The Kindly Ones Read online

  Then the soldiers in the cordon ordered the Jews to stand up and march. Blobel got into his car with Häfner and Zorn; von Radetzky invited me to come with him and also took Thomas. The crowd followed the Jews, there was an immense commotion. Everyone headed outside the city toward what people called the Pferdefriedhof, the horse cemetery: a trench had been dug there, with thick beams stacked up behind, to stop stray bullets. Obersturmführer Grafhorst, who commanded our company of Waffen-SS, was waiting with about twenty of his men. Blobel and Häfner inspected the trench, then we waited. I was thinking. I thought about my life, about what relationship there could be between this life that I had lived—an entirely ordinary life, the life of anyone, but also in some respects an extraordinary, an unusual life, although the unusual is also very ordinary—and what was happening here. There must have been a relationship, and it was a fact, there was one. True, I wasn’t taking part in the executions, I wasn’t commanding the firing squads; but that didn’t change much, since I often attended them, I helped prepare them and then I wrote the reports; what’s more, it was just by chance that I had been posted to the Stab rather than to the Teilkommandos. And if they had given me a Teilkommando, would I too have been able, like Nagel or Häfner, to organize the roundups, have the ditches dug, line up the condemned men, and shout “Fire!”? Yes, certainly. Ever since I was a child, I had been haunted by a passion for the absolute, for the overcoming of all limits; and now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of the Ukraine. I had always wanted my thinking to be radical; and now the State, the nation had also chosen the radical and the absolute; how, then, just at that moment, could I turn my back, say no, and at the end of the day prefer the comfort of bourgeois laws, the mediocre assurance of the social contract? That was obviously impossible. And if this radicalism was the radicalism of the abyss, and if the absolute turned out to be absolute evil, one still had to follow them to the end, with eyes wide open—of that at least I was utterly convinced. The crowd was arriving and filling the cemetery; I noticed some soldiers in bathing suits; there were also women, children. People were drinking beer and passing cigarettes around. I looked at a group of officers from headquarters: Oberst von Schuler was there, the IIa, along with several other officers. Grafhorst, our Kompanieführer, was positioning his men. Now we were using one rifle per Jew, a bullet in the chest at the level of the heart. Often that wasn’t enough to kill, and a man had to go down into the trench to finish them off; the screams resounded among the chatter and clamor of the crowd. Häfner, who was more or less officially commanding the action, was shouting himself hoarse. Between the salvos, men emerged from the crowd and asked the Waffen-SS to trade places with them; Grafhorst didn’t object to this, and his men handed their rifles over to the Landsers, who tried one or two shots before returning to join their comrades. Grafhorst’s Waffen-SS were quite young and, since the beginning of the execution, seemed disturbed. Häfner began bawling one of them out, who at each salvo handed his rifle over to a volunteer soldier and stood off to the side, white as a sheet. And then there were too many shots that missed and that was a problem. Häfner had the executions stopped and started to confer with Blobel and two officers from the Wehrmacht. I didn’t know them, but could see from the colors of their collar patches that one was a military judge and the other a doctor. Then Häfner went to talk things over with Grafhorst. I saw that Grafhorst was objecting to what Häfner was saying, but I couldn’t hear their words. Finally Grafhorst had a new batch of Jews brought over. They were positioned facing the trench, but the shooters from the Waffen-SS aimed at the head rather than the chest; the result was horrifying: the tops of their skulls flew into the air, the shooters got pieces of brain splashed in their faces. One of the volunteer shooters from the Wehrmacht was vomiting and his comrades were making fun of him. Grafhorst had flushed completely red and was cursing Häfner; then he turned toward Blobel and the debate started up again. Once again they changed methods: Blobel added some shooters and they shot two at a time into the neck, as in July; Häfner himself administered the deathblow when it was necessary.

