The Kindly Ones Page 4

  Blobel called all the officers together the next day. Early in the morning, about twenty men had gone with Callsen. “I sent him to Lutsk with a Vorkommando. The whole Kommando will follow in a day or two. That’s where we’ll set up our headquarters, for now. The AOK will also be transferred to Lutsk. Our divisions are advancing quickly, we have to get to work. I’m waiting for Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, who will give us orders.” Jeckeln, an old Party hand, was the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer for southern Russia; all SS formations in the zone, including our own, were subordinated to him in one way or another. But the question of the chain of command continued to worry Kehrig: “So, are we under the authority of the Obergruppenführer?”—“Administratively, we’re subordinated to the Sixth Army. But tactically we receive our orders from the RSHA, via the Gruppenstab, and from the HSSPF. Is that clear?” Kehrig nodded and sighed: “Not entirely, but I’m guessing the details will become clearer as we go along.” Blobel flushed crimson: “But they explained everything to you in Pretzsch, good God!” Kehrig kept his calm. “In Pretzsch, Standartenführer, they explained absolutely nothing to us. They fed us some speeches and made us exercise. That’s it. I would remind you that the representatives of the SD were not invited to the meeting with Gruppenführer Heydrich, last week. I’m sure there were good reasons for that, but the fact is that I have no idea what I should do, aside from write reports on the morale and behavior of the Wehrmacht.” He turned to Vogt, the Leiter IV: “You were there, at that meeting. Well, when they explain our tasks to us, we’ll carry them out.” Vogt tapped on the table with a pen, ill at ease. Blobel chewed the inside of his cheeks and stared furiously at a point on the wall. “All right,” he finally barked. “In any case, the Obergruppenführer is arriving tonight. We’ll see about that tomorrow.”

  This inconclusive meeting probably took place on June 27, since the next day we were summoned to a speech by Obergruppenführer Jeckeln and my books affirm that this speech took place on the twenty-eighth. Jeckeln and Blobel had probably told themselves that the men of the Sonderkommando were in need of a little direction and motivation; late in the morning, the whole Kommando came to line up in the school courtyard to listen to the HSSPF. Jeckeln didn’t mince his words. Our job, he explained to us, was to identify and eliminate any element behind our lines that might threaten the security of our troops. Any Bolshevik, any People’s Commissar, any Jew and any Gypsy could at any instant dynamite our quarters, assassinate our men, derail our trains, or transmit vital information to the enemy. Our duty wasn’t to wait till he acted and then punish him, but to prevent him from acting. Nor was it a question, given the swiftness of our advance, of creating and filling camps: any suspect would be sent to the firing squad. For the lawyers among us, he reminded us that the USSR had refused to sign the Hague conventions, and that, therefore, the international law that regulated our actions in the West did not apply here. Certainly there would be mistakes; certainly there would be innocent victims; but that, alas, was war; when you bomb a city, civilians die too. At times it might be hard for us, our sensitivity and delicacy as men and Germans might sometimes suffer from it, he knew; we should triumph over ourselves; and he could only remind us of a phrase of the Führer’s, which he had heard from his own mouth: The leaders must themselves make the sacrifice of overcoming their doubts. Thank you and Heil Hitler. That at least had the merit of frankness. In Pretzsch, Müller’s and Streckenbach’s speeches abounded with fine phrases about the need to be pitiless and merciless, but aside from confirming that we were in fact going to Russia, they had confined themselves to generalities. Heydrich, in Düben, during the departure parade, might have been more explicit; but he had scarcely begun to speak when a violent rainstorm broke: he had canceled his speech and gone off to Berlin. So our confusion wasn’t surprising, all the more so since few of us had the slightest operational experience; I myself, ever since I had been recruited into the SD, did almost nothing but compile legal files, and I was far from being the exception. Kehrig took care of constitutional questions; even Vogt, the Leiter IV, came from the card files department. As for Standartenführer Blobel, they had taken him from the Düsseldorf Staatspolizei; he had probably never done anything but arrest asocials or homosexuals, along with maybe a Communist from time to time. In Pretzsch, they said he had been an architect: he had obviously not made a career of it. He was not what you would call a nice man; I found him aggressive, almost brutal with his colleagues. His round face, with his crushed chin and protuberant ears, seemed to be perched on the neck of his uniform like the naked