“Pll be in the parking lot behind the Cafe Weitz at quarter to seven,” Peis said Frau Gumbach was usually reliable, but he wanted to see the girl from Kassel before he took her to the Kurhotel to meet Standartenfuhrer Muller He then called Fraulein Dyer and invited her to spend New Year’s Eve with himself and Standartenfuhrer Muller. Muller, he pointedly told her, was a very important officer from Berlin. He asked her to be at the Kurhotel at seven. If he was not yet there, she was to wait for him at the bar.
He did not offer to pick her up. Riding the streetcar and then walking almost a kilometer up the hill to the Kurhotel through the snow would give her time to reflect on her situation.
THREE] Gisella Dyer was twenty-nine years old. She was tall and rather large-boned, the kind of woman described as “statuesque” by those whose perceptions of statues are based on the baroque school.
That is to say, she had broad shoulders and sturdy thighs, large, firm breasts and buttocks, but little fat.
Gisella Dyer and her widowed father lived in a large and comfortable house close to the ancient fortress and later abbey that had been seized from the Papists and turned into Philips University by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, after his conversion to Protestantism by Martin Luther.
The house had been her grandfather’s, and he had left it to Gisella’s father and mother, but it was no longer entirely theirs. She and her father (her mother had died when she was fourteen) lived in four large rooms, with private bath, on the second floor, twenty-five percent of the house.
The rest of the space had been requisitioned (temporarily, until victory) by the Housing office and was now occupied by three families and a bachelor, an engineer at the Fulmar Werke.
Her grandfather had been Professor of Mathematics at Marburg. Her father was an instructor in metallurgy in the College of Physics. If it had not been for the War/ National Socialism (which were in Gisella’s mind interchangeable), her father would have been Professor of Metallurgy.
And three years ago, Gisella would have become Gisella Dyer, D. Med.
But with National Socialism, there had come “Party considerations.” In addition to one’s academic credentials, one needed the blessing of the Party in order to be promoted to a distinguished position. Prof. Dr. Friedrich Dyer’s academic credentials were impeccable, but he was not in good standing with the National Socialists of Stadt und Kreis Marburg. Quite the reverse.
Professor Dyer had been opposed to the Nazi Party from the days when it had been just one more lunatic, amusing fringe party. He had thought then–and worse, said–that it was more dangerous than other batty groups primarily because of its intellectual dishonesty. The National Socialist belief in “Aryanism” and
“Aryan Purity” especially aroused his contempt.
In the fall of 1958, he had made unflattering remarks about Professor Julius Streicher, the Party’s virulent anti-Semite intellectual, in the presence of some people he innocently thought of as friends. They had promptly reported him to the Sicherheitsdienst.
In the course of the investigation that followed, it was discovered that he had illegally transferred funds to Switzerland and was planning not to return to Germany after a seminar to be held in Budapest.
The Sicherheitsdienst officer who conducted the investigation was SSOBERSTURMFUHRER Wilhelm Peis, a former Kreis Marburg policeman whose Party affiliations had led to his duties as deputy commander of the SS-SD office for Stadt und Kreis Marburg.
Peis summoned Gisella to his off fice, offered her a glass of Steinhager, and then outlined to her the severe penalties she could expect her father to suffer. The least of these was punishment under the criminal statutes. But it was more likely that he would be tried under the enemy of the state” laws before a “People’s Court.” If that happened, he certainly–and she herself more than likely–would be sent off to a concentration camp. On his release he would be permitted to make his contribution to the New Germany with a forester’s ax or a laborer’s shovel.
Peis then matter-of-factly let Gisella know there was a way out of the predicament, She would undertake to keep her father on the true National Socialist path, she would report regularly to Peis treasonous or defeatist statements made by their friends and associates, and she would come, when he wished, into his bed.