  The evening of that execution I accompanied Thomas to the Kasino. The officers from the AOK were discussing the day animatedly; they saluted us courteously, but seemed embarrassed, ill at ease. Thomas started up a conversation; I withdrew into an alcove to smoke alone. After the meal, the discussions resumed again. I noticed the military judge whom I had seen speaking with Blobel; he seemed particularly upset. I approached and joined the group. The officers, I understood, had no objection to the action itself, but to the presence of many soldiers from the Wehrmacht and their participation in the executions. “If we give them the order, that’s one thing,” the judge argued, “but as it is, it’s inadmissible. It’s a shame for the Wehrmacht.”—“So,” Thomas cut in, “the SS can shoot, but the Wehrmacht can’t even look?”—“It’s not that, it’s not that at all. It’s a question of order. Tasks like this are disagreeable for everyone. But only those who have received the order should participate in them. Otherwise, all military discipline will collapse.”—“I agree with Dr. Neumann,” Niemeyer, the Abwehroffizier, said. “It’s not a sporting event. The men were acting as if they were at the races.”—“Still, Herr Oberstleutnant,” I reminded him, “the AOK had agreed that this be publicly announced. You even lent us your PK.”—“I’m not criticizing the SS at all, which is carrying out some very difficult work,” Niemeyer replied, a bit on the defensive. “We did discuss it beforehand and we came to an agreement that this would be a good example for the civilian population, that it was useful for them to see with their own eyes how we are smashing the power of the Jews and the Bolsheviks. But things went a little too far here. Your men shouldn’t have been handing their weapons over to ours.”—“Your men,” Thomas dryly retorted, “shouldn’t have been asking for them.”—“At the very least,” barked Neumann, the judge, “we should raise the question with the Generalfeldmarschall.”

  The result of all this was a typical order from Reichenau: referring to our necessary executions of criminals, Bolsheviks, and essentially Jewish elements, he forbade soldiers in the Sixth Army, without orders from a superior officer, from attending, photographing, or participating in the actions. In itself that would probably not have changed much, but Rasch ordered us to conduct the actions outside the towns, and to set a cordon on the perimeter to prevent the presence of spectators. Discretion, it seemed, would henceforth be the rule of the day. But the desire to see these things was also human. Leafing through my Plato, I had found the passage of The Republic that my reaction in front of the corpses in the Lutsk fortress had brought to mind: Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed, near the executioner, some dead bodies lying on the ground; and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time loathing the thought he tried to turn away. For a time he struggled with himself, and covered his eyes, till at length, overcome by the desire, he forced his eyes wide open with his fingers, and running up to the bodies, exclaimed, “There! you devils! gaze your fill at the beautiful spectacle!” To tell the truth, the soldiers rarely seemed to feel Leontius’s anguish, only his desire, and it must have been this that was disturbing the hierarchy, the idea that the men could take pleasure in these actions. Still, everyone who participated in them took some form of pleasure in them—that seemed obvious to me. Some, visibly, enjoyed the act itself, but these could be regarded as sick men, and it was right to ferret them out and give them other tasks, even punish them if they overstepped the bounds. As for the others, whether the actions repelled them or left them indifferent, they carried them out from a sense of duty and obligation, and thus drew pleasure from their devotion, from their ability to carry out such a difficult task despite their disgust and apprehension: “But I take no pleasure in killing,” they often said, finding their pleasure, then, in their rigor and their righteousness. The hierarchy, obviously, had to consider these problems as a whole; the solu
tions could necessarily only be approximate or rough. Einzelaktionen, of course, individual actions, were rightly regarded as murders and were condemned. Berück von Roques had promulgated an interpretation of the OKW order on discipline, imposing a sixty-day confinement, for insubordination, on soldiers who shot Jews on their own initiative; in Lemberg, I had heard, a noncom had received six months in prison for the murder of an old Jewish woman. But as the actions became more widespread, it became increasingly difficult to control all their repercussions. On August 11 and 12, Brigadeführer Rasch gathered all his Sonderkommando and Einsatzkommando leaders together: besides Blobel, there were Hermann from 4b, Schulz from 5 and Kroeger from 6. Jeckeln came too. Blobel’s birthday was on the thirteenth, and the officers had decided to throw him a party. During the day, he