Death in Breslau Read Online Free PDF

work. Much had changed since then. On January 31st, the posts of Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of the entire Prussian Police were taken by Hermann Göring; a month later, the new, brown-shirt Oberpräsident of Silesia, Helmuth Brückner, had moved into the impressive building of the Regierungsbezirk Breslau on Lessingplatz; and not quite two months later, the new President – shrouded in ill-repute – Edmund Heines had marched into the Police Praesidium of Breslau. A new order had come to pass. The old camp for French prisoners of war on Strehlener Chaussee in Dürrgoy had been turned into a concentration camp where the first to find themselves were Mock’s close acquaintances: the former President of Breslau police, Fritz Voigt, and the former Mayor, Karl Mach. Suddenly there appeared, in the streets, bands of juveniles, drunk with a sense of their own impunity and the vilest beer from Haas. Carrying torches and in a tight cordon, they surrounded transports of arrested Jews and anti-Nazis on whom hung wooden notices with “crimes” committed against the German nation inscribed on them. From one day to the next, streets had been given the names of brown-shirt patrons. In the Police Praesidium, members of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had suddenly become active; the Gestapo had overrun in the beautiful building’s west wing and all of a sudden the best men from other departments were having themselves transferred there. Heines – in defiance of Mühlhaus’ protests – had settled his favourite ward, Forstner, in the Criminal Department, and Mock’s particular enemy, a Counsellor Eile, had become Director of the newly created Jewish Department. No, today – in May of 1933 – Mock could not afford to react so decisively. He was in a difficult situation: he had to be loyal to von der Malten and the Masonic lodge which had facilitated his brilliant career yet, at the same time, he could not provoke the Nazis against him. What irritated him most was that he did not have any influence over the situation and his future depended on hisfinding the murderer of the Baron’s daughter. If it turned out that it was the member of some sect – as was highly probable – Hitler’s propaganda would find a convenient pretext to destroy Breslau’s Freemasons and anyone connected with them, therefore also Mühlhaus and Mock. That sectarian would very readily be transformed into a Freemason by the tabloids – the Stürmer , for example, and the cruel felony would be depicted as a ritual murder, a settling of accounts between Breslau’s three Lodges.
    If the murderer turned out to be a mentally deficient pervert, Heines et consortes would certainly have Mock concoct an “anti-German” – Jewish or Masonic – biography for him. In both the first and the second case, the Counsellor, as an instrument in the hands of propaganda, would appear in an ambiguous light in the eyes of his protectors, the Freemasons. It was not surprising that von der Malten demanded that the murderer be given over to him; he would wreak bloody vengeance on the perpetrator while nipping any intrigue against the Lodge in the bud. Consequently, either handing over or not handing over the murderer to the Baron would mean a career in the Fisheries Police in Lubin for Mock. In the first instance, the brown-shirt newspapers, incited by Forstner, would write at length about the Masons administering justice off their own bats, in the second, Mühlhaus and his people in the Lodge would react correspondingly. Certainly, the Counsellor could break with the Lodge and become a Hitlerite, but remnants of “good taste”, which twenty-four years of police service had not eradicated, protested against this course, as did his awareness of the end to any future career: the Lodge could avenge itself on him in a very simple way – it could inform the appropriate people about his own Masonic past.
    Nicotine always clarified Mock’s mind. And