In Europe

committed suicide at the fall of the Third Reich, three died violent deaths, but only Eichmann was convicted for his part in the Holocaust. Nine of the fifteen received little or no punishment. Heinrich Müller was able to escape in 1945. He was recruited by the CIA and probably started a new life for himself in the United States. Wilhelm Stuckart was imprisoned for four years after the war, but by 1951 he had already become head of the Bund Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten. Georg Leibbrandt died in 1982 at the age of eighty-two, without ever being tried. Gerhard Klopfer led a normal life as a lawyer after the war. Otto Hofmann was granted a pardon in 1954. He became a merchant in Württemberg. These latter two died in their beds, like respectable citizens, in the 1980s.
    In the garden at Dahlem, Wolf Siedler talked about his family home during the first years of the war, and about the people who visited them: his best friend at school, for example, Ernstel Jünger, son of Ernst Jünger; the Hahn family, his parents’ most trusted friends and every bit as anti-Nazi as they were.‘Otto Hahn discovered the principle of nuclear reaction, but I believe he skilfully sidetracked the development of a German A-bomb.’
    And then there was Else Meyer, the elderly widow of a Jewish army officer and an old friend of Siedler's grandparents. Officially, as from summer 1941, the family was not allowed to have dealings with her. ‘My parents did anyway, of course, the maids were sent out of the house then, visits like that always caused quite a stir. In 1942 she told them she had received orders to report to the train station at Grunewald. For relocation (
Umsiedlung
) to the East. Before she left, she brought over a present: a teacup with a picture of the Brandenburg gate on it. She was convinced that she was only being asked to move to Lódź or something like that. “See you soon,” we shouted back and forth.’
    Around 1930 there were some 160,000 Jews living in Berlin. By 1945, there were only 6,000 left: most of those were partners in ‘privileged mixed marriages’.
    ‘My father did all he could, through his former diplomatic connections, to find out what had happened to Else Meyer,’ Siedler says.‘It turned out that, somewhere in eastern Poland, the wagons were unhitched from the engine, which was needed more urgently for troop transports. It was winter. When they opened the wagons three weeks later, everyone was dead, of course. After experiences like that, my parents no longer had any illusions about the fate of the Jews. They were being wiped out, that was clear. From soldiers back on leave we had started hearing more and more about mass executions in Poland. There were too many soldiers present at those killings, the Nazis couldn't keep it a secret. But that they would start the production-line killing of Jews in such massive numbers, that defied our imagination. In the circles I moved in, no one could believe that a place like Auschwitz or Majdanek really existed.’
    There was one isolated moment of resistance. In February 1943, the non-Jewish wives of some 2,000 Jewish workers who had been arrested attacked the improvised prison on Rosenstrasse, and the wives of other Berlin workers joined them. That unique uprising lasted several days, the SS threatened the women with machine guns, and finally the men were released. The Nazis did not want to run a risk by shooting down a few thousand German housewives in the middle of the capital.
    In Berlin, however, Jews were not taken into hiding on any significant scale. Of the four million citizens of Berlin, only a few thousand at most offered any assistance to those Jews who had remained behind clandestinely,hiding in coal bins and forgotten attics. Siedler: ‘Mrs Hahn was part of the organisation that collected food for them, so my family became a bit involved. We helped her acquire ration booklets, and I collected groceries. I was sixteen or seventeen at the time, it was all quite exciting really, a sort of game of Cowboys and Indians.’
    In the end, about 2,000 of Berlin's ‘U-boat’ Jews survived the war.
    Beside the former art academy, close to Wilhelmstrasse and the place where the Wall once stood, is a little, weed-covered mound. Beneath it are the remains of the former Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The building survived the war, but was finally demolished in 1949. A road was built over it, the rest remained a vacant lot. In May 1985