National Socialism was coined by a Jew, a precursor of Zionism, Moses Hess? Read his book someday, Rome and Jerusalem, you’ll see. It’s very instructive. And that’s not by chance: what’s more völkisch than Zionism? Like us, they realized that there can be no Volk or Blut without Boden, without land, and so the Jews must be brought back to the land, Eretz Israël, purified of any other race. Of course, those are ancient Jewish ideas. The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists, for almost three thousand five hundred years they’ve been so, ever since Moses gave them a Law to separate them forever from the other peoples. All our great ideas come from the Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it: the Land as promise and as accomplishment, the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of blood. That’s why the Greeks, degenerate, democrats, travelers, cosmopolitans, hated them so much, and that’s why they tried first to destroy them, then, through Paul, to corrupt their religion from within, by detaching it from the soil and from the blood, by making it catholic, that is, universal, by suppressing all the laws that served as a barrier to maintaining the purity of Jewish blood: food prohibitions, circumcision. And that’s also why the Jews, of all our enemies, are the worst, the most dangerous; the only ones who truly deserve being hated. They are our only real competitors, in fact. Our only serious rivals. The Russians are weak, a horde deprived of a center despite the attempts of that arrogant Georgian to impose a ‘National Communism’ on them. And the islanders, British or American, are rotten, corrupt, polluted. But the Jews! Who was it who, in the scientific era, discovered the truth of race by drawing on the age-old intuition of his people, humiliated but unconquered? Disraeli, a Jew. Gobineau learned everything from him. You don’t believe me? Go look.” He pointed to the shelves next to his desk: “There, go look.” I got up again and went over to the shelves: several books by Disraeli stood next to books by Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge, Drumont, Chamberlain, Herzl, and others. “Which one, Herr Doktor? There are many.”—“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. They all say the same thing. Take Coningsby. You read English, don’t you? Page two hundred and three. Begin with But Sidonia and his brethren…Read it out loud.” I found the passage and read: “But Sidonia and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race…. An unmixed race of a first-rate organisation are the aristocracy of Nature.”—“Very good! Page two-thirty-one, now. The fact is, you cannot destroy… He’s talking about the Jews, of course.”—“Yes. The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organisation. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature, which has baffled Egyptian and Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, and Christian Inquisitors. No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it. The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains.”—“There you have it! Just think that this man, this Jew, was Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister! That he founded the British Empire! A man who, when still unknown, advanced such arguments in front of a Christian Parliament! Come back here. Serve me some more tea, please.” I went back to him and poured him another cup. “Out of love and respect for your father, Max, I have helped you, I have followed your career, I’ve supported you when I could. You owe it to yourself to make him proud, both for his race and for your own. There’s room on this earth for only one chosen people, called on to dominate the others: either it will be them, as the Jew Disraeli and the Jew Herzl wanted, or it will be us. And so we must kill them down to the last one, extirpate their stock. Because even if only ten remain, an intact quorum, or if only two remain, a man and a woman, in a hundred years we’ll have the same problem, and we’ll have to do everything over again.”—“May I ask you a question, Herr Doktor?”—“Ask away, my boy.”—“What is your role in all this, precisely?”—“Leland’s and mine, you mean? It’s a little hard to explain. We don’t have a bureaucratic position. We…we stand by the Führer’s side. You see, the Führer had the courage and the lucidity to make this historic, fatal decision; but, of course, the practical side of things doesn’t concern him. Between that decision and its realization, which has been entrusted to the Reichsführer-SS, there is, however, an immense space. Our task consists of reducing this space. In this sense, we don’t even answer to the Führer, but rather to that space.”—“I’m not sure I entirely understand. But what do you expect from me?”—“Nothing, except that you follow the path that you yourself have traced, to the end.”—“I’m not really sure what my path is, Herr Doktor. I have to think about it.”—“Oh, think! Think. And then call me. We’ll discuss it again.” Another cat was trying to climb up onto my lap, leaving white hairs on the black fabric before I could chase it away. Mandelbrod, without even batting an eyelid, still just as impassive, almost sleeping, emitted another huge fart. The odor made my throat seize up and I breathed in tiny breaths through my mouth. The main door opened and the young woman who manned the reception desk came in, seemingly oblivious to the smell. I got up: “Thank you, Herr Doktor. Please pass on my respects to Herr Leland. Soon, then.” But Mandelbrod seemed already almost asleep; only one of his enormous hands, which was slowly caressing a cat, showed the contrary. I waited for an instant, but he didn’t seem to want to say anything else, so I went out, followed by the girl, who closed the doors without a sound.