Diels disappeared.One night in early October, Diels was working late at his office at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 when, around midnight, he received a telephone call from his wife, Hilde, who sounded deeply distressed. As he recounted in a later memoir, Lucifer Ante Portas—Lucifer at the Gate—his wife told him that “a horde” of armed men in black uniforms had broken into their apartment, locked her in a bedroom, and then conducted an aggressive search, collecting diaries, letters, and various other files that Diels kept at home. Diels raced to his apartment and managed to piece together enough information to identify the intruders as a squad of SS under the command of one Captain Herbert Packebusch. Packebusch was only thirty-one years old, Diels wrote, but already had a “harshness and callousness written deep into his face.” Diels called him “the very prototype and image of the later concentration-camp commandants.”Although the brazen nature of Packebusch’s raid surprised Diels, he understood the forces at work behind it.