head of a vulture, a resemblance even more accentuated by his beaklike nose. Every time I passed near him, he stank of alcohol; Häfner said that he was trying to get over a case of dysentery. I was happy I didn’t have to deal with him directly, and Dr. Kehrig, who was forced to, seemed to suffer from it. He himself seemed to feel out of place here. In Pretzsch, Thomas had explained to me that they had taken most of the officers from offices where they weren’t indispensable; they had been summarily attributed SS ranks (that’s how I found myself an SS-Obersturmführer, the equivalent of one of your lieutenants); Kehrig, an Oberregierungsrat, or government adviser, barely a month earlier, had benefited from his rank in the civil service to be promoted to Sturmbannführer; and he obviously had trouble getting used to his new epaulettes, as well as to his new functions. As for the noncoms and the troops, they came mostly from the lower middle class—shopkeepers, accountants, clerks, the kind of men who signed up in the SA during the Depression in the hope of finding work, and had never left it. Among them were a certain number of Volksdeutschen from the Baltic countries or from Ruthenia, gloomy, dull men, ill at ease in their uniforms, whose sole qualification was their knowledge of Russian; some could barely manage to make themselves understood in German. Von Radetzky, it’s true, stood out from the rest: he boasted of knowing the slang of the brothels of Moscow, where he was born, as well as that of Berlin, and always seemed to know what he was doing, even when he wasn’t doing anything. He also spoke some Ukrainian—he had apparently worked a little in import-export; like me, he came from the Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS. His posting to the southern sector filled him with despair; he had dreamed of being in the center, of entering Moscow as a conqueror and of striding across the Kremlin carpets. Vogt consoled him by telling him we’d have fun enough in Kiev, but von Radetzky made a face: “It’s true that the lavra is magnificent. But aside from that, it’s a hole.” The night of Jeckeln’s speech, we received the order to pack our things and prepare to march the next day: Callsen was ready to receive us.

  Lutsk was still burning when we arrived. A liaison officer from the Wehrmacht took charge of us to guide us to our quarters; we had to skirt the old city and the fort, the path was a complicated one. Kuno Callsen had requisitioned the Academy of Music, near the main square, at the foot of the castle: a fine, simple, seventeenth-century building—a former monastery that had also served as a prison, in the previous century. Callsen was waiting for us on the steps with some men. “It’s a practical place,” he explained to me as our equipment and our things were being unloaded. “There are still some cells in the basement, we just have to retool the locks, I’ve already started.” For my part I preferred libraries to jails, but all the books were in Russian or Ukrainian. Von Radetzky was also walking around with his bulbous nose and his vague eyes, examining the decorative moldings; when he passed near me, I remarked to him that there weren’t any Polish books. “It’s curious, Sturmbannführer. Not so long ago, this was Poland.” Von Radetzky shrugged: “The Stalinists got rid of everything, as you can well imagine.”—“In two years?”—“Two years is enough. Especially for an academy of music.”

  The Vorkommando was already overworked. The Wehrmacht had arrested hundreds of Jews and looters and wanted us to take care of them. The fires were still burning and it seemed that saboteurs were keeping them up. And then there was the problem of the old fort. When he was putting his files in order, Dr. Kehrig
had found his Baedeker and had held it out to me over the torn-open crates to show me the entry: “Castle Lubart. Look, a Lithuanian prince built it.” The central courtyard was overflowing with corpses, prisoners shot by the NKVD before their retreat, apparently. Kehrig asked me to go have a look. This castle had immense brick walls built on earthen ramparts, surmounted by three square towers; sentinels from the Wehrmacht guarded the gate, and an officer from the Abwehr had to intervene so I could enter. “Sorry. The Generalfeldmarschall ordered us to secure the place.”—“Of course, I understand.” An abominable stench assaulted my nose as soon as I went through the gate. I didn’t have a handkerchief and held one of my gloves over my nose to try to breathe. “Take this,” the Hauptmann from the Abwehr suggested, handing me a wet cloth, “it helps a little.” It did help a little, but not enough; even though I breathed through my mouth, the smell filled my nostrils, sweet, heavy, nauseating. I swallowed convulsively to keep from vomiting. “Your first time?” the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. “You’ll get used to it,” he went on, “but maybe never completely.” He himself was livid, but didn’t cover his mouth. We had passed through a long vaulted corridor, then a little quadrangle. “It’s that way.”

