The Kindly Ones Read online

  It didn’t stay that way for long. It wasn’t right away but maybe a year later that we discovered those things; then a boundless pleasure filled our childhood. And then one day, as I said, we were caught. There were endless scenes, my mother called me a pig and a degenerate, Moreau cried, and it was the end of all that is beautiful. A few weeks later, when school began, they sent us to Catholic boarding schools, hundreds of kilometers away from each other, and so, vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle, began a nightmare that lasted many years and that, in a way, still continues. Frustrated, bitter priests, informed of my sins, forced me to spend hours on my knees on the ice-cold flagstones of the chapel, and let me take nothing but cold showers. Poor Partenau! I too have known the Church, and worse still. Yet my father was a Protestant, and I already despised the Catholics; under this treatment, the few remnants of my naïve child’s faith disintegrated, and rather than repentance, I learned hatred.

  Everything in that school was deformed and perverted. At night, the older boys came and sat down on the edge of my bed and put their hands between my legs until I slapped them; then they laughed, calmly got up, and left; but in the showers, after gym, they slipped up against me and quickly rubbed their things on my rear end. The priests also sometimes invited boys into their offices to hear their confessions, then, with promises of gifts or through intimidation, forced them to commit criminal acts. It was hardly surprising that the unhappy Pierre R. tried to kill himself. I was disgusted, I felt as if I were covered in mud. I didn’t have anyone to appeal to: my father would never have allowed such things, but I had no idea where my father was.

  Since I refused to submit to their hateful desires, the older boys treated me as viciously as the reverend fathers. They beat me up at the slightest pretext, forced me to serve them, to shine their shoes, to brush their suits. One night I opened my eyes: three of them were standing next to my bed, rubbing themselves over my face; before I could react, their horrible stuff blinded me. There was only one way to escape this kind of situation, the classic way—to choose a protector. For that the school had developed a precise ritual. The younger boy was called the shot; the older boy was supposed to make advances, which could be rejected right away; otherwise, he had the right to make his case. But I wasn’t ready yet: I preferred to suffer, and dream of my lost love. Then an odd incident made me change my mind. The boy in the bunk next to mine, Pierre S., was my age. One night his voice woke me up. He wasn’t moaning: on the contrary, he was speaking loudly and clearly, but to all appearances he was asleep. I myself was only half awake, but though I don’t remember his words exactly, the horror they filled me with is still keen. It was something like: “No, no more, that’s enough,” or else: “Please, that’s too far, just half.” Thinking about it, the meaning of these words is ambiguous; but in the middle of the night my interpretation didn’t seem doubtful at all. And I was frozen, overcome by this great fear; I curled up in the middle of my bed, trying not to hear. Even then, the violence of my terror, the quickness with which it had filled me, surprised me. These words, as I came to understand in the next few days, which said openly things that were hidden and unnamable, must have found their hidden counterparts deep down within me, and these, once awakened, raised their sinister heads and opened their shining eyes. Little by little, I came to tell myself this: If I can’t have her, then what possible difference can any of this make? One day a boy confronted me on the staircase: “I saw you during gym,” he said, “I was underneath you, on the hurdle, your shorts were wide open.” He was an athletic boy about seventeen years old with disheveled hair, strong enough to intimidate the others. “All right,” I replied, before running down the steps. After that I didn’t have any more problems. This boy, whose name was André N., gave me little gifts and from time to time took me into the bathroom stalls. A poignant smell of fresh skin and sweat emanated from his body, sometimes mingled with slight hints of shit, as if he hadn’t wiped himself properly. The stalls stank of urine and disinfectant, they were always dirty, and even today the smell of men and sperm reminds me of the odor of carbolic acid and urine, along with dirty porcelain, flaking paint, rust, and broken locks. In the beginning, he didn’t do anything except touch me, or else I took him in my mouth. Then he wanted more. I was familiar with that already, I had already done it with her, after her periods had started; and it had given her pleasure, why couldn’t it give me pleasure too? And also, I reasoned, it brought me even closer to her; in that way, I would feel almost everything she felt, when she touched me, kissed me, licked me, then offered me her thin, narrow buttocks. It hurt me, it must have hurt her too, and then I waited, and when I came, I imagined that it was she who was coming, a blinding, heartrending orgasm, I almost managed to forget how my coming was a poor, limited thing next to hers, her oceanic pleasure of a woman already.

