1 Among the Elite

1

Among the Elite

A more distinctively old-world setting it would have been difficult to imagine.

To one side of the expansive lawn, a string quartet was playing the “Menuetto” from Mozart’s Serenade in G.

Waiters attired in fashionable suits made their way inconspicuously among the guests. Silver trays were held aloft by the deft fingers of catering experience, and were laden with truffles and single bites of bread topped with a multitude of colored things and glasses of white and red wine from the Mosel Valley. Many other delicacies adorned various tables spread throughout the garden.

The silently moving waiters were by no means overdressed for the occasion. Most of the men wore tails and black ties, the women long gowns. The occasion had been long awaited. Everyone who was anyone in Berlin was here. Even the Führer was expected, someone had said, though he had not yet made his appearance.

The only men not sporting expensive tails were those in uniform, and more members of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were indeed on hand than the dozen or two foreign diplomats present were altogether comfortable with. That Germany was rapidly becoming a military power again was certainly no secret, and the look in the faces behind the uniforms was not one to engender a feeling of security concerning the development.

Three or four there were, too, whose eyes revealed an intensity and devotion to their cause which, not many years hence, would produce such panic as to hold an entire nation of their countrymen in terror. Only a year before, the Gestapo had been combined with the SS under the command of Heinrich Himmler. Though the name of the secret police was by now well enough known, the cruel connotations of dread at the very hearing of the word were still in the embryonic stage.

The bright smiles and laughter and setting of cultured serenity that on this day surrounded Gestapo and military officers, as well as the most wealthy and influential from every walk of life in Germany, belied the ominous rumbling of world events as they approached from an ever-shrinking distance. This was Berlin, the eye of the hurricane whence all the windy tumult originated but where none of it could yet be felt. Here were the elite of society, those caught up, though they yet knew it not, in determining the direction history would march, changing the world for all time.

How could they know the facade of ebullience and good cheer for what it was?