The Kindly Ones Page 29

  I returned to Voroshilovsk as our forces were taking Mozdok, an important Russian military center; the front now followed the Terek and Baksan rivers, and the 111th Infantry Division was getting ready to cross the Terek toward Groznyi. Our Kommandos were getting active: in Krasnodar, Sk 10a had liquidated the three hundred patients of the regional psychiatric hospital as well as those of a psychiatric clinic for children; in the KMV, Dr. Müller was preparing a large-scale Aktion, and had already formed Jewish Councils in every city; the Jews of Kislovodsk, headed by a dentist, had shown themselves to be so eager that they had come to hand over their carpets, jewelry, and warm clothes before they had even received the order. The HSSPF, Korsemann, had just arrived in Voroshilovsk with his staff and invited us, the night of my return, to his introductory speech. I had already heard about Korsemann, in the Ukraine: he had been a member of the Freikorps and the SA, had worked mostly with the Hauptamt Orpo and hadn’t joined the SS until late, just before the war. Heydrich, they said, didn’t want him and called him an SA agitator; but he was supported by Daluege and von dem Bach-Zelewski, and the Reichsführer had decided to make him an HSSPF, raising him up step-by-step. In the Ukraine, he was already serving as HSSPF z.b.V., that is, “for special tasks,” but he had remained largely in the shadow of Prützmann, who had succeeded Jeckeln as HSSPF Russland-Süd in November 1941. So Korsemann still hadn’t proven himself; the offensive in the Caucasus offered him the chance to demonstrate his capabilities. That seemed to have stimulated an enthusiasm in him that bubbled over in his speech. The SS, he hammered out, had to carry out not only negative tasks, of security and repression, but also positive tasks, to which the Einsatzgruppe could and should contribute: positive propaganda for the natives; fighting infectious diseases; renovating sanatoriums for the Waffen-SS wounded; and economic production, especially in the oil industry, but also in other mining assets still to be allocated, which the SS could assume control of for its businesses. He also urgently stressed the subject of relations with the Wehrmacht: “You’re all certainly aware of the problems related to this that severely affected the work of the Einsatzgruppe at the beginning of the campaign. From now on, to avoid any incident, relations of the SS with the OKHG and the AOK will be centralized by my office. Beyond the usual liaisons and working relations, no SS officer under my command is authorized to negotiate questions of importance directly with the Wehrmacht. In case of any inopportune initiative in this domain, I will be ruthless, believe me.” But despite this unusual stiffness, which seemed to stem from the lack of confidence of a newcomer still ill at ease in his functions, Korsemann spoke eloquently, and showed great personal charm; the general impression was mostly positive. Later that night, during a small informal meeting of subaltern officers, Remmer offered an explanation for Korsemann’s pettifogging attitude: what worried him was still having almost no actual authority. According to the principle of double subordination, the Einsatzgruppe reported directly to the RSHA, and therefore Bierkamp could countermand any order from Korsemann that didn’t suit him: the same was true for the SS economists from the WVHA, and of course for the Waffen-SS, which in any case was subordinated to the Wehrmacht. Ordinarily, to establish his authority and dispose of his own troops, an HSSPF had a few Orpo battalions; but Korsemann hadn’t yet received such forces, and so in fact remained an HSSPF “without special tasks”: he could make suggestions, but if Bierkamp didn’t like them, he wasn’t obliged to follow them.

  At the KMV, Dr. Müller was launching his action and Prill asked me to go inspect it. I began to find this curious: I didn’t have anything against inspections, but Prill seemed to be doing everything to keep me away from Voroshilovsk. We were expecting the imminent arrival of Seibert’s replacement, Dr. Leetsch; perhaps Prill, whose rank was the same as mine, was worried that, playing on my relations with Ohlendorf, I could scheme with Leetsch to be named adjunct instead of him. If that was the case, it was idiotic: I had no ambition in that regard, and Prill had nothing to fear from me. But maybe I was imagining things for no reason? It was hard to say. I had never mastered the baroque rituals of precedence in the SS, and it was easy to err in either direction; instinct and Thomas’s advice here would have been precious to me. But Thomas was far away, and I didn’t have any close friend in the Group. To tell the truth, they weren’t the kind of people with whom I could easily strike up a bond. They had been picked out of the most obscure offices of the RSHA, and most of them were very ambitious and saw the work of the Einsatzgruppe only as a springboard; almost all of them, as soon as they arrived, seemed to regard the work of extermination as self-evident, and they didn’t even ask themselves the questions that had so worried the men in the first year. In the midst of these men, I was seen as a somewhat complicated intellectual, and I remained isolated. That didn’t bother me: I have always been able to do without the friendship of coarse loudmouths. But I had to stay on my guard.

