The Nazi Party’s rise to power sets in motion the destruction of Dr B’s discreet professional world: a practice entrusted with monastic and imperial assets becomes a target for surveillance, arrest, and interrogation. His account connects the regime’s political advance to an intimate system of control, in which the uncertainty of what the authorities know follows him from the interrogation room into solitary confinement.

Before the Arrest

Dr B and his father ran a quiet legal practice that advised and managed the assets of large monasteries. The family’s connections to the clergy and the imperial court stretched back two generations; after his father’s death, Dr B maintained the inherited trust, which depended on discretion and reliability. The practice also managed funds belonging to members of the imperial family. Its clients and work were deliberately kept from public attention: the office had no sign on its door, and the firm avoided monarchist circles.

When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and began targeting Church and monastic property, Dr B’s firm handled cross-border negotiations and transactions intended to move portable assets out of reach of confiscation. In the process, he and his father knew of secret political dealings involving the Roman Curia and the imperial house. The unremarkable office also served as a discreet channel for important messages carried by secret couriers, without attracting the notice of Austrian ministries.

The concealment was compromised from within. National Socialist networks had placed informers in ministries and businesses, and a clerk in Dr B’s office was acting as their man. Hired on a priest’s recommendation to make the practice appear like a conventional business, the clerk handled the telephone and filed only harmless documents. Dr B kept important letters under his own control, removed essential files, and held secret discussions elsewhere. Nevertheless, the clerk’s growing eagerness to carry correspondence to the post, remembered only after Dr B’s imprisonment, helped reveal how the surveillance had developed unnoticed.

Surveillance and Arrest

Dr B could not identify precisely what alerted the clerk or when the surveillance began. He suspected that the clerk had inferred that important business was being kept from him, perhaps after hearing a courier use an agreed name incorrectly, or by opening letters. Whatever the cause, the clerk eventually undertook to watch the practice on behalf of authorities in Munich or Berlin.

Dr B learned how closely the Gestapo had been monitoring him on the evening Chancellor Schuschnigg announced his resignation, a day before Adolf Hitler marched into Vienna. He was arrested by the SS. After hearing Schuschnigg’s farewell speech on the radio, Dr B had burned the most important papers. In the last moments before the arresting men broke down his door, his reliable old housekeeper carried indispensable documents concerning assets that monasteries and two archdukes had deposited abroad to his uncle in a laundry basket.

The arrest was not, in Dr B’s account, simply an effort to punish those loyal to the old Austria. The authorities placed him among a small group from whom they expected to obtain money or information. They wanted incriminating material against monasteries suspected of moving assets fraudulently, as well as evidence concerning the imperial family and its supporters. Dr B believed they also suspected that some of the funds entrusted to his practice remained hidden beyond their reach.

A Hotel as an Interrogation System

Instead of being sent to a concentration camp, Dr B was held in a private room at the Hotel Metropole, the Gestapo headquarters. He compares this arrangement with the apparent preferential treatment given to other detainees from whom the regime hoped to extract money or information. A separate room, he stresses, was not a humane alternative to imprisonment but a more calculated interrogation method: isolation replaced overt physical hardship as the principal means of pressure.

The room contained a bed, an armchair, a washbasin, a table, and a barred window facing a firewall. The door stayed locked. Dr B had no book, newspaper, paper, or pencil, and his watch and penknife were taken; even cigarettes were denied him. The warder was not permitted to speak or answer questions, and Dr B saw no other human face or heard another human voice. With no reliable way to mark time and almost no variation in his surroundings, he was left alone with the same few objects and his own thoughts.

The isolation lasted fourteen days before interrogations began. Dr B recalls being summoned without knowing whether it was day or night, led through corridors, made to wait, and then questioned by uniformed officials around a table covered with files. The questions mixed clear inquiries with misleading ones, while officials consulted documents whose contents he could not see. He could not tell what the Gestapo already knew, what the clerk might have disclosed, or whether the papers sent to his uncle had arrived safely.

The Interrogations and Their Aftermath

That uncertainty made every answer consequential. The interrogators asked which bonds he had bought for particular monasteries, which banks he had contacted, and whether he knew named individuals or had received letters from Switzerland or Steenokerzeel. If he admitted something the authorities did not already know, he might expose another person to danger; if he denied too much, he risked condemning himself. His professional knowledge of the entrusted funds thus became the very information the regime sought to turn against his clients and associates.

The questioning did not end when Dr B was returned to his room. Alone again with the same furniture and wallpaper, he reviewed each answer, trying to anticipate what the officials had recorded and what he should say next. Because there was no paper or pencil with which to set down his thoughts, the review remained internal and repetitive. The interrogators’ session might end, but his own continuing examination of his words did not; the isolation carried the pressure of the interview into the hours that followed.

Dr B contrasts this method with the visible hardships of concentration-camp imprisonment. His point is not that the alternatives were equivalent, but that isolation denied him even the ordinary points of attention available in shared surroundings. The Hotel Metropole room was designed to keep his attention turned inward until rumination and uncertainty weakened his resistance and made him more likely to disclose the men and material the Gestapo wanted. His account therefore presents the arrest and imprisonment as parts of one operation: surveillance gathered information about a hidden network, while isolation and interrogation sought to make its captive supply what the authorities could not yet establish for themselves.