Hotel Metropole

Hotel Metropole is the Gestapo headquarters where Dr B is detained after the Nazi takeover of Austria. Although he is assigned a private hotel room rather than sent to a concentration camp, the accommodation is part of a deliberate interrogation method: isolation is used to unsettle him and extract information about the monasteries and imperial family whose assets he helped manage.

Political and Institutional Setting

Dr B’s detention follows a career built around discretion. He and his father managed assets for monasteries and members of the imperial family, and their unassuming legal practice also handled secret communications. When Hitler’s government began targeting church and monastic property, their office took part in efforts to move portable assets beyond confiscation. Its unobtrusive fourth-floor premises and careful handling of sensitive work had helped protect those dealings, but a clerk recruited on a priest’s recommendation was secretly reporting on the office.

The Gestapo suspected that funds administered by Dr B remained beyond its reach. It wanted evidence that monasteries had transferred assets fraudulently, as well as information about the imperial family and its supporters. The account places Hotel Metropole within a system of detention for people from whom the regime sought money or politically valuable information: Dr B describes the Chancellor and Baron Rothschild as other detainees given rooms there rather than confinement in a camp.

A Room as an Interrogation Method

The private room initially suggests comfort, but its function is the opposite of humane lodging. Dr B explains that the Gestapo used isolation rather than the conspicuous hardship associated with crowded, cold barracks. The locked door, lack of visitors, and prohibition on conversation turned the room itself into an instrument of pressure, intended to make a prisoner disclose information from within rather than be forced to do so through overt physical punishment.

The room contained a bed, armchair, washbasin, table, and barred window facing a blank wall. These ordinary objects marked the boundaries of a deliberately restricted world. Dr B was deprived of his watch, writing materials, penknife, cigarettes, books, newspapers, and any other possession that might help him measure time, occupy himself, or communicate. The warder could not answer questions or speak. Apart from that silent attendant, Dr B saw no human face and heard no human voice.

Isolation and the Interrogations

Dr B says the isolation lasted fourteen days. With no reliable sense of time and nothing changing in the room, his attention repeatedly returned to its few objects and to the same pattern on the wallpaper. He describes the room as a world reduced to furniture, wall, and window, while his thoughts increasingly circled without a fresh subject to interrupt them. The accommodation’s defining effect was therefore not simply confinement, but the loss of ordinary sensory and social reference points.

Interrogations began only after this period. Dr B was summoned without knowing whether it was day or night, led through corridors, and made to wait before facing uniformed questioners and a sheaf of files whose contents were withheld from him. They asked about monastery bonds, bank correspondence, and letters from abroad. He could not tell what the Gestapo already knew, what the clerk might have disclosed, or whether the papers he had sent to his uncle had arrived. That uncertainty made every answer consequential: an admission might expose another person, while denying too much could implicate Dr B himself.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The room’s pressure continued after each interrogation ended. Returned to the same surroundings, Dr B replayed his answers and tried to anticipate what he might be asked next, unable to check his suspicions against the unseen files or record his thoughts. The Gestapo’s questioning thus extended into an internal cycle of review that, he says, could continue beyond the interrogators’ hour with him. His account identifies this enforced sameness and lack of distraction as the intended mechanism of the hotel-room system.

Hotel Metropole consequently embodies the contrast between apparent privilege and coercive purpose. A private, heated room seems to distinguish its occupants from prisoners subjected to more visible hardship; in Dr B’s experience, that distinction conceals a different form of pressure, organized around isolation, informational uncertainty, and the prisoner’s forced self-questioning. The hotel is not merely the place where the interrogation occurs: its controlled room and restricted conditions are central to how the interrogation works.