Berlin Police Headquarters

The Berlin Police Presidium is the practical machinery of policing in the novel: a large complex at Alexander-Platz housing forensic laboratories, criminal records, an armory, workshops, and detention cells. It is where an investigation can be advanced through routine expertise, but also part of a wider apparatus in which personal conduct and communications are documented and exploited by the regime.

Setting and Functions

The headquarters of the Reich Kripo are elsewhere, at Werderscher Markt; the Presidium houses the police’s operational infrastructure. Xavier March walks there from the crime scene, arriving after fifteen minutes, to ask the fingerprint section to prioritize its work. This distinction between central headquarters and the place where police business is materially conducted gives the building a functional role in the investigation rather than making it merely an administrative address.

March approaches Otto Koth, deputy head of the fingerprint section, with the fingerprint cards. He identifies the dead man as male, about sixty, and dead for a day, and asks for priority despite the section’s backlog and pressure from the Sipo. Koth initially reacts with disbelief, then agrees to put the cards at the top of the pile. Their exchange is shaped by professional familiarity: two years earlier, they had helped trap armed robbers who had killed a policeman, and Koth’s promotion had followed that case.

Investigation and Institutional Networks

The Presidium’s routine work sits within a wider web of police and party institutions. Koth’s backlog includes demands from the Sipo to address terrorism, while a book by Artur Nebe, head of the Kripo since 1933, remains the standard work on criminology on Koth’s shelf. The scene therefore links practical forensic processing to both the broader security apparatus and the institutional authority of the Kripo.

The same system that handles fingerprints also produces records of political behavior. In Nebe’s account of March’s personnel file, reports document his refusal to contribute to Winter Relief, his repeated refusal to join the NSDAP, and disparaging remarks about Heinrich Himmler overheard in public and private settings. The Presidium is not explicitly identified as the source of every report, but the file’s contents show how police and party reporting can make conduct in canteens, bars, restaurants, and corridors legible to authority.

Surveillance and Narrative Significance

The novel extends this institutional logic from written reports to intercepted communications. In 1934, Gestapo agent Georg Hannes Thomae, acting on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders, used bank contacts and attempted deposits to identify German account holders in Switzerland. The regime also routinely intercepted calls, cables, and letters between Germany and Switzerland; information could lead to arrest and torture, and a bank could then receive a formal demand for the return of assets. The resulting pressure helped provoke Swiss legal protections for client confidentiality, while the German numbered-account business collapsed by 1939.

Later, Charlotte Maguire reveals a portable American tape recorder with a suction-cup connection and plays a recording of a telephone call that identifies Martin Luther. The scene makes a private call into evidence through a physical recording device. A different interception becomes decisive when Karl Krebs tells March that the authorities learned Luther was alive and intended to meet an American journalist through a wiretap, not an embassy tip. Krebs produces a top-secret state document from the wiretappers in Charlottenburg, turning surveillance into actionable intelligence. Across these episodes, the Presidium’s forensic work belongs to a state where files, recorded calls, and intercepted messages can serve both investigation and political control.