The Kindly Ones

MENUET (EN RONDEAUX)

It was Thomas, as you might have guessed, who brought me the letter. I had gone down to listen to the news at the hotel bar, along with some officers from the Wehrmacht. It must have been around the middle of May: in Tunis, our troops had carried out a voluntary contraction of the front in accordance with the preestablished plan; in Warsaw, the liquidation of the terrorist bands was proceeding without obstacles. The officers around me listened glumly, in silence; only a one-armed Hauptmann laughed loudly at the terms freiwillige Frontverkürzung and planmässig, but stopped when he met my anguished gaze; like him and the others too, I knew enough to interpret these euphemisms: the Jews who had revolted in the ghetto had been resisting our best troops for several weeks now, and Tunisia was lost. I looked around for the waiter to order another Cognac. Thomas came in. He crossed the room with a martial stride, ceremoniously gave me a German salute while clicking his heels, then took me by the arm and drew me toward a booth; there, he slipped into the banquette, negligently throwing his cap on the table, and brandished an envelope that he held delicately between two gloved fingers. “Do you know what’s inside?” he asked, frowning. I made a sign that I didn’t. The envelope, I saw, bore the header of the Persönlicher Stab des Reichsführer-SS. “I know what’s inside,” he went on in the same tone. His face cleared up: “Congratulations, dear friend. You play your cards close to your chest. I always knew you were smarter than you let on.” He was still holding the letter. “Take it, take it.” I took it, broke it open, and pulled out a sheet of paper, an order to present myself at the earliest opportunity to Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt, personal adjutant to the Reichsführer-SS. “It’s a summons,” I said somewhat stupidly.—“Yes, it’s a summons.”—“And what does it mean?”—“It means that your friend Mandelbrod has a very long arm. You’ve been assigned to the Reichsführer’s personal staff, my friend. Shall we celebrate?”

I didn’t feel much like celebrating, but I let myself be carried along. Thomas spent the night buying me American whiskies and excitedly holding forth on the stubbornness of the Jews in Warsaw. “Can you imagine? Jews!” As to my new assignment, he seemed to think I had brought off a masterstroke; I had no idea what it was all about. The next morning, I presented myself at the SS-Haus, located on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse right next to the Staatspolizei, in a former grand hotel converted into offices. Obersturmbannführer Brandt, a stooped little man with a wan, timid look, his face hidden behind large, round, black horn-rimmed glasses, received me right away: it seemed to me I had seen him already, in Hohenlychen, when the Reichsführer had decorated me on my hospital bed. In a few terse, precise sentences, he filled me in about what was expected of me. “The transition of concentration camps from a purely corrective finality to a function as a reservoir of labor force, which was begun more than a year ago now, has not been accomplished without conflicts.” The problem involved both relations between the SS and outside participants, and internal relations within the SS itself. The Reichsführer wanted to get a better understanding of the source of the tensions in order to reduce them and also to maximize the productive capacity of this considerable human labor pool. He had consequently decided to appoint an already experienced officer as his personal representative for the Arbeitseinsatz (“labor operation” or “labor organization”). “After examination of the files and receipt of a number of recommendations, you were selected. The Reichsführer has complete confidence in your ability to carry out this task successfully—it will require a strong capacity for analysis, a sense of diplomacy, and an SS spirit of initiative, the kind you’ve already demonstrated in Russia.” The SS offices concerned would receive an order to cooperate with me; but it would be up to me to ensure that this cooperation would be effective. “All your questions, as well as your reports,” Brandt finished, “should be addressed to me. The Reichsführer will see you only when he deems it necessary. He will receive you today to explain what he expects of you.” I had listened without batting an eye; I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but thought it more politic to keep my questions to myself for the moment. Brandt asked me to wait in a lounge on the ground floor; I found some magazines there, along with tea and cakes. I soon tired of leafing through old issues of Schwarzes Korps in the subdued lighting of this room; unfortunately, there was no smoking allowed in the building—the Reichsführer had forbidden it because of the smell—and you couldn’t go out to the street to smoke, either, in case you were summoned. They came looking for me around the end of the afternoon. In the antechamber, Brandt gave me his final recommendations: “Don’t make any comments, don’t ask any questions, only talk if you’re asked to.” Then he led me in. Heinrich Himmler was sitting behind his desk; I came forward with a military stride, followed by Brandt who introduced me; I saluted, and Brandt, after handing the Reichsführer a file, withdrew. Himmler motioned to me to sit down and consulted the file. His face seemed strangely vague, colorless; his little moustache and his pince-nez only emphasized the elusive quality of his features. He looked at me with a small, friendly smile; when he raised his head, the light, reflected in the glass of his pince-nez, made them opaque, hiding his eyes behind two round mirrors: “You look in better form than the last time I saw you, Sturmbannführer.” I was quite surprised that he remembered me; perhaps there was a note in the file. He went on: “You have fully recovered from your wound? That’s good.” He leafed through a few pages. “Your mother is French, I see?” That seemed to be a question and I attempted an answer: “Born in Germany, my Reichsführer. In Alsace.”—“Yes, but French all the same.” He raised his head and this time the pince-nez did not reflect the light, revealing little eyes too close together, with a surprisingly gentle look. “You know, in principle I never accept men with foreign blood into my staff. It’s like Russian roulette: too dangerous. You never know what will manifest, even in very good officers. But Dr. Mandelbrod convinced me to make an exception. He is a very wise man, whose judgment I respect.” He paused. “I had considered another candidate for the position. Sturmbannführer Gerlach. Unfortunately he was killed a month ago. In Hamburg, during an English air raid. He didn’t take shelter in time and a flowerpot fell on his skull. Begonias, I think. Or maybe tulips. He died on the spot. These English are monsters. Bombing civilians like that, without discrimination. After the victory we should organize war crimes trials. The people responsible for these atrocities have to answer for them.” He fell silent and plunged into my file again. “You’ll be thirty soon and you’re not married,” he said, raising his head. “Why?” His tone was severe, professorial. I blushed: “I haven’t had an opportunity yet, my Reichsführer. I finished my studies just before the war.”—“You should seriously consider it, Sturmbannführer. Your blood is valuable. If you are killed during this war, it shouldn’t be lost for Germany.” My words came to my lips of their own accord: “My Reichsführer, please excuse me, but my spiritual approach to my National Socialist commitment and to my service in the SS does not allow me to consider marriage so long as my Volk has not mastered the dangers threatening it. Affection for a woman can only weaken a man. I have to give myself wholly and I couldn’t share my devotion before the ultimate victory.” Himmler listened, scrutinizing my face; his eyes had opened slightly. “Sturmbannführer, despite your foreign blood, your Germanic and National Socialist qualities are impressive. I don’t know if I can accept your reasoning: I continue to think that the duty of every SS-Mann is to continue the race. But I will reflect on your words.”—“Thank you, my Reichsführer.”—“Did Obersturmbannführer Brandt explain your work to you?”—“In broad terms, my Reichsführer.”—“I don’t have much to add. Above all, use delicacy. I don’t want to provoke useless conflicts.”—“Yes, my Reichsführer.”—“Your reports are very good. You have an excellent ability to seize the overall picture based on a proven Weltanschauung. That’s what made up my mind to choose you. But watch out! I want practical solutions, not whining.”—“Yes, my Reichsführer.”—“Dr. Mandelbrod will no doubt ask you to send him copies of your reports. I don’t object. Good luck, Sturmbannführer. You may go.” I got up, saluted, and prepared to leave. Suddenly Himmler called out to me in his dry little voice: “Sturmbannführer!”—“Yes, my Reichsführer?” He hesitated: “No false sentimentality, yes?” I remained rigid, at attention: “Of course not, my Reichsführer.” I saluted again and left. Brandt, in the antechamber, gave me an inquisitive look: “Did it go well?”—“I think so, Obersturmbannführer.”—“The Reichsführer read your report on the nutritional problems of our soldiers in Stalingrad with great interest.”—“I’m surprised that report reached him.”—“The Reichsführer is interested in a lot of things. Gruppenführer Ohlendorf and the other Amtschefs often send him interesting reports.” Brandt gave me a book from the Reichsführer entitled Jewish Ritual Murders, by Helmut Schramm. “The Reichsführer had copies printed for all SS officers with at least the rank of Standartenführer. But he also asked that it be distributed to subaltern officers concerned with the Jewish question. You’ll see, it’s very interesting.” I thanked him: one more book to read, when I hardly read anymore. Brandt advised me to take a few days to get organized: “You won’t achieve anything worthwhile if your personal affairs aren’t in order. Then come see me.”

It quickly became apparent to me that the most delicate question would be that of lodging: I couldn’t stay indefinitely at the hotel. The Obersturmbannführer from the SS-Personal Hauptamt proposed two options: SS housing for single officers, very inexpensive, with meals included; or a room with a lodge, for which I would have to pay rent. Thomas stayed in a three-room apartment, spacious and very comfortable, with high ceilings and valuable old furniture. Given the grave housing crisis in Berlin—people who had a room empty were in principle forced to take on a tenant—it was a luxurious apartment, especially for a single Obersturmbannführer; a married Gruppenführer with children wouldn’t have turned it down. He laughingly told me how he had gotten it: “It’s not at all complicated. If you like, I can help you find one, maybe not as large, but with two rooms at least.” Thanks to an acquaintance working at the Berlin Generalbauinspektion, he had had a Jewish apartment, liberated in view of the reconstruction of the city, assigned to him by special dispensation. “The only problem is that it was only granted to me provided I pay for the renovation, about five hundred reichsmarks. I didn’t have the money, but I managed to get it allocated to me by Berger as a one-time aid.” Leaning back on the sofa, he ran a satisfied eye around him: “Not bad, don’t you agree?”—“And the car?” I asked, laughing. Thomas also had a little convertible, which he loved to go out in and in which he sometimes came to pick me up in the evening. “That, my friend, is another story that I’ll tell you someday. I did tell you, in Stalingrad, that if we got out of it, life would be good. There’s no reason to deprive ourselves.” I thought about his offer, but finally decided on a furnished room with a family. I wasn’t keen on living in a building for the SS, I wanted to be able to choose whom I met with outside of work; and the idea of staying alone, of living in my own company, made me a little afraid, to tell the truth. Lodgers would at least be a human presence, I would have my meals prepared, there would be noise in the hallways. So I filed my request, specifying that I would like two rooms and that there had to be a woman for cooking and housekeeping. They offered me something in Mitte, with a widow, six stations on a direct U-Bahn line from Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, at a reasonable price; I accepted without even visiting it and they gave me a letter. Frau Gutknecht, a fat, ruddy-cheeked woman past sixty, with voluminous breasts and dyed hair, examined me with a long, wily look when she opened the door to me: “So you’re the officer?” she said with a thick Berlin accent. I stepped across the threshold and shook her hand: she stank of cheap perfume. She retreated into the long hallway and showed me the doors: “This is my place; that’s yours. Here’s the key. I have one too, of course.” She opened the door and showed me around: mass-market furniture laden with curios, yellowing, wrinkled wallpaper, a musty smell. After the living room was the bedroom, isolated from the rest of the apartment. “The kitchen and toilets are in the back. Hot water is rationed, so no baths.” Two black-framed portraits hung on the wall: a man about thirty, with a little civil servant’s moustache, and a young, solid, blond boy in a Wehrmacht uniform. “Is that your husband?” I asked respectfully. A grimace deformed her face: “Yes. And my son, Franz, my little Franzi. He fell the first day of the French campaign. His Feldwebel wrote me that he died a hero, to save a comrade, but he didn’t get a medal. He wanted to avenge his dad, my Bubi, there, who died gassed in Verdun.”—“My condolences.”—“Oh, for Bubi, I’m used to it, you know. But I still miss my little Franzi.” She cast me a calculating look. “Too bad I don’t have a daughter. You could have married her. I would have liked that, an officer son-in-law. My Bubi was Unterfeldwebel and my Franzi was still a Gefreiter.”—“Yes,” I replied politely, “it’s too bad.” I pointed to the curios: “Could I ask you to take all those away? I’ll need some room for my things.” She looked indignant: “And where do you suggest I put them? In my place there’s even less room. Plus they’re pretty. You just have to push them over a little. But watch out! If you break it you pay for it.” She pointed to the portraits: “If you like, I can take those away. I wouldn’t want to inflict my mourning on you.”—“That’s not important,” I said.—“Fine, then I’ll leave them. This was Bubi’s favorite room.” We came to an agreement on the meals, and I gave her a section of my ration book.

I settled in as well as I could; in any case I didn’t have a lot of things. By piling up the curios and the cheap prewar novels, I managed to free up a few shelves where I put my own books, delivered from the basement where I had stored them before I left for Russia. It made me happy to unpack them and leaf through them, even though many of them had been damaged by humidity. Next to them I put the edition of Nietzsche that Thomas had given me and that I had never opened, the three Burroughs books brought back from France, and the Blanchot, which I had given up reading; the Stendhal books I had taken to Russia had remained there, just like Stendhal’s own 1812 diaries and somewhat in the same way, really. I regretted not having thought to replace them during my Paris trip, but there would always be another opportunity, if I were still alive. The booklet on ritual murder puzzled me a little: whereas I could easily arrange the Festgabe next to my economics and political science books, it was a little harder to find a place for this book. I finally slipped it in with the history books, between von Treitschke and Gustav Kossinna. These books and my clothes were all that I owned, aside from a gramophone and a few records; the kinzhal from Nalchik, alas, had also stayed in Stalingrad. After I had put everything away, I put on some Mozart arias, dropped into an armchair and lit a cigarette. Frau Gutknecht came in without knocking and was immediately upset: “You’re not going to smoke here! It’ll make the curtains stink.” I got up and pulled down the tails of my tunic: “Frau Gutknecht. Please be so kind as to knock, and to wait for my reply before you come in.” She turned crimson: “Excuse me, Herr Offizier! But I’m in my own home, aren’t I? And also, with all due respect, I could be your mother. What does it matter to you, if I come in? You don’t intend to have girls up here, do you? This is a respectable house, the house of a good family.” I decided it was urgent to make things clear: “Frau Gutknecht, I am renting your two rooms; so it’s no longer your home but my home. I have no intention of having girls up, as you say, but I am attached to my private life. If this arrangement doesn’t suit you, I’ll take my things and my rent back and leave. Do you understand?” She calmed down: “Don’t take it like that, Herr Offizier…I’m not used to it, that’s all. You can even smoke if you like. Only you might open the windows…” She looked at my books: “I see you’re cultivated…” I interrupted her: “Frau Gutknecht. If you have nothing else to ask me, I would be grateful if you left me alone.”—“Oh yes, sorry, yes.” She went out and closed the door behind her, leaving the key in the lock.

I put my papers in order with the personnel office and returned to see Brandt. He had freed up one of the small, light-filled offices fitted out in the attic of the old hotel. I had an antechamber with a telephone and a work room with a sofa; a young secretary, Fräulein Praxa; the services of an orderly who assisted three offices; and of a pool of typists available for the whole floor. My driver was named Piontek, a Volksdeutscher from Upper Silesia who would also serve as my orderly whenever I went anywhere; the vehicle was at my disposal, but the Reichsführer insisted that any trip of a personal nature be itemized separately, and the cost of the gas taken from my salary. I found all this almost extravagant. “It’s nothing. You have to have the means to work correctly,” Brandt assured me with a little smile. I couldn’t meet the head of the Persönlicher Stab, Obergruppenführer Wolff; he was recovering from a serious illness, and Brandt had in effect taken over all his duties for months. He gave me a few additional instructions on what was expected of me: “First of all, it’s important that you familiarize yourself with the system and its problems. All reports addressed to the Reichsführer about this are archived here: have them brought up to you and look them over. Here is a list of the SS officers who head the various departments covered by your mandate. Make appointments and go talk with them, they’re expecting you and will talk frankly to you. When you’ve gotten a suitable overall impression, you can go on an inspection tour.” I consulted the list: they were mostly officers from the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (the SS Main Office for Economics and Administration) and from the RSHA. “The Inspectorate for Concentration Camps has been incorporated in the WVHA, isn’t that right?” I asked.—“Yes,” replied Brandt, “a little over a year ago. Look at your list, that’s the Amtsgruppe D now. You’ve been referred to Brigadeführer Glücks, who heads the directorate, and his deputy Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel—who between you and me will probably be more useful to you than his superior—along with some department heads. But the camps are only one facet of the problem; there are also the SS enterprises. Obergruppenführer Pohl, who heads the WVHA, will receive you to talk to you about that. Of course, if you want to meet other officers to go more deeply into certain points, please do: but see these people first. At the RSHA, Obersturmbannführer Eichmann will explain the system of special transports to you, and he’ll also present you with the current progress of the resolution of the Jewish question, and its future perspectives.—“May I ask you a question, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Of course.”—“If I understand correctly, I can have access to all documents concerning the definitive solution to the Jewish question?”—“Insofar as the resolution of the Jewish problem directly affects the maximum deployment of manual labor, yes. But I should point out that this will make you a Geheimnisträger, a bearer of secrets, to a far greater degree than your duties in Russia did. You are strictly forbidden to discuss this with anyone outside of the service, including the civil servants in the ministries or the Party functionaries with whom you will be in contact. The Reichsführer allows only one sentence for any violation of this rule: the death penalty.” He again pointed to the sheet he had given me: “You can talk freely with all the officers on this list; for their subordinates, check first.”—“Understood.”—“For your reports, the Reichsführer has issued Sprachregelungen, language regulations. Any report that doesn’t conform to them will be returned to you.”—“Zu Befehl, Obersturmbannführer.”

I plunged into my work as into an invigorating bath in one of Piatigorsk’s sulfurous springs. For days on end, sitting on the little sofa in my office, I devoured reports, correspondence, orders, and organizational tables, smoking a discreet cigarette from time to time at my window. Fräulein Praxa, a somewhat scatterbrained Sudeten-lander who would obviously have preferred spending her days chattering on the telephone, had to keep going up and down to the archives, and complained that her ankles were swelling. “Thank you,” I said without looking at her when she came into my room with a new bundle. “Put it down there and take these; I’m done with them, you can take them back.” She sighed and left, trying to make as much noise as possible. Frau Gutknecht quickly revealed herself to be an execrable cook, knowing three dishes at most, all with cabbage, which she often spoiled; so at night I got into the habit of dismissing Fräulein Praxa and going down to the mess for a bite, and then to keep working in my office till late at night, returning home only to sleep. So as not to keep Piontek waiting, I took the U-Bahn; at those late hours the C line was almost empty, and I liked observing the rare passengers, their faces worn out, exhausted; it took me out of my work a little. Many times I found myself in a car with the same man, a civil servant who like me must have been working late; he never noticed me, since he was always immersed in a book. This man, otherwise so unremarkable, read in a remarkable way: while his eyes ran over the lines, his lips moved as if he were saying the words, but without any sound that I could hear, not even a whisper; and I felt then something like Augustine’s surprise when he saw for the first time Ambrose of Milan reading silently, with his eyes only—a thing the provincial Augustine didn’t know was possible, since he could only read out loud, listening to himself.

In the course of my own reading, I came upon the report turned in to the Reichsführer at the end of March by Dr. Korherr, the glum statistician who had questioned our figures: his, I have to admit, horrified me. At the end of a statistical argument difficult to follow for a non-specialist, he concluded that by December 31, 1942, 1,873,549 Jews, not including Russia and Serbia, had died, been “transported to the East,” or had been “sluiced through the camps” (durchgeschleust, a curious term imposed, I imagine, by the Reichsführer’s Sprachregelungen). In all, he estimated in conclusion, German influence, since the Seizure of Power, had reduced the Jewish population of Europe by four million—a number including, if I understood correctly, prewar emigration. Even after what I had seen in Russia, this was impressive: we had long since moved beyond the primitive methods of the Einsatzgruppen. Through a whole series of orders and instructions, I was also able to form an idea of the difficult adaptation of the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps to the requirements of total war. Whereas the very formation of the WVHA and its absorption of the IKL, which were supposed to signal and implement a passage to maximal war production, dated back to March 1942, serious measures to reduce the mortality of the inmates and improve their output had not been promulgated until October; in December still, Glücks, the head of the IKL, was ordering doctors in the Konzentrationslager to improve sanitary conditions, lower mortality, and increase productivity, but once again without specifying any concrete measures. According to the statistics of the D II that I consulted, mortality, expressed in monthly percentages, had gone down considerably: the overall rate for all of the KLs had gone from losses of 10 percent in December to 2.8 percent in April. But this reduction was entirely relative, since the population of the camps continued to increase; the net losses hadn’t changed. A semiannual report of the D II indicated that from July to December 1942, 57,503 inmates out of 96,770, or 60 percent of the total, had died; since January, the losses continued to hover at around 6,000 or 7,000 a month. None of the measures taken seemed able to reduce them. What’s more, certain camps appeared clearly worse than others; the mortality rate in March at Auschwitz, a KL in Upper Silesia that I was hearing about for the first time, had been 15.4 percent. I began to see what the Reichsführer was driving at.

Nevertheless I felt rather unsure of myself. Was that because of recent events, or simply my innate lack of bureaucratic instinct? Whatever the case, after I had managed to gather an overall idea of the problem from the documents, I decided, before going up to Oranienburg where the IKL people had their headquarters, to consult Thomas. I liked Thomas, but I would never have spoken to him about my personal problems; for my professional doubts, though, he was the best confidant I knew. He had once demonstrated to me in luminous terms the principle of how the system functioned (this must have been in 1939, or maybe even the end of 1938, during the internal conflicts that had shaken the movement after the Kristallnacht): “It’s normal that orders are always vague; it’s even deliberate, and it stems from the very logic of the Führerprinzip. It’s up to the recipient to recognize the intentions of the one who gives the command, and to act accordingly. The ones who insist on having clear orders or who want legislative measures haven’t understood that it’s the will of the leader, and not his orders, that counts, and that it’s up to the receiver of the orders to know how to decipher and even anticipate that will. Whoever knows how to act this way is an excellent National Socialist, and he’ll never be reproached for his excess of zeal, even if he makes mistakes; the others are the ones who, as the Führer says, are afraid of jumping over their own shadows.” I had understood that; but I also understood that I lacked the skill to go beyond the surfaces of things, to guess at the hidden stakes; and Thomas had precisely this talent to the highest degree, and that’s why he was driving in a sports convertible while I was going home on the U-Bahn. I found him at the Neva Grill, one of the good restaurants he liked to frequent. He talked to me with cynical amusement about the population’s morale, as it was revealed in Ohlendorf’s confidential reports, copies of which he received: “It’s remarkable how well informed people are of the so-called secrets—the euthanasia program, the destruction of the Jews, the camps in Poland, the gas, everything. You, in Russia, had never heard of the KLs in Lublin or Silesia, but the lowliest tramcar driver in Berlin or Düsseldorf knows they’re burning prisoners there. And despite Goebbels’s propaganda, people are still capable of forming opinions for themselves. The foreign radio broadcasts aren’t the only explanation, since a lot of people are still afraid of listening to them. No, all of Germany today is a vast tissue of rumors, a spider’s web that extends to all the territories under our control—the Russian front, the Balkans, France. Information circulates at an incredible speed. And the cleverest are able to match up these pieces of information so as sometimes to arrive at surprisingly precise conclusions. You know what we did, recently? We deliberately started a rumor in Berlin, a real false rumor, based on authentic but distorted information, to study how quickly and by what means it was transmitted. We picked it up in Munich, Vienna, Königsberg, and Hamburg in twenty-four hours, and in Linz, Breslau, Lübeck, and Jena in forty-eight. I’m tempted to try the same thing starting in the Ukraine, just to see. But the encouraging thing is that despite everything, people continue to support the Party and the authorities; they still have faith in our Führer and believe in the Endsieg. Which demonstrates what? That barely ten years after the Seizure of Power, the National Socialist spirit has become the truth of the daily life of the Volk. It has penetrated into the most obscure recesses. And so even if we lose the war, it will survive.”—“Let’s talk instead about how the war can be won, all right?” While eating, I told him about the instructions I had received and the general state of the situation as I understood it. He listened to me while drinking wine and cutting his steak, perfectly grilled, pink and juicy inside. He finished his meal and poured some more wine before he replied. “You’ve landed yourself a very interesting job, but I don’t envy you. I have the impression they’re sending you into a lion’s den, and even if you don’t make any blunders you’re going to be eaten alive. What do you know about the political situation? The internal one, I mean.” I too finished eating: “I don’t know much about the internal political situation.”—“Well you should. It has radically changed since the beginning of the war. Firstly, the Reichsmarschall is out, for good, in my opinion. What with the failure of the Luftwaffe against the bombings, his Homeric corruption, and his immoderate use of drugs, no one pays any attention to him anymore: he serves as an extra, they take him out of the closet when they need someone to talk in the Führer’s place. Our dear Dr. Goebbels, despite his valiant efforts after Stalingrad, is on the sidelines. The rising star today is Speer. When the Führer appointed him, no one gave him more than six months; since then, he’s tripled our weapons production, and the Führer grants him anything he asks for. What’s more, this little architect whom everyone used to make fun of has turned out a remarkable politician, and he’s now got several heavyweights on his side: Milch, who oversees the Aviation Ministry for Göring, and Fromm, the head of the Ersatzheer. What is Fromm’s interest? Fromm has to provide men for the Wehrmacht; so every German worker replaced by a foreign worker or an inmate is one more soldier for Fromm. Speer thinks only about how to increase production, and Milch does the same for the Luftwaffe. They all demand just one thing: men, men, men. And that’s where the Reichsführer has a problem. Of course, no one can criticize the Endlösung program in itself: it’s a direct order from the Führer, so the ministries can just quibble at the margins, playing on the diversion of some of the Jews for work. But after Thierack agreed to empty his prisons into the KLs, they have come to represent a considerable pool of manual labor. It’s nothing, of course, next to the foreign workers, but it’s still something. Now the Reichsführer is very jealous about his SS’s autonomy, and Speer is encroaching on it. When the Reichsführer demanded that the factories be built inside his camps, Speer went to see the Führer and, presto! The inmates left for the factories. You see the problem: the Reichsführer feels he’s in a weak position and has to give guarantees to Speer, to demonstrate that he’s showing goodwill. Of course, if he actually manages to inject more labor into industry, everyone’s happy. But that, in my opinion, is where the internal problem comes in: the SS, you see, is like the Reich in miniature, people tug it every which way. Take the example of the RSHA: Heydrich was a genius, a force of nature and an admirable National Socialist; but I’m convinced that the Reichsführer was secretly relieved by his death. Sending him to Prague was a brilliant move: Heydrich took it as a promotion, but he also saw that he was forced to let go a little of the RSHA, simply because he was no longer in Berlin. His tendancy toward autonomy was very strong, that’s why the Reichsführer didn’t want to replace him. And then each of the Amtschefs began to go his own way. So the Reichsführer appointed Kaltenbrunner to control them, hoping that Kaltenbrunner, who is a complete idiot, would himself remain controllable. But you’ll see, it’ll start all over again: the job requires it, more than the man. And it’s the same thing for all the other departments and divisions. The IKL is particularly rich in alte Kämpfer: there, even the Reichsführer has to tread softly.”—“If I understand correctly, the Reichsführer wants to promote reforms without upsetting the IKL too much?”—“Or else he doesn’t care about reforms, but wants to use them as an instrument to tighten the screws on the stubborn ones. And at the same time, he has to demonstrate to Speer that he’s cooperating with him, but without giving him the possibility of interfering with the SS or cutting back its privileges.”—“It certainly is delicate.”—“Ah! Brandt said it well: analysis and diplomacy.”—“He also said ‘initiative.’”—“Of course! If you find answers, even to problems that weren’t directly submitted to you but that play to the vital interests of the Reichsführer, your career is made. But if you start indulging in bureaucratic romanticism and try to change everything all at once, you’ll very quickly end up as a deputy Leiter in some shabby SD-Stelle in the hinterlands of Galicia. So beware: if you pull off the same kind of trick you did in France, I’ll regret having gotten you out of Stalingrad. Staying alive has to be earned.”

This mocking and at the same time formidable warning was painfully emphasized by a brief letter I got from my sister. As I suspected, she had left for Antibes just after our phone conversation:

Max, the police were talking about a psychopath or a thief or even a gangland killing. In fact they don’t know anything. They told me they were looking into Aristide’s business affairs. It was odious. They asked me all kinds of questions about the family: I told them about you, but I don’t know why, I took care not to tell them you were there. I don’t know what I was thinking of but I was afraid of making trouble for you. And what would be the use, anyway? I left immediately after the funeral. I wanted you to be there and at the same time I would have hated you to be there. It was sad and poor and awful. They were buried together at the town cemetery. Aside from me and a policeman who had come to see who would be at the funeral there were just a few old friends of Aristide’s and a priest. I left immediately afterward. I don’t know what else to write you. I’m terribly sad. Take care of yourself.

Of the twins, she didn’t breathe a word: after her violent reaction on the telephone, I found that surprising. What was even more surprising, for me, was my own lack of reaction: this frightened and mournful letter had the same effect on me as a yellow fall leaf, detached and dead before it had even touched the ground. A few minutes after reading it, I was thinking again about work problems. The questions that just a handful of weeks before had been eating away at me and keeping me awake at night now seemed to me like a row of closed, silent doors; the thought of my sister, a stove that had gone out and smelled of cold ashes, and the thought of my mother, a quiet, long-neglected gravestone. This strange apathy extended to all other aspects of my life: my landlady’s petty annoyances left me indifferent, sexual desire seemed like an abstract old memory, anxiety about the future a frivolous, vain luxury. That is somewhat the state in which I find myself today, and I feel fine this way. Only work occupied my thoughts. I meditated on Thomas’s advice: he seemed to me to be even righter than he knew. Toward the end of the month, with the Tiergarten flowering and the trees covering the still-gray city with their insolent greenery, I went to visit the offices of the Amtsgruppe D, the former IKL, in Oranienburg, near KL Sachsenhausen: long, white, clean buildings, perfectly straight lanes, flowerbeds meticulously mulched and weeded by well-fed inmates in clean uniforms, energetic, busy, motivated officers. I was courteously received by Brigadeführer Glücks. Glücks talked quickly and volubly, and this flow of confused words presented a marked contrast with the aura of efficiency that characterized his kingdom. He completely lacked an overall picture, and lingered at length and stubbornly over unimportant administrative details, quoting statistics—often wrong —to me at random, which I noted down out of politeness. To every somewhat specific question, he invariably replied: “Oh, you’d do better to see about that over at Liebehenschel’s,” all the while cordially pouring me French Cognac and offering me cookies. “Made by my wife. Despite the restrictions, she knows how to get by, she’s a wonder.” He clearly wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible, without, however, taking the risk of offending the Reichsführer, so as to return to his torpor and his cookies. I decided to cut things short; as soon as I paused, he called his adjutant and poured me a last Cognac: “To the health of our dear Reichsführer.” I took a sip, put down the glass, saluted him, and followed my guide. “You’ll see,” Glücks called to me as I was going out the door, “Liebehenschel can answer all your questions.” He was right, and his deputy, a small man with a sad, tired face who also ran the Central Office of Amtsgruppe D, gave me a concise, lucid, realistic summary of the situation and the state of progress of the reforms that had been undertaken. I already knew that most of the orders given out under Glücks’s signature were in fact prepared by Liebehenschel: that wasn’t very surprising. For Liebehenschel, a large share of the problems came from the Kommandanten: “They have no imagination, and they don’t know how to apply our orders. As soon as we get anything like a motivated Kommandant, the situation changes completely. But we sorely lack personnel, and there’s no prospect of replacing these cadres.”—“And the medical departments can’t make up for the deficiencies?”—“You’ll see Dr. Lolling after me, you’ll understand.” In fact, although the hour I spent with Standartenführer Dr. Lolling didn’t teach me much about the problems of the medical departments of the KLs, it at least allowed me, despite my irritation, to understand why these departments had no choice but to try to function autonomously. Elderly, his eyes watery, his mind confused and muddled, Lolling, whose department supervised all the sanitary structures of the camps, not only was an alcoholic but, according to widespread rumor, helped himself daily from his stock of morphine. I didn’t understand how such a man could remain in the SS, even less occupy a position of responsibility in it. No doubt he benefited from protection within the Party. Nevertheless I extracted a pile of highly useful reports from him: Lolling, for lack of anything better to do and to mask his own incompetence, spent his time ordering reports from his subordinates; they weren’t all men like him, there was some substantial material there.

That left Maurer, the creator and head of the Arbeitseinsatz, now department D II in the WVHA organizational table. Actually, I could have done without the other visits, even the one to Liebehenschel. Standartenführer Gerhard Maurer, a man still young, without any diplomas but endowed with a solid professional experience in accounting and management, had been pulled out of obscurity from an office in the old SS administration by Oswald Pohl and had quickly distinguished himself by his administrative abilities, his spirit of initiative, and his keen understanding of bureaucratic realities. When Pohl had taken the IKL under his wing, he had asked Maurer to set up the D II in order to centralize and rationalize the exploitation of camp labor. I was to see him again several times afterward and to correspond with him regularly, always with the same satisfaction. Maurer represented for me a certain ideal National Socialist who, though he must be a man with a Weltanschauung, still has to be a man who gets results. And concrete, measurable results formed Maurer’s very life. Although he himself hadn’t invented all the measures set in place by the Arbeitseinsatz, he had out of whole cloth created the impressive statistical data collection system that now covered all the WVHA camps. This system he patiently explained to me, itemizing the standardized, pre-printed forms that each camp had to fill out and send in, pointing out the most important figures and the right way to interpret them: considered thus, these numbers became fungible, more legible than a narrative report; capable of being compared and thus conveying an enormous amount of information, they allowed Maurer to follow precisely, without leaving his office, to what extent his orders were implemented, and with what success. These data allowed him to confirm Liebehenschel’s diagnosis for me. He gave me a severe speech on the reactionary attitude of the corps of Kommandanten, “trained in the Eicke method,” competent enough when it came to the old repressive, police functions, but in the main, limited and inept, unable to integrate modern management techniques adapted to new requirements: “These men aren’t bad, but they’re just not up to what’s being asked of them now.” Maurer himself had only one aim in mind: to extract the maximum amount of work from the KLs. He didn’t serve me any Cognac but when I took my leave he warmly shook my hand: “I’m delighted that the Reichsführer is finally looking more carefully into these problems. My office is at your service, Sturmbannführer, you can always count on me.”

I returned to Berlin and made an appointment with my old acquaintance Adolf Eichmann. He came to welcome me in person in the vast main lobby of his department on the Kurfürstenstrasse, walking in short strides in his heavy rider’s boots on the polished marble slabs and warmly congratulating me on my promotion. “You too,” I congratulated him in turn, “you were promoted. In Kiev, you were still a Sturmbannführer.”—“Yes,” he said with satisfaction, “that’s true, but you, in the meantime, got two stripes…Come in, come in.” Despite his superior rank, I found him curiously attentive, affable; perhaps the fact that I had come on behalf of the Reichsführer impressed him. In his office, he dropped into his chair and crossed his legs, negligently dropped his cap on a pile of files, took off his large glasses, and began to clean them with a handkerchief while calling out to his secretary: “Frau Werlmann! Some coffee, please.” I observed this little game with amusement: Eichmann had gained self-confidence, since Kiev. He raised his glasses to the window, inspected them meticulously, rubbed them some more, put them back on. He took a box out from under a folder and offered me a Dutch cigarette. Lighter in hand, he gesticulated at my chest: “You’ve received a lot of decorations, I congratulate you again. That’s the advantage of being at the front. Here, in the rear, we have no opportunity to win decorations. My Amtschef managed to get me the Iron Cross, but that was really just so I’d have something. I volunteered for the Einsatzgruppen, did you know that? But C (that was how Heydrich, wanting to give himself an English touch, had himself called by his coterie) ordered me to stay. You’re indispensable to me, he said. Zu Befehl, I said, but in any case I didn’t have a choice.”—“You have a good position, though. Your Referat is one of the most important in the Staatspolizei.”—“Yes, but as far as advancement goes, I’m completely blocked. A Referat is headed by a Regierungsrat or an Oberregierungsrat or an equivalent SS rank. So in principle, in this position, I can’t go beyond Obersturmbannführer. I complained to my Amtschef: he told me I deserved to be promoted, but that he didn’t want to stir up problems with his other department heads.” He made a pinched face that deformed his lips. His balding head gleamed under the overhead lamp, turned on despite the daylight. A no-longer-young secretary came in with a tray and two steaming cups, which she placed in front of us. “Milk? Sugar?” Eichmann asked. I shook my head and smelled the cup: it was real coffee. While I was blowing on it Eichmann asked me out of the blue: “Were you decorated for the Einsatzaktion?” His complaining was beginning to annoy me; I wanted to get to the point of my visit. “No,” I replied. “I was posted in Stalingrad, afterward.” Eichmann’s face darkened and he took off his glasses in an abrupt gesture. “Ach so,” he said, straightening. “You were in Stalingrad. My brother Helmut was killed there.”—“I’m sorry. All my condolences. Was he your older brother?”—“No, the younger one. He was thirty-three. Our mother still hasn’t gotten over it. He fell as a hero, doing his duty for Germany. I’m sorry,” he added ceremoniously, “that I haven’t had that chance myself.” I seized the opening: “Yes, but Germany is asking you for other sacrifices.” He put his glasses back on and drank a little coffee. Then he put out his cigarette in an ashtray: “You’re right. A soldier doesn’t choose his post. What can I do for you, then? If I understood the letter from Obersturmbannführer Brandt correctly, you’re in charge of studying the Arbeitseinsatz, is that right? I don’t quite see what that has to do with my departments.” I pulled a few sheets of paper from my imitation-leather briefcase. (I felt a disagreeable sensation every time I used this briefcase, but I hadn’t been able to find anything else, because of the restrictions. I had asked Thomas’s advice, but he had laughed in my face: “I wanted a leather office set, you know, with a writing pad and a penholder. I wrote to a friend in Kiev, a guy who was in the Group and who stayed on with the BdS, to ask him if he could have one made for me. He answered that ever since we had killed all the Jews, you couldn’t even get a pair of boots resoled in the Ukraine.”) Eichmann was observing me, knitting his brows. “The Jews you are in charge of are today one of the main pools the Arbeitseinsatz can draw on to renew its workforce,” I explained. “Aside from them, there’s really nothing else but foreign workers sentenced for petty crimes, and political deportees from the countries under our control. All the other possible sources, the war prisoners or the criminals transferred by the Ministry of Justice, are mostly exhausted. What I would like is to have an overall view of how your operations function, and especially of your prospects for the future.” While he was listening to me, a curious tic deformed the left corner of his mouth; I had the impression that he was chewing his tongue. He leaned back again in his chair, his long veined hands joined in a triangle, index fingers taut: “Fine, fine. I’ll explain things to you. As you know, in every country subject to the Endlösung, there is a representative from my Referat, subordinate either to the BdS, if it’s an occupied country, or to the embassy’s police attaché, if it’s an allied country. I should point out right away that the USSR doesn’t come into my domain; as for my representative in the Generalgouvernement, he has an entirely minor role.”—“How is that?”—“The Jewish question, in the GG, is the responsibility of the SSPF in Lublin, Gruppenführer Globocnik, who reports directly to the Reichsführer. So the Staatspolizei isn’t concerned, in general.” He pinched his lips: “Except for a few exceptions that still have to be settled, the Reich itself can be considered judenrein. As to the other countries, everything depends on the degree of understanding about the resolution of the Jewish question shown by the national authorities. Because of that, in a way every country poses a special case that I can explain to you.” As soon as he began to talk about his work, I noticed, his already curious mixture of Austrian accent and Berlin slang was complicated by a particularly muddled bureaucratic syntax. He spoke calmly and clearly, choosing his words, but it was sometimes hard for me to follow his phrases. He himself seemed to get a little lost in them. “Take the example of France, where we have so to speak only begun to work last summer once the French authorities, guided by our specialist and also by the advice and wishes of the Auswärtiges Amt, um, if you like, had agreed to cooperate and especially when the Reichsbahn agreed to provide us with the necessary transportation. We were thus able to begin, and in the beginning it even had some success, since the French showed a lot of understanding, and also thanks to the assistance of the French police, without which we could have done nothing, of course, since we don’t have the resources, and the Militärbefehlshaber certainly wasn’t going to provide them, so the aid of the French police was a vital element, since they’re the ones who arrested the Jews and transferred them to us, and they even overdid it, since we had only officially asked for Jews over sixteen—to begin with of course—but they didn’t want to keep the children without their parents, which is understandable, so they gave them all to us, even the orphans—in short we soon understood that in fact they were only giving us their foreign Jews, I even had to cancel a transport from Bordeaux because they couldn’t find enough to fill it, of those foreign Jews, a real scandal, since when it comes to their own Jews, the ones who were French citizens, I mean, for a long time, well then, you see, it was nothing doing. They didn’t want to and there was nothing to be done. According to the Auswärtiges Amt it was Maréchal Pétain himself who made problems, and it was useless for us to explain to him, it didn’t do any good. So after November, of course, the situation changed completely, because we were no longer necessarily bound by all those agreements or by the French laws, but even then, this is what I told you, there was the problem of the French police, which didn’t want to cooperate anymore, I don’t want to complain about Herr Bousquet, but he too had his orders, and of course it wasn’t possible to send the German police knocking on doors, so, in fact, in France, we’re not making much progress anymore. What’s more, a lot of Jews have gone to the Italian sector, and that’s really a problem, since the Italians have no understanding at all, and we’re having the same problem everywhere, in Greece and in Croatia, where they’re in charge, there they protect the Jews, and not only their own Jews but all of them. And this is a real problem and it’s completely beyond my competence, and also I think I know for a fact that it was discussed at the highest level, the highest there is, and that Mussolini replied that he would take care of it, but obviously it’s not a priority, is it, and at the lower levels, the ones we’re dealing with, there it’s downright bureaucratic obstruction, delaying tactics and that’s something I know a lot about, they never say no but it’s like quicksand, and nothing happens. That’s where we are with the Italians.”—“And the other countries?” I asked. Eichmann got up, put on his cap, and motioned for me to follow: “Come. I’ll show you.” I followed him to another office. He was, I noticed for the first time, bowlegged, like a rider. “Do you ride horses, Obersturmbannführer?” He made another face: “In my youth. Now I don’t get much of a chance.” He knocked at a door and went in. Some officers got up and saluted; he returned their salute, crossed the room, knocked at another door, and entered. In the back of the room, behind a desk, was a Sturmbannführer; there was also a secretary there and a subaltern. They all got up when we came in; the Sturmbannführer, a handsome blond animal, tall and muscular, buttoned up tight in his tailored uniform, raised his arm and shouted a martial “Heil!” We returned his salute before walking over to him. Eichmann introduced me and then turned to me: “Sturmbannführer Günther is my permanent deputy.” Günther contemplated me with a taciturn look and asked Eichmann: “What can I do for you, Obersturmbannführer?”—“I’m sorry to disturb you, Günther. I wanted to show him your board.” Günther moved away from his desk without a word. Behind him on the wall was a large multicolored chart. “You see,” Eichmann explained, “it’s organized by country and brought up to date every month. On the left, you have the objectives, and then the totals accrued to realize the objective. You can see at a glance that we’re approaching the goal in Holland, fifty percent in Belgium, but that in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria we’re still close to zero. In Bulgaria, we’ve had a few thousand, but that’s deceptive: they let us evacuate the territories they occupied in 1941, in Thrace and Macedonia, but we can’t touch the ones in Old Bulgaria. We officially asked them again a few months ago, in March I think, there was an approach from the AA, but they refused again. Since it’s a question of sovereignty, everyone wants guarantees that his neighbor will do the same thing, that’s to say that the Bulgarians want the Romanians to start, and the Romanians the Hungarians, and the Hungarians the Bulgarians or something like that. Note that since Warsaw we’ve at least been able to explain to them the danger it represents, having so many Jews in one’s country, it’s a hotbed of partisans, and well, I think that impressed them. But we haven’t reached the end of our efforts yet. In Greece, we began in March, I have a Sonderkommando over there, in Thessalonica right now, and you see that it’s going quite rapidly, it’s already almost over. After that we’ll still have Crete and Rhodes, no problem, but for the Italian zone, Athens and the rest, I’ve already explained to you. Then, of course, there are all the associated technical problems, they’re not just diplomatic problems, that would be too easy, no, and so especially the problem of transport, that’s to say rolling stock and thus the allocation of freight cars and also, how should I say, of time on the tracks even if we have the cars. For example, sometimes, we’re negotiating an agreement with a government, we have the Jews in hand, bam, Transportsperre, everything’s blocked because there’s an offensive in the East or something and they can’t let anything else go through Poland. So of course when it’s quiet we work twice as hard. In Holland or in France, we centralize everything in transit camps, and we’re emptying them out little by little, when there’s transport and also according to the admission capacity, which is also limited. For Thessalonica, on the other hand, it was decided to do everything all at once, one two three four and that’s it. In fact, since February, we’ve really had a lot of work, transport is available and I received an order to speed things up. The Reichsführer wants it to be over this year and then we won’t talk about it anymore.”—“And can that be realized?”—“Where it depends on us, yes. I mean transport is always a problem, finances too, since we have to pay the Reichsbahn, you know, for each passenger, and I don’t have any budget for that, I have to make do. We ask the Jews to help out, that’s fine, but the Reichsbahn only accepts payment in reichsmarks or at a pinch in zlotys, if we send them within the GG, but in Thessalonica they have drachmas and of course it’s impossible to exchange currency there. So we have to make do, but we know how to do that. After that of course there are the diplomatic questions, if the Hungarians say no, I can’t do anything about it, it doesn’t depend on me and it’s up to Herr Minister von Ribbentrop to see to that with the Reichsführer, not me.”—“I see.” I studied the chart for a bit: “If I understand correctly, the difference between the numbers there in the ‘April’ column and the numbers on the left represents the potential pool, subject to the various complications you’ve explained to me.”—“Exactly. But note that those are overall figures, that is to say that a large part, in any case, doesn’t interest the Arbeitseinsatz, because you see they’re old people or children or I don’t know what, so from that total you can deduct a large number.”—“How big, in your opinion?”—“I don’t know. You should check that with the WVHA—admission and selection is their problem. My responsibility stops when the train leaves—the rest I can’t talk about. What I can tell you is that in the opinion of the RSHA, the number of Jews temporarily kept for work should be as limited as possible: creating large concentrations of Jews, you see, is inviting a repetition of Warsaw, it’s dangerous. I think I can tell you that that’s the opinion of Gruppenführer Müller, my Amtschef, and of Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner.”—“I see. Could you give me a copy of these figures?”—“Of course, of course. I’ll send them to you tomorrow. But for the USSR and the GG, I don’t have those, as I told you.” Günther, who hadn’t said a word, let out another resounding “Heil Hitler!” while we got ready to leave. I returned with Eichmann to his office so that he could explain a few more points to me. When I was ready to go, he accompanied me. In the lobby he made a low bow: “Sturmbannführer, I would like to invite you to my place one night this week. We sometimes give chamber music performances. My Hauptscharführer Boll plays first violin.”—“Oh. That’s very nice. And you, what do you play?”—“Me?” He stretched out his neck and head, like a bird. “Violin too, second violin. I don’t play as well as Boll, unfortunately, so I gave way to him. C…Obergruppenführer Heydrich, I mean, not Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner whom I know well, we’re from the same province and he’s the one who had me enter the SS and he still remembers—no, the Chief played the violin magnificently. Yes, really very fine, he had a huge amount of talent. He was a fine man, whom I respected very much. Very…considerate, a man who suffered in his heart. I miss him.”—“I hardly knew him. And what are you playing?”—“At the moment? Mostly Brahms. A little Beethoven.”—“No Bach?” He pinched his lips again: “Bach? I don’t like him very much. I find him dry, too…calculated. Sterile, so to speak, very beautiful, of course, but soulless. I prefer Romantic music, it sometimes overwhelms me, yes, it takes me far beyond myself.”—“I’m not sure I share your opinion of Bach. But I’ll happily accept your invitation.” The idea in fact bored me profoundly, but I didn’t want to offend him. “Good, good,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’ll check with my wife and I’ll call you. And don’t worry about your documents. You’ll have them tomorrow, you have my word as an SS officer.”

I still had to see Oswald Pohl, the big boss of the WVHA. He received me, in his offices on Unter den Eichen, with expansive cordiality and chatted with me about Kiel, where he had spent many years in the Kriegsmarine. It was there, in the Kasino, that the Reichsführer had noticed and recruited him, in the summer of 1933. Pohl had begun by centralizing the administration and finances of the SS, then little by little had built up his network of companies. “Like any multinational, we’re very diversified. We’re in construction materials, wood, ceramics, furniture, publishing, even mineral water.”—“Mineral water?”—“Oh! That’s very important. It allows us to provide our Waffen-SS with drinkable water throughout all the territories in the East.” He said he was particularly proud of one of his recent creations: Osti, the East Industries, a corporation set up in the district of Lublin in order to put the remaining Jews to work for the SS. But despite his geniality, he quickly grew vague as soon as I wanted to talk to him about the Arbeitseinsatz in general; according to him, most of the effective measures were in place, it was simply a matter of giving them time to take effect. I questioned him about the criteria of selection, but he referred me to the functionaries in Oranienburg: “They know the details better. But I can guarantee you that ever since the selection has been medicalized, it’s going very well.” He assured me that the Reichsführer was fully informed of all these problems. “I don’t doubt it, Obergruppenführer,” I replied. “But the Reichsführer has put me in charge of seeing what the points of blockage are and what possible improvements there might be. The fact of having been integrated into the WVHA, under your orders, has entailed considerable modifications in our system of National Socialist camps, and the measures that you ordered or encouraged, as well as your choice of subordinates, have had a massively positive impact. The Reichsführer, I think, simply wants now to obtain an overall picture. Your suggestions for the future will count enormously, I don’t doubt that for an instant.” Did Pohl feel threatened by my mission? After this soothing little speech, he changed the subject; but a little later, he became animated again and even went out with me to introduce me to some of his co-workers. He invited me to come back and see him when I returned from my inspection (I was to leave for Poland soon, and also to visit some camps in the Reich); he followed me into the hallway, putting his hand on my shoulder in a familiar way; outside, I turned around, he was still waving his hand, smiling: “Bon voyage!”

