Friday 28 October

(There are some things I cannot tell you, such as the names of the towns we have travelled through.) But! I will tell you everything else, my dearest, you and the children. So that you may remember these days, when your papa does his duty for the fatherland, and for you.

We arrived by train in the evening. It was still warm, and many people were still sitting at the café tables along the boulevards when we marched from the railway station. I noticed hundreds of swifts here, screeching along the streets. I could not help but raise my eyes to watch them as they screeched along. Very lovely to see.
The people here are very welcoming. We have all we want to eat and drink, and people make us welcome in their homes. The people here are enthusiastic about the Führer and about the fatherland.

My lodging is very comfortable. This evening we ate roast duck and dumplings with red cabbage. It was lovely, but I miss your cooking, my darling. Well, I must close now.
With a hug and a kiss for you and the children,
Your Lorrie.

This was long before Jan had been attached to the unit in 1941. Lorenz Thomas was a captain by that stage of the war, the chest pocket of his tunic studded with campaign medals – Poland, Holland, France, Russia. There’s an early unit photograph, taken before they left the homeland, that shows Thomas in the group, seated in the middle of the front row; he had a soft-looking jaw then, and his round glasses perched on his rounded cheeks. When Jan first met him in 1941, he had lost considerable weight, and his black hair had thinned on the top of his skull: he was using a lot of hair oil to smooth it into a more even coverage of his pink scalp area. Thomas saluted, shook hands, and bade Jan ‘welcome to the unit’. Jan noticed that there was a distinct tremor in Thomas’s voice, like the trembling, uncertain pitch of a pre-adolescent boy. “One of my best officers,” said Mechelen, as he led Jan on to the next greeting.

Letter from First Sergeant Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated March xx, 1939:
Hello dearest – please accept my apology for the delay in replying to your letters. Yes, we have been away from the barracks, in special training. Of course, I cannot say anything more about it. But! You must trust that it is for the best, and that our leaders know the way that is best for us all. I will try and write more often in future, my darling – but it has been difficult for me also.

Tell me how Johann likes his new school? What stories does he tell you when he returns home? I would love to know some of them! Tell our son that he must study hard and learn both practical and mental skills, and then he too can be a soldier like his daddy. (If there are still wars when he is a grown man. If the Fuhrer is correct, then will have no more need of war when our next victory is complete.) And Lise is well, too, you tell me. Please kiss her for me and give papa’s baby a special long hug tonight.
Thank you for the parcel. We have shared the sausage this evening in the mess after dinner. Everyone says ‘thank you’. Please thank your mother also for me. Regards also to your father.
I will send more parcels soon. At present it is not so easy to gather things and visit the post office, but I think that will change soon. Soon there will be more gifts on their way. And then soon it will be Christmastime! I hope to be able to get leave this year and be with you, all four of us together again in our warm house against the snow.
With my love to you and the children,
Your,
Lorrie

In March 1939, when the fatherland’s newly confident armies had sat on more far-flung eastern borders than had existed for decades, Jan had only just started in the Service. He’d finished his degree (Economics, History) in the excitement-rich spring of 1938, and spent the summer with his fiancée Mariette boating and partying among the lakes, rivers, woods and private gardens that girdled the capital. In October, with the days shortening and his passion for Mariette reaching an unbearable intensity – he could only think about her, and couldn’t bear to have anyone else talk to her or make her laugh – he had gone up to the Service’s world-famous Academy.

Back before the war, and before austerity and bombing chipped away at its grandeur, the Academy was an echoing mausoleum in the heart of the capital’s ministerial district. You left the dank October pavement, climbed the broad, sooty steps to a classical portico [?], and attained a separate realm of white stone and chilled light, pillars and mouldings, vast walls of cold, chalky plaster, lofty ceilings, and a hushed stillness that took the sound of your footsteps, paused, judged them, and transmuted them into hollow, squeaking ghosts of themselves. Suspicious voices whispered in those echoes, [even though you belonged]: Who are you? How do have the temerity to pace these halls? Are you not crushed by our disdain?

From the very first class of the very first day of the Academy’s new intake, the tutors had tried to impress on them that the Imperial Service — they were allowed to use the ‘I’ word in those simpler days — was about administration. Not development, nor exoticism, nor policy, nor glamour, nor political intrigue, nor personal advancement. Administration, the thing that Jan was so good at: the details, the systems, the intricate coordination of papers, files and cross-references. All the dancing variables and unknowns that intimidated other people, but which Jan found he could juggle and control, always knowing the where the linkages were (or where they should be, in a better-managed world), always able to put his hand on the relevant folder or index card. It was intuitive. The longer he worked, the more effortless it became, and the less effort he made, the less conscious thinking he had to do. When you watched him at work, you thought of a delicate machine, all sweeping motions and smooth arcs: deliberate, interlocking movements, and balanced, trustworthy outcomes.
(c. 1070 words)