Equally difficult for a hotel detective was the high turnover of staff, with honest, hardworking personnel who happened to be Jewish making way for people who turned out to be much less honest and hardworking but who were at least apparently more German.

Mostly I kept my nose out of these matters, but when the Adlon’s female house detective decided to leave Berlin for good, I felt obliged to try and help her.

Frieda Bamberger was more than an old friend. From time to time we were lovers of convenience, which is a nice way of saying that we liked going to bed with each other, but that this was as far as it went, since she had a semi-detached husband who lived in Hamburg. Frieda was a former Olympic fencer, but she was also a Jew, and for this reason she had been expelled from the Berlin Fencing Club in November 1933. A similar fate had befallen nearly every Jew in Germany who was a member of a gymnasium or sporting association. To be a Jew in the summer of 1934 was like some cautionary tale by the Brothers Grimm in which two abandoned children find themselves lost in a forest full of hungry wolves.

It wasn’t that Frieda believed the situation in Hamburg would be any better than in Berlin, but she hoped the discrimination she now suffered might be easier to bear with the help of her Gentile husband.

“Look here,” I told her. “I know someone in the Jewish Department of the Gestapo. A cop I used to know at the Alex. I recommended him for a promotion once, so he owes me a favor. I’ll go and speak to him and see what’s to be done.”

“You can’t change what I am, Bernie,” she said.

“Maybe not. But I might be able to change what someone else says you are.”

At that time I was living on Schlesische Strasse, in the east of the city. And on the day of my appointment with the Gestapo I’d caught the U-Bahn west to Hallesches Tor and walked north up Wilhelmstrasse. Which was how I’d run into that spot of trouble with the policeman in front of the Kaiser Hotel. From the temporary sanctuary of the Excelsior it was only a few steps to Gestapo House at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8—a building that looked less like the headquarters of the new Germany’s secret state police and more like an elegant, Wilhelmine hotel, an effect enhanced by the proximity of the old Hotel Prinz Albrecht, which now accommodated the administrative leadership of the SS. There were few people who walked up Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse unless they really had to. Especially when they had just assaulted a policeman. Perhaps for that reason I figured it was the last place anyone would think of looking for me.

With its marble balustrades, high vaulted ceilings, and a stair as wide as a railway track, Gestapo House was more like a museum than a building owned by the secret police; or perhaps like a monastery—just as long as the order of monks was one that wore black and enjoyed hurting people in order to make them confess their sins. I entered the building and approached a uniformed and not unattractive girl on the front desk, who walked me up a stair and around a corner to Department II.