  Afterward it became a habit. When I looked at girls, trying to imagine myself taking their milk-white breasts in my mouth and then rubbing my penis in their mucous membrane, I said to myself: What’s the point? It’s not her and it never will be her. Better then for me to be her and all the others, me. I didn’t love those others, I already explained that to you at the outset. My mouth, my hands, my penis, my ass desired them, intensely sometimes, breathlessly, but from them I only wanted their hands, their penises, and their mouths. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel anything. When I contemplated Partenau’s beautiful naked body, already so cruelly wounded, a secret anguish filled me. When I ran my fingers over his breast, grazing the nipple and then his scar, I imagined this breast once again crushed under metal; when I kissed his lips, I saw his jaw torn off by burning jagged shrapnel; and when I went down between his legs, plunging into the luxuriant forest of his genitals, I knew that somewhere a landmine was lurking, waiting to tear them to shreds. His powerful arms, his lean thighs were just as vulnerable, no part of his beloved body was safe from harm. Next month, in a week, tomorrow, an hour from now, all this beautiful, soft flesh could in an instant be transformed into pulp, into a bloody, charred mass of meat, and his green eyes be extinguished forever. Sometimes I almost cried thinking about it. But when he was healed, and had finally left, I didn’t feel any sadness. He was killed in the end, the following year, at Kursk.

  Alone, I read, took walks. In the sanatorium garden, the apple trees were in flower, the bougainvilleas, wisteria, lilacs, laburnum, were all in bloom and assailed the air with a riot of violent, heavy, contrasting odors. I also went every day to stroll about in the botanical gardens, east of Yalta. The different sections rose in tiers above the sea, with grand views over the blue and then the gray of the horizon, and always to the back the omnipresent snow-covered range of the Yaila Mountains. In the arboretum, signs guided the visitor to a pistachio tree over a thousand years old and a yew tree that might have been five hundred; higher up, in the Verkhniy Park, the rose garden displayed two thousand species that were just opening up but were already humming with bees, like the lavender of my childhood; in Primorsky Park there were subtropical plants in glass houses, hardly damaged at all, and I would sit facing the sea to read, at rest. One day, returning through town, I visited Chekhov’s house, a comfortable little white dacha turned into a museum by the Soviets; the staff, judging from the signs on the walls, seemed especially proud of the living room piano, on which Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin had played; but for my part, I was stunned by the caretaker of the place, Masha, the actual sister, now an octogenarian, of Chekhov, who stayed seated on a simple wooden chair in the entryway, motionless, silent, her hands flat on her thighs. Her life, I knew, had been broken by the impossible, just like mine. Was she still dreaming, there in front of me, of the one who should have been standing at her side, Pharaoh, her dead brother and husband?

