Xavier March—Hermann Jost

Xavier March’s relationship with Hermann Jost is a sequence of witness interviews in which March tests a young SS cadet’s account, separates private vulnerability from the matter under investigation, and eventually draws out the name Odilo Globocnik. Jost initially reports finding a body by the Havel during his regular run; the unexplained time in his statement makes him a witness whose silence may matter. When March later tells him that the dead man was Josef Buhler, he uses a reconstruction of Jost’s route to bring a crucial recognition to the surface. Their encounters reveal both March’s investigative method and the danger of speaking plainly in a state where an SS cadet can be marked as an outsider.

The Witness and His Statement

Jost is a cadet at the Sepp Dietrich SS Academy in Berlin. In his written statement, he says he left the barracks at 5:30 for his usual solitary run through the Grunewald Forest to the Havel, then north along the lakeshore toward the Lindwerder Restaurant before turning south toward Schlachtensee. Three hundred meters north of the Schwanenwerder causeway, he saw a male body in the water, ran half a kilometer to a telephone to notify the police, and returned to wait. He says it was raining hard and that he saw nobody. The statement is precise about his route and his actions, but the account’s timeline gives March reason to question what it leaves out.

The initial exchange is not presented as a simple confrontation. March lets Jost leave, then stops him with a direct accusation: the time between leaving the barracks and calling the police does not fit the distance or Jost’s daily running routine. March calculates that roughly twenty minutes of the thirty-five-minute interval remain unaccounted for. Jost first offers tentative possibilities—that he may have left later or run additional circuits—but March warns that these are checkable facts and asks what he was doing.

Suspicion Without Condemnation

March recognizes that the missing time may concern Jost’s private life. He asks whether Jost is homosexual, and the cadet reacts with alarm. March then makes clear that he is not investigating that aspect of Jost’s life: meeting someone during a solitary morning run is Jost’s business, and March says it is no crime in his book. What matters to him is whether Jost saw something connected with the body.

That distinction shapes their relationship. March does not treat Jost’s vulnerability as evidence of guilt, but neither does he let it dissolve the practical question. Jost denies having seen anything and swears that he did not; tears well in his eyes. March releases him and arranges transport back to Schlachtensee, repeating that Jost should tell the truth before March has to discover it independently. The encounter ends without a confession, leaving the discrepancy unresolved rather than converting suspicion into certainty.

Reconstructing the Encounter

March later returns to the cadet after learning that the body is Doctor Josef Buhler, an official of the General Government and an SS-Brigadeführer. The identification makes the discovery more consequential. March has also checked the barracks sentries’ record, which confirms that Jost left at 5:30 as usual; the timings in the original statement still do not make sense.

Instead of relying only on another direct demand, March helps Jost picture the run. He takes the cigarette from Jost’s hand, puts it out, and begins jogging on the spot, acting out the fatigue of running through the woods and arriving at the lakeside in poor light and heavy rain. He suggests that Jost may have been thinking about a book or about how unhappy his life was when he came onto the path and noticed something to his left. As March continues the reconstruction, Jost watches intently. The method shifts the interview from a dispute over clock times to a guided return to what Jost perceived.

When March asks whose face Jost can see, Jost shouts, “Globus!” The name is the decisive disclosure in their relationship: Jost’s initial denial gives way to recognition, and the witness who reported a body has now connected the scene to Globus. The evidence establishes that Jost names him; it does not, by itself, explain what Jost saw or establish Globus’s role. March’s questioning opens a lead, not a complete account.

A Vulnerable Witness in a Dangerous System

The academy context makes Jost’s position precarious. After an instructor dismisses the other cadets, Jost is left standing alone in the classroom while classmates look at him as an outsider and anticipate that he may face another beating in the barracks. His isolation is tied to his reputation as a loner and to the same private vulnerability March had identified during the first interview. March’s assurance that he does not care about Jost’s sexuality offers a narrow space in which the cadet can answer as a witness rather than defend himself against a moral accusation.

The wider investigation gives Jost’s disclosure added weight without resolving his personal fate. March later establishes that thirteen of the fourteen men invited by Reinhard Heydrich to the conference are dead, while Martin Luther is missing. The novel’s repeated concern with the elimination of witnesses and the suppression of proof places the Jost interviews in a world where testimony is not merely a source of information: it is exposed to institutional danger. The evidence here does not state what ultimately happens to Jost, but his account and the name he supplies help turn March’s inquiry toward the people and history that official power would rather keep beyond scrutiny.