The Kindly Ones Read online

  I must not have been the only one asking questions. A mute but profound uncertainty was pervading the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Cooperation with the SS was still excellent, but the Great Action had provoked anxious stirrings. A new order of the day by von Reichenau was beginning to circulate, a raw, harsh text, a brutal disclaimer of Rasch’s conclusions. It described the men’s doubts as vague ideas about the Bolshevik system. The soldier in the territories of the East is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of warfare, he wrote, but also the bearer of a pitiless völkisch ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities inflicted on the German and ethnically related nations. Therefore, the soldier must have a full understanding of the necessity for harsh but just countermeasures against Jewish subhumanity. Human pity had to be banished: offering a traveling Slav, possibly a Bolshevik agent, something to eat was pure thoughtlessness, a mistaken humanitarian act. The cities would be destroyed, the partisans annihilated along with the uncommitted. These ideas, of course, didn’t all come from von Reichenau; the Reichsführer must have suggested a few passages to him, but the main point was that this order worked correctly toward the Führer, along his lines and toward his aims, to use the fine expression of an obscure employee of the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, and so it was hardly surprising that the Führer was delighted with it, that he caused it to be distributed as an example to all the armies in the East. But I doubted if it was enough to set people’s minds at rest. National Socialism was a complete, total philosophy, a Weltanschauung, as we said; each person had to be able to find his place within it; there had to be room for all. But now, it was as if an opening had been forced into this whole, and all the destinies of National Socialism had been driven into it, on a one-way path of no return, which everyone had to follow until the end.

  The fatality of things in Kiev only increased my unease. In the hallway of the palace of young virgins, I met an acquaintance from Berlin: “Sturmbannführer Eichmann! You’ve been promoted. Congratulations!”—“Ah! Dr. Aue. I’ve been looking for you. I have a package for you. It was given to me at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais.” I had known this officer back when he was setting up for Heydrich the Central Offices for Jewish Emigration; he would often come to my department to consult us on legal questions. He was an Obersturmführer then; now, he was sporting his four new diamonds on the neck of a black dress uniform that contrasted sharply with our campaign feldgrau. He strutted about like a little rooster; it was curious, he had left me with the impression of a hurried, plodding civil servant; I hardly recognized him now. “And what brings you here?” I asked him, inviting him into my office.—“Your package, and I have another one for one of your colleagues.”—“No, I mean to Kiev.” We had sat down and he leaned forward with a conspiratorial air: “I came to see the Reichsführer.” He was obviously beaming with pride and seemed eager to talk: “With my Amtschef. On special invitation.” He leaned over again: now he looked like a bird of prey, small and furtive. “I had to present a report. A statistical report. Prepared by my staff. You know that I head a whole Referat now?”—“No, I didn’t know. My congratulations.”—“The Four-B-four. Jewish affairs.” He had put his cap on my desk and was holding a black leather briefcase tightly on his knees; he pulled a case out of his tunic pocket, took out some large glasses, put them on, and opened the briefcase to extract a large envelope, quite thick, which he gave me. “Here it is. Of course, I won’t ask you what it is.”—“Oh, I can tell you. They’re scores.”—“You’re a musician? Me too, a little bit. I play the violin.”—“Actually not. It was for someone else, but he’s dead now.” He took off his glasses: “Ah. I’m very sorry. This war is really terrible. Actually,” he went on, “your friend Dr. Lulley also gave me a small bill, for the shipping costs.”—“No problem. I’ll send you some money this evening. Where are you staying?”—“With the Reichsführer’s staff.”—“Fine. Thank you very much for the favor. It was very kind of you.”—“Oh, it was nothing. We SS men have to help each other out. I’m just sorry it arrived too late.” I shrugged: “That’s how it is. Can I pour you a drink?”—“Oh, I shouldn’t. Work, you know. But…” He seemed sorry and I took the bait: “In the last war, they used to say Krieg ist Krieg…” He finished the sentence with me: “…und Schnaps ist Schnaps. Yes, I know. A very little one, then.” I opened my safe and took out two glasses and the bottle I kept for my guests. Eichmann got up to offer the toast, ceremoniously: “To the health of our Führer!” We clinked glasses. I saw he still wanted to talk. “So what was in your report, then?…If it isn’t a secret.”—“Well, it’s all very hush-hush, as the English say. But I can tell you. The Gruppenführer and myself were sent here by the Chief”—he meant Heydrich, now stationed in Prague as Assistant Reichsprotektor—“to discuss with the Reichsführer the plan for the evacuation of the Jews from the Reich.”—“Evacuation?”—“Exactly. To the East. By the end of the year.”—“All of them?”—“All of them.”