NO ONE KNEW EXACTLY how many people had lost their lives in the purge. Official Nazi tallies put the total at under one hundred. Foreign Minister Neurath, for example, told Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps that there had been “forty-three or forty-six” executions and claimed that all other estimates were “unreliable and exaggerated.” Dodd, in a letter to his friend Daniel Roper, wrote that reports coming in from America’s consulates in other German cities suggested a total of 284 deaths.
