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Thomas must have begun to guess my state of mind, since after the first few days, I stopped calling him and going out to di
It was also during those first days of March 1943 that Dr. Mandelbrod invited me over for tea.
I had known Mandelbrod and his partner, Herr Leland, for some time. Many years before, after the Great War—and maybe even before it, but I have no way of checking—my father had worked for them (apparently my uncle had also served as an agent for them on occasion). Their relations, from what I had gleaned little by little, went beyond a simple employer-employee relationship: after my father’s disappearance, Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland had helped my mother in her searches, and may also have supported her financially, but that’s not so certain. And they had continued to play a role in my life; in 1934, when I was preparing to break with my mother, to come to Germany, I got in touch with Mandelbrod, who had long been a respected figure within the Movement; he supported me and offered me his help; it was he too who encouraged me to pursue my studies—for the sake of Germany now, though, and not for France—and who organized my enrollment in Kiel as well as my enlisting in the SS. Despite his Jewish-sounding name, he was, like Minister Rosenberg, a pure German of old Prussian stock, with perhaps a drop of Slavic blood; as for Herr Leland, he was of British origin, but his Germanophile convictions had impelled him to turn his back on his native country long before my birth. They were industrialists, but their exact position would be hard to define. They sat on numerous boards, especially that of IG Farben, and held shares in other companies, without their names being linked to any one in particular; they were said to be very influential in the chemical sector (they were both members of the Reichsgruppe for the chemical industry) and also in the metals sector. Moreover, they had been close to the Party ever since the Kampfzeit, and had contributed to financing it when it was starting up; according to Thomas, with whom I had discussed them once before the war, they held positions in the Führer’s chancellery, but were not entirely subordinate to Philipp Bouhler; and they had access to the highest spheres of the Party chancellery. Finally, the Reichsführer-SS had made them honorary SS-Gruppenführers, and members of the Freundeskreis Himmler; but Thomas, mysteriously, stated that this gave the SS no influence over them, and that any influence there might be worked the other way. He had been very impressed when I told him about my relationship with them, and obviously even envied me a little for having such protectors. Their interest in my career, however, had varied over time: when I had been in effect sidelined, after my 1939 report, I had tried to see them; but that was a busy period, it had taken me several months to get a reply, and it wasn’t until the invasion of France that they invited me to di