Eichmann had kept his word: when I returned from Lichtenfelde at the end of the afternoon, I found on my desk a large sealed envelope marked GEHEIME REICHSSACHE! It contained a bundle of documents accompanied by a typed letter; there was also a handwritten note from Eichmann inviting me to his place the next evening. Driven by Piontek, I went to buy some flowers first—an uneven number, as I had learned to do in Russia—and some chocolate. Then I had him drop me off at the Kurfürstenstrasse. Eichmann had his apartment in a wing of his office building, intended too for single officers passing through. He opened the door himself, dressed in civilian clothes: “Ach! Sturmbannführer Aue. I should have told you not to come in uniform. It’s a very simple soirée. But that’s fine. Come in, come in.” He introduced me to his wife, Vera, a small Austrian with a discreet personality, but who blushed with pleasure and gave a charming smile when I handed her the flowers with a low bow. Eichmann had two of his children line up, Dieter, who must have been six, and Klaus. “Little Horst is already asleep,” Frau Eichmann said.—“He’s our latest one,” her husband added. “He’s not yet a year old. Come, I’ll introduce you.” He led me into the living room where there were already several men and women, standing or sitting on sofas. There were, if I remember correctly, Hauptsturmführer Novak, an Austrian of Croatian origin with firm, angular features, quite handsome but curiously arrogant; Boll, the violinist; and some others whose names I have unfortunately forgotten, all colleagues of Eichmann’s, with their wives. “Günther will come by too, but just for a cup of tea. He rarely joins us.”—“I see you cultivate the spirit of camaraderie in your section.”—“Yes, yes. I like having friendly relations with my subordinates. What would you like to drink? A little schnapps? Krieg ist Krieg…” I laughed and he joined in with me: “You have a good memory, Obersturmbannführer.” I took the glass and raised it: “This time, I drink to the health of your charming family.” He clicked his heels and bowed his head: “Thank you.” We conversed a little, then Eichmann led me to the sideboard to show me a photograph framed in black, showing a man, still young, in uniform. “Your brother?” I asked.—“Yes.” He looked at me with his curious birdlike air, particularly accentuated in this light by his hooked nose and protruding ears. “I don’t suppose you ran into him, over there?” He mentioned a division and I shook my head: “No. I arrived rather late, after the encirclement. And I didn’t meet many people.”—“Oh, I see. Helmut fell during one of the fall offensives. We don’t know the exact circumstances, but we received an official notification.”—“All that was a hard sacrifice,” I said. He rubbed his lips: “Yes. Let’s hope it wasn’t in vain. But I believe in the Führer’s genius.”

Frau Eichmann served cakes and tea; Günther arrived, took a cup, and stationed himself in a corner to drink it, without talking with anyone. I secretly observed him while the others were talking. He was obviously a very proud man, jealous of his impenetrable, closed bearing, which he exhibited to his more talkative colleagues as a silent reproach. He was said to be the son of Hans F. K. Günther, the doyen of German racial anthropology, whose work had an immense influence at that time; if this was true, the elder Günther could be proud of his offspring, who had gone from theory to practice. He slipped away, saying goodbye distantly after a scant half hour. We proceeded to the music: “Always before dinner,” Eichmann said to me. “Afterward, we’re too busy digesting to play well.” Vera Eichmann picked up the viola and another officer brought out a cello. They played two of the three Brahms string quartets, pleasant, but of little interest, in my opinion; the execution was adequate, without any great surprises: only the cellist had any special talent. Eichmann played calmly, methodically, his eyes riveted to the score; he didn’t make any mistakes, but didn’t seem to understand that that wasn’t enough. I remembered then his comment two days before: “Boll plays better than I, and Heydrich played even better.” Maybe after all he understood this, and accepted his limits, taking pleasure in the little he could manage.

I applauded vigorously; Frau Eichmann seemed especially flattered. “I’ll go put the children to bed,” she said. “Then we’ll have dinner.” We had another drink while we waited: the women spoke about rationing or rumors, the men about the latest news, which wasn’t very interesting, since the front remained stable and nothing had happened since the fall of Tunis. The atmosphere was informal, gemütlich in the Austrian style, an exaggerated offhandedness. Then Eichmann had us pass into the dining room. He himself assigned the seats, placing me at his right, at the head of the table. He uncorked some bottles of Rhine wine, and Vera Eichmann brought in a roast with a bay leaf sauce and some green beans. This was a change for me from Frau Gutknecht’s inedible cooking and even from the usual canteen at the SS-Haus. “Delicious,” I complimented Frau Eichmann. “You are an outstanding cook.”—“Oh, I am lucky. Dolfi often manages to find scarce foods. The stores are almost empty.” Inspired, I gave vent to a character sketch of my landlady, beginning with her cooking and then going on to other peculiarities. “Stalingrad?” I said, imitating her dialect and voice. “But what on earth were you messing around there for? Aren’t we fine as we are, here? And also where is it, exactly?” Eichmann laughed and choked on his wine. I went on: “One day, in the morning, I went out at the same time as she did. We see someone wearing the star, probably a privileged Mischling. She exclaims: Oh! Look, Herr Offizier, a Jew! You haven’t gassed that one yet?” Everyone laughed; Eichmann was laughing so hard he cried, and hid his face in his napkin. Only Frau Eichmann kept a straight face: when I noticed, I interrupted myself. She seemed to want to ask a question, but held back. To regain my composure, I poured Eichmann some wine: “Go on, drink.” He laughed again. The conversation shifted again, and I ate; one of the guests told a joke about Göring. Eichmann looked serious and turned to me: “Sturmbannführer Aue, you’re a cultivated man. I would like to ask you a question, a serious question.” I gestured with my fork for him to continue. “You have read Kant, I imagine? Right now,” he went on, rubbing his lips, “I’m reading his Critique of Practical Reason. Of course, a man like me, without any university education I mean, can’t understand everything. But still one can understand some things. And I’ve thought a lot about the question of the Kantian Categorical Imperative, especially. You agree with me, I’m sure, in saying that every honest man must live according to this imperative.” I drank a mouthful of wine and agreed. Eichmann continued: “The Imperative, as I understand it, says: The principle of my individual will must always be such that it can become the principle of moral law. By acting, man legislates.” I wiped my mouth: “I think I see where you’re heading. You’re wondering if our work is in agreement with the Kantian Imperative.”—“That’s not quite it. But one of my friends, who is also interested in these kinds of questions, maintains that in wartime, by virtue if you like of the state of exception caused by danger, the Kantian Imperative is suspended, since of course what one wants to do to the enemy, one doesn’t want the enemy to do to us, and so what one does cannot become the basis for a general law. That’s his opinion, you see. I sense that he’s wrong, though, and that in fact it is by our fidelity to duty, in a way, by our obedience to superior orders…that precisely we have to bend our will on following orders better. To live them in a positive way. But I haven’t yet found the irrefutable argument to prove that he’s wrong.”—“But it’s quite simple, I think. We all agree that in a National Socialist State the ultimate foundation of positive law is the will of the Führer. That’s the well-known principle Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. Of course, we realize that in practice the Führer cannot take care of every single thing, and so others must also act and legislate in his name. In principle, this idea should be extended to the entire Volk. Thus Dr. Frank, in his treatise on constitutional law, extended the definition of the Führerprinzip in the following way: Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew of your action, would approve of it. There is no contradiction between that principle and Kant’s Imperative.”—“I see, I see. Frei sein ist Knecht sein, To be free is to be a vassal, as the old German proverb says.”—“Precisely. This principle is applicable to every member of the Volksgemeinschaft. You have to live out your National Socialism by living your own will as if it were the Führer’s, and so, to use Kant’s terms, as a foundation of the Volksrecht. Whoever only obeys orders like an automaton, without examining them critically to penetrate their inner necessity, does not work closer to the Führer; most of the time, he distances himself from him. Of course, the very foundation of völkisch constitutional law is the Volk: it cannot be applied outside of the Volk. Your friend’s mistake is to appeal to an entirely mythical supranational law, an aberrant invention of the French Revolution. All law must rest on a foundation. Historically, this has always been a fiction or an abstraction—God, the King, or the People. Our great advance has been to base the legal concept of the Nation on something concrete and inalienable: the Volk, whose collective will is expressed by the Führer who represents it. When you say Frei sein ist Knecht sein, you have to understand that the foremost vassal of all is precisely the Führer, since he is nothing but pure service. We are not serving the Führer as such, but as the representative of the Volk, we serve the Volk and must serve it as the Führer serves it, with total abnegation. That’s why, confronted with painful tasks, we have to bow down, master our feelings, and carry them out with firmness.” Eichmann listened attentively, his neck stretched out, his eyes staring behind his large glasses. “Yes, yes,” he said warmly, “I completely understand you. Our duty, our accomplishment of duty, is the highest expression of our human freedom.”—“Absolutely. If our will is to serve our Führer and our Volk, then, by definition, we are also bearers of the principle of the law of the Volk, as it is expressed by the Führer or derived from his will.”—“Excuse me,” one of the guests interrupted, “but wasn’t Kant anti-Semitic, in any case?”—“Indeed,” I replied. “But his anti-Semitism remained purely religious, dependent on his belief in a life to come. Those are concepts that we have for the most part moved beyond.” Frau Eichmann, helped by one of the guests, cleared the table. Eichmann served schnapps and lit a cigarette. For some minutes ordinary talk resumed. I drank my schnapps and smoked too. Frau Eichmann served coffee. Eichmann signed to me: “Come with me. I want to show you something.” I followed him into his bedroom. He turned on the light, pointed me to a chair, pulled a key out of his pocket, and, as I sat down, he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a rather thick album bound in black pebble-grained leather. Eyes shining, he handed it to me and sat down on the bed. I leafed through it: it was a series of reports, some of them on Bristol board, others on ordinary paper, and photographs, all bound into an album like the one I had put together in Kiev after the Grosse Aktion. The title page, written in calligraphic Fraktur, announced: WARSAW’S JEWISH QUARTER NO LONGER EXISTS! “What is this?” I asked.—“Those are Brigadeführer Stroop’s reports on the suppression of the Jewish uprising. He offered this album to the Reichsführer, who gave it to me so I could study it.” He was radiant with pride. “Look, look, it’s astonishing.” I examined the photos, some were impressive: fortified bunkers, burned buildings, Jews jumping from rooftops to escape the flames; and the ruins of the neighborhood after the battle. The Waffen-SS and the auxiliary forces had had to reduce the pockets of resistance with artillery, at point-blank range. “It lasted almost a month,” Eichmann whispered, biting a cuticle. “A month! With more than six battalions. Look at the beginning, at the list of losses.” The first page listed sixteen dead, including a Polish policeman. A long list of wounded followed. “What kind of weapons did they have?” I asked.—“Not much, fortunately. A few machine guns, some grenades and pistols, some Molotov cocktails.”—“How did they get them?”—“Probably from the Polish partisans. They fought like wolves, did you see? Jews who had been starving for three years. The Waffen-SS was shocked.” This was almost the same as Thomas’s reaction, but Eichmann seemed more frightened than admiring. “Brigadeführer Stroop says even the women hid grenades under their skirts to blow themselves up with a German when they surrendered.”—“That’s understandable,” I said. “They knew what was waiting for them. Was the district completely emptied?”—“Yes. All the Jews who were taken alive were sent to Treblinka. That’s one of the centers led by Gruppenführer Globocnik.”—“Without any selection.”—“Of course! Much too dangerous. You know, once again, Obergruppenführer Heydrich was right. He compared it to a disease: it’s always the final residue that’s the most difficult to destroy. The weak, the old, die right away; in the end, only the young, the strong, the clever, remain. It’s very worrisome, because it’s the result of natural selection, the strongest biological pool: if they survive, in fifty years everything will start all over again. I’ve already explained to you that this uprising worried us a lot. If it happens again, it could be a catastrophe. No opportunity must be left. Imagine a similar revolt in a concentration camp! Unthinkable.”—“But we need workers, as you know very well.”—“Of course, I’m not the one who decides. I just wanted to stress the risks to you. The question of labor, I’ve already told you, isn’t at all my field, and everyone has his own ideas. But still: as the Amtschef often says, you can’t plane a board without chips flying. That’s all I mean.” I returned the album. “Thank you for showing me this, it was very interesting.” We rejoined the others; the first guests were already taking their leave. Eichmann held me back for one last drink, then I excused myself, thanking Frau Eichmann and kissing her hand. In the front hallway, Eichmann gave me a friendly slap on the back: “Allow me, Sturmbannführer, you’re a regular guy. Not one of those kid-gloved boys over at the SD. No, you’re on the level.” He must have had a little too much to drink, and it was making him sentimental. I thanked him and shook his hand, leaving him on his doorstep, hands in his pockets, smiling from one side of his mouth.

If I have described these meetings with Eichmann at such length, it’s not because I remember them better than the others: but this little Obersturmbannführer, in the meantime, has become a kind of celebrity, and I thought that my memories, shedding light on his character, might interest the public. A lot of stupid things have been written about him: he was certainly not the enemy of mankind described at Nuremberg (since he wasn’t there, it was easy to blame everything on him, especially since the judges didn’t understand much about how our services functioned); nor was he an incarnation of banal evil, a soulless, faceless robot, as some sought to present him after his trial. He was a very talented bureaucrat, extremely competent at his functions, with a certain stature and a considerable sense of personal initiative, but solely within the framework of clearly circumscribed tasks: in a position of responsibility, where he would have had to make decisions, in the place of his Amtschef Müller, for example, he would have been lost; but as a middle manager, he would have been the pride of any European firm. I never perceived that he nourished a particular hatred of the Jews: he had simply built his career on them, they had become not just his specialty but, in a way, his stock in trade; later on, when they tried to take it away from him, he defended it jealously, which is understandable. But he could just as easily have done something else, and when he told his judges that he thought the extermination of the Jews was a mistake, we can believe him; many people, in the RSHA and especially in the SD, thought similarly—I’ve already shown this—but once the decision was made, it had to be seen through to the end, he was very aware of that; what’s more, his career depended on it. Of course he wasn’t the kind of person I liked to see frequently, his ability to think on his own was extremely limited, and when I returned to my place, that night, I wondered why I had been so expansive, why I had fallen so easily into that familial, sentimental atmosphere that is usually so repugnant to me. Maybe I too had some need to feel I belonged to something. His interest was clear; I was a potential ally in a higher sphere to which he would normally have had no access. But despite all his friendliness I knew that for him I remained an outsider to his department, and thus a potential threat to his domain. And I sensed that he would cunningly and stubbornly confront any obstacle to what he regarded as his objective, that he wasn’t a man to let himself be easily checked. I understood his apprehensions, faced with the danger posed by concentrations of Jews: but for me this danger, if needed, could be minimized, one simply had to be aware of it and take the necessary measures. For the moment, I kept an open mind, I hadn’t reached any conclusions, I reserved my judgment till my analysis was complete.

And the Kantian Imperative? To tell the truth, I didn’t have much of an idea, I had told poor Eichmann pretty much whatever came into my head. In the Ukraine or in the Caucasus, questions of this kind still concerned me, difficulties distressed me and I discussed them seriously, with the feeling that they were a vital issue. But that feeling seemed to have gotten lost. Where, when did that happen? In Stalingrad? Or afterward? For a while I thought I had drowned, submerged by the things resurfaced from the depths of my past. And then, with the stupid, incomprehensible death of my mother, this anguish too had disappeared: the feeling that dominated me now was a vast indifference—not dull, but light and precise. Only my work engaged me; I felt I had been offered a stimulating challenge that would call on all my abilities, and I wanted to succeed—not for a promotion or for any ulterior ambitions, I had none, but simply to enjoy the satisfaction of a thing well done. It was in this state of mind that I left for Poland, accompanied by Piontek, leaving Fräulein Praxa in Berlin to see to my mail, my rent, and her nails. I had chosen a good time to begin my trip: my former superior in the Caucasus, Walter Bierkamp, was replacing Oberführer Schöngarth as BdS of the Generalgouvernement, and, having learned this from Brandt, I had gotten myself invited to the presentation ceremony. This took place in mid-June 1943, in Cracow, in the inner courtyard of the Wawel Castle, a magnificent building, even with its tall, thin columns hidden beneath banners. Hans Frank, the Generalgouverneur, gave a long speech from a platform set up in the rear of the courtyard, surrounded by dignitaries and by an honor guard. He looked a little ridiculous in his brown SA uniform with his tall stovepipe cap, the strap of which cut into his jowls. The crude frankness of the speech surprised me, I still remember, since there was a considerable audience there, not just representatives from the SP and the SD, but also from the Waffen-SS, civil servants in the GG, and officers from the Wehrmacht. Frank congratulated Schöngarth, who stood behind him, stiff and a head taller than Bierkamp, on his successes in the implementation of difficult aspects of National Socialist ideology. This speech has survived in the archives; here’s an extract that gives a good idea of the tone: In a state of war, where victory is at stake, where we are looking eternity in the face, this is an extremely difficult problem. How, it is often asked, can the need to cooperate with an alien culture be reconciled with the ideological aim of, say, wiping out the Polish Volkstum? How is the need to maintain industrial output compatible with the need, for example, to annihilate the Jews? These were good questions, yet I found it surprising that they were so openly aired. A GG civil servant assured me later on that Frank always spoke this way, and that in any case in Poland the extermination of the Jews wasn’t a secret for anyone. Frank, who must have been a handsome man before his face drowned in fat, spoke with a powerful but squeaky, almost hysterical voice; he kept rising on his toes, stretching his paunch over the podium, and waving his hand. Schöngarth, a man with a tall, square forehead, who spoke in a calm, somewhat pedantic voice, also gave a speech, followed by Bierkamp, whose National Socialist proclamations of faith I couldn’t help myself from finding a little hypocritical (but I probably found it hard to forgive the dirty trick he’d played on me). When I came up to congratulate him during the reception, he acted as if he were delighted to see me: “Sturmbannführer Aue! I heard you behaved heroically, in Stalingrad. My congratulations! I never doubted you.” His smile, in his little otter face, looked like a grimace; but it was entirely possible that he had in fact forgotten his last words in Voroshilovsk, which were hardly compatible with my new situation. He asked me some questions about my duties and assured me of the complete cooperation of his departments, promising me a letter of recommendation to his subordinates in Lublin, where I counted on beginning my inspection; he also told me, over a few drinks, how he had brought Group D back through Byelorussia, where, renamed Kampfgruppe Bierkamp, it had been assigned to the anti-partisan fight, especially north of the Pripet Marshes, taking part in the major cleansing operations, like the one code-named “Cottbus” that had just ended at the time of his transfer to Poland. About Korsemann, he whispered to me in a confidential tone that he had acted poorly and was on the point of losing his position; there was talk of putting him on trial for cowardice in the face of the enemy, he would at the very least be stripped of his rank and sent to redeem himself at the front. “He should have followed the example of a man like you. But his indulgence toward the Wehrmacht has cost him dearly.” These words made me smile: for a man like Bierkamp, obviously, success was everything. He himself hadn’t done too badly; BdS was an important position, especially in the Generalgouvernement. I didn’t mention the past, either. What counted was the present, and if Bierkamp could help me, so much the better.

I spent a few days in Cracow, to go to meetings and also to enjoy this beautiful city a little. I visited the old Jewish quarter, the Kasimierz, now occupied by haggard, sickly, and unkempt Poles, displaced by the Germanization of the Incorporated Territories. The synagogues hadn’t been destroyed: Frank, they said, wanted some material traces of Polish Judaism to survive, for the edification of future generations. Some served as warehouses, others remained closed; I had the two oldest ones opened for me, around the long Szeroka Square. The so-called Old Synagogue, which dated back to the fifteenth century, with its long crenellated-roof annex added for women in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, served the Wehrmacht to store food supplies and spare parts; the brick façade, many times remodeled, the blocked windows, white limestone arches, and somewhat randomly set sandstone blocks had an almost Venetian charm, and owed much to the Italian architects working in Poland and Galicia. The Remuh Synagogue, at the other end of the square, was a small, narrow, sooty building of no architectural interest. But of the large Jewish cemetery surrounding it, which would certainly have been worth the trouble of visiting, nothing more remained but a vacant, desolate lot; the old gravestones had been taken away as construction material. The young officer from the Gestapostelle who accompanied me knew the history of Polish Judaism very well, and showed me where the grave of Rabbi Moses Isserles, a famous Talmudist, had been. “As soon as Prince Mieszko began to impose the Catholic faith on Poland, in the tenth century,” he explained, “the Jews appeared to sell salt, wheat, furs, wine. Since they made the kings richer, they obtained franchise after franchise. The people, at that time, were still pagan, healthy and unspoiled, apart from a few Orthodox Christians to the East. So the Jews helped Catholicism implant itself on Polish soil, and in exchange, Catholicism protected the Jews. Long after the conversion of the people, the Jews kept this position of agents of the powerful, helping the pan bleed the peasants by every means possible, serving them as bailiffs, usurers, holding all commerce firmly in their hands. Hence the persistence and strength of Polish anti-Semitism: for the Polish people, the Jew has always been an exploiter, and even if the Poles hate us profoundly, they still approve of our solution to the Jewish problem from the bottom of their hearts. That’s also true for the supporters of the Armia Krajowa, who are all Catholics and bigots, even if it’s a little less true for the Communist partisans, who are forced, sometimes against their will, to follow the Moscow Party line.”—“But the AK sold weapons to the Jews in Warsaw.”—“Their worst weapons, in ridiculous quantities, at exorbitant prices. According to our information, they agreed to sell them only on direct orders from London, where the Jews are manipulating their so-called government in exile.”—“And how many Jews are left now?”—“I don’t know the exact number. But I can assure you that before the end of the year all the ghettos will be liquidated. Aside from our camps and a handful of partisans, there won’t be any more Jews left in Poland. Then it will finally be time to look seriously into the Polish question. They too will have to submit to a major demographic diminution.”—“Total?”—“I don’t know about total. The economics departments are in the process of studying it and making calculations. But it will be sizeable: the overpopulation is far too important. Without that, this region can never prosper or flourish.”

Poland will never be a beautiful country, but some of its landscapes have a melancholy charm. It took me about half a day to get from Cracow to Lublin. Along the road, large, gloomy potato fields, interspersed with irrigation canals, alternated with Scotch pine and birch woods, the ground bare, without undergrowth, dark and silent, seemingly sealed off from the beautiful June light. Piontek drove capably, at a steady speed. This taciturn family man was an excellent travel companion: he spoke only when addressed, and carried out his tasks calmly and methodically. Every morning, I found my boots polished and my uniform brushed and ironed; when I went out, the Opel was waiting, cleaned of any dust or mud from the day before. At meals, Piontek ate with gusto and drank little, and between meals, he never asked for anything. I had immediately given him our travel budget folder, and he kept the expenses meticulously up to date, noting down, with a pencil stub wetted between his lips, every pfennig spent. He spoke a rasping German, with a strong accent but correctly, and also got by in Polish. He had been born near Tarnowitz; in 1919, after the Partition, he and his family had found themselves Polish citizens, but had chosen to stay there, so as not to lose their plot of land; then his father had been killed in a riot, during the days of unrest before the war: Piontek assured me that it was an accident, and didn’t blame his old Polish neighbors, most of them expelled or arrested during the reincorporation of that part of Upper Silesia. Having become a citizen of the Reich again, he had been mobilized and had ended up in the police, and from there, he didn’t really know how, he had been assigned to the service of the Persönlicher Stab in Berlin. His wife, his two little girls, and his old mother still lived on their farm, and he didn’t see them often, but sent them most of his salary; in return they sent him things to supplement the usual fare—a chicken, half a goose, enough to treat a few comrades. Once I had asked him if he missed his family: Especially the little girls, he had replied, he missed not seeing them grow up; but he didn’t complain; he knew he was lucky, and that it was much better than freezing his ass off in Russia. “Begging your pardon, Sturmbannführer.”

In Lublin, as in Cracow, I put up at the Deutsches Haus. The taproom, when we arrived, was already animated; I had called ahead, and my room was reserved; Piontek would sleep in a dormitory for enlisted men. I took my things up and asked for some hot water to wash with. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on my door, and a young Polish servant came in with two steaming buckets. I pointed to the bathroom, and she went in to put them down. Since she didn’t come back out, I went in to see what she was doing: I found her half naked, undressed to the waist. Stunned, I looked at her red cheeks, her little breasts, tiny but charming; fists on her hips, she was staring at me with a bold smile. “What are you doing?” I asked severely.—“Me…wash…you,” she answered in broken German. I picked up her blouse from the stool where she had put it and handed it to her: “Get dressed and leave.” She obeyed with the same naturalness. That was the first time such a thing had happened to me: the Deutsches Häuser I knew were strictly run, but obviously this must have been a common practice here, and I didn’t think for an instant that it was restricted to the bath. After the girl had gone, I got undressed, washed, and, having changed into a dress uniform (for long journeys, because of the dust, I wore a gray field uniform), I went downstairs. A noisy crowd was now filling the bar and the restaurant. I went out into the backyard to smoke and found Piontek standing, cigarette dangling from his mouth, watching two teenagers wash our car. “Where did you find them?” I asked.—“Not me, Sturmbannführer. The Haus. The garage owner complains about it, actually—he says he could have Jews for free, but that the officers made scenes if a Jew touched their car. So he pays Poles like them, one reichsmark a day.” (Even in Poland, that was a ridiculous amount. A night at the Deutsches Haus, although subsidized, with three meals, came to about 12 RM; a coffee in Cracow cost 1.50 RM.) I watched the young Poles wash the car with him. Then I invited him to have dinner with me. We had to clear our way through the throng to find a free spot at a table. The men were drinking, shouting as if for the pleasure of hearing their own voices. There were SS there, Orpos, men from the Wehrmacht and from the Organisation Todt; almost everyone was in uniform, including many women, probably typists or secretaries. Polish waitresses threaded their way with difficulty with trayfuls of beer and food. The meal was plentiful: sliced roast beef, beets, seasoned potatoes. As I ate I observed the crowd. A lot of people were just drinking. The waitresses were having trouble: the men, already drunk, groped the girls’ breasts or buttocks as they went by, and since they had their hands full, they couldn’t defend themselves. Near the long bar was a group in SS-Totenkopf uniforms, probably personnel from the Lublin camp, with two women among them, Aufseherinnen, I imagine. One of them, who was drinking brandy, had a masculine face and laughed a lot; she held a riding crop with which she tapped her tall boots. At one point, one of the waitresses was blocked near them: the Aufseherin held out her whip and slowly, to the laughter of her comrades, lifted the girl’s skirt from behind, up to her buttocks. “You like that, Erich!” she exclaimed. “But her ass is filthy, like all Poles.” The others laughed louder: she let the skirt fall and whipped the backside of the girl, who let out a cry and had to make an effort not to spill her glasses of beer. “Go on, move, sow!” the Aufseherin shouted. “You stink.” The other woman chuckled and rubbed shamelessly against one of the noncoms. In the back of the room, under an arch, some Orpos were playing billiards, shouting loudly; near them, I noticed the young servant who had brought me hot water; she was sitting on the lap of an OT engineer, who had his hand slipped under her blouse and was feeling her up while she laughed and stroked his balding forehead. “Well,” I said to Piontek, “it’s definitely lively here, in Lublin.”—“Yeah. It’s known for that.” After the meal, I had a Cognac and a little Dutch cigar; the Haus had a full shelf at the bar; you could choose from many quality brands. Piontek had gone to bed. They had put music on, and couples were dancing; the second Aufseherin, obviously drunk, was holding her partner by the buttocks; an SS secretary was letting her neck be kissed by a Supply Corps Leutnant. This stifling, cloying, lewd, noise-filled atmosphere got on my nerves and ruined the pleasure I took from traveling, the joyful feeling of freedom I had felt during the day on the long, almost deserted roads. And it was impossible to escape this grating, sordid atmosphere; it followed you even into the john. The large room, though, was remarkably clean, tiled in white up to the ceiling, with thick oak doors, mirrors, fine porcelain sinks, and brass taps for running water; the stalls too were white and clean, they must have scrubbed the seatless Turkish-style toilets regularly. I undid my trousers and squatted down; when I had finished, I looked for paper, but there didn’t seem to be any; then I felt something touch my backside; I jumped and turned around, trembling, already reaching for my service revolver, my underpants ridiculously lowered: a man’s hand was stretched out through a hole in the wall and was waiting, palm up. A little fresh shit was already staining the tips of his fingers, where they had touched me. “Go away!” I screamed. “Go away!” Slowly, the hand withdrew from the hole. I burst into nervous laughter: it was vile, they had really gone mad, in Lublin. Fortunately I still had some squares of newspaper in my tunic, a good precaution when traveling. I quickly wiped myself and fled, without pulling the chain to flush. When I went back into the main room I had the impression that everyone would look at me, but no one was paying any attention, they were drinking and shrieking, with brutal or hysterical, crude laughter, like a medieval court. Shaken, I leaned on the bar and ordered another Cognac; as I drank, I looked at the fat Spiess from the KL, with the Aufseherin, and, repulsive thought, imagined him squatting down, having his ass wiped with delight by a Polish hand. I also wondered if the women’s bathroom benefited from a similar arrangement: looking at them, I thought the answer was yes. I finished my Cognac in one gulp and went up to go to bed; I slept poorly, because of the noise, but still better than poor Piontek: some Orpos had brought Polish girls back to the dormitory, and spent the night fornicating in the beds next to his, without any qualms, trading girls and making fun of him because he didn’t want one. “They pay them in canned food,” he explained to me laconically over breakfast.

From Cracow, I had already phoned to make an appointment with Gruppenführer Globocnik, the SSPF of the Lublin district. Globocnik in fact had two offices: one for his SSPF staff, and another, on Pieradzky Street, from which the Einsatz Reinhard was run and where he had invited me to meet him. Globocnik was a powerful man, much more than his rank indicated; his superior in the hierarchy, the HSSPF of the Generalgouvernement (Obergruppenführer Krüger), had almost no right of supervision over the Einsatz, which covered all the Jews in the GG and thus extended quite a bit beyond Lublin; for that, Globocnik reported directly to the Reichsführer. He also held important functions within the Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom. The HQ of the Einsatz was set up in a former medical school, a squat, yellow ocher building with a red pitched roof, characteristic of this region where German influence had always been strong, and where you entered through a wide double door under a half-moon archway, still surmounted by the inscription COLLEGIUM ANATOMICUM. An orderly welcomed me and led me to Globocnik. The Gruppenführer, buttoned into a uniform so tight it seemed a size too small for his imposing build, received my salute perfunctorily and waved a mission order in front of me: “So, just like that, the Reichsführer sends me a spy!” He let out a loud laugh. Odilo Globocnik was a Carinthian, born in Trieste, and was probably of Croat origin; an Altkämpfer from the Austrian NSDAP, he had briefly been Gauleiter in Vienna, after the Anschluss, before being sacked over some currency trafficking. He had served prison time under Dollfuss, for the murder of a Jewish jeweler: officially, that made him a martyr of the Kampfzeit, but malicious tongues argued that the Jew’s diamonds had played a larger role in the affair than ideology. He was still waving my paper: “Admit it, Sturmbannführer! The Reichsführer doesn’t trust me anymore, is that it?” Still standing at attention, I tried to justify myself: “Gruppenführer, my mission…” He let out another Homeric burst of laughter: “I’m joking, Sturmbannführer! I know better than anyone that I have the Reichsführer’s full confidence. Doesn’t he call me his old Globus? And not just the Reichsführer! The Führer in person has come to congratulate me on our great work. Have a seat. Those are his own words, a great work. ‘Globocnik,’ he said to me, ‘you are one of the forgotten heroes of Germany. I would like every newspaper to be able to publish your name and your exploits! In a hundred years, when we can talk about all this, your great deeds will be taught to children right in elementary school! You are a valiant knight, and I admire the fact that you have been able to remain so modest, so discreet, having accomplished such things.’ And I said—the Reichsführer was there too—‘My Führer, I’ve only done my duty.’ Have a seat, have a seat.” I took the armchair he indicated; he flopped down next to me, slapping me on my thigh, then reached behind himself for a box of cigars and offered me one. When I refused, he insisted: “In that case, keep it for later.” He lit one himself. His moonlike face beamed with satisfaction. On the hand that held the lighter, his thick, gold SS ring looked as if it were encrusted in a pudgy finger. He exhaled the smoke with a grimace of pleasure. “If I understand the Reichsführer’s letter right, you’re one of those bores who want to save the Jews under the pretext that we need labor?”—“Not at all, Gruppenführer,” I replied courteously. “The Reichsführer gave me the order to analyze the problems of the Arbeitseinsatz as a whole, in view of future evolutions.”—“I imagine you want to see our installations?”—“If you mean the gassing stations, Gruppenführer, that doesn’t concern me. It’s more the question of the selections, and the use of the Arbeitsjuden that preoccupies me. So I would like to begin with Osti and the DAW.”—“Osti! Another of Pohl’s grand ideas! We’re gathering millions, here, for the Reich, millions, and Pohl wants me to look after secondhand clothes, like a Jew. Ostindustrie, give me a break! Another fine piece of crap they’ve inflicted on me.”—“Perhaps, Gruppenführer, but…”—“No ‘but’! The Jews are going to have to disappear in any case, all of them, industry or no industry. Of course, we can keep a few, long enough to train Poles to replace them. The Poles are dogs, but they can look after secondhand clothes, if that’s useful for the Heimat. So long as it’s profitable, I’m not against it. But you’ll see that. I’ll fix you up with my deputy, Sturmbannführer Höfle. He’ll explain to you how it all works and you’ll sort things out with him.” He got up, the cigar wedged between two fingers, and shook my hand. “You can see anything you want, of course. If the Reichsführer sent you, that’s because you know how to hold your tongue. Here I shoot blabbermouths. That happens every week. But for you, I’m not worried. If you have a problem, come see me. Goodbye.”

Höfle, his deputy for the Einsatz Reinhard, was also an Austrian, but much more staid than his superior. He received me with a dispirited, weary air: “Not too shaken up? Don’t worry about him, he’s like that with everyone.” He chewed his lip and pushed a piece of paper toward me: “I have to ask you to sign this.” I skimmed over the text: it was a declaration of secrecy, in five points. “But it seems to me,” I said, “that I’m already compelled to secrecy by my very position.”—“I know. But it’s a rule imposed by the Gruppenführer. Everyone has to sign.” I shrugged my shoulders: “If it makes him happy.” I signed. Höfle put the paper away in a folder and crossed his hands on his desk. “Where do you want to start?”—“I don’t know. Explain your system to me.”—“It’s quite simple, really. We have three installations: two on the Bug and one on the Galician border, in Belzec, which we’re in the process of closing because Galicia, aside from the labor camps, is mostly judenrein. Treblinka, which mainly served Warsaw, is also going to be closed. But the Reichsführer has just given the order to transform Sobibor into a KL, which will be done toward the end of the year.”—“And all the Jews pass through these three centers?”—“No. For logistical reasons, it wasn’t possible or practical to evacuate all the little towns in the region. For that, the Gruppenführer received some Orpo battalions that dealt with those Jews on-site, little by little. I’m the one who directs the Einsatz on a day-to-day basis, together, with my inspector of the camps, Sturmbannführer Wirth, who’s been there since the beginning. We also have a training camp for Hiwis, mostly Ukrainians and Latvians, in Travniki.”—“And aside from them, all your personnel are SS?”—“Actually, no. Out of about four hundred and fifty men, not counting the Hiwis, almost a hundred were assigned to us by the Führer’s Chancellery. Almost all our camp commanders are from there. Tactically, they’re under control of the Einsatz, but administratively, they depend on the Chancellery. They supervise everything having to do with salaries, leaves, promotions, and so on. Apparently it’s a special agreement between the Reichsführer and Reichsleiter Bouhler. Some of those men aren’t even members of the Allgemeine-SS or of the Party. But they’re all veterans of the Reich’s euthanasia centers; when most of those centers were closed, some of the personnel, with Wirth at their head, were transferred here so that the Einsatz could profit from their experience.”—“I see. And Osti?”—“Osti is a recent creation, the result of a partnership between the Gruppenführer and the WVHA. Since the beginning of the Einsatz, we’ve had to set up centers to deal with the confiscated goods; little by little, they’ve expanded into various kinds of workshops, for the war effort. Ostindustrie is a limited liability corporation created last November to regroup and rationalize all those workshops. The board of directors named an administrator from the WVHA, Dr. Horn, to run it, along with the Gruppenführer. Horn is a rather nitpicking bureaucrat, but I suppose he’s competent.”—“And the KL?” Höfle waved his hand: “The KL has nothing to do with us. It’s an ordinary WVHA camp; of course, the Gruppenführer is responsible for it as SS- und Polizeiführer, but it’s completely separate from the Einsatz. They also manage companies, especially a workshop of the DAW, but that’s the responsibility of the SS economist attached to the SSPF. Of course, we cooperate closely; some of our Jews have been handed over to them, either to work, or for Sonderbehandlung; and not long ago, since we were overflowing, they set up their own installations for the ‘special treatment.’ Then you have all the armament enterprises of the Wehrmacht, which also use the Jews we’ve provided them; but that’s the responsibility of the Armaments Inspectorate of the GG, headed by Generalleutnant Schindler, in Cracow. Finally, you have the civilian economic network, under the control of the new district governor, Gruppenführer Wendler. You might be able to see him, but be careful, he doesn’t get along at all with Gruppenführer Globocnik.”—“The local economy doesn’t interest me; what concern me are the channels for assigning prisoners, in terms of the economy as a whole.”—“I think I understand. Go see Horn, then. His head’s a little in the clouds, but you can probably get something out of him.”

I found this Horn to be nervous, agitated, overflowing with zeal but also with frustration. He was an accountant, educated at the Stuttgart polytechnic university; when the war started, he had been called up by the Waffen-SS, but instead of sending him to the front, they assigned him to the WVHA. Pohl had chosen him to set up Osti, a subsidiary of the German Economic Enterprises, the holding company created by the WVHA to consolidate the SS companies. He was strongly motivated, but faced with a man like Globocnik, he couldn’t hold his own, and he knew it. “When I arrived, it was unimaginable…chaos,” he told me. “There were all kinds of things: a basket factory and carpentry workshops in Radom, a brush factory here in Lublin, a glass factory. Already, right away, the Gruppenführer insisted on keeping a work camp for himself, for self-provisioning as he said. All right, in any case there was plenty to do. All this was managed any which way. The accounts weren’t kept up to date. And production was close to zero. Which is completely understandable, given the state of the workforce. So I set to work: but then they did everything they could to complicate my existence. I train specialists; they take them away from me and they disappear God knows where. I ask for better food for the workers; they tell me there is no extra food for Jews. I ask them at least to stop beating them all the time; they give me to understand that I shouldn’t interfere in what isn’t my business. How is anyone supposed to work properly in such conditions?” I understood why Höfle didn’t much like Horn: with complaints, one rarely succeeded at anything. But Horn had a good analysis of the dilemmas: “The problem too is that the WVHA doesn’t support me. I sent report after report to Obergruppenführer Pohl. I keep asking him: What is the priority factor? The political-police factor? In that case, yes, the concentration of Jews is the main objective, and economic factors recede to the background. Or the economic factor? If that’s it, production has to be rationalized, the camps have to be organized in a flexible manner so that a range of orders can be dealt with as they come in, and above all the workers have to be guaranteed a vital minimum subsistence. And Obergruppenführer Pohl answers: both. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out.”—“And you think that if they provided you with the means, you could create modern, profitable businesses with Jewish forced labor?”—“Of course. The Jews, it goes without saying, are inferior people, and their work methods are completely archaic. I studied the organization of labor in the Litzmannstadt ghetto; it’s a catastrophe. All supervision, from the reception of the raw materials to the delivery of the finished product, is carried out by Jews. Of course there’s no quality control. But with well-trained Aryan supervisors, and a rational, modern division and organization of labor, we could have very good results. A decision has to be made about this. Here, I encounter nothing but obstacles, and I know I have no support.”

Obviously he was looking for some. He had me visit several of his enterprises, frankly showing me the state of undernourishment and poor hygiene of the prisoners placed in his charge, but also the improvements he had been able to introduce, the increase in quality of the products, which mainly served to supply the Wehrmacht, and the quantitative increase too. I had to acknowledge that his presentation was convincing: he did seem to have found a way here to reconcile the requirements of war with increased productivity. Horn, of course, was not informed of the Einsatz, at least not of its extent, and I took care not to speak of it to him; so it was difficult to explain to him the causes of the obstructions from Globocnik, who must have found it difficult to reconcile Horn’s requests with what he regarded as his main mission. But at bottom Horn was right: by choosing the strongest or most specialized Jews, by concentrating them and adequately supervising them, one could certainly provide a considerable contribution to the war economy.

I visited the KL. It was spread out along a rolling hill just outside the city, west of the road to Zamosc. It was an immense establishment, with rows of long wooden barracks stretching all the way back inside barbed-wire fences, surrounded by watchtowers. The Kommandantur was outside the camp near the road, at the foot of the hill. I was received there by Florstedt, the Kommandant, a Sturmbannführer with an abnormally narrow, elongated face, who looked through my mission orders with obvious mistrust: “It is not stated that you have access to the camp.”—“My orders give me access to all structures controlled by the WVHA. If you don’t believe me, get in touch with the Gruppenführer, he’ll confirm it for you.” He went on leafing through the papers. “What do you want to see?”—“Everything,” I said with a friendly smile. Finally, he handed me over to an Untersturmführer. It was the first time I had visited a concentration camp, and I had everything shown to me. Among the inmates, or Häftlinge, there were all kinds of nationalities: Russians, Poles of course, as well as Jews, but also German political prisoners and criminals, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and who knows what else. The barracks, long field stables of the Wehrmacht modified by SS architects, were dark, stinking, crowded; the inmates, most of them in rags, were piled up, three or four to a bunk, on several levels. I discussed the sanitary and hygienic problems with the head doctor: it was he, still with the Untersturmführer trailing behind, who showed me the Bath and Disinfection barrack, where on one side newcomers were given a shower, and on the other those unfit for work were gassed. “Up until spring,” the Untersturmführer said, “it was only dusting out. But since the Einsatz transferred some of its load to us, we’ve been overflowing.” The camp didn’t know what to do with the corpses and had ordered a crematorium, equipped with five single-muffle furnaces designed by Kori, a specialized company in Berlin. “They’re competing for the business with Topf und Söhne, of Erfurt,” he added. “In Auschwitz, they work only with Topf, but we thought Kori’s conditions were more competitive.” The gassing, curiously, was not carried out with carbon monoxide, as in the vans we used in Russia or, according to what I had read, in the fixed installations of the Einsatz Reinhard; here, they used hydrocyanic acid, in the form of tablets that released the gas when in contact with air. “It’s much more effective than carbon monoxide,” the head doctor assured me. “It’s quick, the patients suffer less, there are never any failures.”—“Where does the product come from?”—“It’s actually an industrial disinfectant, which they use for fumigation, against lice and other vermin. Apparently it was Auschwitz that had the idea to test it for the ‘special treatment.’ It works very well.” I also inspected the kitchen and the supply warehouses; despite the assurances of the SS-Führers and even of the prisoner employees who distributed the soup, the rations looked insufficient to me, an impression that was confirmed for me in veiled terms by the head doctor. I came back several days running to study the files of the Arbeitseinsatz; each Häftling had his individual index card, filed with what was called the Arbeitstatistik, and was assigned, if he wasn’t sick, to a work Kommando, some inside the camp, for maintenance, others outside; prisoners in the largest Kommandos lived at their worksite, like that of the DAW, the German Armament Works, in Lipowa. On paper, the system seemed solid; but the losses in manpower remained considerable; and Horn’s criticisms helped me see that most of the prisoners employed—poorly fed, dirty, regularly beaten—were incapable of any consistent, productive work.

I spent several weeks in Lublin and also visited the region around it. I went to Himmlerstadt, formerly Zamosc, an excentric Renaissance gem built ex nihilo at the end of the sixteenth century by a rather megalomaniac Polish chancellor. The city had flourished thanks to its advantageous position on the commercial routes between Lublin and Lemberg and between Cracow and Kiev. It was now the heart of the most ambitious project of the RKF, the SS organization in charge, since 1939, of ensuring the repatriation of the Volksdeutschen from the USSR and the Banat, thus bringing about the Germanization of the East: the creation of a Germanic buffer region on the threshold of the Slavic regions, confronting eastern Galicia and Volhynia. I discussed the details of this with Globocnik’s delegate, a bureaucrat from the RKF who had his headquarters in the town hall, a tall baroque tower by the side of the square, its entrance on the upper story reached by a majestic, crescent-moon-shaped double staircase. From November to March, he explained to me, more than a hundred thousand people had been expelled—the able-bodied Poles sent to German factories via the Aktion Sauckel, the others to Auschwitz, and all the Jews to Belzec. The RKF aimed to replace them with Volksdeutschen; but despite all the incentives and the natural wealth of the region, they were having trouble attracting enough settlers. When I asked him if our setbacks in the East discouraged them—this conversation took place in the beginning of July; the great battle of Kursk had just begun—this conscientious administrator looked at me with surprise and assured me that not even the Volksdeutschen were defeatist, and that, in any case, our brilliant offensive would soon reestablish the situation and bring Stalin to his knees. This optimistic man did, though, allow himself to talk about the local economy with some discouragement: despite the subsidies, the region was still far from self-sufficient, and depended entirely on money and food inputs from the RKF; most of the settlers, even the ones who had taken immediate possession of entire working farms, weren’t managing to feed their families; and as for the ones who wanted to set up enterprises, it would take them years to stay afloat. After this visit, I was driven by Piontek south of Himmlerstadt: it was a beautiful region, made of gentle hills with meadows and copses, dotted with fruit trees; it already looked more Galician than Polish, with rich fields spread out beneath a light blue, unvarying sky, broken only here and there by little puffs of white clouds. Out of curiosity, I went on to Belzec, one of the last towns before the district’s border. I stopped near the train station, where there was some bustle: cars and wagons moved up and down the main street, officers from various branches, as well as settlers in threadbare suits, were waiting for a train, farmers who looked more Romanian than German were selling apples on upturned crates by the side of the road. Beyond the track stood brick warehouses, a kind of small factory; and just behind, a few hundred meters farther on, thick black smoke rose up from a birch wood. I showed my papers to an SS noncom standing there and asked him where the camp was: he pointed to the wood. I got back into the car and traveled about three hundred meters on the main road alongside the railway toward Rawa Ruska and Lemberg; the camp stood on the other side of the tracks, surrounded by a forest of pine and birch. They had put tree branches in the barbed-wire fence, to hide the interior; but some of them had already been removed, and one could see through these gaps teams of prisoners, busy as ants, tearing down barracks and, in places, the fence itself; the smoke came from a hidden zone, a little higher up in the back of the camp; despite the lack of wind, a sweetish, nauseating smell made the air reek, and spread even into the car. After everything I had been told and shown, I had thought that the camps of the Einsatz were set up in uninhabited areas, difficult to access; but this one was right next to a little town swarming with German settlers and their families; the main railroad linking Galicia to the rest of the GG, on which civilians and soldiers traveled daily, passed right by the barbed wire, through the horrible smell and the smoke: and all these people, trading, traveling, scurrying in one direction or another, chatted, argued, wrote letters, spread rumors, told jokes.

But in any case, despite the interdictions, the promises of secrecy and Globocnik’s threats, the men of the Einsatz remained talkative. You just had to wear an SS uniform and frequent the bar in the Deutsches Haus, occasionally buying someone a drink, to be quickly informed of everything. The obvious discouragement caused by the military news, clearly decipherable through the optimism radiating from the communiqués, contributed to loosening people’s tongues. When they proclaimed that in Sicily our courageous Italian allies, backed by our forces, are holding firm, everyone understood that the enemy had not been driven back into the sea, and had finally opened a second front in Europe; as for Kursk, anxiety increased as the days passed, for the Wehrmacht, after its initial successes, remained obstinately, unusually silent: and when finally they began to mention the planned implementation of elastic tactics around Orel, even the most obtuse must have understood something was wrong. There were many who ruminated over these developments; and among the loudmouths who ranted every night, it was never hard to find a man drinking alone and in silence, and to engage him in conversation. That’s how one day I began talking with a man in an Untersturmführer’s uniform, leaning on the bar in front of a tankard of beer. Döll—that was his name—seemed flattered that a superior officer would treat him so familiarly; yet he must have been ten years older than me. He pointed to my “Order of the Frozen Meat” and asked me where I had spent that winter; when I answered Kharkov, he relaxed even further. “Me too, I was there, between Kharkov and Kursk. Special Operations.”—“You weren’t with the Einsatzgruppe, though?”—“No, it was something else. Actually, I’m not in the SS.” He was one of those famous functionaries from the Führer’s Chancellery. “Between us, we say T-four. That’s how it’s called.”—“And what were you doing around Kharkov?”—“You know, I was in Sonnenstein, one of the centers for the sick there…” I motioned with my head to show I knew what he meant, and he went on. “In the summer of ’forty-one, they closed it. And some of us, we were considered specialists, they wanted to keep us, so they sent us to Russia. There was a whole delegation of us, it was Oberdienstleiter Brack himself who led us, there were the doctors from the hospital, everything, and we carried out special actions. With gas trucks. We each had a special notice in our pay book, a red piece of paper signed by the OKW, that forbade us from being sent too close to the front: they were afraid we’d fall into the hands of the Russians.”—“I don’t really understand. The special measures, in that region, all the SP measures, those were the responsibility of my Kommando. You say that you had gas trucks, but how could you be carrying out the same tasks as us without our knowing it?” His face took on a belligerent, almost cynical look: “We weren’t carrying out the same tasks. The Jews or the Bolsheviks, over there, we didn’t touch them.”—“So?” He hesitated and drank some more, in long draughts, then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his fingers. “We took care of the wounded.”—“Russian wounded?”—“You don’t understand. Our own wounded. The ones who were too messed up to have a useful life were sent to us.” I understood and he smiled when he saw: he had produced his effect. I turned to the bar and ordered another round. “You’re talking about German wounded,” I finally said, softly. “As I told you. A real shit pile. Guys like me and you, who had given everything for the Heimat, and bang! That’s how they were thanked. I can tell you, I was happy when they sent me here. It’s not very cheerful here, either, but at least it’s not that.” Our drinks arrived. He told me about his youth: he had gone to a technical school; he wanted to be a farmer, but with the crisis he had joined the police: “My children were hungry, it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table every day.” At the end of 1939, he had been assigned to Sonnenstein for the Euthanasia Einsatz. He didn’t know how he had been chosen. “On one hand, it wasn’t very pleasant. But on the other, it wasn’t the front, and the pay was good, my wife was happy. So I didn’t say anything.”—“And Sobibor?” He had already told me that’s where he worked now. He shrugged his shoulders: “Sobibor? It’s like everything, you get used to it.” He made a strange gesture, which made a strong impression on me: with the tip of his boot, he scraped the floor, as if he were crushing something. “Little men and little women, it’s all the same. It’s like stepping on a cockroach.”