  The corpses were piled up in a big paved courtyard, in disordered mounds, scattered here and there. An immense, haunting buzzing filled the air: thousands of heavy blue flies were hovering over the bodies, the pools of blood, the fecal matter. My boots stuck to the pavement. The dead were already swelling up, I gazed at their green and yellowish skin, their faces gone shapeless, as if they’d been beaten to death. The smell was vile; and this smell, I knew, was the beginning and the end of everything, the very signification of our existence. This thought filled me with dismay. Little groups of soldiers from the Wehrmacht equipped with gas masks were trying to disentangle the piles and line up the bodies; one of them tugged on an arm, which came off and stayed in his hand; he tossed it with a weary gesture onto another pile. “There are more than a thousand of them,” the Abwehr officer said to me, almost whispering. “All the Ukrainians and Poles they’d been keeping in prison since their invasion. We found women, even children.” I wanted to close my eyes, or put my hand over my eyes, and at the same time I wanted to look, to look as much as I could, and by looking, try to understand, this incomprehensible thing, there, in front of me, this void for human thought. At a loss, I turned to the officer from the Abwehr: “Have you read Plato?” He looked at me, taken aback: “What?”—“No, it’s nothing.” I did an about-face and left the place. In the back of the first small courtyard, a door opened on the left; it led to some steps. In the upper floors, I wandered haphazardly through empty hallways, then noticed a spiral staircase, in one of the towers; at the top, one could access a wooden footbridge attached to the walls. From there, I could smell the odor from the fires in the city; it was far better, and I breathed deeply, then took a cigarette out of my case and lit it. I had the impression that the stench from the putrefied corpses was still stuck to the insides of my nose, I tried to chase it away by exhaling the smoke through my nostrils, but managed only to make myself cough convulsively. I looked at the view. Toward the back of the fort lay some gardens, little vegetable gardens with a few fruit trees; beyond the wall I saw the city and the loop of the Styr; on that side there wasn’t any smoke, and the sun shone on the countryside. I smoked quietly. Then I went down again and returned to the main courtyard. The officer from the Abwehr was still there. He stared at me inquisitively but without irony: “Feeling better?”—“Yes, thanks.” I tried to take an official tone: “You have an exact count? It’s for my report.”—“Not yet. Tomorrow, I think.”—“And the nationalities?”—“I told you, Ukrainians, Poles probably. It’s hard to say, most of them don’t have any papers. They were shot in groups, you can see they did it in a hurry.”—“Any Jews?” He looked at me with surprise: “Of course not. It’s the Jews who did this.” I grimaced: “Oh yes, of course.” He turned back to the corpses and didn’t say anything for a while. “What a mess,” he finally mumbled. I saluted him. Outside, some kids were gawking; one of them asked me a question, but I didn’t understand his language, I passed by without saying anything and returned to the Academy of Music to report to Kehrig.

