undergoing secret air-force training at Jüterbog Airfield, and
brought them into Berlin to guard the three airports and the air
ministry building.
What happened on the morning of June , , in Bava-
ria is history. Hitler had moved the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hit-
ler, an élite unit of thirteen hundred men, to Bavaria, planning
to rush them in the trucks provided by the regular army to Bad
Wiessee, where Röhm and his henchmen were understood to
have converged on an inn. From Berlin, Göring and Himmler
prodded and cajoled their irresolute Führer along, by tele-
phone, telegram, and courier. Wilhelm Brückner, Hitler’s slow-
witted but devoted adjutant, recalled later that their messages
painted the crisis in “increasingly dark hues.” By the time Hit-
ler’s plane landed at Munich, around : .., the word was
that hundreds of Röhm’s men had spent the early hours ram-
paging mindlessly around the city. Hitler decided to go on
ahead to Bad Wiessee and have it out with Röhm then and
there.
In Berlin, the whole area around Göring’s villa had been
barricaded and sandbagged by his troops. His personal Lan-
despolizei-Gruppe “General Göring” were manning machine-
gun positions in the streets.
At : .. Goebbels phoned from Munich with the code
word, “Kolibri.” For a moment Göring’s actions were guided by
compassion. He sent for his trusty henchmen, the “murder
managers,” but he also offered sanctuary to a little cluster of old
friends and foes toward whom he bore no ill will. Wilhelm Frick
was one now Reich minister of the interior; he slunk into the
villa that morning, “as pale as a vomited-up pea,” as Göring un-
charitably recalled. He also feared for Franz von Papen’s safety;
he had crossed the vice-chancellor’s name off one “hit list,” but
sensing ill omens Göring ordered Karl Bodenschatz to summon