There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Döll is a good example. What else was he, Döll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn’t entirely agree? If he had been born in France or America, he’d have been called a pillar of society and a patriot; but he was born in Germany, and so he is a criminal. Necessity, as the Greeks knew already, is not only a blind goddess, but a cruel one too. Not that there was any lack of criminals, at the time. All of Lublin, as I’ve tried to show, was steeped in a sleazy atmosphere of corruption and excess; the Einsatz, but also colonization and exploitation of that isolated region, made more than one person lose his head. Since my friend Voss’s remarks about this, I have thought about the difference between German colonialism, as it was practiced in the East during those years, and the colonialism of the British and the French, in principle more civilized. There are, as Voss stressed, objective facts: after the loss of its colonies in 1919, Germany had to recall its cadres and close its colonial administration offices; the training institutes remained open in principle, but didn’t attract anyone, because of the lack of prospects; twenty years later, a whole specialized field of knowledge had been lost. That being the case, National Socialism had given impetus to an entire generation, full of new ideas and greedy for new experiences, which, as regards colonization, were perhaps just as valid as the old ones. As for the excesses—the aberrant outbursts like those you could see in the Deutsches Haus or, more systematically, the seeming incapability of our administrators to treat the colonized peoples, some of whom would have been ready to serve us willingly if we had left the door open, other than with violence and contempt—one shouldn’t forget, either, that our colonialism, even in Africa, was a young phenomenon, and that the others, in the beginning, scarcely did any better: just consider the Belgian exterminations in the Congo, and their policy of systematic mutilation, or else the American policy, precursor of and model for our own, of the creation of living space through murder and forced displacement—America, we tend to forget, was anything but a “virgin territory,” but the Americans succeeded where we failed, which makes all the difference. Even the British, so often cited as an example, and whom Voss so admired, needed the trauma of 1858 to begin to develop more sophisticated tools of control; and if, little by little, they learned to play a virtuoso game of carrot-and-stick, we shouldn’t forget that the stick was far from neglected, as one can see from the Amritsar Massacre, the bombing of Kabul, and other examples, many and forgotten.

But now I’ve strayed from my first reflections. What I wanted to say is that if man is certainly not, as some poets and philosophers have made him out to be, naturally good, he is not naturally evil, either: good and evil are categories that can serve to qualify the effect of the actions of one man on another; but they are, in my opinion, fundamentally unsuitable, even unusable, to judge what goes on in the heart of that man. Döll killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities? And how many philanthropists, throughout the world, made famous by their extravagant generosity are, on the contrary, monsters of egotism and harshness, greedy for public glory, full of vanity, tyrannical toward those close to them? Every man wants to satisfy his own needs and remains indifferent to the needs of others. And in order for men to be able to live together, avoiding the Hobbesian state of “all against all,” and, on the contrary, to be able, thanks to mutual aid and the increased productivity that stems from it, to satisfy a greater portion of their desires, you need a regulatory authority, which prescribes limits to these desires and arbitrates conflicts: this mechanism is the Law. But it is also necessary for men, egotistical and weak, to accept the constraint of the Law, and so this Law must refer to an authority outside of man, must be founded on a power that man feels is superior to himself. As I had suggested to Eichmann during our dinner, this supreme and imaginary reference point was for a long time the idea of God; from that invisible, omnipotent God, it shifted to the physical presence of the king, sovereign by divine right; and when that king lost his head, sovereignty passed to the People or to the Nation, and was based on a fictive “contract,” without any historical or biological foundation, and thus just as abstract as the idea of God. German National Socialism sought to anchor it in the Volk, a historical reality: the Volk is sovereign, and the Führer expresses or represents or embodies this sovereignty. From this sovereignty the Law is derived, and for most men, in all countries, morality is nothing but Law: in this sense, Kantian moral law, with which Eichmann was so preoccupied, stemming from reason and identical for all men, is a fiction like all laws (but perhaps a useful fiction). Biblical Law says, Thou shalt not kill, and doesn’t brook any exception; but every Jew or Christian accepts that in wartime that law is suspended, that it is just to kill the enemy of one’s people, that there is no sin in that; once the war is over and the weapons stored away, the old law resumes its peaceful course, as if the interruption had never taken place. So for a German, to be a good German means to obey the laws and thus the Führer: there can be no other morality, since there would be nothing to support it. (And it’s not by chance that the rare opponents of our power were for the most part believers: they preserved another moral reference point, they could judge Good and Evil on another basis than the will of the Führer, and God served them as a fulcrum to betray their leader and their country: without God, that would have been impossible for them, since where could they have found a justification? What man alone, of his own free will, can come to a decision and say, This is good, that is evil? How outrageous that would be, and how chaotic too, if everyone dared to act that way: if every man lived according to his private Law, Kantian as it might be, we’d be back with Hobbes again.) So if you wish to judge German actions during this war as criminal, it’s all of Germany you have to call to account, not just the Dölls. If Döll and not his neighbor ended up in Sobibor, that’s chance, and Döll is no more responsible for Sobibor than his luckier neighbor; at the same time, his neighbor is just as responsible as he is for Sobibor, since both served the same country with integrity and devotion, the country that created Sobibor. When a soldier is sent to the front, he doesn’t protest; not only is he risking his life, but he is forced to kill, even if he doesn’t want to kill; his free will abdicates; if he remains at his post, he’s a virtuous man, if he runs away, he’s a deserter, a traitor. The man posted to a concentration camp, like the man assigned to an Einsatzkommando or a police battalion, most of the time doesn’t reason any differently: he knows that his free will has nothing to do with it, and that chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man. Otherwise, you would have to consider these things from a moral standpoint not Judeo-Christian (or secular and democratic, which amounts to exactly the same thing) but rather Greek: for the Greeks, chance played a part in the doings of men (chance, it should be said, often disguised as an intervention of the gods), but they did not consider that this chance diminished one’s responsibility in any way. Crime has to do with the deed, not the will. When Oedipus kills his father, he doesn’t know he is committing parricide; killing a stranger who has insulted you on the open road, for Greek conscience and law, is a legitimate action, there’s no sin in it; but that man was Laius, and ignorance doesn’t alter the crime in the least: and Oedipus himself recognizes this, and when he finally learns the truth, he chooses his own punishment, and inflicts it on himself. The link between will and crime is a Christian notion, which persists in modern law; the penal code, for example, regards involuntary or negligent homicide as a crime, but a lesser one than premeditated homicide; the same is true for the legal concept of diminished responsibility in case of insanity; and the nineteenth century ended by linking the notion of crime to that of the abnormal. For the Greeks, it doesn’t matter whether Heracles kills his children in a fit of madness, or if Oedipus kills his father by accident: that changes nothing, it’s a crime, they are guilty; you can pity them, but you can’t absolve them—and that is true even if often their punishment is left to the gods, and not to men. From this perspective, the principle of the postwar trials, which tried men for their concrete actions, without taking chance into account, was just; but they went about it clumsily; tried by foreigners whose values they denied (while still acknowledging their rights as the victors), the Germans could feel they had been relieved of this burden, and were hence innocent: since the person who wasn’t tried regarded the one who was as a victim of bad luck, he absolved him, and at the same time absolved himself; and the man rotting in a British jail, or a Russian gulag, did the same. But could it have been otherwise? How, for an ordinary man, can something be righteous one day and a crime the next? Men need to be guided, it’s not their fault. These are complex questions and there are no simple answers. Who knows where the Law is? Everyone must look for it, but it’s difficult, and it’s normal to bow to the common consensus. Everybody can’t be a legislator. It’s no doubt my meeting with a judge that made me think about all that.

For those who didn’t enjoy the binges at the Deutsches Haus, distractions were rare in Lublin. In my spare time, I visited the old town and the castle; at night, I had my meal served to me in my room and I read. I had left Best’s Festgabe and the volume on ritual murder in Berlin, on my bookshelf, but I had brought along the collection by Maurice Blanchot that I had purchased in Paris, which I had started again at the beginning, and after days of difficult discussions, I took great pleasure in plunging into this other world, all made of light and thought. Minor incidents continued to eat away at my tranquility; in this Deutsches Haus, it didn’t seem it could be otherwise. One night, somewhat agitated, too distracted to read, I had gone down to the bar for a schnapps and some talk (I knew most of the regulars now). Going back upstairs, it was dark, and I mistook the room; the door was open and I went in: on the bed, two men were copulating simultaneously with a girl, one lying on his back, the other kneeling, the girl, also kneeling, between them. I took a minute to understand what I was seeing, and when, as in a dream, things finally fell into place, I muttered an apology and tried to go out. But the kneeling man, naked except for a pair of boots, withdrew and stood up. Holding his erect penis in one hand and stroking it gently, he pointed, as if to invite me to take his place, to the girl’s buttocks, where the anus, surrounded by a pink halo, gaped open like a sea anemone between two white globes. Of the other man I saw only his hairy legs, testicles and penis disappearing into the tufted vagina. The girl was moaning feebly. Without a word, smiling, I shook my head, and went out, gently closing the door. After that, I was even less inclined to leave my room. But when Höfle invited me to an outdoor reception Globocnik was giving for the birthday of the commanding officer of the district garrison, I unhesitatingly accepted. The party took place at the Julius Schreck Kaserne, the HQ of the SS: behind the mass of an old building a rather beautiful park spread out, with a very green lawn, tall trees at the rear, and flowerbeds at the sides; in the distance, you could see some houses, then countryside. Wooden tables had been set up on trestles, and the guests were drinking in clusters on the grass; in front of the trees, over some pits that had been dug for the purpose, a whole stag and two pigs were roasting on spits, supervised by a few enlisted men. The Spiess who had escorted me from the gate led me straight to Globocnik, who was standing with his guest of honor, Generalleutnant Moser, and some civilian officials. It was barely noon, Globocnik was drinking Cognac and smoking a fat cigar, his red face sweating over his buttoned collar. I clicked my heels in front of the group and saluted, and then Globocnik shook my hand and introduced me to the others; I congratulated the General on his birthday. “So, Sturmbannführer, your investigations are going forward? What have you found?”—“It’s a little too early yet to draw conclusions, Gruppenführer. And also the problems are rather technical. What is definite is that in terms of exploitation of labor, we could conduct some improvements.”—“We can always improve! In any case, a real National Socialist knows nothing but movement and progress. You should speak to the Generalleutnant here: he was complaining just now that we took some Jews away from the factories of the Wehrmacht. Explain to him that he just needs to replace them with Poles.” The General interrupted: “My dear Gruppenführer, I wasn’t complaining; I understand these measures as well as the next person. I was simply saying that the interests of the Wehrmacht should be taken into consideration. Many Poles have been sent to work in the Reich, and it takes time to train the remaining ones; by acting unilaterally, you are disturbing the war production.” Globocnik let out a burst of crude laughter: “What you mean, my dear Generalleutnant, is that the Polacks are too stupid to learn how to work correctly, and that the Wehrmacht prefers Jews. That’s true, the Jews are cleverer than the Poles. That’s why they’re more dangerous too.” He stopped and turned to me: “But, Sturmbannführer, I don’t want to detain you. The drinks are on the tables, help yourself, have fun!”—“Thank you, Gruppenführer.” I saluted and headed to one of the tables, which was groaning beneath the bottles of wine, beer, schnapps, Cognac. I poured myself a glass of beer and looked around. More guests were flowing in, but I didn’t recognize many people. There were some women, a few employees of the SSPF in uniform, but mostly officers’ wives, in civilian clothes. Florstedt was talking with his camp colleagues; Höfle was smoking alone on a bench, elbows on the table, a bottle of beer open in front of him, with a pensive air, lost in the void. In the spring, I had recently learned, he had lost both his children, twins, carried off by diphtheria; at the Deutsches Haus, they said that at the funeral he had collapsed, raving, seeing divine punishment in his misfortune, and that since then he was no longer the same man (he would in fact commit suicide twenty years later, at the remand center in Vienna, without even waiting for the verdict of the Austrian court, certainly more clement than God’s, though). I decided to leave him alone and joined the little group surrounding the Lublin KdS, Johannes Müller. I knew the KdO Kintrup by sight; Müller introduced me to his other interlocutor: “This is Sturmbannführer Dr. Morgen. Like you, he works directly under the Reichsführer’s orders.”—“Excellent. In what capacity?”—“Dr. Morgen is an SS judge, attached to the Kripo.” Morgen continued the explanation: “For now, I head a special commission appointed by the Reichsführer to investigate the concentration camps. And you?” I explained my mission to him in a few words. “Ah, so you’re also concerned with the camps,” he commented. Kintrup had wandered off. Müller patted my shoulder: “Meine Herren, if you want to talk shop, I’ll leave you. It’s Sunday.” I saluted him and turned to Morgen. He examined me with his keen, intelligent eyes, slightly veiled behind thin-rimmed glasses. “What exactly does your commission consist of?” I asked him.—“It’s essentially an SS and police court ‘for special tasks.’ I have direct authority from the Reichsführer to investigate corruption in the KLs.”—“That’s very interesting. Are there a lot of problems?”—“That’s an understatement. The corruption is massive.” He signed with his head to someone behind me and smiled slightly: “If Sturmbannführer Florstedt sees you with me, your own work won’t be made any easier.”—“You’re investigating Florstedt?”—“Among others.”—“And he knows it?”—“Of course. It’s an official investigation, I’ve already questioned him several times.” He was holding a glass of white wine in his hand; he drank a little, and I drank too, emptying my glass. “What you’re talking about interests me enormously,” I continued. I explained my impressions to him about the gaps between the official dietary norms and what the prisoners actually received. He listened, nodding his head: “Yes, definitely, the food is looted too.”—“By whom?”—“By everyone. From the lowest to the highest. The cooks, the kapos, the SS-Führers, the warehouse managers, and the top of the hierarchy too.”—“If that’s true, it’s a scandal.”—“Absolutely. The Reichsführer is very troubled by it personally. An SS-Mann should be an idealist: he cannot do his work and at the same time fornicate with the prisoners and fill up his pockets. But that happens.”—“And are your investigations succeeding?”—“It’s very difficult. These people stick together, and resistance is enormous.”—“But if you have the Reichsführer’s full support…”—“That’s quite recent. This special court was created scarcely a month ago. My investigations have been going on for two years and I have encountered considerable obstacles. We began—at the time I was a member of the SS and Police Court Twelve, in Kassel—with KL Buchenwald, near Weimar. More precisely with the Kommandant of that camp, a certain Koch. The investigations were blocked: Obergruppenführer Pohl wrote a letter of congratulations then to Koch, where he said among other things that he would step in as a shield whenever an unemployed lawyer should stretch out his hangman’s hands again to grasp the white body of Koch. I know this because Koch circulated this letter widely. But I didn’t let him go. Koch was transferred here, to command the KL, and I followed him. I discovered a network of corruption that covered all the camps. Finally, last summer, Koch was suspended. But he had also had most of the witnesses assassinated, including a Hauptscharführer in Buchenwald, one of his accomplices. Here, he had all the Jewish witnesses killed; we opened an investigation into that too, but then all the Jews in the KL were executed; when we tried to react, they pleaded superior orders to us.”—“But such orders exist, you must know that.”—“I learned it then. And it’s clear that in that case we have no jurisdiction. But, still, there is a distinction: if a member of the SS has a Jew killed in the context of superior orders, that’s one thing; but if he has a Jew killed to cover his embezzlements, or for his own perverted pleasure, as also happens, that’s another thing, that’s a crime. Even if the Jew is to die anyway.”—“I entirely agree with you. But the distinction must be hard to make.”—“Legally, yes: you can have doubts, but to charge someone, you need evidence, and as I’ve told you, these men help each other out, they make witnesses disappear. Sometimes, of course, there’s no ambiguity: for instance, I’m also investigating Koch’s wife, a sexual deviant who had tattooed prisoners killed in order to remove their skin; she used the tanned skins for lampshades or other things like that. Once all the evidence is gathered, she’ll be arrested, and I don’t doubt she’ll be condemned to death.”—“And how did your investigations into Koch end?”—“They’re still under way; when I’ve finished my work here and have all the evidence in hand, I plan on arresting him again. He too deserves the death penalty.”—“So he was let go? I’m not following you very well.”—“He was acquitted in February. But I wasn’t in charge of the case anymore. I had problems with another man, not a camp officer but a Waffen-SS officer, a certain Dirlewanger. A raving lunatic, at the head of a unit of reprieved criminals and poachers. In 1941, I received information that he was conducting so-called scientific experiments, here in the GG, with his friends: he was killing girls with strychnine and watching them die while he smoked cigarettes. But when I wanted to prosecute him, he and his unit were transferred to Byelorussia. I can tell you that he benefits from protection at a very high level of the SS. Finally I was demoted, relieved of my functions, reduced to the rank of SS-Sturmmann, and sent to a field battalion, then to the SS-‘Wiking,’ in Russia. It was during that time that the proceedings against Koch collapsed. But in May the Reichsführer had me recalled, appointed me Sturmbannführer of the Reserve, and assigned me to the Kripo. After another complaint from the authorities in the district of Lublin, about thefts of property belonging to prisoners, he ordered me to form this commission.” I nodded admiringly: “You’re not afraid of trouble.” Morgen laughed dryly: “Not really. Already, before the war, when I was a judge in the Landgericht in Stettin, I was demoted because I disagreed with a ruling. That’s how I ended up in the SS-Gericht.”—“Can I ask you where you studied?”—“Oh, I moved around a lot. I studied in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Kiel, then also in Rome and in The Hague.”—“Kiel! At the Institute for World Economics? I did some of my studies there too. With Professor Jessen.”—“I know him well. I studied international law with Professor Ritterbusch.” We chatted for a while, exchanging memories of Kiel; Morgen, I discovered, spoke very good French, and four other languages besides. I returned to the initial subject: “Why did you begin with Lublin?”—“First of all to corner Koch. I’m almost there. And also the complaint about theft in the district gave me a good pretext. But all kinds of bizarre things go on here. Before I came, I received a report from the KdS on a Jewish wedding in a work camp. There were more than a thousand guests.”—“I don’t understand.”—“A Jew, an important kapo, got married in this Judenlager. There were astronomical quantities of food and alcohol. SS guards took part. Clearly, there must have been criminal infractions there.”—“Where did that take place?”—“I don’t know. When I arrived in Lublin, I asked Müller; he was very vague. He sent me to the camp of the DAW, but there they didn’t know anything. Then they advised me to go see Wirth, a Kriminalkommissar, you know who he is? And Wirth told me it was true, and that it was his method for the extermination of the Jews: he gave privileges to some, who helped him kill the others; then he killed them too. I wanted to learn more, but the Gruppenführer forbade me from going into the camps of the Einsatz, and the Reichsführer confirmed this prohibition.”—“So you have no jurisdiction over the Einsatz?”—“Not on the question of extermination, no. But no one forbade me from looking into what’s happening with the confiscated property. The Einsatz is generating colossal sums, in gold, currency, and goods. All that belongs to the Reich. I’ve already gone to see the warehouses here, on Chopin Street, and I count on investigating further.”—“Everything you say,” I said warmly, “is hugely interesting to me. I hope we can discuss it more in detail. In a certain sense, our missions are complementary.”—“Yes, I see what you mean: the Reichsführer wants to put his house in order. And maybe, since they don’t mistrust you as much, you’ll be able to dig up some things that are kept hidden from me. We’ll see each other again.”

For some minutes, Globocnik had been calling the guests to sit down to lunch. I found myself opposite Kurt Claasen, a colleague of Höfle’s, and next to a very talkative SS secretary. She immediately wanted to tell me about her tribulations, but fortunately Globocnik began a speech in honor of General Moser, which forced her to wait. He ended quickly and everyone there got up to drink to Moser’s health; then the General said a few words of thanks. The food was brought over: the roasted animals had been expertly carved, the pieces piled on wooden trays spread out on the tables, everyone could serve himself as he pleased. There were also salads and fresh vegetables, it was delicious. The girl nibbled on a carrot and straight away wanted to go on with her story: I listened to her with half an ear while I ate. She talked about her fiancé, a Hauptscharführer stationed in Galicia, in Drohobycz. It was a tragic story: she had broken off her engagement to a Viennese soldier for him, and as for him, he was married, but to a woman who didn’t love him. “He wanted to get a divorce, but I did a stupid thing, I saw that soldier I broke up with again, he’s the one who asked to see me but I said yes, and Lexi”—the fiancé—“knew it, and it discouraged him because he wasn’t sure about my love anymore and he went back to Galicia. But fortunately he still loves me.”—“And what is he doing, in Drohobycz?”—“He’s in the SP, he’s playing general with the Jews on the Durchgangstrasse.”—“I see. And you see each other often?”—“When we have leave. He wants me to come live with him, but I don’t know. Apparently it’s very dirty there. But he says I won’t have to see his Jews, he can find a good house. But if we’re not married, I don’t know, he’d have to get a divorce. What do you think?” My mouth was full of venison and I merely shrugged. Then I talked a little with Claasen. Around the end of the meal an orchestra appeared, set up on the steps that led to the garden, and began a waltz. Several couples got up to dance on the lawn. The young secretary, disappointed no doubt by my lack of interest in her sentimental misfortunes, went to dance with Claasen. At another table I noticed Horn, who had arrived late, and got up to exchange a few words with him. One day, noticing my leatherette satchel, he had offered, as a way of showing me the quality of his Jews’ work, to have one made for me in leather; I had just received it, a beautiful morocco portfolio with a brass zipper. I thanked him warmly, but insisted also on paying for the leather and the labor, in order to avoid any misunderstanding. “No problem,” Horn agreed. “We’ll send you a bill.” Morgen seemed to have disappeared. I drank another beer, smoked, watched the dancers. It was warm out, and with the heavy meats and the alcohol I was sweating in my uniform. I looked around: many people had unfastened or even unbuttoned their tunics; I opened the collar on mine. Globocnik didn’t miss one dance, each time inviting one of the women in civilian dress or a secretary; my lunch companion also ended up in his arms. But not many people had his spirit: after several waltzes and other dances, they had the orchestra change its music, and a choir of Wehrmacht and SS officers gathered to sing “Drei Lilien, kommt ein Reiter, bringt die Lilien” and other songs. Claasen had joined me with a glass of Cognac; he was in shirtsleeves, his face red and swollen; he was laughing mechanically and while the orchestra played “Es geht alles vorüber” he intoned a cynical variation:

Es geht alles vorüber

Es geht alles vorbei

Zwei Jahre in Russland

Und nix ponimai.

“If the Gruppenführer hears you, Kurt, you’ll end up a Sturmmann in Orel and no more nix ponimai.” Wippern, another department head in the Einsatz, had come over and was scolding Claasen. “Listen, we’re going swimming, are you coming?” Claasen looked at me: “Will you come? There’s a pool in the back of the park.” I took another beer from an ice bucket and followed them through the trees: in front of us, I heard laughter, splashing. On the left, barbed wire ran behind the pines: “What’s that?” I asked Claasen. “A little camp of Arbeitsjuden. The Gruppenführer keeps them there for maintenance work, the garden, the vehicles, things like that.” The pool was separated from the camp by a narrow rise; several people, including two women in bathing suits, were swimming or sunbathing on the grass. Claasen stripped down to his boxer shorts and dove in. “Are you coming?” he shouted as he resurfaced. I drank a little more, then, folding my uniform next to my boots, got undressed and went into the water. It was cool, somewhat the color of tea; I did a few laps and then stayed in the middle, floating on my back and contemplating the sky and the trembling treetops. Behind me, I heard the two girls chatting, sitting by the edge of the pool, paddling their feet in the water. A quarrel broke out: some officers had pushed Wippern, who didn’t want to get undressed, into the water; he was swearing and raging as he extracted himself from the pool in his soaking uniform. While I watched the others laughing, maintaining my position in the middle of the pool with little hand movements, two helmeted Orpos appeared behind the rise, rifles on their shoulders, pushing in front of them two very thin men in striped uniforms. Claasen, standing by the edge of the pool, still dripping in his boxer shorts, called out: “Franz! What the hell are you up to?” The two Orpos saluted; the prisoners, who were walking with their eyes to the ground, caps in hand, stopped. “These Yids were caught stealing potato peelings, Sturmbannführer,” explained one of the Orpos in a thick Volksdeutschen dialect. “Our Scharführer told us to shoot them.” Claasen’s face darkened: “Well, you’re not going to do that here, I hope. The Gruppenführer has guests.”—“No, no, Sturmbannführer, we’ll go farther away, to the trench over there.” A vivid anguish seized me without any warning: the Orpos were going to shoot the Jews right here and throw them into the pool, and we would swim in the blood, between the bodies bobbing on their stomachs. I looked at the Jews; one of them, who must have been about forty, was furtively examining the girls; the other, younger, his skin yellowish, kept his eyes riveted to the ground. Far from being reassured by the Orpo’s last words, I felt an intense tension, my distress only increased. When the Orpos started moving again I remained in the middle of the pool, forcing myself to breathe deeply and to float. But the water now weighed on me like a wet woollen cloak, suffocating me. This strange state lasted until I heard the two gunshots, a little farther away, scarcely audible, like the pop! pop! of Champagne bottles being opened. Slowly, my anguish ebbed away and then disappeared altogether when I saw the Orpos return, still walking with their heavy, steady steps. They saluted us again as they went by and continued on to the camp. Claasen was talking with one of the girls, Wippern was trying to dry out his uniform. I let myself go and floated.

I saw Morgen again. He was on the verge of indicting Koch and his wife, as well as several other officers and noncoms in Buchenwald and Lublin; under seal of secrecy, he told me that Florstedt too would be charged. He showed me in detail the tricks used by these corrupt men to hide their embezzlements, and the means he used to catch them in the act. He compared the records of the Abteilungen of the camp: even when the culprits forged something, they didn’t go to the trouble of reconciling their forgeries with the documents and reports from other departments. Thus, in Buchenwald, he had gathered his first serious evidence of the murders committed by Koch when he had noticed that the same inmate was registered at the same time in two different places: at a given date, the prison register of the Politische Abteilung bore, next to the name of the inmate, the comment “Released, noon,” while the register of the Revier indicated: “Patient deceased at 9:15.” The inmate had in fact been killed at the Gestapo prison, but his killers had tried to make it look as if he had died of illness. Similarly, Morgen explained to me how one could compare the different administration or Revier records with those of the blocks to try to find evidence of diversions of food, medicine, or property. He was quite interested in the fact that I planned on going to Auschwitz: several leads he was following up on seemed to lead to that camp. “It’s probably the richest Lager, because that’s where most of the special transports of the RSHA go now. Just like here, with the Einsatz, they have immense warehouses to sort and package all the confiscated goods. I suspect that must give rise to colossal misappropriations and thefts. We were alerted by a package sent from the KL by military post: because of its unusual weight, it was opened; inside, they found three chunks of dental gold, big as fists, sent by a camp nurse to his wife. I calculated that such a quantity of gold represents more than a hundred thousand dead.” I let out an exclamation. “And imagine!” he went on. “That’s what a single man could divert. When we’ve finished here, I’ll go set up a commission in Auschwitz.”

I myself had almost finished with Lublin. I made a brief round to say goodbye. I went to settle with Horn, for the portfolio, and found him just as depressed and agitated, struggling with his management difficulties, his financial losses, his contradictory instructions. Globocnik received me much more calmly than the first time: we had a brief but serious discussion about the work camps, which Globocnik wanted to develop further: it was just a matter, he explained to me, of liquidating the last ghettos, so that not a single Jew would remain in the Generalgouvernement outside of the camps under SS control; that, he asserted, was the Reichsführer’s inflexible desire. In all of the GG, 130,000 Jews remained, mostly in Lublin, Radom, and Galicia, with Warsaw and Cracow being entirely judenrein, apart from a handful of clandestines. That was still a lot. But the problems would be solved with determination.

I had thought of going to Galicia to inspect a work camp, such as the one run by the unfortunate Lexi; but my time was limited, I had to make choices, and I knew that aside from minor differences due to local conditions or personalities, the problems would be the same. I wanted to concentrate now on the camps in Upper Silesia, the “Ruhr of the East”: the KL Auschwitz and its many annexes. From Lublin, the quickest way was to drive through Kielce and then the industrial region of Kattowitz, a flat, gloomy landscape dotted with pine or birch copses, and disfigured by the tall chimneys of factories and blast furnaces that, standing out against the sky, vomited bitter, sinister smoke. Thirty kilometers before Auschwitz, already, SS checkpoints carefully verified our papers. Then we reached the Vistula, broad and murky. In the distance we could see the white line of the Beskids, pale, shimmering in the summer mist, less spectacular than the Caucasus, but wreathed in a gentle beauty. Chimneys were smoking here too, on the plain, at the foot of the mountains: there was no wind and the smoke rose straight up before bending under its own weight, scarcely disturbing the sky. The road ended at the train station and the Haus der Waffen-SS, where we waited for our quarters. The lobby was almost empty; they showed me to a simple, clean room; I put away my things, washed, and changed my uniform, then went out to present myself at the Kommandantur. The road to the camp ran along the Sola, a tributary of the Vistula; half hidden by dense trees, greener than the broad river into which it ran, it flowed in peaceful twists and meanderings, at the foot of a steep, grassy bank; on the water, pretty ducks with green heads let themselves be carried along by the current, then took off with a tension of their whole bodies, necks stretched out, feet folded in, their wings projecting this mass upward, before lazily dropping down again a little farther on, near the shore. A checkpoint barred the entrance to the Kasernestrasse; beyond, behind a wooden watchtower, stood the long gray cement wall of the camp, topped with barbed wire, behind which the red roofs of the barracks were silhouetted. The Kommandantur occupied the first of three buildings between the street and the wall, a squat stucco building with an entrance reached by a flight of steps, flanked by wrought iron lamps. I was taken immediately to the camp’s Kommandant, Obersturmbannführer Höss. This officer, after the war, acquired a certain notoriety because of the colossal number of people put to death under his command and also because of the frank, lucid memoirs he wrote in prison, during his trial. Yet he was an absolutely typical officer of the IKL, hardworking, stubborn, and of limited abilities, without any whims or imagination, but with just, in his movements and conversation, a little of the virility, already diluted by time, left by a youth rich in Freikorps brawls and cavalry charges. He welcomed me with a German salute and then shook my hand; he didn’t smile, but didn’t seem unhappy to see me. He wore leather riding breeches, which, on him, didn’t seem an officer’s affectation: he kept a stable in the camp and rode often; he could be found, they said in Oranienburg, much more often on horseback than behind his desk. While he spoke, he kept his surprisingly pale, vague eyes—I found them disconcerting, as if he were constantly on the point of grasping something that had just evaded him—fixed on my face. He had gotten a telex about me from the WVHA: “The camp is at your disposal.” The camps, rather, for Höss managed an entire network of KLs: the Stammlager, the main camp behind the Kommandantur, but also Auschwitz II, a camp for war prisoners transformed into a concentration camp and situated a few kilometers past the station in the plain, near the old Polish village of Birkenau; a large work camp beyond the Sola and the town, created to serve the synthetic rubber factory of IG Farben in Dwory; and about a dozen scattered auxiliary camps, or Nebenlager, set up for agricultural projects or for mining or metallurgical enterprises. Höss, as he spoke, showed me all this on a large map pinned to his office wall: and with his finger he traced the camp’s zone of interest, which covered the entire region between the Vistula and the Sola, more than a dozen kilometers to the south, except for some plots of land around the train station, which were controlled by the municipality. “About that,” he explained, “we had a disagreement, last year. The town wanted to build a new neighborhood there, to house the railway workers, whereas we wanted to acquire part of that land in order to create a village for our married SS officers and their families. Finally nothing came of it. But the camp is constantly expanding.”

Höss, when he took a car rather than a horse, liked to drive himself, and he came by to pick me up the next morning, at the door to the Haus. Piontek, seeing I wouldn’t need him, had asked for a day off; he wanted to take the train to go see his family in Tarnowitz; I gave him the night off too. Höss suggested we begin with Auschwitz II: an RSHA convoy was arriving from France, and he wanted to show me the selection process. It took place on the ramp of the freight station, midway between the two camps, under the direction of a garrison doctor, Dr. Thilo. When we arrived, he was waiting at the head of the platform, with Waffen-SS guards and dogs and teams of inmates in striped uniforms, who when they saw us snatched their caps off their shaved heads. The weather was even finer than the previous day, the mountains in the south gleamed in the sun; the train, after passing through the Protektorat and through Slovakia, had arrived from that direction. While we waited, Höss explained the procedure to me. Then the train was brought up and the doors of the cattle cars were opened. I expected a chaotic outburst: despite the shouts and the barking of the dogs, things happened in a relatively orderly way. The newcomers, obviously disoriented and exhausted, poured out of the cars in the midst of an abominable stink of excrement; the Häftlinge of the work Kommando, shouting in a mixture of Polish, Yiddish, and German, made them abandon their luggage and line up in rows, the men to one side, the women and children to the other; and while these lines shuffled toward Thilo, and Thilo separated the men fit for work from the unfit, sending mothers to the same side as their children, toward trucks waiting a little farther away—“I know they could work,” Höss had explained to me, “but trying to separate them from their kids would be exposing ourselves to all kinds of disorder.”—I walked slowly between the rows. Most of the people were talking, in low voices, in French; others, no doubt naturalized Jews or foreigners, in various languages: I listened to the sentences I understood, the questions, the comments; these people had no idea where they were or what was awaiting them. The Kommando Häftlinge, obeying orders, reassured them: “Don’t worry, you’ll see each other afterward, they’ll return your suitcases, tea and soup are waiting for you after the shower.” The columns inched forward. A woman, seeing me, asked me, in bad German, pointing to her child: “Herr Offizier! Can we stay together?”—“Don’t worry, Madame,” I replied politely in French, “you won’t be separated.” Immediately questions rained down from all sides: “Are we going to work? Can families stay together? What will you do with the old people?” Before I could reply, a noncom had rushed forward, flogging people. “That’s enough, Rottenführer!” I shouted. He looked sheepish: “It’s just that we’re not supposed to let them get excited, Sturmbannführer.” Some people were bleeding, children were crying. The smell of filth that emanated from the cars and even from the clothes of the Jews was suffocating me, I felt the old, familiar nausea rise up again and I breathed deeply through my mouth to master it. In the cars, teams of inmates were hurling the abandoned suitcases down onto the ramp; the corpses of people who had died on the way were treated the same way. Some children were playing hide-and-seek: the Waffen-SS let them, but shouted if they got close to the train, for fear they’d slip under the cars. Behind Thilo and Höss, the first trucks were already setting off. I went toward them and watched Thilo at work: for some, a glance was enough; for others, he asked a few questions, made them unbutton their shirts. “In Birkenau, you’ll see,” Höss commented, “we have just two ridiculous delousing stations. On full days, that considerably limits the capacity for admission. But for a single convoy, it’s enough.”—“What do you do if there are several?”—“That depends. We can send some to the admission center in the Stammlager. Otherwise, we have to reduce the quota. We plan on building a new central sauna to remedy this problem. The plans are ready, I’m just waiting for the approval of Amtsgruppe C for the budget. But we constantly have financial problems. They want me to enlarge the camp, accept more inmates, select more, but they make a fuss when money is at stake. I often have to improvise.” I frowned: “What do you mean, ‘improvise’?” He looked at me with his drowned eyes: “All sorts of things. I make agreements with the companies we provide workers to: sometimes they pay me in kind, with construction materials or such things. I’ve even gotten trucks, like that. One company sent me some to transport its workers, but never asked me to return them. You have to know how to get by.” The selection was coming to an end: the whole thing had lasted less than an hour. When the last trucks were loaded, Thilo quickly added up the numbers and showed them to us: out of 1,000 newcomers, he had kept 369 men and 191 women. “Fifty-five percent,” he commented. “With the convoys from the West, we get good averages. But the Polish convoys are a disaster. It never goes beyond twenty-five percent, and sometimes, aside from two or three percent, there’s really nothing to keep.”—“What do you think is the reason for that?”—“Their condition on arrival is deplorable. The Jews in the GG have been living for years in ghettos, they’re malnourished, they have all kinds of diseases. Even among the ones we select, we try to be careful, a lot of them die in quarantine.” I turned to Höss: “Do you get many convoys from the West?”—“From France, this one was the fifty-seventh. We’ve had twenty from Belgium. From Holland, I don’t remember. But these last few months especially we’ve had convoys from Greece. They’re not very good. Come, I’ll show you the process for reception.” I saluted Thilo and got back into the car. Höss drove fast. On the way, he went on explaining his difficulties to me: “Ever since the Reichsführer decided to allocate Auschwitz for the destruction of the Jews, we’ve had nothing but problems. All last year, we were forced to work with improvised installations. A real mess. I was able to begin building permanent installations, with an adequate reception capacity, only in January of this year. But everything still isn’t in perfect running order. There have been delays, especially in the transport of construction materials. And also, because of the haste, there have been manufacturing defects: the oven of Crematorium III cracked two weeks after it was put into service, it overheated. I had to close it down so it could be repaired. But we can’t get worked up about it, we have to remain patient. We’ve been so overwhelmed that we’ve had to divert a large number of convoys to Gruppenführer Globocnik’s camps, where of course no selection is carried out. Now it’s much calmer, but it will start up again in ten days: the GG wants to empty its last ghettos.” In front of us, at the end of the road, stretched a long red brick building, pierced at one end by an arch, and topped with a peaked guard tower; from its sides stretched out cement poles with barbed wire and a series of watchtowers, regularly spaced; and behind, as far as the eye could see, were lined rows of identical wooden barracks. The camp was immense. Groups of inmates in striped uniforms were walking down the lanes, tiny, insects in a colony. Beneath the tower, in front of the gate to the arch, Höss turned right. “The trucks keep going straight ahead. The Kremas and the delousing stations are in the back. But we’ll go to the Kommandantur first.” The car ran alongside the whitewashed poles and watchtowers; the barracks streamed past, and their perfect alignment made long brown perspectives unfurl, fleeting diagonals that opened up and then intersected with the next one. “Are the fences electrified?”—“Recently, yes. That was another problem, but we solved it.” At the end of the camp, Höss was developing another sector. “It will be the Häftlingskrankenbau, an enormous hospital that will serve all the camps in the region.” He had just stopped in front of the Kommandantur and pointed to a vast empty field, surrounded by barbed wire. “Do you mind waiting five minutes for me? I have to have a quick word with the Lagerführer.” I got out of the car and smoked a cigarette. The building that Höss had just entered was also made of red brick, with a steep roof and a three-story tower in the center; beyond, a long road passed in front of the new sector and disappeared toward a birch wood, visible behind the barracks. There was very little noise; just, from time to time, a brief order or a harsh cry. A Waffen-SS on a bicycle came out of one of the sections of the central sector and headed toward me; when he reached me, he saluted without pausing and turned toward the entrance of the camp, pedaling calmly, without hurrying, alongside the barbed wire. The watchtowers were empty: during the day, the guards positioned themselves on a “large chain” around the two camps. I looked distractedly at Höss’s dusty car: didn’t he have anything better to do than to show a visitor around? A subaltern, as in the Lublin KL, could have done the job just as well. But Höss knew that my report would go to the Reichsführer; perhaps he was anxious to make me understand the extent of his accomplishments. When he reappeared, I threw away my cigarette butt and got in next to him; he took the road toward the birch trees, pointing out the “fields,” or subcamps, of the central section as we went along: “We’re in the process of reorganizing everything for the maximum deployment of labor. When it’s done, this whole camp will serve only to supply workers to the industries of the region and even of the Altreich. The only permanent inmates will be the ones who provide for the upkeep and management of the camp. All political inmates, especially the Poles, will stay in the Stammlager. Since February, I also have a family camp for the Gypsies.”—“A family camp?”—“Yes. It’s a directive from the Reichsführer. When he decided to deport the Gypsies from the Reich, he wanted them not to be selected, to remain together, in families, and not to work. But a lot of them are dying of illness. They have no resistance.” We had reached a barrier. Beyond, a long line of trees and bushes hid a barbed-wire fence, isolating two buildings, long, identical, each one with two tall chimneys. Höss parked near the building on the right, in the middle of a sparse pine grove. In front, on a well-kept lawn, Jewish women and children were finishing undressing, supervised by guards and by inmates in striped uniforms. The clothes were piled up pretty much everywhere, properly sorted, with a piece of wood stamped with a number on each pile. One of the inmates shouted: “Go on, quick, quick, to the shower!” The last Jews entered the building; two mischievous kids were playing at switching the numbers on the piles; they ran away when a Waffen-SS raised his club. “It’s like in Treblinka or Sobibor,” Höss commented. “Until the last minute, we make them think they’re going to be deloused. Most of the time, it happens very calmly.” He began explaining the arrangements: “Over there, we have two other crematoriums, but much bigger: the gas chambers are underground and can accommodate up to two thousand people. Here the chambers are smaller and there are two per Krema: it’s much more practical for small convoys.”—“What is the maximum capacity?”—“In terms of gassing, practically unlimited; the major constraint is the capacity of the ovens. They were conceived especially for us by the Topf firm. These officially have a capacity of seven hundred and sixty-eight bodies per installation per twenty-four-hour period. But you can cram in up to a thousand or even fifteen hundred, if you have to.” An ambulance with a red cross on it arrived and parked next to Höss’s car; an SS doctor with a white smock over his uniform came over and saluted us. “This is Hauptsturmführer Dr. Mengele,” Höss said. “He joined us two months ago. He’s the head doctor of the Gypsy camp.” I shook his hand. “Are you supervising, today?” Höss asked him. Mengele nodded. Höss turned to me: “Do you want to observe?”—“That’s all right,” I said. “I know what it’s like.”—“But it’s much more efficient than Wirth’s method.”—“Yes, I know. They explained it to me in the Lublin KL. They adopted your method.” Höss seemed displeased; I asked, to be polite: “How long does it take, in all?” Mengele replied with his melodious, suave voice: “The Sonderkommando opens the doors after half an hour. But we let some time pass so the gas can disperse. In principle, death occurs in less than ten minutes. Fifteen if it’s damp out.”

We had already moved on to the Kanada, where the confiscated goods were sorted and warehoused before being distributed, when the chimneys of the crematorium that we had just left began to smoke, spreading that same sweetish, hideous smell I had experienced in Belzec. Höss, noticing my discomfort, commented: “I’ve been used to this smell ever since I was a boy. It’s the smell of cheap church candles. My father was very religious and took me to church often. He wanted me to be a priest. Since there wasn’t enough money for wax, they made the candles from animal tallow, and they gave off the same smell. It’s due to a chemical compound, but I’ve forgotten the name; it was Wirths, our head doctor, who explained it to me.” He also insisted on showing me the other two crematoria, colossal structures, inactive at that time; the Frauenlager, or women’s camp; and the sewage treatment station, built after repeated complaints from the district, which alleged that the camp was contaminating the Vistula and the surrounding aquifer. Then he took me to the Stammlager, which he also had me visit from top to bottom; finally he drove me to the other side of town to show me rapidly the Auschwitz III camp, where the inmates working for IG Farben lived: he introduced me to Max Faust, one of the factory engineers, with whom I agreed to return another day. I won’t describe all these installations: they are very well known and are described in many other books, I have nothing to add. Back at the camp, Höss sought to invite me horseback riding; but I could barely stand up and wanted a bath more than anything, and I managed to convince him to drop me off at my quarters.

Höss had assigned me an empty office in the Stammlager Kommandantur. I had a view of the Sola and of a pretty square house surrounded by trees on the other side of the Kasernestrasse, which was in fact the home of the Kommandant and his family. The Haus where I was staying turned out to be much quieter than the one in Lublin: the men who slept there were sober professionals, passing through for various reasons; at night, the camp officers came to drink and play billiards, but always behaved correctly. We ate very well there, copious helpings washed down with Bulgarian wine, with Croatian slivovitz as an after-dinner drink, and sometimes even vanilla ice cream. My main interlocutor, aside from Höss, was the chief physician of the garrison, Sturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Wirths. He had his offices in the SS hospital in the Stammlager at the end of the Kasernestrasse, opposite the premises of the Politische Abteilung and a crematorium due to go out of service any day now. Alert, intelligent, with fine features, pale eyes, and sparse hair, Wirths seemed exhausted by his tasks, but motivated to overcome all difficulties. His obsession was the struggle against typhus: the camp was already going through its second epidemic of the year, which had decimated the Gypsy camp and also struck, sometimes fatally, SS guards and their families. I spent long hours in discussion with him. He reported, in Oranienburg, to Dr. Lolling, and complained about the lack of support; when I let on that I shared his opinion, he opened up to me and confessed his inability to work constructively with a man so incompetent and furthermore addled by drugs. He himself was not an IKL professional. He had served at the front with the Waffen-SS since 1939, and had won the Iron Cross, second class, but he had been discharged because of a serious illness and assigned to camp service. He had found Auschwitz in a catastrophic state: for almost a year, the desire to improve matters consumed him.

Wirths showed me the reports he sent monthly to Lolling: the conditions in the different sections of the camp, the incompetence of many doctors and officers, the brutality of the subalterns and kapos, the daily obstacles blocking his work, everything was described in plain, straightforward language. He promised to have copies of his last six reports typed out for me. He was particularly up in arms about the use of criminals in positions of responsibility in the camp: “I’ve talked about it dozens of times with Obersturmbannführer Höss. Those ‘greens’ are brutes, sometimes psychopaths, they’re corrupt, they reign with terror over the other inmates, and all with the connivance of the SS. It’s inadmissible, not to speak of the fact that the results are lamentable.”—“What would you prefer? Political prisoners, Communists?”—“Of course!” He began to count on his fingers: “One: they are by definition men who have a social conscience. Even if they can be corrupted, they’ll never commit the same atrocities as the common-law prisoners. Do you realize that in the women’s camp the Blockältesten are prostitutes, degenerates! And most of the male block elders keep what they call here a Pipel, a young boy who serves as their sex slave. That’s what we have to rely on here! Whereas the ‘reds,’ to a man, refuse to use the brothel reserved for inmate functionaries, even though some of them have been in the camp for ten years. Two: the priority now is organization of labor. Now, what better organizer than a Communist or an SD activist? The ‘greens’ just know how to hit and hit again. Three: they object to me that the ‘reds’ will deliberately sabotage production. To which I reply that, first of all, it couldn’t be worse than the present production, and then that there are ways to control this: political prisoners aren’t idiots, they’ll understand very quickly that at the slightest problem they’ll be sacked and that the common-law criminals will return. It will thus be wholly in their own interest, for themselves and for all of the Häftlinge, if they guarantee good production. I can even give you an example, that of Dachau, where I worked briefly: there, the ‘reds’ control everything and I can assure you that the conditions are incomparably better than in Auschwitz. Here, in my own department, I use only political prisoners. I have no complaints. My private secretary is an Austrian Communist, a serious, self-possessed, efficient young man. We sometimes have very frank conversations, and it’s very useful for me, since he learns from other inmates things that are hidden from me, and he reports them to me. I trust him much more than some of my SS colleagues.” We also discussed the selection. “I think the principle is odious,” he frankly confessed to me. “But if it has to be done, then it might as well be done by doctors. Before, it was the Lagerführer and his men who ran it. They did it any which way, and with unimaginable brutality. At least now it takes place in an orderly fashion, according to reasonable criteria.” Wirths had ordered all the camp doctors to take their turn at the ramp. “I myself go there too, even if I find it horrifying. I have to set an example.” He looked a little lost as he said that. It wasn’t the first time someone had opened up to me this way: since the beginning of my mission, certain individuals, either because they instinctively understood that I was interested in their problems or because they hoped to use me as a channel to air their grievances, confided far beyond the requirements of the service. It’s true that, here, Wirths must not often have found a friendly ear: Höss was a good professional, but devoid of any sensitivity, and the same must have been true for most of his subordinates.

I inspected the different parts of the camp in detail. I went back several times to Birkenau, and had them show me the systems for inventorying the confiscated property at the Kanada. It was chaos: crates of uncounted currency lay in heaps, one walked on banknotes, torn and pressed into the mud of the alleys. In principle, the inmates were searched at the zone’s exit; but I imagined that with a watch or a few reichsmarks, it must not have been difficult to bribe a guard. The “green” kapo who kept the accounts confirmed this to me indirectly: after showing me around his piles of clutter—the shifting mountains of used clothing, from which teams unstitched the yellow stars before repairing the clothes, sorting them, re-piling them; the crates of glasses, watches, pens, jumbled together; the orderly rows of strollers and baby carriages; the clumps of women’s hair, consigned in bales to German firms that transformed it into socks for our submariners, mattress stuffing, and insulating material; and the disparate piles of religious paraphernalia, which no one really knew what to do with—this inmate functionary, as he was about to leave me, said to me carelessly, in his cheeky Hamburg dialect: “If you need anything, let me know, I’ll take care of it.”—“What do you mean?” “Oh, sometimes it’s pretty easy. Anything to be of service, y’know—we like to oblige.” That was what Morgen was talking about: the camp SS, with the complicity of the inmates, had come to consider this Kanada as their private reserve. Morgen had advised me to visit the guards’ barrack rooms: I found SS officers lounging on expensively upholstered sofas, half drunk, staring off into emptiness; a few female Jewish inmates, dressed not in regulation striped uniforms but in light dresses, were cooking sausages and potato pancakes on a large cast-iron stove; they were all real beauties, and they had kept their hair; and when they served the guards, bringing them food or pouring them alcohol from crystal carafes, they addressed them familiarly, using the du form, and calling them by their nicknames. Not one of the guards had gotten up to salute me. I gave the Spiess who accompanied me on my visits a shocked look; he shrugged: “They’re tired, Sturmbannführer. They’ve had a hard day, you know. Two transports already.” I’d have liked to have them open their lockers, but my position didn’t authorize me to: I was sure I’d have found all kinds of objects and money. What’s more, this generalized corruption appeared to rise to the highest level, as remarks I’d overheard suggested. At the bar of the Haus der Waffen-SS, I had surprised a conversation between a camp Oberscharführer and a civilian; the noncom, sniggering, was explaining that he had delivered to Frau Höss “a basket full of panties, the best quality, in silk and lace. She wanted to replace her old ones, you see.” He didn’t say where they came from, but I guessed readily enough. I myself received propositions; I was offered bottles of Cognac or victuals, to improve my usual fare. I refused, but politely: I didn’t want these officers to mistrust me; that would have harmed my work.

As agreed, I went to visit the great IG Farben factory, known as Buna, the name of the synthetic rubber it was eventually supposed to produce. Construction, apparently, was going forward slowly. Since Faust was busy, he assigned one of his assistants to my visit, an engineer named Schenke, a man about thirty years old, in a gray suit with the Party insignia. This Schenke seemed fascinated by my Iron Cross; while he spoke to me, his eyes kept shifting over to it; finally he asked me, timidly, how I had gotten it. “I was in Stalingrad.”—“Oh! You were lucky.”—“To have gotten out?” I asked, laughing. “Yes, I think so too.” Schenke looked confused: “No, that’s not what I meant. To have been over there, to have been able to fight like that, for the Heimat, against the Bolsheviks.” I looked at him curiously and he blushed. “I have a childhood deformity, in my leg. A bone that broke and didn’t heal well. That prevented me from going to the front. But I would have liked to serve the Reich too.”—“You’re serving it here,” I pointed out.—“Of course. But it’s not the same. All my childhood friends are at the front. One feels…excluded.” Schenke did limp, but it didn’t prevent him from striding along with a nervous, quick step, so that I had to hurry to follow him. As he walked, he explained the factory’s history to me: the leadership of the Reich had insisted that Farben build a factory for Buna—a vital product for armaments—in the East, because of the bombardments that were already ravaging the Ruhr. The site had been chosen by one of the directors of the IG, Dr. Ambros, because of a large number of favorable criteria: the confluence of three rivers providing the considerable quantities of water required by the production of Buna; the existence of a broad plateau that was almost empty (aside from a Polish village that had been razed), geologically ideal since it was elevated; the intersection of several railway lines; and the proximity of many coal mines. The presence of the camp had also been a positive factor: the SS had declared it was delighted to support the project and had promised to provide inmates. But the factory’s construction was dragging, partly because of the difficulties of getting supplies, and partly because the output of the Häftlinge had turned out poor, and management was furious. However often the factory returned to the camp the inmates unable to work and demanded replacements, as the contract allowed, the new ones would arrive in a scarcely better state. “What happens to the ones you send back?” I asked in a neutral tone. Schenke looked at me with surprise: “I have no idea. That’s not my business. I guess they fix them up in the hospital. Don’t you know?” I pensively contemplated this young, motivated engineer: Was it really possible that he didn’t know? The chimneys in Birkenau were smoking daily eight kilometers away, and I knew as well as anyone else how gossip spread. But after all, if he didn’t want to know, it was possible for him not to know. The rules of secrecy and concealment could serve that purpose too.

