“And I would like to catch up on my smoking. I’d given up until I left Cuba. Since I met you I’ve got a much better reason to kill myself.”

They left me alone after that. Pencils and paper, a bottle of brandy, a clean glass, a couple of packets of cigarettes and some matches, and even a newspaper arrived, and I placed them all on the table and just watched them for a while, enjoying the freedom to have a drink or not have a drink. It’s the little things that can make prison tolerable. Like a door key. By all accounts, they’d let Hitler have the run of Landsberg and he’d treated the place more like a hotel than a penitentiary. Not that he was in any way penitent about the putsch of 1923, of course.

I lay down on the bed and tried to relax, but it wasn’t easy in that cell. Was this why they’d put me in here? Or was it just an American idea of a joke? I tried not to think about Adolf Hitler, but he kept on getting up from the desk and, full of impatience, going to the window and staring out through the bars in that way he had of always looking like a man chosen by destiny.

The curious thing was I’d never really thought about Hitler. For years when he was still alive I tried not to think of him at all, dismissing him as a crank before he was elected chancellor of Germany and, after that happened, merely wishing him dead. But now that I was lying on the bed where, for nine months, he had dreamed his autocratic dreams, it seemed impossible not to pay attention to the man with blue eyes at the window.

As I watched he sat down at the desk again, picked up the pen, and started to write, covering the sheets of paper with furious scribbling, and sweeping each page off the table and onto the floor as he finished so that I might pick them up and read what was written. At first, the sentences made no sense at all; but gradually these became more coherent, affording glimpses into the extraordinary phenomenon that was Hitler’s mind. Whatever he wrote was based on his own incontrovertible logic and served as a perfect guide for the commission of evil, worked out to the most minute detail. It was like sitting in the same asylum cell as the insane Dr. Mabuse, together with the ghosts of all those he had exterminated and watching him write his last criminal testament.