all-male company jested that they should nominate Baroness
Viktoria von Dirksen while they could. At the mention of this,
one of the more tedious females around the Führer, everybody
heaved with nervous laughter.
It is not hard to recognize the “Oscars” that Göring himself
awarded, or at least nodded to. Who else had any score to settle
with Erich Klausener, whom Göring had sacked as head of the
Prussian Police Department in February ? Who, other than
Göring, would have ordered the pickax murder of seventy-one-
year-old ex-dictator Gustav von Kahr and Munich journalist
Fritz Gerlich? Kahr had betrayed the beer hall putsch. Ger-
lich had claimed that Göring broke his word of honor to escape;
Göring had sued him for libel and lost. Now both those old
scores were settled, permanently.
At : .. the day’s bloody business came to an end.
Himmler nonchalantly ordered all SS documents relating to the
purge destroyed. Göring took Milch and Körner out to Tem-
pelhof Airport in his black Mercedes saloon, to await Hitler’s
return from Bavaria. As they waited, a Junkers from Bremen
touched down, and Karl Ernst, the Berlin SA commander, was
led in manacles out of its corrugated fuselage. He had been
aboard a ship about to sail from Bremen. Years later, still incor-
rigible, Göring would continue to maintain that Ernst had been
“trying to abscond with eighty thousand Reichsmarks.” In
truth, the unfortunate man had just set out on a belated hon-
eymoon voyage with his wife. Now the baffled SA Gruppen-
führer was hustled away to a brief and merciless ceremony at
Göring’s old military academy at Lichterfelde. Facing an SS
firing squad was not a good start to anybody’s honeymoon.
Hitler’s plane landed, and he emerged, deathly pale and
grim-faced. He nervously complimented Göring on the honor
guard, of four hundred hand-picked air-force troops drawn u p