However, judging from the treatment of the inmates employed, it didn’t seem that their ultimate fate was a major preoccupation for Schenke or his colleagues. In the midst of the immense, muddy construction site that was to become the factory, columns of scrawny Häftlinge in rags carried at a run, under the shouts and cudgel blows of the kapos, beams or bags of cement far too heavy for them. If a worker, in his big wooden clogs, stumbled and let his load fall, or collapsed himself, the blows redoubled, and blood, fresh and red, gushed onto the oily mud. Some never got up again. The din was infernal, everyone was yelling, the SS noncoms, the kapos; the beaten inmates screamed pitifully. Schenke guided me through this Gehenna without paying the slightest attention to it. Here and there, he paused and conversed with other engineers in well-pressed suits, holding yellow folding rulers and little fake-leather notebooks in which they jotted down figures. They commented on the progress of the construction of a wall, then one of them muttered a few words to a Rottenführer, who began to yell and viciously hit the kapo with his boot or rifle butt; the kapo, in turn, dove into the mass of inmates, distributing savage blows with full force, bellowing; and then the Häftlinge attempted a surge of activity, which died down on its own, since they could scarcely stand up. This system seemed to me extremely inefficient, and I said as much to Schenke; he shrugged his shoulders and looked around him as if he were seeing the scene for the first time: “In any case they don’t understand anything but blows. What else can you do with such a workforce?” I looked again at the undernourished Häftlinge, their rags coated in mud, black grease, diarrhea. A Polish ‘red’ stopped for an instant in front of me and I saw a brown stain appear on the back of his pants and the rear of his leg; then he resumed his frenetic run before a kapo could approach. Pointing him out, I said to Schenke: “Don’t you think it’s important to oversee their hygiene better? I’m not just talking about the stench, but it’s dangerous, that’s how epidemics break out.” Schenke replied somewhat haughtily: “All that is the responsibility of the SS. We pay the camp to have inmates fit for work. But it’s up to the camp to wash them, feed them, and take care of them. That’s included in the package.” Another engineer, a thickset Swabian sweating in his twill jacket, let out a coarse guffaw: “Anyway, Jews are like venison, they’re better when they’re a little gamy.” Schenke smiled thinly; I retorted curtly: “Your workers aren’t all Jews.”—“Oh! the others are hardly any better.” Schenke was beginning to grow annoyed: “Herr Sturmbannführer, if you think the condition of the Häftlinge is unsatisfactory, you should complain to the camp, not to us. The camp is responsible for their upkeep, I told you. All that is specified in our contract.”—“I understand very well, believe me.” Schenke was right; even the blows were administered by SS guards and their kapos. “But it seems to me that you could obtain better output by treating them a little better. Don’t you think so?” Schenke shrugged: “Ideally, maybe. And we often complain to the camp about the workers’ condition. But we have other priorities besides constantly splitting hairs.” Behind him, knocked down by a cudgel, an inmate was dying; his bloody head was buried in the thick mud; only the mechanical trembling of his legs showed that he was still alive. Schenke, as we left, stepped over him without looking at him. He was still thinking about my words with irritation: “We can’t have a sentimental attitude, Herr Sturmbannführer. We are at war. Production counts above all else.”—“I’m not saying otherwise. My objective is just to suggest ways to increase production. That should concern you. After all, it’s been, what? Two years now that you’ve been constructing, and you still haven’t produced a kilo of Buna.”—“Yes. But I should point out to you that the methanol factory has been functioning for a month.”

Despite his retort, my last remark must have annoyed Schenke; for the rest of the visit, he confined himself to dry, brief comments. I had myself shown around the KL attached to the factory, a rectangle surrounded by barbed wire, set up south of the complex in fallow fields, on the site of the razed village. I thought the conditions there were deplorable; the Lagerführer seemed to find it normal. “In any case, we send the ones the IG rejects to Birkenau, and they send us fresh ones.” On my way back to the Stammlager, I noticed on a wall in town this surprising inscription: KATYN = AUSCHWITZ. Ever since March, in fact, Goebbels’s press had kept harping about the discovery in Byelorussia of Polish corpses, thousands of officers assassinated by Bolsheviks after 1939. But who, here, could have written that? There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.

As for the life of the camp, it was turning out to be full of unusual phenomena. Piontek had dropped me off in front of the Kommandantur and backed up to park the Opel; I was about to go in when my attention was drawn by some noise in the garden of the Hösses’ house. I lit a cigarette and discreetly approached: through the gate, I saw children playing Häftlinge. The biggest one, who had his back to me, wore an armband marked KAPO and was shrilly shouting the standardized commands: “Ach…tung! Mützen…auf! Mützen…ab! Zu fünf!” The other four, three little girls, one of them very young, and a boy, were standing in a row facing me and were clumsily trying to obey; each one wore a triangle, sewn on their chests, of a different color: green, red, black, purple. Höss’s voice resounded behind me: “Hello, Sturmbannführer! What are you watching?” I turned around: Höss was coming toward me, his hand outstretched; near the barrier, an orderly was holding his horse’s lead. I saluted him, shook his hand, and without a word pointed to the garden. Höss blushed suddenly, passed through the gate, and hurried toward the children. Without saying anything, without slapping them, he tore the triangles and the armband off and sent them inside. Then he came back to me, still red, holding the pieces of cloth. He looked at me, looked at the badges, looked at me again, and then, still silent, walked past me and into the Kommandantur, tossing the badges into a metal trash can near the door. I picked up my cigarette, which I had dropped to salute him and which was still smoking. An inmate gardener, in a clean, well-pressed striped uniform, holding a rake, came out, removing his cap as he passed me, went to get the trash-can, and emptied it into the basket he was carrying; then he went back into the garden.

During the day, I felt fresh, alert; at the Haus, I ate well, and in the evenings I thought with pleasure about my bed, with its clean sheets; but at night, ever since I had arrived, the dreams came in vast gusts, sometimes short and abrupt and soon forgotten, other times like a long worm uncoiling inside my head. One sequence in particular repeated itself and expanded nightly, an obscure, difficult-to-describe dream, without any narrative meaning, but that unfurled according to a spatial logic. In this dream I was traveling, at different altitudes, but always as if in the air, I was more like a pure gaze or even a camera than a living being, traveling through an immense city, without any visible end, its topography monotonous and repetitive, divided into geometric sectors, its way animated with an incessant flow. Thousands of beings came and went, entered and exited identical buildings, walked along long, straight avenues, plunged underground through subway entrances to emerge at some other place, constantly and without any apparent aim. If I, or rather the gaze I had become, went down toward these avenues to examine them close up, I noticed that these men and women weren’t distinguished from one another by any special characteristic; they all had white skin, light-colored hair, blue, pale, lost eyes, Höss’s eyes, the eyes of my old orderly Hanika, too, when he died in Kharkov, eyes the color of the sky. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the city, little trains came forward and made regular stops to spew out an instantly replaced wave of passengers, as far as the eye could see. During subsequent nights, I entered some of the buildings: lines of people moved between long communal tables and latrines, eating and defecating in a row; on bunk beds, others were fornicating, then children were born, played between the bedsteads, and, when they had grown big enough, went out to take their place in the human waves of this city of perfect happiness. Little by little, by dint of looking from different points of view, a tendency became apparent in the seemingly arbitrary swarm: imperceptibly, a certain number of people always ended up on the same side, and finally went into windowless buildings, where they lay down to die without a word. Specialists came and collected from them whatever could still contribute to the city’s economy; then their bodies were burned in ovens that served simultaneously to warm the water distributed by pipes throughout the sectors; the bones were ground up; the smoke, coming from the chimneys, rejoined, like tributaries, the smoke of neighboring chimneys to form one long, calm, solemn river. And when the dream’s point of view took on altitude again, I could make out an equilibrium in all this: the quantity of births, in the dormitories, equaled the number of deaths, and the society self-reproduced in perfect equilibrium, always in movement, producing no excess and suffering no diminution. When I woke up, it seemed obvious to me that these serene dreams, void of all anguish, represented the camp, but a perfect camp, having reached an impossible point of stasis, without violence, self-regulated, functioning perfectly and also perfectly useless since, despite all this movement, it produced nothing. But upon thinking more about it, as I tried to do while drinking my ersatz in the dining room of the Haus der Waffen-SS, wasn’t it a representation of social life as a whole? Stripped of its tawdry rags and its pointless agitation, human life was reduced to scarcely more than that; once one had reproduced, one had fulfilled the purpose of mankind; and as for one’s own purpose, that was just an illusion, a stimulus to encourage oneself to get up in the morning; but if you examined the thing objectively, as I thought I could do, the uselessness of all these efforts was obvious, as was the uselessness of reproduction itself, since it served only to produce more uselessness. So I came to think: Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?

But I hadn’t come to Auschwitz to philosophize. I inspected the Nebenlager: the experimental agricultural station in Rajsko, so dear to the Reichsführer, where Dr. Caesar explained to me how they were still trying to resolve the problem of large-scale cultivation of the kok-sagyz plant, discovered, you’ll remember, near Maikop and capable of producing rubber; and also the cement factory in Golleschau, the steelworks in Eintrachthütte, the mines in Jawizowitz and Neu-Dachs. Aside from Rajsko, which was something of a special case, the conditions in these installations seemed if possible worse than at Buna: the absence of any security measures led to countless accidents, the lack of hygiene constantly assailed the senses, the savage and deadly violence of the kapos and civilian foremen broke out on the slightest excuse. I went down to the bottom of the mine shaft via shaky wire-caged elevators; at every level, perspectives of tunnels, weakly illuminated by yellowish lamps, pierced the darkness; any inmate who went down here must have lost all hope of ever seeing daylight again. At the bottom, water trickled from the walls, metallic sounds and shouts resounded through the low, stinking tunnels. Oil drums cut in half with a board across the top served as latrines: some Häftlinge were so weak that they fell inside. Others, skeleton-like, their legs swollen with edema, expended immense effort pushing overloaded carts on badly adjusted tracks, or cutting into the wall with picks or pneumatic drills that they could barely hold. At the exit, lines of exhausted workers, supporting half-fainting comrades and carrying their dead on improvised stretchers, were waiting to go back to the surface, to be sent back to Birkenau: they, at least, would see the sky again, even if only for a few hours. Learning that almost everywhere the work progressed less quickly than the engineers had foreseen didn’t surprise me: usually they blamed the bad quality of the goods supplied by the camp. A young engineer from the Hermann-Göring Werke had tried, he told me with a resigned air, to obtain an extra ration for the inmates in Jawizowitz, but management had refused the additional expenditure. As for hitting them less, even this man with progressive ideas sadly acknowledged that it was difficult: if you hit them, the inmates advanced slowly, but if you didn’t hit them, they didn’t advance at all.

With Dr. Wirths, I had an interesting discussion about precisely this question of physical violence, since to me it evoked problems I had already encountered in the Einsatzgruppen. Wirths agreed with me in saying that even men who, in the beginning, hit only out of obligation ended up developing a taste for it. “Far from correcting hardened criminals,” he passionately affirmed, “we confirm them in their perversity by giving them full rights over the other prisoners. And we’re even creating new ones among our SS. These camps, with the present methods, are a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations; after the war, when these men go back to civilian life, we’ll find ourselves with a considerable problem on our hands.” I explained to him that, according to what I had heard, the decision to transfer the work of extermination to the camps was made partly because of the psychological problems it caused among troops assigned to mass executions. “True,” Wirths replied, “but we’re only shifting the problem, especially by mixing extermination functions with the correctional and economic functions of ordinary camps. The mentality engendered by extermination overpowers and affects all the rest. Even here, in my Reviers, I discovered that some doctors were killing patients, exceeding their instructions. I had a lot of trouble putting a stop to such practices. As for the sadistic tendencies, they are very frequent, especially with the guards, and they’re often connected to sexual troubles.”—“Do you have concrete examples?”—“They rarely come to consult me. But it happens. A month ago, I saw a guard who’s been here for a year. A man from Breslau, thirty-seven years old, married, three children. He confessed to me that he had beaten inmates until he ejaculated, without even touching himself. He no longer had any normal sexual relations; when he had leave, he didn’t go back home, he was so ashamed. But before he came to Auschwitz, he told me, he was perfectly normal.”—“And what did you do for him?”—“In the conditions we have here, there’s not much I can do. He would need extensive psychiatric treatment. I’m trying to have him transferred outside the camp system, but it’s hard: I can’t tell the whole story, or he’d be arrested. But he’s a sick man, he needs to be taken care of.”—“And how do you think this sadism develops?” I asked. “I mean with normal men, without any predisposition that would be revealed under these conditions?” Wirths looked out the window, pensive. He took a long while to reply: “That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s difficult to answer. An easy solution would be to blame our propaganda, the way for instance it’s taught here to the troops by Oberscharführer Knittel, who heads the Kulturabteilung: the Häftling is subhuman, he’s not even human, so it’s entirely legitimate to hit him. But that’s not the whole of it—after all, animals aren’t human, either, but none of our guards would treat an animal the way they treat the Häftlinge. Propaganda does play a role, but in a more complex way. I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as a non-human. In the end, no other solution remains for him than to kill him, which is an acknowledgment of complete failure.” Wirths fell silent. He was still looking out the window. I broke the silence: “Can I ask you a personal question, Doktor?” Wirths answered without looking at me; his long, thin fingers tapped the table: “You can ask it.”—“Are you a believer?” He took a while to reply. He was still looking outside, toward the street and the crematorium. “I used to be, yes,” he said finally.

I had left Wirths and was walking up the Kasernestrasse toward the Kommandantur. Just before the checkpoint with its red-and-white barrier, I noticed one of Höss’s children, the oldest one, squatting in the street in front of the gate to their house. I went over and greeted him. The boy raised frank, intelligent eyes to me and stood up: “Hello, Sturmbannführer.”—“What’s your name?”—“Klaus.”—“What are you looking at, Klaus?” Klaus pointed toward the gate: “Look.” The ground in front of the threshold was black with ants, an amazingly dense swarm. Klaus crouched down again to observe them and I bent over beside him. At first sight, these thousands of ants seemed to be running around in the most frenzied, utterly aimless disorder. But then I looked more closely, trying to follow one of them in particular, then another. I noticed then that the disrupted aspect of this swarm came from the fact that each insect kept pausing to touch antennas with every other one it met. Little by little I saw that some of the ants were leaving toward the left while others were arriving, carrying debris or food: an exhausting, vast labor. The ones that were coming must have been using their antennae to inform the others about where the food had come from. The gate to the house opened and a Häftling, the gardener I had seen before, came out. Seeing me, he stiffened and removed his cap. He was a man a little older than me, a Polish political prisoner, according to his triangle. He noticed the anthill and said: “I’ll destroy that, Herr Offizier.”—“Absolutely not! Don’t touch it.”—“Oh yes, Stani,” Klaus gushed, “leave them alone. They haven’t done anything to you.” Klaus turned to me: “Where are they going?”—“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” The ants were following the garden wall, then hurrying along the curb, passing behind the cars and motorcycles parked opposite the Kommandantur; then they continued straight ahead, a long wavering line, beyond the camp’s administration building. We followed them step-by-step, admiring their indefatigable determination. When we neared the Politische Abteilung, Klaus looked at me nervously: “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer, but my father doesn’t want me to come this way.”—“Wait for me, then. I’ll tell you.” Behind the barracks of the political department stood the squat mass of the crematorium, a former ammunition bunker covered with earth and vaguely resembling, apart from the chimney, a flattened kurgan. The ants continued toward its somber mass; they climbed up the sloping side, weaving their way through the grass; then they turned and went down a cement section of wall, where the entrance to the bunker formed a recess between the dirt slopes. I kept following them and saw that they went through the half-open door and into the crematorium. I looked around: aside from a guard who was staring at me curiously and a column of inmates pushing wheelbarrows a little farther away, near the extension of the camp, there was no one. I went up to the door, which was bracketed by two frames, like windows; inside, everything was black and silent. The ants were marching over the angle of the doorstep. I turned around and rejoined Klaus. “They’re going that way,” I said vaguely. “They found something to eat.” Followed by the little boy, I returned to the Kommandantur. We separated in front of the entrance. “Are you coming tonight, Sturmbannführer?” Klaus asked. Höss was giving a little reception and had invited me. “Yes.”—“Till tonight, then!” Stepping over the anthill, he went into the garden.

At the end of the day, after stopping by the Haus der Waffen-SS to wash and change, I went back to the Hösses. In front of the gate, there were now only a few dozen ants left, rapidly crisscrossing the surface. The thousands of others must have been underground now, digging, clearing away, shoring up, invisible but continuing their mad labor without respite. Höss welcomed me on the steps, glass of Cognac in hand. He introduced me to his wife, Hedwig, a blond woman with a fixed smile and hard eyes, wearing a becoming evening gown with a lace collar and sleeves, and his two eldest daughters, Kindi and Püppi, also prettily dressed. Klaus shook my hand in a friendly way; he was wearing a tweed jacket of English cut, with suede patches on the elbows and large horn buttons. “That’s a handsome jacket,” I remarked. “Where did you find that?”—“My dad brought it back for me from the camp,” he replied, beaming with pleasure. “The shoes too.” They were polished brown leather ankle boots, with buttons up the side. “Very elegant,” I said. Wirths was there and he introduced me to his wife; the other guests were all camp officers: there were Hartjenstein, the garrison commander; Grabner, the head of the political department; Lagerführer Aumeier, Dr. Caesar, and a few others. The ambiance was somewhat formal, more than at Eichmann’s, in any case, but cordial. Caesar’s wife, a woman still young, laughed a lot; Wirths explained that she had been one of Caesar’s assistants, and he had proposed to her soon after his second wife died of typhus. Conversation turned on Mussolini’s recent fall and arrest, which had made a strong impression on everybody; the protestations of loyalty from Badoglio, the new Prime Minister, didn’t inspire much confidence. Then we discussed the Reichsführer’s plans for developing the German East. All sorts of contradictory ideas flew among the guests; Grabner tried to draw me into a discussion on the Himmlerstadt colonization project, but I replied evasively. One thing remained clear: whatever people’s views were on the future of the region, the camp was an integral part of it. Höss thought it would last at least ten or twenty years. “The extension of the Stammlager has been planned with that in mind,” he explained. “Once we’ve finished with the Jews and the war, Birkenau will disappear, and the land will be given back to agriculture. But the industry of Upper Silesia, especially with the German losses in the East, won’t be able to do without Polish labor; the camp will remain vital for control of these populations, for a long time.” Two inmates, wearing simple but clean dresses made of good material, circulated among the guests with trays; they wore the purple triangle of the IBVs, also known as “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The rooms were nicely furnished, with rugs, leather sofas and armchairs, furniture in rich, well-tooled wood, vases with fresh flowers on lace doilies. The lamps gave off a yellow, discreet, almost subdued light. Signed enlargements of photographs of the Reichsführer visiting the camp with Höss or holding his children on his knees decorated the walls. The brandies and wines were of good quality; Höss also offered his guests fine Yugoslavian cigarettes, Ibars. I contemplated with curiosity this rigid, conscientious man, who dressed his children in the clothes of Jewish children killed under his direction. Did Höss think of that as he looked at them? Probably the idea didn’t even enter his mind. His wife held his elbow and emitted curt, sharp bursts of laughter. I looked at her and thought about her cunt, under her dress, nesting in the lace panties of a pretty young Jewish girl gassed by her husband. The Jewess had long ago been burned along with her own cunt and had gone up in smoke to join the clouds; her expensive panties, which she might have put on especially for her deportation, now adorned and protected the cunt of Hedwig Höss. Did Höss think about that Jewess, when he took off her panties to honor his wife? But maybe he wasn’t much interested anymore in Frau Höss’s cunt, however delicately it was covered: work in the camps, when it didn’t make men insane, often made them impotent. Maybe he kept his own Jewess somewhere in the camp, clean, well fed, a lucky one, the Kommandant’s whore? No, not him: if Höss took a mistress from among the inmates, it would be a German, not a Jew.

It is never good to have such thoughts, I know that. That night my recurrent dream had a final intensification. I was approaching that immense city by way of a derelict railroad track; in the distance, the line of chimneys was peacefully smoking; and I felt lost, isolated, an abandoned whelp, and the need for men’s companionship tormented me. I mixed with the crowd and wandered for a long time, irresistibly drawn by the crematoriums vomiting spirals of smoke and clouds of sparks into the sky, like a dog, both attracted and repell’d / By the stench of his own kind / Burning. But I couldn’t reach it, and entered instead one of the vast building-barracks, where I occupied a bunk, shoving away an unknown woman who wanted to join me. I fell asleep promptly. When I woke up, I noticed a little blood on my pillow. I looked closer and saw there was also some on the sheets. I removed them; beneath, they were soaking in blood mixed with sperm, big gobs of sperm too thick to seep through the cloth. I was sleeping in a room in Höss’s house, upstairs, next to the children’s room; and I had no idea how I could bring these soiled sheets to the bathroom, to wash them, without Höss noticing. This problem was causing me a horrible, agonizing discomfort. Then Höss came into my room with another officer. They took off their underpants, sat down cross-legged next to my bed, and began to masturbate vigorously, each crimson glans disappearing and reappearing from the foreskin, until they had sent huge jets of sperm onto my bed and onto the rug. They wanted me to imitate them, but I refused; the ceremony apparently had a precise significance, but I didn’t know what it was.

This brutal, obscene dream marked the end of my first stay in the KL Auschwitz: I had finished my work. I returned to Berlin and from there went to visit some camps in the Altreich, the KLs Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, as well as many of their satellite camps. I won’t expand any further on these visits: all these camps have been amply described in the historical literature, better than I could do; and it’s also quite true that when you’ve seen one camp, you’ve seen them all: all camps look alike, it’s a well-known fact. Nothing of what I saw, despite local variations, perceptibly changed my opinion or my conclusions. I returned to Berlin for good around mid-August, in the period between the recapture of Orel by the Soviets and the final conquest of Sicily by the Anglo-Americans. I wrote my report quickly; I had already gathered my notes together along the way, I just needed to organize the sections and type it all out, a matter of a few days. I was careful with both my prose and the logic of my argumentation: the report was addressed to the Reichsführer, and Brandt had warned me that I would probably have to give a verbal report. When the final version was corrected and typed up, I sent it off and waited.

I had gone back, without much pleasure I have to confess, to my landlady Frau Gutknecht. She went into raptures, and was determined to make me tea; but she didn’t understand how, since I was coming home from the East, where one can find everything to eat, I hadn’t thought to bring back a pair of geese, for the household of course. (Actually, she wasn’t the only one with this in mind: Piontek had returned from his stay in Tarnowitz with a trunkful of food, and had offered to sell me some without coupons.) What’s more, I got the impression that she had taken advantage of my absence to search through my belongings. My indifference to her whining and her childish behavior was beginning, unfortunately, to wear thin. As for Fräulein Praxa, she had changed her hairdo, but not the color of her nails. Thomas was happy to see me again: great changes were under way, he affirmed, it was good I was in Berlin, I had to be prepared.

What a curious sensation, suddenly finding myself, after such a journey, with nothing to do! I had finished the Blanchot a long time ago; I opened the treatise on ritual murder only to shut it again right away, surprised that the Reichsführer could take an interest in such drivel; I had no private affairs to attend to; all my files were in order. With my office window open onto the park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, sunny but already a little dried out by the August heat, my feet up on my sofa, or else leaning out the window to smoke a cigarette, I reflected; and when immobility began to weigh on me, I went down to take a walk in the garden, strolling through the dusty gravel lanes, greatly tempted by the pockets of shady grass. I thought about what I had seen in Poland, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, my thinking skimmed over the images and came to rest on the words. The words preoccupied me. I had been wondering how much the differences between German and Russian reactions to mass killings (differences that caused us finally to change our method to make the thing somehow easier, while the Russians seemed, even after a quarter century, to remain unmoved by it) had to do with differences of vocabulary. The word Tod, after all, has the stiffness of a clean, already cold, almost abstract corpse, the finality in any case of the after-death, whereas smiert’, the Russian word, is as heavy and greasy as the thing itself. What about French, in that case? That language, for me, remained dependent on the feminization of death by Latin: What a difference finally between la Mort and all the almost warm, tender images it gives rise to, and the terrible Thanatos of the Greeks! The Germans had at least preserved the masculine (smiert’, it should be said in passing, is also feminine). There, in the brightness of summer, I thought about that decision we had made, the extraordinary idea of killing all the Jews, whoever they might be, young or old, good or bad, of destroying Judaism in the person of its bearers, a decision that had received the name, now well known, of Endlösung: the “Final Solution.” But what a beautiful word! It had not always been a synonym for extermination, though: since the beginning, people had called for, when it came to the Jews, an Endlösung, or else a völlige Lösung (a complete solution) or also an allgemeine Lösung (a general solution), and according to the period, this meant exclusion from public life or exclusion from economic life or, finally, emigration. Then, little by little, the signification had slid toward the abyss, but without the signifier changing, and it seemed almost as if this final meaning had always lived in the heart of the word, and that the thing had been attracted, drawn in by it, by its weight, its fabulous gravity, into that black hole of the mind, toward the point of singularity: and then we had passed the event horizon, beyond which there is no return. We still believe in ideas, in concepts, we believe that words designate ideas, but that’s not necessarily true, maybe there aren’t really any ideas, maybe there’s really nothing but words, and the weight peculiar to words. And maybe thus we had let ourselves be led along by a word and its inevitability. Within us, then, there would have been no ideas, no logic, no coherence? There would have been only words, in our oh so peculiar language, only that word, Endlösung, its streaming beauty? For, really, how could one resist the seduction of such a word? It would have been as inconceivable as resisting the word obey, the word serve, the word law. And perhaps that, at bottom, was the reason for our Sprachregelungen, quite transparent finally in terms of camouflage (Tarnjargon), but useful for keeping those who used these words and expressions—Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), abtransportiert (transported onward), entsprechend behandelt (treated appropriately), Wohnsitzverlegung (change of domicile), or Executivmassnahmen (executive measures)—between the sharp points of their abstraction. This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that…,” “the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung, the “steppification” of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses. Man lebt in seiner Sprache, wrote Hanns Johst, one of our best National Socialist poets: “You live in your language.” Voss, I was sure, would not have denied it.

I was still waiting for my summons from the Reichsführer when the English resumed their massive strikes on Berlin, with considerable vigor. It was August 23, a Monday, I remember, late at night: I was at home, in bed, but I probably wasn’t asleep yet, when the sirens went off. I was tempted to remain lying, but already Frau Gutknecht was banging my door. She was bellowing so loudly you could scarcely hear the sirens: “Herr Offizier! Herr Offizier!…Doktor Aue! Get up! The Luftmörder! Help!” I pulled on a pair of trousers and unlocked the door: “Well, yes, Frau Gutknecht. It’s the RAF. What do you want me to do?” Her jowls were trembling, her cheeks were pale, and she was crossing herself convulsively, muttering: “Jesus-Mary-Joseph, Jesus-Mary-Joseph, what are we going to do?”—“We are going to go down into the shelter, like everyone else.” I shut the door and got dressed, then calmly went downstairs, locking my door against looters. We could hear the flak thundering, especially to the south and near the Tiergarten. The building’s basement had been turned into an air-raid shelter: it would never have survived a direct hit, but it was better than nothing. I threaded my way through the suitcases and legs and settled into a corner, as far as possible from Frau Gutknecht, who was sharing her terrors with some neighbors. Children were crying anxiously, others were running between the adults, some wearing suits, others still in their bathrobes. Just two candles lit the basement, little quivering, trembling flames that registered the nearby explosions like seismographs. The alert lasted for several hours; unfortunately, it was forbidden to smoke in these shelters. I must have dozed, I think no bombs hit our neighborhood. When it was over I went upstairs to go back to bed, without even going to look in the street. The next day, instead of taking the U-Bahn, I called the SS-Haus and sent for Piontek. He reported that the bombers had come from the south, from Sicily, probably, and that it was mostly Steglitz, Lichterfelde, and Marienfelde that had been hit, although some buildings had been destroyed at Tempelhof and all the way to the zoo. “Our boys used a new tactic, Wilde Sau, they called it on the radio, but they didn’t really explain what it was, Sturmbannführer. Heard it works, and we shot down more than sixty of their planes, the bastards. Poor Herr Jeschonnek, he should have waited a little.” General Jeschonnek, the Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe, had just committed suicide, because of his service’s repeated failures to prevent the Anglo-American raids. Even before crossing the Spree, Piontek had to make a detour to avoid a street blocked by rubble, the ruins of a building rammed by a bomber, a Lancaster, I think: its tail was sticking out of the ruins, desolate, like a ship’s stern after a shipwreck. Thick black smoke hid the sun. I ordered Piontek to drive me to the southern part of the city: the farther we got, the more buildings were still burning, and the streets were full of debris. People were trying to pull their furniture out of gutted homes to pile it in the middle of streets flooded by fire hoses; mobile field kitchens were serving soup to lines of shocked, exhausted, soot-covered survivors; near the fire trucks, shapes were lined up on the sidewalks, sometimes with a foot, bare or still wearing a pathetic shoe, sticking out from under a dirty sheet. Some streets were barred by streetcars toppled onto to their sides by the force of the explosions or blackened by fire; power lines trailed on the pavement, trees lay crushed or remained standing but bare, stripped of all their leaves. The neighborhoods most affected were impassable; I had Piontek turn around and return to the SS-Haus. The building itself hadn’t been hit, but nearby impacts had blown out the windows, and broken glass on the steps crunched beneath my feet. Inside, I met Brandt in the lobby, looking terribly excited, animated by a glee that was rather surprising in the circumstances. “What is happening?” He paused for an instant: “Ah, Sturmbannführer, you don’t know the news yet. Great news! The Reichsführer was appointed Minister of the Interior.” So that was it, the changes Thomas was talking about, I thought while Brandt rushed into the elevator. I walked up the stairs: Fräulein Praxa was at her place, made up, fresh as a rose. “Sleep well?”—“Oh, you know, Sturmbannführer, I live in Weissensee, I didn’t hear anything.”—“All the better for you.” The window in my office was intact: I had gotten into the habit of leaving it open at night. I thought about the repercussions of the news announced by Brandt, but I lacked information to analyze it in detail. A priori, it seemed to me, it wouldn’t change much for us: although Himmler, as chief of the German police, was technically subordinate to the Minister of the Interior, he was actually completely autonomous, and had been since 1936 at least; neither Frick, the outgoing minister, nor his Staatsekretär Stuckart had ever had the slightest influence over the RSHA or even the Hauptamt Orpo. The only thing over which they had kept control was the civilian administration, the civil servants; now that would also revert to the Reichsführer; but I couldn’t believe it was a major issue. Obviously, to have the rank of minister could only reinforce the Reichsführer’s hand against his rivals: but I didn’t know enough about the struggles at the top to gauge this fact to its full extent.

I had imagined that this appointment would postpone the presentation of my report indefinitely: that showed I didn’t really know much about the Reichsführer. I was summoned to his office two days later. The night before, the English had returned, fewer than the first time, but I still didn’t get much sleep. I splashed cold water on my face before going downstairs, to try to muster some kind of human appearance. Brandt, staring at me with his owl-like look, made a few preliminary comments to me, as was his wont: “As you can imagine, the Reichsführer is extremely busy right now. Nonetheless, he was anxious to see you, since this concerns an issue he wants to make progress on. Your report was deemed excellent, a little too direct perhaps, but conclusive. The Reichsführer will certainly ask you to summarize it for him. Be concise. He doesn’t have a lot of time.” This time, the Reichsführer welcomed me with an almost friendly tone: “My dear Sturmbannführer Aue! Forgive me for making you wait, these past few days.” He waved his soft, vein-covered hand toward a chair: “Have a seat.” Brandt, as on the first time, had given him a file, which he consulted. “You saw the good Globus, then. How is he doing?”—“Gruppenführer Globocnik seemed in excellent form, my Reichsführer. Very enthusiastic.”—“And what do you think of his management of the yield of the Einsatz? You can speak freely.” His cold little eyes shone behind his pince-nez. I suddenly remembered Globocnik’s first words; he certainly knew his Reichsführer better than I. I chose my words carefully: “The Gruppenführer is a fervent National Socialist, my Reichsführer, there’s no doubt about that. But such wealth can give rise to formidable temptations in his entourage. I got the impression that the Gruppenführer could have been stricter on that level, that he might trust some of his subordinates too much.”—“You talk a lot about corruption in your report. Do you think it’s a real problem?”—“I’m convinced of it, my Reichsführer. To a certain extent, it’s affecting the work of the camps and also of the Arbeitseinsatz. An SS man who steals is an SS man the inmate can buy.” Himmler took off his pince-nez, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and began polishing his glasses: “Summarize your conclusions. Be brief.” I took a sheet of notes out of my briefcase and began. “In the KL system as it presently functions, my Reichsführer, I see three obstacles to a maximum, rational use of available labor. We’ve just discussed the first obstacle, corruption among the SS in the camps. It is not only a moral question; it also poses practical problems on many different levels. But for that, the remedy already exists—it’s the special commission you appointed, which should intensify its work. Second obstacle: a persistent bureaucratic incoherence, which Obergruppenführer Pohl’s efforts have not yet resolved. Allow me, my Reichsführer, to give you an example, drawn from those cited in my report: Brigadeführer Glücks’s order of December twenty-eighth, 1942, addressed to all head doctors in the KLs, giving them, among other things, the responsibility of improving the nourishment of the Häftlinge so as to reduce the mortality rate. Yet in the camps, the kitchens report to the administrative department, which is subordinated to Department D-Four of the WVHA; as for the rations, they are decided centrally by the D-Four-two, in conjunction with the SS-Hauptamt. Neither the doctors on-site nor Department D-Three have any right of oversight in regard to this process. So that part of the order was quite simply not implemented; the rations remain identical to what they were last year.” I paused; Himmler, watching me in a friendly way, nodded: “But the death rate has fallen, it seems to me.”—“Indeed, my Reichsführer, but for other reasons. There has been progress in the field of medical care and hygiene, which the doctors control directly. But it could be lowered even more. In the present state of things, if you allow me the remark, my Reichsführer, every Häftling who dies prematurely represents a net loss for the war production of the Reich.”—“I know that better than you, Sturmbannführer,” he barked in a displeased, pedantic-school-master tone of voice. “Continue.”—“Very good, my Reichsführer. Third obstacle: the mentality of the superior officers who are IKL veterans. These remarks do not at all concern their considerable qualities as men, SS officers, or National Socialists. But most of them, and this is a fact, were trained at a time when the functioning of the camps was completely different, according to the directives of the late Obergruppenführer Eicke.”—“Did you know Eicke?” Himmler cut in.—“No, my Reichsführer. I did not have that honor.”—“That’s too bad. He was a great man. We miss him a lot. But excuse me, I interrupted you. Go on.”—“Thank you, my Reichsführer. What I meant was that these officers have acquired a perspective that is directed toward the political and police functions of the camps, as was predominant then. That is a problem both of state of mind and of training: few of them have the slightest experience in economic management, and they work poorly with the administrators of the WVHA enterprises. I should stress that this is an overall problem, a generational problem, if I may put it that way, and not one of individual personalities, even if I have cited some as an example.” Himmler had brought his hands together to a point under his receding chin. “Fine, Sturmbannführer. Your report will be distributed to the WVHA, and I think it will give ammunition to my friend Pohl. But so as not to offend anyone, you will first make a few corrections. Brandt will show you the list. Above all, you will not mention anyone by name. You understand why.”—“Of course, my Reichsführer.”—“On the other hand, I authorize you, in confidence, to send an uncorrected copy of your report to Dr. Mandelbrod.”—“Zu Befehl, my Reichsführer.” Himmler coughed, hesitated, took out a handkerchief, and coughed again, covering his mouth. “Excuse me,” he said as he put the handkerchief away. “I have another task for you, Sturmbannführer. The question of feeding in the camps, which you mention, is a recurrent problem. It seems to me that it’s a question you are beginning to be familiar with.”—“My Reichsführer…” He made a sign with his hand: “Yes, yes. I remember your report from Stalingrad. This is what I want: While Department D-Three covers all medical and sanitary problems, we do not have, as you stressed, any centralized authority for the inmates’ diet. So I have decided to create an interdepartmental study group to solve this problem. You will coordinate it. You will involve all the competent departments of the IKL; Pohl will also assign you a representative from the SS enterprises who will give their point of view. I also want the RSHA to have its say. Finally, I want you to consult the other ministries concerned, especially Speer’s, which keeps showering us with complaints from private enterprises. Pohl will put all the necessary experts at your disposal. I want a consensual solution, Sturmbannführer. When you have prepared some concrete suggestions, you will submit them to me; if they are valid and realistic, they will be adopted. Brandt will help you with the means necessary. Any questions?” I straightened up: “My Reichsführer, your trust is an honor to me, and I thank you for it. I would like to make sure about one point.”—“Which is?”—“That increased production remains the main objective.” Himmler had leaned back in his armchair, his hands dangling from the armrests; his face had resumed its sly expression: “Insofar as that does not harm the other interests of the SS, and does not interfere with the programs under way, the answer is yes.” He paused. “The requirements of the other ministries are important, but you know that there are constraints beyond their purview. Take that into account too. If you have any doubts, check with Pohl. He knows what I want. Good day, Sturmbannführer.”

As I left Himmler’s office, I have to confess, I felt as if I were floating in my boots. Finally I was being given a responsibility, an authentic responsibility! So they had recognized my true worth. And it was a positive job, a way to contribute to the war effort and to the victory of Germany by other means than murder and destruction. Even before talking with Rudolf Brandt, I gave in to glorious, ridiculous fantasies, like a teenager: convinced by my flawless argumentation, the departments fell in behind me; the inept and the criminal were overthrown, sent back to their lairs; in a few months, considerable progress had been made, inmates recovered their strength, their health; many of them, their hearts swept away by the force of unchained National Socialism, began working joyously to help Germany in its struggle; production soared from month to month; I got a more important position, real influence, allowing me to improve things in accord with the principles of the true Weltanschauung, and the Reichsführer himself listened to my advice, the advice of one of the best National Socialists there was. Ridiculous, puerile, I am well aware, but intoxicating. Of course, things wouldn’t turn out quite like that. But in the beginning I was truly bursting with enthusiasm. Even Thomas seemed impressed: “You see what happens, when you follow my advice instead of doing whatever you please,” he said to me with his sardonic smile. But when I thought about it, I hadn’t acted very differently than during our shared mission in 1939: once again, I had written the strict truth, without thinking too much about the consequences; but it just happened that I had more luck, and that the truth, this time, corresponded to what they wanted to hear.

I threw myself into the job with dedication. Since there wasn’t enough room in the SS-Haus, Brandt had a suite of offices assigned to me in the Minister of the Interior’s Zentralabteilung, on the Königsplatz in a bend of the Spree, on the top floor; from my windows, the Reichstag remained hidden, but I could see to one side, behind the Kroll Opera, the entire green, serene expanse of the Tiergarten, and to the other, beyond the river and the Moltke Bridge, the Lehrter customs rail station, with its vast network of sidings, constantly alive with a slow, juddering, soothing traffic, a perpetual childlike pleasure. Even better, the Reichsführer never came here: I could finally smoke in peace in my office. Fräulein Praxa, whom after all I didn’t really mind, and who knew at least how to answer the telephone and take messages, moved with me; I also managed to keep Piontek. Brandt also assigned me a Hauptscharführer, Walser, to take care of the filing, and two stenographers, and he authorized me to take on an administrative assistant with the rank of Untersturmführer; I had Thomas recommend one for me, a young man named Asbach, who had just entered the Staatspolizei after studying law and passing a training course at the Junkerschule in Bad Tölz.

The British planes had come back several nights running, but each time there were fewer: the Wilde Sau, which allowed our fighter planes to shoot down enemy aircraft from above while themselves remaining above the level of the flak, did a lot of damage, and the Luftwaffe had also begun to use flares to light up their targets as if in broad daylight; after September 3, the raids stopped completely: our new tactics had discouraged them. I went to see Pohl at his headquarters in Lichterfelde to discuss the composition of my research group. Pohl seemed very happy that this problem was finally being looked into in a systematic way; he told me frankly he was sick of sending his Kommandanten orders that weren’t followed through. We agreed that the Amtsgruppe D would appoint three representatives, one for each department; Pohl also suggested an administrator from the main office of the DWB, the German Economic Enterprises, to advise us about the economic aspects and constraints of companies using inmate labor; finally, he seconded to me his Nutrition Inspector, Professor Weinrowski, a man with moist eyes and hair already white, with a deep cleft in his chin, in which nested rough stubble that had escaped the razor. For almost a year already, Weinrowski had been trying to improve the nourishment of the Häftlinge, without any success; but he had a good experience with the obstacles, and Pohl wanted him to participate in our work. After an exchange of correspondence with the departments concerned, I summoned a preliminary meeting to take stock of the situation. At my request, Professor Weinrowski, along with his assistant, Hauptsturmführer Dr. Isenbeck, had prepared a brief memo for us that was distributed to all the participants; he also gave us an oral presentation. It was a beautiful September day, the end of the Indian summer; the sun shone on the trees of the Tiergarten and cast great patches of light into our conference room, illuminating the professor’s hair like a halo. The nutritional situation of the Häftlinge, Weinrowski explained to us in his jerky, didactic voice, was quite confused. Central regulations set norms and budgets, but the camps got their supplies locally, of course, which gave rise to sometimes considerable variation. As a typical ration, he gave the example of KL Auschwitz, where a Häftling assigned to heavy labor was supposed to receive, per day, 350 grams of bread, half a liter of ersatz, and a liter of potato or turnip soup, with the addition, four times a week, of 20 grams of meat in the soup. The inmates assigned to light work or to the infirmary obviously received less; there were also all kinds of special rations, such as those for children in the family camp or for inmates selected for medical experiments. To summarize the situation, roughly: an inmate assigned to heavy labor officially received about 2,150 calories per day and, for light work, 1,700. Now, without even knowing if these norms were applied, they could already be seen to be insufficient: a man at rest needs, depending on his size and weight, and taking environment into account, a minimum of 2,100 calories per day to stay in good health, and a man who works, 3,000. So the inmates could only waste away, all the more so since the balance between fats, carbohydrates, and proteins was far from being respected: 6.4 percent of the ration, at most, consisted of proteins, whereas the requirement ought to be 10 percent, or even 15 percent. His presentation over, Weinrowski sat down with a satisfied air, and I read extracts from the series of orders from the Reichsführer to Pohl for the improvement of nutrition in the camps, which I had had my new assistant, Asbach, analyze. The first of these orders, which dated back to March 1942, remained somewhat vague: the Reichsführer simply asked Pohl, a few days after the incorporation of the IKL into the WVHA, to gradually develop a diet, like that of the Roman soldiers or Egyptian slaves, that would contain all the vitamins and would remain simple and inexpensive. The ensuing letters were a little more precise: more vitamins, large quantities of raw vegetables and onions, carrots, kohlrabi, turnips, and also garlic, a lot of garlic, especially in winter, to improve the state of health. “I know these orders,” Professor Weinrowski declared when I had finished. “But in my opinion that’s not the main point.” For a man working, the important thing is calories and proteins; vitamins and micronutrients remain secondary when all is said and done. Hauptsturmführer Dr. Alicke, who represented the D III, agreed with this point of view; the young Isenbeck, on the other hand, had his doubts: classical nutrition, he seemed to think, underestimates the importance of vitamins, and he put forward in favor of this opinion, as if it settled everything, an article taken from a 1938 British medical journal, a reference that seemed not to impress Weinrowski much. Then Hauptsturmführer Gorter, the representative of the Arbeitseinsatz, spoke in turn: As regards the overall statistics of registered inmates, the situation was continuing to show progressive improvement; from 2.8 percent in April, the average rate of mortality had fallen to 2.23 percent in July, then to 2.09 percent in August. Even in Auschwitz, it hovered around 3.6 percent, a remarkable drop since March. “At the moment, the system of KLs includes about one hundred and sixty thousand inmates: of this number, only thirty-five thousand are classified by the Arbeitseinsatz as unfit for work, and a hundred thousand, which is not inconsiderable, work outside, in factories or enterprises.” Thanks to the construction program undertaken by Amtsgruppe C, overcrowding, a source of epidemics, was diminishing; although clothing remained problematic, despite the use of goods taken from the Jews; the medical aspect had made great progress. In short, the situation seemed to be stabilizing. Obersturmführer Jedermann, from the administration, stated that he mostly agreed with this; but he reminded us too that control of costs remained a vital problem: the budgets allocated were restrictive. “That’s entirely true,” said Sturmbannführer Rizzi, the economic specialist chosen by Pohl, “but there are still a number of factors to take into account.” He was an officer about my age, with sparse hair and an upturned, almost Slavic nose; when he spoke, his thin, bloodless lips scarcely moved, yet his statements were lucid and precise. The productivity of an inmate could in general be expressed in terms of a percentage of the productivity of a German worker or a foreign worker; but those two categories entailed much greater expense than the Häftling, not to speak of the fact that their availability was growing more and more limited. Indeed, ever since the major corporations and the Armaments Ministry had complained about unfair competition, the SS could no longer provide inmates for its own enterprises at cost, but had to bill for them at the same price as for outside companies, four to six reichsmarks a day, while the cost for an inmate’s upkeep obviously remained less than that sum. Now, a slight increase of the actual cost of upkeep, carefully managed, could lead to a considerable increase in the ratio of productivity, from which everyone would gain. “I will explain: the WVHA presently spends, let’s say, one point five reichsmarks per day for an inmate capable of carrying out ten percent of the daily work of a German worker. So we need ten inmates, or fifteen reichsmarks per day, to replace a German. But what if, by spending two reichsmarks per day for an inmate, we could give him back his strength, increase the period during which he’s fit for work, and thus train him correctly? In that case, it would be conceivable that an inmate could, after a few months, provide fifty percent of the work of his German counterpart: thus, we would need no more than two inmates, or four reichsmarks per day, to carry out the job of one German. You follow me? Of course, these figures are approximate. A study would have to be carried out.”—“Could you take charge of that?” I asked with interest.—“Wait, wait,” Jedermann cut in. “If I have to provide for one hundred thousand inmates at two reichsmarks instead of one point five, that is an overcost of fifty thousand reichsmarks per day, every day. The fact that they’re producing more or less doesn’t change anything. My budget doesn’t change.”—“That’s true,” I replied. “But I see what Sturmbannführer Rizzi is getting at. If his idea is valid, the overall profits of the SS will increase, since the inmates will produce more without any increase in cost for the companies that employ them. It would be enough, if that can be demonstrated, to convince Obergruppenführer Pohl to transfer part of these increased profits to the maintenance budget of Amtsgruppe D.”—“Yes, that’s a good point,” agreed Gorter, Maurer’s man. “And if the inmates don’t get worn out so quickly, in the end, the labor pool will grow more quickly, in fact. Hence the importance of lowering the death rate, in the end.”

The meeting concluded on this note, and I suggested a division of tasks to prepare for the next meeting. Rizzi would try to study the validity of his idea; Jedermann would explain his budgetary constraints to us in detail; as for Isenbeck, I directed him, with Weinrowski’s consent (he himself obviously didn’t want to move around much), to conduct a quick inspection of four camps: the KLs Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Auschwitz, with the aim of collecting all their ration lists, the menus that were actually prepared for the main categories of inmates in the past month, and especially samples of the rations that we would have analyzed: I wanted to be able to compare the theoretical menus with the food actually served.

At this last remark, Rizzi had thrown me a curious glance; after the meeting was adjourned, I brought him into my office. “Do you have reasons to believe that the Häftlinge don’t receive what they are supposed to?” he asked in his dry, abrupt manner. He seemed to me an intelligent man, and his query led me to imagine that our ideas and objectives should be able to intersect: I decided to make him my ally; in any case, I didn’t see any risk in opening up to him. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Corruption is a major problem in the camps. A large part of the food bought by the D-Four is diverted. It’s hard to estimate, but the Häftlinge at the end of the chain—I’m not talking about the kapos or the Prominenten—must be deprived of twenty to thirty percent of their ration. Since it’s inadequate to begin with, only the inmates who manage to obtain extra, legally or illegally, have any chance of staying alive more than a few months.”—“I see.” He thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “We should try to calculate life expectancy precisely and adjust it according to the degree of specialization.” He paused again and concluded: “Very well, I’ll see.”