  One evening near the end of my leave, I went to the Kasino in Yalta, set up in a sort of slightly outmoded, rather pleasant rococo palace. In the large stairway leading to the main hall, I ran into an SS-Oberführer whom I knew well. I stepped aside and stood at attention to sa
lute him, and he returned my salute absentmindedly; but two steps farther down he stopped, turned around suddenly, and his face lit up: “Dr. Aue! I didn’t recognize you.” It was Otto Ohlendorf, my Amtschef in Berlin, who now commanded Einsatzgruppe D. He nimbly climbed back up the steps and shook my hand, congratulating me on my promotion. “What a surprise! What are you doing here?” I briefly explained my story. “Oh, you were with Blobel! I pity you. I don’t understand how they can keep mentally ill men like that in the SS, even less entrust them with a command.”—“Whatever the case,” I replied, “Standartenführer Weinmann seemed like a serious man.”—“I don’t know him much. He’s an employee of the Staatspolizei, isn’t he?” He contemplated me for an instant and then abruptly suggested: “Why don’t you stay with me? I need an adjunct for my Leiter III, in the Gruppenstab. My old one got typhus and was sent home. I know Dr. Thomas well, he won’t refuse your transfer.” The offer caught me by surprise: “Do I have to give you an answer right away?”—“No. Actually, yes!”—“All right, then, if Brigadeführer Thomas gives his consent, I accept.” He smiled and shook my hand again. “Excellent, excellent. Now I have to run. Come see me tomorrow in Simferopol, we’ll arrange everything and I’ll explain the details to you. You won’t have any trouble finding us, we’re next to the AOK, just ask. Good night!” He ran down the steps, waving, and disappeared. I headed for the bar and ordered a Cognac. I liked Ohlendorf enormously, and always took keen pleasure in our conversations; a chance to work with him again was more than I could have hoped for. He was a remarkably intelligent, penetrating man, definitely one of the best minds of National Socialism, and one of the most uncompromising; his attitude made him a lot of enemies, but for me he was an inspiration. The lecture he had given in Kiel, the first time I met him, had dazzled me. Speaking eloquently from a few scattered notes, in a clear, well-modulated voice, which marked each point forcefully and precisely, he had begun with a vigorous criticism of Italian fascism, which, according to him, was guilty of deifying the State without recognizing human communities, whereas National Socialism was based on community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Worse, Mussolini had systematically suppressed all institutional constraints on the men in power. That led directly to a totalitarian version of State control, where neither power nor its abuses knew the slightest limit. In principle, National Socialism was based on the reality of the value of the life of the human individual and of the Volk as a whole; thus, the State was subordinate to the requirements of the Volk. Under fascism, people had no value in themselves, they were objects of the State, and the only dominant reality was the State itself. Nevertheless, certain elements within the Party wanted to introduce fascism into National Socialism. Since the Seizure of Power, National Socialism, in certain sectors, had deviated, and was falling back on old methods to overcome temporary problems. These foreign tendencies were especially strong in the agricultural economy, and also in heavy industry, which was National Socialist in name only and which was profiting from the uncontrolled overspending of the State to expand beyond all measure. The arrogance and megalomania that reigned in certain sectors of the Party only aggravated the situation. The other mortal danger for National Socialism was what Ohlendorf called its Bolshevist deviation, mainly the collectivist tendencies of the DAF, the Labor Front. Ley was constantly denigrating the middle classes; he wanted to destroy small-and medium-size businesses, which formed the real social basis of the German economy. The fundamental and decisive measure of political economy should be Man; economics—and in this, one could follow Marx’s analyses completely—was the most important factor in the fate of mankind. It was true that a National Socialist economic order did not yet exist. But National Socialist policies in all sectors—economic, social, or constitutional—should always keep in mind that their object was man and the Volk. The collectivist tendencies in economic and social policies, like the absolutist tendencies in constitutional policies, deviated from this line. As the wellspring of National Socialism, we students, the future elite of the Party, should always remain faithful to its essential spirit, and let this spirit guide each of our actions and decisions.

  It was the most incisive critique of the state of things in modern Germany that I had ever heard. Ohlendorf, a man scarcely older than I, had obviously meditated for a long time on these questions and had based his conclusions on profound and rigorous analyses. What’s more, I later learned, when he was a student in Kiel, in 1934, he had been arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo for his virulent denunciations of the prostitution of National Socialism; this experience had no doubt contributed to inclining him toward the security services. He had a high opinion of his work; he saw it as an essential part of the implementation of National Socialism. After the lecture, when he had suggested that I collaborate with him as a V-mann, I had the misfortune, when he described the tasks, of blurting out stupidly: “But that’s a snitch’s job!” Ohlendorf had reacted dryly: “No, Herr Aue, it’s not the job of an informer. We’re not asking you to squeal, we couldn’t care less if your cleaning lady tells an anti-Party joke. But the joke interests us, since it reveals the mood of the Volk. The Gestapo has perfectly competent services to take care of the enemies of the State, but that’s not the jurisdiction of the Sicherheitsdienst, which is essentially an organ of information.” In Berlin, after I arrived, I had little by little attached myself to him, thanks especially to the intervention of my professor, Höhn, with whom he had stayed in touch after Höhn had left the SD. We saw each other from time to time over coffee; he invited me to his house to explain the Party’s latest unhealthy tendencies, and his ideas for correcting and fighting them. At that time he wasn’t working in the SD full time, he was also conducting research at the University of Kiel and later on became an important figure in the Reichsgruppe Handel, the Organization of German Commerce. When I finally entered the SD, he acted, as did Dr. Best, a little like my protector. But his ever-worsening conflict with Heydrich, and his difficult relations with the Reichsführer, had weakened his position, which didn’t prevent him from being appointed Amtschef III—head of the Sicherheitsdienst—during the formation of the RSHA. In Pretzsch, there were a lot of rumors about the reasons for his departure for Russia; they said he had refused the position several times, until Heydrich, supported by the Reichsführer, forced him to accept it in order to shove his nose in the mud.

