FOR HITLER, THE conspiracy provided clear proof that army leaders had deliberately sabotaged Germany’s military campaigns.
He had always been suspicious of his generals, impatient with their “weak,” cautious attitude before the war, angry at their failures or hesitancy during it. The bomb plot convinced him that they had been wrecking his work. “Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years,” he ranted. “It was all treason!” For Hitler the traitorous generals’ presence was like a “blood poisoning,” undermining the morale of the German people. “These most base creatures to have worn the soldier’s uniform in the whole of history . . .” he shouted. “This rabble which has preserved itself from bygone times, must be got rid of and driven out!”1 When the names of aristocrats such as Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg and Ulrich von Hassell were read to him, Hitler sneered: “We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but unfortunately forgot to finish off the class struggle on the Right.”
After Fromm had sought to cover his tracks with the swift executions of key conspirators at the Bendler Block, the arrival of Remer, Kaltenbrunner, and SS Major Otto Skorzeny ended the summary executions and sought to restore order. On arrival in Berlin, Himmler ordered that no further independent action be taken and immediately appointed Gestapo Müller to head the Sonderkommission 20 Juli. The unit brought together four hundred Gestapo and SS investigators, including Sonderegger, who had pursued the Abwehr case with Roeder, and SS Colonel Walter Huppenkothen, who had served as a Gestapo liaison officer to Einsatzgruppen in Poland and as a Gestapo commander in Kraków and Lublin, where a large number of Jews had been murdered. Huppenkothen added a further element of ruthlessness to the proceedings by creating a special torture squad under SS Major Kurt Stawitzki.
The net was cast wide. Six hundred people were arrested within days, but no records were kept of all those detained—or indeed all those executed.2 Even the slightest suspicion of sympathy for the coup was grounds for arrest, and the families of the conspirators were to be locked up, too. Stauffenberg’s wife, Nina, was pregnant with the couple’s fifth child at the time of the assassination attempt and gave birth in prison. Her other four children, who were aged between three and ten, were taken to an orphanage and given a different surname.
Many, like Tresckow, succeeded in cheating the hangman’s noose. Major Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, interrogated at the Berlin military district headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm, hid two rifle grenades in sand buckets in a corridor on the way to the restrooms. After being arrested, he asked to use the toilet, snatched one of the grenades, held it to his head, and detonated it. Severely wounded but not dead, he crawled to the other bucket, found the other grenade, and detonated it inside his mouth.
Rommel, when threatened with a public trial and the arrest of his family, took poison—as did Kluge.
Meanwhile, in the Great Hall of the Berlin Supreme Court, the People’s Court sat in judgment of the conspirators. Hitler told Roland Freisler, the maniacally angry, shouting judge who had tried the members of the White Rose: “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle.”3 Freisler needed no encouragement: He was more incensed than ever by the attempt on the Führer’s life. With a bust of Hitler behind him and huge swastika flags streaming down the walls, he spat his hatred at the accused, shouted over them, yelled that they were traitors and murderers. Sentences had been decided before each “trial” began: When Trott was listed for trial, it was noted that he would be “condemned to death at the next session of the People’s Court.”4
Despite Freisler’s ranting, a few of the accused managed to speak. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin said treason against Hitler had been a “command from God,” while Werner von Haeften’s brother, Hans-Bernd, told the astonished Freisler that Hitler would go down in history as a “great perpetrator of evil.” Both were hanged at Plötzensee.5
Ludwig Beck’s friend Fritz Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg, who had shared his vision of a united, federal, and peaceful Europe with his friends in the Kreisau Circle, refused to be flustered by Freisler, who referred to him as “Scoundrel Schulenburg.” When Freisler accidentally called him “Count Schulenburg” by mistake, the aristocrat laughed and said, “Scoundrel Schulenburg, if you please!” When Freisler sentenced him to death, Schulenburg said, “We resolved to take this deed upon ourselves in order to save Germany from indescribable misery. I realize that I shall be hanged for my part in it, but I do not regret what I did and only hope that someone else will succeed in luckier circumstances.”
Only the three hundred specially chosen spectators in the court got to hear their words. Goebbels ordered that reporters were not permitted to publish anything from the speeches of the accused.
