When I had spoken with Dr. Mandelbrod about my interest in issues of European relations, I wasn’t lying, but I hadn’t said everything, either: in fact, I had an idea in mind, a precise idea of what I wanted. I don’t really know how it came to me: during a night of semi-insomnia at the Eden Hotel, probably. It was time, I thought, for me to do something for myself, to think of myself. And what Mandelbrod was suggesting didn’t correspond to the idea that had come to me. But I wasn’t sure I knew how to go about putting it in play. Two or three days after my interview in the offices on Unter den Linden, I called Thomas, who invited me to come see him. Instead of meeting me at his office, on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, he gave me an appointment at the headquarters of the SP and the SD, on the neighboring Wilhelmstrasse. Situated a block down from Göring’s Ministry of Aviation—an immense angular cement structure, in a sterile and pompous neoclassical style—the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais was quite the opposite: an elegant little eighteenth-century classical palazzo, renovated in the nineteenth by Schinkel, but with taste and delicacy, and rented to the SS by the government since 1934. I knew it well; before I left for Russia, my department was housed there, and I had spent many hours strolling through the gardens, a little masterpiece of asymmetry and calm variety designed by Lenné. From the street, a large colonnade and some trees hid the façade; guards, in their red-and-white kiosks, saluted me as I went by, but another, more discreet team checked my papers in a little office next to the driveway, then escorted me to reception. Thomas was waiting for me: “Shall we go to the park? It’s nice out.” The garden, which one reached by a few steps lined with stoneware flowerpots, stretched from the palace to the Europahaus, a plump modernist cube set down on the Askanischer Platz and contrasting oddly with the calm, sinuous volutes of the lanes laid out between the mulched flowerbeds, the little round fountains, and the still-bare trees on which the first buds were forming. No one was there. “Kaltenbrunner never comes here,” Thomas remarked, “so it’s quiet.” Heydrich liked to walk there; but then no one else could have access to it, except the people he invited. We strolled through the trees and I told Thomas the gist of my conversation with Mandelbrod. “He exaggerates,” he said when I had finished. “The Jews are indeed a problem and we have to take care of them, but that’s not an end in itself. The objective isn’t to kill people, it’s to manage a population; physical elimination is part of the management tools. We can’t make it into an obsession, there are other problems that are just as serious. You really think he believes everything he told you?”—“That’s the impression I got. Why?” Thomas thought for a minute; the gravel crunched under our boots. “Look,” he finally went on, “for a lot of people, anti-Semitism is an instrument. Since it’s a subject that means a lot to the Führer, it has become one of the best ways to get close to him: if you manage to play a role in the solution to the Jewish question, your career will advance much more quickly than if you concern yourself, say, with Jehovah’s Witnesses or homosexuals. In that sense, you can say that anti-Semitism has become the currency of power of the National Socialist State. You remember what I said to you in November ’thirty-eight, after the