  I reached Pyatigorsk early in the morning. It was the beginning of September and the blue-gray of the sky was still hazy and heavy with summer dust. The road from Voroshilovsk crosses the railroad just before Mineralnye Vody, then, running alongside it, snakes between the five volcanic peaks that give Pyatigorsk its name. You enter the city from the north, skirting round the great hump of the Mashuk; the road rises at this point, and the town appeared suddenly at my feet, with beyond it the undulating sweep of the foothills, dotted with volcanoes, their collapsed domes scattered about. The Einsatzkommando was occupying one of the turn-of-the-century sanatoriums sprawled at the foot of Mount Mashuk, in the eastern part of town; von Kleist’s AOK had requisitioned the immense Lermontov Sanatorium, but the SS had been able to obtain the Voenaya Sanatoria, which would serve as a lazaretto for the Waffen-SS. The Leibstandarte was fighting in the area, and I thought with a vague twinge about Partenau; but it isn’t good to try to revive old affairs, and I knew I wouldn’t make any effort to see him again. Pyatigorsk was still mostly intact; after a brief skirmish with a factory’s self-defense militia, the town had been captured without combat; the streets were swarming like those of an American mining town during the Gold Rush. Wagons and even camels got in the way of military vehicles pretty much everywhere to create traffic jams that the Feldgendarmen broke up with a liberal sprinkling of insults and blows. Opposite the large Tsvetnik Garden, in front of the Bristol Hotel, neatly parked cars and motorcycles marked the emplacement of the Feldkommandantur; the offices of the Einsatzkommando were lower down, on Kirov Boulevard, in a two-story former institute. The trees on the boulevard hid its pretty façade; and I examined the ceramic floral motifs, set under stucco moldings representing, seated above two pigeons, a cherub with a basket of flowers on his head; at the top, you could make out a parrot perched on a ring, and the head of a sad little girl with pinched nostrils. On the right an archway led to an inner courtyard. My driver parked there next to the Saurer truck while I showed the guards my papers. Dr. Müller was busy, and I was received by Obersturmführer Dr. Bolte, an officer from the Staatspolizei. The staff occupied large rooms with high ceilings, well lit by tall wooden casement windows; Dr. Bolte had his office in a pretty little circular room, at the very top of one of the two towers set at the corners of the building. He curtly explained the procedures of the action: each day, according to a timetable drawn up on the basis of the figures provided by the Jewish Councils, a part or all of the Jews of one of the towns of the KMV were evacuated by train; the posters inviting them to come “resettle in the Ukraine” had been printed by the Wehrmacht, which also provided the train and the escort troops; they were sent to Mineralnye Vody, where they were held in a glass factory before they were taken a little farther off, to a Soviet antitank ditch. The figures had turned out larger than expected: we had found a lot of Jews evacuated from the Ukraine or from Byelorussia, as well as the teaching staff and students from the University of Leningrad, sent to the KMV the previous year for their safety, many of whom were either Jews or Party members, or were regarded as dangerous because th
ey were intellectuals. The Einsatzkommando was taking advantage of the occasion to liquidate arrested Communists, Komsomols, Gypsies, common law criminals found in jail, and the staff and patients of several sanatoriums. “You understand,” Bolte explained, “the infrastructure here is ideal for our administration. Envoys of the Reichskommissar, for example, asked us to free up the sanatorium of the People’s Commissariat for the oil industry, in Kislovodsk.” The Aktion was already well under way: on the first day they had finished with the Jews of Minvody, then of Yessentuki and Zheleznovodsk; the next day, they would start with the Jews of Pyatigorsk, then the action would end with the Jews of Kislovodsk. In each case, the evacuation order was posted two days before the operation. “Since they can’t travel from one town to the other, they don’t suspect anything.” He invited me to come with him to inspect the action under way; I replied that I would rather visit the other towns of the KMV first. “Then I won’t be able to go with you: Sturmbannführer Müller is waiting for me.” “That’s all right. You can just lend me a man who knows the offices of your Teilkommandos.”

  The road left the town from the west, skirting round Beshtau, the largest of the five volcanoes; below, one could glimpse now and then the bends of the Podkumok, its waters gray and muddy. I didn’t actually have much to do in these other towns, but I was curious to visit them, and I wasn’t burning with desire to go see the Aktion. Yessentuki, under the Soviets, had been transformed into an industrial city of not much interest; I met the officers of the Teilkommando there, discussed their arrangements, and didn’t linger. Kislovodsk, on the other hand, turned out to be very pleasant, an old spa town with a faded, outmoded charm, greener and prettier than Pyatigorsk. The main baths were housed in a curious imitation Indian temple, built around the turn of the century; I tasted the water they call Narzan, and found it pleasantly sparkling, but a little too bitter. After my discussions I took a stroll in the large park, then returned to Pyatigorsk.