Yorck von Wartenburg, of the Kreisau Circle, was among the first of the two hundred people executed after Valkyrie to die. In a last note to his wife from his prison cell, he wrote: “They can take the uniform from us, but not the spirit in which we acted.” Those to follow him to the gallows included Generals Erich Hoepner, Erwin von Witzleben, and Erich Fellgiebel; Colonel Stieff; and the conspirators in Paris, Stülpnagel, Hofacker, and Linstow.
The trials continued until the final weeks of the war. The senior policeman Arthur Nebe had faked his own suicide, dyed his hair, and gone into hiding with the help of friends. Arrested in January 1945, he was hanged in March.6 Fromm was shot on March 12. Carl Goerdeler, who had also been arrested while on the run, was executed on February 2, 1945. In his last letter, he wrote: “I ask the world to accept our martyrdom as penance for the German people.”
The scene at Plötzensee was truly macabre. Denied the last rites or pastoral care, and wearing rough prison clothes and wooden shoes, the condemned were marched into the execution room, where ropes were swiftly passed around their necks. Their bodies were then lifted and each rope placed over a hook. Making them hang rather than drop from a gallows prolonged their suffering as it could take several minutes to die. The executioners—fortified by cognac—were advised to leave them hanging there for twenty minutes to be sure.
Both the executioners and the hanging men cast huge shadows on the whitewashed walls as the room was being lit for film cameras that whirred throughout.
Goebbels had had the film crew cover the trial and executions. During the trial, the film’s director, Hans Hinkel, had to ask Freisler not to shout so loudly as he was distorting the sound. Hinkel’s edited version of the court proceedings was given the title Action X—Traitors before the People’s Court and ran for three and a half hours. When it came time to view the executions—twenty minutes of silent film—Goebbels closed his eyes. Only short excerpts of the trial footage were ever shown to the public.
Hitler eventually had the film locked away, but it was stolen and turned up in Switzerland before the end of the war. The foreign press division of the Propaganda Ministry reported to Goebbels that when it was viewed there on March 5, 1945, “the audience got a frightful impression.”7
THE GESTAPO’S ROUTE back to the Abwehr conspirators began when Gestapo Müller was astonished to hear a suggestion that Colonel Georg Hansen—Schellenberg’s right-hand man—had confirmed to Haeften in advance of the coup that he would help the conspirators occupy Gestapo headquarters if he was asked. Müller found it impossible to believe that Hansen was a traitor, but under interrogation, the colonel confessed. After being tortured, he began to name names and stated he believed that Canaris was the “spiritual instigator of the revolutionary movement” and that the admiral had made an important personal contribution by “maintaining the requisite contacts abroad.”8
Müller informed Schellenberg, who was astonished. Schellenberg’s professional rivalry with Canaris did not stop him from liking and respecting him. He found it hard to believe he could be a leader of the anti-Nazi movement, and there was nothing in Canaris’s behavior on July 20 to raise suspicion. However, Schellenberg agreed that he should be the one to arrest the admiral.
Schellenberg left his driver at his car and knocked on Canaris’s door alone. Although the admiral had guests, the SD man reckoned Canaris must have seen him coming, as the little admiral himself opened the door and not his servant.
Stepping calmly aside to let his visitor past, Canaris said, “Somehow I felt that it would be you.”9
Schellenberg explained that Hansen had led them to him, and Canaris nodded. Canaris’s guests left, leaving their half-finished coffee cups on the table, and Schellenberg said he should pack a bag and come with him.
As Canaris paused, the SD officer added more softly: “If the Herr Admiral wishes to make other arrangements, then I beg him to consider me at his disposal. I shall wait in this room for an hour and during that time you may do whatever you wish. My report will say that you went to your bedroom in order to change.”
Canaris smiled. “No, dear Schellenberg,” he said, “flight is out of the question for me. And I won’t kill myself either.”
Schellenberg waited while Canaris packed his bag. When at last he came downstairs, he said, “Well, then, let’s go.”10
COUP INVESTIGATOR COLONEL Huppenkothen knew all about the Abwehr investigation from Sonderegger. On hearing of Canaris’s arrest, the two men revisited the old file—which had been largely abandoned on Keitel’s orders a year earlier. Sonderegger believed the case had been covered up, despite all of his hard work. With the influential Huppenkothen’s help he now saw a chance to see the investigation through.
