A Quiet Flame

ON BEHRENSTRASSE, I parked the car in front of a glass-covered arcade that led to Unter den Linden. The arcade was nicknamed the Back Passage, because it was a popular pick-up spot for Berlin’s male prostitutes. These were easily identifiable thanks to the short white trousers, sailor shirts, and peaked caps many of them wore to appear younger to the tree stumps—their middle-aged clients who, until they had made their selection, would walk up and down the passage pretending to look in the windows of the arcade’s antique shops.

It was a warm night. By my reckoning, there were at least eighty or ninety of the city’s sultriest boys milling around underneath the famous REEMTSMA sign—one of the few left unbroken by the Nazi SA. Storm troopers were supposed to smoke a Trommler brand called Story, so, being Nazis and, therefore, very brand-loyal, they often took exception to other brands of tobacco, of which Reemtsma was perhaps the best known. If the SA did show up, all of the sultry boys would take to their heels or risk a beating—perhaps worse. The SA seemed to hate queers almost as much as they hated Communists and Jews.

We found the apartment above a café in a smart-looking Romanesque building. I pulled the polished brass bell and we waited. A minute later we heard a man’s voice above our heads, and we stepped back on the sidewalk to get a better look at him.

“Yes?”

“Herr Schwarz?”

“Yes.”

“Police, sir. May we come up?”

“Yes. Wait there. I’ll come down and let you in.”

While we waited, Heinrich Grund fulminated against all the sultries we’d seen. “Russian fairies,” he said.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of Berlin’s prostitutes, male and female, had been Russians. But this was no longer true, and I did my best to ignore him. It wasn’t that I liked queers. I just didn’t dislike them as much as he did.

Otto Schwarz came to the door to let us in. We showed him our KRIPO warrant discs and introduced ourselves, and he nodded as if he had been expecting us. He was a big man with a belly that looked as if a lot of money had been poured into it. His fair hair was cut very short at the sides and wavy on top. Underneath a swinish nose that was almost divided in two by a thick scar was a nearly invisible toothbrush mustache. That he reminded me strongly of Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, was a first impression—reinforced by the uniform he was wearing, illegally. There had been a ban on Nazi uniforms since June 1930, and as recently as April, in a campaign to reduce Nazi terrorism in Berlin, Reich President Hindenburg had dissolved the SA and the SS. I wasn’t much good at recognizing the shoulder and collar insignia on their uniforms, but Grund was. The two of them made polite conversation as we tramped upstairs. That was how I came to learn not just that Schwarz was an Oberführer in the SA but also that this was the equivalent of a brigadier general. There was a small part of me that wanted to join in this polite conversation. I wanted to say I was surprised to find an SA Oberführer at home when there were Communists to lynch and Jewish windows to smash. But since I was about to tell Schwarz that his daughter was dead, I had to make do with an observation about his wearing the uniform of a proscribed organization. Half of the polenta in Berlin would have looked the other way, ignored it. But then half of the cops in Berlin were Nazis.

Many of my colleagues seemed quite happy to be sleepwalking their way to a dictatorship. I wasn’t one of them.

“You know that since April 14 of this year, it’s illegal to wear that uniform, don’t you, sir?” I said.

“Surely that hardly matters now. The ban on uniforms is about to be revoked.”

“Until then it’s still illegal, sir. However, under the circumstances, I’ll overlook it.”

Schwarz colored a little and then squeezed his fists, one after the other. These made a noise like a noose tightening. I imagine he was wishing there was one around my neck. He bit his lip. It was easier to reach than my face. He pushed open the apartment door. Stiffly, he said, “Please. Come in, gentlemen.”

The apartment was a shrine to Adolf Hitler. There was a portrait of him in an oval frame in the hall, and another, different portrait of him inside a square frame in the sitting room. A copy of Mein Kampf lay open on a book stand that was on the sideboard, next to a family Bible, and behind these was a framed photograph of Otto Schwarz and Adolf Hitler. They were wearing leather flying helmets and sitting in the front seat of an enormous open-top Mercedes with cheesy grins on their faces, as if they had just won the ADAC Eifelrennen, and in record time. By one of the armchairs on the floor lay a dozen or so copies of Der Stürmer, the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper. I’d seen election posters for Adolf Hitler that were less obviously Nazi than the Schwarz family home.