It was not anticipated by either of them that he would actually become a policeman, but Lorin Wahl did extraordinarily well in the basic police school, and when an administrative bulletin came down from Berlin directing the recruitment into the Gestapo of promising young police cadets, he was immediately thought o He was not only undeniably Aryan, but his father was in that now-esteemed group of National Socialist Party members known as the ZUNTERFUNFTAUSENDER.” His Party card carried a number below five thousand.
At nineteen, Lorin had become a Railway Police Cadet, his records indicating that he was a candidate for the Gestapo. He took a number of courses designed both to train him as an investigator and to convince him that the entire fate of the Third Reich depended on the vigilance of the Gestapo.
At the age of twenty-two, he was assigned as a probationer to the Gestapo office in Dresden, where he worked for twelve months under the close supervision of experienced inspectors, met their approval, and took a final examination.
A week after his twenty-third birthday, he was notified of his appointment (subject to a year’s satisfactory performance) as an Unterinspektor of the Gestapo and issued a Walther PPK. 32 ACP semiautomatic pistol and the credentials of his profession. These consisted of an identification card (bearing his photograph and the signature of Heinrich Himmler himself) and the Gestapo identity disk, an elliptical piece of cast aluminum bearing the Seal of State and his serial number.
The disk announced that the bearer possessed, authority to arrest anyone without specification of charges, immunity from arrest (except by other officers of the Gestapo), and superior police powers over all other law enforcement agencies. Illegal possession of the Gestapo identity disk was a capital offense, and loss of his disk by a member of the Gestapo was punishable by immediate dismissal.
On his appointment, Lorin Wahl was transferred from Dresden to the Stuttgart Regional Office in Wurttemberg-Baden, with further detail to Freiburg, twenty-four kilometers from the French border and three times that far by road from Lorrach, the first stop inside Germany for trains inbound from Basel.
He took a small furnished apartment in a pension owned by the mother of one of the other Gestapo officers. It was the first time in his life that he did not have to share a bathroom.
The Kreditanstalt branch bank in Freiburg advanced him the money to purchase an Autounion closed coupe, a nice car, formerly the property of a Jew who had been relocated and had died, according to the records, of complications resulting from an appendectomy at a place called Dachau in Bavaria. Wahl had been told Dachau was a sort of reception center where the Jews were taken for classification before being relocated in the Eastern Territories.
Lorin Wahl was permitted to bill the Freiburg Suboff fice of the Gestapo for the expenses involved in the official use of his personal car.
The officer in-charge had informed him that since Gestapo off ficers were never off duty, anywhere they drove their personal automobiles was on official duty. The payments he received for the use of his car would be more than enough to meet his loan payments.
He was first started out under supervision examining trains crossing the German-Swiss border just the other side of Lorrach.
Later, he would be allowed on his own. While most of the travelers in and out would be perfectly respectable Swiss with business in Germany, he was told, there would be people ixegally attempting to leave–“and not all of them Jews, Wahl, keep that in mind! “–or to enter Germany.
In the latter category would be spies, French, English, and others.
He was instructed to examine identity documents and entrance and exit visas with extraordinary care, and to detain anyone whose documents, or behavior, was not absolutely beyond question.
“It is better, Wahl, to temporarily inconvenience some perfectly respectable businessman than to let an illegal, an enemy of the state, slip through.” After a month of supervised duty, he was finally judged competent to work by himself, as of 28 January.
On the next day, he left his apartment an hour before he really had to, just to make sure that a flat tire or some other mishap would not keep him from meeting the Basel train.