The Kindly Ones Page 23

  Weinmann’s decision had provoked an irrational surge of hatred and resentment in me; but when I arrived in the Crimea, I understood right away that he had been correct. During the long train journey, I had thought a little; I let my thoughts roam over the vast white expanses. I missed Hanika. The empty room, when I had returned to it to prepare my kit, had brought a lump to my throat; I felt as if I were covered from head to foot in Hanika’s blood, and I changed furiously; all my uniforms seemed unclean to me, and that drove me out of my mind. Once again, I had a vomiting fit; but I didn’t even think of crying. I left as soon as possible, via Dniepropetrovsk to Simferopol. Most of the men on the train were convalescents or men on leave, being sent to recover after the horrors of the front. A military doctor explained to me that in January alone, we had lost the equivalent of twelve divisions to frost and illness. Already the temperature was getting a little warmer, and we were starting to hope that the hardest part was over; but it had been one of the worst winters in memory, not just in Russia—so cold that everywhere in Europe they were burning books, furniture, pianos, even antique ones, just as from one end of the Continent to the other everything that had been the pride and joy of our civilization was burning. The Negroes in their jungle, I said to myself bitterly, must be having a good laugh at us if they’re up on the news. Our mad ambitions, for now, were not bringing the anticipated result, and everywhere suffering was increasing, expanding. Even the Reich was no longer safe: the British were launching huge air raids, especially on the Ruhr and the Rhine; the officers who had their families in those regions were very much affected by them. In my compartment alone, a Hauptmann in the artillery, wounded in the leg in front of Izyum, had lost his two children during the bombing of Wuppertal; they had told him he could go back home, but he had asked to go to the Crimea instead, as he didn’t want to face his wife. “I just couldn’t,” he let out laconically before relapsing into silence.

  The military doctor, a rather chubby, almost bald Viennese named Hohenegg, turned out to be a very pleasant travel companion. He was a professor, holder of an important chair in Vienna, who had been named as the Sixth Army’s chief pathologist. Even when he was expressing the most serious opinions, his soft, almost oiled voice seemed to betray a trace of irony. Medicine had given him his philosophical views: we discussed them at some length while the train crossed the steppe beyond Zaporozhie, as empty of life as the high seas. “The advantage of forensic pathology,” he explained to me, “is that after you’ve opened up corpses of all ages and sexes, you have the impression that death loses its horror, is reduced to a physical phenomenon as ordinary and banal as the natural functions of the body. I can manage very calmly to imagine myself on a dissection table, under the hands of my successor, who would grimace slightly as he observed the state of my liver.”—“Ah, but that’s because you have the luck to get them when they’re already dead. It’s a very different thing when, as so often happens here, especially when you work in the SD, you’re present at the step beyond itself.”—“And are even contributing to it.”—“Exactly. Whatever his attitude or his ideology, the spectator can never fully grasp the experience of the deceased.” Hohenegg reflected: “I see what you mean. But this gap exists only for the person who watches. For he alone can see both sides. The man dying will only experience something confused, more or less brief, more or less brutal, but something in any case that will always escape his awareness. Do you know Bossuet?”—“In French, even,” I replied, smiling, in that language. “Excellent. I see that your education was a little broader than that of the average lawyer.” He declaimed the sentences in a rather thick, choppy French: “This final instant, which in one single stroke will erase your whole life, will itself be lost, with all the rest, in that great abyss of nothingness. No trace of what we are will remain on earth: the flesh will change its nature; the body will take on another name; even that of corpse will not long remain. ‘It will become,’ said Tertullian, ‘a strange something that no longer has a name in any language.’”—“That,” I said, “is fine for the dead man, I’ve often thought that way. The problem is only one for the living.”—“Until their own death,” he retorted, winking. I laughed gently and he did too; the other passengers in the compartment, who were discussing girls or sausages, looked at us with surprise.

