Doing violence to this defeated woman and at the same time doing violence to his own oaths of devotion to God and Jesus liberated Reinhard from his weak, ineffectual, tormented self. It felt good. This was power. Destruction was power. And through destruction lay the path to liberation and fulfillment. What a fool he had been! Good and evil were a false duality, ridiculous abstractions that had nothing to do with real existence. They were intellectual constructs designed to mask the total chaos, to somehow make the world seem orderly. Love was just another expression of fear and submission. Violence was the only true response in this chaotic world. Chaos could only be made orderly by brute force. The only true duality was power and powerlessness. It was fuck or be fucked, defeat or be defeated, kill or be killed.
Reinhard had just experienced an exhilaration unlike any he had ever experienced before. And so it was not surprising that he eventually sought to repeat the experience. When the irrepressible desire overcame him, he would attack another woman, and have the exhilaration all over again. True, the woman with the umbrella, that had gone awry. But there was always the risk that something would go wrong. However, the risk, the audacity, was part of the thrill.
There was nothing in Reinhard’s upbringing that could have predicted his violent eruption of mind and spirit. He was the son of decent Catholics – his father was a government bureaucrat, his mother ran a small nursery school out of their home. Reinhard, an only child, had been a sweet boy, shy, a little bit fearful. He was not stupid, but neither was he gifted or bold. He was a mediocre student, confused and adrift. He had vague dreams, but he was not moved to do anything, was not moved by anything or anyone. He had been weak all his life. Pathetic really. Until now.
Reinhard believed that he had found the courage to see things as they really were. Adolf Hitler – not Jesus or Saint Ignatius – became his patron saint. Only Hitler embodied the true human spirit. Adolf Hitler was willfulness, lust, power in human form, and that was everything Reinhard had been lacking. He saw it now: power was as close as he would ever get to goodness, because power was the only thing that was true. Hitler and Hitler alone understood the necessity of dominance.
Reinhard did not want to be loved, he wanted to be feared. Being feared would bring him the freedom he had been missing; being feared would bring the fulfillment he sought. Invoking fear in others would be the irrefutable confirmation of the triumph of his power and his will. It would end his own fearfulness and timidity and finally bring focus and meaning to his life.
The SS and the Gestapo drew their members from all segments of society. And not a few had been doctors and lawyers and teachers and even members of the clergy. What went on in their minds to take them from the helping professions to the hating professions is essentially unknowable. In Reinhard’s case it had to do with the void within. He was and always had been morally empty, devoid of purpose because he was devoid of humanity. He had a great barren desert at his center, where the hot, empty wind blew back and forth and never stopped. Just as it can be with anyone, the lawyer’s or the doctor’s or the teacher’s or even the priest’s conscience can be a feeble organ. In Reinhard’s case, whatever conscience he had was too small and too weak to resist the siren call of fearsomeness, power and malignant and sadistic delight.
Reinhard Pabst had sufficient intelligence and training to allow him to construct an intellectual framework on which he could organize a justification for his malignancy. ‘Look around, Reinhard,’ said Hobbes, ‘at the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Nietzsche told him, ‘Give up on God. He’s dead. Your Christian love is nothing more than impotent hate.’ The world Hitler was making was the one true reality, one that sprang from the tribal Germanic essence, from blood and soil, and from an unblinking appraisal of human existence. And most importantly it spoke to Reinhard’s desire.
The SS were Hitler’s knights, dressed in black and silver with the death’s head on their hats. And the Gestapo, the secret state police, were of an even higher order. The Gestapo wore no uniforms. They could not be recognized until you felt their hand on your shoulder. Their charge was to pursue traitors, spies, saboteurs and those who committed criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and on Germany – that is, on the essential truth of power. And because their charge was almost a holy one, they did so without oversight by the courts or by anyone else, except the Führer himself. They could take any citizen into custody for any reason or no reason at all and dispose of them as they saw fit. Reinhard joined the SS where you swore an oath to live and die for the Führer. And, after his basic military training, he went to work for the Gestapo, an occupation that meshed nicely with his murderous inclination.
The Gestapo sent Reinhard to Berlin for several months of advanced training. He was attached to a security service unit and, because of his Jesuit experience, was sent to root out trouble in the theology department at Humboldt University. Because Reinhard was young and attractive, he mingled easily with the students and