—“And where will they be sent?”—“Most of them to the Ostland, probably. And down South too, for the construction of the Durchgangstrasse Four. It hasn’t yet been settled.”—“I see. And your report?”—“A statistical summary. I presented it in person to the Reichsführer. On the global situation regarding Jewish emigration.” He raised a finger. “Do you know how many there are?”—“Of what?”—“Of Jews. In Europe.” I shook my head: “No idea.”—“Eleven million! Eleven million, can you believe it? Of course, for the countries we don’t control yet, like England, the numbers are approximate. Since they don’t have any racial laws, we had to base our figures on religious criteria. But still that gives a rough estimate. Here in the Ukraine alone you have almost three million.” He took on a more pedantic tone: “Two million nine hundred ninety-four thousand six hundred and eighty-four, to be exact.”—“That is exact. But tell me, with one Einsatzgruppe we won’t be able to do much.”—“Precisely. Other methods are being studied.” He looked at his watch and got up. “You’ll have to excuse me now. I have to go back and find my Amtschef. Thank you for the drink.”—“Thank you for the package! I’ll send you the money for Lulley right away.” Together, we raised our arms and bellowed, “Heil Hitler!”

  After Eichmann had left, I sat down and contemplated the package left on my desk. It contained the Rameau and Couperin scores that I had ordered for the little Jew in Zhitomir. That had been a mistake, a sentimental naïveté; still it filled me with a great melancholy. I now thought I could understand better the reactions of the men and officers during the executions. If they suffered, as I had suffered during the Great Action, it wasn’t just because of the smells and the sight of blood, but because of the terror and the moral suffering of the people they shot; in the same way, their victims often suffered more from the suffering and death, before their eyes, of those they loved, wives, parents, beloved children, than from their own deaths, which came to them in the end like a deliverance. In many cases, I said to myself, what I had taken for gratuitous sadism, the astonishing brutality with which some men treated the condemned before executing them, was nothing but a consequence of the monstrous pity they felt and which, incapable of expressing itself otherwise, turned into rage, but an impotent rage, without object, and which thus almost inevitably had to turn against those who had originally provoked it. If the terrible massacres of the East prove one thing, paradoxically, it is the awful, inalterable solidarity of humanity. As brutalized and habituated as they may have become, none of our men could kill a Jewish woman without thinking about his wife, his sister, or his mother, or kill a Jewish child without seeing his own children in front of him in the pit. Their reactions, their violence, their alcoholism, the nervous depressions, the suicides, my own sadness, all that demonstrated that the other exists, exists as an other, as a human, and that no will, no ideology, no amount of stupidity or alcohol can break this bond, tenuous but indestructible. This is a fact, not an opinion.

  The hierarchy was beginning to perceive this fact and take it into consideration. As E
ichmann had explained to me, new methods were being studied. A few days after his visit, a certain Dr. Widmann arrived in Kiev, come to deliver a new sort of truck to us. This truck, a Saurer, was driven by Findeisen, Heydrich’s personal driver, a taciturn man who stubbornly refused, despite numerous requests, to explain to us why he had been chosen for this journey. Dr. Widmann, who headed the chemistry department at the Criminal-Technical Institute attached to the Kripo, gave the officers a long presentation: “Gas,” he declared, “is a more elegant method.” The truck, hermetically sealed, used its own exhaust gas to asphyxiate the people locked up inside; this solution, indeed, lacked neither elegance nor economy. As Widmann explained to us, other solutions had been tried out first; he himself had conducted experiments in Minsk, on the patients of an asylum, in the company of his Amtschef, Gruppenführer Nebe; one attempt, using explosives, had given disastrous results. “Indescribable. A catastrophe.” Blobel looked enthusiastic: he liked this new toy and was eager to try it out for the first time. Häfner objected that the truck didn’t hold many people—Dr. Widmann had told us fifty, sixty at most—and didn’t work very quickly, and therefore seemed inefficient. But Blobel swept these reservations aside: “We’ll keep it for the women and children, it will be good for morale.” Dr. Widmann dined with us; afterward, around the billiard table, he told us how the thing had been invented: “Actually it’s Gruppenführer Nebe who had the idea. One night, in Berlin, he had had a little too much to drink, and he fell asleep in his car, in his garage; the engine was still running and he almost died. We were already working on a truck model, but we were planning on using bottled carbon monoxide, which isn’t at all practical in the conditions in the East. It’s the Gruppenführer, after his accident, who thought of using the gas of the truck itself. A brilliant idea.” He had heard the anecdote from his superior, Dr. Heess, who had told it to him on the U-Bahn. “Between Wittenbergplatz and Thielplatz, to be precise. I was very impressed.”

