Schleicher were under Göring’s surveillance. The naïve von
Bülow immediately telephoned to warn them and thus von
Bülow’s name too went onto a “hit list.”)
For several more days the Berlin ministries and clubs
crackled with the static electricity of rumor and counter-rumor.
On June , the army instructed lower echelons to provide guns
and transport to the SS for any coming operation against the
SA. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich instructed their police
forces to go onto the alert.
Göring went about his affairs seemingly unconcerned. His
private photo album shows him with Bodenschatz and Julius
Streicher at a children’s party at Dinkelsbuhl on June , then
holidaying briefly on the island of Sylt, where Emmy had a
summer house, on the twenty-sixth. On the twenty-seventh, a
photographer snapped him landing at Cologne, and driving, on
the twenty-eighth, through the Rhineland city. That day he
met with Hitler, who had flown to Essen to attend the wedding
of Göring’s friend Joseph Terboven, the gauleiter and newspa-
per owner. Hitler had brought with him Viktor Lutze, who he
intended should take over the SA after he had “expelled” Röhm
from it. By that time everybody had seen documents or knew
of people who had seen them “proving” that Röhm was up to
no good. Hitler decided on one last attempt at reconciliation,
and told Röhm’s deputy, SA-Gruppenführer Fritz von
Krausser on the twenty-ninth, “I want to try and dispose of all
these misunderstandings.”
Then the evidence against Röhm suddenly seemed to
harden. Hitler got a telephone call from Himmler in Berlin;
disturbed, he retired to his hotel room taking Göring and Lutze
with him. After a while Paul Körner came into the room, having
just flown to Essen from Berlin, bringing still more evidence that
seemed to clinch the case against Röhm. Körner later told Milch