  In Simferopol, the terminus, they loaded us into trucks or ambulances for a convoy to Yalta. Hohenegg, who had come to visit the doctors of AOK 11, stayed in Simferopol; I parted from him regretfully. Our convoy took a mountain road, to the east, via Alushta, since Bakhchisaray was still in the zone of operations of the siege of Sebastopol. I was put up in a sanatorium west of Yalta, high over the road to Livadia, its back to the steep snow-covered mountains overlooking the city, a former royal palace converted into a Kurort for Soviet workers; it had been damaged a bit by the fighting but quickly patched up and repainted. I had a nice little bedroom on the third floor, with a bathroom and a small balcony: the furniture left something to be desired, but at my feet, beyond a few cypress trees, stretched the Black Sea, smooth, gray, calm. I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. Though it was still a little cold, the air was much softer than in the Ukraine, and I could go out to smoke on the balcony; otherwise, lying on the sofa facing the French doors, I spent long tranquil hours reading. I didn’t lack reading material: I had my own books, and the sanatorium too had a library, made up mostly of books abandoned by previous patients, very eclectic, even including, next to the unreadable Myth of the Twentieth Century, some German translations of Chekhov that I discovered with great pleasure. I didn’t have any medical obligations. At my arrival a doctor had examined me and had me describe my symptoms. “It’s nothing,” he concluded after reading Dr. Sperath’s note. “Nervous fatigue. Rest, baths, no excitement, as little alcohol as possible, and beware of Ukrainian girls. It will pass on its own. Have a nice stay.”

  A joyful atmosphere reigned in this sanatorium: most of the patients and convalescents were a mix of young subalterns from all branches, whose bawdy humor was sharpened, at night, by the Crimean wine served with the meals and by the scarcity of females. That might have contributed to the surprising freedom of tone during discussions: the most cutting jokes were circulating about the Wehrmacht, about Party dignitaries; one officer, showing me his medal for the winter campaign, asked me ironically, “And what about you in the SS—you haven’t received the Order of the Frozen Meat yet?” The fact that they were in the presence of an officer from the SD didn’t bother these young men at all; they seemed to think it went without saying that I shared their wildest ideas. The most critical of them were the officers from Army Group Center; whereas in the Ukraine, people thought that the transfer south of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, at the beginning of August, had been a stroke of genius that, by taking the Russians from the rear, had pried open the blocked Southern Front, and had led to the taking of Kiev and, in the end, the advance all the way to the Donets, the men from the Center thought it was a mad idea of the Führer’s, a mistake that some even described as criminal. Without that, they argued vehemently, instead of loitering for two months around Smolensk, we could have taken Moscow in October, the war would have been over or almost over, and the men could have been spared a winter in snow holes, a detail that the gentlemen in OKH of course couldn’t care less about, since who has ever seen a general get his feet frozen? History, since then, has certainly proven them right, as most experts would agree; yet the perspectives weren’t the same then; words like that smacked of defeatism, even insubordination. But we were on vacation, it didn’t matter, I wasn’t offended. What’s more, all this liveliness, so many handsome, cheerful young men made feelings and desires resurge that I hadn’t experienced in many months. And it didn’t seem impossible for me to satisfy them: it all depended on making the right choice. I often took my meals in the company of a young Leutnant of the Waffen-SS named Willi Partenau. Thin, with a fine bearing, his hair almost black, he was recovering from a chest wound received near Rost
ov. At night, while the others were playing cards or billiards, singing, or drinking at the bar, we sometimes stayed talking, sitting at a table in front of one of the bay windows of the dining room. Partenau came from a Catholic lower-middle-class family in the Rhineland. He had had a difficult childhood. Even before the 1929 crisis, his family was teetering on the brink of proletarianization; his father, an undersized but tyrannical military man, was obsessed with the question of his social status, and swallowed up their meager resources to keep up appearances: they would eat potatoes and cabbage every day, but at school the boys would wear suits with starched collars and polished shoes. Partenau had been raised in strict religiosity; for the slightest mistake, his father forced him to kneel on the cold tile floor and recite prayers; he had soon lost his faith, or rather had replaced it with National Socialism. The Hitlerjugend, then the SS, had finally allowed him to flee this stifling environment. He was still in training during the campaigns in Greece and Yugoslavia, and was disconsolate to have missed them; his joy knew no bounds when he was posted to the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler for the invasion of Russia. One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. “In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things,” he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead I told him a little about my life, especially my childhood. I had been a fragile child. My sister and I were just a year old when our father left for the war. Milk and food were rare; I grew up thin, pale, nervous. I loved playing in the forest near our house; we lived in Alsace, there were big forests there, I would go out to gaze at insects or wet my feet in the streams. One incident remained clearly in my memory: in a meadow or a field, I found an abandoned puppy, looking forlorn, and my heart was filled with pity for it, I wanted to bring it home; but when I approached to pick it up, the little dog, frightened, ran away. I tried to speak to it gently, to cajole it so it would follow me, but without success. It didn’t run away, it always stayed a few meters away from me, but it didn’t let me approach. Finally I sat down in the grass and burst out crying, broken with pity for this puppy that didn’t want to let me help it. I begged it: “Please, puppy, come with me!” Finally it gave in. My mother was horrified when she saw it yapping in our garden, tied to the fence, and after a long argument convinced me to take it to the SPCA where, I’ve always thought, they must have killed it as soon as I turned my back. But maybe this incident took place after the war and my father’s definitive return, maybe it took place in Kiel, where we had moved after the French reoccupied Alsace. My father, finally back among us, spoke little, and seemed somber, full of bitterness. Thanks to his diplomas, he soon landed a good job in a large company; at home, he often stayed by himself in his library, where, when he wasn’t around, I would sneak in to play with his butterfly collection, some of them as big as a grown-up’s hand; I took them out of their boxes and turned them around on their long needles like a pinwheel, until one day when he surprised me and punished me. Around that time, I began pinching things from our neighbor—no doubt, as I understood later, to attract his attention: I stole toy pistols, flashlights, other toys, which I buried in a hiding place in the back of our garden; even my sister didn’t know; finally the whole thing came out. My mother thought I stole for the pure pleasure of doing evil; my father patiently explained the Law to me, then gave me a spanking. This happened not in Kiel but on the island of Sylt, where we spent our summer vacations. To get there, you took the train that runs along the Hindenburg Dam: at high tide, the tracks are surrounded by water, and from the train you have the impression of traveling on the sea, with the waves rising up to the wheels, beating against the hubs. At night, over my bed, electric trains burst through the starry sky of my dreams.

