The Vengeance of Rome
- Автор: Муркок Майкл
- Серия: Between The Wars #4
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Vengeance of Rome». Краткое содержание книги:
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.