The Trial: Judge Feisler

Judge Feisler, the Reich's senior judge, presides with the vulture-clawed cruelty Quangel had been warned to expect. Both Quangels plead 'guilty' outright, denying Feisler his theatre, so he drags the hearing out for seven hours of vindictive questioning instead. He needles Quangel over the 4,763 marks and 67 pfennigs he and Anna saved, accusing him of avarice; Quangel answers that half was saved before the Nazis took power and, pressed on why he kept saving at all, says flatly that he never expected the 'Thousand-Year Reich' to last. Uproar follows in the gallery, and Anna's guard grips her shoulder while Otto's guard reaches for his holster. Quangel is dragged out; when the trial resumes a quarter-hour later he can barely walk, and Feisler sentences him to four weeks' solitary confinement on bread and water, his braces confiscated on suspicion of a suicide attempt, so that he must stand through the rest of the trial clutching his own trousers.

Feisler runs the trial as personal vendetta rather than procedure, measuring his cruelty in petty specifics: pfennigs counted, braces confiscated. Quangel's line about the 'Thousand-Year Reich' is the closest the novel lets him come to a public statement, costing him his dignity and his trousers' support.