  The next day, the Sonderkommando set to work in earnest. One squad, under Callsen and Kurt Hans, shot three hundred Jews and twenty looters in the castle garden. In the company of Dr. Kehrig and Sturmbannführer Vogt, I spent my day in planning meetings with the military intelligence chief of the Sixth Army, the Ic/AO Niemeyer, along with several colleagues of his, including Hauptmann Luley, whom I had met the day before at the fort and who was in charge of counterespionage. Blobel thought that we were short on men and wanted the Wehrmacht to lend us some; but Niemeyer was categorical: it was up to the Generalfeldmarschall and his Chief of Staff, Oberst Heim, to decide that sort of question. During another meeting, in the afternoon, Luley announced to us in a strained voice that they had found ten German soldiers among the dead in the castle, horribly mutilated. “They were tied up and their noses, ears, tongues, and genitals were cut off.” Vogt went up to the castle with him and returned with a waxen face: “Yes, it’s true, it’s horrible, they’re monsters.” This news created a stir; Blobel ranted through the hallways and then went back to see Heim. That night he announced to us: “The Generalfeldmarschall wants to take punitive action. Strike a strong blow, discourage those bastards.” Callsen gave us a report on the day’s executions. They had gone off without any snags, but the method imposed by von Reichenau, with just two guns per condemned man, had its disadvantages: if you wanted to be sure of your shot, you had to aim at the head rather than the chest, which caused splattering, the men got blood and brains in their faces, they were complaining. That led to a heated argument. Häfner shouted, “You’ll see that it’ll end up with a bullet in the back of the neck, like the Bolsheviks.” Blobel reddened and pounded on the table: “Gentlemen! Such language is inadmissible! We are not Bolsheviks!…We are German soldiers. In the service of our Volk and our Führer!” He turned to Callsen: “If your men are too sensitive, we’ll have schnapps served to them.” Then to Häfner: “In any case there’s no question of bullets in the neck. I don’t want the men to have a feeling of personal responsibility. Executions will take place according to military method, and that’s final.”

  I spent the next morning at the AOK: they had seized crates of documents when they captured the city, so I had to go with a translator and inspect these files, especially the ones from the NKVD, and decide which ones to deliver to the Sonderkommando for priority analysis. We were especially looking for lists of members of the Communist Party, of the NKVD, or other groups: many of those people must have stayed in town mixed in with the civilian population, to carry out acts of espionage or sabotage, so it was urgent to identify them. Around noon, I returned to the Academy to consult Dr. Kehrig. There was some agitation on the ground floor: groups of men were milling in the corners, whispering agitatedly. I caught a Scharführer by the sleeve: “What’s happening?”—“I don’t know, Obersturmführer. I think there’s a problem with the Standartenführer.”—“Where are the officers?” He pointed to a stairway that led to our quarters. On the way up, I met Kehrig, who was muttering as he came down, “This is insane, just insane.”—“What’s happening?” I asked him. He glanced at me gloomily and said, “How do you expect to work in such conditions?” He continued on his way. I climbed up a few more steps and heard a shot, the sound of broken glass, some shouts. On the landing in front of the open door of Blobel’s bedroom, two officers from the Wehrmacht were pacing furiously back and forth in front of Kurt Hans. “What’s happening?” I asked Hans. He gestured toward the room with his chin, his hands clenched behind his back. I went in. Blobel, sitting on his bed, wearing his boots but no jacket, was waving a pistol around; Callsen was standing next to him and trying without grasping his arm to direct the pistol toward the wall; a window pane had shattered; on the floor, I noticed a bottl
e of schnapps. Blobel was livid and spluttering incoherent words. Häfner came in behind me: “What’s happening?”—“I don’t know, it seems the Standartenführer is having a fit.”