seemed in an even more execrable mood than usual, and spent long hours alone, locked up in his office. I myself was rather busy: we had just received an order from Gruppenführer Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to collect visual materials on our activities—photographs, films, posters, notices—to send to the Führer. I had gone to negotiate a small budget with Hartl, the administrator of the Gruppenstab, so as to buy copies of their photos from the men; he had started out by refusing, alleging an order from the Reichsführer forbidding members of the Einsatzgruppen to profit from executions in any way whatsoever; and for him, the sale of photographs constituted a profit. I finally managed to convince him that we couldn’t ask the men to finance the Group’s work out of their own pockets, and that we had to defray the expenses of printing the images we wanted to archive. He accepted, but on condition that we pay only for the photos of noncommissioned officers and soldiers; officers should reprint their photos at their own expense, if they took any. Armed with this agreement, I spent the rest of the day in the barracks, examining the men’s collections and ordering prints. Some of them were remarkably accomplished photographers; but their work left me with an unpleasant aftertaste, and at the same time I couldn’t take my eyes away from it, I was stunned. At night, the officers gathered in the mess, decorated for the occasion by Strehlke and his adjuncts. When Blobel joined us, he had already been drinking; his eyes were bloodshot, but he controlled himself and didn’t speak much. Vogt, who was the oldest officer, presented him our best wishes and led the toast for his health; then he was asked to speak. He hesitated, then put down his glass and addressed us, his hands clasped behind his back. “Meine Herren! Thank you for your good wishes. Know that your confidence means a lot to me. I have to share some bad news with you. Yesterday, the HSSPF Russland-Süd, Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, delivered us a new order. This order came directly from the Reichsführer-SS and emanates, I want to emphasize this for you as he emphasized it for us, from the Führer himself.” As he spoke, he winced; between phrases, he chewed the inside of his cheeks. “Our actions against the Jews will henceforth have to include the entire population. There will be no exceptions.” The officers present reacted with consternation; several started talking at the same time. Callsen’s voice rose, incredulous: “All of them?”—“All of them,” Blobel confirmed.—“But look, that’s impossible,” Callsen said. He seemed to be begging. I remained silent; I felt a great coldness come over me; Oh Lord, I was saying to myself, now that too must be done, it has been spoken, and we’ll have to go through that too. I felt invaded by a boundless horror, but I remained calm, nothing showed through, my breathing remained even. Callsen continued his objections: “But, Standartenführer, most of us are married, we have children. They can’t ask us to do that.”—“Meine Herren,” Blobel snapped in a brutal but toneless voice, “this is a direct order from our Führer, Adolf Hitler. We are National Socialists and SS men, and we will obey. Understand this: in Germany, the Jewish question was able to be resolved, fully resolved, without excesses and in a manner in keeping with the requirements of humanity. But when we conquered Poland we inherited three million additional Jews. No one knows what to do with them or where to put them. Here, in this immense country, where we are waging a pitiless war of destruction against the Stalinist hordes, from the beginning we have had to take radical measures to ensure the security of our rear. I think you have all understood their necessity and efficacy. Our forces are not sufficient to patrol each village and at the same time wage battle; and we cannot allow ourselves to leave such treacherous, such sly potential enemies behind us. At the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the possibility is being discussed, once the war is won, of gathering all Jews into a large reservation in Siberia or in the North. There, they’ll be peaceful, and we will be too. But first we have to win the war. We have already executed thousands of Jews and there are still tens of thousands left; the more our forces advance, the more there will be. Now, if we execute only the men, there will be no one left to feed the women and their children. The Wehrmacht doesn’t have the resources to feed tens of thousands of useless Jew females along with their brats. Nor can we leave them to die of hunger: those are Bolshevik methods. To include them in our actions, along with their husbands and their sons, is in fact the most humane solution given the circumstances. What’s more, experience has taught us that the more procreative Eastern Jews are the original breeding ground from which the forces of Judeo-Bolshevism as well as of the capitalist plutocracy are constantly renewed. If we let some of them survive, those