He sighed and put down the paper  distasteful-
ly.  'Eighty marks a gross,  what does he take me 
for?  If you can't make a profit in wartime,  you 
might as well blow your brains out!'
   'The war could  be  over  by  Christmas,  Herr 
Krauss,'  said  Schulz  as cheerfully as he could 
make it sound.
   'Jesus Christ,' snapped  Krauss, 'what are you 
trying to do, depress me even more? I've got con-
tracts here for a hundred thousand pairs of  army 
underpants!  Where  will  I  get orders like that 
in peace time?'
   'I only thought' Schulz began.
   'You've got no  right  to  go  around  raising 
people's hopes!  There's  a  new law about  that! 
That's called "endangering the defensive power of 
the German people".  Some  idiot  was shot for it 
the other day.'
   'Sorry, Herr Krauss.  Er,  there's something I
wanted to'
   But Krauss hadn't finished.  'Over  by Christ-
mas!  That's the most depressing thing I've heard 
all week. What's the matter with everyone? Nobody  
wants to fight!  The  damned  Poles  collapsed in 
three weeks!  Draft  an ad for the papers.  If  I 
don't get more labour I'll never meet those  con-
tracts on time.'
   Once more Schulz took the plunge.  'I'm  leav-
ing, Herr Krauss.'
   'You're what?'  Krauss  looked like an elderly 
greying baby who was about to lose his dummy.
   'I said, I'm leaving.'
   'But you've only been here a month!'
   'The telegram came yesterday  afternoon.  I've 
got a job in  Postal  Security.  I've  to  report 
there this afternoon.'
   Krauss looked as if his  own  underpants  were
pinching him.  He jammed his spectacles higher up 
his nose and bore down on Schulz, his breath com-
ing in hot patriotic little gasps.
   'You selfish little sod! You don't give a damn 
about me, do you?  You  don't  give a damn how  I 
meet that contract or whether I attract the  pen-
alty clauses for failing to  deliver on time?'
   'The country comes first,  Herr Krauss,'  said
Schulz stiffly.
   'To hell with the country! How am I to produce 
underpants if everyone  keeps joining  the army?'
   'I  am  going  into  Postal  Censorship,  Herr 
Krauss. You see, I happen to speak five languages 
and'
   'You self-absorbed little swine!'
   'Come, Herr Krauss ...'
   'You've found yourself a nice  little  number,
haven't you?  You want to sit the war out in some 
safe little office and just read about it in oth-
er people's letters.  I  should have known better  
than to employ an ex-jailbird.  You needn't think 
I'm taken in by you, Schulz. I am perfectly aware  
that what you have done is nothing  more  than  a 
cowardly device to  protect yourself from induct-
ion into the  armed forces where you  might  just 
possibly run the risk of being killed in action.  
   'You've just spoiled my morning  and  left  me 
with a very nasty taste in my mouth and all I can 
say is that you can do as you damn well like.  Go  
and be a bloody postman.  I hope the British drop 
a bomb on the building and blow it to bits!  If I 
were running the country I'd have you  shot.  Now  
get out of my office and I hope to  God  I  never 
set eyes on you again.'

swarming with SS men, which was quite unexpected. 
I've  come  to  the wrong building  again, Schulz 
thought, and turned round  and  went  outside  to 
check the address. No question about it,  the ad-
dress was right.  He went back inside and stopped 
a clerk on his way across the hall.
   'Excuse me. Er - Herr Ditzer ...?'
   'Go down to  the  basement,'  the clerk  said. 
'It's the room at the far end of the corridor.'
   Ah,  Schulz  thought,  this is  different from 
that affair  in  Hamburg.  People  here  seem  to 
know what they are about.
   In the  room at the  end  of  the  corridor  a 
middle-aged, grey-haired lady in the  uniform  of
the SS sat at a desk working.
   'To see Herr Ditzer,' said Schulz.
   'Name?'
   'Herr Schulz.'
