Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

THE BLOOD PURGE 769squads could not stand the strain very long; they had to be frequentlychanged; and after each change, the shooting was accurate the first time,but at the second or third execution many shots went wide of the mark.The victims lay on the ground, but were still alive; the commanding S.S.officer had to finish them off with a revolver shot in the head.From time to time a horse-drawn tin-lined truck, which obviouslybelonged to a butcher and served for transporting meat, entered theyard. The corpses were thrown into this truck and carted away.How many such corpses had been carried away by July 1 was neverknown. In his Reichstag speech Hitler mentioned a figure which meansnothing: he said that there were more than seventy-seven. There werecertainly many hundreds. Executions like those at Stadelheim andLichterfelde also took place in Stettin, Dresden, Breslau, and othercities. But not everywhere were such masses dragged to theslaughterhouse. Many victims were hunted down individually, and morethan one man in those gruesome days took advantage of the generalfreedom to shoot in order to satisfy his private hatred, lust for revenge,and sometimes the most hideous murderous instincts. There is no doubtthat Goring himself sent the six assassins in mufti who on the morningof June 30 appeared at von Schleicher's villa, rang the bell, quicklybroke in, and shot the former Chancellor in front of his wife and niece.Von Schleicher died on the spot. He had reached for his gun, and the sixassassins had killed him in self-defense — this was the version Goringat first tried to circulate; but later Hitler in his Reichstag speech madeno attempt to maintain it. One bullet, allegedly by mistake, hit FrauElisabeth von Schleicher, who died half an hour later; the six murderersdrove away in their car one minute after they had carried out theirmission.Goring took advantage of the vagueness of Hitler's orders and theconfused state ot the death lists to slaughter a number of enemies otherthan the rebellious S.A. leaders, but he certainly did not go againstHitler's intentions in doing this. For in Munich, too, where Hitler gavedirect orders, people were murdered who had nothing in common withRohm. To justify these crimes, the story of a 'reactionary' plot was putinto circulation, a plot which was even