Warnemünde demonstrated to Harro that he could exist inside the system, that he could get by and not stand out: that is the first step. He has transformed himself from a bohemian who hoped to turn the world upside down by the sheer force of his charisma, with his boundless energy and passion for debate, into a disciplined soldier. Into someone whose interior life is opaque to outsiders. When his training ends on April 1, 1934, and the Imperial Air Ministry—Reichsluftfahrtministerium, or RLM for short—in Berlin is simultaneously restructured and starts to hire new personnel as part of Germany’s ongoing attempt at rearmament, Harro applies for a position as a simple office clerk.
He has two reasons for doing so: First, Göring’s ministry is one of the most powerful in the capital, and full of career opportunities; second, he can feel secure there in the knowledge that according to law the Luftwaffe is subject only to its own jurisdiction—meaning he’ll be shielded from the Gestapo. “I could have found far better things to do in financial terms, but at the moment I don’t think of that as the main concern, but rather my personal security,” Harro tells his parents when he’s hired.
The decision has been made: Harro moves back to Berlin, the city where he had spent so much time, where he had been tortured and seen his friend murdered. He returns to a place full of memories both fond and traumatic, renting a small apartment on his own in a new neighborhood in a western part of town.
It is not an easy restart. The Air Ministry has some rigid rules. On his first day of work in Behrenstrasse in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood, he must sign a paper handed to him by Flight Captain Hilmer Freiherr von Bülow, the head of the department where Harro is starting, Abteilung IV Fremde Luftmächte, or Foreign Air Forces. According to the paper, Harro must pledge to always lift his right arm and simultaneously say “Heil Hitler” by way of greeting.
To his relief, Harro quickly learns that neither von Bülow nor Major Karl Bartz, for whom Harro will be working as adjutant, are fanatical Nazis. They are aviators through and through, who put a “downright touching effort” into their new hire, as Harro writes to his parents.
And his job is also not too demanding. Every day he must read foreign papers, magazines, and journals for information on the capabilities of rival countries’ air forces. The latest editions of Moscow’s Pravda as well as the New York Times are delivered to his desk each morning by intelligence services. It is something that interests him anyway: to stay informed outside of the Nazi propaganda organs, which for the majority of Germans have become the lone source of news. Finally he can make use of his talent for languages, his good English, French, and Swedish. In addition, he decides to join the student circle around his old friend Werner Dissel and a few others who work on their Russian in their free time.
But there is something that bothers him about the new position: the poor wages of just 120 marks per month. The low pay is partly due to Harro’s lack of academic credentials. Even though “earthly goods” have become even more trivial to him since the attack on the Gegner offices, when the SS stole everything from him, he’s still bitter about the exploitation he experiences at the giant bureaucracy, which leads to his having virtually no life outside of work. This parsimoniousness reinforces his anti-capitalist leanings. If there is good money being earned in the imperial capital, then surely it is at the Air Ministry, where the aircraft and arms industries are engineering lucrative deals with the regime, lining the pockets of managers and high-level officials. Göring, whose substantial belly no longer fits in a cockpit and mandates a custom-made uniform, creates a slipstream of corruption. But for the ordinary employees, who work their tails off from morning to night, there’s nothing left; their paltry wages aren’t even paid on time.
Harro’s initial hope to quickly build a career evaporates as a result. The march through such an institution—in order to change things from within—is arduous and paved with obstacles. Regardless of how friendly Bartz and von Bülow are, Harro isn’t happy spending this valuable time in his life without even being fairly compensated. “One is hired,” he reports home, “and must, according to popular opinion, be ‘happy if you receive your contract by Christmas’! . . . It’s spectacularly antisocial to let someone work like a dog all day but to drag things out on the bureaucratic front.”
To the outside world, the Air Ministry presents an aura of professionalism and efficiency and inspires an impression of a modern, highly technical approach to the art of war, but in fact the Behrenstrasse-based ministry is hobbled by sloppiness and sluggishness, Harro realizes. There’s a prevailing mood of fear and conformity that creeps into every office. If the ministry had once had a code of honor as a civilian institution, it becomes apparent to Harro that it is now a rather dishonorable mixture: hard-core Nazism paired with naked greed in the face of the fabulous profits flowing to the aircraft industry as a result of the arms buildup.
The conditions at his office seem to Harro to mirror the streets of Berlin and the entire country, as economic challenges abound. The ranks of the unemployed begin to rise again in 1934; the economic surge of the first months after Hitler’s ascent to power has receded. Just as Harro prophesied, the Nazi regime cannot make good on the “socialist” promises of its program and fights internal contradictions.
The way the Nazis deal with social problems is revealed to Harro on May 1, formerly a day to celebrate workers, now renamed in 1934 the National Holiday of the German People. Harro is on duty and must report to the Tempelhof airfield at 10:00 A.M. sharp. There, an endless mass has gathered, “shoved together in horrible cattle market-like pens,” as he describes it in a letter to his sister, Helga. “The women sweated, took off their shoes and sat around in their stockings. The men ate sausages and drank beer, as much as they could get hold of. The sun beat down mercilessly.” Maypoles stand around festooned with swastikas; signs for the German Labor Front, which has replaced the unions, hang here and there. To Harro it all seems forced. Then the Reich chancellor speaks. Harro manages to slip out a gap in the fence at one o’clock: “Hitler’s speech was nothing but hot air,” he writes Helga: “Not a single original thought. Anyway, it doesn’t matter . . . Deeds are stronger than any words. And since he spoke so despairingly about the grousers, I don’t want to needlessly increase their number.”
In the following days, Harro catches wind at the ministry: Everywhere there are rumblings behind the scenes. Demands for a second, real national socialist revolution are getting louder. It’s the crack in the Nazi system that Harro had predicted: the friction between the conservative camp, which feels a sense of obligation toward industry, and the radical socialist-oriented wing orbiting SA commander Röhm, who is tied to the masses and the youth. Will the Hitler regime fracture along this fault line? The Reichsmark is already weakening on the currency markets in London. “The political atmosphere here in Berlin,” Harro writes to his father, “is charged as if with electricity.”
The air temperature is also heating up during these weeks. According to the calendar it’s still spring, but it feels as if summer has long since arrived. The sky above the capital is cobalt blue, the air humid, summer storms breaking out.