already knew as a vacation spot. In Switzerland he was forbidden any political activity as well as gainful employment. He had been able to save most of his assets, but, confident that he would be paid his pension as Prussian Minister President, he had spent it on a plot of land with a house and even taken out a mortgage. After it became clear that he would have to get by with almost no money, Braun in depression withdrew into gardening and thus the nature he loved. He wrote in a letter that he was brooding over the "whole misery of my wretched existence" and that he was asking himself, "How am I, as a 62-year-old worn out man whose freedom of movement is severely hampered by my paralyzed wife, supposed to create a new existence for myself under today's conditions?" Although it seemed implausible to the Gestapo that the "Red Tsar of Prussia" was content to grow potatoes in exile, they found no convincing evidence to the contrary. In the summer of 1937, a lawyer attempted to collect five hundred marks in debt from Braun. He tried unsuccessfully to rent or sell his house, but fearing the bailiff, he finally left Switzerland. In Paris he had his first close contact with the SPD in exile and showed a constant manic compulsion to justify himself. His friends were able to persuade him to write his memoirs. Braun buried himself in documents, and by 1938 the manuscript for ('From Weimar to Hitler') was completed. His political testament appeared in 1940, greatly abridged because of Swiss censorship. He was at that point able to rent out his house in Ascona at a good price. It allowed him to move back to Switzerland and live there, relieved of at least the worst of his financial worries until the outbreak of the war. Then things went downhill again; no tenant could be found so Braun had to move back into his house without any income. His book did not bring in enough to even pay the mortgage interest on his house. In the summer of 1941, he sold his watch and "other expendable things that could be turned into money". He spent much of the time in bed suffering from attacks of rheumatism. To his closest confidant Herbert Weichmann, he wrote, "when many weeks I wander from table to table like a beggar student,