products of natural selection will be the source of a renewal even more dangerous for us than the present peril. The Jewish children of today are the saboteurs, the partisans, the terrorists of tomorrow.” The officers were silent, glum; Kehrig, I noticed, was downing glass after glass. Blobel’s bloodshot eyes glistened through the veil of alcohol. “We are all National Socialists,” he continued, “SS men in the service of our Volk and our Führer. I remind you that Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, the Führer’s word has the force of law. You must resist the temptation to be human.” Blobel was not a very intelligent man; these striking sentences had certainly not originated from him. But he believed in them; even more important, he wanted to believe in them, and he was offering them in turn to those who needed them, those to whom they could be of use. For me, they weren’t much use; I would have to work out my reasoning on my own. But it was hard for me to think about it; my head was buzzing with an intolerable pressure, I wanted to go to sleep. Callsen was fiddling with his wedding ring, I was sure he didn’t realize it; he wanted to say something, but changed his mind. “A Schweinerei, this is a grosse Schweinerei,” Häfner muttered, and no one contradicted him. Blobel seemed drained, out of ideas, but everyone could feel that his will was holding us and wouldn’t let us go, just as other wills held him. In a State like ours, everyone had his assigned role: You, the victim, and You, the executioner, and no one had a choice, no one asked anyone’s consent, since everyone was interchangeable, victims as well as executioners. Yesterday we had killed Jewish men, tomorrow it would be women and children, the day after tomorrow yet others; and after we had fulfilled our role, we would be replaced. Germany, at least, did not liquidate its executioners; on the contrary, it took care of them, unlike Stalin with his mania for purges; but that too was part of the logic of things. For the Russians, as for us, man counted for nothing; the nation, the State were everything; and in this sense we saw our reflection in each other. The Jews too had this strong feeling of community, of Volk: they mourned their dead, buried them if they could and said Kaddish; but as long as one single Jew remained alive, Israel lived. That, no doubt, was the reason they were our privileged enemies, they resembled us too much.

  It wasn’t a problem of humanity. Some people, of course, could criticize our actions in the name of religious values, but I wasn’t one of them, and in the SS there must not have been many; or in the name of democratic values, but we had moved beyond what is called democracy in Germany sometime ago. Blobel’s arguments, in fact, were not entirely idiotic: if the supreme value is the Volk, the people to which one belongs, and if the will of this Volk is embodied in a leader, then in fact, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. But still it was vit
al to comprehend within oneself the necessity of the Führer’s orders: if one accepted them out of a simple Prussian spirit of obedience, out of a Knecht’s spirit, without understanding them and without accepting them, that is without submitting to them, then one was nothing but a sheep, a slave and not a man. When the Jew submitted to the Law, he felt that this Law lived in him, and the more terrible, hard, demanding it was, the more he loved it. National Socialism had to be that too: a living Law. Killing was a terrible thing; the reaction of the officers was a good proof of that, even if they didn’t all draw the consequences of their own reactions; and the man for whom killing was not a terrible thing, killing an armed man as well as an unarmed man, and an unarmed man as well as a woman and her child, was nothing but an animal, unworthy of belonging to a community of men. But it was possible that this terrible thing was also a necessary thing; and in that case we had to submit to this necessity. Our propaganda repeated over and over again that the Russians were Untermenschen, sub-humans; but I refused to believe that. I had interrogated captured officers, Commissars, and I saw that they too were men like us, men who wished only good, who loved their families and their country. But these Commissars and these officers had caused millions of their own fellow citizens to die, they had deported the Kulaks, starved the Ukrainian peasantry, repressed and shot the bourgeois and deviationists of all stripes. Among them were sadists and psychopaths, of course, but also kind men, honest and upright, who sincerely wanted the good of their people and of the working class; and though they had gone astray, they were still men of good faith. They too were for the most part convinced of the necessity of what they were doing, they weren’t all madmen, opportunists, and criminals like that Kieper; among our enemies too, a good and honest man could convince himself to do terrible things. What they were asking us to do now posed the same problem for us.