Upon arrival in Plötzensee the car door is thrown open: “Out!” They have to line up. Two guards per prisoner bring each separately to their cells on death row. There are broad red strips of fabric on the doors, fifteen centimeters long and two centimeters wide. They are the only touches of color aside from the bright blue of Harro’s sweater. The cells are cold; the radiators were removed to prevent suicide. So close to the end, the state won’t be robbed of its valuable prizes.
The lamp in the ventilation hole above the cell door only scantly illuminates the small room; the switch is outside, as usual. No one speaks loudly, and all activities are muted: a consideration that is even more horrifying than the rough tone on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, in the Spandau jail, or in the Rote Burg on Alexanderplatz.
Harro’s handcuffs are removed so that he can write his farewell letter. The Plötzensee prison chaplain is with him, Harald Poelchau. By chance he witnessed the arrival of the transport around one o’clock; no one had informed him of the upcoming execution, as they normally would have. In answer to his questions he was told the matter was secret. Hearing this, he took it upon himself to visit the cells on death row. Now he is bringing Harro ink and a pen. “My impression was that he, unlike the others, had not come to terms with the sentence to be carried out,” the clergyman describes the meeting: “True he was outwardly composed, but inside passionately embittered over his fate and the fate of his movement. Such an attitude is of course not determined by logical and rational reflection, but rather is a matter of temperament and of passion. And Schulze-Boysen had a strong temperament.”
At two P.M. the clergyman visits Arvid, who makes the calmest impression on him of all of them. He has been brought a piece of chocolate, a few cakes, two rolls, and grain coffee. He eats it all except for the bread. The pastor has cigarettes with him and a little wine.
“This morning I kept repeating the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ to myself: ‘The sun contends in age-old fashion . . . ,’ ” Arvid says, and wraps a second blanket around himself. “I think a lot about the enormity of nature. I feel so connected to it.” He asks the pastor if he knows Goethe’s “Primal Words—Orphic” by heart, and Poelchau, who has never been so happy for the fruits of his education, recites for him:
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows.
Arvid voices his wish to read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke together later that evening, a small before-Christmas celebration in memory of his childhood and his father, who died in 1914. The hanging, he comments, was a “personal slap in the face from Hitler.” Then he adds that the soul of the German people under the National Socialist dictatorship was “leached out.”
Arvid calmly writes his farewell letter. “But above all I think that humanity is on the ascendant,” he writes.