16 Dec December 16, 1944

To Marianne Hapig and Marianne Punder:

Good people!  God reward you for the care and love you’re always showing me.  I hope you don’t ever have to experience how much this goodness and loyalty mean to a person.  May God let you know in his own way.

The lawyer was here today, and I now know something about the charge….Most of it isn’t serious.  It can probably be dealt with.  But Sperr’s statement is going to kill me….He has to write, because unless the president of the People’s Court has read it at home beforehand, it will come to nothing.  He doesn’t take any further information during the proceeding.  (Please try, through Dr. Reisart’s wife or someone else and try to get some kind of a written response….)  And help me to beg this letter from the Christ Child.  My head is at stake.  The delay is a big grace, because it means I can prepare in an entirely different way now that I know the charge.  Please—some paper that I can write on with ink because I have to write a defense for the lawyer…

Is it possible to get something for the person who brings the laundry for Christmas?  And also for the man you visited recently?  That visit had a very positive outcome.

May you be led by God’s bright light in this last week of Advent

I think that the trial was also postponed because Freisler [the president of the so-called People’s Court] apparently had to go somewhere.

God reward you, and may you be led by God’s bright light in this last week of Advent.  Good-bye.

Yours gratefully,

Max

Also, I’d like to find out urgently, immediately, if Jakob and Siemer O.P. have been arrested.  Before that I won’t be ready to work out my defense.  And pray for a letter from Sperr as a gift from the Christ Child.