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41. Revenge
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146 D Chapter Forty-One d reVenge At six o’clock in the morning on July 22, our doorbell rang. Four Gestapo officials had been delegated by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, after Himmler second in command of the SS and the Gestapo, to search the house and arrest my father. At the sound of the bell, I had raced to the radio to make sure it was tuned to a German station, and, indeed, the first thing the leader of the gang did was to switch it on. Much to his disappointment, what he heard was Deutschlandfunk blaring more details about the evil deed. In my father’s study, my mother explained the absence of her husband. Before she could prevent it, one of the Gestapo officials picked up something from the desk. It was a piece of paper with a telephone number scribbled on it.Aha! A telephone number? Whose telephone number? My mother’s cool Prussian blue eyes met with those of the intruder as she told him she really had no idea. The suspicious man dialed it over and over again, then put the receiver down; he could not get a connection.Whatever prompted him to allow my mother to grab the note from him under the pretense that the problem was probably with the downstairs phone and she would try upstairs,would forever remain an enigma.Coming down the stairs again, she seemed a shade paler when she handed him the paper back with the information that she, too, had not been able to get through. After the uninvited guests had left the house, she confided in me what she had done while upstairs; in an attempt to change the number, she had erased two digits and replaced them with different ones. She did not know that the real number in question was that of the designated chancellor in the post-Hitler regime, Karl Goerdeler. Goerdeler, the former Lord Mayor of Leipzig, had managed to escape arrest and, in spite of his imposing height of six feet, five inches, had made it as far as East Prussia, where a safe hiding place was waiting for him. Not far from his destination, fate caught up with him in a small restaurant while he was eating some soup. Helene Schwärzel, a mousy creature ,who identified him instantly from a photo in the local newspaper as a wanted criminal with a huge reward on his head, wasted no time calling the authorities. Sharing the fate of his fellow conspirators, Goerdeler was hanged by the neck. Hitler was not a man of empty words. He kept his promise to sweep the traitors from the face of the Earth.16 After eight hours of intense search, during which the Gestapo tore our house apart without finding any substantially incriminating evidence and no Jews, they settled on the veranda, facing the backyard. There they waited for hours for a certain someone to show Destruction unlimiteD 147 up and ring the doorbell. But the bell did not ring for the simple reason that I had posted myself at the kitchen window, signaling everyone who came to turn away fast. When the gangsters finally left,they took me along.During the endless ride to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin’s Französische Strasse,crammed in the black limousine with the men,I took the precaution of letting my life pass before my inner eye, just in case I did not return home again. On the fourth floor of the dismal but still miraculously undamaged building, I was delivered to an obviously high-ranking official in civilian clothes. Kommissar Wipper motioned me into his office. Over the years, my father had carefully instructed me on how to behave during a possible Gestapo interrogation. The first rule was never to volunteer any information beyond a yes or a no.“When they get friendly,”he had hammered into me,“it is time to watch out.” And he also told me to never fall into a well-known Gestapo trap— admitting to something that had allegedly been confessed by another member of the family. Wipper, his spongy, clean-shaven poker face not betraying any emotion, was civilized. Sitting across the desk from me, he first lamented the lack of qualified personnel in his department , complaining about the extra workload as a deplorable consequence of the latest events.“If it were not for the alertness of the population,”he added,looking out of the window ,“we would have to hire at...