Security Service

The Security Service is presented as a party-intelligence body that monitors political opponents while operating within the regime’s overlapping administrative and personal networks. The novel does not supply a formal organizational chart; instead, it reveals the institution through the work of Konrad Peters, its contacts with Angelus Thomsen, and Martin Bormann’s familiarity with its staff. This limited view makes the Security Service legible less as an abstract structure than as a place where surveillance, political influence, and private entitlement meet.

Intelligence Work and Political Surveillance

Konrad Peters, an old friend of Angelus Thomsen’s father, is a senior figure in the Security Service. Formerly a professor of modern history at Humboldt, he now helps monitor the enemies of National Socialism, with a sardonic specialty in Freemasons. His career change places academic expertise inside the machinery of political surveillance, while his friendship with Thomsen’s family gives the narrator a route into a world otherwise difficult to approach.

Thomsen establishes contact with Peters first by teletype and then by telephone, overcoming his own ambivalence before reaching out. Peters assures him that the telephone line is secure. The exchange presents intelligence work through its ordinary mechanisms—communications, personal contacts, and the reassurance of a supposedly protected channel—rather than through a formal account of the Security Service’s structure.

Peters also serves as an informed, senior interlocutor on the regime’s crimes. In a later conversation, he explains that the gas chambers and crematories accelerated killing, economized effort, and spared the killers’ nerves, but were not indispensable to the murderous intent. He points to the Einsatzgruppen’s mass shootings as evidence that bullets and pyres would have sufficed. This is Peters’s analysis as the novel presents it, not an official Security Service doctrine; its force comes from the gap between administrative means and the will to kill.

A Node in the Regime’s Administrative System

The Security Service’s political-monitoring role sits within a broader system in which state offices press competing demands. Paul Doll describes the Economic Administration Head Office as urging him to increase labor for the munitions industries, while central security authorities press for the disposal of evacuees. He objects to a proposal that able-bodied mothers be worked in a boot factory at Chełmek, invoking the practical difficulty of separating them from their children. The episode does not identify those central authorities as the Security Service itself, but it places the institution’s field of activity beside the wider bureaucratic contest over deportees, labor, and security.

The novel’s broader account of extermination policy likewise locates decisions across levels of authority. Angelus Thomsen discusses the July 1941 authorization associated with Adolf Hitler’s wish for a total solution, then describes mounting pressure among officials in occupied Poland as the numbers of Jews grew and territorial deportation schemes receded. The transition to killing women and children marks a decisive escalation. The episode illuminates the administrative environment in which intelligence and security bodies operated, without establishing that the Security Service alone formulated or directed the policy.

Personnel, Access, and Private Power

The Security Service’s offices also function as a social and professional setting for the regime’s elite. Martin Bormann teases his nephew Thomsen about his apparent memory for the women working on the third floor and asks him to help identify a staff member. Bormann recounts that, while collecting paperwork and mimeographs from Schneidhuber, he touched a woman from the office pool without invitation; she did not visibly resist, and he later found that she had disappeared during his month away. He recalls her hair and figure and tries to remember her name, perhaps Klara.

The episode does not show the Security Service directing Bormann’s conduct or establish what became of the woman. It does show how Bormann treats the office and its female staff as part of his sphere of access, and how casually he narrates that entitlement to Thomsen. His request relies on Thomsen’s familiarity with the institution’s workplace and personnel. In this glimpse, bureaucratic proximity offers the powerful not only professional connections but also a presumed license to intrude on subordinates.

Narrative Significance

The Security Service emerges through contrasting kinds of knowledge. Peters’s communications and expertise expose political monitoring and the regime’s capacity for organized violence; Bormann’s anecdote reveals the intimate, unequal workplace culture surrounding senior officials. Neither strand offers a complete institutional portrait. Together, however, they show how political power is exercised through both administrative channels and personal networks, while Thomsen’s access to those networks implicates him in the world he observes.