The way it has always worked. What do you think that little slut used to do for him? She kept him moving forward. I don't know what you call it—but it got rid of any guilt he might be feeling about what he was doing.'

‘Guilt?'

‘There were things he promised his mother. Other loyalties. He had to give them up. He had to give a lot up, Mashi, to get where he is.'