   'Herr Schulz.'  She  opened one of the drawers 
of a filing  cabinet and fingered rapidly through 
the files, finally pulling one  out  and  opening 
it.
   'Gerhardt Otto Schulz,' she said,  pronouncing 
the end of her search.
   Schulz nodded.
   'Come with me.'
   She led the way out of the room and back along 
the corridor.  She  walked with a heavy, rhythmic 
tread so that Schulz almost had to  run  now  and 
then to keep up with her.  She opened a  door and  
stood aside for him to enter.
   There were half a dozen other men in the room,  
sitting on chairs in total silence.  Things  were 
now going in the way Schulz would have  expected.
   He did not, however,  expect  a  uniformed  SS 
officer to step smartly in through the other door 
and to stand staring at them all with a  glitter-
ing hostility.
   'Stand up,' he said  in  a  high-pitched  and, 
Schulz thought, almost hysterical  voice.  'Stand 
up when an officer enters the room!'
   They stood, embarrassed, making an  effort  to 
look as if they were standing to attention  with-
out actually doing so.  This  seemed  to  mollify 
the officer for he said, in a somewhat lower key,
'Sit down.'
   They sat down again and waited. The  situation 
was beginning to puzzle Schulz.  For one thing he 
could find no connection  between  the  interview 
he had had in Hamburg and  this  SS  officer  who 
stood before  him.  Was  it  possible that postal 
censorship had  been taken over  by  the  SS?  He 
really had to find out.  
   He half rose from his chair, his hand automat-
ically lifting itself in a long-forgotten infant-
ile gesture to attract attention,  but froze mid-
way as the officer suddenly turned and peered  at 
him.
   'You,' he barked, 'come with me.'
   Schulz was now beginning to tremble.  He foll-
owed the officer down  a  corridor  into  a  room 
identical to the previous  one.  The officer  was  
talking to another man  in  plain  clothes.  Both 
were eyeing Schulz as  they  conversed  and  were 
examining a file on which  he  suddenly  saw  his 
name printed.  They seemed to be arguing. Finally 
they nodded to each  other  and the plain-clothes 
man approached him.
   Schulz decided it was time he took some  init-
iative.  'What  sort of kit do I need for  postal 
censorship?' he asked.
   The man  didn't  appear  to  have  heard  him. 
'You're  in  the  army  now,'  he  said  blandly.
'You're a Hippo, an Auxiliary Army policeman.'

They tried first  to  straighten the  uniform  on 
Schulz and  then,  in  mounting  frustration,  to 
straighten Schulz  inside  the  uniform,  but  no 
pleasing effect could be achieved either way.  In 
the end they gave up.
   Schulz hated being  shouted  at.  He  marched, 
when he marched, with a  kind  of  co-ordination, 
but the wrong arm always seemed to swing in  time 
to the wrong leg.  Martial  music  made  his hair 
stand on end. He seemed to be alone in his uneas-
iness.  The  men with whom he now mixed were all,  
unlike Schulz, bursting with enthusiasm.  It  was 
as if the war had given them the chance  to  make 
up for all that had gone  wrong  on  their  lives 
previously.  They were the awkward squad,  but it 
was an eager awkward  squad.  When  one  man  had 
trouble with his teeth he had them all out rather 
than be invalided out of the army. The teeth went 
for the Fatherland.
   At the end of their induction they were  given 
bright yellow shoulder flashes to sew on to their 
tunics, with labels that said: Geheime Feldpoliz-
ei, Secret Field Police.

Within an hour Schulz was in  a  truck  with  two
guards, being escorted to Dusseldorf.
   There he was taken to a room that looked pecu-
liarly like a cell but  they  did  not  lock  the 
door.  Down the corridor he could hear someone in 
authority raving in a speech that echoed  through 
the whole building. 
   'Don't forget we are fighting  against  bitter
enemies who do us immense harm and damage.  It is 
our duty to fight them with every available weap-
on.'
