that the evidence consisted of Brown Pages (Forschungsamt
wiretaps); and from surviving members of the FA staff we know
that a chief evaluator named Rudolf Popp later discreetly
bragged that he was the one who had provided the Brown
Pages, intercepts of Röhm’s telephone orders to his SA com-
manders to meet him at a secret rendezvous, at Bad Wiessee in
Bavaria. “I’ve seen enough,” announced Hitler, grimly adding,
“I’m going to make an example of them.”
He flew to Munich that same night, after ordering Göring
to return to Berlin with Körner immediately. Hitler gave Göring
dictatorial powers to strike in Prussia, as soon as he received the
code word Kolibri “hummingbird” to strike against the SA
leaders in Prussia.
Not without prudent forethought, Hermann Göring had
located his imposing Berlin villa in the center of a fortresslike
block of public buildings. “You go in through the entrance of
the old Herrenhaus,” wrote one visitor, “and after being
marched by soldiers through endless halls and past endless sen-
tries find yourself in a garden of four or five acres, in the middle
of which his house stands.” Here Göring and Himmler had just
one day, June , to prepare the massacre that was to become
known as the Night of the Long Knives. It was like Oscar Night
in Hollywood, but with only the deadliest prizes in their gift.
The lists were taken out of the various safes, and last-
minute adjustments made here an additional “nomination,”
there a reprieve. Göring handed one list to a senior Gestapo offi-
cial and sent him by private plane to Breslau with a letter or-
dering SS-Gruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch the “SS com-
mander, southeast” and one of the nastiest of Himmler’s blue-
blooded, black-sheathed thugs to stand by to pounce on their
opponents.
On Göring’s orders Milch whistled up six hundred troops,