Freud and the Nazis: Maintaining the Proprieties

The wife of Sigmund Freud, receiving unwelcome visitors in their Vienna apartment, maintains the bourgeois proprieties:

When the Nazis arrived at the door, Martha, having asked them to deposit their rifles in the umbrella stand, asked if they might care to sit down. This too, they refused. As they began to search the house, Martha went off, fetched the household money, and placed it on the dining room table. “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” she suggested, and this time, the gentlemen complied.

—Mark Edmundson The Death of Sigmund Freud ,
As read on the BBC Book of the Week