It was not anticipated by either of them that he would actually become a policeman, but Lorin Wahl did extraordinarily well in the basic police school; and when an administrative bulletin came down from Berlin directing the recruitment into the Gestapo of promising young police cadets, he was immediately thought of. He was not only undeniably Aryan, but his father was in that now-esteemed group of National Socialist Party members known as the “Unterfünftausender.” His Party card carried a number below five thousand.
At nineteen, Lorin had become a Railway Police Cadet, his records indicating that he was a candidate for the Gestapo. He took a number of courses designed both to train him as an investigator and to convince him that the entire fate of the Third Reich depended on the vigilance of the Gestapo.
At the age of twenty-two, he was assigned as a probationer to the Gestapo office in Dresden, where he worked for twelve months under the close supervision of experienced inspectors, met their approval, and took a final examination.
A week after his twenty-third birthday, he was notified of his appointment (subject to a year’s satisfactory performance) as an Unterinspektor of the Gestapo and issued a Walther PPk .32 ACP semiautomatic pistol and the credentials of his profession. These consisted of an identification card (bearing his photograph and the signature of Heinrich Himmler himself) and the Gestapo identity disk, an elliptical piece of cast aluminum bearing the Seal of State and his serial number.
The disk announced that the bearer possessed: authority to arrest anyone without specification of charges, immunity from arrest (except by other officers of the Gestapo), and superior police powers over all other law-enforcement agencies. Illegal possession of the Gestapo identity disk was a capital offense, and loss of his disk by a member of the Gestapo was punishable by immediate dismissal.
On his appointment, Lorin Wahl was transferred from Dresden to the Stuttgart Regional Office in Württemberg-Baden, with further detail to Freiburg, twenty-four kilometers from the French border and three times that far by road from Lörrach, the first stop inside Germany for trains in-bound from Basel.
He took a small furnished apartment in a pension owned by the mother of one of the other Gestapo officers. It was the first time in his life that he did not have to share a bathroom.
The Kreditanstalt branch bank in Freiburg advanced him the money to purchase an Autounion closed coupé, a nice car, formerly the property of a Jew who had been relocated and had died, according to the records, of complications resulting from an appendectomy at a place called Dachau in Bavaria. Wahl had been told Dachau was a sort of reception center where the Jews were taken for classification before being relocated in the Eastern Territories.
Lorin Wahl was permitted to bill the Freiburg Suboffice of the Gestapo for the expenses involved in the official use of his personal car. The officer-in -charge had informed him that since Gestapo officers were never off duty, anywhere they drove their personal automobiles was on official duty. The payments he received for the use of his car would be more than enough to meet his loan payments.
He was first started out under supervision examining trains crossing the German-Swiss border just the other side of Lörrach. Later, he would be allowed on his own. While most of the travelers in and out would be perfectly respectable Swiss with business in Germany, he was told, there would be people illegally attempting to leave—“and not all of them Jews, Wahl, keep that in mind!”—or to enter Germany. In the latter category would be spies, French, English, and others.
He was instructed to examine identity documents and entrance and exit visas with extraordinary care, and to detain anyone whose documents, or behavior, was not absolutely beyond question.
“It is better, Wahl, to temporarily inconvenience some perfectly respectable businessman than to let an illegal, an enemy of the state, slip through.”
After a month of supervised duty, he was finally judged competent to work by himself, as of 28 January.
On the next day, he left his apartment an hour before he really had to, just to make sure that a flat tire or some other mishap would not keep him from meeting the Basel train.
The nominal inspection of the train was a responsibility shared by the Border Police and the Railway Police. The Gestapo was present as much to see that the others did their jobs properly as it was to personally inspect the train and its passengers.
Regulations required that the conductor of every train prepare and furnish a passenger manifest, identifying each passenger by name and listing his or her seat or compartment. Wahl’s first duty was to take the manifest and compare it with a list of persons furnished, via Stuttgart, by Berlin. These were people believed by headquarters to be likely to try to leave or enter Germany illegally. He was of course expected to make sure the Border Police searched the passenger manifest for names of people who were fugitive from German law, and whose names were provided by Berlin on a separate list, through regular—as opposed to Gestapo—channels.
But it had been explained to him that he was really looking for people whose names would not be on any list. Spies do not identify themselves.
In the first of the three first-class wagons-lits on the train, something caught Wahl’s eye.
There was nothing that he could put his finger on. It was a gut feeling. He had learned in school that gut feelings were not to be dismissed as unprofessional. There was even a proper word for them: intuitive. He had been told that over time he would be able to “intuit” something illegal, to “sense it intuitively.”
Something didn’t ring true about the young Swiss who was alone in the first-class compartment.
In Wahl’s professional judgment, it was unlikely that the young Swiss was a spy, or any other kind of an enemy of the state. He was too young for that; he didn’t look like a spy. What he was, Wahl thought, was a healthy young man of German blood who because of a line drawn on a map was able to sit safely on the sidelines while his brothers were dying in Russia to protect European culture. And it was entirely likely that in his luggage there would be a dozen or so twenty-one-jewel Swiss watches.
Wahl decided to have a look at the young Swiss’s luggage. He would examine it politely, of course, but with more care than the Border Police had examined it. And perhaps ask a few polite questions.
It would be nice, he thought, if he could make an arrest on his very first day of unsupervised duty. And especially nice if it was this “neutral” German-Swiss for smuggling contraband.
He made his way to the first car of the three first-class wagons-lits and, without knocking, slid open the door to the compartment.
The young Swiss was standing up, in the act of putting one of his suitcases on the luggage rack. Or taking one of them down. He looked just a little nervous.
“Guten Tag, mein Herr,” Wahl said, correctly. “Passport, please.”
“It’s already been examined,” the young Swiss said, “by the Border Police. ”
“Passport, please,” Wahl said impatiently.
The young Swiss shrugged and took the document from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and handed it over.
Wahl carefully compared the photograph in the passport with the young Swiss’s face. It was without question him. He asked the ritual questions, date and place of birth, address, and occupation, and the young Swiss without hesitation replied with answers that matched the information on the passport.