The Kindly Ones Page 37

  Voss, according to von Gilsa, was still in Nalchik; I had to see him and went there at the first opportunity. In Malka, a thin layer of snow already covered the fields; by the time I reached Baksan, flurries were darkening the sky, great whirls of flakes projected into the light from the headlamps. The mountains, the fields, the trees, everything had disappeared; the vehicles coming from the opposite direction looked like roaring monsters, surging out of the wings hidden by the curtain of the storm. I had only a wool coat from the previous year; it was still sufficient, but wouldn’t be for long. I would have to think about getting some warm clothing, I said to myself. In Nalchik, I found Voss surrounded by his books at the Ortskommandantur, where he had set up his office; he took me to have some ersatz coffee at the mess, at a little beaten-up Formica table with a vase of plastic flowers on it. The coffee was revolting and I tried to drown it in milk; Voss didn’t seem to mind it. “You aren’t too disappointed by the failure of the offensive?” I asked him. “For your research, I mean.”—“A little, of course. But I have enough to keep me busy here.” He seemed distant, a little lost. “So General Köstring has asked you to take part in the commission to investigate the Bergjuden?”—“Yes. And I heard that you were going to represent the SS.” I laughed dryly: “More or less. Oberführer Bierkamp automatically promoted me to the rank of specialist in Caucasian affairs. That’s your fault, I think.” He laughed and drank some coffee. Soldiers and officers, some still coated with snow, were coming and going or talking in low voices at the other tables. “And what do you think about the problem?” I asked.—“What do I think? The way they’ve put it, it’s absurd. The only thing you can say about these people is that they speak an Iranian language, practice the Mosaic religion, and live according to the customs of the Caucasian mountain people. That’s it.”—“Yes, but they do have an origin.” He shrugged his shoulders: “Everyone has an origin, most of the time a dreamed one. We talked about that. For the Tats, it’s lost in time and legend. Even if they really were Jews who came from Babylonia—let’s even say one of the lost tribes—in the meantime they must have mingled with the peoples from here so much that it wouldn’t mean anything anymore. In Azerbaidjan, there are Muslim Tats. Are they Jews who accepted Islam? Or did these hypothetical Jews from elsewhere trade women with an Iranian, pagan tribe whose descendants converted later on to one or the other religion of the Book? It’s impossible to say.”—“But,” I insisted, “there must be scientific clues that would allow us to decide?”—“There are plenty, and you can make them say anything. Take their language. I’ve already talked with them and I can situate it pretty well. Especially since I found a book by Vsevolod Miller about it. It’s basically a western Iranian dialect, with Hebrew and Turkish contributions. The Hebrew contribution concerns mostly the religious vocabulary, but not systematically: they call the synagogue nimaz, Passover Nisanu, and Purim Homonu; those are all Persian names. Before Soviet power, they wrote their Persian language with Hebrew characters, but according to them, those books didn’t survive the reforms. Nowadays, Tat is written in Latinic characters: in Daghestan, they publish newspapers and educate their children in that language. Now, if they really were Chaldeans or Jews who came from Babylon after the destruction of the First Temple, as some people would like us to think, they should by all logic speak some dialect derived from Middle Iranian, close to the Pahlavi language of the Sassanid era. But this Tat language is a new Iranian dialect, posterior to the tenth century and hence close to Dari, Baluch, or Kurdish. Without stretching the facts, we could conclude that there was a relatively recent immigration, followed by a conversion. But if you want to prove the opposite, you could do that too. What I don’t understand is what connection any of this has with the security of our troops. Aren’t we capable of judging their attitude toward us objectively, based on fact?”—“It’s quite simply a racial problem,” I replied. “We know that racially inferior groups exist, including the Jews, who present marked characteristics that in turn predispose them to Bolshevik corruption, theft, murder, and all kinds of other harmful manifestations. Obviously, that is not the case for all members of the group. But in wartime, in a context of occupation, and with our limited resources, it is impossible for us to carry out individual investigations. So we are forced to consider the risk-bearing groups as a whole, and to react globally. That creates great injustices, but that’s because of the exceptional situation.” Voss gazed at his coffee with a bitter, sad look. “Doktor Aue. I have always thought of you as an intelligent, sensible man. Even if everything you’re telling me is true, explain to me, if you please, what you mean by ‘race.’ Because for me, that’s a concept that is scientifically indefinable and hence without any theoretical value.”—“But race exists, that’s a fact, our best researchers are studying it and writing about it. You know that very well. Our racial anthropologists are the best in the world.” Voss suddenly exploded: “They are clowns. They have no competition in serious countries because their discipline doesn’t exist and isn’t taught there. If it weren’t for politics, none of them would have a job or be published!”—“Doktor Voss, I respect your opinions very much, but you’re going a little far, aren’t you?” I said gently. Voss struck the table with the flat of his hand, causing the cups and the vase of fake flowers to jump; the noise and his outburst made some heads turn: “This philosophy of veterinarians, as Herder called it, has stolen all its ideas from linguistics, the only social science to this day that has a scientifically valid theoretical basis. Do you understand”—he had lowered his voice and was speaking quickly and furiously—“do you even understand what a scientific theory is? A theory is not a fact: it is a tool that allows one to make predictions and generate new hypotheses. We say a theory is good, first of all, if it is relatively simple and then if it allows us to make verifiable predictions. Newtonian physics allows us to calculate orbits: if you observe the position of Earth or Mars at several months’ intervals, they are always exactly where the theory predicts they should be. On the other hand, it has been noted that the orbit of Mercury has slight irregularities that deviate from the orbit predicted by Newtonian theory. Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts these deviations with precision: so it is a better theory than Newton’s. Now, in Germany, once the greatest scientific country in the world, Einstein’s theory is denounced as Jewish science and rejected without any other explanation. That is quite simply absurd, that’s what we reproach the Bolsheviks for, with their own pseudo-sciences in the service of the Party. It’s the same thing for linguistics as against so-called racial anthropology. In linguistics, for example, Indo-Germanic comparative grammar has allowed us to draw up a theory of phonological mutations that has an excellent predictive value. As early as 1820, Bopp derived Greek and Latin from Sanskrit. By starting with Middle Iranian and following the same fixed rules, we can find words in Gaelic. It works and it’s demonstrable. So it’s a good theory, although it’s constantly being elaborated, corrected, and perfected. Racial anthropology, by comparison, has no theory. It postulates races, without being able to define them, then posits hierarchies, without the slightest criteria. All the attempts to define races biologically have failed. Cranial anthropometry was a total flop: after decades of measurements and compilations of tables, based on the most farfetched indices or angles, we still can’t tell a Jewish skull from a German skull with any degree of certainty. As for Mendelian genetics, it gives good results for simple organisms, but aside from the Habsburg chin, we’re still far from being able to apply it to man. All this is so much the case that in order to write our famous racial laws, we were forced to use the grandparents’ religion as a basis! It was postulated that the Jews of the last century were racially pure, but that’s absolutely arbitrary. Even you have to see that. As for what constitutes a racially pure German, no one knows, whatever your Reichsführer-SS may say. So racial anthropology, incapable of defining anything, was simply built on the so much more demonstrable categories of linguistics. Schlegel, who was fascin
ated by the work of Humboldt and Bopp, deduced from the existence of a supposedly original Indo-Iranian language the idea of an equally original people, whom he baptized Aryan, taking the term from Herodotus. The same for the Jews: once the linguists had demonstrated the existence of a so-called Semitic group of languages, the racialists jumped on the idea, which they apply in a completely illogical way, since Germany wants to cultivate the Arabs and the Führer officially welcomes the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem! Language, as a vehicle of culture, can have an influence on thought and behavior. Humboldt had already understood that a long time ago. But language can be transmitted and so can culture, although much more slowly. In Chinese Turkestan, the Muslim Turkic speakers in Ürümqi or Kashgar have an appearance we’ll call Iranian: you might take them for Sicilians. Of course they are descendants of peoples who must have migrated from the West and who once spoke an Indo-Iranian language. Then they were invaded and assimilated by a Turkic people, the Uighurs, from whom they took their language and some of their customs. They now form a cultural group that is distinct, for example, from Turkic peoples like the Kazakhs or the Kirghiz, and also from the Islamicized Chinese called the Hui, or from Indo-Iranian Muslims such as the Tadjiks. But trying to define them other than by their language, their religion, their customs, their habitat, their economic usages, or their own sense of identity would make no sense. And all that is acquired, not innate. Blood transmits a propensity for heart diseases; if it also transmits a propensity for treason, no one has ever been able to prove it. In Germany, some idiots are studying cats with their tails cut off to try to prove that their kittens will be born without a tail; and because they wear a gold button they’re given a university chair! In the USSR, on the other hand, despite all the political pressure, the linguistic studies of Marr and his colleagues, at least on a theoretical level, are still excellent and objective, because”—he rapped sharply on the table with his knuckles—“like this table, it exists. As for people like Hans Günther or that Georges Montandon, in France, who’s also made a name for himself, I say they’re full of shit. And if it’s criteria like theirs that you use to decide whether people live or die, you’d do better to go shooting at random into a crowd, the result would be the same.” I hadn’t said anything during Voss’s whole long tirade. Finally I replied, rather slowly: “Doktor Voss, I didn’t know you were so passionate. Your theses are provocative, and I cannot agree with you on every point. I think you underestimate some of the idealistic notions that form our Weltanschauung and that are far from a philosophy of veterinarians, as you say. Nevertheless, this requires thought, and I wouldn’t want to answer you lightly. So I hope you will agree to resume this conversation in a few days, when I’ve had time to think about it.”—“Of course,” Voss said, suddenly calmer. “I’m sorry I got carried away. Only, when you hear so many stupid and inept things around you, it becomes difficult at a certain point to keep quiet. I’m not talking about you, of course, but about some of my colleagues. My only wish and my only hope would be that German science, when passions have calmed down, can recover the position it had acquired with so much difficulty thanks to the work of so many fine men, subtle, attentive, and humble before the things of this world.”

