Ohlendorf, whom I saw toward the end of the month, when I finally began to go out again, seemed to think as I did. I found him—he who had already been so glum to begin with—even more despondent than Thomas. He confessed to me that the night before the execution of Jessen, to whom he had remained close in spite of everything, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. “I kept thinking about his wife and children. I’ll try to help them, I’m going to give them part of my salary.” He still thought, though, that Jessen deserved the death sentence. For years, he explained to me, our professor had broken his ties to National Socialism. They had continued to see each other, to talk, and Jessen had even tried to recruit his former student. Ohlendorf agreed with him on a number of points: “It’s obvious—the widespread corruption within the Party, the erosion of the rule of law, the pluralist anarchy that’s replaced the Führerstaat, all that’s unacceptable. And the measures against the Jews, the Endlösung, were a mistake. But overthrowing the Führer and the NSDAP, that’s unthinkable. We have to purge the Party, bring up the veterans of the front, who have a realistic vision of things, the leaders of the Hitlerjugend, maybe the only idealists we have left. It’s those young people who will have to spur the Party on after the war. But we can’t dream of going backward, to the middle-class conservatism of the career soldiers and the Prussian aristocrats. This deed discredits them forever. What’s more, the people understand this.” It was true: all the SD reports showed that ordinary people and soldiers, despite their concerns, their fatigue, their anxieties, their demoralization, even their defeatism, were scandalized by the conspirators’ treason. The war effort and the campaign for austerity had received a jolt of energy; Goebbels, finally authorized to truly declare the “total war” he held so dear, went to great lengths to whip it up, without it really being necessary. The situation, though, was only getting worse: the Russians had retaken Galicia and gone beyond their 1939 border, Lublin was falling, and the wave had finally died down on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Bolshevik command was obviously just waiting for us to crush for them the Polish insurrection, launched at the beginning of the month. “We’re playing Stalin’s game there,” Ohlendorf commented. “It would be better to explain to the AK that the Bolsheviks represent a much greater danger than we do. If the Poles fought at our side, we could still hold the Russians back. But the Führer doesn’t want to hear about it. And the Balkans are going to fall like a house of cards.” In Bessarabia, in fact, the Sixth Army, reconstituted from scratch under Fretter-Pico, was getting itself cut into pieces a second time around: the gates to Romania gaped wide open. France was obviously lost; after having opened another front in Provence and taken Paris, the Anglo-Americans were getting ready to clear the rest of the country, while our bruised troops ebbed back to the Rhine. Ohlendorf was very pessimistic: “The new rockets are almost ready, according to Kammler. He’s convinced they will change the course of the war. But I don’t see how. A rocket carries fewer explosives than an American B-17, and can be used only once.” Unlike Schellenberg, about whom he refused to speak, he didn’t have any plans or concrete solutions: he could only talk about a “final National Socialist leap forward, a giant surge,” which to me resembled Goebbels’s rhetoric a little too much. I had the impression that he was secretly resigned to defeat. But I don’t think he had yet admitted that to himself.

The events of July 20 had another consequence—minor, but unfortunate for me: in mid-August, the Gestapo arrested Judge Baumann, of the Berlin SS court. I learned of it fairly rapidly from Thomas, but didn’t immediately realize all the consequences. At the beginning of September, I was summoned by Brandt, who was accompanying the Reichsführer on an inspection in Schleswig-Holstein. I joined the special train near Lübeck. Brandt began by announcing that the Reichsführer wanted to confer the first-class distinction on my War Service Cross: “Whatever you may have thought of it, your action in Hungary was very positive. The Reichsführer is pleased with it. He was also favorably impressed by your recent initiative.” Then he informed me that the Kripo had asked Baumann’s replacement to reopen the case against me; the latter had written to the Reichsführer: in his opinion, the accusations deserved an investigation. “The Reichsführer hasn’t changed his mind, and you have all his confidence. But he thinks it would be detrimental to you to prevent an investigation again. Rumors are beginning to circulate, you must know that. The best thing would be for you to defend yourself and prove your innocence: that way, we can close the case once and for all.” I didn’t like this idea at all, I was beginning to know the manic stubbornness of Clemens and Weser too well, but I didn’t have a choice. Back in Berlin, I went on my own initiative to introduce myself to Judge von Rabingen, a fanatical National Socialist, and explained my version of the facts to him. He retorted that the case put together by the Kripo contained disturbing elements, he kept going back to the bloodstained German clothes, made to my size, and he was also intrigued by the business with the twins, which he wanted to clear up at all costs. The Kripo had finally questioned my sister, who was back in Pomerania: she had placed the twins in a private institution, in Switzerland; she affirmed they were our orphaned second cousins, born in France, whose birth certificates had disappeared in the French rout in 1940. “That could be true,” von Rabingen superciliously declared. “But for now it’s unverifiable.”

This permanent suspicion haunted me. For many days running, I almost succumbed to a relapse of my illness; I remained locked up at home in a black prostration, even going so far as to refuse to answer the door to Helene, who came to visit me. At night, Clemens and Weser, animated marionettes, poorly made and badly painted, jumped on my sleep, creaked through my dreams, buzzed around me like dirty little mocking creatures. My mother herself sometimes joined this chorus, and in my anguish I came to believe these two clowns were right, that I had gone mad and had in fact killed her. But I wasn’t insane, I felt it, and the whole business came down to a monstrous misunderstanding. When I got hold of myself a little, I had the idea of contacting Morgen, the upright judge I had met in Lublin. He worked in Oranienburg: he immediately invited me to come see him, and received me affably. He talked to me first about his activities: after Lublin, he had set up a commission in Auschwitz, and charged Grabner, the head of the Politische Abteilung, for two thousand illegal murders; Kaltenbrunner had had Grabner released; Morgen had re-arrested him and the investigation was following its course, along with that of numerous accomplices and other corrupt subalterns; but in January a fire of criminal origin had destroyed the barracks where the commission stored all the evidence and some of the files, which complicated things quite a bit. Now, he confessed to me in confidence, he was aiming for Höss himself: “I’m convinced he’s guilty of diversion of State property and of murder, but it will be hard for me to prove it; Höss has powerful protections. What about you? I heard you were having some problems.” I explained my case to him. “Accusing you isn’t enough,” he said thoughtfully, “they have to prove it. Personally, I trust your sincerity: I know the worst elements of the SS only too well, and I know you’re not like them. Whatever the case, to charge you, they have to prove concrete things, that you were there at the time of the murder, that those famous clothes were yours. Where are those clothes? If they stayed in France, it seems to me that the prosecution doesn’t have much to go on. And also, the French authorities who sent the request for legal assistance are now under the control of an enemy power: you should ask an expert in international law to study that aspect of things.” I left this interview a little reassured: the obsessive stubbornness of the two investigators was making me paranoid, I could no longer see what was true and what was false, but Morgen’s good legal sense was helping me find terra firma again.