  Very early, it seems to me, I greedily sought the love of everyone I met. This instinct, with adults at least, was generally repaid in kind, since I was both handsome and very intelligent as a boy. But at school, I found myself confronted with cruel, aggressive children, many of whom had lost their fathers in the war, or were beaten and neglected by fathers who had returned from the trenches brutalized and half mad. They avenged themselves, at school, for this lack of love at home by turning viciously against other children who were frailer and more sensitive. They hit me, and I had few friends; in sports, when teams were being formed, no one ever picked me. Then, instead of begging for their affection, I sought their attention. I also tried to impress the teachers, who were fairer than the boys my age; since I was intelligent, this was easy: but then the others called me a teacher’s pet and beat me up even more. Of course, I never mentioned any of this to my father.

  After the defeat, when we had settled in Kiel, he had had to leave again—we didn’t really know where or why; from time to time he returned to see us, then he would disappear again; he didn’t settle down with us for good till the end of 1919. In 1921, he fell seriously ill and had to stop working. His convalescence dragged on, and the atmosphere at home grew tense and gloomy. Around the beginning of the summer, still gray and cold as I remember it, his brother came to visit us. This younger brother, cheerful and funny, told wonderful stories about the war and about his travels that made me roar in admiration. My sister didn’t like him so much. A few days later, my father left with him on a trip, to visit our grandfather, whom I had seen only once or twice and whom I scarcely remembered (my mother’s parents, I think, were already dead). Even today I remember this departure: my mother, my sister, and I were lined up in front of the gate to the house, my father was loading his suitcase into the trunk of the car that would take him to the train station: “Goodbye, little ones,” he said with a smile, “don’t worry, I’ll come back soon.” I never saw him again. My twin sister and I were almost eight then. I learned much later that after some time my mother had gotten a letter from my uncle: after the visit to their father, it said, they had had a falling-out, and my father, apparently, had left in a train for Turkey and the Middle East; my uncle didn’t know anything else about his disappearance; his employers, contacted by my mother, didn’t know anything either. I never saw this letter from my uncle; it was my mother who explained it to me one day, and I could never confirm what she said, or locate this brother who nevertheless did exist. I did not tell all of this to Partenau: but I am telling it to you.