  I was open to some of Voss’s arguments: if the Bergjuden did in fact think of themselves as authentic Caucasian mountain people, and were regarded as such by their neighbors, their attitude toward us, in general, might indeed remain loyal, whatever the origin of their blood. Cultural and social factors could also count; one had to consider, for example, the relations this people had with the Bolshevik authorities. The words of the old Tat, in Pyatigorsk, had suggested to me that the Bergjuden were not particularly fond of the Jews of Russia, and perhaps the same was true for the whole Stalinist system. The attitude of the other tribes toward them was also important, you couldn’t depend on the word of Shadov alone: here too, perhaps, the Jews were living as parasites. Going back to Pyatigorsk, I thought about Voss’s other arguments. To deny racial anthropology as a whole in that way seemed to me to be overdoing it; of course the methods could be refined, and I didn’t doubt that people of little talent were able to profit from their Party connections to construct an undeserved career for themselves: Germany was swarming with parasites like that (and fighting that was also one of the tasks of the SD, in the minds of some people at least). But Voss, despite all his talent, had the definitive opinions of youth. Things were certainly more complex than he thought. I didn’t have the knowledge to criticize him, but it seemed to me that if you believed in a certain idea of Germany and the German Volk, the rest had to follow naturally. Some things could be demonstrated, but others simply had to be understood; it was also no doubt a question of faith.

  In Pyatigorsk, the first reply from Berlin was waiting for me, sent by telex. Amt VII had sought the opinion of a certain Professor Kittel, who wrote: Difficult question, to be studied locally. That was not very encouraging. Department VII B 1, on the other hand, had prepared documentation that would arrive soon by air mail. The specialist from the Wehrmacht, von Gilsa told me, was on his way, and Rosenberg’s expert would follow him soon after. Waiting for ours to arrive, I settled the problem of my winter clothing. Reuter kindly placed one of the Jewish artisans from the Wehrmacht at my service, an old man with a long beard, quite thin; he came to take my measurements, and I ordered a long gray coat from him with an Astrakhan collar, lined with shearling, which the Russians call a shuba, and a pair of fleece-lined boots; as for the shapka (the one from the year before had disappeared a long time ago), I went myself and found one at the market, the Verkhnyi rynok, in silver fox. A number of officers from the Waffen-SS had adopted the custom of having a death’s head insignia sewn onto their non-regulation shapkas; I thought that a bit affected; but on the other hand, I removed the epaulettes and an SD insignia from one of my jackets and had them sewn onto the coat.

  My bouts of nausea and vomiting caught me at irregular intervals; and harrowing dreams began to deepen my unease. Often they remained black and opaque; morning erased all images and left only the weight of them. But sometimes too this darkness was ripped apart all of a sudden, revealing visions blinding in their clarity and horror. Two or three nights after I returned from Nalchik, I ill-advisedly opened one of these doors: Voss, in a dark, empty room, was on all fours, his rear end bare, and liquid shit was streaming from his anus. Worried, I seized some paper, some pages from Izvestia, and tried to sponge up this brown liquid, which was becoming increasingly darker and thicker. I tried to keep my hands clean, but it was impossible, the almost black pitch covered the pages and my fingers, then my whole hand. Sick with disgust, I ran to wash my hands in a bathtub nearby; but during this time it was still streaming. Waking up, I tried to understand these frightful images; but I must not have been completely awake, since my thoughts, which seemed to me at the time perfectly lucid, remained as cloudy as the meaning of the image itself: it seemed to me in fact from certain signs that these people represented others, that the man on all fours must have been me, and the one who was wiping him, my father. And what could the articles from Izvestia have been about? Could there have been a piece there that might have settled the Tat question once and for all? The mail from VII B 1, sent by a certain Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Füsslein, did nothing to resolve my pessimism; the zealous Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat, in fact, had simply contented himself with culling excerpts from The Jewish Encyclopedia. There were some very erudite things there, but their contradictory opinions, alas, led to no conclusion. Thus I learned that the Jews of the Caucasus were mentioned for the first time by Benjamin of Tudela, who had traveled to these lands around 1170, and Pethahiah of Ratisbon, who asserted that they were of Persian origin and had come to the Caucasus around the twelfth century. Willem van Ruysbroeck, in 1254, had found a large Jewish population east of the massif, in the region of Astrakhan. But a Georgian text of 314 mentioned Hebrew-speaking Jews who had adopted the old Iranian language (“Parsee” or “Tat”) after the occupation
of the Transcaucasus by the Persians, mixing it with Hebrew and local languages. The Jews of Georgia, however, called, according to Koch, Huria (perhaps derived from Iberia), speak not Tat but a Kartvelian dialect. As for Daghestan, according to the Derbent-Nameh, the Arabs had already found Jews there during their conquest, in the eighth century. Contemporary researchers only complicated the affair. There was reason to despair; I resolved to send all of it to Bierkamp and Leetsch without commentary, insisting that a specialist be summoned as soon as possible.