  For several days already, Blobel had been sending Teilkommandos outside Kiev to clean up the little towns, Pereyaslav, Yagotin, Kozelets, Chernigov, there were a lot of them. But the Teilkommandoführers were in despair: after an action, if they returned to the town, they found still more Jews there; the ones who had hidden kept coming back after they left. They complained that it upset all their statistics. According to Blobel’s accrued totals, the Kommando had liquidated fifty-one thousand people, including fourteen thousand without outside help (meaning without Jeckeln’s Orpo battalions). A Vorkommando was being formed to enter Kharkov, and I was supposed to be part of it; in the meantime, since I had nothing to do in Kiev (the Ek 5 had taken over all our tasks), Blobel asked me to go inspect the Teilkommandos. The rains had started, and as soon as you crossed the swollen Dnieper, you sank into the mud. The trucks, the cars were dripping with black, thick mud mixed with strands of the hay that the soldiers looted from the haystacks along the road to spread in front of their cars, uselessly. It took me two days to reach Häfner in Pereyaslav, towed most of the time by the Wehrmacht’s tracked vehicles and covered in mud up to my eyes from wading around trying to push the Admiral. I spent the night in a little village with some officers from an infantry division that was moving up to the front from Zhitomir—exhausted men, who anxiously saw winter approaching and wondered what their ultimate objective was. I took care not to tell them about the Urals; we couldn’t even advance up to Kharkov. They complained about the new recruits, sent from Germany to replace the casualties, but poorly trained and with a tendency to panic under fire, at least more readily than before. The equipment was falling to pieces: the modern German general-service wagons, with their rubber tires and ball bearings, were breaking apart on the tracks; they replaced them with almost indestructible panje carts, taken from the peasants. The beautiful German, Hungarian, or Irish horses with which they had started the campaign were dying in droves; only the scrubby Russian ponies were surviving, they could eat anything at all—birch shoots, the straw from the roofs of isbas—but they were too lightweight to pull the heavier carts, and the units had to abandon tons of provisions and equipment. “Every night, the men fight with each other to find a roof or a half-dry hole. Everyone’s uniform is in rags, full of lice; we’re not receiving anything, there’s almost no more bread.” Even the officers lacked the basics: no more razors, soap, toothpaste, no more leather to repair the boots, no more needles, no more thread. It rained day and night, and they were losing many more men from illness—dysentery, jaundice, diphtheria—than from gunfire. The sick had to walk up to thirty-five kilometers a day, since there was no way to transport them, and if they stayed alone in the villages, the partisans came and killed them. The partisans now were proliferating like lice; they seemed to be everywhere, and isolated couriers and dispatch bearers were vanishing in the woods. But I had also noticed among the soldiers a number of Russians in German uniforms, with the white armband of the Hilfswillige. “The Hiwis?” replied an officer to whom I had mentioned this. “No, we’re not really allowed to. But we take them anyway, we don’t have a choice. The guys are volunteer civilians or prisoners. They do all the transport and B-echelon jobs; it works out pretty well, they’re more used to these conditions than we are. And also Headquarters couldn’t care less, they close their eyes. Anyway they must have forgotten us. By the time we reach Poltava they won’t even know who we are.”—“But aren’t you afraid the partisans will take advantage of this to infiltrate your ranks and inform the Reds of your movements?” He shrugged his shoulders in a weary, disgusted way. “If it makes them happy…. In any case, there isn’t a single Russian within a hundred kilometers. Nor a single German, either. No one. Rain and mud, that’s all.” This officer seemed completely discouraged; but he also showed me how to clean the mud off my uniform, it was useful and I didn’t want to contradict him. “First you have to dry the mud by the stove, then you scrape it with a knife, see, then with a metal brush; and only then can you wash the uniform. For the underwear, you absolutely have to have it boiled.” I watched the operation: it was disgusting, the lice came off in the boiling water in clusters, thick, swollen. I understood better Häfner’s suppressed anger when