  I spent a lot of time with Partenau now. Sexually, he left me with an uncertain impression. His rigor and his National Socialist and SS enthusiasm could turn out to be an obstacle; but deep down, I felt, his desire must not have been more oriented than anyone else’s. In high school I had quickly learned that there was no homosexuality, as such; the boys made do with what there was, and in the army, as in prisons, it was certainly the same. Of course, since 1937, the date of my brief arrest for the Tiergarten affair, the official attitude had grown considerably harsher. The SS seemed particularly targeted. The previous autumn, when I arrived in Kharkov, the Führer had signed a decree, “On the Maintenance of Purity Within the SS and the Police,” condemning to death any SS man or police employee who engaged in indecent behavior with another man or even permitted himself to be abused. This decree, out of fear it might give rise to misinterpretation, had not been published, but in the SD we had been informed of it. For my part, I thought it was mostly rhetorical posturing; in actual fact, if you stayed discreet, there were rarely any problems. It all depended on not compromising yourself with a personal enemy; but I didn’t have any personal enemies. Partenau, however, must have been influenced by the hysterical rhetoric of the Schwarzes Korps and other SS publications. But my intuition told me that if one could provide him with the necessary ideological framework, the rest would come on its own.

  It wasn’t necessary to be subtle: it was just a question of being methodical. In the afternoons, occasionally, if there was some free time, we wo
uld go out and walk about town, strolling through the little streets or along the quays lined with palm trees; then we would go sit in a café and drink a glass of Crimean muscatel, a little sweet to my taste, but pleasant. On the esplanade, we met mostly Germans, sometimes accompanied by girls; as for the men of the region, aside from a few Tatars or Ukrainians wearing the white armband of the Hiwis, we didn’t see any; in January, in fact, the Wehrmacht had evacuated the entire male population, first to transit camps, then to the Nikolayev Generalkommissariat: a radical solution indeed to the problem of partisans, but it must be acknowledged that with all those wounded or convalescent soldiers, they couldn’t take any risks. Before springtime, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, aside from the theater, or some movies arranged by the Wehrmacht. Even bacilli fall asleep in Yalta, wrote Chekhov, but this slow boredom suited me. Sometimes several other young officers joined us, and we would go sit on a café terrace overlooking the sea. If we found one—provisions from the requisitioned supplies were ruled by mysterious laws—we’d order a bottle of wine; along with the muscatel, there was a red Portwein, just as sweet but suited to the climate. Talk centered on the local women sadly deprived of husbands, and Partenau didn’t seem indifferent to this. In the midst of bursts of laughter, one of the bolder officers would accost some young women and, talking gibberish, invite them to join us; sometimes they blushed and went on their way, and sometimes they came and sat down; Partenau, then, cheerfully joined in on a conversation made up mainly of gestures, onomatopoeia, and isolated words. This had to be cut short. “Meine Herren, I don’t want to be a spoilsport,” I began on one of these occasions. “But I should warn you of the risks you’re running.” I rapped sharply a few times on the table. “In the SD, we receive and synthesize all the reports on incidents in the rear zones of the Wehrmacht. That gives us an overview of problems that you can’t have. I should tell you that having relations with Soviet, Ukrainian, or Russian women is not only unworthy of a German soldier, but dangerous. I’m not exaggerating. Many of these females are Jews, whose Jewish origins can’t be seen; that by itself is already risking Rassenschande, racial soiling. But there’s something else. Not only the Jewesses but also Slav females are in league with the partisans; we know that they make unscrupulous use of their physical advantages, and our soldiers’ trust, for espionage. You might think you can hold your tongue, but I can tell you that there’s no such thing as a harmless detail, and the work of an intelligence service consists of creating giant mosaics from minuscule elements that are insignificant if taken individually but, when connected to thousands of others, make sense. The Bolsheviks don’t go about it any differently.” My pronouncements seemed to be putting my comrades ill at ease. I continued. “In Kharkov, in Kiev, we had many cases of men and officers who slipped off to a rendezvous and were found horribly mutilated. And then of course there are the diseases. Our health services believe, based on Soviet statistics, that ninety percent of Russian females are afflicted with gonorrhea, and fifty percent with syphilis. Many of our soldiers are already infected; and these men, when they go home on leave, contaminate their wives or their girlfriends; the medical services of the Reich are horrified, and are talking of an epidemic. Such a profanation of the race, if it isn’t violently combated, can lead in the end only to a form of Entdeutschung, a de-Germanizing of our race and our blood.”