  The snow stopped for a few days, then started up again. In the mess, the officers spoke in low, worried voices: Rommel had been beaten by the English at El-Alamein, then, a few days later, the English and Americans had landed in North Africa; our forces had just occupied the Free Zone in France, in retaliation; but that had pushed the Vichy troops in Africa to go over to the Allies. “If only things were going better here,” was von Gilsa’s comment. But before Ordzhonikidze our divisions had gone on the defensive; the line ran from south of Chegem and Nalchik to Chikola and Gizel, then followed the Terek to the north of Malgobek; and soon, a Soviet counterattack recaptured Gizel. Then came the real blow. I didn’t learn about it right away, since the officers from the Abwehr blocked my access to the map room and refused to give me any details. “I’m sorry,” Reuter said. “Your Kommandant will have to discuss it with the OKHG.” At the end of the day I managed to learn that the Soviets had launched a counteroffensive on the Stalingrad front; but I couldn’t find out where or how large it was: the officers from the AOK, their faces somber and tense, obstinately refused to talk to me. Leetsch, on the telephone, told me that the OKHG was reacting in the same way; the Gruppenstab didn’t know any more than I did, and asked me to pass on any new information immediately. This attitude persisted the next day, and I got angry with Reuter, who retorted curtly that the AOK had no obligation to inform the SS about operations under way outside of its own area of responsibility. But already the rumors were spreading, the officers could no longer control the Latrinenparolen; I fell back on the drivers, dispatch riders, and noncoms and, in a few hours, by cross-checking the various tidbits, managed to form some idea of the extent of the danger. I called back Leetsch, who seemed to have the same information; but as to what the Wehrmacht’s reaction would be, no one could say. The two Romanian fronts, west of Stalingrad on the Don and to the south in the Kalmuk Steppe, were collapsing, and the Reds were evidently aiming to take the Sixth Army from the rear. Where had they found the necessary troops? I couldn’t manage to find out where they were, the situation was evolving too quickly even for the cooks to follow, but it seemed urgent that the Sixth Army begin a retreat to keep from being surrounded; yet the Sixth Army wasn’t moving. On November 21, Generaloberst von Kleist was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and named Commander in Chief of Army Group A: the Führer must have been feeling overwhelmed. Generaloberst von Mackensen took Kleist’s place at the head of the First Panzer Army. Von Gilsa passed me this news officially; he seemed desperate, and hinted to me that the situation was becoming catastrophic. The next day, a Sunday, the two Soviet pincer movements met up at Kalach-on-the-Don, and the Sixth Army as well as part of the Fourth Panzer Army were surrounded. Rumors spoke of a debacle, of massive losses, of chaos; but every seemingly precise piece of information contradicted the previous one. By the end of the day, finally, Reuter took me to von Gilsa, who gave me a quick summary on the maps. “The decision not to try to evacuate the Sixth Army was made by the Führer himself,” he told me. The surrounded divisions now formed a giant Kessel, a “cauldron” as they said, cut off from our lines, but stretching from Stalingrad through the steppe almost to the Don. The situation was worrisome, but the rumors were exaggerating things terribly; the German forces had lost few men or materiel and kept their cohesion; what’s more, the experience of Demiansk, the previous year, showed that a Kessel, if supplied by air, could hold out indefinitely. “A breakthrough operation will soon be launched,” he concluded. A meeting called the next day by Bierkamp confirmed this optimistic interpretation: Reichsmarschall Göring, Korsemann announced, had given his word to the Führer that the Luftwaffe was able to supply the Sixth Army; General Paulus had joined his staff in Gumrak to direct operations from within the Kessel; and Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein was being recalled from Vitebsk to form a new Army Group Don, tasked with relieving the surrounded forces. This last piece of news especially created a great sense of relief: ever since the taking of Sebastopol, von Manstein was regarded as the best strategist in the Wehrmacht; if anyone could resolve the situation, it was he.