Full disclosure: I couldn’t actually find a picture of Sauerwald (whose name means “sour forest,” I think), so I just faked it. When asked why he’d helped the Freuds (and their maid!) get out of Austria, he replied that while “the Führer knows best” and he believed in the elimination of the Jews, he also believed rare exceptions could be made for outliers like Freud (and, evidently, his maid). Sauerwald lived through the war and died in the seventies, but I don’t know if he ever confronted or resolved the cognitive dissonance his actions suggested.

As for Dr. Bloch, “Hitler makes a huge painting for the Jewish doctor who attended his beloved mother in her final illness” sounds like a joke, but the Blochs said this was true, though the painting has since been lost, assuming it existed in the first place. Either way, what is undoubtedly true is that Hitler not only agreed to let the Blochs emigrate to New York but enabled them to sell their house at market value and even put them under special protection by the Gestapo until everything was arranged for their voyage. So Sauerwald’s cognitive dissonance was not unique but affected even the Führer himself. We can never know how many other cases like this there were.

I think I got Himmler right this time, incidentally. His eyes were too small in the last comic, here they’re just right.