Berlin appears as both a center of Nazi administration and a place where the machinery of mass murder is discussed in the guarded language of policy. Through Angelus Thomsen’s contacts with Konrad Peters and their walk in the Tiergarten, the city brings distant authorization, bureaucratic pressure, and the physical consequences of extermination into the same frame; after the war, its blockade makes it an uneasy counterpoint to the apparent freedom of provincial life.

Intelligence Contacts and Institutional Silence

Thomsen puts aside his ambivalence and uses a teletype, then a telephone, to reach Peters, an old friend of his father who now works in the Security Service. Peters, formerly a professor of modern history at Humboldt, monitors opponents of National Socialism and specializes, sardonically, in Freemasons. Their exchange places Berlin within the regime’s intelligence apparatus, while Peters’s former academic career gives the contact a personal history as well as an official purpose.

The contact does not produce an immediate answer about Dieter Kruger. Ten days pass before Peters calls again from Berlin. He says the case is taking longer than expected, describing an unusual atmosphere of opacity and settled silence. The delay makes the city’s communications feel less like a transparent route to information than a channel constrained by what the authorities will disclose. Thomsen asks whether Kruger could have been drafted and whether the prisons are being emptied, but the evidence here leaves the question unresolved.

The Tiergarten and the Policy’s Development

On March 29, Peters meets Thomsen in the Tiergarten. The setting is a public garden in the capital, its paths dotted with small groups conversing quietly; against that subdued scene, Peters gives Thomsen an account of the decision-making behind mass murder. He identifies July 31, 1941, as a turning point: a letter drafted by Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, sent to a senior authority and returned with a signature. As Peters interprets it, the letter gave authority to proceed with a total solution after manpower had been assembled in the east.

Peters describes a proposed territorial alternative before the policy hardened: deporting Jews to cold, barren regions beyond the Urals or in the Arctic Circle, where the deaths would come more slowly. That option receded as the number of Jews under German control grew, including after the annexation of a further three million in Poland. Peters presents pressure among officials there as part of an extremism contest, and says that by August or September another push followed. The decisive change, in his account, was the extension of killing from men to women and children.

The walk also unsettles any explanation that treats the killing technology as its cause. Peters calls gas chambers and crematories means of speeding the process, economizing, and sparing the killers’ nerves—not the source of the will to murder. He insists that bullets and pyres would have sufficed. He cites the Einsatzgruppen’s killing of well over a million people by shooting as evidence that extermination did not depend on industrial facilities. In the novel’s Berlin scene, the modern machinery of killing is therefore set against a more disturbing proposition: that the intention could have reached its end by other means.

Thomsen’s Position in the Capital’s Shadow

Peters’s account does not offer Thomsen a refuge in professional detachment. When Thomsen explains that Grofaz and Rupprecht Strunck have exposed him as a desk murderer, he says the exposure was for nothing; Peters answers that the stakes remain enormous because Buna and synthetic fuel could prolong the war even if they could not win it. The exchange connects Berlin’s political and administrative world to the industrial effort in which Thomsen is implicated. The city’s role is not only to host decisions or conversations, but to make visible the reach of a system whose consequences extend to the camps and factories beyond it.

The Blockaded Capital After the War

In September 1948, Thomsen’s search for Hannah Doll’s maiden name takes him to Rosenheim, not Berlin. The contrast nevertheless gives the capital a distinct place in the postwar narrative: as Thomsen stands in the peace and freedom of the town, he notes that Berlin is under blockade and that the Russian mandate to the northeast offers little peace or freedom. His description refuses to equate the end of the Nazi regime with a return to normal life. Berlin remains a place marked by political constraint, while Rosenheim’s calm is real but does not erase the unresolved past that has brought Thomsen there.