The Kindly Ones

In the end, and as always with the course of justice, this business lasted for many more months. I won’t go into it in detail. I had several more confrontations with von Rabingen and the two investigators; my sister, in Pomerania, had to testify: she was on her guard, she never revealed that I had informed her of the murders; she just claimed that she had received a telegram from Antibes, from an associate of Moreau’s. Clemens and Weser were forced to acknowledge that they had never seen the famous clothes: all their information came from letters from the French criminal police, which had little legal value, especially now. What’s more, since the murders had been committed in France, an indictment could only have led to my extradition, which had obviously become impossible—although one lawyer did suggest to me, not at all unpleasantly, that before an SS court I could risk being sentenced to death for breach of honor, without any reference to the civil criminal code.

These considerations did not seem to shake the favor the Reichsführer was showing me. During one of his lightning visits to Berlin, he had me come on board his train, and after a ceremony where I received my new decoration in the company of a dozen other officers, most of them from the Waffen-SS, he invited me into his private office to discuss my memorandum, whose ideas, according to him, were sound but required a more thorough examination. “For example, there’s the Catholic Church. If we impose a celibacy tax, they’ll certainly require an exemption for the clergy. And if we grant it to them, that will be another victory for them, another demonstration of their strength. Therefore, I think that a precondition for any positive development, after the war, will be to settle the Kirchenfrage

, the question of the two Churches. Radically, if necessary: those Pfaffen, those little monks, are almost worse than the Jews. Don’t you think so? I’m in complete agreement with the Führer about this: the Christian religion is a Jewish religion, founded by a Jewish rabbi, Saul, as a vehicle to bear Judaism to another level, the most dangerous of all, together with Bolshevism. Eliminating the Jews and keeping the Christians would be like stopping halfway.” I listened gravely to all this, taking notes. Only at the end of the interview did the Reichsführer mention my case: “They haven’t produced any evidence, isn’t that right?”—“No, my Reichsführer. There is none.”—“That’s very good. I saw right away it was all nonsense. But it’s better that they convince themselves of that on their own, isn’t that right?” He accompanied me to the door and shook my hand after I had saluted him: “I’m very happy with your work, Obersturmbannführer. You are an officer with a bright future ahead.”