Probably the rain didn’t help, either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad, but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterward. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull, it was getting his hat wet.

I guess the Reds decided they’d had enough. Then again, they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o’clock that evening, shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way—the biggest we’d seen since the 1919 uprising.

News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o’clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I’d helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bülowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings, and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn’t get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theater, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.

Of the three policemen in the doorway, two were dead. The third, Sergeant Willig, “the Hussar,” was seriously wounded. He’d been shot in the stomach and in the arm, and his blue-gray tunic was purple with blood, not all of it his own.

“We were set up,” he gasped as we sat with him and waited for the ambulance. “They weren’t on the rooftops, the ones who got us. The bastards were hiding in a doorway and shot us from behind as we walked past.”