Knowing that on July 20 Canaris had been either at home, entertaining neighbors and with his servant present, or in his office—from where he had sent the evening telegram to Hitler—Sonderegger turned his attention to Oster, whose name had come up during the interrogations of the bomb-plot conspirators.
Through what Sonderegger saw as old-fashioned detective work, he set about establishing Oster’s whereabouts on the day of the bomb plot. Oster had told investigators he was at his manor house in the countryside near Leipzig, but Sonderegger uncovered a food ration card that showed Oster had in fact been at his Berlin apartment at Bayerischer Platz that day. A document found at Olbricht’s office showed that Oster had been listed as a liaison with the military districts after the coup. Sonderegger was convinced he had come to Berlin to await his moment to play a central role in a post-Hitler Germany.
He had Oster arrested in Leipzig and brought to the dungeon cells at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where he was manacled day and night and placed on one-third rations. Huppenkothen and Sonderegger both took part in his interrogation, one being probing but sympathetic, the other threatening and angry. Oster played the role of an old-fashioned career officer, uncertain of politics, a reactionary who had not understood the Nazi revolution. He confessed to nothing but was happy to talk.
Schellenberg had taken Canaris to a prison in Fürstenberg an der Havel, where a number of senior officers were being kept. But with total power vested in the commission, Sonderegger had him transferred to the Gestapo cells. He then requested the handing over from the army prison of two of Oster’s key contacts: Hans von Dohnanyi and Josef Müller. Both men—like Bonhoeffer—had faced no trial after Roeder’s investigation but had remained in custody.11 All the key Abwehr conspirators—apart from Bonhoeffer—were now in Gestapo custody, held in small, dark cells behind heavy steel doors. They were allowed no visitors and no contact with other prisoners.
Josef Müller was tortured but refused to speak. Hans von Dohnanyi had been injured in a bombing raid on the Lehrter Strasse prison and had suffered a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed. Knowing the Gestapo was coming for him, he had persuaded his wife, Christine, to smuggle in food infected with a diphtheria bacteria so that he could infect himself with it. In too much pain to speak, and unable to walk or control his bowels, Dohnanyi avoided giving anything away to his interrogators. Sonderegger sneaked in a doctor, but Huppenkothen was livid and sent Dohnanyi to Sachsenhausen. “Let him croak on his own shit!” he told Sonderegger angrily.12
Gestapo Muller interrogated Canaris, but the admiral appeared to have an answer to every charge and could rightly claim no involvement in the Stauffenberg plot.
However, the Gestapo produced a star witness, Alexander von Pfuhlstein, now a major-general and a former army divisional commander whom Oster had cautiously approached a couple of years earlier to join the coup. Pfuhlstein told the Gestapo about a partly coded but highly incriminating conversation in which Oster had spoken about “reorganizing the leadership of the armed forces.” Asked by Sonderegger why he had not reported it at the time, Pfuhlstein said he felt he had not enough proof of treasonous activity to be believed.13
Taking Pfuhlstein’s evidence to Oster, Sonderegger managed to gain the admission that discussions had taken place in 1942 about a reorganization of the army “if necessary against the Führer’s wishes” and that these measures had later been developed by him and Dohnanyi into a plan to include “the party, the police, the administration, the working class, and, finally, the army.” Oster admitted that Olbricht had also become involved and that Canaris was aware of the plan.
Sonderegger realized that through a mixture of detective work, threats, sleep and food deprivation, and Gestapo torture, he had what effectively amounted to a complete admission that there had been an Abwehr plan to depose Hitler as commander of the army and leader of Germany.
Confronted with Oster’s testimony, Canaris was strident: “I was never in doubt that any change of government during the war would not only be construed as a stab in the back but would disrupt the home front,” he told Sonderegger. “I was also convinced that neither our Western enemies nor the Russians would accept an offer of peace, which they would automatically regard as a sign of weakness. Were they actually to accept one in the first instance they would do so only for show, in order to submit a ruthless demand for unconditional surrender thereafter. It would be 1918 all over again, but in a far worse form.”14
Oster, he said, had come up with many dreams and schemes as part of his intelligence work, but he—Canaris—had been unimpressed and had dismissed many of them.
Sonderegger then had Pfuhlstein and Oster confront Canaris in the interrogation room. The conversation descended into a shouting match in which Pfuhlstein accused the admiral of being a defeatist and Canaris shouted at Oster that he had never been involved in a conspiracy against the regime.
