Having a Jewish woman in the house would have been one more item on the charge sheet against me.

The search of the remaining rooms also failed to yield anything remotely incriminating. In sullen silence they then climbed up into the attic and proceeded to search through our empty suitcases and boxes. I stood by one of the attic windows, while the SA leader and policeman stood by the next one, deep in conversation. Suddenly I heard the policeman say firmly: ‘There’s not a shred of evidence against him. I can’t arrest the man.’

The SA leader replied heatedly: ‘But look here – we’ve received very definite information. You’ve got to take him in.’

The policeman put on his helmet and tugged at his belt. ‘I can’t – and I won’t’, he stated as firmly as before. ‘Then I’ll just have to arrest him myself!’ retorted the SA leader waspishly. ‘Do what you like. But I’m having nothing to do with it!’ replied the policeman, and left the attic. When he left the house, all ‘legality’ went out the door with him: so much for compliance with Göring’s edicts37 . . . Up until this moment I had looked upon the whole thing as a rather tiresome but amusing game: these fellows had nothing on me – I was innocent! But now I realized that this was beside the point, if they really had it in for me. I realized that I was in real danger, and that it would be better for me not to take the whole thing so lightly. It might be that I would need all my strength and courage to get out of this business in one piece!

I was taken back to my study and kept there, guarded by two SA men, while the others left, along with their leader. But when I looked out of the window I saw that an SA sentry had been posted by the garden gate that led to the street. Doubtless there was another one behind the house, on the side overlooking the Spree. I really did seem to be very valuable to them. I listened for any sound in the house: dead quiet everywhere. The waiting was torture. What had they got planned for me? Why were they leaving me here? I looked into the faces of my two guards – and thought it better not to ask. They had the coarse faces of thugs, veterans of a hundred brawls at political meetings, where they drove home the words of their Führer with knuckledusters and chair legs; the vicious faces of ruthless men who were ready to smash heads in here – anyone’s head – if someone gave the word. I’ve always thought that this archetypal SA visage, which became a familiar sight after the Nazis had seized power, was perfectly epitomized in the face of Gauleiter Streicher,38 that intimate friend of the Führer and editor of the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer – a filthy rag, and far filthier than any muck-raking scandal sheet. Whenever I saw that man in a photograph, I felt the hatred rising up within me, a hatred that had absolutely nothing to do with politics. Those little piggy eyes, the low brow, the overdeveloped chin, and above all that thick neck with its six or seven rolls of fat: for me he was the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate – so much so that I had taken to calling him ‘the Hangman’. My two guards had faces just like him, the kind of people who wouldn’t hesitate to grab a child by the legs and smash its head against the radiator of their car until it was dead. (This is what eye-witnesses later told me about the Führer’s praetorian guard, the SS, the elite formation that employed such methods to solve the Jewish question . . .)

I was waiting two or three hours like this.