‘Now if there was just something else besides your statement. Something that could let you off the hook on the murder charge. Of course, you’d have to take your chances on the Para 175. But you might get away with five years in a KZ, instead of an outright death sentence. You’d still have a chance.’ I paused. ‘So how about it, Reinhard?’

‘All right,’ he said after a minute, ‘there is something.’

‘Talk to me.’

He started hesitantly, not quite sure whether or not he was right to trust me. I wasn’t sure myself.

‘Lanz is Austrian, from Salzburg.’

‘That much I guessed.’

‘He read medicine in Vienna. When he graduated he specialized in nervous diseases and took up a post at the Salzburg Mental Asylum. Which was where he met Weisthor. Or Wiligut, as he called himself in those days.’

‘Was he a doctor too?’

‘God, no. He was a patient. By profession a soldier in the Austrian army. But he is also the last in a long line of German wise men which dates back to prehistoric times. Weisthor possesses ancestral clairvoyant memory which enables him to describe the lives and religious practices of the early German pagans.’

‘How very useful.’

‘Pagans who worshipped the Germanic god Krist, a religion which was later stolen by the Jews as the new gospel of Jesus.’

‘Did they report this theft?’ I lit another cigarette.

‘You wanted to know,’ said Lange.

‘No, no. Please go on. I’m listening.’

‘Weisthor studied runes, of which the swastika is one of the basic forms. In fact, crystal shapes such as the pyramid are all rune types, solar symbols. That’s where the word “crystal” comes from.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Well, in the early 1920S Weisthor began to exhibit signs of paranoid schizophrenia, believing that he was being victimized by Catholics, Jews and Freemasons. This followed the death of his son, which meant that the line of the Wiligut wise men was broken. He blamed his wife and as time went by, became increasingly violent. Finally he tried to strangle her and was later certified insane. On several occasions during his confinement he tried to murder other inmates. But gradually, under the influence of drug treatment, his mind was brought under control.’

‘And Kindermann was his doctor?’

‘Yes, until Weisthor’s discharge in 1932.’

‘I don’t get it. Kindermann knew Weisthor was a spinner and let him out?’