The men were taken back to their cells. Sonderegger was convinced of both Canaris’s and Oster’s guilt, but he was determined to break the defenses of these two great intelligence men.
Like many detectives on a major case he felt it in his bones that somewhere in the files or among the disgruntled employees of the Abwehr, the key bit of evidence he so craved was just waiting to be discovered.
IT CAME OUT of the blue and from an unlikely source.
Kurt Kerstenhan had been an Abwehr driver. A self-centered grumbler and agitator, he had no intention of being drawn into an investigation into treason in which he had played no part. As the personal driver for Werner Schrader, an Abwehr officer involved in the procurement of Stauffenberg’s explosives who had committed suicide after the bomb plot, Kerstenhan knew he was a witness on Sonderegger’s list.
He scratched his head to think if there was a morsel of helpful intelligence that he might give the detective that would bring him under the protection—rather than the suspicion—of the Gestapo. He had been involved in no anti-Hitler discussions or plans for the coup, but something had always troubled him. On September 21, he turned up at Gestapo headquarters and asked for Sonderegger.
This might be nothing, he told the Gestapo detective, but in 1942 he had helped drive two carloads of documents from Abwehr headquarters to a building with the word “Seehandlung” over the entrance. Then later the same group of men had returned to the building and moved the documents to Camp Zeppelin, a security zone inside the army training center at Zossen, on the southern outskirts of Berlin, to which the Abwehr had moved its headquarters to escape the air raids.
The detective was intrigued. Who was in charge of the operation? Sonderegger asked. Schrader and Friedrich Heinz, he was told.
Sonderegger quickly discovered that the distinctive “Seehandlung” inscription belonged to the Prussian State Bank, where Heinz’s stepbrother was manager. Sonderegger issued a warrant for Heinz’s arrest, but tipped off, the man whom Oster had chosen to kill Hitler if the 1938 coup had gone ahead went on the run.
Sonderegger asked Kerstenhan if he would recognize the bunker at Camp Zeppelin to which he delivered the files. The driver said he would.
The detective sensed he was onto something, but he could have never imagined what: Hidden in one of the 130 safes at Camp Zeppelin were Oster and the conspirators’ complete files. It was enough to hang everyone who had so far escaped the wrath of Hitler.
All Sonderegger had to do now was find the right safe.
BY THE SUMMER of 1944, untried but unreleased, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been detailed to work in the sick bay of Tegel military prison, where the radio was kept on to comfort patients.
It was there he listened to the broadcasts describing the failure of the plot and the subsequent arrests and executions, and he began to fear for his family. Early in August he heard that his mother’s cousin Lieutenant-General Paul von Hase had been tried and executed on the same day. On August 23, his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, visited him. The strain was showing on her face, and although she had moved in with Dietrich’s parents to be nearer to him, she was struggling to sleep and suffering from headaches brought on by stress and worry. Bonhoeffer held her hands and told her not to lose heart.
Bonhoeffer was secretly wondering how long it would be before the Gestapo came for him, and he began to plan his escape from Tegel.
As yet nothing had been found that would link Bonhoeffer to the July 20 plot, and he was still able to talk with guards and move about the prison as part of his work comforting the sick.
Among the prison guards who had befriended Bonhoeffer was a Corporal Knoblauch, a deeply Christian working-class soldier from north Berlin.15 Bonhoeffer provided Knoblauch with spiritual guidance, as he had to many guards and prisoners, and they now discussed a plan that would see Bonhoeffer escape and Knoblauch go into hiding. He wanted nothing more to do with his job in the prison.
Bonhoeffer told his sister Ursula during a visit that she needed to get a workingman’s overalls in his size, together with food coupons and money, and deliver them to Knoblauch’s house. Knoblauch, he said, was confident that in this guise he would be able to walk out next to the guard, as there were many workmen coming and going to fix air raid damage. The difficulty would be finding somewhere to hide and getting to Switzerland.
On Sunday, September 24, Ursula and her husband, Rüdiger Schleicher, drove—with their daughter Renate in the back of the car—to the address Dietrich had given them and gave a package to Knoblauch. The family told the guard they were desperately looking for somewhere he and Dietrich would be able to hide that was not associated with the family.