I swiftly understood, alas, that my initial enthusiasm would be damped. The ensuing meetings got bogged down in a mass of technical details as voluminous as they were contradictory. Isenbeck had made a good analysis of the menus, but seemed incapable of demonstrating their relationship to the rations actually distributed; Rizzi seemed to be focused on the idea of emphasizing the division between skilled and nonskilled workers, and of concentrating our efforts on the former; Weinrowski couldn’t manage to come to an agreement with Isenbeck and Alicke on the question of vitamins. To try to stimulate the debate, I invited a representative from Speer’s ministry. Schmelter, who headed their department for the allocation of labor, told me it was high time for the SS to take this problem into account, and sent me as his representative an Oberregierungsrat with a long list of grievances. Speer’s ministry had just absorbed some of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Finance and had been rebaptized Ministry for Armaments and War Production, or RMfRuK according to the barbaric acronym, in order to reflect his expanded authority in this domain; and this reorganization seemed to be reflected in the unwavering self-confidence of Dr. Kühne, Schmelter’s envoy. “I don’t speak just for the ministry,” he began when I introduced him to my colleagues, “but also for the companies that use the labor the SS provides, whose repeated complaints reach us daily.” This Oberregierungsrat wore a brown suit with a bow tie, and had a Prussian toothbrush moustache; his few strands of stringy hair were carefully combed to the side, to cover the oblong dome of his skull. But the firmness of his speech contradicted his rather ludicrous appearance. As we surely knew, the inmates generally arrived in the factories in a feeble condition, and often, exhausted after only a few weeks, they had to be sent back to the camp. Their training required a minimum of several weeks; there was a shortage of instructors, and they didn’t have the means to train new groups every month. What’s more, for the slightest job requiring even a minimum level of qualification, at least six months had to go by before output reached a satisfactory level: and few inmates lasted that long. Reichsminister Speer was very disappointed by this state of things and thought that the contribution of the SS to the war effort, on this level, would benefit from being improved. He concluded by handing out a memo containing extracts of letters from various firms. After he left, as I looked through the memo, Rizzi shrugged his shoulders and licked his thin lips: “That’s what I’ve been saying since the beginning. Skilled workers.” I had also asked the office of Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for the Arbeitseinsatz or GBA, to send someone to express their views: one of Sauckel’s assistants had replied somewhat acidly that so long as the SP saw fit to find any pretext whatsoever to arrest foreign workers and send them off to increase the manpower of the camps, it was up to the SS to take care of their upkeep, and the GBA, for its part, no longer felt involved. Brandt had called me to remind me that the Reichsführer attached a lot of importance to the RSHA’s opinion, so I had also written to Kaltenbrunner, who referred me to Müller, who in turn told me to get in touch with Obersturmbannführer Eichmann. In vain I protested that the problem didn’t only concern Jews, Eichmann’s sole area of responsibility, Müller had insisted; so I placed a call to the Kurfürstenstrasse and asked Eichmann to send a colleague; he told me he preferred to come in person. “My deputy Günther is in Denmark,” he explained to me when he came over. “Anyway, I prefer to deal with questions of this importance myself.” At our roundtable, he launched into a pitiless indictment of the Jewish inmates, who, according to him, represented an ever greater threat; after Warsaw, revolts were increasing; an uprising in a special camp in the East (this was Treblinka, but Eichmann didn’t mention it by name) had caused many deaths among the SS, and hundreds of inmates had escaped; not all of them had been recaptured. The RSHA, as well as the Reichsführer himself, was afraid that such incidents would multiply. This, given the tense situation on the front, we could not allow. He also reminded us that the Jews conveyed to the camps in RSHA convoys were all under a death sentence: “We can’t change anything about that, even if we wanted to. At the most we have the right to extract from them, as it were, their work capacity, for the Reich, before they die.” In other words, even if certain political objectives were deferred for economic reasons, they remained no less in force; thus it wasn’t a question of distinguishing between skilled inmates and nonskilled ones—I had briefly summarized the state of our discussions for him—but between the different political-police categories. The Russian or Polish workers arrested for theft, for example, were sent to a camp, but their punishment didn’t extend further than that; so the WVHA could use them as it liked. As for those condemned for “defiling the race,” that was more delicate. But for the Jews and the asocials transferred by the Ministry of Justice, everyone had to be clear: they were, in a way, only on loan to the WVHA, since the RSHA preserved jurisdiction over them until their death; for these prisoners, the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, annihilation through work, had to be strictly applied: so it was useless to waste food on them. These statements made a strong impression on my colleagues, and, once Eichmann had left, some began to propose that rations for Jewish inmates be differentiated from the others; I even went so far as to see Oberregierungsrat Kühne again to tell him about this suggestion; he answered me in writing that, in that case, the enterprises would certainly refuse the Jewish inmates, which went against the agreement between Reichsminister Speer and the Führer, as well as the decree of January 1943 on the mobilization of manpower. Nevertheless my colleagues did not entirely abandon the idea. Rizzi asked Weinrowski if it was technically possible to calculate rations that were liable to make a man die within a given period of time; one ration, for example, that would give three months to an unskilled Jew, another ration that would give nine months to an asocial specialized worker. Weinrowski had to explain to him that, no, it wasn’t possible; not even mentioning the other factors such as cold and disease, everything depended on the weight and resistance of the subject; with a given ration, one individual could die in three weeks, another might last indefinitely; all the more so since the clever inmate would always find something extra, whereas the one who was already weakened and apathetic would only let himself go more quickly. This reasoning gave a brilliant idea to Hauptsturmführer Dr. Alicke: “What you are saying,” he said, as if thinking out loud, “is that the strongest inmates will always find a way to steal some of the rations of the weaker inmates, and so to survive. But in a way, isn’t it in our own interest for the weakest inmates not to get their complete ration? Once they’ve passed a certain level of weakness, automatically so to speak, their rations get stolen, so they eat even less and die faster, and so we save on their food. As to what is stolen from them, that strengthens the inmates who are already stronger, so that they work better. It’s simply the natural mechanism of survival of the fittest; in the same way, a sick animal succumbs quickly to predators.” That was going a little far, I thought, and I reacted sharply: “Hauptsturmführer, the Reichsführer did not set up the concentration camp system to conduct experiments on the theories of social Darwinism. Your reasoning does not seem very pertinent to me.” I turned to the others: “The real problem is what we want to prioritize: The political imperatives? Or the economic needs?”—“It’s certainly not at our level that a decision like that can be made,” Weinrowski said calmly.—“True,” Gorter interrupted, “but still, for the Arbeitseinsatz, the instructions are clear: Everything must be implemented to increase the productivity of the Häftlinge.”—“From the standpoint of our SS enterprises,” Rizzi confirmed, “that’s true too. But we still cannot ignore certain ideological imperatives.”—“In any case, meine Herren,” I concluded, “we don’t have to settle this question. The Reichsführer asked me to make recommendations that would satisfy the interests of your different departments. In the worst case we can prepare several options and leave the choice to him; whatever the case, the final decision is up to him.”

I began to see that these fruitless discussions could go on indefinitely, and this prospect alarmed me; so I decided to change tactics: prepare a concrete suggestion, and have it endorsed by the others, or else modify it a little, if necessary. For that, I decided to come to an agreement first with the specialists Weinrowski and Isenbeck. When I approached Weinrowski, he quickly understood my intentions and promised me his support; as for Isenbeck, he would do whatever he was told to do. But we still lacked concrete data. Weinrowski believed the IKL had already carried out research on this subject; I sent Isenbeck to Oranienburg with a mission order; triumphant, he brought back a pile of files: at the end of the 1930s, the medical department of the IKL had in fact carried out a set of experiments, at the KL Buchenwald, on minimal feeding for inmates subjected to forced labor; with punishment or the threat of punishment as the sole incentive, they had tested a large number of formulas, frequently changing the rations and weighing the subjects regularly; a whole array of statistics had been generated from this. While Isenbeck analyzed these reports, I talked with Weinrowski about what we called the “secondary factors,” such as hygiene, cold, illness, beatings. I had a copy of my Stalingrad report sent to me by the SD, which dealt with precisely these subjects; skimming through it, Weinrowski exclaimed: “Oh, but you quote Hohenegg!” At these words, the memory of that man, buried inside me like a glass bubble, detached from the depths and rose up, gathering speed by the second, before bursting at the surface: how curious that is, I said to myself, I hadn’t thought of him in a long time. “Do you know him?” I asked Weinrowski, overcome with intense emotion.—“Of course! He’s one of my colleagues from the faculty of medicine in Vienna.”—“So he’s still alive?”—“Yes, of course, why not?”

I immediately set out looking for him: he was well and truly alive, and I had no difficulty finding him; he too was working in Berlin, at the medical department of the Bendlerstrasse. Happy, I called him on the telephone without giving my name; his throaty, musical voice sounded a little annoyed when he answered: “Yes?”—“Professor Hohenegg?”—“Speaking. What’s this about?”—“I’m calling from the SS. It’s about an old debt.” His voice became a shade more irritated. “What are you talking about? Who are you?”—“I’m talking about a bottle of Cognac you promised me nine months ago.” Hohenegg let out a long burst of laughter: “Alas, alas, I have to confess something to you: I thought you were dead, and I drank it to your health.”—“Man of little faith.”—“So you are alive.”—“And promoted: Sturmbannführer.”—“Bravo! Well, I’ll just have to unearth another bottle.”—“I give you twenty-four hours: we’ll drink it tomorrow night. In exchange, dinner will be on me. At Borchardt’s, eight o’clock, does that suit you?” Hohenegg gave a long whistle: “They must have given you a raise too. But allow me to point out that it’s not quite oyster season yet.”—“That’s all right; we’ll eat wild boar pâté. Till tomorrow.”

Hohenegg, as soon as he saw me, wanted at all cost to feel my scars; I graciously permitted him, under the surprised eye of the maître d’hôtel, who had come to proffer the wine list. “Good work,” Hohenegg said, “good work. If you had had that before Kislovodsk, I would have cited you in my seminar. All in all, I did well to insist.”—“What do you mean?”—“The surgeon in Gumrak didn’t want to operate on you, which is understandable. He had pulled a sheet over your face and had told the nurses to put you out in the snow, as they did then, to get it over with. I happened to be walking by, I noticed this sheet moving at mouth level, and of course I thought that was curious, a dead man breathing like an ox under his shroud. I turned down the sheet: imagine my surprise. So I told myself that ordering someone else to take care of you was the least I could do. The surgeon didn’t want to; we had a few words, but I was his hierarchical superior, and he had to give in. He kept complaining that it was a waste of time. I was in something of a hurry, I let him get on with it; I imagine he made do with a hemostasis. But I’m happy it was of some use.” I remained motionless, riveted to his words; at the same time I felt immensely remote from all that, as if it concerned another man, whom I scarcely knew. The maître d’hôtel brought the wine. Hohenegg interrupted him before he could pour: “Just a minute, please. Could you bring us two Cognac glasses?”—“Of course, Herr Oberst.” With a smile, Hohenegg took a bottle of Hennessy out of his briefcase and placed it on the table: “There. A promise is a promise.” The maître d’hôtel returned with the glasses, uncorked the bottle, and poured us each a measure. Hohenegg took his glass and got up; I did the same. Suddenly he looked serious and I noticed that he had aged perceptibly from what I remembered of him: his yellow, soft skin drooped under his eyes and on his round cheeks; his whole body, still fat, seemed to have shrunk somehow on his frame. “I suggest,” he said, “that we drink to all our comrades in misfortune who didn’t have as much luck as we did. And especially to those who are still alive, somewhere.” We toasted, and sat back down. Hohenegg remained silent for a little bit, playing with his knife, then resumed his cheerful air. I told him how I had gotten out, or at least what Thomas had told me, and asked him for his story. “With me it’s simpler. I had finished my work, turned in my report to General Renoldi, who was already packing his bags for Siberia and couldn’t have cared less about anything else, and I realized they had forgotten me. Fortunately, I knew an obliging young man at the AOK; thanks to him, I was able to send a signal to the OKHG with a copy for my faculty, stating simply that I was ready to submit my report. Then they remembered me and the next day I received orders to leave the Kessel. And it was when I was waiting for a plane in Gumrak that I came across you. I wanted to take you with me, but in that state, you were unfit for travel, and I couldn’t wait for your operation, since flights were becoming rare. I think I actually got one of the last flights leaving Gumrak. The plane just before mine crashed right in front of my eyes; I was still a bit dazed by the noise of the explosion when I got to Novorossisk. We took off straight through the smoke and the flames rising up from the wreck, it was very impressive. Afterward I got leave, and instead of reassigning me to the new Sixth Army, they gave me a job at the OKW. And you, what’s become of you?” While we ate I described my work group’s problems to him. “Indeed,” he commented, “it sounds tricky. I know Weinrowski well; he’s an honest man and a scholar of integrity, but he has no political sense and often makes blunders.” I remained pensive: “You couldn’t meet him with me? To help us get our bearings.”—“My dear Sturmbannführer, I would remind you that I am an officer of the Wehrmacht. I don’t think your superiors—or mine—would appreciate your mixing me up in this dark business.”—“Not officially, of course. A simple private discussion, with your old faculty friend?”—“I never said he was my friend.” Hohenegg ran his hand pensively over the dome of his bald skull; his wrinkled neck stuck out of his buttoned collar. “Of course, as a clinical pathologist, I am always delighted to be of help to the human species; after all, I never lack customers. If you like, the three of us can just finish off this bottle of Cognac together.”

Weinrowski invited us to his place. He lived with his wife in a three-room apartment in Kreuzberg. He showed us two photos on the piano of young men, one framed in black with a ribbon: his eldest son, Egon, killed in Demiansk; the younger one was serving in France and had been quiet till then, but his division had just been rushed to Italy to reinforce the new front. While Frau Weinrowski served us tea and cakes, we talked about the Italian situation: as pretty much everyone expected, Badoglio was just waiting for the occasion to switch sides, and as soon as the Anglo-Americans had set foot on Italian soil, he had seized it. “Fortunately, fortunately, the Führer was cleverer than he!” Weinrowski exclaimed.—“You say that,” Frau Weinrowski murmured sadly as she offered us sugar, “but it’s your Karl who is there, not the Führer.” She was a rather heavy woman, with puffy, tired features; but the outline of her mouth and especially the light in her eyes hinted at past beauty. “Oh, be quiet,” Weinrowski grumbled, “the Führer knows what he’s doing. Look at that Skorzeny! Tell me that wasn’t a master stroke.” The raid on the Gran Sasso, to liberate Mussolini, had made headlines for days in Goebbels’s press. Since then, our forces had occupied northern Italy, interned six hundred and fifty thousand Italian soldiers, and set up a Fascist republic in Salò; and all that was presented as a significant victory, a brilliant maneuver of the Führer’s. But the resumption of raids on Berlin was also a direct consequence; the new front was draining our divisions, and in August the Americans had managed to bomb Ploesti, our last source of oil. Germany was truly caught in the crossfire.

Hohenegg got out his Cognac and Weinrowski went to look for glasses; his wife had disappeared into the kitchen. The apartment was dark, with the musty, stale smell of old people’s apartments. I had always wondered where this smell came from. Would I smell that way too, if I ever lived long enough? Strange idea. Today, in any case, I don’t think I smell; but one can never smell one’s own odor, they say. When Weinrowski returned, Hohenegg poured three measures and we drank to the memory of his dead son. Weinrowski seemed a little moved. Then I took out the documents I had prepared and showed them to Hohenegg, after asking Weinrowski for a little more light. Weinrowski was sitting next to his old colleague and commenting on the papers and the charts as Hohenegg examined them; unconsciously, they had slipped into a Viennese dialect that I had trouble following. I settled into my armchair and drank Hohenegg’s Cognac. Both had a rather odd attitude: in fact, as Hohenegg had explained to me, Weinrowski, at the faculty, had seniority; but as Oberst, Hohenegg was superior in rank to Weinrowski, who in the SS had the rank of Sturmbannführer of the Reserve, the equivalent of a Major. They didn’t seem to be sure which of them had precedence over the other, so they had adopted a diffident attitude, with much “If you please,” “No, no, of course you’re right,” “Your experience…” “Your practice…,” which was starting to get rather comical. Hohenegg raised his head and looked at me: “If I understand correctly, according to you, the inmates don’t even receive the complete rations described here?”—“Aside from a few privileged ones, no. They lose at least twenty percent.” Hohenegg resumed his conversation with Weinrowski. “That’s bad.”—“It certainly is. That gives them between thirteen hundred and seventeen hundred calories a day.”—“It’s still more than our men in Stalingrad.” He looked at me again: “What are you aiming for, in the end?”—“The ideal thing would be a normal minimum ration.” Hohenegg tapped the papers: “Yes, but if I understood correctly, that’s impossible. Lack of resources.”—“In a way, yes. But we could suggest improvements.” Hohenegg thought: “In fact, your real problem is the argumentation. The inmate who should receive seventeen hundred calories only receives thirteen hundred; in order for him actually to receive seventeen hundred…”—“Which is insufficient in any case,” Weinrowski interjected.—“…the ration would have to be twenty-one hundred. But if you ask for twenty-one hundred, you have to justify twenty-one hundred. You can’t say you’re asking for twenty-one hundred in order to get seventeen hundred.”—“Doktor, as always, it’s a pleasure talking with you,” I said, smiling. “As is your wont, you go straight to the heart of the matter.” Hohenegg went on without letting himself be interrupted: “Wait. To ask for twenty-one hundred, you would have to demonstrate that seventeen hundred wasn’t enough, which you can’t do, since they don’t actually receive seventeen hundred. And of course, you can’t take the diversion factor into account in your arguments.”—“Not really. Management knows the problem exists, but we can’t get mixed up in it. There are other authorities for that.”—“I see.”—“In fact, the problem is to obtain an increase of the overall budget. But the people who manage that budget think that it should be enough, and it’s hard to prove the contrary. Even if we demonstrate that the inmates continue to die too quickly, they tell us that throwing money at the problem won’t solve it.”—“In which they aren’t necessarily wrong.” Hohenegg rubbed the top of his skull; Weinrowski was silent and listened. “Couldn’t we modify the distributions?”—“Meaning?”—“Well, without increasing the overall budget, favor the working inmates a little more, and the ones who don’t work a little less.”—“In principle, dear Doktor, there are no inmates who don’t work. There are only sick inmates: but if they are fed even less than they are now, they would have no chance to recover and become fit for work again. In that case, might as well not feed them at all; but then the death rate would increase again.”—“Yes, but what I mean is that you must keep the women and the children somewhere? So they must be fed too?” I stared at him without replying. Weinrowski too remained silent. Finally I said: “No, Doktor. We don’t keep the women, the elderly, or the children.” Hohenegg opened his eyes wide and looked at me without replying, as if he wanted me to confirm that I had indeed said what I had said. I nodded. Finally he understood. He gave a long sigh and rubbed the back of his neck: “Well…” Weinrowski and I still remained silent. “Ah yes…yes. That’s rough.” He breathed heavily: “Well. I see how it is. I imagine that, after all, especially after Stalingrad, we don’t have much of a choice.”—“No, Doktor, not really.”—“Still, that’s hard. All of them?”—“All those who can’t work.”—“Well…” He pulled himself together: “At bottom, it’s normal. There’s no reason for us to treat our enemies better than our own soldiers. After what I saw in Stalingrad…. Even these rations are luxurious. Our men survived with much less. And also, the ones who survived, what are they getting to eat now? What are our comrades in Siberia getting? No, no, you’re right.” He stared at me pensively: “Still, it’s a Schweinerei, a filthy business. But still, you’re right.”

I had been right, too, to ask his opinion: Hohenegg had understood right away what Weinrowski couldn’t see, that it was a political problem, not a technical one. The technical aspect had to serve to justify a political decision, but couldn’t dictate it. Our discussion that day reached no conclusions; but it made me think, and in the end I found the solution. Since Weinrowski seemed incapable of grasping it, to keep him busy I asked him to develop another report, and turned to Isenbeck for the necessary technical support. I had underestimated this boy: he was very keen and turned out to be fully capable of understanding my thinking, and even of anticipating it. In one night of work, alone in our big office at the Ministry of the Interior, drinking coffee brought to us by a drowsy orderly, we sketched the rough outlines of the project together. I started with Rizzi’s concept, setting up a distinction between skilled and unskilled workers: all rations would be increased, but just a little for the unskilled workers, while skilled workers could receive a whole series of new advantages. The project didn’t deal with the different categories of inmates, but allowed, if the RSHA insisted, for the categories meant to be disadvantaged, such as the Jews, to be assigned solely to unskilled jobs: in any case, the options remained open. Starting from this central distinction, Isenbeck helped me define others: heavy labor, light labor, hospitalization; in the end, it formed a scale to which we merely had to index the rations. Instead of struggling with fixed rations, which in any case could not be guaranteed because of restrictions and difficulties in obtaining provisions, I asked Isenbeck to calculate—based on standard menus—a daily budget corresponding to each category, then, in addition, to suggest various menus that would correspond to these budgets. Isenbeck insisted that these suggestions also include qualitative options, such as distributing raw onions rather than cooked ones, because of the vitamins; I agreed. At the bottom line, there was nothing revolutionary about this project: it took the current practices and modified them slightly to try to produce a net increase; in order to justify it, I went to find Rizzi, explained the concept to him, and asked him to write an economic argument for me in terms of output; he immediately agreed, all the more so since I readily attributed authorship of the key ideas to him. For myself I reserved the drafting of the project, once I had all the technical elements in hand.

The important thing, I saw clearly, was for the RSHA not to have too many objections; if the project was acceptable to them, Department D IV of the WVHA couldn’t oppose it. So I called Eichmann to sound him out: “Ah, my dear Sturmbannführer Aue! Meet with me? It’s just that I’m absolutely snowed under at the moment. Yes, Italy, and something else too. Tonight, then? For a drink. There’s a little café not too far from my office, at the corner of Potsdamerstrasse. Yes, next to the U-Bahn entrance. Till tonight, then.” When he arrived, he flopped onto the banquette with a sigh and threw his cap on the table, massaging the bridge of his nose. I had already ordered two glasses of schnapps and I offered him a cigarette, which he took with pleasure, leaning back in the banquette with his legs crossed, one arm thrown over the back. Between puffs he chewed his lower lip; his broad bare forehead reflected the lights of the café. “So, Italy?” I asked.—“The problem isn’t so much Italy—well, we’ll get eight or ten thousand of them there, of course—it’s mostly the zones that they occupied: with their imbecilic policies they’ve become paradise for Jews. They’re everywhere! In the South of France, the Dalmatian coast, the Italian zone in Greece. I sent teams right away pretty much everywhere, but it’s going to be a big job; with the transport problems on top of that, it won’t get done in a day. In Nice, with the benefit of surprise, we managed to arrest a few thousand; but the French police are becoming less and less cooperative, and that complicates matters. We lack resources terribly. And also Denmark is worrying us a lot.”—“Denmark?”—“Yes. It should have been quite simple, but it’s become a real mess. Günther is furious. Did I tell you I sent him there?”—“Yes. What happened?”—“I don’t know exactly. According to Günther, it’s Dr. Best, the ambassador, who’s playing a weird game. You know him, don’t you?” Eichmann emptied his schnapps in one gulp and ordered another. “He was my superior,” I replied. “Before the war.”—“Yes, well, I don’t know what’s on his mind now. For months and months, he’s been doing everything he can to get in our way, under the pretext that it’s going to…”—he made a repeated gesture from top to bottom—“interfere with his policy of cooperation. And then in August, after the riots, when we imposed a state of emergency, we said, fine, let’s do it. On-site, there’s a new BdS, Dr. Mildner, but he’s already overwhelmed; what’s more the Wehrmacht immediately refused to cooperate, that’s why I sent Günther, to get things going. So we prepared everything, a boat for the four thousand who are in Copenhagen, trains for the others, and then Best keeps creating difficulties. He always has an objection, the Danish, the Wehrmacht, e tutti quanti. What’s more, this was supposed to stay a secret, so we could round them all up at once, without their expecting it, but Günther says they already know everything. It looks like it’s off to a pretty bad start.”—“So where are you at now?”—“It’s planned for a few days from now. We’ll do it all at once, there aren’t all that many of them anyway. I called Günther and said to him, Günther, my friend, if that’s the way it is, tell Mildner to move the date up, but Best refused. Too sensitive, he had to talk some more with the Danes. Günther thinks he’s doing it on purpose so it’ll fail.”—“But I know Dr. Best well: he’s anything but a friend of the Jews. You’d have a hard time finding a better National Socialist than him.” Eichmann made a face: “Mmmh. You know, politics change people. Well, we’ll see. Me, I’m covered, we prepared everything, planned everything, if it goes wrong, it won’t fall on my shoulders, I’m telling you that right now. But how about your project, how’s that going?”

I ordered another round: I had already had a chance to notice that drinking tended to relax Eichmann, to arouse his sentimental, friendly side. I wasn’t trying to con him, far from it, but I wanted him to trust me and see that my ideas weren’t incompatible with his vision of things. I gave him a rough outline of the project; as I had foreseen, he scarcely listened. One single thing interested him: “How do you reconcile all that with the principle of Vernichtung durch Arbeit?”—“It’s very simple: the improvements relate only to the skilled workers. It will be enough to make sure that the Jews and the asocials are assigned to heavy but unskilled labor.” Eichmann scratched his cheek. Of course I knew that in actual fact the assignments of each individual worker were decided by the Arbeitseinsatz of each camp, but if they wanted to keep skilled Jews, that would be their problem. Eichmann, in any case, seemed to have other concerns. After a minute of thought, he said abruptly: “Fine, that’s okay,” and began talking about the South of France again. I listened to him as I drank and smoked. After a while, at an opportune moment, I asked him politely: “To come back to my project, Obersturmbannführer, it’s almost ready, and I’d like to send it to you so you can study it.” Eichmann waved his hand: “If you like. I already get so much paper.”—“I don’t want to bother you. It’s just to be sure you don’t have any objections.”—“If it’s as you say…”—“Listen, if you have the time, look at it, and then send me a little letter. That way I can show that I took your opinion into account.” Eichmann gave an ironic little smile and waved a finger at me: “Ah, you’re a clever one, Sturmbannführer Aue. You have to cover your tracks too.” I kept my face impassive: “The Reichsführer wants the opinions of all departments involved to be taken into account. Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner told me that for the RSHA, I would have to see you. I find it normal.” Eichmann scowled: “Of course, I’m not the one who decides: I’ll have to submit it to my Amtschef. But if I give a positive recommendation, there’s no reason he’ll refuse to sign it. In principle, of course.” I raised my glass: “To the success of your Danish Einsatz, then?” He smiled; when he smiled that way, his ears seemed to stick out, and he looked more than ever like a bird; at the same time, a nervous tic deformed his smile, making it almost into a grimace. “Yes, thank you, to the Einsatz. To your project too.”

I drafted the text in two days; Isenbeck had meticulously prepared handsome detailed charts for the annexes, and I used Rizzi’s arguments without altering them too much. I hadn’t quite finished when Brandt summoned me. The Reichsführer was going to the Warthegau to deliver important speeches there; on October 6, a conference of the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters was taking place, at which Dr. Mandelbrod would be present; and the latter had asked that I be invited. How far was I with my project? I assured him that I had almost finished. I just had to present it to my colleagues before sending it to the relevant offices for approval. I had already discussed it with Weinrowski, presenting Isenbeck’s scales to him as a simple technical elaboration of his ideas: he seemed to think it was fine. The general meeting went off without any hitches; I let Rizzi do most of the talking, and contented myself with stressing that I had secured the verbal agreement of the RSHA. Gorter seemed satisfied, and just wondered if we had gone far enough; Alicke seemed unable to follow Rizzi’s economic arguments; Jedermann grumbled that it was still going to be expensive, and where would we find the money? But he was reassured when I guaranteed that if the project were approved, it would be financed through additional allocation. I asked each person for a written reply from his Amtschef for the tenth, counting on being back in Berlin by then; I also forwarded a copy to Eichmann. Brandt had let me know that I could probably present the project to the Reichsführer in person, once the departments had given their agreement.

The day of our departure, at the end of the afternoon, I went to the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. Brandt had invited me to attend a speech of Speer’s before joining Dr. Mandelbrod in the special train for the bigwigs. In the lobby, I was welcomed by Ohlendorf, whom I hadn’t seen since he left the Crimea. “Dr. Aue! How nice to see you again. I hear you’ve been in Berlin for months. Why didn’t you call me? I would have been happy to see you.”—“I’m sorry, Brigadeführer. I was terribly busy. You too, I imagine.” He seemed to be radiating intensity, a dark, concentrated energy. “Brandt sent you for our conference, isn’t that right? As I understood it, you’re looking into questions of productivity.”—“Yes, but only in matters concerning concentration camp inmates.”—“I see. Tonight we’re going to introduce a new cooperation agreement between the SD and the Armaments Ministry. But the subject is much vaster; it will also cover the treatment of foreign workers, among other things.”—“You’re in the Ministry of Economics now, Brigadeführer, isn’t that so?”—“That’s right. I’m wearing several hats these days. It’s too bad you’re not an economist: with these agreements, a whole new field will open up for the SD, I hope. Well then, let’s go up, it’s going to start soon.”

The conference took place in one of the great oak-paneled halls of the palace, where National Socialist decorations clashed somewhat with the eighteenth-century woodwork and gilt candelabra. More than a hundred SD officers were present, among them a number of my former colleagues or superiors: Siebert, with whom I had served in the Crimea, Regierungsrat Neifend, who had worked in Amt II but had since been appointed Gruppenleiter in Amt III, and others. Ohlendorf had his seat near the rostrum, next to a man in an SS-Obergruppenführer’s uniform, with a broad, bare forehead and firm, set features: Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter from Lower Silesia, who was representing the Reichsführer at this ceremony. Reichsminister Speer arrived a little late. He struck me as surprisingly young, even though his hair was starting to recede, slim, vigorous; he wore a simple twill suit, with the Gold Badge of the Party as sole decoration. Some civilians accompanied him, and took their seats on chairs lined up behind Ohlendorf and Hanke, while he stepped up to the podium and began his speech. He spoke, in the beginning, in an almost gentle voice, precise and polished, which emphasized rather than masked an authority that Speer seemed to draw more from himself than from his position. His dark, keen eyes remained fixed on us and left our faces only occasionally, to look at his notes; when they were lowered, they almost disappeared under his thick, bushy eyebrows. The notes were just there to serve as pointers for his speech; he hardly consulted them at all, and seemed to take all the figures he ticked off directly from his head, as he needed them, as if they were constantly stored there, ready for use. His statements were brutally and, to my way of thinking, refreshingly frank: if total military production was not rapidly implemented, the war was lost. These weren’t Cassandra warnings; Speer compared our present production with the estimates we had of Soviet and especially American production; at this pace, he demonstrated, we wouldn’t hold out for a year. But our industrial resources were far from being fully exploited; and one of the major obstacles, aside from the problems of manual labor, was the obstruction, at a regional level, by private interests: it was especially for that reason that he counted on the support of the SD, and that was one of the main subjects of the agreements he was going to conclude with the SS. He had just signed an important agreement with the French Economics Minister, Bichelonne, to transfer the majority of our production of consumer goods to France. That would certainly give a considerable commercial advantage to postwar France, but we didn’t have a choice: if we wanted victory, it was up to us to make sacrifices. This measure would allow us to transfer an additional million and a half workers to armaments. But we could expect a number of Gauleiters to oppose the necessary closures of firms; and this was one particular area where the SD could intervene. After this speech, Ohlendorf got up, thanked Speer, and swiftly presented the terms of the agreement: the SD would be authorized to examine the conditions of recruitment and the treatment of foreign workers; similarly, any refusal by the Gauleiters to follow the minister’s instructions would be subject to an SD investigation. On a table set up for this purpose the agreement was ceremoniously signed, by Hanke, Ohlendorf, and Speer; then everyone exchanged a German salute, Speer shook their hands, and left. I looked at my watch: I had less than forty-five minutes, but I had brought my travel bag. In all the milling around, I slipped next to Ohlendorf, who was talking to Hanke: “Brigadeführer, excuse me. I’m taking the same train as the Reichsminister; I have to go.” Ohlendorf, a little surprised, raised his eyebrows: “Call me when you get back,” he said.

The special train left not from one of the main stations but from the S-Bahn station on Friedrichstrasse. The platform, cordoned off by police and Waffen-SS forces, was swarming with senior officials and Gauleiters, in SA or SS uniforms, greeting one another noisily. While a Leutnant from the Schupo checked his list and my orders, I examined the crowd: I didn’t see Dr. Mandelbrod, whom I was supposed to meet there. I asked the Leutnant to show me his compartment; he consulted his list: “Herr Doktor Mandelbrod, Mandelbrod…here it is, the special car, at the end of the train.” This car was specially built: instead of an ordinary door, there was a double door, as in a cattle car, comprising about a third of its length; and steel blinds hid all the windows. One of Mandelbrod’s amazons was standing in front of the door, in an SS uniform with an Obersturmführer’s stripes; she was wearing not the regulation skirt but masculine riding breeches, and was at least an inch taller than I. I wondered where Mandelbrod recruited his aides: he must have had a special arrangement with the Reichsführer. The woman saluted me: “Sturmbannführer, Dr. Mandelbrod is waiting for you.” She seemed to have recognized me, but I didn’t recognize her; they all looked pretty much alike. She took my bag and led me into a carpeted antechamber, from which a hallway branched out to the left. “Your cabin will be the second on the right,” she said. “I’ll put your things there. Dr. Mandelbrod is this way.” A double sliding door, opposite the hallway, opened automatically. I went in. Mandelbrod, bathed in his usual frightful odor, was sitting in his enormous platform-armchair, which could be hoisted on board thanks to the arrangement of the doors; next to him, in a little rococo armchair, his legs casually crossed, sat Minister Speer. “Ah, Max, there you are!” Mandelbrod exclaimed in his musical voice. “Come in, come in.” A cat slipped between my boots when I wanted to step forward and I almost tripped; I caught myself and saluted Speer, then Mandelbrod. He turned his head to the Minister: “My dear Speer, let me introduce you to one of my young protégés, Dr. Aue.” Speer examined me under his voluminous eyebrows and unfolded himself from his chair; to my surprise, he came forward to shake my hand: “Pleased to meet you, Sturmbannführer.”—“Dr. Aue is working for the Reichsführer,” Mandelbrod explained. “He is trying to improve the productivity of our concentration camps.”—“Ah,” Speer said, “that’s very good. Will you succeed?”—“I’ve been looking into this question for several months now, Herr Reichsminister, and my role is a minor one. But on the whole a lot of things have been accomplished. I think you’ve been able to see the results.”—“Yes, of course. It’s a subject I recently discussed with the Reichsführer. He agreed with me that it could be even better.”—“Without a doubt, Herr Reichsminister. We’re working hard on it.” There was a pause; Speer was obviously looking for something to say. His eyes fell on my medals: “You were at the front, Sturmbannführer?”—“Yes, Herr Reichsminister. In Stalingrad.” His gaze darkened, and he lowered his eyes; his jaw twitched. Then he looked at me again with his precise, searching eyes, circled, I noticed for the first time, by heavy shadows of fatigue. “My brother Ernst disappeared in Stalingrad,” he said in a calm, slightly tense voice. I bowed my head: “I’m sorry, Herr Reichsminister. My condolences. Do you know how he fell?”—“No. I don’t even know if he’s dead.” His voice seemed distant, almost detached. “Our parents received letters, he was sick, in one of the hospitals. The conditions were…horrible. In his penultimate letter, he said he couldn’t bear it anymore and he was going to rejoin his comrades at his artillery post. But he was almost an invalid.”—“Dr. Aue was seriously wounded in Stalingrad,” Mandelbrod interrupted. “But he was lucky, he was able to be evacuated.”—“Yes…,” Speer said. He looked dreamy now, almost lost. “Yes…you were lucky. His entire unit disappeared during the January Russian offensive. He is certainly dead. Without a doubt. My parents still can’t quite get over it.” His eyes met mine again. “He was my father’s favorite son.” Embarrassed, I muttered another polite phrase. Behind Speer, Mandelbrod said: “Our race is suffering, my dear friend. We must ensure its future.” Speer nodded and looked at his watch. “We’re about to leave. I’ll go back to my compartment.” He held out his hand to me again: “Goodbye, Sturmbannführer.” I clicked my heels and saluted him, but he was already shaking hands with Mandelbrod, who pulled him toward him and said something softly that I didn’t hear. Speer listened attentively, nodded, and went out. Mandelbrod pointed to the armchair he had left: “Have a seat, have a seat. Have you eaten? Are you hungry?” A second double door, in the back of the sitting room, opened silently, and in came a young woman in an SS uniform who looked just like the first one, but must have been a different one—unless the one who had welcomed me had gone round the car from the outside. “Would you like anything, Sturmbannführer?” she asked. The train had slowly started off and was leaving the station. Curtains hid the windows, the room was lit by the warm, golden light of many little lamps; on a curve, one of the curtains gaped open, and I could see the metal shutters beyond the glass and thought the whole car must have been armored. The young woman reappeared and set down a tray of sandwiches and beer on a folding table that she unfolded adroitly next to me with one hand. As I ate, Mandelbrod asked me about my work; he had much appreciated my August report, and was waiting with pleasure for the project I was about to finish; he seemed already to know about most of the details. Herr Leland in particular, he added, was interested in questions of individual output. “Is Herr Leland traveling with us, Herr Doktor?” I asked.—“He will join us in Posen,” Mandelbrod replied. He was already in the East, in Silesia, in some places I had visited and where they both had considerable interests. “It’s very good that you’ve met Reichsminister Speer,” he said almost offhandedly. “He is a man with whom it is important to get along. The SS and he should grow even closer.” We talked a little more as I finished eating and drank my beer; Mandelbrod stroked a cat that had slipped onto his knees. Then he allowed me to withdraw. I went back through the antechamber and found my cabin. It was roomy, with a comfortable couchette already made up, a little work table, and a sink with a mirror over it. I opened the curtain: there too, steel shutters closed the window, and there seemed no way to open them. I abandoned the idea of smoking and took off my tunic and shirt to wash. I had scarcely washed my face, with a pretty little cake of perfumed soap placed next to the faucet—there was even hot water—when someone knocked on my door. “Just a minute!” I toweled off, put my shirt back on, put on my tunic without buttoning it, and then opened the door. One of the assistants was standing in the hallway and staring at me with her light-colored eyes, with the shadow of a smile on her lips, delicate as her perfume, which I could just make out. “Good evening, Sturmbannführer,” she said. “Do you find your cabin satisfactory?”—“Yes, very.” She looked at me, barely blinking. “If you like,” she went on, “I could keep you company for the night.” This unexpected offer, uttered in the same indifferent tone with which they had asked me if I wanted anything to eat, caught me a little unawares, I have to admit: I felt myself blush and searched hesitatingly for a reply. “I don’t think Dr. Mandelbrod would approve,” I said finally.—“On the contrary,” she answered in the same friendly, calm tone, “Dr. Mandelbrod would be very happy. He is firmly convinced that all occasions to perpetuate our race must be taken advantage of. Of course, if I happened to become pregnant, your work wouldn’t be disturbed: the SS has institutions for this purpose.”—“Yes, I know,” I said. I wondered what she would do if I accepted: I had the impression she would come in, get undressed without comment, and would wait, naked, on the bed, until I finished washing up. “That’s a very tempting proposition,” I said finally, “and I’m truly sorry I have to refuse. But I’m very tired and tomorrow will be a busy day. Another time, with a little luck.” Her expression didn’t show any change; perhaps she barely blinked. “As you like, Sturmbannführer,” she replied. “If you need anything at all, you can ring. I’ll be next door. Good night.”—“Good night,” I said, forcing myself to smile. I closed the door. Once I had finished washing, I put the light out and went to bed. The train sailed into the invisible night, swaying slightly when it passed over the switches. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

About the hour-and-a-half-long speech the Reichsführer gave on the night of October 6 to the assembled Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, I don’t have much to say. This speech is less well known than the one, almost twice as long, he read on October 4 to his Obergruppenführers and HSSPFs; but aside from a few differences due to the nature of the respective audiences, and the less informal, less sardonic, less colloquial tone of the second speech, the Reichsführer said essentially the same thing. Thanks to the chance survival of archives, and the victors’ justice, these speeches have become famous far beyond the closed circles for which they were intended; you won’t find a book on the SS, the Reichsführer, or the destruction of the Jews in which they aren’t cited; if their content interests you, you can easily consult them, in several languages; the October 4 speech was entered as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, under document number 1919-PS (it was obviously in this form that I was finally able to study it in detail, after the war, although I learned its general import in Posen itself); moreover, it was recorded, either on a wax disk or on a red oxide magnetic tape—the historians aren’t in agreement, and on this point I cannot enlighten them, not having been present at that speech, but whatever the case the recording has survived and, if you feel so inclined, you can listen to it, and thus hear for yourself the Reichsführer’s monotone, pedantic, didactic, precise voice, a little more urgent when he waxes ironic; there are even, though rarely, moments of anger, especially obvious, in hindsight, when he comes to subjects over which he must have felt he had little control—the widespread corruption, for instance, which he also spoke about on the sixth to the regime’s dignitaries, but on which he insisted especially, as I heard at the time from Brandt, during his speech to the Gruppenführers given on the fourth. If these speeches have entered history, it’s not of course because of all that, but because in this speech the Reichsführer, with a frankness he has never to my knowledge equaled either before or since, with frankness thus and in a manner that could even be called crude, outlined the program of the destruction of the Jews. Even I, when I heard it on October 6, didn’t at first believe my ears, the hall was full, the sumptuous Golden Hall in the castle at Posen, I was in the very back, behind about fifty Gauleiters and leaders of the Party, not to mention a few industrialists, two service chiefs, and three (or maybe two) ministers of the Reich; and I found it, considering the secrecy rules we were bound to, truly shocking, almost indecent, and at the beginning, it made me very ill at ease, and I was certainly not the only one, I could see Gauleiters sigh and mop their foreheads or necks, it wasn’t that they were learning something new, no, everyone, in that great hall with its subdued lighting must have been in the know, even though some of them, until then, probably hadn’t had to think the thing through to the end, to discern its full extent, to think, for instance, about the women and children, and that’s probably why the Reichsführer insisted on this point, far more, moreover, to the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters than to his Gruppenführers, who couldn’t in any case have had any illusions, which is probably why he insisted that, yes, we were indeed killing the women and the children too, so as not to let any ambiguity linger, and that’s precisely what was so uncomfortable, that total absence, for once, of ambiguity, and it was as if he were violating an unwritten rule, even stronger than his own rules he decreed for his subordinates, his Sprachregelungen already absolutely strict, the rule of tact perhaps, that tact he spoke of in his first speech, evoking it in the context of the execution of Röhm and his SA comrades, a kind of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, he said, a consequence of this tact due to which we have never spoken about it among ourselves, but perhaps it was also a matter of something other than the question of that tact and of those rules, and that’s when I began to understand, I think, the profound reason for these declarations, and also why the dignitaries sighed and sweated so much, for they too, like me, were beginning to understand, to understand that it wasn’t by chance that the Reichsführer, in the beginning of the fifth year of the war, was thus openly referring to the destruction of the Jews before them, without euphemisms, without winks, with simple and brutal words like kill—exterminate, he said, meaning kill or order to have killed— that, for once, the Reichsführer spoke to them quite openly about this question…to tell you how it was, no, that certainly wasn’t by chance, and if he allowed himself to do it, then the Führer knew about it, and worse, the Führer had wanted it, hence their anguish, the Reichsführer was speaking necessarily here in the name of the Führer, and he was saying this, these words that you weren’t supposed to say, and he was recording them, on a disk or a tape, it doesn’t matter, and he was carefully taking note of those present and those absent—among the SS leaders, the only ones who didn’t attend the October 4 speech were Kaltenbrunner, who was sick with phlebitis, Daluege, who had a serious heart disease and was on leave for a year or two, Wolff, just recently appointed HSSPF for Italy and plenipotentiary to Mussolini, and Globocnik, who had just, although I didn’t know it yet and heard about it only after Posen, suddenly been transferred from his little Lublin kingdom to his native town of Trieste, as SSPF for Istria and Dalmatia, under Wolff’s orders in fact, accompanied—but this I wouldn’t know till even later on—by almost the entire personnel of Einsatz Reinhard, T-4 included, everything was being shut down, Auschwitz would henceforth be enough, and the beautiful Adriatic coast would make a fine dumping ground for all these people we had no further use for, even Blobel would come join them a little later on, let them go get killed by Tito’s partisans, that would spare us some housekeeping; and as to the Party dignitaries, note was also taken of the missing heads, but I never saw the list—all that, then, the Reichsführer was doing deliberately, on instructions, and for that there could only have been one reason, hence the perceptible emotion of the listeners, who grasped this reason very well: it was so that none of them could, later on, say that he didn’t know, couldn’t try to make people think, in case of defeat, that he was innocent of the worst, couldn’t think he might someday be able to get off scot-free; it was in order to drag them in, and they understood it very well, hence their distress. The Moscow Conference, at the end of which the Allies swore to pursue the “war criminals” to the furthest corners of the earth, hadn’t yet taken place, that would come a few weeks later, before the end of that month of October 1943, but already, especially since summer, the BBC was conducting an intensive propaganda campaign on this theme, naming names, and with a certain precision, for it sometimes quoted officers and even noncoms from specific KLs, it was very well informed, and the Staatspolizei certainly wondered how, and this, it is entirely correct to note, provoked a certain nervousness among the interested parties, all the more so since the news from the front wasn’t good, to hold on to Italy we had had to strip the Eastern Front, and there wasn’t much chance we could remain on the Donets, we had already lost Briansk, Smolensk, Poltava, and Kremenchug, the Crimea was threatened, in short, anyone could see that things were going badly, and certainly there must have been many who were asking themselves questions about the future, the future of Germany in general of course but their own in particular too, hence a certain effectiveness of this English propaganda, which demoralized not only some who were named, but also others not yet named, by encouraging them to think that the end of the Reich might not automatically mean their own end, and thus rendering the specter of defeat a tiny bit less inconceivable, hence, one can well understand this, when it came to the cadres of the Party, the SS, and the Wehrmacht, the necessity to make them understand that a potential defeat would concern them too, personally, so as to remotivate them a little, that the so-called crimes of some would in the eyes of the Allies be the crimes of all, in the upper echelons at least, that all the boats, or bridges, if you like, were burning, that no return to the past was possible, and that the only salvation was victory. And indeed victory would have settled everything, for if we had won, imagine it for an instant, if Germany had crushed the Reds and destroyed the Soviet Union, there would have been no more question of crimes, or rather, yes, but of Bolshevik crimes, duly documented thanks to the archives seized (the archives of the NKVD in Smolensk, evacuated to Germany and recovered at the end of the war by the Americans, played precisely this role, when the time finally came when they had to explain almost overnight to the good democratic voters why the evil monsters of the day before now had to serve as a bulwark against the heroic allies of the day before, now revealed as even worse monsters), we might even perhaps have conducted full-blown trials, why not, have prosecuted the Bolshevik leaders, imagine that, doing things seriously as the Anglo-Americans later sought to (Stalin, we know, couldn’t have cared less about these trials, he took them for what they were, a hypocrisy, and pointless to boot), and then everyone, with the British and the Americans leading the way, would have made do with us, the diplomats would have adjusted to the new realities, and despite the inevitable squalling of the New York Jews, the European Jews, whom in any case no one would have missed, would have been written off as a loss, like all the other dead, the Gypsies, the Poles, what do I know, the grass grows thick on the graves of the defeated, and no one holds the victor to account, I’m not saying this to try to justify us, no, it’s the simple, frightening truth, look at Roosevelt, that good man, with his dear friend Uncle Joe, how many millions had Stalin already killed, in 1941, or even before 1939, many more than we did, that’s certain, and even if you drew up a full balance sheet he might well remain ahead of us, between collectivization, de-kulakization, the great purges and the deportations of peoples in 1943 and 1944, and all that, everyone knew it at the time, everyone knew more or less what was happening in Russia during the 1930s, Roosevelt knew it too, that friend of mankind, but that never prevented him from praising Stalin’s loyalty and humanity, despite the repeated warnings of Churchill, who was a little less naïve from a certain point of view, a little less realistic, from another, and so if we Germans had in fact won this war, it would certainly have been the same, little by little, the stubborn ones who kept calling us the enemies of mankind would have fallen silent one by one, for lack of an audience, and the diplomats would have smoothed things out, since after all, Krieg ist Krieg und Schnaps ist Schnaps, isn’t that right, and that’s the way of the world. And maybe even in the end our efforts would have been applauded, as the Führer often predicted, or maybe not, in any case many would have applauded, who in the meantime have fallen silent, for we lost, harsh reality. And even if a certain tension had persisted on this subject, for ten or fifteen years, it would have dissipated sooner or later, when for example our diplomats would have firmly condemned, while still reserving the possibility of showing a certain degree of comprehension, the harsh measures, liable to impinge on human rights, that someday or other Great Britain or France would have had to apply in order to restore order in their restive colonies, or, in the case of the United States, to ensure the stability of world commerce and fight the communist hotbeds of revolt, as they indeed ended up doing, with the results we all remember. For it would be a mistake, a serious one, in my opinion, to think that the moral sense of the Western powers differs so fundamentally from our own: after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn’t become one by chance, and doesn’t remain one by chance, either. The people of Monaco, or the inhabitants of Luxembourg, can afford the luxury of a certain political uprightness; it’s a little different for the English. Wasn’t it a British administrator, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, who in 1922 advocated administrative massacres to ensure the security of the colonies, and bitterly regretted that the political situation in the Home Islands rendered these salutary measures impossible? Or, if like some people, you want to charge all our sins to the account of anti-Semitism alone—a gross mistake, in my opinion, but a seductive one for many—wouldn’t you have to acknowledge that France, on the eve of the Great War, went much further in this domain than us (not to mention the Russia of the pogroms!)? I hope, by the way, that you won’t be too surprised that I thus discount anti-Semitism as a fundamental cause of the massacre of the Jews: that would be forgetting that our extermination policies went much further. By the time of our defeat—and far from wanting to rewrite History, I would be the first to acknowledge it—we had already, aside from the Jews, completed the destruction of all the German incurable physically and mentally handicapped, of most of the Gypsies, and of millions of Russians and Poles. And the projects, as you know, were even more ambitious: for the Russians, the necessary natural diminution, according to the experts of the Four-Year Plan and the RSHA, was to reach thirty million, or even forty-six to fifty-one million, according to the dissident opinion of a somewhat zealous Dezernent in the Ostministerium. If the war had lasted a few more years, we would certainly have begun a massive reduction of the Poles. The idea had already been in the air for some time: viz the voluminous correspondence between Gauleiter Greiser in Warthegau and the Reichsführer, where Greiser asks, in May 1942, for permission to use the Kulmhof gassing installations to destroy thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles, who constituted, he said, a grave health menace for his Gau; after seven months, the Reichsführer finally let him understand that his proposition was interesting, but premature. You must think I’m explaining all this to you rather coldly: that’s simply in order to demonstrate to you that the destruction by our deeds of the people of Moses did not stem solely from an irrational hatred of the Jews—I think I’ve already shown how poorly the emotional type of anti-Semite was regarded by the SD and the SS in general—but above all from a firm, well-reasoned acceptance of the recourse to violence to resolve the most varied social problems, in which, moreover, we differed from the Bolsheviks only by our respective evaluations of the categories of problems to be resolved: their approach being based on a horizontal reading of social identity (class), ours on a vertical one (race), but both equally deterministic (as I think I’ve already stressed) and reaching similar conclusions in terms of the remedy to be employed. And if you think carefully about it, you could deduce from this that this will, or at least this capacity, to accept the necessity of a much more radical approach to the problems afflicting all societies, can have been born only from our defeats during the Great War. Every country (except perhaps the United States) suffered; but victory, and the arrogance and moral smugness born of victory, probably allowed the English and the French and even the Italians more readily to forget their sufferings and their losses, and to settle down again, sometimes even to wallow in their self-satisfaction, and thus to grow frightened again more easily, from fear of seeing this oh so fragile compromise fall apart. As for us, we had nothing more to lose. We had fought just as honorably as our enemies; we had been treated like criminals, humiliated and dismembered, and our dead were scorned. The fate of the Russians, objectively, was scarcely any better. What could be more logical, then, than to say: Well, then, if that’s the way it is, if it’s just to sacrifice the best of the nation, to send to their deaths the most patriotic, the most intelligent, the most devoted men, those most loyal to our race, and all in the name of the salvation of the nation—and if that was all for naught—and if their sacrifice is spat upon—then, what right to life should the worst elements have, the criminals, the insane, the retarded, the asocials, the Jews, not to mention our external enemies? The Bolsheviks, I am convinced, reasoned in the same way. Since respecting the rules of so-called humanity was useless to us, why stubbornly persist in a respect for which no one was even grateful? Hence, inevitably, a much harsher, stiffer, more radical approach to our problems. In every society, in every age, social problems have been subject to arbitration between the needs of the group and the rights of the individual, and thus have given rise to a number of responses that are ultimately quite limited: roughly, death, charity, or exclusion (especially, historically, in the form of exile). The Greeks exposed their deformed children; the Arabs, acknowledging that they constituted, economically speaking, a burden that was too heavy for their families, but not wanting to kill them, put them in the care of the community, thanks to the zakat, that obligatory religious charity (a tax for good works); even in our days, in our countries, there exist specialized establishments for such cases, so that their misfortune need not spoil the view of those in good health. Now, if you adopt such an overall vision, you can see that in Europe at least, from the eighteenth century onward, all the distinct solutions to the various problems—public torture for criminals, exile for the contagiously ill (leprosariums), Christian charity for imbeciles—converged, under the influence of the Enlightenment, toward a single type of solution, applicable to all cases and infinitely variable: institutionalized imprisonment, financed by the State, a form of inner exile, if you like, sometimes with pedagogical pretensions, but above all with a practical finality: the criminals to prison, the sick to the hospital, the crazy to the asylum. And who cannot see that these humane solutions, too, resulted from compromise, were made possible by wealth, and remained, in the end, contingent? After the Great War many understood that they were no longer adapted, that they no longer sufficed to address the new amplitude of the problems, because of restricted economic means and also because of the hitherto unthinkable level of the stakes (the millions of dead of the war). New solutions were necessary, and they were found, as man always finds the solutions he needs, as the so-called democratic countries too would have found them, if they had needed them. But then why, you might ask today, the Jews? What do the Jews have in common with your lunatics, your criminals, your contagious? Yet it’s not hard to see that, historically, the Jews constituted themselves as a “problem,” by wanting to remain apart at all costs. Didn’t the first writings against the Jews, those of the Greeks of Alexandria, long before Christ and theological anti-Semitism, accuse them of being an asocial people, of violating the laws of hospitality, the main foundation and political principle of the ancient world, in the name of their food prohibitions, which prevented them from eating at other people’s houses or from receiving them as guests, from being hosts? Then, of course, there was the religious question. I am not seeking here, as some might think, to make the Jews responsible for their catastrophe; I’m simply trying to say that a certain aspect of European history, unfortunate according to some, inevitable according to others, has made it so that even in our days, in times of crisis, it is natural to turn against the Jews, and that if you become involved in a reshaping of society through violence, sooner or later the Jews will end up on the receiving end—sooner, in our case, later, in the Soviets’—and that this is not entirely by chance. Some Jews too, with the threat of anti-Semitism averted, succumb to hubris.

