March and Halder secretly consult Interior Ministry records

March and Halder’s clandestine search of ministry records turns a suspected Swiss bank account into a trail of documentary evidence about the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews. The search begins with the possibility that three senior officials—Josef Buhler, Wilhelm Stuckart, and Martin Luther—left papers in Zurich; it leads instead through a central archive index to a record of a Wannsee meeting and proof that its minutes were later removed. In a state that controls what can be consulted and what can disappear, the archive’s gaps become evidence in their own right.

The Question Behind the Search

March asks Halder for help after months without contact, warning that association with him may put Halder in danger. The historian accepts the risk, and March lays out the puzzle: Buhler and Stuckart are dead, Luther is a fugitive, and the three opened a bank account in Zurich in the summer of 1942. March initially considered whether the account held money or art, especially given Buhler’s corruption, but now suspects that the deposit may be connected to documents.

The scale of the task is daunting. The men served in three different administrations: Foreign Affairs, the Interior Ministry, and the General Government in occupied Poland. Halder explains that the first two bodies’ records are available in the archive, while the General Government’s are in Krakau. He has no official access to the records, only the possibility of unofficial help, and warns that searching them all could take a lifetime. March’s answer is that some clue—or a conspicuous absence—must be there.

A small procedural opening makes the search possible. Halder learns that the Interior Ministry files have been cataloged by office, allowing a central index to show which papers passed across Stuckart’s desk and when. The archive works through a central handling area and enormous ledgers: each entry points to a numbered stack in fireproof storerooms. Halder knows how to navigate this system, but the scale remains formidable. The index lists four hundred boxes of State Secretary’s Office files, covering 1939 to 1950.

Searching the Archive

March narrows the inquiry to the first seven months of 1942, the period around the account’s opening, and asks for something linking Stuckart with Buhler and Luther. Halder selects office correspondence as the best place to begin. They locate six boxes in Storeroom D, stack fifteen, section M, and divide the work: March takes January through April, Halder May through July. Sitting on the floor beside the shelving, they read through records that range from routine government business to material of far greater consequence.

Among the papers, March finds a January 6, 1942 letter from Reinhard Heydrich. Its letterhead identifies the Reich Main Security Office, and its text reschedules an interagency discussion followed by lunch for January 20, at the office of the International Criminal Police Commission at Wannsee. The invitation connects the otherwise dispersed paper trail to a specific meeting. The other correspondence in the box—official letters, circulars, and invitations—contains nothing else from Heydrich.

Halder then checks the minutes and memoranda series. In a second box he finds a single typed notice stating that, in the interest of state security, the minutes of the January 20 meeting have been removed at the request of the Reichsführer-SS. Its date is April 6, 1964: Heydrich had extracted the minutes only eleven days earlier. Halder explains that the Gestapo can remove records on security grounds and generally transfers them to the vaults at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The archival omission is therefore not an old accident. It records a recent act of suppression.

Copies, Risk, and Separation

The discovery changes the search from an attempt to find a link among three officials into a pursuit of evidence about what happened at Wannsee and why the state is hiding it. March and Halder make poor-quality photocopies of three sheets from the archive. Halder has not wanted to copy them and is visibly frightened by the invitation’s implications; after making the copies, he returns the originals to their boxes and shelves. At his insistence, the two leave through a rear entrance.

Halder tells March that they should not see one another for a long time. March accepts the separation, recognizing that Halder’s family comes first. Their cooperation has produced a lead, but it also exposes the personal cost of pursuing records the authorities have marked for removal. Halder’s earlier willingness to help gives way to caution, not because the evidence has become less important, but because it has become dangerous to possess.

Later, March studies the photocopies at the Registry. Their quality is poor: the copying machine was set too faint, and the originals were placed crookedly and hastily. Halder’s fear had made him reluctant to copy them, and March had effectively needed to pull him to the photocopier. Even so, the copies preserve information that the original files no longer contain. Their weakness as reproductions underscores their value as surviving traces of a record the state has taken away.

What the Documents Establish

The first copied document is Heydrich’s invitation, dated November 19, 1941. It cites Hermann Goering’s July 31 authorization, which tasked Heydrich with preparing the organizational, technical, and material measures for a complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe. The invitation describes deportations to the East as already under way and proposes a meeting to coordinate the further work among central agencies. Set beside the archive notice of removal, it shows both the administrative coordination of the policy and the later effort to conceal a record of that coordination.

The second document is a faint photostat of a photostat of Goering’s directive. It charges Heydrich with making the preparations for a complete solution within Germany’s European sphere of influence, requires other government agencies to cooperate, and asks for an overall plan. The document gives the search a written bureaucratic authorization, even as the evidence that follows distinguishes this authorization from the secret Führer Order described by Stuckart.

A further document in Martin Luther’s doctor’s case is Stuckart’s sworn affidavit, presented as a four-page typewritten record. It recounts a December 1941 report to Stuckart that Jews deported from Berlin had been massacred in the Rumbuli Forest, and describes a later conversation in which Heydrich said Hitler had decided to resolve the Jewish question once and for all. Stuckart states that he proposed putting the Führer Order in writing, but Heydrich said political considerations made that impossible and directed him to raise any reservations with Hitler himself. The affidavit thus supplies testimony about the unwritten authority behind the policy, while also showing Stuckart’s own place within the administrative chain.

The Meaning of the Missing Record

The inquiry’s discovery is not simply that a meeting took place. The surviving invitation, Goering’s directive, the removal notice, and Stuckart’s affidavit form different kinds of evidence: an invitation, an authorizing document, an archival trace of deletion, and a sworn account of a concealed verbal order. Their origins and conditions matter. The minutes themselves are unavailable, but their absence has a date, a stated cause, and an identifiable official responsible for removing them.

For March and Halder, the archive is both a research resource and an instrument of state power. Its indexes make vast collections searchable, while security procedures allow the authorities to withdraw particular records. The secret consultation therefore exposes not only evidence of criminal policy but also the machinery that regulates access to its history. Halder’s expertise helps March find what remains; their fragile copies preserve it after the originals have been returned to a system that can make them vanish.