SS (SS)

The SS is the arresting force in Dr B’s account of Nazi rule in Austria, and an instrument of a broader effort to monitor political networks and obtain information. Its treatment of Dr B shows how the Gestapo turns surveillance, isolation, and interrogation into pressure on a former lawyer entrusted with church and imperial assets.

Surveillance and Arrest

The SS appears within a system of surveillance that had reached into Dr B’s inconspicuous law practice. His firm managed the assets of monasteries and members of the imperial family, and had handled transactions intended to protect portable church property from confiscation. Although Dr B and his father concealed the practice’s real work—keeping no sign on the door and moving sensitive discussions elsewhere—a clerk employed on a priest’s recommendation became an informer. The clerk’s access was limited: he handled harmless messages and documents, while Dr B typed important letters himself, kept essential files at home, and sent sensitive discussions to other locations.

Dr B later suspected that the clerk had noticed the firm’s distrust or glimpsed hints of its hidden business, and that he had been assigned to watch the practice. The change in the clerk’s behavior, from lax work to unusual eagerness to carry correspondence, became significant only in retrospect. On the evening Chancellor Schuschnigg announced his resignation, one day before Hitler entered Vienna, the SS arrested Dr B. After hearing Schuschnigg’s farewell speech, Dr B burned important papers and sent indispensable documents concerning monastery and archducal assets abroad to his uncle in a laundry basket carried by his housekeeper.

Detention and Intended Pressure

Dr B distinguishes his fate from that of people sent to concentration camps. The authorities placed him in a smaller category of prisoners from whom they hoped to obtain money or politically useful information. They suspected that funds administered by his firm remained hidden from their reach, and wanted material that could implicate monasteries in allegedly fraudulent transfers, as well as evidence against the imperial family and its supporters.

Rather than send Dr B to a camp, his captors held him at the Hotel Metropole, which also served as Gestapo headquarters, in a room of his own. The appearance of preferential treatment concealed a different interrogation method: strict isolation intended to make him disclose information. The SS’s role in the episode is part of this wider coercive apparatus; Dr B describes the Gestapo as applying its established methods to prisoners selected for their access to money or information.

Isolation and Interrogation

The room contained a bed, an armchair, a washbasin, a table, and a barred window facing a blank wall, but the door remained locked and Dr B was denied books, paper, and writing tools. His watch, pencil, penknife, and cigarettes were taken away. Apart from a warder who was forbidden to answer or speak, he saw no one and heard no human voice. He spent fourteen days without knowing whether a war had begun, with the room’s few objects and the repeated pattern of the wallpaper marking the limits of his world.

Interrogations began after those fourteen days. Dr B was summoned without knowing whether it was day or night, taken through corridors, and questioned by uniformed officials over files whose contents were hidden from him. He could not tell what the authorities already knew, what the informer had disclosed, or whether his uncle had received the papers sent through the housekeeper. Questions about monastery bonds, banks, correspondents, and letters therefore forced a choice without a safe answer: admitting something unknown to the investigators might endanger someone else, while denying too much could incriminate Dr B himself.

The questioning did not end when he returned to his room. He repeatedly reviewed his answers and imagined what the interrogators might have recorded, while knowing that he could not discover what they knew. In Dr B’s account, the isolation made this private review a continuation of interrogation: his own thoughts kept reopening the questions without the one-hour limit that applied to the officials’ sessions. The method depended on uncertainty as well as confinement, turning the absence of information into pressure to speak.

Narrative Significance

Dr B’s account connects the SS’s arrest of an individual to a chain of administrative surveillance: an informer inside a discreet office, the pursuit of records and assets, detention, and questioning shaped by the prisoner’s ignorance of the evidence against him. The episode also shows how the authorities’ goals extended beyond Dr B personally to the monasteries, imperial family, and associates whose finances and dealings he had managed.

The account later becomes part of the story’s explanation of how Dr B encounters a chess almanac in captivity. After he risks obtaining the book, he discovers that it contains a collection of 150 grandmaster matches rather than ordinary reading. The contrast between the authorities’ effort to isolate him and the book’s capacity to occupy his mind marks a further consequence of the detention, while keeping the SS’s immediate function clear: it places Dr B in the conditions from which that encounter emerges.