You must find these reflections extremely interesting, I don’t doubt it for an instant; but I have wandered off the subject a little, I still haven’t spoken of that famous day of October 6, which I wanted to describe briefly. A few quick knocks on the door of my compartment had tugged me from my sleep; with the blinds fastened, it was impossible to know the time, I was probably in the midst of a dream, I remember being completely disoriented by them. Then I heard the voice of Mandelbrod’s assistant, gentle but firm: “Sturmbannführer. We’re arriving in half an hour.” I washed, got dressed, and went to stretch my legs in the antechamber. The young woman was standing there: “Hello, Sturmbannführer. Did you sleep well?”—“Yes, thanks. Is Dr. Mandelbrod awake?”—“I don’t know, Sturmbannführer. Would you like some coffee? A full breakfast will be served when we arrive.” She returned with a small tray. I drank the coffee standing up, my legs slightly apart because of the train’s swaying; she sat down on a little armchair, her legs discreetly crossed—she was wearing now, I noticed, a long skirt instead of the black breeches of the day before. Her hair was pulled back in a severe chignon. “You aren’t having any?” I asked.—“No, thanks.” We stayed thus in silence until the squeal of brakes sounded. I gave her back the cup and took my travel bag. The train was slowing down. “Have a good day,” she said. “Dr. Mandelbrod will find you later on.” On the platform, there was a certain amount of confusion; the tired Gauleiters were exiting the train one by one, yawning, welcomed by a squad of civil servants in civilian clothes or in SA uniform. One of them saw my SS uniform and frowned. I pointed to Mandelbrod’s car, and his face lit up: “I’m sorry,” he said as he came forward. I gave him my name, and he consulted a list: “Yes, I see. You are with the members of the Reichsführung, at the Posen Hotel. There’s a room for you. I’ll go find you a car. Here’s the program.” At the hotel, a fancy but rather staid building dating back to the Prussian period, I showered, shaved, changed, and downed a few pieces of toast with jam. Around eight o’clock, I went down to the lobby. People were beginning to come and go. I finally found one of Brandt’s assistants, a Hauptsturmführer, and showed him the program I had been given. “Listen, you can go right now. The Reichsführer won’t come until the afternoon, but there will be some officers there.” The car lent me by the Gau was still waiting, and I had myself driven to the Schloss Posen, admiring on the way the blue belfry and the arcaded loggia of the city hall, then the many-colored façades of the narrow houses of burghers crowded onto the Old Square, reflections of many centuries of subtly fanciful architecture, until this fugitive morning pleasure collided with the castle itself, a vast pile of blocks abutting a large empty square, crude and bristling with pointed roofs and a tall buttressed tower propped against it, massive, proud, severe, dreary, in front of which the penant-bearing Mercedes of the dignitaries were lining up one by one. The program began with a series of lectures given by experts from Speer’s entourage, including Walter Rohland, the steel magnate, who exposed one after the other, with distressing precision, the state of war production. In the first row, listening gravely to this somber news, could be seen most of the government elite: Dr. Goebbels, Minister Rosenberg, Axmann, the Reich Youth Führer, Grand Admiral Dönitz, Feldmarschall Milch from the Luftwaffe, and a beefy man with a bull’s neck, his thick hair combed back, whose name I asked during one of the breaks: Reichsleiter Bormann, the personal secretary of the Führer and the head of the NSDAP chancellery. His name was known to me, of course, but I didn’t know much about him; the newspapers and newsreels at the cinema never mentioned him, and I didn’t remember seeing his photo. After Rohland, it was Speer’s turn: his presentation, which lasted less than half an hour, reiterated the same themes as those dealt with the day before at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, but in a surprisingly direct, almost brusque language. Only then did I notice Mandelbrod: a special place had been arranged on the side for his cumbersome platform-chair, and he listened, his eyes creased, with Buddhist detachment, flanked by two of his assistants—so there really were two of them—and by the tall rugged figure of Herr Leland. Speer’s last words provoked a tumult: returning to the theme of obstruction by individual Gaus, he mentioned his agreement with the Reichsführer, threatening to deal ruthlessly with the recalcitrant. As soon as he had come down from the podium, several Gauleiters surrounded him, expostulating; I was too far away, at the back of the hall, to hear what they said, but I could imagine it. Leland had leaned over and was murmuring something into Mandelbrod’s ear. Then we were invited to return to town, to the Ostland Hotel, where the dignitaries were staying, for a buffet reception. Mandelbrod’s assistants led him out a side exit, but I found him in the courtyard and went to greet him and Herr Leland. I could see then how he was traveling: his special Mercedes, with its immense interior, was equipped with a mechanism by which his armchair, detached from its platform, slid into the car; a second vehicle carried the platform, along with the two assistants. Mandelbrod had me get in with him, and I sat down on a jump seat; Leland sat in front, next to the chauffeur. I regretted not traveling with the young women: Mandelbrod didn’t seem to notice the stinking gases his body emitted; fortunately the journey was a short one. Mandelbrod didn’t speak; he seemed to be drowsing. I wondered if he ever got up out of his armchair, and if not, how did he get dressed, how did he attend to his bodily functions? His assistants, in any case, must have been able to bear anything. During the reception, I talked with two officers from the Persönlicher Stab, Werner Grothmann, who still hadn’t gotten over being appointed to Brandt’s position (Brandt, promoted to Standartenführer, was taking Wolff’s), and an adjutant in charge of the police. It was they, I think, who first told me about the strong impression caused among the Gruppenführers by the Reichsführer’s speech two days before. We also talked about Globocnik’s departure, a real surprise for everyone; but we didn’t know each other well enough to speculate on the motives for this transfer. One of the two amazons—it was indeed hard for me to tell them apart, I couldn’t even say which one had offered herself to me the night before—appeared beside me. “Excuse me, meine Herren,” she said with a smile. I excused myself in turn and followed her through the crowd. Mandelbrod and Leland were talking with Speer and Rohland. I saluted them and congratulated Speer on his speech; he assumed a melancholy air: “Obviously it wasn’t to everyone’s taste.”—“It doesn’t matter,” Leland retorted. “If you manage to get on with the Reichsführer, none of these drunken idiots can stand in your way.” I was surprised: I had never heard Herr Leland speak so brutally. Speer was nodding. “Try to stay in regular contact with the Reichsführer,” Mandelbrod whispered. “Don’t let this new momentum lapse. For minor questions, if you don’t want to bother the Reichsführer himself, just contact my young friend here. I can guarantee his reliability.” Speer contemplated me absentmindedly: “I already have a liaison officer at the ministry.”—“Of course,” Mandelbrod said. “But Sturmbannführer Aue will, I’m sure, have more direct access to the Reichsführer. Don’t worry about bothering him.”—“Fine, fine,” Speer said. Rohland had turned to Leland: “We agree, then, about Mannheim…” With a brief pressure on my elbow, Mandelbrod’s assistant let me understand that I was no longer required. I saluted and withdrew discreetly to the buffet. The young woman had followed me and ordered a tea while I nibbled on a hors d’oeuvre. “I think Dr. Mandelbrod is very pleased with you,” she said in her beautiful, flat voice.—“I don’t see why, but if you say so, I must believe you. Have you been working for him for a long time?”—“For several years.”—“And before?”—“I studied for my doctorate in Latin and German philology, in Frankfurt.” I raised my eyebrows: “I’d never have guessed. It isn’t too difficult, working full-time for Dr. Mandelbrod? He seems pretty demanding.”—“Everyone serves where he has to,” she replied without hesitating. “I am extremely honored by Dr. Mandelbrod’s trust. It’s thanks to men like him and Herr Leland that Germany will be saved.” I examined her smooth, oval, barely made-up face. She must have been very beautiful, but no detail, no particularity allowed one to grab hold of this entirely abstract beauty. “May I ask you a question?”—I asked her.—“Of course.”—“The hallway outside my compartment wasn’t very well lit. Are you the one who came and knocked on my door?” She gave a pearly little laugh: “The hallway wasn’t all that badly lit. But the answer is no: that was my colleague Hilde. Why? Would you rather it had been me?”—“No, I was just wondering,” I said stupidly.—“If the opportunity comes up again,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “it will be my pleasure. I hope you’ll be less tired.” I blushed: “What is your name, then? So I’ll know.” She held out her little hand with its shimmering nails; her palm was dry and soft and her handshake as firm as a man’s. “Hedwig. Have a good afternoon, Sturmbannführer.”

The Reichsführer, surrounded by a silent horde of officers and flanked by Rudolf Brandt, made his appearance around three o’clock in the afternoon, soon after we returned to the Schloss. Brandt noticed me and motioned to me with his head; he was already wearing his new stripes, but didn’t give me time to congratulate him when I came over: “After the Reichsführer’s speech, we’re leaving for Cracow. You will come with us.”—“Fine, Standartenführer.” Himmler had sat down in the first row, next to Bormann. First we were fed a speech by Dönitz, who justified the temporary cessation of submarine warfare, while hoping it would soon resume; by Milch, who hoped the Luftwaffe’s new tactics would soon put an end to the terrorist raids on our cities; and by Schepmann, the new Chief of Staff of the SA, who hoped for nothing that I could remember. Around five thirty, the Reichsführer mounted the podium. Blood-red flags and the black helmets of the honor guard framed his small silhouette on the high platform; the tall microphone stands almost hid his face; the light from the hall played on his glasses. The amplification gave his voice a metallic tone. Of the reactions of the audience, I have already spoken; I was sorry, finding myself in the rear of the hall, to have to contemplate the backs of people’s necks rather than their faces. Despite my alarm and surprise, I might add that some of his words touched me personally, especially those that had to do with the effect of this decision on those in charge of carrying it out, of the danger they ran in their minds of becoming cruel and heartless and no longer respecting human life, or of going soft and succumbing to weakness and nervous depression— yes, I knew this appallingly narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis well, these words could have been addressed to me, and to a certain extent, in all modesty, they were, to me and to those who like me were afflicted with this horrific responsibility, by our Reichsführer who understood well what we were enduring. Not that he let himself give in to the slightest sentimentality; as he said so brutally, toward the end of the speech: Many will weep, but that doesn’t matter; there is a lot of weeping already, words, to my ear, almost Shakespearean in breath, but maybe that was in the other speech, the one I read later on, I’m not sure, it matters little. After the speech—it must have been seven o’clock—Reichsleiter Bormann invited us to a buffet in a neighboring room. The dignitaries, especially the older Gauleiters, stormed the bar; since I had to travel with the Reichsführer, I abstained from drinking. I saw him in a corner, standing in front of Mandelbrod, with Bormann, Goebbels, and Leland; his back was turned to the room and he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the effect his words had produced. The Gauleiters downed drink after drink and talked in low voices; from time to time one of them barked out a platitude; his colleagues solemnly nodded and drank some more. I must confess that I, for my part, was, despite the effect of the speech, more preoccupied by the little scene of that afternoon: I felt clearly that Mandelbrod was seeking to position me, but how and in relation to whom, I didn’t yet see; I knew too little about his relations with the Reichsführer, or with Speer, for that matter, to come to any conclusion, and that worried me, I felt that these issues went beyond me. I wondered if Hilde or Hedwig could have enlightened me; at the same time I knew very well that, even in bed, they would have told me nothing that Mandelbrod didn’t want me to know. And Speer? For a long time I thought I remembered, but without thinking about it, that he too was talking with the Reichsführer during this reception. Then one day, some time ago, in a book, I learned that for years Speer has energetically denied having been there, that he claims he left at lunchtime with Rohland, and that he wasn’t present at the Reichsführer’s speech. All I can say about it is that it’s possible: for my part, after the words we exchanged at the noon reception, I didn’t pay any special attention to him, I was more concentrated on Dr. Mandelbrod and the Reichsführer, and also, there were really a lot of people; nonetheless, I thought I had seen him that evening, and he himself has described the frantic drinking bout of the Gauleiters, at the end of which, according to his own book, many of them had to be carried to the special train; at that moment, I had already left with the Reichsführer, so I didn’t see that myself, but he describes it as if he had been there, so it’s hard to say, and in any case it’s a rather pointless quibble: whether or not he heard the Reichsführer’s words that day, Reichsminister Speer knew, like everyone else; at the very least, by that point, he knew enough to know that it was better not to know any more, to quote a historian, and I can affirm that a little later on, when I knew him better, he knew everything, including about the women and children who, after all, couldn’t have been warehoused without his knowing it, even if he never spoke about it, that’s true, and even if he wasn’t up to date on all the technical details, which didn’t concern his specific field of responsibility, after all. I won’t deny that he would no doubt have preferred not to know; Gauleiter von Schirach, whom I saw that night sprawled on a chair, his tie undone and his collar open, drinking one Cognac after another, would certainly have preferred not to know, either, and many others along with him, either because the courage of their convictions failed them or because they were already afraid of the Allied reprisals, but it should be added that those men, the Gauleiters, did little for the war effort, and even hampered it in some cases, whereas Speer, as all the specialists now affirm, gave at least two extra years to National Socialist Germany, more than anyone he contributed to prolonging the business, and he would have prolonged it even more if he could have, and certainly he wanted victory, he struggled vehemently for victory, the victory of this National Socialist Germany that was destroying the Jews, women and children included, and the Gypsies too and many others besides, and that’s why I permit myself, despite the immense respect I have for his accomplishments as Minister, to find his oh so very public postwar regrets somewhat indecent, regrets that saved his skin, indeed, whereas he deserved life neither more nor less than the others, Sauckel, for instance, or Jodl, and which then forced him, in order to maintain the pose, into ever more intricately baroque contortions, whereas it would have been so simple, especially after he had served his sentence, to come out and say: Yes, I knew, and so what? As my comrade Eichmann stated so well, in Jerusalem, with all the direct simplicity of simple men: “Regrets, that’s for children.”

I left the reception around eight o’clock, on Brandt’s orders, without managing to say a proper goodbye to Dr. Mandelbrod, deep in discussion. With several other officers, I was driven to the Posen Hotel so I could pick up my things, then to the train station, where the Reichsführer’s special train was waiting for us. Once again, I had a private cabin, but of much more modest dimensions than in Dr. Mandelbrod’s car, with a tiny couchette. This train, called Heinrich, was extraordinarily well designed: in front, along with the Reichsführer’s personal armored cars, were cars made into offices and into a mobile communications center, all of them protected by flatcars equipped with antiaircraft weaponry; the entire Reichsführung-SS, if necessary, could keep working on the move. I didn’t see the Reichsführer get in; a little while after we arrived, the train started off; this time there was a window in my cabin, so I could put out the light and, sitting in the dark, contemplate the night, a beautiful, clear fall night, lit by stars and a crescent moon that shed a fine metallic gleam over Poland’s poor landscape. From Posen to Cracow it’s about four hundred kilometers; with the many stops required by alerts or blockages, we arrived long after dawn; awake already and sitting on my couchette, I watched the gray plains and potato fields slowly turn pink. At the Cracow train station, an honor guard was waiting for us, led by the Generalgouverneur, with a red carpet and a brass band; from a distance I saw Frank, surrounded by young Polish women in national dress carrying baskets of hothouse flowers, give the Reichsführer a German salute that almost made the seams of his uniform burst, then exchange a few animated words with him before they were swallowed up by an enormous sedan. We were given rooms in a hotel at the foot of the Wawel; I bathed, shaved carefully, and sent one of my uniforms to the cleaners. Then, strolling through the sunny, beautiful old streets of Cracow, I headed toward the HSSPF’s offices, where I sent a telex to Berlin to ask for news of my project’s progress. At midday, I attended the official lunch as a member of the Reichsführer’s delegation; I was seated at a table with several SS and Wehrmacht officers, as well as minor civil servants of the Generalgouvernement; at the main table, Bierkamp sat next to the Reichsführer and the Generalgouverneur, but I had no opportunity to go over and greet him. The conversation centered on Lublin, with Frank’s men confirming the rumor, in the GG, that Globocnik had been fired because of the epic scale of his embezzlements: according to one version, the Reichsführer even wanted to have him arrested and tried, as an example, but Globocnik had prudently accumulated a large number of compromising documents, and had used them to negotiate an almost golden retreat for himself to his native coast. After the banquet there were speeches, but I didn’t wait and went back to town to make my report to Brandt, who had established himself at the HSSPF’s. There wasn’t much to say: aside from the D III, which had immediately said yes, we were still waiting for the opinions of the other departments as well as the RSHA. Brandt told me to speed things up as soon as I returned: the Reichsführer wanted the project to be ready by midmonth.

For the evening reception, Frank had not skimped. An honor guard, swords in hand, uniforms streaming with gold stripes, formed a diagonal line across the main courtyard of the Wawel; on the stairway, other soldiers presented arms at every third step; at the entrance to the ballroom, Frank himself, in an SA uniform and flanked by his wife, a stout woman with her white flesh bursting out of a monstrous green velvet concoction, was welcoming his guests. The Wawel gleamed with all its lights: from the town you could see it sparkling atop its cliff; garlands of electric lightbulbs decorated the tall columns surrounding the courtyard, and soldiers, posted behind the guard of honor, held torches; and if you left the ballroom to stroll in the loggias, the courtyard looked as if it were circled by flaming rings, a well of light at the bottom of which the parallel rows of torches gently roared; on the other side of the palace, from the immense balcony jutting out of its flank, the city, below the guests’ feet, stretched out dark and silent. On a stage at the back of the main hall, an orchestra was playing Viennese waltzes; the GG officials had brought their wives; some couples were dancing, others were drinking, laughing, digging into the hors d’oeuvres on the overloaded tables, or, like me, studying the crowd. Aside from some colleagues from the Reichsführer’s delegation, I didn’t recognize many people. I examined the coffered, multicolored ceiling made of precious wood, with a polychrome head in relief set into each square—bearded soldiers, hat-wearing burghers, feathered courtiers, coquettish ladies—all contemplating vertically, impassive, the strange invaders below them. Beyond the main staircase, Frank had had other rooms opened, each one with a buffet, armchairs, sofas, for those who wanted to rest or be quiet. Large, handsome ancient carpets broke the harmonious perspectives of the black-and-white tiled floor, muting the footsteps that resounded elsewhere on marble. Two helmeted guards, swords drawn and held in front of their noses like English Horse Guards, framed each door leading from one room to the other. Glass of wine in hand, I wandered through these rooms, admiring the friezes, the ceilings, the paintings; the Poles, alas, had at the beginning of the war taken away Sigismond Augustus’s famous Flemish tapestries: they were said to be in England, or even Canada, and Frank had often denounced what he regarded as the looting of the Polish cultural heritage. Bored, I finally joined a group of SS officers talking about the fall of Naples and Skorzeny’s exploits. I listened to them absentmindedly, for a curious noise had come to capture my attention, a kind of rhythmic scraping noise. It grew closer and I looked around; I felt a bump against my boot and lowered my eyes: a multicolored pedal car, driven by a handsome blond child, had just rammed into me. The child was looking at me severely without saying anything, his chubby little hands gripping the steering wheel; he must have been four or five, and wore a pretty little houndstooth suit. I smiled, but he still didn’t say anything. Then I understood and stepped aside with a little bow; still silent, he began again to pedal furiously, heading toward a neighboring room and disappearing between the caryatid guards. A few minutes later I heard him come back: he was charging straight ahead without paying attention to people, who had to step out of his way. Having reached a buffet, he paused and extricated himself from his vehicle to get a piece of cake; but his little arm was too short; even standing on tiptoe he couldn’t reach anything. I went over and asked: “Which do you want?” Still silent, he pointed to a Sacher torte. “Do you speak German?” I asked him. He looked indignant: “Of course I speak German!”—“So you should have learned to say bitte.” He shook his head: “I don’t need to say bitte!”—“And why is that?”—“Because my papa is the King of Poland, and everyone here has to obey him!” I nodded: “That’s very good. But you should learn to recognize uniforms. I don’t serve your father, I serve the Reichsführer-SS. So if you want some cake, you have to say bitte to me.” The child, his lips pinched, hesitated; he must not have been used to such resistance. Finally he gave in: “Can I have the cake, bitte?” I took a piece of torte and handed it to him. As he ate, smearing his mouth with chocolate, he examined my uniform. Then he pointed at my Iron Cross: “Are you a hero?”—“In a way, yes.”—“Have you been to war?”—“Yes.”—“My papa commands, but he doesn’t go to war.”—“I know. Do you live here all the time?” He nodded. “And do you like living in a castle?” He shrugged: “It’s all right. But there aren’t any other children.”—“You have brothers and sisters, though?” He nodded: “Yes. But I don’t play with them.”—“Why not?”—“Dunno. That’s how it is.” I wanted to ask his name, but a big commotion was taking place at the entrance to the room: a crowd was headed toward us, Frank and the Reichsführer in the lead. “Ah, there you are!” Frank exclaimed to the little boy. “Come, come with us. You too, Sturmbannführer.” Frank took his son in his arms and pointed to the car: “Could you carry that?” I picked the car up and followed them. The crowd crossed all the rooms and massed in front of a door that Frank had opened. Then he stood aside to let Himmler pass: “After you, my dear Reichsführer. Come in, come in.” He put his son down and pushed him in front of him, hesitated, searched me out with his eyes, then whispered to me: “Just leave that in a corner. We’ll get it later.” I followed them into the room and went to put the car down. In the center of the room there was a large table with something on top of it beneath a black sheet. Frank, with the Reichsführer at his side, waited for the other guests and arranged them around the table, which was at least three-by-four meters. The little boy, again, stood against the table on tiptoe, but barely reached the top. Frank looked around, saw me standing a little apart, and called to me: “Excuse me, Sturmbannführer. You’re already friends, I see. Would you mind carrying him so he can see?” I bent down and took the child in my arms; Frank made room for me next to him, and while the last guests came in, he ran his pointed fingers through his hair and fiddled with one of his medals; he seemed scarcely able to contain his impatience. When everyone was there, Frank turned to Himmler and declared in a solemn voice: “My dear Reichsführer, what you are now about to see is an idea that has occupied my spare time for a while now. It’s a project that, I hope, will make the city of Cracow, capital of the Generalgouvernement of Poland, famous, and will be an attraction for all of Germany. When it is finished, I plan on dedicating it to the Führer for his birthday. But since you are giving us the pleasure of visiting us, I don’t want to keep it secret any longer.” His puffy face, with its weak, sensual features, gleamed with pleasure; the Reichsführer, his hands crossed behind his back, contemplated him through his pince-nez with a half-sarcastic, half-bored look. I hoped more than anything that he would hurry up: the child was beginning to get heavy. Frank gave a signal, and some soldiers pulled the sheet, revealing a large architectural model, a kind of park, with trees and curving paths, outlined between houses of different styles, surrounded by a wall. While Frank puffed himself up, Himmler scrutinized the model. “What is it?” he finally asked. “It looks like a zoo.”—“Almost, my dear Reichsführer,” Frank chuckled, his thumbs in the pockets of his tunic. “It is, in the words of the Viennese, a Menschengarten, an anthropological garden that I hope to establish here, in Cracow.” He made a wide gesture over the model. “You remember, my dear Reichsführer, in our youth, before the war, those Hagenbeck Völkerschauen? With families of Samoans, Laplanders, Sudanese? One of them came to Munich, my father took me to see it; you must have seen it too. And there were some in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Basel, it was a huge success.” The Reichsführer rubbed his chin: “Yes, yes, I remember. They were traveling exhibitions, right?”—“Yes. But this one will be permanent, like a zoo. And it won’t be a public amusement, my dear Reichsführer, but a pedagogical, scientific tool. We will gather together specimens of all the peoples who have disappeared or are about to disappear in Europe, to preserve a living trace of them this way. German schoolchildren will come in buses to learn here! Look, look.” He pointed to one of the houses: it was half open, sectioned; inside, one could see little figurines sitting around a table, with a seven-branched candelabrum. “For the Jew, for example, I chose the Jew from Galicia as the best representative of the Ostjuden. The house is typical of their filthy habitat; of course, it will have to be disinfected regularly, and the specimens subjected to medical supervision, to avoid contaminating the visitors. For these Jews, I want pious ones, very pious, we’ll give them a Talmud, and the visitors can see them muttering their prayers, or watch the wife prepare kosher food. Over here are Polish peasants from Masuria; over there, Bolshevized Kolkhozniks; and there, Ruthenians, and over there, Ukrainians, see, with the embroidered shirts. This big building here will house an institute for anthropological research; I will endow it with a chair myself; scholars can come and study on-site these peoples who were once so numerous. It will be a unique opportunity for them.”—“Fascinating,” the Reichsführer murmured. “And ordinary visitors?”—“They can walk freely around the fences, watch the specimens working in their gardens, beating rugs, hanging out the wash. Then there will be guided tours of the houses, which will allow them to observe the habitat and customs.”—“And how would you maintain the institution in the long run? After all, your specimens will grow old, and some will die.”—“That is precisely, my dear Reichsführer, where I would need your support. They will marry among themselves and reproduce. One single family will be exhibited at a time; the others will serve to replace them if they fall ill, to procreate, to teach the children the customs, the prayers and the rest. I picture them being guarded nearby in a camp, under SS surveillance.”—“If the Führer authorized it, it would be possible. But we’ll have to discuss it. It’s not certain that it’s desirable to preserve certain races from extinction, even this way. It could be dangerous.”—“Of course, every precaution will be taken. In my opinion, such an institution will be found to be precious and irreplaceable for science. How do you think future generations will be able to understand the amplitude of our work, if they have no idea of the conditions that prevailed before?”—“You are certainly right, my dear Frank. It’s a fine idea. And how do you plan to finance this…Völkerschauplatz?”—“On a commercial basis. Only the research institute will receive government subsidies. For the park itself, we will create a public corporation to raise capital by subscription. Once the initial investment is amortized, the entry fees will cover the cost of upkeep. I looked into the Hagenbeck exhibitions: they made considerable profits. The Paris Jardin d’Acclimatation regularly lost money until its director organized ethnological exhibits of Nubians and Eskimos, in 1877. The first year, they drew a million paying visitors. That continued until the Great War.” The Reichsführer was nodding: “A fine idea.” He examined the model up close; Frank pointed out a detail to him from time to time. The little boy had begun to squirm, so I put him down: he got into his pedal car and fled out the door. The guests were also leaving. In one of the rooms, I found Bierkamp, as unctuous as always, with whom I talked a little. Then I went out to smoke under the colonnade, admiring the baroque splendor of the illuminations, of the martial, barbaric guard who seemed specially designed to bring out the gracious forms of the palace. “Good evening,” a voice next to me said. “It’s impressive, isn’t it?” I turned around and recognized Osnabrugge, the friendly civil engineer I had met in Kiev. “Hello! What a nice surprise.”—“Ah, there’s been a lot of water under the destroyed bridges of the Dnieper.” He was holding a glass of red wine and we toasted our meeting. “So,” he asked, “what brings you to the Frankreich?”—“I’m with the Reichsführer. And you?” His nice oval face took on a look that was both mischievous and knowing: “State secret!” He creased his eyes and smiled: “But to you, I can say it: I’m on a mission for the OKH. I’m preparing demolition programs for the bridges in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.” I looked at him, stunned: “For what earthly reason?”—“In the event of a Soviet advance, you know.”—“But the Bolsheviks are on the Dnieper!” He rubbed his pug nose; his pate, I noticed, had grown much balder. “They crossed it today,” he finally said. “They also took Nevel.”—“But that’s still far away. We’ll stop them first. Don’t you think your preparations are a little defeatist?”—“Not at all: it’s foresight. A quality still prized by the military, I assure you. But in any case I’m just doing what I’m told. I did the same thing in Smolensk in the spring and in Byelorussia during the summer.”—“And what does a bridge demolition program consist of, can you explain it to me?” He looked mournful: “Oh, it’s not very complicated. Local engineers write up studies of each bridge to be demolished; I look them over, approve them, and afterward we calculate the necessary amount of explosives for the whole area, the number of detonators, et cetera, then we decide where and how to store them, on-site; finally we outline the different stages that will allow local commanders to know exactly when and where they should set the explosives, when they should set up the detonators, and under what conditions they should press the button. A plan, you know. So in case anything crops up, we wouldn’t have to leave the bridges for the enemy because we didn’t have anything on hand to blow them up.”—“And you still haven’t built any?”—“Unfortunately not! My mission in the Ukraine was my downfall: the chief engineer of the OKHG South liked my report on Soviet demolitions so much that he forwarded it to the OKH. I was recalled to Berlin and promoted to the Demolitions Department—just for bridges, there are other sections that take care of factories, railroads, roads; airfields are the Luftwaffe’s responsibility, but occasionally we hold conferences together. So since then, that’s all I’ve been doing. All the bridges on the Manych and the lower Don, that’s me. The Donets, the Desna, the Oka, that’s me too. I’ve already had hundreds blown up. It’s enough to make you cry. My wife is happy, because I’ve gone up in rank”—he tapped his epaulettes: in fact, he had been promoted several times since Kiev—“but it breaks my heart. Every time I feel as if I’m killing a child.”—“You shouldn’t take it that way, Herr Oberst. After all, they’re just Soviet bridges.”—“Yes, but if it keeps up, someday they’ll be German bridges.” I smiled: “That’s really defeatism.”—“I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m filled with discouragement. Even when I was little, I liked to build things, when all my classmates just wanted to break them.”—“There’s no justice. Come, let’s go in and fill our glasses.” In the main hall, the orchestra was playing Liszt and some couples were still dancing. Frank was sitting around a table with Himmler and his Staatsekretär Bühler, talking animatedly and drinking coffee and Cognac; even the Reichsführer, who was smoking a fat cigar, had, contrary to his custom, a full glass in front of him. Frank was leaning forward, his moist gaze already misted over by alcohol; Himmler was frowning stiffly: he must have disapproved of the music. I clinked glasses again with Osnabrugge while the piece came to an end. When the orchestra stopped, Frank, his glass of Cognac in hand, got up. Looking at Himmler, he declared in a voice that was strong but too shrill: “My dear Reichsführer, you must know the popular old quatrain: Clarum regnum Polonorum / Est coelum Nobiliorum / Paradisum Judeorum / Et infernum Rusticorum. The nobles disappeared a long time ago, and now, thanks to our efforts, the Jews too; the peasantry, in the future, will only grow richer and will bless us; and Poland will be the Heaven and Paradise of the German people, Coelum et Paradisum Germanorium.” His shaky Latin made a woman standing nearby titter; Frau Frank, sprawling not far from her husband like a Hindu idol, glared at her. Impassive, his eyes cold and inscrutable behind his little pince-nez, the Reichsführer raised his glass and wet his lips with it. Frank walked around the table, crossed the hall, and leaped nimbly onto the stage. The pianist jumped up and disappeared; Frank slid into his place and, with a deep breath, shook his long, chubby white hands over the keyboard, then began to play a Chopin Nocturne. The Reichsführer sighed; he blinked rapidly and puffed vigorously on his cigar, which was threatening to go out. Osnabrugge leaned toward me: “In my opinion, the Generalgouverneur is teasing your Reichsführer on purpose. Don’t you think?”—“That would be a little childish, wouldn’t it?”—“He’s annoyed. They say he tried to resign last month, and that the Führer refused again.”—“If I understood right, he doesn’t control much here.”—“According to my Wehrmacht colleagues, nothing at all. Poland is a Frankreich ohne Reich. Or rather ohne Frank.”—“In short, a little prince rather than a king.” That said, aside from the choice of music—even if you have to play Chopin, there are surely better things than the Nocturnes—Frank played pretty well, but used too much pedal. I looked at his wife, whose shoulders and chest, fat and flushed, were gleaming with sweat in her low-cut dress: her little eyes, set deep into her face, shone with pride. The boy seemed to have disappeared, I hadn’t heard the obsessive rolling of his pedal car for some time. It was getting late, some guests were taking their leave; Brandt had gone over to the Reichsführer and, calmly contemplating the scene with his birdlike attentive face, was standing at the ready. I scribbled my telephone numbers into a notebook, tore out the sheet, and gave it to Osnabrugge. “Here. If you’re in Berlin, call me, we’ll go out for a drink.”—“Are you leaving?” I pointed to Himmler with my chin, and Osnabrugge raised his eyebrows: “Ah. Good night, then. It was a pleasure seeing you again.” Onstage, Frank was concluding his piece, nodding to the beat. I made a face: even for Chopin, it wouldn’t do, the Generalgouverneur was really overdoing the legato.

The Reichsführer was leaving the next morning. In the Warthegau, a fall rain had soaked the plowed fields, leaving puddles the size of small ponds, dull, as if they’d absorbed all the light from the unchanging sky. The pine woods, which always seemed to be hiding horrifying and obscure deeds, darkened this muddy, receding landscape; here and there, rare in these parts, birch trees crowned with flames still raised a last protest against the coming of winter. In Berlin it was raining, and people scurried by in their wet clothes; on the bomb-damaged sidewalks, water sometimes formed impassable areas, pedestrians had to turn back and take another street. The day after my return, I went up to Oranienburg to spur my project along. I was convinced it would be Sturmbannführer Burger, the new Amtschef of D IV, who would give me the most trouble; but Burger, after listening to me for a few minutes, said simply: “If it’s financed, it’s fine with me,” and ordered his adjutant to write me a letter of support. Maurer, on the other hand, made a lot of difficulties for me. Far from being happy with the progress my project represented for the Arbeitseinsatz, he thought it didn’t go far enough, and told me frankly that he was afraid if he approved it he’d close the door to any future improvements. For over an hour I exhausted all my arguments on him, explaining to him that without the agreement of the RSHA, we couldn’t do anything, and that the RSHA wouldn’t support a project that was overgenerous, for fear of favoring the Jews and other dangerous enemies. But on this subject it was especially difficult to come to an understanding with him: he got muddled up, he kept repeating that precisely, for the Jews, in Auschwitz, the numbers didn’t match up, that, according to the statistics, scarcely 10 percent of them worked, where did the others go, then? It wasn’t possible that so many of them were unfit for work. He sent letter after letter about this to Höss, who replied vaguely or not at all. He was obviously looking for an explanation, but I decided that it wasn’t my role to give him one; I confined myself to suggesting that an on-site inspection might clear some things up. But Maurer didn’t have time to carry out inspections. I ended up wresting a limited agreement from him: he wouldn’t oppose the system of categories, but would request on his side that the scales be increased. Back in Berlin, I reported to Brandt. I told him that, according to my information, the RSHA would approve the project, even if I didn’t yet have any written confirmation. He ordered me to send him the report, with a copy for Pohl; the Reichsführer would eventually come to a final decision, but it would serve in the meantime as a working basis. As for me, he asked me to start going through the SD reports on foreign workers, and to begin thinking about this question as well.

It was my birthday: my thirtieth. As in Kiev, I had invited Thomas to dinner, I didn’t want to see anyone else. In truth, I had a lot of acquaintances in Berlin, old friends from university or the SD, but no one aside from Thomas whom I regarded as a friend. Ever since my convalescence I had resolutely cut myself off; plunged into my work, I had almost no social life, aside from professional relationships, and no emotional or sexual life. Nor did I feel any need for that; and when I thought about my excesses in Paris, it made me feel ill at ease, I didn’t want to lapse into those murky pursuits anytime soon. I didn’t think about my sister, or about my dead mother; at least, I don’t remember thinking about them much. Maybe after the horrible shock of my wound (although it was completely cured, it terrified me every time I thought about it, it stripped away all my abilities, as if I were made of glass, of crystal, and might shatter into pieces at the slightest jolt) and the nightmarish events of the spring, my soul aspired to a monotonous calm, and rejected anything that might trouble it. That evening, though—I had arrived early, to have time to think a little, and I was drinking Cognac at the bar—I thought again about my sister: it was after all her thirtieth birthday too. Where could she be celebrating it: In Switzerland, in a sanatorium full of strangers? In her remote home in Pomerania? It had been a long time since we’d celebrated our birthday together. I tried to remember the last time: it must have been when we were children in Antibes, but to my utter confusion, no matter how hard I concentrated, I was incapable of remembering, of visualizing the scene. I could calculate the date: logically, it was in 1926, since in 1927 we were already in boarding school; so we were thirteen, I should have been able to remember, but it was impossible, I saw nothing. Maybe there were photographs of this party in the crates or boxes in the attic in Antibes? I was sorry I hadn’t looked through them more thoroughly. The more I thought about this rather idiotic detail, the more the defects of my memory upset me. Fortunately Thomas arrived to draw me out of my funk. I’ve probably said this already, but it bears repeating: What I liked about Thomas was his spontaneous optimism, his vitality, his intelligence, his calm cynicism; his gossip, his chatter sprinkled with innuendos always delighted me, for with him one seemed to penetrate the underside of life, hidden from the profane gazes that see only people’s obvious actions, but as if flipped over into the light of day by his knowledge of the hidden connections, secret liaisons, closed-door discussions. He could deduce a realignment of political forces from the simple fact of a meeting, even if he didn’t know what had been said; and if he was sometimes mistaken, his avidity in gathering new information allowed him constantly to correct the chancy constructions he devised in that manner. At the same time he had no imagination, and I had always thought, despite his ability to paint a complex scene in a few strokes, that he would have made a poor novelist: in his reasoning and intuitions, his polestar always remained personal interest; and although, sticking to that, he was rarely wrong, he was incapable of imagining any different motivation for people’s actions and words. His passion—and in this he was Voss’s opposite (and I thought back to my previous birthday, and missed that brief friendship)—his passion was not a passion for pure knowledge, for knowledge for its own sake, but solely for practical knowledge, providing tools for action. That night, he told me a lot about Schellenberg, but in a curiously allusive way, as if I were supposed to understand on my own: Schellenberg had doubts, Schellenberg was thinking over alternatives, but what these doubts were about, and what these alternatives consisted of, he didn’t want to say. I knew Schellenberg a little, but I can’t say I liked him. At the RSHA, he had a position that was somewhat apart, thanks, above all, I think, to his special relationship with the Reichsführer. By my lights, I didn’t regard him as a real National Socialist, but rather as a technician of power, seduced by power in itself and not by its object. Reading over what I’ve written, I realize that, judging from my own statements, you might think the same about Thomas; but Thomas was different; even if he had a holy terror of theoretical and ideological discussions—which explained, for example, his aversion to Ohlendorf—and even if he always took great care to look out for his own future, his slightest actions were as if guided by an instinctive National Socialism. Schellenberg was constantly changing his mind, and I had no trouble imagining him working for the British Secret Service or the OSS, which in Thomas’s case was unthinkable. Schellenberg had the habit of calling people he didn’t like whores, and this term suited him well—and when I think about it, it’s true that the insults people prefer, the ones that come most spontaneously to their lips, often in the end reveal their own hidden faults, since they naturally hate what they most resemble. This idea stayed with me all evening, and when I was back home, late at night, a little drunk perhaps, I took down from a shelf an anthology of the Führer’s speeches that belonged to Frau Gutknecht and began leafing through it, looking for the most virulent passages, especially on the Jews, and as I read them I wondered if, when he said, The Jews lack ability and creativity in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating, or else The Jew’s entire building will collapse if he’s refused a following, or They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They only got anywhere through the simplemindedness of those around them, or We can live without the Jew. But he cannot live without us, the Führer, without knowing it, was really describing himself. Yet this man never spoke in his own name, so the accidents of his personality counted for little: his role was almost that of a lens, he captured and concentrated the will of the Volk to bring it into focus always at the right point. Thus, even if in those passages he was speaking about himself, wasn’t he speaking about us all? But it is only now that I can say that.

During dinner, Thomas had once again reproached me for my unsociability and impossible hours: “I know everyone has to give his utmost, but you’re going to ruin your health if you go on like that. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that Germany isn’t going to lose the war if you take your evenings and Sundays off. This is going to last a while, you should pace yourself, otherwise you’ll collapse. And look, you’re even getting a belly.” It was true: I wasn’t getting fat, but my abdominal muscles were sagging. “At least come and get some exercise,” Thomas insisted. “Twice a week I fence, and on Sunday I go to the pool. You’ll see, it will do you good.” As always, he was right. I soon regained my taste for fencing, which I had practiced a little at university; I took up the saber, I liked the keen, nervous aspect of this weapon. What I liked in this sport was that, despite its aggressiveness, it’s not a brute’s sport: as much as the good reflexes and agility required to handle the weapon, it’s the mental work before the pass that counts, the intuitive anticipation of the other’s movements, the swift calculation of possible responses, a physical chess game where you have to foresee several moves, for once a decision has been made, there’s no more time to think, and one can often say that the pass is won or lost even before it began, according to whether one saw rightly or not, the thrusts themselves only confirming or refuting the calculation. We practiced in the arms room of the RSHA, at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais; but for swimming we went to a public pool in Kreuzberg, instead of the Gestapo’s: first of all, an essential point for Thomas, there were women there (and not just the unavoidable secretaries); it was bigger too, so that after swimming one could go in a bathrobe and sit down at wooden tables, on a wide balcony upstairs, to drink cold beer while watching the swimmers, whose happy shouts and splashes resounded throughout the vast dome. The first time I went there, I had a violent shock that left me for the rest of the day with a distressing anguish. We were getting undressed in the changing room: I looked at Thomas and saw that a wide forked scar ran across his belly. “Where did you get that?” I exclaimed. Thomas looked at me, surprised: “In Stalingrad of course. Don’t you remember? You were there.” A memory, yes, I had one, and I wrote it down with the others, but I had filed it away in the back of my head, in the attic of hallucinations and dreams; now this scar came to turn everything upside down, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. I kept staring at Thomas’s belly; he slapped his abdominal muscles with the flat of his hand, smiling widely: “It’s all right, don’t get upset, it’s all better. And also it drives the girls wild, it must excite them.” He closed one eye and pointed at my head, his thumb up, like a child playing cowboy: “Pow!” I almost felt the shot in my forehead, my anguish grew like a gray, flaccid, endless thing, a monstrous body that occupied the limited space of the changing room and prevented me from moving, a terrified Gulliver stuck in a Lilliputian house. “Don’t look like that,” Thomas shouted cheerfully, “come swim!” The water, heated but still a little cool, did me good; tired after just a few laps—I had definitely let myself get out of shape—I stretched out on a deck chair while Thomas frolicked, bellowing and letting his head be dunked underwater by spirited young women. I watched these people letting off steam, having fun, taking pleasure in their own strength; I felt far away. Bodies, even the handsomest ones, no longer threw me into a panic, as the ballet dancers’ had a few months before; they left me indifferent, boys’ as well as girls’. I could admire with detachment the play of muscles under the white skin, the curve of a hip, water streaming down a neck: the crumbling bronze Apollo in Paris had excited me much more than all this insolent young musculature, which was deployed casually, as if jeering at the flabby, yellowing flesh of the few old people who came there. My attention was drawn to a young woman who stood out from the others by her serenity; as her girlfriends ran or splashed around Thomas, she remained motionless, her arms folded on the edge of the pool, her body floating in the water, and her head, oval beneath an elegant black rubber cap, resting on her forearms, her large somber eyes calmly directed at me. I couldn’t tell if she was really looking at me; without moving, she seemed to be contemplating with pleasure everything that was in her field of vision; after a long while, she raised her arms and let herself slowly sink down. I waited for her to come back to the surface, but the seconds passed; finally she reappeared at the other end of the pool, which she had crossed underwater, as calmly as I had once crossed the Volga. I leaned back on my chaise and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sensation of the chlorinated water slowly evaporating on my skin. My anguish, that day, was slow to relax its asphyxiating embrace. The next Sunday, though, I went back to the pool with Thomas.

In the meantime, I had once again been summoned by the Reichsführer. He asked me to explain how we had arrived at our results; I launched into a detailed explanation, since there were technical points that were difficult to summarize; he let me talk, looking cold and unforthcoming, and when I had finished he asked me curtly: “And the Reichssicherheitshauptamt?”—“Their specialist agrees in principle, my Reichsführer. He is still waiting for Gruppenführer Müller’s confirmation.”—“We have to be careful, Sturmbannführer, very careful,” he rapped out in his most pedantic voice. Another Jewish rebellion, I knew, had just taken place in the GG, at Sobibor this time; again, some SS had been killed, and despite a vast manhunt, some of the fugitives hadn’t been recaptured; and these were Geheimnisträger, witnesses of the extermination operations: if they managed to join the partisans in the Pripet Marshes, chances were good that the Bolsheviks would then pick them up. I understood the Reichsführer’s anxiety, but he had to make up his mind. “You have met Reichsminister Speer, I think?” he said suddenly.—“Yes, my Reichsführer. I was introduced by Dr. Mandelbrod.”—“Did you talk to him about your project?”—“I didn’t go into details, my Reichsführer. But he knows that we are working to improve the state of health of the Häftlinge.”—“And what does he say about it?”—“He seemed satisfied, my Reichsführer.” He leafed through some papers on his desk: “Dr. Mandelbrod wrote me a letter. He tells me that Reichsminister Speer seemed to like you. Is that true?”—“I don’t know, my Reichsführer.”—“Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland very much want me to move closer to Speer. In principle, that’s not a bad idea, since we have interests in common. Everyone always thinks Speer and I are in conflict. But that’s not true at all. Why, as long ago as 1937, I created the DESt and set up camps especially for Speer, to provide him with construction materials, bricks, and granite for the new capital he was going to build for the Führer. At the time, the whole of Germany could provide him with only four percent of his needs in granite. He was very grateful for my help and delighted to cooperate. But of course you can’t trust him. He’s not an idealist, and he doesn’t understand the SS. I wanted to make him one of my Gruppenführers, and he refused. Last year, he took the liberty of criticizing our labor organization to the Führer: he wanted to obtain jurisdiction over our camps. Even today he dreams of having the right to look into our internal functioning. But still, it’s important to cooperate with him. Did you consult his ministry, as you prepared your project?”—“Yes, my Reichsführer. One of their people came and gave us a presentation.” The Reichsführer slowly nodded: “Fine, fine…” Then he seemed to come to a decision: “We don’t have much time to lose. I’ll tell Pohl that I approve the project. You’ll send a copy to Reichsminister Speer, directly, with a personal note signed by you reminding him of your meeting and indicating to him that the project will be implemented. And of course send a copy to Dr. Mandelbrod.”—“Zu Befehl, my Reichsführer. And what would you like me to do regarding the foreign workers?”—“For now, nothing. Study the question, from the angle of nutrition and productivity, but confine yourself to that. We’ll see how things turn out. And if Speer or one of his associates makes contact with you, inform Brandt and react favorably.”

I followed the Reichsführer’s instructions to the letter. I don’t know what Pohl did with our project, so lovingly conceived: a few days later, around the end of the month, he sent another order to all the KLs, instructing them to diminish the mortality and morbidity rate by ten percent, but without giving the slightest concrete suggestion; to my knowledge, Isenbeck’s rations were never applied. Nevertheless I received a very flattering letter from Speer, who was pleased with the project’s adoption, concrete proof of our new, recently inaugurated cooperation. He ended: I hope to have the opportunity to see you again soon to discuss these problems. Yours, Speer. I forwarded this letter to Brandt. In the beginning of November, I received a second letter: the Gauleiter of the Westmark had written to Speer to demand that the five hundred Jewish workers delivered by the SS to a weapons factory in Lorraine be withdrawn immediately: Thanks to my care, Lorraine is Judenfrei and will remain so, wrote the Gauleiter. Speer asked me to forward this letter to the relevant authority to settle the problem. I consulted Brandt; a few days later, he sent me an internal memo, asking me to answer the Gauleiter myself in the Reichsführer’s name, negatively. Tone: abrupt, wrote Brandt. I pulled out all the stops:

Dear Party Comrade Bürckel!

Your request is inopportune and cannot be accepted. In this difficult hour for Germany, the Reichsführer is aware of the need to use the labor of the enemies of our Nation to the utmost. Decisions about assignment of workers are made in consultation with the RMfRuK, the only authority competent today to deal with this question. Since the prohibition presently in force not to employ Jewish inmate workers concerns only the Altreich and Austria, I cannot avoid the impression that your request stems chiefly from your desire to avoid being ignored in the overall handling of the Jewish question.

