Someone knocked and I opened the door: a bellboy was there to tell me that Obersturmbannführer Hauser had left a message. I had him cart away the leftovers of the meal I had had sent up the day before, and took the time to shower and comb my hair before going down to reception to call Thomas. Werner Best was in Berlin, he told me; he was willing to see me, that very evening, in the bar at the Hotel Adlon. “You’ll be there?” I went back up to run a bath, as hot as possible, and plunged into it until my lungs felt as if they would crush. Then I sent for a barber to come shave me. At the appointed time I was at the Adlon, toying nervously with the stem of a martini glass, gazing at the Gauleiters, diplomats, high-ranking SS officers, wealthy aristocrats who stayed there while they were passing through Berlin, or were just dining there. I thought about Werner Best. How would a man like Best react if I told him I thought I’d seen the Führer draped in a rabbi’s shawl? No doubt he’d give me the address of a good doctor. But maybe he’d also coldly explain to me why it had to be that way. An odd man. I had met him in the summer of 1937, after he had helped me, through Thomas, during my arrest in the Tiergarten; he had never again alluded to it. After my recruitment, although I was at least ten years younger than he, he seemed to take an interest in me and invited me several times to dinner, usually along with Thomas and one or two other officials from the SD, once with Ohlendorf, who drank a lot of coffee and spoke little, and sometimes also one-on-one. He was an extraordinarily precise, cold, and objective man, and at the same time passionately devoted to his ideals. When I still barely knew him, it seemed obvious to me that Thomas Hauser imitated his style, and I saw later on that this was the case for most of the young SD officers, who definitely admired him more than they did Heydrich. Best, at that time, still liked to preach what he called heroic realism: “What counts,” he asserted, quoting Jünger, whom he read avidly, “is not what you fight for, but how you fight for it.” For this man, National Socialism was not a political opinion, but rather a way of life, a hard, radical one that blended a capacity for objective analysis with the ability to act. The highest morality, he explained to us, consists in surmounting traditional inhibitions in the search for the good of the Volk. In that, the Kriegsjugendgeneration, the “war youth generation,” to which he belonged along with Ohlendorf, Six, Knochen, and also Heydrich, was clearly distinct from the previous generation, the junge Frontgeneration, the “youth of the front,” who had been in the war. Most of the Gauleiters and Party leaders, like Himmler and Hans Frank and also Goebbels and Darré, belonged to that generation, but Best thought them too idealistic, too sentimental, naïve, and unrealistic. The Kriegsjungen, too young to have been in the war or even fought with the Freikorps, had grown up during the troubled Weimar years, and against this chaos they had forged a völkisch, radical approach to the problems of the nation. They had joined the NSDAP not because its ideology was different from that of the other völkisch parties of the 1920s, but because instead of getting bogged down in ideas, in leaders’ quarrels, in endless, unproductive debates, it had concentrated on organization, mass propaganda, and activism, and had thus naturally emerged in a guiding position. The SD embodied this hard, objective, realistic approach. As for our generation—by that, Best, in these discussions, meant the generation of Thomas and me—it hadn’t yet fully defined itself: it had reached adulthood under National Socialism, but hadn’t yet been confronted with its real challenges. That was why we had to prepare ourselves, cultivate a severe discipline, learn to fight for our Volk and if necessary destroy our enemies, without hatred and without animosity, not like those Teutonic big shots who behaved as if they were still wearing animal pelts, but in a systematic, efficient, carefully thought-out way. That was the mood of the SD then—and, for example, of Professor Dr. Alfred Six, my first department head, who was also at the same time the head of the foreign economics faculty at the university: a bitter, somewhat disagreeable man who spoke more often of bioracial politics than of economics; but he advocated the same methods that Best did, and the same held true for all the young men recruited through the years by Höhn, the young wolves of the SD, Schellenberg, Knochen, Behrends, d’Alquen, Ohlendorf of course, but also less well known men now, such as Melhorn, Gürke who was killed in combat in 1943, Lemmel, Taubert. It was a race apart, not much appreciated within the Party, but lucid, active, disciplined, and after I entered the SD, I had aspired only to become one of them. Now I wasn’t so sure. I had the impression, after my experiences in the East, that the idealists in the SD had been overwhelmed by the policemen, the bureaucrats of violence. I wondered what Best thought of the Endlösung. But I had no intention of asking him, or even of broaching the subject, not to mention that of my strange vision.