  The next morning, I took a military shuttle and went up to Simferopol. Ohlendorf welcomed me with his usual politeness, which perhaps lacked warmth, but was suave and pleasant. “I forgot to ask you yesterday how Frau Ohlendorf is doing?”—“Käthe? Fine, thanks. Of course she misses me, but Krieg ist Krieg.” An orderly served us some excellent coffee and Ohlendorf launched into a quick presentation. “You’ll find that the work will be very interesting to you. You won’t have to worry about executive measures, I leave all that to the Kommandos; in any case, the Crimea is already nearly judenrein, and we’ve almost finished with the Gypsies too.”—“All the Gypsies?” I interrupted, surprised. “In the Ukraine, we’re not so systematic.”—“For me,” he replied, “they’re just as dangerous as the Jews, if not more so. In every war, the Gypsies act as spies, or as agents to communicate through the lines. Just read the narratives by Ricarda Huch or Schiller on the Thirty Years’ War.” He paused. “At first, you’ll mostly have to deal with research. We’re going to advance into the Caucasus in the spring—that’s a secret that I recommend you keep to yourself—and since it’s still a mostly unknown region, I’d like to gather some information for the Gruppenstab and the Kommandos, especially about the different ethnic minorities and their relationships among themselves and with the Soviet government. In principle, the same system of occupation will be applied as in the Ukraine; we’ll form a new Reichskommissariat, but of course the SP and the SD have to put their two cents in, and the better backed up those two cents are, the more chances they’ll have of being listened to. Your immediate superior will be Sturmbannführer Dr. Seibert, who is also the Group’s
Chief of Staff. Come with me, I’ll introduce you to him, and to Hauptsturmführer Ulrich, who will take care of your transfer.”

  I knew Seibert vaguely; in Berlin, he headed the SD Department D (Economics). He was a serious man, sincere, cordial, an excellent economist from the University of Göttingen, who seemed as out of place here as Ohlendorf. The premature loss of his hair had accelerated since his departure; but neither his broad bare forehead nor his preoccupied air nor the old dueling scar that gashed his chin managed to make him lose a kind of adolescent, perpetually dreamy look. He welcomed me kindly, introduced me to his other colleagues, and then, when Ohlendorf had left us, took me to the office of Ulrich, who seemed to me a fussy little bureaucrat. “The Oberführer has a somewhat loose vision of transfer procedures,” he informed me sourly. “Normally, you have to send a request to Berlin, then wait for the reply. You can’t just pick people off the street like that.”—“The Oberführer didn’t find me in the street, he found me in a Kasino,” I pointed out. He took off his glasses and looked at me, squinting: “Tell me, Hauptsturmführer, are you trying to be funny?”—“Not at all. If you really think it isn’t possible, I’ll tell the Oberführer and return to my Kommando.”—“No, no, no,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It’s complicated, that’s all. It will make more paperwork for me. However that may be, the Oberführer has already sent a letter about you to Brigadeführer Thomas. When he receives a reply, if it’s positive, I’ll refer to Berlin. It will take time. Go back to Yalta, then, and then come see me at the end of your leave.”