March and Charlie attempt to escape Germany with the evidence

March and Charlie’s attempt to escape Germany with the evidence is the point at which their investigation becomes a practical effort to carry its findings beyond the reach of the state. The plan depends on paper, concealment, timing, and trust: the documents must cross the Swiss border, but the route that offers Charlie a chance of escape also leaves March behind in a country whose authorities can monitor communications and seize him. Their preparation is careful; its outcome is not.

From evidence to an escape plan

The escape is the culmination of an investigation built around records that the regime can remove, restrict, or intercept. March has found Heydrich’s invitation concerning a January 1942 interagency discussion and discovered that the meeting’s minutes were officially withdrawn from the archive in April 1964. The notice attributed their removal to state security and the request of the Reichsführer-SS. For March, the missing minutes are not an empty space that ends inquiry: their absence, alongside the surviving invitation, helps reveal the stakes of the record itself.

The documents they hope to preserve include material connected to the mass killing of Jews and the state’s account of it. Among the papers is the sworn affidavit of Wilhelm Stuckart, which recounts that an Interior Ministry official learned that Jews deported from Berlin had been massacred at Rumbuli Forest. The collection is therefore not merely evidence of bureaucratic activity. It bears on what officials knew and on the distance between administrative language and the fate of the people it describes.

The plan also reflects the hazards of trying to move information through a police state. The novel has shown that German surveillance reaches across borders: the Gestapo sought information about German account holders in Switzerland through agents and bank contacts, while telephone calls, cables, and letters between Germany and Switzerland were routinely intercepted. In this setting, sending the papers through ordinary post or entrusting them to contacts in Berlin is treated as too dangerous. The Swiss border appears to offer the best remaining possibility, but not a safe one.

Packing the record for flight

March makes the evidence physically compact and difficult to recognize. He spreads brown paper on a threadbare carpet, squares the documents into a neat stack, and adds a photograph of the Weiss family from his wallet. He wraps the collection tightly in paper and layers of cellophane tape until it becomes an oblong parcel about ten centimeters thick, solid to the touch and anonymous in appearance. The photograph joins the documentary record, linking an individual family image to the larger evidence March is trying to preserve.

The parcel is assigned to Charlie, who is to travel ahead. March tells her to allow herself up to twenty-four hours to get clear of the capital and then telephone the Hotel Bellevue in Waldshut to reserve a room. He expects to follow a couple of hours behind and meet her around midnight. He also gives her a stolen passport bearing the identity Paul Hahn, an SS-Sturmbannführer born in Cologne in 1925. The alias and the separate journeys are practical precautions: March judges that his own chances of covering the long distance without being stopped are worse than hers.

The separation is not incidental to their plan. Charlie must carry the central packet while March remains in Germany long enough to try to follow. He asks her to wait at the hotel until 8:30 the next morning, but not beyond that time if he has failed to arrive. He wants her to cross the border close to nine, when Hitler is expected to leave the Reich Chancellery for the Great Hall and border guards may be listening to the broadcast. The calculation turns a public ceremony into cover for a private escape, while the strict deadline recognizes that waiting for March could expose Charlie and the papers to capture.

The border instructions

Before they separate, March makes the crossing conditional on what Charlie sees. He tells her to assess the level of security before committing herself. If officials appear to be searching everything, she must turn back, hide the packet somewhere retrievable—a wood, ditch, or barn—and get away. The instruction sets preservation of the evidence above the immediate goal of crossing: the papers must survive, even if the first attempt fails. Charlie promises to follow the plan.

March also points her toward the next stage of escape: a daily Swissair flight from Zürich to New York leaves at two. The route is therefore conceived in stages, from the hotel to the bridge and into Switzerland, then onward by air. The bridge between Germany and Switzerland has particular force for March: a memory of an earlier holiday with Klara, when the two had traveled through the Rhine region, includes the steel bridge spanning the border. In the present, that remembered crossing becomes a possible way out, though the earlier family life associated with the landscape is no longer intact.

The careful instructions cannot remove the central uncertainty. Charlie is to travel with the papers, but March knows he may not reach her. He makes her promise not to wait past the appointed hour because delay could make the route unsafe. Their plan thus depends not on a single successful escape but on Charlie being able to act independently if March is intercepted. Each contingency acknowledges how little control they have over the authorities and the border.

Concealment and separation

At the hotel, March and Charlie handle the package carefully and keep it hidden within her suitcase, buried among her clothes. She wears a dark blue suit and covers her hair with a scarf. March carries the parcel downstairs and out through the rear fire exit, away from the main lobby. The details turn the escape into a sequence of small efforts to keep the documents and the people carrying them from attracting attention.

March then changes the arrangement. Rather than send the whole collection with Charlie, he takes thirty sheets of paper, his notebook, and Buhler’s pocket diary, wraps them in the remaining brown paper, and slips them inside his tunic. He conceals this second packet beneath the dashboard of the Volkswagen, taping it to a smooth surface under the dashboard. The division means that evidence is not all entrusted to one carrier or one route. It also leaves March with material he must protect while continuing to move through Germany in uniform.

Before leaving, he disposes of Luther’s bag. He puts Charlie’s discarded items into it, drops the roll of tape inside, and hides the brown leather case beneath kitchen refuse outside the hotel. In the same scene, he dresses in his black uniform and recognizes that it may be the last time he wears it. The uniform is both an instrument of concealment and a sign of the identity that has helped define his life; as he prepares to leave, its protection is no longer assured.

Capture and the plan’s failure

The escape is interrupted at Klara’s home. March is with his son, Pili, when the quiet outside the house alerts him that something is wrong. A sound of glass follows; as March tries to reach the door, Pili clings to his legs and pleads with him not to leave. Armed officers enter, and March is brought down before he can get away. The scene makes the personal cost of the plan immediate: his attempt to escape is arrested at the moment of contact with his son, not at the distant border.

The authorities disarm and search March, then take him from the bungalow in handcuffs. Klara’s elderly neighbors watch as he is put into a BMW, while several cars, a lorry, and troops wait in the street. He sees no sign of Pili. The scale of the operation suggests that the authorities have arrived prepared to seize him, and the neighbors’ return to their houses marks how quickly an extraordinary public arrest is absorbed back into ordinary life.

March is driven through the city to Gestapo headquarters and taken through prison gates into a brick courtyard, then down to a cell. The journey ends not at the Swiss border or the Hotel Bellevue but inside the institution whose surveillance and control the escape was meant to evade. The evidence has been divided and concealed, but March himself is in custody; the plan’s success now depends on what Charlie can do without him and whether the documents can survive the systems arrayed against them.

Significance

The attempted escape gives physical form to the novel’s distinction between discovering the truth and making it travel. March has turned suspicion into documents, but documents are vulnerable: minutes can be removed from an archive, communications intercepted, and a carrier stopped before reaching a border. Wrapping the papers, dividing them, hiding them under a dashboard, and planning a fallback cache are not incidental details; they are the practical consequences of trying to preserve a record in a state that controls both information and movement.

The plan also places March’s professional purpose beside his intimate loyalties. Charlie is trusted with the main packet and with the choice to continue without him. At Klara’s home, however, Pili’s appeal stops March at the threshold just as the escape is physically beginning to fail. The contrast does not undo his investigation or his attempt to expose what happened; it shows that the effort to carry evidence outward is inseparable from the relationships and dangers left inside Germany. The route to Switzerland remains a possibility for Charlie, but March’s capture breaks the plan’s intended reunion and makes the survival of the evidence uncertain.