  The officers ate together in the sanatorium’s dining room. Conversation dealt mostly with military events, and most of the diners showed proper optimism. “Now that Schweppenburg’s Panzers have crossed the Terek,” argued Wiens, Müller’s adjunct, a bitter Volksdeutscher who hadn’t set foot outside of the Ukraine until he was twenty-four, “our forces will soon be in Groznyi. After that, Baku is just a matter of time. Most of us will be able to celebrate Christmas at home.”—“General Schweppenburg’s Panzers are making no headway whatsoever, Hauptsturmführer,” I politely remarked. “They’ve barely managed to establish a bridgehead. Soviet resistance in Chechnya-Ingushetia is much stiffer than they expected.”—“Bah,” exclaimed Pfeiffer, a fat red Untersturmführer, “it’s their last gasp. Their divisions are bled dry. They’re just leaving a thin screen in front of us to try to deceive us; but at the first serious thrust, they’ll collapse or cut and run like rabbits.”—“How do you know that?” I asked curiously.—“That’s what they’re saying at the AOK,” Wiens answered for him. “Ever since the beginning of the summer, very few prisoners have been taken in the areas surrounded, like at Millerovo. From that they deduce that the Bolsheviks have exhausted their reserves, as our high command had foreseen.”—“We talked a lot about this aspect of things at the Gruppenstab and with the OKHG,” I said. “Not everyone shares your opinion. Some think that the Soviets learned a lesson from their terrible losses last year, and changed their strategy: they’re withdrawing before us in an orderly way, so as to mount a sudden counteroffensive when our lines of communication are vulnerable and stretched too thin.”—“I think you’re too much of a pessimist, Hauptsturmführer,” grumbled Müller, the head of the Kommando, his mouth full of chicken.—“I’m not a pessimist, Sturmbannführer,” I replied. “I’m just saying that there are different opinions, that’s all.”—“Do you think our lines are stretched too thin?” Bolte asked curiously.—“That depends on what’s actually facing them. The front line of Army Group B follows the course of the Don, where there are still Soviet bridgeheads that we haven’t been able to eliminate, all the way from Voronezh, which the Russians still hold despite all our efforts, down to Stalingrad.”—“Stalingrad won’t last much longer,” said Wiens, who had just emptied his stein. “Our Luftwaffe crushed the defense last month; the Sixth Army will just have to clean up.”—“Maybe. But since all our troops are concentrated on Stalingrad, the flanks of Army Group B are held only by our allies, on the Don and in the steppe. You know as well as I do that the quality of Romanian or Italian troops doesn’t come close to that of the German forces; the Hungarians might be good soldiers, but they have no supplies. Here, in the Caucasus, it’s the same, we don’t have enough men to form a continuous front along the ridges. And between the two Army Groups, the front peters out in the Kalmuk Steppe; we only send patrols out there, and we’re not safe from unpleasant surprises.”—“On that point,” interrupted Dr. Strohschneider, an immensely tall man, whose lips jutted out from under a bushy moustache and who commanded a Teilkommando on assignment in Budyonnovsk, “Hauptsturmführer Aue is not entirely wrong. The steppe is wide open. A bold attack could weaken our position.”—“Oh,” said Wiens as he drank some more beer, “they’ll never be anything but mosquito bites. And if they take a shot at our allies, the German ‘corsetting’ will be more than enough to control the situation.”—“I hope you’re right,” I said.—“In any case,” Dr. Müller sententiously concluded, “the Führer will always be able to impose the right decisions on all those reactionary generals.” That was certainly one way of seeing things. But the conversation had already shifted to the day’s Aktion. I listened in silence. As always, there were the inevitable anecdotes about the way the condemned behaved, how they prayed, cried, sang the Internationale, or were silent, and then commentaries on the problems of organization and our men’s responses. I put up with all this wearily; even the old-timers were only repeating what we’d been hearing for a year, there wasn’t a single authentic reaction in all these boasts and platitudes. One officer, though, stood out because of his particularly prolonged, coarse invectives against the Jews. He was the Leiter IV of the Kommando, Hauptsturmführer Turek, a disagreeable man I’d already met in the Gruppenstab. This Turek was one of the few visceral, obscene anti-Semites, in the Streicher mode, whom I had met in the Einsatzgruppen; at the SP and the SD, traditionally, we cultivated an intellectual kind of anti-Semitism, and these kinds of emotional remarks were poorly viewed. But Turek was afflicted with a remarkably Jewish physique: he had dark curly hair, a prominent nose, sensual lips; behind his back, some people cruelly called him “Jew Süss,” while others insinuated that he had Gypsy blood. He must have suffered from this since childhood; and at the slightest provocation he boasted about his Aryan ancestry: “I know it’s hard to see,” he would begin before explaining that for his recent wedding he had had to carry out exhaustive research and had been able to go back to the seventeenth century; he would go so far as to produce his RuSHA certificate attesting that he was of pure race and fit to procreate German children. I understood all that, and might have pitied him; but his outrageousness and obscenities surpassed all bounds: at the executions, I had heard, he taunted the condemned men for their circumsized penises, and forced women to strip naked so he could tell them that their Jewish vaginas would never produce any more children. Ohlendorf would not have tolerated such behavior, but Bierkamp closed his eyes to it; as for Müller, who should have called him to order, he said nothing. Turek was talking now with Pfeiffer, who directed the firing squads during the action; Pfeiffer was laughing at his jokes and egging him on. Sickened, I excused myself before dessert and went up to my room. My bouts of nausea had started up again; since Voroshilovsk, or earlier maybe, I was again suffering from the brutal retching that had so exhausted me in the Ukraine. I had vomited only once, in Voroshilovsk, after a rather heavy meal, but sometimes I had to make an effort to control the nausea: I coughed a lot, grew red, I found this unseemly and preferred to withdraw.