Heil Hitler! Yours, etc.

I sent a copy to Speer, who thanked me. Little by little, this began to be repeated: Speer had irritating demands and requests sent to me, and I replied to them in the Reichsführer’s name; for more complicated cases, I referred to the SD, going through acquaintances rather than the official route, to speed things up. In this way I again saw Ohlendorf, who invited me to dinner, and inflicted on me a long tirade against the industry self-management system set in place by Speer, which he regarded as a simple usurpation of the powers of the State by capitalists without the slightest responsibility toward the community. If the Reichsführer approved of it, according to him, that was because he didn’t understand anything about economics, and moreover he was under the influence of Pohl, himself a pure capitalist obsessed with the expansion of his industrial SS empire. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much about economics, either, or about Ohlendorf’s violent arguments on the subject, for that matter. But it was always a pleasure just to listen to him: his frankness and intellectual honesty were as refreshing as a glass of cold water, and he was right to stress that the war had caused or accentuated a number of abuses; afterward, we would have to reform the structures of the State in depth.

I began to regain a taste for life outside work: whether this was thanks to the beneficial effects of exercise or to something else, I don’t know. One day I realized that I hadn’t been able to bear Frau Gutknecht for a long time now; the next day, I set to work looking for another apartment. This was a little complicated, but finally Thomas helped me find something: a small furnished bachelor apartment on the top floor of a fairly new building. It belonged to a Hauptsturmführer who had just gotten married and was leaving for a post in Norway. I quickly settled with him on a reasonable rent, and in one afternoon, with Piontek’s help, and under salvos of Frau Gutknecht’s squeals and entreaties, I transferred my few belongings. My new apartment wasn’t very big: two square rooms separated by a double door, a little kitchen, and a bathroom; but it had a balcony, and since the living room was at the corner of the building, the windows opened onto two sides; the balcony looked out over a little park, where I could watch children playing. It was quiet too, and I wasn’t disturbed by car noises; from my windows, I had a fine view over a landscape of roofs, a comforting tangle of shapes, constantly changing with the weather and the light. On days when it was nice out, the apartment was bright from morning to night: on Sunday, I could watch the sun rise from my bedroom and set from the living room. To make it even brighter, I had the faded old wallpaper stripped, with the owner’s permission, and the walls painted white; in Berlin, this wasn’t very common, but I had known apartments like that in Paris, and I liked it, with the wooden floor it was almost ascetic, it corresponded to my state of mind: quietly smoking on my sofa, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of moving sooner. In the morning, I got up early, before sunrise, in that season, ate a few pieces of toast and drank some genuine black coffee; Thomas had it sent to him from Holland by an acquaintance, and he sold me some of it. To get to work I took the trolley. I liked watching the streets go by, contemplating the faces of my neighbors in the light of day, sad, closed, indifferent, tired, but also sometimes surprisingly happy, and if you pay attention to such things, you know that it’s rare to see a happy face in the street or on the trolley, but when it happened, I was happy too, I felt I was rejoining the community of men, these people for whom I was working but from whom I had been living so far apart. For several days in a row, on the trolley, I noticed a beautiful blond woman who took the same line that I did. She had a quiet and grave face; I noticed her mouth first, especially her upper lip, two muscular, aggressive wings. Sensing my gaze, she had looked at me: under high-arched, thin eyebrows, she had dark, almost black eyes, asymmetrical and Assyrian (but perhaps this last likeness only came to my mind through assonance). Standing, she held on to a strap and stared at me with a calm, serious look. I had the impression that I had already seen her somewhere, at least her gaze, but I couldn’t remember where. The next day she spoke to me: “Hello. You don’t remember me,” she added, “but we’ve already seen each other. At the swimming pool.” She was the young woman leaning on the edge of the pool. I didn’t see her every day; when I saw her, I greeted her amiably, and she smiled, gently. At night, I went out more often: I went to dinner with Hohenegg, whom I introduced to Thomas, I saw old university friends again, I let myself be invited out to suppers and little parties where I drank and chatted happily, without horror, without anguish. This was normal life, everyday life, after all, this too was worth living.

Not long after my supper with Ohlendorf, I had received an invitation from Dr. Mandelbrod to come spend the weekend at a country estate belonging to one of the directors of IG Farben, in the north of Brandenburg. The letter made it clear that there would be a hunting party and an informal dinner. Massacring fowl didn’t tempt me much, but I didn’t have to shoot, I could just walk in the woods. The weather was rainy: Berlin was sinking into fall, the beautiful October days had come to an end, the trees were all stripped bare now; sometimes, though, the sky cleared and you could go out and enjoy the already cool air. On November 18, at dinnertime, the sirens wailed and the flak began to thunder, for the first time since the end of August. I was at a restaurant with some friends, including Thomas—we had just left our fencing session. We had to go down into the basement without even eating; the alert lasted for two hours, but they had wine served to us, and the time passed in pleasantries. The raid caused serious damage to the center of town; the English had sent more than four hundred aircraft: they had decided to brave our new tactics. That took place on the Thursday evening; on the Saturday morning, I had Piontek drive me toward Prenzlau, to the village mentioned by Mandelbrod. The house was a few kilometers outside of town, at the end of a long lane bordered with ancient oaks, many of which were missing, however, decimated by disease or storms; it was an old manor house, bought by the director, next to a forest dominated by pine trees mixed in with beech and maple trees, and surrounded by a handsome, open park, and then, farther away, big, empty, muddy fields. It had drizzled during the journey, but the sky, whipped by a bracing little north wind, had cleared up. On the gravel in front of the steps, several sedans had parked side by side, and a uniformed chauffeur was washing the mud from the bumpers. I was welcomed on the steps by Herr Leland; that day he looked very soldierly, despite his brown woollen knit cardigan: the owner was away, he explained, but he had lent them the house; Mandelbrod wouldn’t arrive till evening, after the hunting party. On his advice, I sent Piontek back to Berlin: the guests would return together, there would certainly be room for me in one of the cars. A black-uniformed servant girl wearing a lace apron showed me my room. A fire was roaring in the chimney; outside it had begun to rain again gently. As the invitation had suggested, I wasn’t wearing my uniform but a country outfit, woollen trousers with boots and a collarless Austrian jacket with bone buttons, made to be water-resistant; for the evening, I had brought a suit that I unfolded, brushed, and hung in the closet before going downstairs. In the living room, several guests were drinking tea or talking with Leland; Speer, sitting in front of a casement window, recognized me right away and got up with a friendly smile to come shake my hand. “Sturmbannführer, what a pleasure to see you again. Herr Leland told me you’d be coming. Come, I’ll introduce you to my wife.” Margret Speer was sitting near the fireplace with another woman, a certain Frau von Wrede, the wife of a general who was going to join us; standing in front of them, I clicked my heels and gave a German salute that Frau von Wrede returned; Frau Speer just held out an elegant little gloved hand to me: “Pleased to meet you, Sturmbannführer. I’ve heard about you: my husband tells me you’ve been a great help to him, in the SS.”—“I do what I can, meine Dame.” She was a thin, blond woman of a decidedly Nordic beauty, with a strong, square jaw and very light blue eyes under blond eyebrows; but she seemed tired and that gave her skin a slightly sallow cast. I was served tea, and chatted a little with her while her husband joined Leland. “Your children didn’t come?” I asked politely.—“Oh! If I had brought them, it wouldn’t have been a vacation. They stayed in Berlin. It’s already so hard for me to tear Albert away from his ministry, once he accepts, I don’t want him to be disturbed. He so needs rest.” The conversation turned to Stalingrad, for Frau Speer knew I had been there; Frau von Wrede had lost a cousin there, a Generalmajor who was commanding a division and was probably in the hands of the Russians: “It must have been terrible!” Yes, I confirmed, it had been terrible, but I didn’t add, out of courtesy, that it had surely been less so for a divisional general than for an ordinary trooper like Speer’s brother, who, if by some miracle he was still alive, would not be benefiting from the preferential treatment that the Bolsheviks, hardly egalitarian for once, gave superior officers, according to our information. “Albert was very affected by the loss of his brother,” Margret Speer said dreamily. “He doesn’t show it, but I know. He gave his name to our last-born child.”

Little by little, I was introduced to the other guests: industrialists, superior officers from the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe, a colleague of Speer’s, other senior officials. I was the only member of the SS and also the lowest-ranking of the gathering, but no one seemed to pay that any heed, and Herr Leland introduced me as “Dr. Aue,” sometimes adding that I carried out “important functions for the Reichsführer-SS”; so I was treated quite cordially, and my nervousness, which at the outset had been rather strong, slowly diminished. Around noon we were served sandwiches, pâté, and beer. “A light snack,” Leland declared, “so we won’t get too tired.” The hunting began afterward; we were poured coffee, then everyone was given a game bag, some Swiss chocolate, and a flask of brandy. The rain had stopped and weak sunlight seemed to want to pierce the grayness; according to one general who said he knew hunting, it was perfect weather. We were going to hunt black grouse, a privilege that was apparently very rare in Germany. “This house was bought after the war by a Jew,” Leland explained to his guests. “He wanted to give himself lordly airs, and he had the grouse imported from Sweden. The woods suited them well, and the present owner puts strict limits on hunting.” I knew nothing about it, and had no intention of learning; out of politeness, I had nonetheless made up my mind to accompany the hunters rather than set off on my own. Leland gathered us on the front steps, and some servants distributed the shotguns, ammunition, and dogs. Since black grouse is hunted either singly or in pairs, we would be divided into little groups; to avoid accidents, everyone was assigned a section of the forest, and was not to stray from it; what’s more, our departures would be staggered. The hunt-loving general set off first, alone with a dog, then after him a few pairs. Margret Speer, to my surprise, had joined the group and had also taken a shotgun; she set out with her husband’s colleague, Hettlage. Leland turned to me: “Max, why don’t you accompany the Reichsminister? Go that way. I’ll go with Herr Ströhlein.” I spread out my hands: “As you wish.” Speer, his shotgun already under his arm, smiled at me: “Good idea! Come.” We went through the park toward the woods. Speer was wearing a leather Bavarian jacket with rounded lapels, and a hat; I had also borrowed a hat. At the entrance to the wood, Speer loaded his weapon, a double-barreled shotgun. I kept mine on my shoulder, unloaded. The dog they had given us fidgeted, stationed at the edge of the wood, its tongue lolling out, pointing. “Have you hunted grouse before?” Speer asked.—“Never, Herr Reichsminister. In fact, I don’t hunt at all. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just walk with you.” He looked surprised: “As you like.” He pointed to the forest: “If I understood correctly, we should walk a kilometer till we reach a stream, then cross it. Everything beyond it, to the edge of the forest, is ours. Herr Leland will stay on this side.” He set out into the undergrowth. It was quite dense; we had to go around the bushes, it was impossible to walk straight; drops of water streamed from the leaves and splattered onto our hats and hands; on the ground, the dead, wet leaves gave off a strong odor of earth and humus—beautiful, rich, and invigorating, but it brought unhappy memories to my mind. A sudden burst of bitterness invaded me: so this is what they’ve turned me into, I said to myself, a man who can’t see a forest without thinking about a mass grave. A dead branch snapped under my boot. “It’s surprising that you don’t like hunting,” Speer commented. Absorbed in my thoughts, I answered without thinking: “I don’t like killing, Herr Reichsminister.” He gave me a curious look, and I explained: “It’s sometimes necessary to kill out of duty, Herr Reichsminister. Killing for pleasure is a choice.” He smiled: “As for me, thank God, I’ve done nothing but kill for pleasure. I’ve never been to war.” We walked a little more in silence, amid the crackling of branches and the noise of water, soft and discreet. “What were you doing in Russia, Sturmbannführer?” Speer asked. “You served in the Waffen-SS?”—“No, Herr Reichsminister. I was with the SD. In charge of security matters.”—“I see.” He hesitated. Then he said in a calm, detached voice: “We hear a lot of rumors about the fate of the Jews, in the East. You must know something about it?”—“I know the rumors, Herr Reichsminister. The SD collects them and I’ve read the reports. They have many different sources.”—“You must have some idea of the truth, in your position.” Curiously, he made no allusion to the Reichsführer’s Posen speech (I was convinced at the time that he had been there, but maybe he had in fact left early). I answered courteously: “Herr Reichsminister, for a large part of my functions, I’m compelled to secrecy. I think you can understand. If you really want some explanations, might I suggest that you address the Reichsführer or Standartenführer Brandt? I’m sure they’ll be happy to send you a detailed report.” We had reached the stream: the dog, happy, capered about in the shallow water. “Here it is,” Speer said. He pointed to a zone a little farther off: “You see, there, in the hollow, the forest changes. There are evergreens, and fewer alder trees, and some bay shrubs. That’s the best place to flush grouse. If you’re not shooting, stay behind me.” We crossed the stream in long strides; over the hollow, Speer closed his shotgun, which he had been carrying open under his arm, and shouldered it. Then he began walking forward, on the lookout. The dog stayed near him, its tail pointing. After a few minutes I heard a loud noise and saw a large brown shape fly up through the trees; at the same instant, Speer pulled the trigger, but he must have missed the mark, since I could still hear the sound of wings through the echo. Thick smoke and the acrid smell of cordite filled the undergrowth. Speer hadn’t lowered his shotgun, but everything was quiet now. Once again, there was the noise of wings among the wet branches, but Speer didn’t shoot; I hadn’t seen anything, either. The third bird took off right under our noses, I saw it very clearly, it had rather broad wings and a collar of feathers, and twisted through the trees with an agility surprising for its mass, accelerating as it turned; Speer pulled the trigger but the bird was too quick, he hadn’t had time to traverse and the shot went wide. He opened the gun, ejected the casings, blew on it to get rid of the smoke, and pulled two cartridges out of his jacket pocket. “Grouse are very difficult to hunt,” he commented. “That’s why it’s interesting. You have to choose your weapon well. This one is balanced, but a little too long for my taste.” He looked at me, smiling: “In the spring, it’s very beautiful, during the mating season. The cocks clack their beaks, they gather together in clearings to strut and sing, displaying their colors. The females are very dull, as is often the case.” He finished loading his shotgun, then raised it before starting off again. In dense places, he cleared a path for himself between the branches with the barrel of the gun, without ever lowering it. When he flushed another bird, he pulled the trigger right away, a little in front of him; I heard the bird falling and at the same time the dog leaping and disappearing into the brush. It reappeared a few seconds later, the bird in its mouth, the head hanging down. It set it down at Speer’s feet, and he put it away in his bag. A little farther on, we came out into a clearing in the wood covered with yellowing tufts of grass and opening out onto the fields. Speer took out his chocolate bar: “Would you like some?”—“No, thanks. Do you mind if I take the time to smoke a cigarette?”—“Not at all. It’s a good place to rest.” He opened his gun, put it down, and sat down at the foot of a tree, nibbling on his chocolate. I drank a swig of brandy, handed him the flask, and lit a cigarette. The grass I was sitting on was wetting my pants, but I didn’t mind: hat on my knees, I rested my head against the rough bark of the pine tree I was leaning against and contemplated the calm stretch of grass and the silent woods. “You know,” Speer said, “I entirely understand the requirements of security. But more and more they are in conflict with the needs of the war industry. Too many potential workers are not deployed.” I exhaled the smoke before replying: “That’s possible, Herr Reichsminister. But in this situation, with our difficulties, I think priority conflicts are inevitable.”—“But they should be resolved.”—“Indeed. But in the end, Herr Reichsminister, it’s up to the Führer to decide, isn’t it? The Reichsführer is only obeying his orders.” He bit into his chocolate bar again: “You don’t think that the priority, for the Führer, as well as for us, is to win the war?”—“Certainly, Herr Reichsminister.”—“Then why deprive us of precious resources? Every week, the Wehrmacht comes and complains to me that Jewish workers are being taken away from them. And they’re not being redeployed elsewhere, otherwise I’d know it. It’s ridiculous! In Germany, the Jewish question is resolved, and elsewhere, what importance does it have for now? Let’s win the war first; afterward there will always be time to resolve the other problems.” I chose my words carefully: “Perhaps, Herr Reichsminister, some people believe that since the war is taking so long to be won, some problems ought to be resolved right away…” He turned his head to me and stared at me with his keen eyes: “You think so?”—“I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Can I ask you what the Führer says about it when you talk to him?” He bit his lip pensively: “The Führer never talks about these things. Not with me, at least.” He got up and brushed off his pants. “Shall we go on?” I threw away my cigarette, then drank a little more brandy and put the flask away: “Which way?”—“That’s a good question. I’m afraid, if we cross to the other side, we might come across one of our friends.” He looked toward the back of the opening, at the right: “If we go that way, we should come back toward the stream. Then we can go back the way we came.” We started off, walking alongside the edge of the wood; the dog followed us a few steps away, in the wet grass of the meadow. “Actually,” Speer said, “I haven’t thanked you yet for your help. I appreciate it a lot.”—“It’s a pleasure, Herr Reichsminister. I hope it’s useful. Are you satisfied with your new cooperation with the Reichsführer?”—“To tell the truth, Sturmbannführer, I expected more from him. I have already sent him several reports on Gauleiters who refuse to close down useless companies for the sake of war production. But from what I can see, the Reichsführer is content to forward these reports to Reichsleiter Bormann. And Bormann of course always sides with the Gauleiters. The Reichsführer seems to accept it quite passively.” We had reached the end of the clearing and were entering the wood. It began to rain again, a fine, light rain that soaked through our clothes. Speer had fallen silent and was walking with his gun raised, concentrating on the bushes in front of him. We walked along this way for half an hour, to the stream, then retraced our steps diagonally, before returning again to the stream. From time to time I would hear an isolated gunshot farther away, a dull sound in the rain. Speer pulled the trigger four more times and shot a black grouse that had a beautiful ruff of feathers with metallic glints. Soaked to the bone, we crossed the stream again, heading toward the house. A little before the park, Speer spoke to me again: “Sturmbannführer, I have a request. Brigadeführer Kammler is in the process of building an underground installation, in the Harz, for the production of rockets. I would like to visit these installations, to see how the work is coming along. Could you arrange that for me?” Taken by surprise, I replied: “I don’t know, Herr Reichsminister. I haven’t heard about it. But I’ll make the request.” He laughed: “A few months ago, Obergruppenführer Pohl sent me a letter to complain that I’d visited only one single concentration camp and that I had formed my opinion about prisoner labor employment with too little information. I’ll send you a copy. If they make difficulties for you, just show them that.”

I was tired, but with the long, pleasant tiredness after exercise. We had walked for a long time. In the entry of the manor house, I returned my shotgun and game bag, scraped the mud off my boots, and went up to my room. Someone had put more logs on the fire, it was warm; I took off my wet clothes and went to inspect the adjoining bathroom: not only was there running water, but it was hot; that seemed a miracle to me, in Berlin hot water was a rarity; the owner must have had a boiler installed. I ran an almost scalding bath and slipped in: I had to clench my teeth, but once I got used to it, stretched out full length, it was soft and gentle like amniotic fluid. I stayed in as long as possible; when I got out, I opened the windows wide and stood naked in front of them, as they do in Russia, until my skin was marbled red and white; then I drank a glass of cold water and stretched out on my stomach on the bed.

In the early evening I put on my suit, without a tie, and went downstairs. Not many people were in the living room, but Dr. Mandelbrod was ensconced in his big armchair in front of the fireplace, sitting catercorner, as if he wanted to warm one side but not the other. His eyes were closed and I didn’t disturb him. One of his assistants, in a severe country outfit, came over to shake my hand: “Good evening, Dr. Aue. It’s a pleasure to see you again.” I examined her face: it wasn’t my imagination, they all really did look alike. “Forgive me, but are you Hilde or Hedwig?” She gave a crystalline little smile: “Neither! You’re a very poor physiognomist. My name is Heide. We saw each other at Dr. Mandelbrod’s offices.” I bowed with a smile and apologized. “You weren’t at the hunt?”—“No. We’ve just arrived.”—“That’s too bad. I can easily picture you with a shotgun under your arm. A German Artemis.” She eyed me with a little smile: “I hope you’re not going to push the comparison too far, Dr. Aue.” I felt myself blush: Mandelbrod definitely recruited odd assistants. No doubt about it, this one too would ask me to get her pregnant. Fortunately, Speer arrived with his wife. “Ha! Sturmbannführer,” he exclaimed cheerfully. “We’re very poor hunters. Margret brought back five birds, Hettlage three.” Frau Speer laughed lightly: “Oh! You must have been talking about work.” Speer went over to pour himself some tea from a large, finely wrought ornate urn like a Russian samovar; I took a glass of Cognac. Dr. Mandelbrod opened his eyes and called to Speer, who went over to greet him. Leland came in and joined them. I went to talk with Heide; she had a solid philosophical background and spoke to me almost clearly about Heidegger’s theories, which at the time I was not at all familiar with. The other guests arrived one by one. A little later on, Leland invited us all into another room, where the dead birds had been set out on a long table, grouped together like a Flemish still life. Frau Speer held the record; the hunt-loving general had killed only one, and complained with bad grace about the section of wood he had been assigned. I thought we were at least going to eat the victims of this slaughter, but no: the birds had to be left to hang, and Leland undertook to have them delivered when they were ready. Nonetheless the dinner was varied and succulent—venison with berry sauce, potatoes roasted in goose fat, asparagus and zucchini, all washed down with a Burgundy of excellent vintage. I was seated opposite Speer, next to Leland; Mandelbrod sat at the head of the table. For the first time since I had met him, Herr Leland was extremely talkative: while drinking glass after glass, he talked about his past as a colonial administrator in Southwest Africa. He had known Rhodes, for whom he professed a boundless admiration, but remained vague about his move to the German colonies. “Rhodes said once: The colonizer can do no wrong; whatever he does becomes right. It is his duty to do what he wants. It is this principle, strictly applied, that won Europe its colonies, its domination over inferior peoples. It’s only when the corrupt democracies wanted to mix in, to give themselves a good conscience, hypocritical principles of morality, that the decline began. You’ll see: whatever the outcome of this war, France and Great Britain will lose their colonies. Their grip has slackened, they won’t be able to close their fists anymore. It’s Germany now that has picked up the torch. In 1907, I worked with General von Trotha. The Herero and the Nama had rebelled, but Trotha was a man who had understood Rhodes’s idea in all its strength. He said it openly: I wipe out rebel tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge. But Germany at the time was already weakening, and Trotha was recalled. I have always thought that was a sign foreshadowing 1918. Fortunately, the course of things has now been reversed. Today, Germany dominates the world. Our youth isn’t afraid of anything. Our expansion is an irresistible process.”—“Still,” broke in General von Wrede, who had arrived a little before Mandelbrod, “the Russians…” Leland tapped the table with the tip of his finger: “Precisely, the Russians. They are the only people today who are our equals. That’s why our war with them is so terrible, so pitiless. Only one of us will survive. The others don’t count. Can you imagine the Yankees, with their corned beef and their chewing gum, enduring a tenth of the Russian losses? A hundredth? They’d pack their bags and go home, and let Europe go to hell. No, what we have to do is show the Westerners that a Bolshevik victory is not in their interest, that Stalin will take half of Europe as his spoils, if not all of it. If the Anglo-Saxons help us finish off the Russians, we could leave them the scraps, or else, when we’ve regained our strength, crush them in turn, calmly. Look at what our Parteigenosse Speer has accomplished in less than two years! And that’s just a beginning. Imagine if our hands were unchained, if all the resources of the East were at our disposal. Then the world could be remade as it should be.”

After dinner I played chess with Hettlage, Speer’s associate. Heide came over and watched us play, in silence; Hettlage won easily. I had one last Cognac and chatted a little with Heide. The guests went up to bed. Finally she got up and, as directly as her colleagues, said: “I have to go help Dr. Mandelbrod now. If you don’t want to be alone, my room is two doors down from yours, on the left. You can come have a drink, a little later on.”—“Thank you,” I replied. “I’ll see.” I went up to my room, pensive, got undressed, and lay down. The remnants of the fire were glowing in the hearth. Lying there in the dark, I said to myself: After all, why not? She was a beautiful woman, she had a superb body, what was preventing me from taking advantage of it? There was no question of an ongoing relationship, it was a simple, clear-cut proposition. And even if my experience of them was limited, women’s bodies didn’t repel me, they must be pleasant too, soft and pliable, you must be able to forget yourself in them as in a pillow. But there was that promise, and if I was nothing else, I was a man who kept his promises. Things weren’t settled yet.

Sunday was a quiet day. I slept late, until about nine o’clock—usually I got up at 5:30—and went down to breakfast. I sat down in front of one of the big casement windows and leafed through an old edition of Pascal, in French, which I had found in the library. At the end of the morning, I accompanied Frau Speer and Frau von Wrede on a walk in the park; the latter’s husband was playing cards with an industrialist known for having built his empire through clever Aryanizations, the hunter general, and Hettlage. The grass, still wet, glistened, and puddles punctuated the gravel and dirt paths; the humid air was cool, invigorating, and our breaths formed little clouds in front of our faces. The sky remained uniformly gray. At noon I had coffee with Speer, who had just made his appearance. He spoke to me in detail about the question of foreign workers and his problems with Gauleiter Sauckel; then the conversation turned to the case of Ohlendorf, whom Speer seemed to regard as a romantic. My notions of economics were too rudimentary for me to be able to support Ohlendorf’s theories; Speer vigorously defended his principle of industrial self-responsibility. “In the end, there’s only one argument: it works. After the war, Dr. Ohlendorf can reform as he likes, if anyone wants to listen to him; but in the meantime, as I said to you yesterday, let’s win the war.”

Leland or Mandelbrod, whenever I found myself near them, chatted to me about various things, but neither one seemed to have anything special to say to me. I began to wonder why they had invited me: certainly not so I could enjoy Fräulein Heide’s charms. But when I thought about the question again, at the end of the afternoon, in the von Wredes’ car, which was taking me back to Berlin, the answer seemed obvious: it was to put me in contact with Speer, so I could get closer to him. And that seemed to have had its effect; when it was time to go, Speer had taken leave of me very cordially, and had promised me that we would see each other again. But one question troubled me: What was the point? In whose interest were Herr Leland and Dr. Mandelbrod bringing me up in this way? For there was no doubt it was a question of planned ascent: ministers, usually, don’t spend their time chatting thus with simple majors. That worried me, for I didn’t have the means to gauge the exact relations between Speer, the Reichsführer, and my two protectors; they were obviously maneuvering, but in what direction, and for whose benefit? I was willing to play the game, but which one? If it wasn’t that of the SS, it could be very dangerous. I had to remain discreet and be very careful; I was no doubt part of a plan; if it failed, there would have to be a scapegoat.

I knew Thomas well enough to know without asking him what he would have advised: cover yourself. On the Monday morning, I requested a meeting with Brandt, which he granted me that afternoon. I described to him my weekend and told him about my conversations with Speer, the main points of which I had already jotted down in an aide-mémoire that I gave him. Brandt didn’t seem to disapprove. “So he asked you to bring him to visit Dora?” That was the code name for the installation Speer had mentioned to me, officially called Mittelbau, “Central Construction.”—“His ministry has filed a request. We haven’t replied yet.”—“And what do you think of it, Standartenführer?”—“I don’t know. It’s up to the Reichsführer to decide. That said, you did well to report to me.” He briefly discussed my work too, and I told him about the initial impressions that emerged from the documents I had studied. When I got up to go, he said: “I think the Reichsführer is satisfied with the course things are taking. Continue on as you are.”

After this meeting I went back to my offices to work. It was pouring outside, I could barely see the trees of the Tiergarten through the downpour whipping the leaf-stripped branches. Around five o’clock, I let Fräulein Praxa go; Walser and Obersturmführer Elias, another specialist sent by Brandt, left at around six o’clock, with Isenbeck. An hour later I went to find Asbach, who was still working. “Are you coming, Untersturmführer? I’ll buy you a drink.” He looked at his watch: “Don’t you think they’re coming back? It’s almost their time.” I looked out the window: it was dark out and still raining a little. “You think—with this weather?” But in the lobby the porter stopped us: “Luftgefahr Fifteen, meine Herren,” a serious raid on its way. They must have detected the planes ahead of time. I turned to Asbach and said cheerfully: “You were right, after all. What should we do? Take our chances outside or wait in here?” Asbach looked a little worried: “It’s just that I have my wife…”—“In my opinion, you don’t have time to go home. I would have given you Piontek, but he left already.” I thought. “We’d do better to wait here till it passes, you can go home afterward. Your wife will go to a shelter, she’ll be fine.” He hesitated: “Listen, Sturmbannführer, I’ll go call her. She’s pregnant, I don’t want her to worry.”—“Right. I’ll wait for you.” I went out onto the steps and lit a cigarette. The sirens began to wail, and the passersbys on the Königsplatz hurried along, anxious to find a shelter. I wasn’t worried: this annex of the ministry had an excellent bunker. I finished my cigarette as the flak opened up and returned to the lobby. Asbach was running down the stairs: “It’s fine, she’s going to her mother’s. It’s just next door.”—“Did you open the windows?” I asked him. We went down into the shelter, a block of solid concrete, well lit, with chairs, folding cots, and large casksful of water. Not many people were there: most of the civil servants went home early, because of the lines for shopping and the air raids. In the distance, it was beginning to thunder. Then I heard well-spaced, massive explosions: one by one they came closer, like the mammoth footsteps of a giant. At each impact the pressure of the air increased, pressing painfully on our ears. There was an immense roar, very close, I could feel the bunker’s walls tremble. The lights flickered and then went out all at once, plunging the shelter into darkness. A girl yelped in terror. Someone turned on a flashlight; others scraped matches. “Isn’t there an emergency generator?” another voice began, but was interrupted by a deafening explosion; rubble rained down from the ceiling, people cried out. I smelled smoke, the smell of explosives bit into my nose: the building must have been hit. The explosions drew off; through the ringing in my ears, I could dimly hear the throbbing of the squadrons. A woman was crying; a man’s voice grunted out curses; I lit my lighter and headed for the armored door. With the porter, I tried to open it: it was blocked, the stairway must have been obstructed by debris. Three of us rammed it with our shoulders and managed to open it enough to slip outside. Bricks were piled on the stairs; I climbed up to the ground floor, followed by a civil servant: the main entrance door had been blown off its hinges and hurled into the lobby; flames were licking the paneling and the porter’s lodge. I ran up the staircase, down a hallway cluttered with window frames and ripped-off doors, then up another floor, to my offices: I wanted to try to save the most important files. The iron balustrade on the staircase was bent: the pocket of my tunic caught on a piece of twisted metal and ripped open. Upstairs, the offices were burning and I had to turn back. In the hallway, an employee was carrying a pile of files; another joined us, his face pale beneath the black traces of smoke and dust: “Leave that! The west wing is burning. A bomb came through the roof.” I had thought the attack was over, but again squadrons were rumbling in the sky; a series of explosions approached at a frightening speed, we ran for the basement, a massive explosion lifted me up and threw me into the stairway. I must have stayed there for a bit, stunned; I came to, blinded by a glaring white light that turned out to be a little flashlight; I heard Asbach shouting, “Sturmbannführer! Sturmbannführer!”—“I’m all right,” I muttered, getting up. In the glow from the fire in the entryway, I examined my tunic: the metal point had cut through the cloth, it was ruined. “The ministry is burning,” another voice said. “We have to get out.” With some other men we cleared the entrance to the bunker as well as we could, so everyone could climb out. The sirens were still wailing but the flak had fallen silent, the last planes were flying away. It was 8:30, the raid had lasted an hour. Someone pointed to some buckets and we formed a chain to fight the fire: it was laughable, in twenty minutes we had used up the water stored in the basement. The faucets didn’t work, the bombs must have burst the pipes; the porter tried to call the firemen, but the telephone was cut off. I recovered my overcoat from the shelter and went out into the square to examine the damage. The east wing looked intact, aside from the gaping windows, but part of the west wing had collapsed, and the neighboring windows vomited thick black smoke. Our offices must have been burning too. Asbach joined me, his face covered in blood. “Are you hurt?” I asked.—“It’s nothing. A brick.” I was still deafened, my ears were ringing painfully. I looked at the Tiergarten: the trees, lit up by several fires, had been smashed, broken, toppled—it looked like a wood in Flanders after an attack, in the books I read as a child. “I’m going home,” Asbach said. Anguish twisted his bloodstained face. “I want to find my wife.”—“Go on. Be careful of falling walls.” Two fire trucks arrived and maneuvered into position, but there seemed to be a problem with the water. The ministry employees were leaving, many carrying files that they put down a little farther away, on the sidewalks: for half an hour I helped them carry binders and papers; my own offices were unreachable in any case. A strong wind had arisen, and to the north, the east, and farther to the south, beyond the Tiergarten, the nighttime sky glowed red. An officer came over to tell us that the fires were spreading, but the ministry and the neighboring buildings seemed to me to be protected by the bend in the Spree on one side and the Tiergarten and Königsplatz on the other. The Reichstag, dark and closed, didn’t seem damaged.

I hesitated. I was hungry, but I couldn’t count on finding anything to eat. At home I had some food, but I didn’t know if my apartment still existed. I finally decided to go to the SS-Haus and report for duty. I set off down the Freidensallee at a run: in front of me, the Brandenburg Gate stood under its camouflage nets, intact. But behind it, almost all of Unter den Linden seemed to be in flames. The air was dense with smoke and dust, thick and hot, I was beginning to have trouble breathing. Clouds of sparks burst forth, crackling, from the buildings on fire. The wind was blowing ever more strongly. On the other side of the Pariser Platz, the Armaments Ministry was burning, partially crushed under the impacts. Secretaries wearing civil defense metal helmets were bustling about in the rubble, recovering files there too. A Mercedes with a fanion stood parked to the side; among the crowd of employees, I recognized Speer, bare-headed, his face black with soot. I went over to greet him and offered him my help; when he saw me, he shouted something to me that I didn’t understand. “You’re burning!” he repeated.—“What?” He came toward me, took me by the arm, turned me around, and beat my back with his open hand. Sparks must have set fire to my overcoat, but I hadn’t felt anything. Confused, I thanked him and asked him what I could do. “Nothing, really. I think we’ve gotten out what we could. My own office took a direct hit. There’s nothing left.” I looked around: the French embassy, the former British embassy, the Bristol Hotel, the offices of IG Farben—everything was heavily damaged or burning. The elegant façades of the Schinkel town houses, next to the Gate, stood out against a background of fire. “How awful,” I muttered.—“It’s terrible to say,” Speer said pensively, “but it’s better that they’re concentrating on the cities.”—“What do you mean, Herr Reichsminister?”—“During the summer, when they attacked the Ruhr, I was terrified. In August, they attacked Schweinfurt, where our entire production of ball bearings is concentrated. Then again in October. Our production fell by sixty-seven percent. You may not realize it, Sturmbannführer, but no ball bearings, no war. If they concentrate on Schweinfurt, we capitulate in two months, three at the most. Here”—he waved his hand at the fires—“they’re killing people, wasting all their resources on our cultural monuments.” He gave a dry, harsh laugh: “We were going to rebuild everything anyway. Ha!” I saluted him: “If you don’t need me, Herr Reichsminister, I’ll keep going. But I wanted to tell you that your request is being considered. I’ll contact you soon to tell you where things stand.” He shook my hand: “Fine, fine. Good night, Sturmbannführer.”

I had soaked my handkerchief in a bucket and was holding it over my mouth to go forward; I had also soaked my shoulders and cap. In the Wilhelmstrasse, the wind roared between the ministries and whipped the flames licking the empty windows. Soldiers and firemen were running everywhere, with little result. The Auswärtiges Amt looked severely hit, but the chancellery, a little farther on, had fared better. I was walking on a carpet of broken glass: in the entire street there wasn’t one window left unbroken. On the Wilhelmplatz some bodies had been stretched out near an overturned Luftwaffe truck; frightened civilians were still coming out of the U-Bahn station and looking around, horrified and lost; from time to time a blast could be heard, a delayed-action bomb, or else the muffled roar of a building collapsing. I looked at the bodies: a man without pants, his bloody buttocks grotesquely exposed; a woman with her stockings intact, but without a head. I thought it especially obscene that they were left there like that, but no one seemed to care. A little farther on, guards had been posted in front of the Aviation Ministry: passersbys shouted insults at them or sarcastic remarks about Göring, but didn’t linger, no crowd was forming; I showed my SD card and went through the cordon. I finally arrived at the corner of Prinz-Albrechtstrasse: the SS-Haus had no windows left, but otherwise didn’t seem damaged. In the lobby, troops were sweeping away the debris; officers were hoisting boards or mattresses to cover the gaping windows. In a hallway, I found Brandt giving instructions in a calm, flat voice: he was especially concerned with getting the telephone restored. I saluted him and informed him of the destruction of my offices. He nodded: “Well, we’ll take care of that tomorrow.” Since there didn’t seem to be much to do, I went next door, to the Staatspolizei; they were busy nailing up the doors that had been torn off, as well as they could; some bombs had struck nearby, an enormous crater disfigured the street a little farther on, and water was escaping from a burst pipe. I found Thomas in his office drinking schnapps with three other officers, unbuttoned, black with filth, laughing. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You’re a sorry sight. Have a drink. Where were you?” I briefly told him about my experiences at the ministry. “Ha! I was home already, I went down to the basement with the neighbors. A bomb came through the roof and the building caught fire. We had to break down the walls of the neighboring basements, several in a row, to come out at the end of the street. The whole street burned down and half of my building, including my apartment, collapsed. To top it all off, I found my poor convertible under a bus. In short, I’m ruined.” He poured me another glass. “Since misfortune is upon us, let us drink, as my grandmother Ivona used to say.”

In the end I spent the night at the Staatspolizei. Thomas had sandwiches, tea, and soup delivered. He lent me one of his spare uniforms, a little too big for me, but more presentable than my rags; a smiling typist took charge of switching the stripes and insignia. They had set up folding cots in the gymnasium for about fifteen homeless officers; I ran into Eduard Holste there, whom I had briefly known as Leiter IV/V of Group D, at the end of 1942; he had lost everything and was almost crying with bitterness. Unfortunately the showers still didn’t work, and I could wash only my hands and face. My throat hurt, I coughed, but Thomas’s schnapps had cut the taste of ash a little. Outside, we still heard explosions. The wind roared, raging and relentless.

Very early in the morning, without waiting for Piontek, I took the car from the garage and went home. The streets, obstructed by burned or overturned trolleys, fallen trees, rubble, were hard to navigate. A cloud of black, acrid smoke veiled the sky and many passersby were holding wet towels or handkerchiefs over their mouths. It was still drizzling. I passed lines of people pushing strollers or little wagonsful of belongings, or else lugging or dragging suitcases. Everywhere water was escaping from pipes, I had to drive through pools hiding debris that could shred my tires at any moment. Still, many cars were still circulating, most of them without windows and some even missing doors, but full of people: those who had space picked up bombing victims, and I did the same for an exhausted mother with two young children who wanted to go see her parents. I cut through the devastated Tiergarten; the Victory Column, still standing as if out of defiance, rose in the midst of a large lake formed by the water from shattered mains, and I had to make a big detour to skirt round it. I dropped the woman off in the rubble of the Händelallee and went on to my apartment. Everywhere, teams were at work repairing the damage; in front of destroyed buildings, sappers were pumping air into collapsed basements and digging to free survivors, assisted by Italian prisoners—everyone nowadays just called them the Badoglios—with the letters KGF painted in red on their backs. The S-Bahn station in the Brückenallee lay in ruins; I lived a little farther, on Flensburgerstrasse; my building looked miraculously intact: a hundred and fifty meters farther, there was nothing but rubble and gaping façades. The elevator, of course, didn’t work, so I climbed the eight flights, passing my neighbors sweeping the stairway or nailing up their doors as best they could. I found mine torn from its hinges and lying sideways; inside, a thick layer of broken glass and plaster covered everything; there were traces of footsteps and my gramophone had disappeared, but nothing else seemed to have been taken. A cold, biting wind blew through the windows. I quickly filled a suitcase, then went downstairs to arrange with my neighbor, who came from time to time to do housework for me, to come and clean up; I gave her money to have the door repaired that day, and the windows as soon as possible; she promised to contact me at the SS-Haus when the apartment was more or less livable. I went out in search of a hotel: above all, I dreamed of a bath. The closest was the Eden Hotel, where I had already stayed for a time. I had luck, the entire Budapesterstrasse seemed razed, but the Eden was still open. The front desk was being taken by storm, rich people who had been left homeless, officers arguing over rooms. When I had mentioned my rank, my medals, my disability, and lied by exaggerating the state of my apartment, the manager, who had recognized me, agreed to give me a bed, provided I share the room. I held out a banknote to the floor waiter so he would bring hot water to my room: finally, around ten o’clock, I was able to run a bath, lukewarm but delectable. The water immediately turned black, but I didn’t care. I was still soaking when they let my roommate in. He excused himself politely through the closed bathroom door and told me he’d wait below until I was ready. As soon as I was dressed I went down to look for him: he was a Georgian aristocrat, very elegant, who had fled his burning hotel with his things and had ended up here.

My colleagues all had the idea to meet at the SS-Haus. I found Piontek there, imperturbable; Fräulein Praxa, prettily dressed, although her wardrobe had gone up in smoke; all cheerful because his neighborhood had been spared, Walser; and, a little shaken up, Isenbeck, whose old neighbor had died of a heart attack right next to him, during the alert, in the dark, without his noticing. Weinrowski had returned some time ago to Oranienburg. As for Asbach, he had sent word: his wife was wounded, he would come as soon as he could. I sent Piontek to tell him to take a few days if he needed to: there wasn’t much chance we could get back to work right away anyway. I sent Fräulein Praxa home, and in the company of Walser and Isenbeck went to the ministry to see what could still be saved. The fire had been contained, but the west wing was still closed; a fireman escorted us through the rubble. Most of the top floor had burned down, as well as the attic: in our offices, only one room, with a file cabinet that had survived the fire, remained, but it had been flooded by the firemen’s hoses. Through a section of collapsed wall you could see part of the ravaged Tiergarten; leaning out, I saw that the Lehrter Bahnhof had also suffered, but the thick smoke that weighed over the city prevented me from seeing farther; in the distance, though, the lines of burned avenues could still be made out. I undertook to move the surviving files with my colleagues, along with a typewriter and a telephone. It was a delicate task, since the fire had burned holes in the floor in places, and the hallways were obstructed with rubble that had to be cleared. When Piontek joined us, we filled the car and I sent him to take everything to the SS-Haus. There I was assigned a temporary storage closet, but nothing more; Brandt was still too overwhelmed to worry about me. Since I had nothing else to do, I dismissed Walser and Isenbeck and had Piontek drop me off at the Eden Hotel, after arranging with him to come pick me up the next morning: without a family, he could just as well sleep in the garage. I went down to the bar and ordered a Cognac. My roommate, the Georgian, wearing a fedora and a white scarf, was playing Mozart on the piano, with a remarkably precise touch. When he stopped, I offered him a drink and chatted a little with him. He was vaguely affiliated with one of those groups of émigrés who were always bustling about the dens of the Auswärtiges Amt and the SS; the name Misha Kedia, when he mentioned it, sounded vaguely familiar. When he learned that I had been in the Caucasus, he leapt up enthusiastically, ordered another round, gave a solemn and interminable toast (although I had never set foot on his side of the mountains), forced me to empty my glass in one swallow, and invited me on the spot to come stay in Tiflis after our forces had freed it, in his ancestral home. Little by little the bar filled up. Around seven o’clock, conversations trailed off, people began to eye the clock over the bar: ten minutes later the sirens started up, then the flak, violent and close. The manager had come to assure us that the bar also served as a shelter; all the hotel clients came downstairs, and soon there was no more room. The ambiance became cheerful and animated: as the first bombs got closer, the Georgian went back to the piano and dove into a jazz tune; women in evening gowns got up to dance, the walls and chandeliers trembled, glasses fell from the bar and shattered, you could scarcely hear the music beneath the explosions, the air pressure became unbearable, I drank, several women, hysterical, laughed, another tried to kiss me, then burst out sobbing. When it was over, the manager handed out a round on the house. I went out: the zoo had been hit, pavilions were burning, again you could see fires pretty much everywhere; I smoked a cigarette, regretting I hadn’t gone to see the animals while there was still time. A section of wall had collapsed; I walked over to it, men were running in every direction, some were carrying shotguns, there was talk of lions and tigers roaming free. Several firebombs had fallen, and beyond the avalanche of bricks, I saw the galleries burning; the large Indian temple had been gutted; inside, a man who was walking next to me explained, they had found the elephants’ corpses torn to pieces by the bombs, as well as a rhinoceros seemingly intact but also dead, maybe from fear. Behind me, most of the buildings on Budapesterstrasse were burning too. I went to lend a hand to the firemen; for hours I helped clear away the rubble; every five minutes a whistle blew, and work stopped so the rescuers could listen for the muffled sounds of trapped people; and we got some of them out alive, wounded or even unhurt. Around midnight I went back to the Eden; the façade was damaged, but the structure had escaped a direct hit; at the bar, the party was still going on. My new Georgian friend forced me to drink several glasses in a row; the uniform Thomas had lent me was covered in filth and soot, but that didn’t prevent women of the highest society from flirting with me; few of them, it seemed, wanted to spend the night alone. The Georgian did so well that I got completely drunk: the next morning, I woke up on my bed, without any memory of climbing up to my room, with my tunic and shirt removed, but not my boots. The Georgian was snoring in the next bed. I cleaned up as well as I could, put on one of my clean uniforms, and gave Thomas’s over to be washed; leaving my sleeping neighbor there, I downed a bad coffee, took an aspirin for my headache, and returned to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.

The officers of the Reichsführung all looked a little wild: a number of them hadn’t slept all night; many had ended up homeless, and several had lost someone in their family. In the lobby and the stairways, inmates in striped uniforms, guarded by some Totenkopf-SS, were sweeping the floor, nailing up boards, repainting the walls. Brandt asked me to help some officers draw up an estimation of the damage for the Reichsführer, by contacting the municipal authorities. The work was simple enough: each of us chose a sector—victims, housing, government buildings, infrastructure, industry—and contacted the proper authorities to note down their figures. I was set up with an office that had a telephone and a directory; a few lines still worked, and I put Fräulein Praxa there—she had unearthed a new outfit somewhere—so she could call the hospitals. To get him out from underfoot, I decided to send Isenbeck, with the salvaged files, to join his boss Weinrowski in Oranienburg, and asked Piontek to drive him there. Walser hadn’t come. When Fräulein Praxa managed to reach a hospital, I asked for the number of dead and wounded they had received; when she had made a list of three or four institutions we couldn’t reach by phone, I sent a driver and an orderly to collect the data. Asbach arrived around noon, his features drawn, making a visible effort to look composed. I took him to the mess for sandwiches and tea. Slowly, between mouthfuls, he told me what had happened: The first night, the building where his wife had joined her mother had taken a direct hit and had collapsed onto the shelter, which had only partly held up. Asbach’s mother-in-law had apparently been killed immediately or had at least died quickly; his wife had been buried alive and they hadn’t been able to free her till the next morning, unhurt aside from a broken arm, but incoherent; she had had a miscarriage during the night, and still hadn’t recovered her wits; she went from a childlike babbling to hysterical tears. “I’m going to have to bury her mother without her,” Asbach said sadly as he sipped his tea. “I’d have liked to wait a little, for her to recover, but the morgues are overflowing and the medical authorities are afraid of epidemics. Apparently all the bodies that haven’t been reclaimed in twenty-four hours will be buried in mass graves. It’s terrible.” I tried my best to console him, but, I have to admit, I’m not very good at that sort of thing: my words about his future conjugal happiness must have sounded pretty hollow. Still it seemed to comfort him. I sent him home with a driver from the Reichsführung, promising I’d find him a van for the funeral the next day.

The Tuesday raid, even though it had involved only half as many aircraft as Monday’s, promised to turn out to be even more disastrous. The working-class neighborhoods, especially Wedding, had been hit hard. By the end of the afternoon we had gathered enough information to form a brief report: we counted about 2,000 dead, with hundreds more beneath the rubble; 3,000 buildings burned or destroyed; and 175,000 people homeless, of whom 100,000 had already been able to leave the city, either for surrounding villages or other cities in Germany. Around six o’clock we dismissed all the people who weren’t doing essential work; I stayed a little longer, and was still on the road, with a driver from the garage, when the sirens began to wail again. I decided not to continue on to the Eden: the bar-shelter didn’t inspire much confidence in me, and I preferred to avoid a repetition of the drinking bout of the night before. I ordered the driver to go around the zoo to reach the large bunker. A crowd was pressed at the doors, which were too narrow and too few; cars came and parked at the foot of the concrete façade; in front of them, in a reserved area, dozens of baby carriages stretched out in concentric circles. Inside, soldiers and policemen barked out orders for people to move upstairs; at each floor a crowd formed, no one wanted to go higher up, women were screaming, while their children ran through the crowd playing war games. We were directed to the third floor, but the benches, lined up as in a church, were already crowded, and I went to lean against the concrete wall. My driver had disappeared in the crowd. Soon afterward the .88s on the roof opened fire: the entire immense structure vibrated, pitching like a ship on the high seas. People, thrown against their neighbors, shouted or groaned. The lights dimmed but didn’t go out. In recesses and in the darkness of the spiral staircases leading from floor to floor, teenage couples clung to each other, intertwined; some even seemed to be making love—you could hear through the explosions moans of a different tone from those of panic-stricken housewives; old people protested indignantly, the Schupos bellowed, ordering people to remain seated. I wanted to smoke but it was forbidden. I looked at the woman sitting on the bench in front of me: she kept her head lowered, I could just see her blond, exceptionally thick, shoulder-length hair. A bomb exploded nearby, making the bunker tremble and throwing up a cloud of concrete dust. The young woman raised her head and I recognized her right away: she was the one I met sometimes in the morning, on the trolley. She too recognized me and a gentle smile lit up her face while she held out her white hand to me: “Hello! I was worried about you.”—“Why?” With the flak and the explosions we could barely hear each other, I crouched down and bent toward her. “You weren’t at the pool Sunday,” she said into my ear. “I was afraid something had happened to you.” Sunday was already another life, it seemed to me; but it was only three days ago. “I was in the country. Does the pool still exist?” She smiled again: “I don’t know.” Another powerful explosion shook the structure and she seized my hand and grasped it strongly; when it was over she let it go, excusing herself. Despite the yellowish light and the dust, I had the impression she was blushing slightly. “Forgive me,” I asked her, “what is your name?”—“Helene,” she replied. “Helene Anders.” I introduced myself. She worked at the press agency of the Auswärtiges Amt; her office, like most of the ministry, had been destroyed Monday night, but her parents’ house, in Alt Moabit, where she lived, was still standing. “Before this raid, in any case. And you?” I laughed: “I had offices at the Ministry of the Interior, but they burned down. For now, I’m at the SS-Haus.” We continued chatting till the end of the alert. She had gone on foot to Charlottenburg to comfort a homeless girlfriend; the sirens had caught her on the way back, and she had taken refuge there, in the bunker. “I didn’t think they’d come back a third night in a row,” she said softly.—“To tell the truth, I didn’t either,” I replied, “but I’m happy it’s given us the chance to see each other again.” I said that to be polite; but I realized it wasn’t just to be polite. This time, she blushed visibly; her tone still remained frank and clear: “Me too. Our trolley will probably be out of service for a while.” When the lights came back on, she got up and brushed off her coat. “If you like,” I said, “I can take you home. If I still have a car,” I added, laughing. “Don’t say no. It’s not very far away.”