I finally reached Pereyaslav. He had three Untersturmführers with him—Ott, Ries, and Dammann—who weren’t getting much done, since they could hardly leave the town any longer, the roads were so impassable. “We would need tanks!” Häfner exclaimed when he saw me. “Soon we won’t even be able to get back to Kiev. Here,” he added before he abruptly turned away, “this is for you. All my congratulations.” It was a teletype from Blobel, confirming my promotion; I had also received the War Merit Cross, Second Class. I followed Häfner into the school the Teilkommando was occupying and looked for a place to put my things. Everyone, soldiers and officers, was sleeping in the gymnasium; the classrooms served as offices. I changed and went to find Häfner, who gave me a report on the tribulations of his adjuncts: “You see this village, Zolotonosha? Apparently there are more than four hundred Jews there. Dammann tried three times to get there; three times he had to turn back, and even then, the last time, he nearly didn’t make it here. The men are getting difficult.” At night, there was soup and the awful black Wehrmacht Kommissbrot, and we went to bed early. I slept poorly. One of the Waffen-SS, a few meters away from my bedding, ground his teeth, an atrocious sound that raised my hackles; every time I began to doze off, he woke me up; it was driving me out of my mind. I wasn’t the only one: some men shouted at him, I heard some blows and saw they were hitting him, but it didn’t do any good, the infuriating sound went on, or else stopped only to start again a few moments later. “It’s like that every night,” grumbled Ries, who was sleeping next to me. “I’m going crazy. I’m going to strangle him one of these days.” Finally I dozed off and had a strange, striking dream. Now I was a great Squid God, and I was ruling over a beautiful walled city of water and white stone. The center, especially, was all water, and tall buildings rose up all around. My city was peopled with humans who worshipped me.
I had delegated part of my power and authority to one of them, my Servant. But one day I decided I wanted all these humans out of my city, at least for a while. The order went out, propagated by my Servant, and immediately droves of humans started fleeing out the gates of the city, to wait in hovels and shantytowns out in the desert beyond the walls. But they didn’t leave fast enough to my liking, and I began to thrash violently, churning up the water of the center with my tentacles, then coiling them back and bearing down on swarms of terrified humans, lashing out and roaring with my terrible voice: “Out! Out! Out!” My Servant ran frantically about, commanded, guided, prompted the sluggish, and in this way the city emptied out. But in the buildings closest to the walls and farthest from the water where I was giving vent to my divine rage, some groups of humans were not heeding my commands. These were foreigners, not really aware of my existence, of my power over this city. They had heard the evacuation orders, but thought them ridiculous and were ignoring them. My Servant had to go see these groups one after another, to convince them diplomatically to leave: such as this conference of Finnish officers, who protested that they had rented the hotel and conference room and paid in advance, and wouldn’t leave just like that. With them, my Servant had to lie skillfully, explaining for instance that there was an alert, a grave security problem, and that they had to evacuate for their own safety. I found this deeply humiliating, since the real reason was my Will; they were supposed to leave just because I wanted it, not because they were coaxed. My rage increased, I thrashed about and roared more violently than ever, sending great waves crashing through the city. When I woke up the rain was still streaming down the windows. At breakfast they served us some Kommissbrot, some coal-based margarine from the Ruhr, quite tasty, synthetic honey made from pine resin, and the frightful ersatz Schlüter tea, the identical packets of which never contained the same ingredients. The men ate in silence. Ries, glum, pointed to a soldier leaning over his tea: “That’s him.”—“Who?” Ries imitated a jaw grinding. I looked again: he was almost a teenager, he had a hollow face spotted with acne, and eyes lost in dark bags. His comrades were rough on him, sending him off on chores and insulting him, slapping him if he didn’t go fast enough. The boy didn’t say anything. “Everyone is hoping he’ll get himself killed by the partisans,” Ries whispered to me. “We’ve tried everything, everything, we’ve even gagged him. No use.”