I wandered around the university campus. Students spend their lives in cafés and bars, that’s where they talk, where they set the world to rights, where they drown their sorrows, it was where I spent most of my four years in Nantes. In Frankfurt I visited every café, every bar, but nowhere did I feel the oppressive, arrogant, feverish atmosphere of Nazi Germany. In the liberal, European, impossibly liberal Germany of today, everything is immaculate, pristine, warm and young although the populace seems older than ever. I wanted to be a conjuror, to wave a magic wand, turn back time and shroud everything in black and grey and fog, restore to the streets their cobblestoned past, to the buildings their pre-war decrepitude, to the ladies, that bourgeois charm perched somewhere between decorousness and depravity, to the girls, that air of Olympian athletes, to the civil servants, the starched formality of dangerous automata, to the working-class the demeanour of bankrupt country squires ripe for exploitation and manipulation, to the politicians, the shrill rhetoric of the madman. I couldn’t picture the young Hans Schiller, too many other images cluttered my mind, the irreproachable SS officer in his black uniform, the Cheikh of Aïn Deb I remembered from childhood in his spotless white burnous, the image of the German businessman trussed up in his dark suit, the picture of these promising students who seemed prematurely solemn. This youthful Hans I cannot picture deserves my compassion, he is young, he does not know. He fell in with the muscular Hitler Youth, the Hitlerjugend, and there lost what little adolescent wisdom had survived from childhood. I did much the same thing in the FLN youth, the FLNjugend, it was not as extreme, just the crackpot rantings of rank amateurs, but I know the symptoms, the dull roar in your head, the spit-flecked slogans in your mouth, the murderous twitch in your hands. His years at university did nothing to improve Hans, his character by now was mapped out, and the spirit of the times was of relentless propaganda, iron vigilance and, shortly afterwards, of Blitzkrieg. It’s easy to understand how difficult it must have been to think for yourself. From here to his induction into the researcher team working on Zyklon B is a matter of simple probability. He was in the right place at the right time, they needed men in white coats to hold the test tubes, monitor the distillate, take notes. Hans, the newly qualified chemical engineer, surely thinking he had been recognised, chosen, honoured, patted himself on the back. He probably genuinely believed that the gas they were working on would be used, as he had been told, to eradicate lice in the camps. What camps? he might have asked. The Arbeitslager – the labour camps of the glorious Reich! someone would have snapped, as though defending a campaign to end poverty and degradation. The real question? What’s going on here? would have come one day, at dusk, at dawn, between two pale pools of light, in some remote Frankfurt suburb, in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, as he witnessed his first live experiment – the gassing of a Jewish family too bewildered to protest or of a group of tramps too drunk to realise what was happening; and with that first question a flood of others would naturally have come: What am I doing here? Is this really happening? Why? I’d like to think he objected, but caught up as he was in some vast secret Reich, he realised there was no way out. The first step is the only one that matters, and he had already taken several. The rest follows, you brood over your own pain, you lick your wounds, you keep going, you keep your opinions to yourself, you forget them, and every day forgetting becomes a little easier, you espouse the common view and every day you believe it a little more fervently; you see cowards, braggarts, killing willingly, zealously, and this persuades you that you are on the right path, the only path. Papa quickly penetrated the inner sanctum of his horror, something which must have required some special trait. An incurable innocence? A healthy dose of cowardice? A little fervour? Perhaps a lot. Maybe a heartfelt rage at the Jews and other Minderwertige Leute.