   So the war has  really  started,  he  thought. 
Atrocities had obviously been committed. He wish-
ed he had read the newspapers that day. But as he 
carried on listening he began to realize that the 
voice was not referring to  the  British.  The SS 
were raving about the Gestapo.
    Presently an officer entered  the  room.  The
fact that he had come to see  Schulz  and  Schulz 
had not been ordered to see him was a good  sign,  
but he then announced that he was an  interrogat-
ing officer.  He began to talk about some slight-
ing reference that Schulz had made  to  the  road 
signs to the SA secret headquarters. Schulz prot-
ested that he was being treated as if he were re-
sponsible for the first of the bomb plots against 
the  Führer.  When two crop-haired thugs appeared 
in the room to  assist the interrogator, he real-
ized he was.
   The  first  thing they did was to tear off the
Geheime Feldpolizei flashes from the shoulders of 
his roomy tunic. It was almost like a court-mart-
ial and Schulz was made to feel as though he  had 
let down not  only the  regiment  but  the  whole 
Fatherland. The flashes came off quite easily due 
to the fact that Schulz had sewn them on himself, 
and one of the SS men,  anticipating  difficulty, 
heaved with  unnecessary force and ripped so hard 
that he brought his hand down and hurt it on  the 
table.
   'I'm  extremely  sorry,  mein  herr,'  mumbled
Schulz.  'My needlework has  never  been  exempl-
ary.'
   The interrogator, who Schulz later  found  had 
been a primary school teacher sacked for indecen-
cy,  grew very angry at this apology which he ob-
viously took to be a deliberate impertinence.  It 
soon became clear to Schulz that  he  thought  he 
had unearthed a master spy.  He  backed away from 
Schulz.
   'I can see at once that  you're  very  danger-
ous,' he said.

Being an ex-schoolmaster, he liked to mark pieces 
of paper and when Schulz was unable to  give  him 
the answer he wanted, he would set Schulz  exerc-
ises, giving him reams of paper to write down ev-
ery detail about his life, over and  over  again, 
and, in particular, facts  concerning the stories 
Schulz had told about his foreign  contacts.  For  
days he was kept busy filling up pieces of  paper 
and at the end of each day the interrogator would 
read  his  classwork  and  then  say,  'Not  good 
enough, Schulz,' after correcting  the  punctuat-
ion.
   Then one day another interrogator came in  and 
asked Schulz about his prison life and why he had 
described it as a home away from home. It finally 
turned out that he'd been at the same prison him-
self.  After  that,  things were a lot easier for  
Schulz. But since they had stripped  him  of  his 
shoulder flashes, he was now  hanging  about  the 
building like a janitor.
   At first he had been told he would soon be re-
ceiving his billeting orders, but no billet came. 
After a few days he began to make  himself useful 
to the SS clerks who had difficulty in filing all
the forms that were flooding the building and  he
was allowed to use the canteen. Schulz was begin-
ning to have the feeling that every lucky soldier
knows, of being forgotten about,  a lost digit in 
the pile.  He  learned to make himself invisible, 
making sure that he was never seen in the corrid-
ors on the way to the canteen without a  file  in
his hand.
   Nobody bothered him.  He wasn't molested.  The 
food was so good in the canteen that he  was  al-
most becoming afraid  that  if  he  went  out  he 
wouldn't be allowed  back  in.  He  did  not,  of 
course, go anywhere near the prisoners' cells  at 
the rear of the building, and he tried to look as
officious as possible, a vital cog in the machin-
ery at the centre of the war effort. In short, he
kept a low profile.

Three or four dozen obviously  new  entries  were 
sitting at attention in total silence.  An SS NCO 
half-escorted, half-pushed Schulz into  an  empty 
place in the front row where he felt disagreeably 
conspicuous among all the yellow-flashed  should-
ers.
   A door  opened  and  an  SS  officer  entered.  
'Stand up,' he said.
