Tiergarten is both a public garden in Berlin and the setting for a grave conversation between Angelus Thomsen and Konrad Peters. Its calm paths and ordinary walkers frame an argument about mass murder: Peters insists that the machinery of extermination accelerated killing, but that the decisive force was the human willingness to kill.

Setting and Encounter

On March 29, Thomsen meets Peters in Tiergarten, described as the garden of beasts. The scene opens among dark tree trunks and grass glazed with smoky dew. Peters is an imposing presence: short and massive, dressed in a bow tie and richly coloured waistcoat, his spectacles above a deeply furrowed, almost entirely bald head. As he and Thomsen walk, Peters briefly stops, apparently short of breath, then throws back his head and marches on.

The garden is not secluded. Its pathways are dotted with pairs and small groups of amblers, engaged in quiet conversation. Tiergarten is presented as Berlin’s equivalent of Hyde Park in London, including a Speakers’ Corner, though here discussion takes place in whispers rather than shouts. The public setting gives the exchange an unsettling contrast: everyday leisure continues around a conversation about mass death.

The Conversation About Killing

Thomsen asks about the rationale used to justify killing children. Peters recounts the claim that infants would grow up to seek revenge, and the further rationales applied to women: possible pregnancy for those under forty-five, and a brutal willingness to kill the older women simply because they were included. The conversation exposes how extermination could be dressed in arguments that collapse into arbitrary violence.

Peters distinguishes the industrial form of killing from its underlying purpose. Gas chambers and crematoria, he argues, were ways to speed the process, economise, and spare the killers’ nerves; they were not what made the murder possible. Bullets and pyres could have carried it out instead. He points to the Einsatzgruppen, which had already killed well over a million people by shooting, and stresses that the perpetrators possessed the will to continue on that scale, including against women and children.

A Public Space for an Unsettling Explanation

When Thomsen asks what happened to them, Peters refuses to treat the violence as something safely over. He describes it as still happening, eerie and apparently supernatural, then turns from the supernatural to a more human explanation: a society that repeatedly presents cruelty as a virtue can reward it with advancement and power. In the same account he sets mass killing beside forced abortions, sterilisation, and euthanasia, describing a pervasive appetite for death through Aztec and Saturnian imagery.

Tiergarten therefore holds together two registers that the conversation will not allow to be separated: the ordinary rhythms of a capital-city garden and the consequences of a political culture that makes cruelty rewarding. The setting does not explain the violence away as machinery, madness, or the supernatural. Through Peters’s argument, its quiet public paths become the place where Thomsen confronts the more disturbing possibility that the will to kill is human.