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 Reichskristallnacht?” Yes, I remembered. I had found Thomas the day after the SA’s rampage, seized by a cold rage. “The morons!” he had barked as he slipped into the booth in the bar where I was waiting for him. “The bloody fools.”—“Who, the SA?”—“Don’t be an idiot. The SA didn’t do that all on their own.”—“Who gave the orders, then?”—“Goebbels, that horrid little cripple. He’s been frantic for years to get his grubby hands on the Jewish question. But he’s screwed it up good now.”—“But don’t you think it was time to do something concrete? After all…” He had given a brief, bitter laugh: “Of course we have to do something. The Jews will drink their cup, to the dregs. But not like that. That’s just idiotic. Do you have the slightest idea what it’s going to cost us?” My empty look must have encouraged him, since he went on almost without a pause. “In your opinion, all those broken windows belong to whom? To the Jews? The Jews rent their shops. And it’s always the owner who’s responsible in case of damage. And also there are the insurance companies. German companies, who will have to reimburse the owners of German buildings, and even Jewish owners. Otherwise, it’s the end of the German insurance business. And then there’s the glass. Plate glass like that, you know, isn’t manufactured in Germany. It all comes from Belgium. We’re still estimating the damage, but it’s already more than half of their total annual production. And it will have to be paid for in hard currency. Just when the nation was directing all its energy at autarky and rearmament. Oh yes, there are truly complete idiots in this country.” His eyes glittered while he spat the words out: “But let me tell you something. All that is finished now. The Führer has just officially entrusted the question to the Reichsmarschall. But actually the fat man will delegate everything to us, to Heydrich and us. And none of those Party cretins will be allowed to get involved again, ever. From now on, things will be done correctly. We’ve been pushing for a global solution for years. Now we can put it to work. Properly, efficiently. Rationally. Finally we’ll be able to do things as they should be done.”

Thomas had sat down on a bench and, with his legs crossed, held out his silver case to offer me a luxury cigarette, with a gold tip. I took one and lit his too, but remained standing. “The global solution you were talking about, then, was emigration. Things have changed quite a bit since then.” Thomas let out a long puff of smoke before replying: “That’s true. And it’s also true that we have to change with the times. That doesn’t mean we have to become stupid. The rhetoric is mostly for those playing second, even third, fiddle.”—“That’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is that we’re not necessarily forced to get mixed up in it.”—“You’d rather do something else?”—“Yes. I’m tired of it.” It was my turn to take a long pull on my cigarette. It was delicious, a rich, fine tobacco. “I’ve always been impressed by your formidable lack of ambition,” Thomas finally said. “I know ten men who’d kill their father and mother to get a private interview with a man like Mandelbrod. Just think that he lunches with the Führer! And you play hard-to-get. Do you know what you want, at least?”—“Yes. I’d like to go back to France.”—“To France!” He thought. “It’s true, with your contacts, your knowledge of the language, that’s not so dumb. But it won’t be easy. Knochen is BdS now, I know him well, but he doesn’t have a lot of openings, and a lot of people are after them.”—“I know Knochen too. But I don’t want to be with the BdS. I want a job where I can get involved in political relations.”—“That means a job at the embassy or with the Militärbefehlshaber. But I heard that since Best left, the Wehrmacht there doesn’t think much of the SS—and same goes for Abetz. We might be able to find something that would suit you with Oberg, the HSSPF. But for that, the Amt I can’t do much: you have to go directly through the SS-Personal Hauptamt, and I don’t know anyone there.”—“If a suggestion came from the Amt I, would that work?”—“Possibly.” He drew a last puff and negligently threw the butt into the flowerbed. “If it had still been Streckenbach, no problem. But he’s like you, he thinks too much and he got sick of it all.”—“Where is he now?”—“At the Waffen-SS. He’s commanding a Lithuanian division at the front, the Fifteenth.”—“And who replaced him? I haven’t even asked.”—“Schulz.”—“Schulz? Which one?”—“Don’t you remember? The Schulz who headed a Kommando, in Group C, and who asked to leave, way back in the beginning. The weasel, with that ridiculous little moustache.”—“Oh, him! But I never met him. I’ve heard he’s a decent sort.”—“No doubt, but I don’t know him personally, and things didn’t go well between the Gruppenstab and him. He was a banker before, you know the type. Whereas I served with Streckenbach, in Poland. And also Schulz has just been appointed, so he’ll overdo things. Especially since he has a lot to make up for. Conclusion: if you make an official request, they’ll send you anywhere but France.”—“What would you suggest, then?” Thomas had gotten up and we had resumed our walk. “Listen, I’ll see. But it’s not going to be simple. On your side, can’t you try too? You used to know Best well: he comes to Berlin often, go ask him his opinion. You can easily contact him through the Auswärtiges Amt. But if I were you, I’d try to think of other options. And it’s wartime. You don’t always have a choice.”