By the time of Hitler’s ascendency in 1933, Emil was twenty-seven and climbing up the Nazi ladder in earnest. The many hatreds he had been nourishing for two decades served him well, for was not hatred the fuel upon which the Fascist machine ran? In temperament he could not have been better suited for recruitment by the Gestapo when it was formed out of the Prussian Secret Police that same year. The following year, when Himmler and Göring ordered the Blood Purge, he had been one of those who had helped carry it out. If the truth were known, he had rather enjoyed killing the SA and Catholic leaders and others with whom the Führer had had old scores to settle. He learned, as time went on, to hate the Jews, the Christians, the wealthy. He hated the Americans and the British—and the Germans along with them.

As he grew more entrenched in fascism, however, he began to find himself curiously drawn toward the roots of his past and desirous of knowing more about the revolution that had swept his Russian homeland. Though bolshevism and fascism were avowedly the bitterest of enemies, and though Germans and Russians hated one another passionately, he found within himself a curious mixture of the psyches of both personalities. In a complex schizophrenia of mingled communism and fascism, he secretly took to reading Marx, even Lenin, and found himself drawn to their Communist ideals. To his other hatreds was now added the Communist enmity toward elitism in all forms, the aristocracy and the ancient land barons in both Germany and Russia.

To this extent he adopted the ideals of 1917 even in the carrying out of his self-promoting agenda as an agent of the SS—that all the old power groups would one day fall, and a new elite would take their place. The landowning elite, the Jewish business elite, the powerful Christian church, and the former powerful controlling interests of government—all would one day be toppled, and Hitler seemed to be the one most likely to emerge as head of the new order. Therefore, he would follow the Nazi train where it led. A Russian-born German, member of the Nazi party and elite secret police, with Communist leanings—Emil Korsch was an enigma in every fiber of his psychologically contorted being.

He had learned through the years to mask the inner storms of his personal furies. In today’s political atmosphere it wouldn’t do to show one’s emotions. No one would have guessed from looking at him the vendettas upon which he was bent.