They gave the prisoner in protective custody five-star treatment: he could feed himself at his own expense, wear his own clothes, smoke, and he didn’t need to work. But those basic legal rights that even the most depraved murderer is granted, the right to retain legal counsel and the right to defend himself, were denied me and all others in my situation. Normally anyone placed under arrest in Germany had to appear before an examining magistrate within twenty-four hours, to be told the reason for his arrest and be given an opportunity to explain himself. Depending on the outcome of that explanation, the examining magistrate then issues a definitive arrest order or releases him from custody.

But it’s a different story altogether for someone taken into ‘protective custody’! The gold-braided brownshirt went to the district council leader and accused me of conspiring against the person of the Führer. So they put me behind bars – where I remained: I was not expected to defend myself, nobody wanted me to defend myself, and I was not even given the opportunity. So and so was safely tucked away, so and so could not do any more damage – and that was all they cared about. This striking characteristic of the Nazis, treating people like cattle for the slaughter and never giving a thought to their distress or suffering, was starting to become apparent even back then. Questions of guilt and innocence never interested those gentlemen. The only thing that mattered to them was expediency. Whatever suited their plans was right, whatever didn’t suit their plans simply didn’t exist in their eyes. When later on during the war – and I’ve just remembered this example – some little postmistress was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment because she had taken a single bar of soap that fell out of a damaged parcel, the powers that be did not care a fig about the grotesque mismatch between the ‘crime’ and the punishment. Nor do they care that they ruined a human life, and perhaps more than one, for the sake of a trifle. They didn’t care about people, and despite all their big talk they have never cared about people. All that mattered to them was expediency. And it was expedient to keep the German population down and in a constant state of fear and terror. They terrorized people until the prisons, jails and mental institutions were full to bursting, they terrorized them with the gallows and the guillotine until nobody cared if they lived or died. Life was cheap; a careless jest could send you to your death. So what does any of it matter? ‘You’re done for one way or the other’, as they say in Berlin – and as usual they are right. We’re all of us well and truly done for.

When I received the message from my lawyer that he had been denied permission to talk to me, I knew straightaway that my wife wouldn’t be allowed to visit me either, and my letter to her probably hadn’t even been forwarded. It was only now, as the days and weeks passed, that I realized how hopeless my situation was. They could leave me here to rot until the end of the thousand-year Reich . . . Nobody cared what happened to me, nobody was able to contact me. The judicial authorities were not responsible for me: I was a ‘political’ prisoner, only held in custody here behind bars. The district council leader who had issued the custody order, and who had taken a decision with such grave consequences on the unproven say-so of an SA leader – this zealous district council leader viewed my case as closed the moment I was put away. And what about the SA who had arrested me, whom I had caused so much trouble by refusing to oblige and let them shoot me while trying to escape? Well, the fact was that the SA men had achieved their purpose; I was living the life of a dead man in here, dead to the world, unable to get a message out or receive any message from outside. And whenever my thoughts had taken me this far, the moment always came when I said to myself: something’s not right here. The SA really had gone to an awful lot of trouble over me, as if they took a very personal interest in my case; first of all the argument with the country policeman, then their attempt to make it look as if I was shot while trying to escape. You don’t go to all that trouble over some faceless prisoner whose arrest order has come down from Berlin! Because the investigation will have to be conducted in Berlin.