The Rendezvous Read Free

the Gestapo in 1940.
    â€˜Your name is Terese Masson, you are eighteen years old, you were born at Nancy on June 18th, 1925, your father is dead, and you live with a Mademoiselle Jerome at 22 Rue Bonnard. This is all in front of me. Major Freischer, that’s all for the moment.’
    Freischer saluted and went out. As he walked past the chair where the girl was sitting he looked at her. He hoped she stuck it out; he hoped he got his hands on her. He’d make the little bitch squeal. He hated the French more even than the Poles or the Jews or any of the inferior races. He couldn’t have explained why, but it was something to do with their culture and their good cooking, and the way everyone talked about Paris as if it were something special, better than other cities. He was not, unlike two of his assistants, one of them a Frenchman, a homosexual, but he enjoyed roughing up French women. They were supposed to be so smart, so pretty, so hot in bed. He felt really savage towards them. He went out and shut the door. Brunnerman didn’t speak, he wrote something down and waited, as if he were thinking.
    He had enjoyed his work with the S.S. for the first year. He liked counter-espionage and he had been rapidly promoted because of the new, intellectual approach he brought to it. Politically he and his family were dedicated National Socialists; his father held the post of Professor of Philosophy at Frankfurt University which had been vacated by a Jew who fled from Germany. The Brunnermans were members of the élite, and the sons of the élite went into the S.S. If they showed real ability they went on to the Gestapo. Brunnerman was a colonel at twenty-four because he was one of the best administrators and interrogators in this particular section. Unlike Freischer and the old beer hall Nazis, he despised brutality and insisted that it was unnecessary and often ineffective. As a young man he had studied psychology and philosophy, and become fascinated by the Russian scientist Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflex. From the thesis that the human being was governed by a series of automatic impulses, and his behaviour could be totally conditioned by interfering with the brain mechanism controlling the reflexes, Brunnerman had gone further still into the structure of the human personality. He believed, and he had proved his point over and over again in dealing with prisoners like the one sitting in front of him, that it was possible to break down resistance without physical pain, and often to transform an enemy into a useful and obedient tool.
    He hated brutality and despised his colleagues who resorted to it because they lacked the skill and patience to try other methods. Cruelty was degrading for both sides; he had seen a great deal of it since he was posted to Paris and he was increasingly disturbed by what he saw. This interrogation was going to be more difficult than most because Terese Masson had been brought straight to Gestapo Headquarters on the Avenue Foch without the usual ten days’ softening up in Fresnes prison. Fresnes was a filthy, overcrowded relic, full of women suspected of every kind of crime from prostitution to Resistance work. After ten days the suspect came to the Avenue Foch in a condition which made it much easier for Brunnerman to work on them. They were starving, and the first thing they were offered was a meal, and it was a meal of pre-war quality. If they ate it, and many did, they were one step nearer giving way. And one of the most important factors in dealing with women in his kind of work was that they had had time to get dirty and bedraggled, often lousy. Mentally they always saw themselves facing interrogation decently dressed and clean, even attractive; it was easier to be heroic when you looked normal. Rags and stink and vermin did something more fundamentally damaging to a woman than to a man, who didn’t care so much how his enemies saw him.
    Terese Masson had spent