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It was late 1942 before Müller stopped killing people for the data he got from their dying, and began trying to revive them after he killed them. He tried everything from electric shocks to various combinations of chemicals injected into their hearts; he froze them in dry ice, he plunged electrodes into their brains, he did everything he could think of, but his subjects stayed stubbornly dead. But he never gave up. I’ll say that for him – with all the failures, he still did not give up.

One day in mid-1943 he came to the lab, grinning like a satyr. "You know what I thought this morning?" he asked.

"I could not say, Herr Doktor."

"Suppose, I thought, my entire approach was wrong. Suppose the problem isn’t reversing death - but restoring life?" 

"I don’t understand."

"No, of course you don’t. But you shall, you shall."

After that we began with a new set of experiments. Müller no longer killed his subjects only to try to make them alive again – instead, he tested their nerves and their reflexes, put tubes inside their stomachs and sucked out the contents at specific periods after feeding them specific meals, drilled holes in their skulls to turn the activity of their brains into graphs on paper, and the like. For a whole year, he did this on a succession of subjects, men and women. He only killed them after they had yielded to him all the information they could.

By midsummer of 1944, the war was clearly all but lost, with the Allies landing in France and the Eastern Front crumbling before the Russians. Müller, though, seemed oblivious to it all. He kept on his experiments and kept collecting his data. I did notice, though, that he no longer told me everything he surmised and what he planned. More and more often, he would make notes by himself and carry out observations using instruments of his devising, things I had never seen before.

And then one day he announced he was ready.

It was a day in late July 1944, and the sun heated the camp until it seemed even the flies felt it was too hot to move. Müller – his white coat stained with some brownish substance that might have been one of his esoteric chemical compounds but was more probably only coffee – stood in the doorway of the laboratory, looking out over the camp. The doorway, I should mention, was the only opening in the walls of the laboratory; there wasn’t a single window and the only ventilation was via a duct in the ceiling fitted with a fan.

"I’ll go find a suitable subject," he had said. He had turned and grinned at me over his shoulder. "Do you have any prior engagement for tonight?"

"If I do, Herr Doktor," I told him, "I’ll cancel it."

"See that you do," he replied, nodding solemnly. "Tell that concubine who’s warming your bed to beat it, there’s a good boy."

When I arrived at the laboratory that evening, and it was windy, with clouds scudding by overhead and the moon appearing and disappearing, the other two camp doctors (I told you there were three, all told, didn’t I?) were already present. One was a bespectacled and chinless young man who was so completely insignificant that I don’t even remember his name. The other was called Schmidt – a big man with a scarred face acquired during the invasion of Poland in 1939, when he had been a soldier – and he and Dr Müller had never got along. It was the first time either of these two had entered the laboratory while I was present. I think Müller had called them there in order to gloat.

I began to prepare the instruments and chemicals according to Müller’s instructions. Schmidt and the chinless wonder watched me, saying nothing.

Dr Müller himself entered with the subject half an hour later than he said he would. He had the subject with him – and I, who had watched him test, work on and kill upwards of two hundred Jews and Social Democrats and Gypsies from the civilian camps, was surprised, because the object of his famous experiment was a hulking Russian soldier.

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