—“He’s gone nuts, you mean.” Callsen turned around: “Ah, Obersturmführer. Go ask the gentlemen from the Wehrmacht to excuse us and come back a little later, all right?” I stepped back and bumped into Hans, who had made up his mind to come in. “August, go find a doctor,” Callsen said to Häfner. Blobel was bawling: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible, they’re sick, I’m going to kill them.” The two officers from the Wehrmacht hovered in the hallway, rigid, pale. “Meine Herren…,” I began. Häfner pushed me aside and ran down the stairs. The Hauptmann squeaked: “Your Kommandant has gone mad! He wanted to shoot at us.” I didn’t know what to say. Hans went out behind me: “Meine Herren, I hope you’ll excuse us. The Standartenführer is suffering a breakdown and we have to call a doctor. We will have to resume this discussion later on.” In the bedroom, Blobel shouted piercingly: “I’m going to kill those shits, let me alone.” The Hauptmann shrugged: “If that’s what the senior officers of the SS are made of…. We’ll do without your cooperation.” He turned to his colleague, spreading his arms: “It’s not possible, they must have emptied the asylums.” Kurt Hans turned pale: “Meine Herren! The honor of the SS…” He too was bawling now. Finally I intervened and cut him off. “Listen, I don’t know what’s happening yet, but obviously we have a problem of a medical nature. Hans, it’s no use getting carried away. Meine Herren, as my colleague was saying, it might be better for you to excuse us for now.” The Hauptmann looked me up and down: “You are Dr. Aue, aren’t you? Fine, let’s go,” he said to his colleague. In the stairway they met Sperath, the doctor from the Sonderkommando, who was coming up with Häfner: “Are you the doctor?”—“Yes.”—“Be careful. He might shoot at you too.” I stood aside to let Sperath and Häfner pass, then followed them into the bedroom. Blobel had put his pistol on the night table and was speaking in a broken voice to Callsen: “But you can see that it’s not possible to shoot so many Jews. We need a plow, to plow them into the earth!” Callsen turned to us. “August, look after the Standartenführer for a minute, will you?” He took Sperath by the arm, drew him aside, and started whispering to him animatedly. “Shit!” Häfner cried. I turned and saw he was struggling with Blobel, who was trying to grab his pistol. “Standartenführer, Standartenführer, calm down, please,” I shouted. Callsen came back and began speaking to him calmly. Sperath also came over and took his pulse. Blobel made another move in the direction of his pistol but Callsen deflected him. Sperath spoke to him: “Listen, Paul, you’re overexerting yourself. I’m going to give you a shot.”—“No! No shots!” Blobel’s arm, flung up, hit Callsen in the face. Häfner had picked up the bottle and showed it to me, shrugging: it was almost empty. Kurt Hans remained by the door and watched without saying anything. Blobel let out almost incoherent exclamations: “It’s those shits from the Wehrmacht that should be shot! All of them!” then started muttering again. “August, Obersturmführer, come help me,” Callsen ordered. At the count of three, we took Blobel by the feet and under the arms and laid him down on the bed. He didn’t struggle. Callsen rolled his jacket into a ball and slid it under his head; Sperath rolled up his sleeve and gave him a shot. He was already starting to seem a little calmer. Sperath led Callsen and Häfner to the door to confer and I stayed next to Blobel. His bulging eyes were staring at the ceiling; a little saliva was wetting the corners of his mouth, and he was still mumbling: “Plow the Jews, plow the Jews.” Discreetly, I slipped the pistol into a drawer: no one had thought to do that. Blobel seemed already to have fallen asleep. Callsen returned to the bed: “We’re going to take him to Lublin.”—“Why Lublin?”—“There’s a hospital there, for this sort of case,” Sperath explained. “A madhouse, you mean,” Häfner blurted coarsely. “August, shut up,” barked Callsen. Von Radetzky appeared at the door: “What is this mess?” Kurt Hans spoke up: “The Generalfeldmarschall gave an order and the Standartenführer was ill, he wasn’t able to bear it. He wanted to shoot at the officers from the Wehrmacht.”—“He already had a fever this morning,” Callsen added. He briefly outlined the situation to von Radetzky, along with Sperath’s suggestion. “Fine,” von Radetzky decided, “we’ll do what the doctor says. I’ll take him myself.” He seemed a little pale. “As for the Generalfeldmarschall’s order, have you already started getting organized?”—“No, we haven’t done anything,” Kurt Hans said. “Fine. Callsen, you take care of the preparations. Häfner, you’ll come with me.”—“Why me?” Häfner retorted, his face darkening. “Because,” von Radetzky snapped with irritation. “Go get the Standartenführer’s Opel ready. Take some extra gas cans, just in case.” Häfner insisted: “Can’t Janssen go instead?”—“No, Janssen is going to help Callsen and Hans. Hauptsturmführer,” he said to Callsen, “do you agree?” Callsen shook his head pensively: “It might be better if you stayed and I went with him, Sturmbannführer. You’re in command, now.” Von Radetzky shook his head: “That’s why I think it would be better for me to go with him.” Callsen still seemed doubtful: “Are you sure you shouldn’t stay?”—“Yes, yes. In any case, don’t worry: Obergruppenführer Jeckeln is arriving soon, along with his staff. Most of them are already here; I’ve just had a meeting with them. He’ll take things in hand.”—“Good. Because, well, you understand, an Aktion of this magnitude, for me…” A thin smile played over von Radetzky’s lips: “Don’t worry. Go see the Obergruppenführer, and start your preparations: everything will go fine, I guarantee it.”