Almost a week went by, and the following Saturday everything changed. Klaus Bonhoeffer was driving home when he saw a Gestapo car parked outside his house. Turning away, he drove to the home of his sister Ursula and, suddenly distraught, said he was considering taking his own life to save his wife and children from trouble. Ursula talked him out of it.16
Then, Paul von Hase’s wife, Margarete, arrived at the house. Heartbroken since the death of her husband, the mother of four was looking to Ursula and Rüdiger for support. She had just been released from prison, and all her other friends had turned her away.
Finally, as Ursula tried to comfort both her brother and aunt, Corporal Knoblauch knocked at the door. Taking Ursula and Rüdiger aside, he wondered if they could get Bonhoeffer a false passport and a flight to Sweden. The pastor had told him he knew people there. The couple explained that the plan might be in trouble as Klaus believed the Gestapo was after him. Knoblauch left quickly, saying he would tell Dietrich.
Sitting in his cell, Bonhoeffer realized that to escape now would bring down certain hell on his family. All would no doubt be arrested, and Maria, too.
On Monday, Knoblauch returned to Ursula’s house to find out that the Gestapo had already taken Klaus away. He told Ursula that, fearing for his family, Bonhoeffer had given up any hope of escape.
A couple of days later Rüdiger Schleicher was arrested, and then, on October 8, Bonhoeffer was moved from Tegel to the dark, windowless, underground cells of the Gestapo prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.
In the days that he had planned and then rejected the idea of escape, the true nature of his opposition to the regime had finally come to the surface.
CAMP ZEPPELIN HAD revealed its secrets to Sonderegger.
After the Abwehr driver Kerstenhan had identified the bunker, Sonderegger had gone in search of the key to the safe. Both were missing, he was told. Unwilling to do anything that might damage the contents of the safe, Sonderegger contacted its manufacturers in Dortmund and had them send a locksmith, who opened it easily. Inside were cardboard boxes, files, and folders, which the detective removed and scanned through.
He was astounded. The conspirators seemed to have recorded everything. The files revealed not only details of the July 20 plot but also anti-Hitler plots going back to 1938. There were files on the Blomberg-Fritsch affair and on Josef Müller’s peace meetings with the Vatican; files on Bonhoeffer’s trips abroad and messages to Britain; draft postcoup speeches by Beck; notebooks belonging to Dohnanyi; three pages on the implementation of a coup d’état written by Oster; assessments of the composition of a new government with signed amendments by Oster, Groscurth, Gisevius, and Heinz; and carbon copies of twenty pages from what appeared to be Admiral Canaris’s diaries. The files went on and on.
Although a member of the Gestapo, Sonderegger was a detective at heart. Even he had doubts about the future of the Hitler regime. As he sat in the bunker, he felt elation at what he had uncovered but a sense of shock, too. He knew that every man who had contributed to these files had signed his own death warrant.
He reported to Huppenkothen that what had been uncovered necessitated a complete rethinking of the Gestapo’s assessment of the anti-Nazi movement. They had previously understood that it originated during late 1941 and early 1942 in dissatisfaction with Hitler’s military strategy and the brutal war in the East. But the majority of the documents in the safe dated from 1938, 1939, and 1940, and so the actions and attitudes of people like Oster and Beck had not been based on the worsening military situation at all: They were a deep-set opposition to what Hitler stood for even during the early successes in Poland and France.
The files also contained names, Sonderegger went on, whom the Gestapo had previously hardly considered: Generals Thomas and Halder; the head of the criminal police, Nebe; Field Marshal von Brauchitsch; the Abwehr’s Lieutenant Commander Liedig; and many more. Huppenkothen listened in astonishment and then—telling his office staff that he was not to be disturbed—sat down to read the files for himself. It took him several days to gain even a superficial knowledge of what they contained.
