SS General Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Russian front. Two men in our own company were found to be sleeping in wet socks and were summarily executed in the Tatar Forest.
    Not even Heide spoke now of the Great Victory of Stalingrad, and the propaganda machine had been ominously silent for some weeks.
     
    The SS Standartenfuhrer, with a pleasure that he did not trouble to conceal, tossed the top-secret telegram onto the table and nodded at SS Sturmbannfuhrer Lippert.
    "Take a look at that, Michel. What do you say to it?"
    Lippert picked up the telegram. A smile slowly crossed his face. "It looks as if we're in business at last!*'
    "Dead right we are." Eicke picked it up again and reread it. "Well, those bastards in the Army have had it coming to them, it was only a question of time. The Fuhrer's a reasonable man, but he can't be expected to tolerate traitors in his midst . . ."
    The large Porsche bearing Eicke's standard pulled slowly out of Dachau and turned off toward Munich, with Eicke and Lippert lolling in the back seat. They stopped on the way to pick up Hauptsturmfuhrer Schmausser, and at 1500 hours exactly the three SS officers arrived at Stadelheim prison in Munich. They were taken at once to the office of the governor, Herr Koch, and without troubling themselves with any tiresome preliminaries, demanded that the prisoner General Rohm be delivered up to them.
    Koch regarded the three men distastefully. It was plain that they had been drinking, and he was not at all sure how to deal with them. He began uncompromisingly by ignoring their demand for Rohm, banging his fist so hard on his desk that his inkwell overturned, and ordering them to leave his office and his prison forthwith, unless they themselves wished to be detained in one of his cells. He then set back to await developments.
    For the next few minutes the ball was tossed back and forth over the net--Eicke demanding Rohm, Koch refusing Rohm--with neither side gaining any advantage. Finally, to settle matters, Koch picked up the telephone and rang straight through to the Minister of Justice. The Minister of Justice heard the story with a sense of mounting indignation and personal outrage, until he could almost be seen to grow purple in the face and to be on the verge of an apoplectic fit, at which point Eicke leaned across the desk and snatched the receiver away from the unsuspecting Koch.
    "I may as well inform you straight away, Minister," he snarled into the telephone, "that I am here on the personal orders of the Fuhrer. I have no time to waste bandying words with petty officialdom, and if I meet with any more attempts to sabotage the Fuhrer's instructions I don't need to remind you that there are always plenty of free places waiting to be filled at Dachau!"
    He thrust the receiver back into Koch's still outstretched hand. There was a long, trembling pause before the minister spoke. Koch nodded, his face white and furrowed. He dialed another number, and without a word to Eicke, gave instructions to the prison staff to allow the three SS officers access to Rohm.
    SA Stabschef Ernst Rohm was sitting on a low wooden bench in cell 474, staring into space. He was naked from the waist up, but it was airless in the tiny cell and he was perspiring heavily.
    Eicke smiled at him and held out a friendly hand. "How goes it, Ernst?"
    Rohm hunched a shoulder. "Not so good," he said. "Not so good."
    Eicke sat down beside him on the bench. "Warm in here, isn't it?" He jerked a thumb toward the window. Through the small pane of speckled glass could be seen the cloudless sky blue of that hot June of 1934. "Even worse out there," he said with a grin. "Half the dames are going about without any underwear; you walk up the stairs behind them, it gets you in a muck sweat!"
    Rohm attempted a smile. He patted his face with a torn and dirty handkerchief. "Have you come for me, Theo? Has the Fuhrer heard I've been arrested?" He looked searchingly at his old friend. "I don't even know what I'm supposed to have done. Some