For a while I was back in Homicide. Berliners were still killing each other, although there wasn’t a moment passed when I didn’t think it risible that I should continue to believe that this mattered very much, knowing what I now knew about what was happening in the East. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t remember the sight of old Jewish men and women being herded toward execution pits where they were dispatched by drunken, laughing SS firing squads. Still, I went through the motions of being a proper detective, although it often felt like I was trying to put out a fire in an ashtray when, down the road, a whole city was the scene of a major conflagration.

It was while I was investigating the several homicides that came my way in early September 1941 that I discovered some new motives for murder that weren’t in the jurisprudence books. Motives that stemmed from the quaint new realities of Berlin life. The smallholder in Weissensee who drove himself mad with coarse, home-made vodka and then killed the postwoman with an axe. A butcher in Wilmersdorf who was stabbed with his own knife by the local air-raid warden in a dispute about a short ration of bacon. The young nurse from the Rudolf Virchow Hospital who, because of the city’s acute accommodation crisis, poisoned a 65-year-old spinster in Plotzensee so that she might have the victim’s better-appointed room. An SS sergeant back on leave from Riga who, habituated to the mass killings that were going on in Latvia, shot his parents because he could see no reason not to shoot them. But most of the soldiers who came home from the eastern front and were in a mood to kill someone, killed themselves.

I might have done it myself but for the certainty that I wouldn’t be missed at all; and the sure knowledge that there were many others – Jews mostly – who seemed to soldier on with so much less in life than I had. Yes. In the late summer of 1941 it was the Jews and what was happening to the Jews that helped to persuade me against killing myself.