Baldur Persicke Pays a Visit

Baldur Persicke, the Napola cadet and most successful of the Persicke children, ties up his affairs in Berlin: he has retrieved his mother from hiding, visited his sister at Ravensbrück to praise her cruelty to inmates, and quietly buried old Persicke's embezzled Party funds by pinning the theft on Borkhausen. He visits his father in the drying-out clinic, refuses him a smuggled schnapps, and coldly tells him he will be committed for life; the old man's pleading about their Sunday walks up the Kreuzberg changes nothing. Baldur then corners the timid Dr Martens, using a family 'aberration' the doctor confessed as leverage, and bullies him into ordering a punishing 'green injection' for old Persicke, claiming his father asked for it himself. Martens capitulates, humiliated. Alone afterward, sickened at having caved to 'that ghastly impertinent punk', he injects himself with morphine instead, promising he will look in on old Persicke once the drug takes hold.

Baldur's visit runs two extortions in parallel, son over father and cadet over doctor, each turning on manufactured shame rather than fact. The cruelty here is administrative: forms, threats, a signature on an order. Martens's morphine, chosen over confronting his own cowardice, closes the chapter on complicity.