o 3b3e7475144cf77c

with stories of what the Gestapo had uncovered; then, from Berlin, he had given the orders,

and when it was too late to reverse them he had phoned the Führer, and the latter had flown to

Munich to display "a courage that has no equal," to show himself to the credulous German people

as "a Real Man."

The official statement was that not more than fifty persons had been killed in the three days

and nights of terror; but the gossip in the Ettstrasse was that there had been several hundred

victims in Munich alone, and it turned out that the total in Germany was close to twelve

hundred. This and other official falsehoods were freely discussed, and the jail buzzed like a

beehive. Human curiosity broke down the barriers between jailers and jailed; they whispered

news to one another, and an item once put into circulation was borne by busy tongues to

every corner of the institution. In the corridors you were supposed to walk alone and not to

talk; but every time you passed other prisoners you whispered something, and if it was a tidbit

you might share it with one of the keepers. Down in the exercise court the inmates were

supposed to walk in silence, but the man behind you mouthed the news and you passed it on to

the man in front of you.

And when you were in your cell, there were sounds of tapping; tapping on wood, on stone,

and on metal; tapping by day and most of the night; quick tapping for the experts and slow

tapping for the new arrivals. In the cell directly under Lanny was a certain Herr Doktor

Obermeier, a former Ministerialdirektor of the Bavarian state, well known to Herr Klaussen.

He shared the same water-pipes as those above him, and was a tireless tapper. Lanny learned

the code, and heard the story of Herr Doktor Willi Schmitt, music critic of the Neueste

Nachrichten and chairman of the Beethoven-Vereinigung; the most amiable of persons, so

Herr Klaussen declared, with body, mind, and soul made wholly of music. Lanny had read his

review of the Eroica performance, and other articles from his pen. The S.S. men came for him,

and when he learned that they thought he was Gruppenführer Willi Schmitt, a quite different

man, he was amused, and told his wife and children not to worry. He went with the Nazis, but

did not return; and when his frantic wife persisted in her clamors she received from Police

Headquarters a death certificate signed by the Burgermeister of the town of Dachau; there had

been "a very regrettable mistake," and they would see that it did not happen again.

Story after story, the most sensational, the most horrible! Truly, it was something fabulous,

Byzantine! Ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, still a member of the Cabinet, had been attacked in

his office and had some of his teeth knocked out; now he was under "house arrest," his life

threatened, and the aged von Hindenburg, sick and near to death, trying to save his "dear

comrade." Edgar Jung, Papen's friend who had written his offending speech demanding

freedom of the press, had been shot here in Munich. Gregor Strasser had been kidnaped from

his home and beaten to death by S.S. men in Grunewald. General von Schleicher and his wife

had been riddled with bullets on the steps of their villa. Karl Ernst, leader of the Berlin S.A.,

had been slugged unconscious and taken to the city. His staff leader had decided that Göring

had gone crazy, and had flown to Munich to appeal to Hitler about it. He had been taken back

to Berlin and shot with seven of his adjutants. At Lichterfelde, in the courtyard of the old

military cadet school, tribunals under the direction of Göring were still holding "trials" averaging

seven minutes each; the victims were stood against a wall and shot while crying: "Heil Hitler!"

IV

About half the warders in this jail were men of the old regime and the other half S.A. men,

and there was much jealousy between them. The latter group had no way of knowing when the

lightning might strike them, so for the first time they had a fellow-feeling for their prisoners. If

one of the latter had a visitor and got some fresh information, everybody wanted to share it, and

a warder would find a pretext to come to the cell and hear what he had to report. Really, the

old Munich police prison became a delightfully sociable and exciting place! Lanny decided that

he wouldn't have missed it for anything. His own fears had diminished; he decided that when

the storm blew over, somebody in authority would have time to hear his statement and realize

that a blunder had been made. Possibly his three captors had put Hugo's money into their

own pockets, and if so, there was no evidence against Lanny himself. He had only to crouch in

his "better 'ole"—and meantime learn about human and especially Nazi nature.

The population of the jail was in part common criminals—thieves, burglars, and sex

offenders—while the other part comprised political suspects, or those who had got in the way of

some powerful official. A curious situation, in which one prisoner might be a blackmailer and