In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson

HITLER RETURNED TO BERLIN that evening. Again, Gisevius stood witness. Hitler’s plane appeared “against the background of a blood-red sky, a piece of theatricality that no one had staged,” Gisevius wrote. After the plane came to a stop, a small army of men moved forward to greet Hitler, among them Göring and Himmler. Hitler was first to emerge from the aircraft. He wore a brown shirt, dark brown leather jacket, black bow tie, high black boots. He looked pale and tired and had not shaved but otherwise seemed untroubled. “It was clear that the murders of his friends had cost him no effort at all,” Gisevius wrote. “He had felt nothing; he had merely acted out his rage.”