Berlin, January 1933
Hitler was appointed Chancellor two days ago. The apparatus has finished assembling. I watched it assemble over the past decade with the specific dread of a man who has seen every component before, in different configurations, in different centuries, producing the same categories of result.
The scapegoating of a population. The institutional blessing of contempt. The crowd that believes it stands on the right side of history. The rallies. The uniforms. The vocabulary that turns violence into virtue by renaming its targets. None of this is new. I watched the Inquisition build its machinery in the 16th century. I watched the Thirty Years War construct its holy justifications before burning a third of Germany’s population. The components are always the same. The scale varies.
What I did not recognize, and what I am sitting with tonight in my room near the Tiergarten, is the efficiency. The precision with which modern states can operationalize these ancient patterns. The speed. What took the Inquisition decades to accomplish can now be accomplished in weeks, because the tools of a modern state are so much more capable than the tools of any previous century.
I am making arrangements. I have a network in Switzerland and one in France and another in England. People will need to move. Documents will need to move. I have been doing this work since the Thirty Years War. I am less good at it than I would like to be. No one is good enough at it. There will be more to carry before this is over.