In a secret meeting in the great hall of Carinhall, sur-
rounded by the hunting trophies and Gothic furniture that he
had already begun to assemble, Göring now persuaded Hitler to
act against Ernst Röhm and the SA before it was too late. As a
thousand hands slapped rifle butts in chiseled unison outside,
and heels slammed together in salute, Göring escorted the
Führer to his car. “The first revolution,” he declared at the
Prussian State Council’s meeting the next day, June , “was be-
gun by the Führer. If the Führer desires a second revolution, he
will find us ready and waiting. If not, then we are equally ready
and willing to act against any man who dares lift his hand
against the Führer’s will.”
The confrontation with Röhm and the SA had drawn
steadily closer. Heinrich Himmler was now a regular caller at
Göring’s villa in Leipziger Strasse. Göring applied Körner and
the Forschungsamt to keeping Röhm under close surveillance.
Meanwhile he drew up his own “hit list” for the day of reckon-
ing, and he gave that to Körner for safekeeping. In his red
linen-bound pocket diary Göring jotted sinister reminders:
“Krausser [SA Gruppenführer Fritz von Krausser] on Röhm’s
staff. Extreme caution. Agitating particularly against me.”
He had ordered the FA to tap the phones of other SA lead-
ers, rebellious figures on the staff of Franz von Papen (still, in
name, Hitler’s vice-chancellor) and the former chancellor Gen-
eral von Schleicher. The FA, already routinely wiretapping
French diplomats, had evidently found them conniving with
Schleicher and his former military assistant Major General
Ferdinand von Bredow, because Joachim von Ribbentrop, head
of the party’s private “Foreign Office,” remarked to an aide as
they visited Paris at this time, “The time has come to deal with
them.” (The aide was an anti-Nazi. He tipped off his friend,
Deputy Foreign Minister Bernhard von Bülow, that Bredow and