The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman Page A

the entire German army was astonished to hear that he’d turned up alive, too, on the German side of the lines. In the Great War, many won medals for bravery. Many even won the Iron Cross. But few earned the highest of all honors: an Iron Cross, First Class.
    All at once the crowd in the Kaiserhof stiffened.
    Out of the elevator came a small gang of men, everyone quickly parting to let them through. Willi’s blood got cold. Unmistakable among them was the blimpish figure of Hermann Göring, the number two Nazi in Germany. Despite his reputation as a fearless World War flying ace, he looked absurd in wide-thighed uniform trousers, belly hanging like the
Graf Zeppelin
over his belt. On the far side, furiously limping with one short leg, was Josef Goebbels, the brilliant propagandist. To his left, the handsome Nazi Party secretary Gregor Strasser. And in the center, pushing aside his famous lock of hair, twisting his square mustacheevery conceivable direction, Adolf Hitler himself, screaming at the top of his famous lungs. “It is betrayal of the highest order, Strasser! You cannot talk your way out of it!”
    “On the contrary,
mein Führer,
” Strasser defended himself. “I think only of the Party. And how to save it from bankruptcy and ruin.”
    “You dare! You dare!” Hitler stopped short and raised his fist as if about to strike him. “Von Schleicher offers you vice chancellorship and you tell him you’ll consider it? Any idiot can see he’s trying to undermine our unity. Destroy everything I have worked a decade for: One people. One party.
One
Führer!”
    Flamboyantly turning his back, the enraged Führer resumed his rapid stride across the lobby, his short tie flying behind him. As he neared, the jagged bolts of hysteria grew in his eyes. The man’s soul, Willi thought, as Germany’s savior raced past like a runaway horse, is as twisted as his swastika.
    “If the Party falls apart”—Hitler turned to yell to Göring and Goebbels, both racing to keep up with him—“I’ll put an end to it all in one second.” He aimed a finger at his head. “You’ll see. But before I do”—he glared back at Strasser—“I’ll crush him like a cockroach!”
    As ostentatiously as they entered, the top Nazis vanished through the revolving doors.
    This little drama was quickly followed up by the surprise Willi got when entering the Apollo Room, smallest of the Kaiserhof’s many banquet halls, where it seemed as though he’d walked straight into a Roman orgy.
    Or Greek.
    Beneath a scaled replica of the Fountain of Apollo, backed by a roaring fireplace, thirty or so mostly young, strapping, blond Aryan exemplars, many naked from the waist up, caroused around a long banquet table decked with pine boughs and glowing red candles. Each held a hefty arm around the shoulder of the man to his right, the other clasping a giant beer stein as they swayed back and forth and sang along with an accordion:
    Bier hier! Bier hier!
    Oder ich fall um!
    Willi had never seen such a collection of hypermasculine beefcake, as if a whole herd of stud bulls had been corralled at one table: giant square torsos, arms the size of tree trunks, rippled, rock-hard, brainless creatures, lacking only rings in their noses. Yet some of them, he noticed, were cozily snuggling on a neighbor’s lap, or running fingers through the blond hair of the stud bull beside him.
    Bier hier! Bier hier!
    Oder ich fall um!
    Seated as if on a throne in the center was the short, dumpy figure of Ernst Roehm, absolute master of the SA. He looked like a neighborhood butcher, Willi thought—cropped hair parted razor-sharp down the middle, a block face with a squashed-up pug nose. His relationship to the Nazis went back to a time when he was more powerful than Hitler, the only Party leader, it was said, who addressed the Führer with the familiar
du
instead of
Sie
. Hitler depended on him, an absolute genius at organization, like a third arm. But a year ago a Communist