I was living and working in the space we called Berlin. There was plenty of business there for a private detective. It was all missing persons, of course. And most of them were Jewish. Most of them murdered in back alleys, or sent off to a KZ, a concentration camp, without the authorities bothering to notify their families. The Nazis thought it was quite funny, the way they did that. The Jews were, of course, officially encouraged to emigrate, but because they were forbidden to take their property with them, few did so. Still, some people devised several neat tricks to get their money out of Germany.

One such trick was for a Jew to deposit a large sealed parcel containing various valuables, and labeled the “last will and testament” of so and so, with a German court of law before going abroad for “a holiday.” The Jew would then “die” in a foreign country and have the local French or English court request the German court to forward the parcel containing his “last will and testament.” German courts being run by German lawyers were usually only too happy to comply with the requests of other lawyers, even French and English ones. And in this way quite a few lucky Jews managed to be reunited with enough cash or valuables to start a new life in a new country.

It might seem hard to believe, but another neat scheme was actually devised by the Jewish Department of the Security Police—the SD. This scheme was seen as a good way of helping Jews leave Germany and, in the process, of enriching certain officers of the SD into the bargain. It was what we called the tocher, or Jewish peddler, scheme, and I first had experience of it as a result of the strangest pair of clients that ever came my way.

Paul Begelmann was a rich German Jewish businessman who owned several garages and car dealerships throughout Germany. And SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Franz Six was the head of the SD’s Jewish Department. I was summoned to meet them both in the department’s modest, three-room suite of offices at the Hohen-zollern Palais, on Wilhelmstrasse. Behind Six’s desk was a picture of the Führer, as well as a host of legal degrees from the universities of Heidelberg, Königsberg, and Leipzig. Six might have been a Nazi crook, but he was an extremely well-qualified Nazi crook. He was hardly Himmler’s ideal-looking Aryan. Aged about thirty, he was dark-haired, a little self-satisfied around the mouth, and no more Jewish-looking than Paul Begelmann. He smelled faintly of cologne and hypocrisy. On his desk was a little bust of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had founded the University of Berlin and who, famously, had defined the limits beyond which the activities of the State should not go. I guessed it was unlikely that Sturmbannführer Six would have agreed with him there.