I was summoned back to Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the scene was frenetic to say the least. People were scurrying around with files. Phones were ringing almost continually. Couriers were running along corridors carrying important dispatches. There was even a gramophone playing the song “Erika,” as if we were actually with the motorized SS as they drove on toward the Normandy coast. And, most unusually, everyone was smiling. No one ever smiled in that place. But that day they did. Even I had a smile on my face. To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn’t have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I’m honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again.

Of course, people were also feeling good because they thought—we thought—that the war was over before it had even begun. Hardly anyone was dead in comparison with the millions who’d died in the Great War. And England would have to make peace. The Russian back door was secure. And America wasn’t interested in getting involved, as usual. All in all, it seemed like some sort of miraculous reprieve. I expect the French felt very differently, but in Germany there was national jubilation. And frankly, the last person on my mind when I walked into Heydrich’s office that morning was a stupid little prick like Erich Mielke.