“By then things were moving more quickly than I knew, and with a greater ruthlessness than even I could have conceived. Captain von Frisch had already been arrested at his home in Lichterfelde and taken into what the Gestapo laughingly called ‘protective custody’ at their Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse HQ. That usually meant something bad was going to happen, and it did. There they subjected him to a terrible beating from which he never really recovered. But he was immensely brave and refused to change his story—that he was the von Frisch who had actually committed the homosexual act in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station, not the general—and eventually they were obliged to let him go. Hennig made me and my partner come and fetch von Frisch from his cell in the basement of the Gestapo HQ, which I can still remember in awful detail. It’s not the kind of thing you ever really forget.

“He was lying naked on the floor of the cell in a pool of blood and urine and, for several minutes, we thought he was dead. His whole body was as purple as a ripe plum—he was actually bleeding through his ears—and it was only when I touched him that he moaned and we realized that, incredibly, he was still alive. The Gestapo were very good at beating a man within an inch of his life, and sometimes nearer than that. A cursory examination of his body revealed he was suffering, probably, from several broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken jaw, and multiple contusions. All of his fingernails and several of his teeth had been torn out with a pair of pliers and one of his eyes was bulging horribly out of its socket. I’d seen men beaten before, but never as badly as that and certainly never one as old. Without a stretcher on which to carry him we were obliged to lift him out to my car in a filthy old blanket and only permitted to take him to the Charité Hospital on condition that we did not tell the medical staff the truth of how he had come by his injuries, so we were obliged to make up a real Bremen Town musician of a tale that he had sleepwalked his way out of the house and into the path of a tram. Not that they believed us, mind. They’d seen men, and women, who’d been beaten up by the Gestapo and SA many times before. How he’d resisted all of that and stuck to his story I’ll never know.