Unabashed, Göring instructed his staff to describe the killing as a
suicide. Down the tube into his private office, however, there
rattled an FA intercept that scotched that plan. Using the dead
general’s own desk telephone (which the FA was tapping) an
overzealous detective had reported to the Ministry of Justice
(which was still in non-Nazi hands): “Former Reich Chancellor
von Schleicher has been shot in a political assassination.” With-
out faltering in his stride for an instant, Göring coolly phoned
Franz Gürtner, the justice minister, and advised him that he
planned to issue a wholly different official version that Gen-
eral von Schleicher had been “shot resisting arrest.” Having
propagated this fiction, Göring characteristically came to believe
it, and would repeat it with wide-eyed innocence until the end
of his life (although the truth is clear from the ministry files,
beyond peradventure).
Throughout that Saturday, June , , the lists short-
ened, the killings went on. Thirty men headed by three of Hey-
drich’s Gestapo officers burst into the absent Papen’s offices
looking for his press chief, Herbert von Bose (who had been
overheard, probably by the FA, plotting against the regime).
They led him into an empty conference room, and his appalled
colleagues heard ten shots fired in rapid succession, followed by
an eleventh some moments later.
What does the board meeting of a Nazi “Murder, Inc.”
look like? Milch saw it in session that afternoon and described it
to this author: Himmler was slowly reeling off names from
sweaty and tattered lists. Göring and Reichenau, the army’s
deputy chief of staff, were nodding or shaking their heads.
Körner was carrying their duly considered “nominations” out-
side with the addition of one ominous word, Vollzugsmeldung
(“Report back!”). Rudolf Diels? Göring shook his head. Bern-
hard von Bülow? He vetoed that name as well. Somebody in this