   Schulz recognized the high-pitched, hysterical
voice that had greeted  him  on  his  arrival  at 
Duisberg.
   'Attention!'
   By now the drill was familiar.
   'You  are  now  probationary  members  of  the 
Schutzstaffeln, the Sicherheitsdienst.' The voice 
was clear, clipped, like  a  precocious  adolesc-
ent's.  He stood surveying them,  a short lock of 
blond hair falling across his brown,  his  eyes a 
piercing blue.
   Schulz sank back in his chair,  stupified.  He
considered asking to be excused as  this  lecture 
had nothing to do with him,  but  that might only 
draw attention to himself.
   'I am Major Schellenberg,'  the  officer  went
on.  'It's my duty to welcome you into the SS.  I
intend to make short work of it  so  you  needn't 
think that any words of mine are sincerely  meant
because they're not.'
   A muscle twitched rapidly at the corner of his
mouth as he  gazed  round  at  them,  a  movement 
Schulz was not foolish enough to  mistake  for  a
smile.
   'I've got no time for people like you.  It's a 
disgrace and an abomination that we  have to  ac-
cept you into our ranks.  Where were you in those
grim dark days when our Party was crying out  for
men? When our Leader was alone but for the few, a
handful of brave and loyal helpers?'
   In prison, thought Schulz nostalgically.
   'And now, when we are  about  to  achieve  our 
greatest rewards, when all the hard work  is  be-
hind us, you come crawling out of the woodwork to
pick up the crumbs.  Well,  don't think I'm taken 
in by it.  I  know you and by thunder you'll know 
me!'
   Schulz felt as though  he  were  going  to  be 
sick.
   'You're here because of the pressing needs  of
war and that's all.  Fortunately, the war will be 
over by Christmas so your days are strictly numb-
ered. Make the most of them.  See that every wak-
ing moment of  your  lives  you  show  yourselves 
worthy of the high honour that has been conferred
on you.  But  remember  this.  The SS is an elite 
body of men and women of true Nordic type,  whose  
children are intended as  the  future  rulers  of 
Germany. This you may never aspire to. The stand-
are set are too high.  However, let me say this -
if you cannot conform, physically, to that Nordic 
ideal which Reichführer-SS Himmler has laid down,
you can at least be truly Nordic in spirit.  And, 
by God, if you can't,  we have camps where we can
show you how. Stand up!'
   Everyone shot to his feet,  freezing solid,  a 
group hewn out of solid rock.
   'Raise you right hands and say after me  -  "I 
swear to you, Adolf Hitler,  as Führer and Reich-
chancellor, loyalty and bravery.  I owe  to  you, 
and to those you have named to command me,  obed-
ience unto death, so help me God."'
   Dazed and nauseous,  Schulz  repeated the oath 
with everyone else.  His voice shook, earning, he
thought, a brief if grim nod of satisfaction from
Schellenberg.
   Once again Schulz donned a new  uniform;  once 
again it had as little chance of fitting  him  as 
he had of fitting it.  He  was  told to bundle up 
his last uniform with his civilian clothes  which 
he had brought with him and report to the  admin-
istrative office on the  ground  floor.  A  woman 
took his bundle,  put  it  into a bag and wrote a 
reference number on  it.  She  then  consulted  a 
list. There was no sign of Schulz's name.  Schulz 
was just beginning to feel that he had  been  let 
off the hook once more when an SS officer appear-
ed as if from nowhere, smiling at him.
   'What is your expertise, my man?'
   'Underwear,' Schulz replied  hastily. 'Ladies' 
and gents'.'
   Immediately the  place  erupted  into  bedlam, 
with the woman in administration being blamed for
not having Schulz's papers,  inner  security  for 
letting Schulz in, outer security for kicking him
out.  Accusations  and  counter-accusations  flew 
over Schulz's head as though he were a net  in  a 
demented game of tennis.  Someone suddenly remem-
bered that he was still there and he  was  packed
off to the second floor, to a room with a name on
the door that was to change his life.