I was hoping for a good long afternoon nap. It would make the time pass more quickly.) ‘Okay, done’, he replied, and left. The long day stretched out before me, and I knew from bitter experience what a long and endless torment a day in a prison cell can be if you have no work to do, and are just left alone with your thoughts. I don’t have the ability to ‘doze’, and my talent for sleep is limited at the best of times. So I had decided on a program of work for myself. My cell was clean enough, but by my Hamburg-born wife’s40 standards of spring cleaning it was a pigsty. I had calculated that my lawyer probably wouldn’t come to see me for another two or three days, so I had allocated these three days for window cleaning, washing the walls and polishing. I knew that one could spend a whole day polishing up the zinc lid of a pail until it shone like a mirror, with not a dull patch the size of a pin-head. So let’s get to it! First, the windows – and the hours just flew past so quickly that I was really surprised when the constable unlocked my cell door and brought in my lunch from the hotel in a tiffin box.

(26.IX.44.) The lunch was tasty enough, and I even got my glass of beer, which was more than I had dared hope for. Ignoring the rules, I let my bed down from the wall and flung myself on it, weary enough and ready for sleep. But then of course my thoughts, as if they had just been waiting for this moment, immediately began to revolve around my wife, left alone without protection, and around this mysterious ‘conspiracy against the person of the Führer’. No stranger to such troublesome intrusions, I countered them by silently reciting poetry to myself from memory, starting with some lines from Hofmannsthal41 (‘Noch spür ich ihren Atem auf den Wangen’) and moving on to Münchhausen’s ballads42 (‘Es ritt nach Krieg und Reisen . . .’). No sooner had I managed to escape the torment of my obsessive thoughts and fallen fast asleep when I heard the key rattling in the lock of my cell door, and I leapt up guiltily from my bed. The police constable didn’t say anything about my using the bed when I wasn’t supposed to, but looked at me instead in silence for a while. Then he asked me a rather surprising question, considering where I was: ‘Do you play cards by any chance?’

I replied: ‘I do indeed, constable!’

He looked at me again, and seemed to be turning something over in his mind. Then he came to a decision. ‘The thing is’, he said, and gestured with his thumb down the corridor of the cell block behind him, ‘back there in the cell there are two old Yids and they’re looking for a third man to play cards with them. Have you got anything against Yids?’

‘Not really, no’, I confessed.

‘Well then’, he said, ‘you come along with me and I’ll put you in with them.’ He led the way down the corridor, then stopped again.

‘But you mustn’t say a word about this to anyone’, he whispered. ‘I won’t, constable. There’s nobody here I could tell.’ He went on: ‘And especially not my colleague, who’s on duty tomorrow afternoon. He’s a Nazi, you see, and I’m Stahlhelm,43 do you understand?’

I understood well enough. The hostility between the Stahlhelm and the Nazis, and more specifically the SA, with which the Stahlhelm had been forced to merge, was well known. The worthy leader of the Stahlhelm, a Mr Düsterberg,44 had been ousted as a result, but the second-in-command, Mr Seldte,45 had landed the job of Reich Minister for Labour in return for selling out his organization. But the struggle between the die-hard Stahlhelm men and the SA continued behind the scenes, and that fire is still burning to this day.

So I indicated by a nod that I understood completely, and assured him that his colleague would learn absolutely nothing from me. To tell you how this little story ends, I now need to fast-forward one day. At lunchtime the next day the key rattled in the lock again, and again I was caught sleeping when I wasn’t supposed to by a police constable, only this time it was the other one, the bad-cop Nazi. Again I didn’t get shouted at for sleeping during the day, but was taken – again – to the other cell and locked in to ‘play cards with the two old Yids’ – but given strict instructions not to say a word to his ‘colleague’: ‘The thing is, he’s Stahlhelm and I’m Nazi, and if he can drop me in it, he will!’

It really wasn’t a bad little jail at all, that courthouse jail in Fürstenwalde an der Spree. Nobody made my life a misery, nobody bawled me out, nobody got worked up because I had been arrested for conspiring against the blessed person of the Führer.