3.

I got to meet Albert Speer in the Heidelberg Post Office. I was with my colleagues from German Customs on our way to their office at the back of the building. They introduced me to Speer.

Remember him? Reichsminister Speer? Head of Armaments and Munitions for Hitler. One of the few members of the Nazi High Command not executed by the Americans in Nuremberg at the end of the war. He served twenty years in Spandau Prison and afterward wrote a best-selling book called Inside the Third Reich. The day I met him, he had a suntan and wore an expensive wool suit. He looked like a retired bank president or college professor. An elegant man picking up his mail.

“Speer,” the postal clerks hissed. They drew the vowels out: Spaaayer.

“Spaaayer, Spaaayer, Spaaayer,” they whispered, lingering on the vowels. They sounded like a Greek chorus.

“Ach, Herr Ryan: das hört sich wie Rhein an,” Speer said to me when we were introduced. He bowed when he spoke. A modest-appearing man.

Ah, Mister Ryan, that sounds like “Rhein.”

The German word for purity. The fabled river of Wagner and the fairy tales his operas are based on.

“Mit einem Namen wie Rhein, müssen Sie ein Held sein.”

With a name like Purity you must be some kind of hero.

I blushed when he said that. He patted me on the arm and smiled.

It never occurred to me that, later on, people would think that I was a war criminal. Me, a criminal—imagine that.

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.