When Gestapo Müller heard about the contents of the Zossen safe, he told Huppenkothen that he was to discuss them with no one—and that even a report to the board of the July 20 Commission must be delayed. Everything surrounding the discovery was to be considered “Geheime Reichssache—Ministersache”—the highest Reich security classification. While they discussed how to tell the Führer that generals and others had been conspiring against him for longer than he had believed, Kaltenbrunner reported to Hitler’s secretary and closest confidant, Martin Bormann, flatly that: “It now emerges from confiscated material found in an Abwehr safe that plans were already afoot in earlier years to effect a change of government by military means.”17
It fell to Huppenkothen to prepare the Führervorlage, the briefing for Hitler. It ran to 160 pages and included a report, an analysis, and two appendices of photocopies of the most important documents. Hitler read it alone, and even in his anger and paranoia—and his obsessive belief that these betrayals, not his own actions, had brought about Germany’s defeats—he recognized that the scale of the conspiracy, its length, and the positions of those involved had to be dealt with privately. His vengeance against the July 20 conspirators had been swift and public. A second high-ranking wave of arrests would make it look like the opposition was broad and strong. He ordered that inquiries must continue in the strictest secrecy; that he would require a full report once the interrogations were complete; and that the cases must not be dealt with in the People’s Court, from where word might leak out.
Huppenkothen and Sonderegger continued their investigations. Goerdeler and Karl Sack, judge advocate general of the army, who had been earmarked by Goerdeler to be justice minister in the new Germany, were questioned about the Zossen file, as was Bonhoeffer. The lives of his family hung upon his answers, Bonhoeffer was told. However, he continued to present himself as merely an emissary of the Confessing Church and as someone doing work for the Abwehr—the purpose of which he did not always fully understand.
Eventually, in a bid to spare his family further inquiry, he admitted only to being an enemy of National Socialism, a stance he took through Christian convictions, he said. One day in the washroom he met Tresckow’s cousin and coconspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was also a cousin of Maria von Wedemeyer. The connection gave Bonhoeffer heart. Schlabrendorff—despite having suffered a heart attack after his interrogators forced metal spikes under his fingernails and into his bare legs—had also so far managed to fend off all the accusations put to him by the Gestapo.
However, on being confronted with the contents of the Zossen safe, Oster confessed all. After so many years living in the shadows, it was a relief to put it all in the open: defend his patriotism and proudly declare his opposition to Nazism. “The game is lost, the dice have fallen,” he told Sonderegger. “Yes, from the beginning I had no other intention in my mind but to overthrow Adolf Hitler and his criminal regime.”18
His former chief, Canaris, though, continued to fight. Feigning exasperation, he told his inquisitors that he had gone along with elements of the conspiracy so that he could track it and intervene when necessary. This, he said, was his duty as the head of the intelligence service. Even Josef Müller’s visits to the Vatican were intelligence-gathering operations, he said—couldn’t they see that?
When Huppenkothen became angry, so did Canaris—affronted that he should be accused of having betrayed his country. They tried to humiliate him, making him scrub the floors of the dungeon block; he would not give in.
But back in his cell, away from their taunts and prying gaze, he sometimes felt overcome by a terror that made him sick to his stomach. He was holding on to a terrible secret: one that he could do nothing about. The Zossen file was not the only cache of incriminating documents held at the military base. The loose pages of his diaries were only a tiny part of his record of military and political affairs. The complete diaries—running to five thick black ring folders—were in another safe at Camp Zeppelin. Only Canaris himself knew of their whereabouts, but without any knowledge of what was going on at the Zossen base, the admiral lived in daily fear of their discovery.
SUSPECTING THAT DOHNANYI believed he had escaped him by making himself appear even sicker than he was, Huppenkothen could not resist the opportunity to gloat over Sonderegger’s Zossen discovery.
On October 5 he strode into the sick bay at Sachsenhausen, stood over Dohnanyi’s bed, and, with a sneer of satisfaction on his face, reached into his attaché case.
Removing a document, he placed it on Dohnanyi’s bed. “There!” he said. “At last we’ve got the evidence against you we’ve been looking for, for two years.”
Dohnanyi glanced at it but pretended not to be interested. “Oh, have you?” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“Zossen.”
It was a page from Dohnanyi’s Chronicle of Shame containing evidence of Nazi crimes against humanity. He had kept it and other files because he believed one day it would form the basis of a trial of Adolf Hitler. And because it would reveal to those who came after that even in the heart of this darkness, there had been kept alive a spirit of the other Germany: self-sacrificing, heroic, humanitarian.
Dohnanyi tried to wipe his eyes behind his spectacles. He wanted to hide his feelings, but he knew the look on his face gave him away.
It was hard not to feel that the Nazis had won.