I found my driver next to his vehicle, looking very upset: it no longer had any windows, and the whole side had been crushed in by the car next to it, propelled by the blast of an explosion. Of the baby carriages, only scattered debris remained on the square. The zoo was burning again, you could hear atrocious sounds, the bellowing, trumpeting, lowing of dying animals. “The poor beasts,” Helene murmured, “they don’t know what’s happening to them.” The driver was only thinking about his car. I went to find some Schupos so they could help us free it. The passenger door was jammed; I had Helene get in the back, then slipped in over the driver’s seat. The ride turned out to be a little complicated, we had to take a detour through the Tiergarten, because of the blocked streets, but I was happy to see, passing by Flensburgerstrasse, that my building had survived. Alt Moabit, aside from a few stray bombs, had been more or less spared, and I dropped Helene off in front of her small building. “Now,” I said as I left her, “I know where you live. If you don’t mind, I’ll come visit when things have calmed down a little.”—“I’d be delighted,” she replied with again that very beautiful, calm smile she had. Then I went back to the Eden Hotel, where I found nothing but a gaping shell in flames. Three bombs had gone through the roof and nothing was left. Fortunately the bar had held up, the hotel residents had escaped with their lives and had been evacuated. My Georgian neighbor was drinking Cognac straight from the bottle with some other now-homeless people; as soon as he saw me, he made me take a swig. “I’ve lost everything! Everything! What I miss most are the shoes. Four new pairs!”—“Do you have a place to go?” He shrugged: “I’ve got some friends not too far away. On Rauchstrasse.”—“Come on, I’ll drive you there.” The house that the Georgian pointed out had no more windows but seemed still inhabited. I waited for a few minutes while he went in to see what he could find out. He returned looking cheerful: “Perfect! They’re going to Marienbad, I’ll leave with them. Will you come in and have a drink?” I refused politely, but he insisted: “Come on! For the pososhok.” I felt drained, exhausted. I wished him good luck and left without further ado. At the Staatspolizei, an Untersturmführer told me that Thomas had found refuge at Schellenberg’s place. I had a bite to eat, had a bed set up for me in the improvised dormitory, and fell asleep.

The next day, Thursday, I continued collecting statistics for Brandt. Walser still hadn’t reappeared but I wasn’t too worried. To make up for the lack of telephone lines, we now had a squad of Hitlerjugend on loan from Goebbels. We sent them all over, on bikes or on foot, to send or get messages and mail. In town, the hard work of the municipal services was already yielding results: in some neighborhoods, water had come back, electricity too, sections of the trolley lines were put back in service, along with the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, where it was possible. We also knew that Goebbels was contemplating a partial evacuation of the city. Everywhere, on the ruins, chalk messages were proliferating, people trying to find their parents, their friends, their neighbors. Around noon, I requisitioned a small van from the police and went to help Asbach bury his mother-in-law in the Plötzensee cemetery, alongside her husband who had died of cancer four years earlier. Asbach seemed a little better: his wife was recovering her senses, she had recognized him; but he hadn’t told her anything yet, either about her mother or about the baby. Fräulein Praxa accompanied us and even managed to find flowers; Asbach was visibly touched. Aside from us there were only three of his friends, including a couple, and a minister. The coffin was made of coarse, badly planed boards; Asbach kept saying that as soon as possible he would ask for a permit to exhume the body to give his mother-in-law a proper funeral: they had never gotten along well, he added, she hadn’t hidden her scorn for his SS uniform, but still, she was his wife’s mother, and Asbach loved his wife. I didn’t envy his situation: to be alone in the world is sometimes a great advantage, especially in wartime. I dropped him off at the military hospital where his wife was, and went back to the SS-Haus. That night, there was no raid; an alert went off in the early evening, provoking an outburst of panic, but they were just reconnaissance planes, come to photograph the damage. After the alert, which I spent in the Staatspolizei bunker, Thomas took me to a little restaurant that had already reopened its doors. He was in a cheerful mood: Schellenberg had arranged to have a small house in Dahlem lent to him, in a fashionable neighborhood near the Grunewald, and he was going to buy a small Mercedes convertible from a widow who needed money; her husband, a Hauptsturmführer, had been killed during the first raid. “Fortunately, my bank is intact. That’s what counts.” I made a face: “Still, there are other things that count.”—“Like what, for example?”—“Our sacrifices. The suffering of the people, here, around us, on the front.” In Russia things were going very badly: after losing Kiev, we had managed to retake Zhitomir, only to lose Cherkassy the day I was hunting grouse with Speer; in Rovno, the Ukrainian insurgents of the UPA, as anti-German as they were anti-Bolshevik, were picking off isolated German soldiers like rabbits. “I’ve always said, Max,” Thomas said, “you take things too seriously.”—“It’s a question of Weltanschauung,” I said, raising my glass. Thomas gave a brief, mocking laugh. “Weltanschauung here, Weltanschauung there, as Schnitzler said. Everyone has a Weltanschauung these days, the lowliest baker or plumber has his Weltanschauung, my mechanic overcharges me thirty percent for repairs, but he too has his Weltanschauung. I have one too…” He fell silent and drank; I drank too. It was a Bulgarian wine, a little rough, but given the circumstances there was nothing to complain about. “I’m going to tell you what counts,” Thomas said urgently. “Serve your country, die if you have to, but take advantage of life as much as possible in the meantime. Your posthumous Ritterkreuz might console your old mother, but it’ll be cold comfort for you.”—“My mother is dead,” I said softly.—“I know. I’m sorry.” One night, after many drinks, I had told him about my mother’s death, without going into too much detail; since then we hadn’t talked about it again. Thomas drank some more, then burst out: “Do you know why we hate the Jews? I’ll tell you. We hate the Jews because they’re a thrifty, prudent people, greedy not just for money and security but also for their traditions, their knowledge, and their books, incapable of giving and spending, a people that doesn’t know war. A people that just knows how to accumulate, never to waste. In Kiev you said the murder of the Jews was a waste. Well, precisely, by wasting their lives the way you throw rice at a wedding, we’ve taught them expense, we’ve taught them war. And the proof that it’s working, that the Jews are beginning to learn the lesson, is Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bialystok, it’s the Jews who are becoming warriors again, who are becoming cruel, who also are becoming killers. I find that very beautiful. We’ve made them into an enemy worthy of us. The Pour la Semite”—he struck his chest at the heart, where the Jews sew the star—“is picking up value again. And if the Germans don’t pull themselves together like the Jews, instead of moaning, they’ll just get what they deserve. Vae victis.” He emptied his glass in one swallow, his gaze distant. I realized he was drunk. “I’m going home,” he said. I offered to drive him back, but he refused: he had taken a car from the garage. In the still-half-cleared street, he absentmindedly shook my hand, slammed the door, and shot off. I went back to sleep at the Staatspolizei; it was heated, and the showers, at least, had been fixed.

The next night there was another raid, the fifth and last in that series. The damage was terrible: the center of the city lay in ruins along with a large part of Wedding; they counted more than four thousand dead and four hundred thousand homeless, many factories and several ministries had been destroyed, communications and public transport would take weeks to be restored. People were living in apartments without any windows or heat: a large portion of the coal reserves, stored in gardens for the winter, had burned. Finding bread had become impossible, the stores remained empty, and the NSV had set up field kitchens in the ravaged streets to serve cabbage soup. In the Reichsführung and RSHA complex, we fared a little better: it was possible to eat and sleep, clothes and uniforms were provided to those who had lost everything. When Brandt received me, I suggested I transfer part of my team to Oranienburg, to the IKL premises, and keep a little office in Berlin for liaison purposes. The idea seemed good to him but he wanted to consult the Reichsführer. The latter, Brandt informed me, had agreed to let Speer visit Mittelbau: I was to take charge of organizing everything. “Arrange things so that the Reichsminister is…satisfied,” he said. He had another surprise for me: I was promoted to the rank of Obersturmbannführer. I was happy, but surprised: “Why?”—“It was the Reichsführer’s decision. Your functions have already taken on a certain importance and will continue to do so. Speaking of that, what do you think of the reorganization of Auschwitz?” In the beginning of the month, Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel, Glücks’s deputy at the IKL, had traded places with Höss; since then, Auschwitz had been divided into three distinct camps: the Stammlager, the Birkenau complex, and Monowitz with all the Nebenlager. Liebehenschel remained as Kommandant of Auschwitz I and also Standortälteste for all three camps, which gave him a right of oversight over the work of the other two new Kommandanten, Hartjenstein and Hauptsturmführer Schwarz, who till then had been Arbeitskommandoführer and then Lagerführer under Höss. “Standartenführer, I think the administrative restructuring is an excellent initiative: the camp was much too large and was becoming unmanageable. As for Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel, judging from what I could see of him, it’s a good choice, he understands the new priorities very well. But I must confess that when I think about Obersturmbannführer Höss’s appointment to the IKL, I have a hard time grasping this organization’s personnel policy. I have the greatest respect for Obersturmbannführer Höss; I regard him as an excellent soldier; but if you ask my opinion, he should be out there leading a Waffen-SS regiment at the front. He is not an administrator. Liebehenschel dealt with most of the daily work at the IKL. Höss is certainly not the man to take an interest in administrative details.” Brandt scrutinized me through his owl glasses. “Thank you for the frankness of your opinion. But I don’t think the Reichsführer is in agreement with you. In any case, even if Obersturmbannführer Höss has other talents than Liebehenschel, there’s still Standartenführer Maurer.” I nodded; Brandt shared the common opinion of Glücks. When I saw Isenbeck the following week, he told me what was being said in Oranienburg: everyone understood that Höss had done his time in Auschwitz, except Höss himself; apparently the Reichsführer in person had informed him of his transfer, during a camp visit, using as a pretext—this is what Höss was saying at Oranienburg—the BBC broadcasts on the exterminations; his promotion to the head of DI made that plausible. But why were they treating him so carefully? For Thomas, to whom I posed the question, there was only one explanation: Höss had done time in prison with Bormann, in the 1920s, for a Vehmgericht murder; they must have remained in touch, and Bormann was protecting Höss.

As soon as the Reichsführer had approved of my suggestion, I proceeded to reorganize my office. The entire unit in charge of research, with Asbach as chief, was transferred to Oranienburg. Asbach seemed relieved to be leaving Berlin. With Fräulein Praxa and two other assistants I set myself up again in my old premises at the SS-Haus. Walser had never come back: Piontek, whom I finally sent to find out about him, reported that the shelter in his building had been struck, on the Tuesday night. The number of dead was estimated at twenty-three, the entire population of the building; there were no survivors, but most of the corpses unearthed were unrecognizable. To set my mind at rest, I reported him missing: that way, the police would look for him in the hospitals; but I had little hope of finding him alive. Piontek seemed very upset about it. Thomas, already over his bout of spleen, was overflowing with energy; now that we were office neighbors again, I saw him more often. Instead of telling him about my promotion, I waited, to surprise him, until I had received my official notification and had had my new stripes and collar tabs sewn on. When I presented myself at his office, he burst out laughing, searched through his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, waved it in the air, and cried out: “Ah! You scoundrel. You thought you could catch up with me!” He made the document into a paper plane and launched it at me; its nose hit my Iron Cross and I unfolded it to read that Müller was proposing Thomas as Standartenführer. “And you can be sure it won’t be refused. But,” he added with good grace, “until it’s official, dinners are on me.”

My promotion had just as little effect on the imperturbable Fräulein Praxa, but she couldn’t hide her surprise when she received a direct phone call from Speer: “The Reichsminister wants to speak to you,” she informed me in a breathless voice, handing me the receiver. After the last raid, I had sent him a message giving him my new coordinates. “Sturmbannführer?” his firm, pleasant voice said. “How are you? Not too much damage?”—“My archivist has probably been killed, Herr Reichsminister. Otherwise, everything’s fine. And you?”—“I moved into temporary offices and sent my family to the country. So?”—“Your visit to Mittelbau has just been approved, Herr Reichsminister. I’ve been appointed to organize it. As soon as possible, I’ll contact your secretary to set up a date.” For important questions, Speer had asked me to call his personal secretary, rather than an assistant. “Very good,” he said. “See you soon.” I had already written to Mittelbau to warn them to prepare for the visit. I called Obersturmbannführer Förschner, the Kommandant of Dora, to confirm the arrangements. “Listen,” his tired voice grumbled at the other end, “we’ll do our best.”—“I’m not asking you to do your best, Obersturmbannführer. I’m asking that the installations be presentable for the Reichsminister’s visit. The Reichsführer personally insisted on that. Do you understand?”—“Fine, fine. I’ll give some more orders.”

My apartment had been more or less fixed up. I had finally managed to find some glass for two windows; the others remained covered with a waxed canvas tarp. My neighbor had not only had my door repaired but had also unearthed some oil lamps to use until electricity was restored. I had some coal delivered, and once the big ceramic stove was started, it wasn’t cold at all. I told myself that taking an apartment on the top floor hadn’t been very smart: I had had incredible luck escaping the raids of that week, but if they returned, and they certainly would, it wouldn’t last. Yet, I refused to worry: the apartment didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t have many personal possessions; you had to keep Thomas’s serene attitude about these things. I simply bought myself a new gramophone, with records of Bach’s Partitas for piano, as well as some opera arias by Monteverdi. In the evening, in the soft, archaic light of an oil lamp, a glass of Cognac and some cigarettes within arm’s reach, I would lie back on my sofa to listen to them and forget everything else.

A new thought, though, came more and more often to occupy my mind. The Sunday after the air raids, around noon, I had taken the car from the garage and had gone to visit Helene Anders. The day was cold and wet, the sky overcast, but it wasn’t raining. On the way, I had managed to find a bouquet of flowers, sold in the street by an old woman near an S-Bahn station. Having reached Helene’s building, I realized I didn’t know what apartment she lived in. Her name wasn’t on the letter boxes. A rather hefty woman who was leaving at that moment stopped and eyed me from head to foot before barking at me, in strong Berlin slang: “Who are you looking for?”—“Fräulein Anders.”—“Anders? There’s no Anders here.” I described her. “You mean the Winnefeld daughter. But she’s not a Fräulein.” She directed me to the apartment and I went up to ring. A lady with white hair opened the door and frowned. “Frau Winnefeld?”—“Yes.” I clicked my heels and bowed my head. “My respects, meine Dame. I came to see your daughter.” I held out the flowers and introduced myself. Helene appeared in the hallway, a sweater over her shoulders, and her face colored slightly: “Oh!” she smiled. “It’s you.”—“I came to ask you if you were planning to swim today.”—“Is the pool still working?” she said.—“Unfortunately not.” I had passed it on my way: a firebomb had gone through the dome, and the concierge who was watching over the ruins had assured me that, given the priorities, it certainly wouldn’t reopen before the end of the war. “But I know of another one.”—“Then I’d be happy to. I’ll go get my things.” Downstairs, I helped her into the car and set off. “I didn’t know you were a Frau,” I said after a few minutes. She looked at me pensively: “I’m a widow. My husband was killed in Yugoslavia last year, by the partisans. We’d been married for less than a year.”—“I’m sorry.” She looked out the window. “Me too,” she said. She turned to me: “But life goes on, doesn’t it?” I didn’t say anything. “Hans, my husband,” she went on, “liked the Dalmatian coast a lot. In his letters, he talked about settling there after the war. Do you know Dalmatia?”—“No. I served in the Ukraine and in Russia. But I wouldn’t want to settle there.”—“Where would you like to live?”—“I don’t know, actually. Not Berlin, I think. I don’t know.” I told her briefly about my childhood in France. She herself was of old Berlin stock: already her grandparents lived in Moabit. We arrived at the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and I parked in front of number eight. “But that’s the Gestapo!” she cried out, terrified. I laughed: “That’s right. They have a small heated pool in the basement.” She stared at me: “Are you a policeman?”—“Not at all.” Through the window, I pointed to the former Prinz-Albrecht Hotel next door: “I work there, in the Reichsführer’s offices. I’m a legal advisor, I’m in charge of economic questions.” That seemed to reassure her. “Don’t worry. The pool is used more by typists and secretaries than by policemen, who have other things to do.” In fact, the pool was so small you had to sign up in advance. We found Thomas there, already in a bathing suit. “Oh, I know you!” he exclaimed, gallantly kissing Helene’s white hand. “You’re the friend of Liselotte and Mina Wehde.” I showed her where the women’s changing rooms were and went to change also, while Thomas smiled at me mockingly. When I emerged, Thomas, in the water, was talking with a girl, but Helene hadn’t reappeared yet. I dove in and did a few laps. Helene came out of the changing room. Her fashionable swimsuit molded to her contours, rounded but slim; beneath the curves the muscles were clearly apparent. Her face, whose beauty wasn’t altered by the swimming cap, was joyful: “Hot showers! What luxury!” She dove in, crossed half the pool underwater, and began doing laps. I was already tired; I got out, put on a bathrobe, and sat down on one of the chairs placed around the pool, to smoke and watch her swim. Thomas, dripping, came to sit next to me: “It was high time you pulled yourself together.”—“Do you like her?” The lapping of the water resounded on the room’s vaulted ceiling. Helene did forty laps without stopping, a thousand meters. Then she came over to lean on the edge, like the first time I’d seen her, and smiled at me: “You don’t swim much.”—“It’s the cigarettes. I get out of breath.”—“That’s too bad.” Again, she raised her arms and let herself sink down; but this time she came back up in the same place and hoisted herself out of the pool in one supple movement. She took a towel, dried her face and came to sit down next to us, taking off her cap and shaking her damp hair. “And you,” she said to Thomas, “do you also deal with economic questions?”—“No,” he replied. “I leave that to Max. He’s much more intelligent than me.”—“He’s a policeman,” I added. Thomas made a face: “Let’s say I’m in security.”—“Brrr…” Helene said. “That must be sinister.”—“Oh, not really.” I finished my cigarette and went back in to swim a little. Helene did twenty more laps; Thomas was flirting with one of the typists. Afterward, I washed under the shower and changed; leaving Thomas there, I suggested to Helene that we go out for some tea. “Where?”—“Good question. On Unter den Linden there’s nothing left. But we’ll find something.” Finally I took her to the Esplanade Hotel, on Bellevuestrasse: it was a little damaged, but had survived the worst; inside the tea room, aside from the boards on the windows, masked by brocade curtains, you might have thought it was before the war. “What a beautiful place,” Helene murmured. “I’ve never been here.”—“The cakes are excellent, I hear. And they don’t serve ersatz.” I ordered a coffee for me and a tea for her; we also ordered a little assortment of cakes. They were in fact delicious. When I lit a cigarette, she asked for one. “You smoke?”—“Sometimes.” Later on, she said pensively: “It’s too bad there’s this war. Things could have been so nice.”—“Maybe. I have to admit I don’t think about it.” She looked at me: “Tell me frankly: we’re going to lose, aren’t we?”—“No!” I said, shocked. “Of course not.” Again, she looked into emptiness and drew a last puff from her cigarette. “We’re going to lose,” she said. I took her home. In front of the entrance, she shook my hand, looking serious. “Thank you,” she said. “I enjoyed that very much.”—“I hope it won’t be the last time.”—“Me too. See you soon.” I watched her cross the sidewalk and disappear into the building. Then I went back to my place to listen to Monteverdi.

I didn’t understand what I was seeking with this young woman; but I didn’t try to understand it. What I liked about her was her gentleness, a gentleness I thought existed only in the paintings of Vermeer of Delft, through which could clearly be felt the supple force of a steel blade. I had enjoyed that afternoon very much, and for now I didn’t look any further, I didn’t want to think. I felt that thinking would immediately have led to painful questions and demands: for once, I didn’t feel the need, I was happy to let myself be carried by the course of events, as I was by Monteverdi’s music, at once utterly lucid and emotional, and then we’d see. During the week that followed, in the slack moments during work, or at night, at home, the thought of her grave face or of the calmness of her smile came back to me, almost warm, a friendly, affectionate thought, which didn’t alarm me.

But the past is a thing that, once it has sunk its teeth into your flesh, doesn’t let go. Around the middle of the week after the air raids, Fräulein Praxa knocked on my office door. “Obersturmbannführer? There are two gentlemen from the Kripo who would like to see you.” I was immersed in a particularly complex report; annoyed, I replied, “Well, let them do what everyone else does: make an appointment.”—“Very well, Obersturmbannführer.” She closed the door. A minute later she knocked again: “Excuse me, Obersturmbannführer. They insist. They said to tell you that it’s about a personal matter. They say it concerns your mother.” I breathed in deeply and closed my file: “Show them in, then.”

The two men who pushed their way into my office were genuine policemen, not honorary ones like Thomas. They wore long gray overcoats made of coarse, stiff wool, probably woven with wood pulp, and held their hats in their hands. They hesitated and then raised their arms, saying, “Heil Hitler!” I returned their salute and motioned them to the sofa. They introduced themselves: Kriminalkommissar Clemens and Kriminalkommissar Weser, from Referat V B 1, “Einsatz/Capital Crimes.” “In fact,” said one of them, possibly Clemens, by way of introduction, “we’re acting at the request of the Five A One, which is in charge of international cooperation. They received a request for legal assistance from the French police…”—“Excuse me,” I interrupted curtly, “can I see your papers?” They handed me their ID cards along with a mission order signed by a Regierungsrat Galzow, assigning them the task of replying to questions sent to the German police by the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes in the context of an investigation into the murders of Moreau, Aristide, and his wife, Moreau, Héloïse, formerly Frau. Aue, née C. “So you’re investigating my mother’s death,” I said, returning their documents. “How does that concern the German police? They were killed in France.”—“True, true,” said the second one, probably Weser. The first one pulled a notebook out of his pocket and leafed through it. “It was a very violent murder, apparently,” he said. “A madman, possibly, a sadist. You must have been very upset.” My voice remained dry and hard: “Kriminalkommissar, I am aware of what happened. My personal reactions are my business. Why are you coming to see me?”—“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” said Weser.—“As a potential witness,” Clemens added.—“A witness of what?” I asked. He looked me straight in the eyes: “You saw them at the time, didn’t you?” I too continued staring at him: “That’s right. You’re well informed. I went to visit them. I don’t know exactly when they were killed, but it was soon afterward.” Clemens examined his notebook, then showed it to Weser. Weser went on: “According to the Gestapo in Marseille, a travel pass was issued to you for the Italian zone on April twenty-sixth. How long did you stay at your mother’s house?”—“Just a day.”—“Are you sure?” Clemens asked.—“I think so. Why?” Weser again consulted Clemens’s notebook: “According to the French police, a gendarme saw an SS officer leaving Antibes in a bus on the morning of the twenty-ninth. There weren’t many SS officers in the sector, and they certainly weren’t traveling by bus.”—“I may have stayed two nights. I traveled a lot, at the time. Is it important?”—“It could be. The bodies were discovered on May first, by a milkman. They weren’t very fresh. The coroner estimated the time of death at sixty to eighty-four hours prior, that is sometime between the night of the twenty-eighth and the night of the twenty-ninth.”—“Well, I can tell you that when I left them they were very much alive.”—“So,” said Clemens, “if you left on the morning of the twenty-ninth, they would have been killed during the day.”—“That’s possible. I never asked myself the question.”—“How did you learn of their deaths?”—“I was informed by my sister.” “In fact,” said Weser, still leaning over to look at Clemens’s notebook, “she arrived almost right away. On May second, to be precise. Do you know how she learned the news?”—“No.”—“Have you seen her again since?” asked Clemens.—“No.”—“Where is she now?” asked Weser.—“She lives with her husband in Pomerania. I can give you the address, but I don’t know if they’re there. They often go to Switzerland.” Weser took the notebook from Clemens and jotted something down. Clemens asked me: “You’re not in touch with her?”—“Not very often,” I replied.—“And your mother, did you see her often?” asked Weser. They seemed systematically to take turns talking, and this little game was grating on my nerves. “Not much, either,” I replied as dryly as possible.—“So,” said Clemens, “you’re not very close to your family.”—“Meine Herren, I’ve already told you, I’m not about to talk to you about my inner feelings. I don’t see how my relations with my family can concern you.”—“When there’s murder, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Weser said sententiously, “anything can concern the police.” They really did look like a pair of cops from an American movie. But they probably acted that way on purpose. “This Herr Moreau was your stepfather by marriage, isn’t that right?” Weser continued.—“Yes. He married my mother in…1929, I think. Or maybe ’twenty-eight.”—“1929, that’s right,” Weser said, studying his notebook.—“Are you aware of his last will?” Clemens abruptly asked. I shook my head: “Not at all. Why?”—“Herr Moreau wasn’t poor,” said Weser. “You’ll probably inherit a tidy little sum.”—“That would surprise me. My stepfather and I didn’t get along at all.”—“That’s possible,” Clemens continued, “but he had no children, and no brothers or sisters. If he died intestate, you and your sister will share everything.”—“I hadn’t even thought about it,” I said sincerely. “But instead of pointlessly speculating, tell me: did they find a will?” Weser leafed through the notebook: “Actually, we don’t know that yet.”—“Well,” I declared, “no one has contacted me about it.” Weser scribbled a note in the notebook. “Another question, Herr Obersturmbannführer: there were two children at Herr Moreau’s house. Twins. Alive.”—“I saw those children. My mother told me they were a friend’s. Do you know who they are?”—“No,” Clemens grumbled. “Apparently the French don’t know, either.”—“Did they witness the murder?”—“They never opened their mouths,” said Weser.—“They might have seen something,” added Clemens.—“But they didn’t want to talk,” repeated Weser.—“Maybe they were shocked,” Clemens explained.—“And what’s become of them?” I asked.—“Actually,” Weser replied, “that’s the curious thing. Your sister took them with her.”—“We don’t really understand why,” said Clemens.—“Or how.” “What’s more, it seems highly irregular,” Weser commented.—“Highly,” Clemens repeated. “But at the time, the Italians were running things there. With them anything is possible.”—“Yes, absolutely anything,” Weser added. “Except an investigation by the rules.”—“It’s the same thing with the French, too,” Clemens went on.—“Yes, they’re the same,” Weser confirmed. “It’s no pleasure working with them.”—“Meine Herren,” I interrupted. “That’s all very well, but how does it concern me?” Clemens and Weser looked at each other. “You see, I’m very busy right now. Unless you have other specific questions, I think we can leave things there?” Clemens nodded; Weser leafed through the notebook and returned it to him. Then he got up: “Excuse us, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”—“Yes,” said Clemens, getting up in turn. “Excuse us. For now, that’s all.”—“Yes,” Weser went on, “that’s all. Thank you for your cooperation.” I held out my hand: “Not at all. If you have other questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.” I took some business cards from my stand and gave one to each. “Thank you,” Weser said, pocketing the card. Clemens examined his own: “Special representative of the Reichsführer-SS for the Arbeitseinsatz,” he read. “What is that?”—“That’s a State secret, Kriminalkommissar,” I replied.—“Oh. I’m sorry.” They both saluted and headed for the door. Clemens, who was a good head taller than Weser, opened it and went out; Weser paused on the threshold and turned around: “Excuse me, Herr Obersturmbannführer. I forgot one detail.” He turned around: “Clemens! The notebook.” He leafed through it again. “Oh yes, here it is: When you went to visit your mother, were you in uniform or in civilian clothes?”—“I don’t remember. Why? Is it important?”—“Probably not. The Obersturmführer in Marseille who issued the travel pass thought you were in civilian clothes.”—“That’s possible. I was on leave.” He nodded: “Thank you. If there’s anything else, we’ll call you. Forgive us for coming like this. Next time we’ll make an appointment.”

This visit left me with a bad taste in my mouth. What did these two characters want with me? They had struck me as very aggressive, insinuating. Of course I had lied to them: but if I had told them I had seen the bodies, that would have created all kinds of complications. I didn’t have the impression that they suspected me on this point; their suspicion seemed systematic, an occupational trait, probably. I had found their questions about the Moreau legacy unpleasant: they seemed to be suggesting that I might have had a motive, a pecuniary interest, it was ridiculous. Could they possibly suspect me of murder? I tried to remember the conversation, and had to acknowledge that it was possible. I found that frightening, but the mind of a career policeman must be made that way. Another question worried me even more: Why had my sister taken the twins away? What relationship was there between them and her? All that, I must say, troubled me deeply. I found it almost unfair: just at the moment when my life seemed finally to be headed for a kind of equilibrium, a feeling of normality, almost like anyone else’s life, those idiotic cops came to stir up questions, give rise to anxieties, questions without answers. The most logical thing, actually, would have been to call or write to my sister, to ask her what the story was with those twins, and also to be sure, if ever those policemen came to question her, that her story didn’t contradict my own, on the point where I had deemed it necessary to dissimulate part of the truth. Yet, I didn’t really know why, I didn’t do so right away; it’s not that something held me back, but rather that I didn’t want to hurry. Telephoning wasn’t a difficult thing, I could do it when I wanted, no need to rush.

What’s more, I was very busy. My team in Oranienburg, which, under Asbach’s direction, continued to grow, regularly sent me summaries of its research on the foreign workers, what was called the Ausländereinsatz. These workers were divided into a number of categories, based on racial criteria, with different levels of treatment; they also included prisoners of war from Western countries (but not the Soviet KGF, a separate category, completely under control of the OKW). The day after the visit of the two inspectors, I was summoned to the Reichsführer’s office; he was interested in the subject. I gave a rather long, but complete, presentation, for the problem was complex: the Reichsführer listened almost wordlessly, inscrutable beneath his little steel-rimmed glasses. At the same time, I had to prepare Speer’s visit to Mittelbau, and I went to Lichterfelde—after the raids, cruel Berlin tongues called the neighborhood Trichterfelde, the “crater meadow”—to have the project explained to me by Brigadeführer Kammler, the head of Amtsgruppe C (“Construction”) of the WVHA. Kammler, an abrupt, nervous, precise man whose rapid-fire speech and quick gestures masked an inflexible will, spoke to me—and this was the first time I heard something other than rumors about this subject—about the A-4 rocket, a miraculous weapon that according to him would irreversibly change the course of the war as soon as it could be mass-produced. The English had caught wind of its existence and, in August, had bombed the secret installations where it was being developed, on the north of the island of Usedom, where my convalescence had been spent. Three weeks later, the Reichsführer suggested to the Führer and to Speer that the installations be transferred underground and their secrecy guaranteed by using solely concentration camp inmates for their construction. Kammler himself had picked the site, underground galleries in the Harz Mountains, used by the Wehrmacht to store fuel reserves. A company had been formed to manage the project, Mittelwerke GmbH, under the control of Speer’s ministry; the SS, however, maintained complete responsibility for designing the premises as well as for on-site security. “The assembly of rockets has already begun, even though the installations aren’t finished; the Reichsminister should be satisfied.”—“I just hope that the working conditions for the inmates are adequate, Brigadeführer,” I replied. “I know that’s a constant concern of the Reichsminister’s.”—“The conditions are what they are, Obersturmbannführer. It’s war, after all. But I can assure you that the Reichsminister won’t have any reason to complain about the level of productivity. The factory is under my personal control, I myself chose the Kommandant, an efficient man. The RSHA doesn’t give me any problems, either: I sent one of my own men, Dr. Bischoff, to supervise production security and prevent sabotage. Up to now, there haven’t been any problems. Anyway,” he added, “I inspected several KLs with subordinates of Reichsminister Speer’s, in April and May; they didn’t have too many complaints, and Mittelbau is no worse than Auschwitz.”

The visit took place on a Friday in December. It was bitterly cold. Speer was accompanied by specialists from his ministry. His special plane, a Heinkel, took us as far as Nordhausen; there, a delegation from the camp led by Kommandant Förschner welcomed us and escorted us to the site. The road, barred by numerous SS checkpoints, ran alongside the south side of the Harz; Förschner explained to us that the entire mountain chain had been declared a no-entry zone; other underground projects had been launched a little farther north, in Mittelbau satellite camps; in Dora itself, the northern sections of the two tunnels had been allocated for the manufacture of Junker airplane engines. Speer listened to his explanations without saying anything. The road led to a large dirt plaza; on one side were lined up the barracks of the SS guards and of the Kommandantur; opposite, cluttered with piles of construction materials and covered with camouflage nets, recessed beneath a ridge planted with pine trees, gaped the entrance to the first tunnel. We entered it behind Förschner and some engineers from Mittelwerke. Gypsum dust and the acrid smoke of industrial explosives caught my throat; mixed in with them were other indefinable odors, sweet and nauseating, which reminded me of my first camp visits. As we advanced, the Häftlinge, alerted by the Spiess who preceded the delegation, lined up at attention and removed their caps. Most were horribly thin; their heads, balanced precariously on scrawny necks, looked like hideous balls decorated with enormous noses and ears cut out of cardboard; they were set with immense, empty eyes that refused to rest on you. Close to them, the smells I had noticed upon entering became a rank stench that emanated from their dirty clothes, their wounds, their very bodies. Many of Speer’s men, green, were holding handkerchiefs to their faces; Speer kept his hands behind his back and examined everything with a closed, tense look. Connecting the two main tunnels, A and B, transverse galleries were spaced out every twenty-five meters: the first of them revealed rows of bunk beds made of coarse wood, four levels high, from which, under cudgel blows of an SS noncom, there tumbled down to come stand at attention a swarming horde of ragged inmates, most of them naked or almost naked, some with their legs stained with shit. The bare concrete ceilings were sweating with humidity. In front of the bunks, at the intersection of the main tunnel, large metal barrels, cut in half lengthwise and placed on their sides, served as latrines; they were almost overflowing with a yellow, green, brown, stinking liquid. One of Speer’s assistants exclaimed: “But it’s Dante’s Inferno!” Another, standing a little back, was vomiting against the wall. I too felt the old nausea returning, but I held myself in and breathed in long hisses, between my teeth. Speer turned to Förschner: “Do the inmates live here?”—“Yes, Herr Reichsminister.”—“They never go outside?”—“No, Herr Reichsminister.” As we continued advancing, Förschner explained to Speer that he lacked everything and that he was incapable of ensuring the requisite sanitary conditions; epidemics were decimating the inmates. He even showed us a few corpses piled in front of the perpendicular galleries, naked or covered with a loose canvas tarp, human skeletons with ravaged skin. In one of the dormitory-galleries, soup was being served: Speer asked to taste it. He swallowed his spoonful, then had me taste it in turn; I had to force myself not to spit it out; it was a bitter, revolting gruel; it tasted like boiled weeds; even at the bottom of the pot, there was almost nothing solid. We visited the entire length of the tunnel this way, up to the Junker factory, wading through the mud and the refuse, breathing with difficulty, in the midst of thousands of Häftlinge who mechanically presented themselves one after the other, their faces stripped of the slightest expression. I examined their badges: aside from Germans, mostly “greens,” there were “reds” there from every country in Europe, Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Dutchmen, Czechs, Poles, Russians, and even Spaniards, republicans interned in France after their defeat (but of course there were no Jews: at that time, Jewish workers were still forbidden in Germany). In the transverse galleries, after the dormitories, inmates supervised by civil engineers worked on the components and assembly of the rockets; farther on, in a deafening din and in a thick cloud of dust, a veritable ant battalion was digging new galleries and emptying the stones into dump carts pushed by other inmates on hastily installed tracks. As we left, Speer asked to see the Revier; it was an extremely makeshift installation, with room for about forty men at the most. The chief physician showed him the mortality and morbidity statistics: dysentery, typhus, and tuberculosis especially wrought havoc. Outside, in the face of the whole delegation, Speer exploded with a contained but virulent rage: “Obersturmbannführer Förschner! This factory is a scandal! I’ve never seen anything like it. How can you hope to work properly with men in that condition?” Förschner, under the invective, had instinctively stood at attention. “Herr Reichsminister,” he replied, “I’m ready to improve the conditions, but I’m not given the means. I can’t be held responsible.” Speer was white as a sheet. “Very well,” he barked. “I order you to have a camp built immediately, here, outside, with showers and toilets. Have the papers for the allocation of materials drawn up for me immediately and I will sign them before I leave.” Förschner led us to the barracks of the Kommandantur and gave the necessary orders. While Speer talked with his aides and the engineers, I, furious, took Förschner aside: “I asked you expressly in the Reichsführer’s name to make sure the camp was presentable. This is a Schweinerei.” Förschner didn’t let himself get flustered: “Obersturmbannführer, you know as well as I do that an order without the means to carry it out isn’t worth much. I’m sorry, but I have no magic wand. I had the galleries washed this morning, but I couldn’t do anything else. If the Reichsminister provides us with construction materials, so much the better.” Speer had joined us: “I’ll see to it that the camp receives additional rations.” He turned to a civil engineer who was standing next to him: “Sawatsky, it goes without saying that the inmates under your orders will have priority. We cannot demand complex assembly labor from the sick and dying.” The civilian nodded: “Of course, Herr Reichsminister. It’s especially the turnover that’s becoming unmanageable. We have to replace them so often that it’s impossible to train them correctly.” Speer turned to Förschner: “That doesn’t mean that you should neglect the ones who are assigned to the construction of the galleries. You will also increase their rations, insofar as possible. I’ll talk about it to Brigadeführer Kammler.”—“Zu Befehl, Herr Reichsminister,” said Förschner. His expression remained opaque, closed; Sawatsky looked happy. Outside, some of Speer’s men were waiting for us, scribbling in notebooks and greedily breathing in the cold air. I shivered: winter had set in.

In Berlin, I again found myself overwhelmed by the Reichsführer’s requests. I had reported Speer’s visit to him, and he made only one comment: “Reichsminister Speer should know what he wants.” I saw him regularly now to discuss labor questions: he wanted at all costs to increase the quantity of workers available in the camps to supply the SS industries, private enterprises, and especially the new underground construction projects that Kammler wanted to develop. The Gestapo was making more and more arrests, but on the other hand, with the coming of fall and then winter, the mortality rate, which had dropped markedly during the summer, was increasing again, and the Reichsführer wasn’t pleased. Still, when I suggested a series of measures I thought were realistic, that I was planning with my team, he didn’t respond, and the actual measures implemented by Pohl and the IKL seemed random and unpredictable, not corresponding to any plan. Once I seized the occasion of a remark of the Reichsführer’s to criticize what I regarded as arbitrary, unconnected initiatives: “Pohl knows what he’s doing,” he retorted curtly. Soon after, Brandt summoned me and scolded me in a courteous but firm tone: “Listen, Obersturmbannführer, you’re doing very good work, but I’m going to tell you what I’ve already said a hundred times to Brigadeführer Ohlendorf: instead of annoying the Reichsführer with negative, pointless criticisms and complicated questions that he doesn’t even understand, you’d do better to cultivate your relationship with him. Bring him, I don’t know, a medieval treatise on medicinal plants, nicely bound, and talk with him a little about it. He’ll be delighted, and it will allow you to form a bond with him, to make yourself better understood. That will make things a lot easier for you. And also, I’m sorry, but when you present your reports, you’re so cold and haughty it only annoys him even more. That’s not how you’re going to settle things.” He went on a little more in the same vein; I didn’t say anything, I was thinking: he was probably right. “One more piece of advice: you’d do well to get married. Your attitude on the subject is deeply annoying to the Reichsführer.” I stiffened: “Standartenführer, I’ve already explained my reasons to the Reichsführer. If he doesn’t approve of them, he should tell me so himself.” An incongruous thought made me repress a smile. Brandt wasn’t smiling and was staring at me like an owl through his large round glasses. Their lenses reflected my own doubled image; the reflection prevented me from discerning his gaze. “You’re wrong, Obersturmbannführer, you’re wrong. But it’s your choice.”

I resented Brandt’s attitude, it was completely unjustified, in my opinion: he had no business getting involved in my private life that way. My private life, actually, was taking a pleasant turn; and it had been a long time since I had enjoyed myself so much. On Sundays I went to the pool with Helene, sometimes also with Thomas and one of his girlfriends; we’d go out for tea or hot chocolate, then I’d take Helene to the movies, if there was something worth seeing, or else to the concert to hear Karajan or Furtwängler; and we’d have dinner before I took her home. I also saw her from time to time during the week: a few days after my visit to Mittelbau, I had invited her to our fencing hall, at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, where she watched us fence and applauded the thrusts, then, in the company of Thomas, who flirted outrageously with her friend Liselotte, to an Italian restaurant. On December 19, we were together during the great English attack; in the public shelter where we had taken refuge, she sat next to me without saying anything, her shoulder against mine, flinching slightly at the closest explosions. After the raid, I took her to the Esplanade, the only restaurant I found open: sitting opposite me, her long white hands resting on the table, she stared at me silently with her beautiful, deep, dark eyes, a searching, curious, serene gaze. In such moments, I said to myself that if things had been different, I could have married this woman, I could have had children with her as I did much later with another woman who wasn’t her equal. It would certainly not have been done to please Brandt or the Reichsführer, to fulfill a duty or satisfy conventions: it would have been a part of everyday, ordinary life, simple and natural. But my life had taken another path, and it was too late. She too, when she looked at me, must have had similar thoughts, or rather women’s thoughts, different from men’s, in their tonality and color probably more than in their content, difficult to imagine for a man, even me. I pictured them this way: Is it possible I will enter this man’s bed someday, give myself to him? To give oneself, a strange phrase in our language; but the man who doesn’t grasp its full extent should try in turn to let himself be penetrated, it will open his eyes. These thoughts, in general, didn’t cause me any regrets, but rather a bitter feeling that was almost sweet. But sometimes, in the street, without thinking, with a natural gesture, she took my arm, and then, yes, I surprised myself by missing that other life that could have been, if something hadn’t been broken so early. It wasn’t just the question of my sister; it was vaster than that, it was the entire course of events, the wretchedness of the body and of desire, the decisions you make and on which you can’t go back, the very meaning you choose to give this thing that’s called, perhaps wrongly, your life.

It had begun to snow, a warm snow that didn’t stick. Then finally it lasted for a night or two, and gave a brief, strange beauty to the ruins of the city, before it melted and thickened the muck disfiguring the broken streets. With my tall riding boots, I walked through it without paying any attention—an orderly would clean them for me the next day—but Helene wore simple shoes, and when we reached a gray stretch thick with melted snow, I would look for a board I could throw over it, then hold her delicate hand so she could cross; and if even that was impossible, I carried her, light in my arms. On Christmas Eve, Thomas organized a small party in his new house in Dahlem, a luxurious little villa: as usual, he knew how to get by. Schellenberg was there with his wife, along with several other officers; I had invited Hohenegg, but hadn’t been able to locate Osnabrugge, who must have been in Poland still. Thomas seemed to have had his way with Liselotte, Helene’s friend: when she arrived, she kissed him passionately. Helene had put on a new dress, God knows where she had found the cloth, the restrictions were becoming more and more severe, she smiled charmingly and seemed happy. All the men, for once, were in civilian clothes. We had scarcely arrived when the sirens began wailing. Thomas reassured us by explaining that the planes coming from Italy almost never dropped their first bombs before Schöneberg and Tempelhof, and the ones from England passed north of Dahlem. Still, we dimmed the lights; thick black curtains masked the windows. The flak began to boom, Thomas put on a record, furious American jazz, and led Liselotte in a dance. Helene drank white wine and watched them dance; afterward, Thomas put on some slow music and she asked me to dance with her. Above we could hear the squadrons roaring; the flak barked without stopping, the windows trembled, we could scarcely hear the record; but Helene danced as if we were alone in a ballroom, leaning lightly on me, her hand firm in mine. Then she danced with Thomas while I exchanged a toast with Hohenegg. Thomas was right: to the north, we could sense more than hear an immense muffled vibration, but around us nothing fell. I looked at Schellenberg; he had gained weight, his successes didn’t encourage moderation. He was talking pleasantly with his specialists on our setbacks in Italy. Schellenberg, I had finally gathered from the few remarks Thomas sometimes let escape, thought he held the key to Germany’s future; he was convinced that if people listened to him, to him and his indisputable analyses, there would still be time to salvage something from the situation. The mere fact that he talked about salvaging something was enough to make my hackles rise: but apparently he had the Reichsführer’s ear, and I wondered where he might have gotten with his schemes. Once the alert was over, Thomas tried to call the RSHA, but the lines were cut off. “Those bastards did it on purpose to ruin our Christmas,” he said to me. “But we won’t let them.” I looked at Helene: she was sitting next to Liselotte and talking animatedly. “She’s very nice, that girl,” declared Thomas, who had followed my gaze. “Why don’t you marry her?” I smiled: “Thomas, mind your own business.” He shrugged: “At least spread the rumor that you’re engaged. That way Brandt will get off your back.” I had told him about Brandt’s comments. “And you?” I retorted. “You’re a year older than I am. Don’t they bother you?” He laughed: “Me? It’s not the same thing. First of all, my congenital inability to stay more than a month with the same girl is well known. But above all”—he lowered his voice—“keep it to yourself, but I’ve already sent two of them to the Lebensborn. I hear the Reichsführer was delighted.” He went to put another jazz record on; I figured he must help himself from the Gestapo’s stocks of confiscated records. I followed him and asked Helene to dance again. At midnight, Thomas put out all the lights. I heard a girl’s joyful shout, a muffled laugh. Helene was next to me: for a brief instant, I felt her sweet, warm breath on my face, and her lips grazed mine. My heart was pounding. When the light returned, she said to me in a composed, calm way: “I have to go home. I didn’t tell my parents, with the alert they must be worried.” I had taken Piontek’s car. We drove up toward the center of town by the Kurfürstendamm; on our right, fires lit by the bombing were roaring. It had started to snow. Some bombs had fallen on the Tiergarten and on Moabit, but the damage seemed minor compared to the big raids of the previous month. In front of her building, she took my hand and briefly kissed my cheek: “Merry Christmas! See you soon.” I went back to get drunk in Dahlem, and ended the night on the carpet, having ceded the sofa to a secretary upset at having been ousted from the host’s bedroom by Liselotte.

Clemens and Weser came back to see me a few days later, this time having duly made an appointment with Fräulein Praxa, who showed them into my office, rolling her eyes. “We tried to contact your sister,” said Clemens, the tall one, by way of introduction. “But she’s not home.”—“That’s quite possible,” I said. “Her husband is an invalid. She often accompanies him to Switzerland for treatment.”—“We asked the embassy in Berne to try to find her,” Weser said aggressively, swaying his narrow shoulders. “We’d very much like to talk with her.”—“Is it that important?” I asked.—“It’s still that damn business of the little twins,” Clemens ejected with his coarse Berliner’s voice.—“We don’t really understand it,” Weser added in his weaselly way. Clemens took out his notebook and read: “The French police investigated.”—“A little late,” Weser interrupted.—“Yes, but better late than never. Apparently, those twins have been living with your mother since at least 1938, when they began going to school. Your mother introduced them as orphaned great-nephews. And some of her neighbors seem to think they may have arrived earlier, as babies, in 1936 or 1937.”—“It’s quite curious,” Weser said acidly. “You never saw them before?”—“No,” I said curtly. “But there’s nothing odd about that. I never went to my mother’s house.”—“Never?” snorted Clemens. “Never?”—“Never.”—“Except exactly at that time,” Weser spat. “A few hours before her violent death. You see that it’s odd.”—“Meine Herren,” I retorted, “your insinuations are completely inappropriate. I don’t know where you learned your profession, but I find your attitude grotesque. What’s more, you have no authority to investigate me without an order from the SS-Gericht.”—“That’s true,” acknowledged Clemens, “but we’re not investigating you. For now, we’re interviewing you as a witness.”—“Yes,” repeated Weser, “as a witness, that’s all.”—“That’s just to say,” continued Clemens, “that there are a lot of things we don’t understand and that we’d like to understand.”—“For instance, this business with the twins,” added Weser. “Let’s say they are actually great-nephews of your mother’s…”—“We didn’t find any trace of brothers or sisters, but let’s say so,” interrupted Clemens.—“Hey, you don’t know, do you?” asked Weser.—“What?”—“If your mother had a brother or a sister?”—“I heard talk of a brother, but I never saw him. We left Alsace in 1918, and after that, to my knowledge, my mother had no more contact with her family in France.”—“So let’s say,” Weser went on, “that they are in fact great-nephews. We haven’t found any paper that proves it, no birth certificates, nothing.”—“And your sister,” rapped out Clemens, “showed no papers when she took them with her.”—Weser smiled cunningly: “For us, these are very important potential witnesses who have disappeared.”—“We don’t know where,” grumbled Clemens. “It’s unacceptable that the French police let them slip away like that.”—“Yes,” said Weser, looking at him, “but what’s done is done. No use going back over it.”—Clemens went on without stopping: “Still, afterward, we’re the ones who get stuck with all the problems.”—“In short,” Weser said to me, “if you talk to her, ask her to contact us. Your sister, I mean.” I nodded. They seemed to have nothing more to say, and I ended the interview. I had never tried to reach my sister; it was beginning to become important, for if they found her and her story contradicted mine, their suspicions would be exacerbated; they would even be, I thought with horror, capable of accusing me. But where could I find her? Thomas, I said to myself, must have contacts in Switzerland, he could ask Schellenberg. I had to do something, this situation was becoming ridiculous. And the question of the twins was worrisome.

Three days before New Year’s Day there was a heavy snow, and this time the snow stuck. Inspired by his Christmas party success, Thomas decided to re-invite everyone: “Might as well take advantage of this shack before it burns down too.” I asked Helene to tell her parents she’d come home late, and it was a really wonderful party. A little before midnight, the whole gang armed itself with Champagne and baskets of Dutch oysters and set out on foot for the Grunewald. Beneath the trees, the snow lay virgin and pure; the sky was clear, lit by an almost full moon, which shed a bluish light on the white expanses. In a clearing, Thomas cracked open the Champagne—he had supplied himself with a real cavalry saber, taken down from the wall of our weapons hall—and the less clumsy ones struggled to open the oysters, a delicate and dangerous art for those who don’t have the knack. At midnight, instead of fireworks, the Luftwaffe artillerymen lit their searchlights, launched flares, and shot off some .88-millimeter rounds. This time, Helene kissed me outright, not for long, but a strong, happy kiss that sent a rush of fear and pleasure through my limbs. Surprising, I said to myself as I drank to hide my confusion, I who thought no sensation was foreign to me, now a woman’s kiss overwhelms me. The others were laughing, throwing snowballs at each other and swallowing oysters from the shell. Hohenegg, who kept a moth-eaten shapka planted on his bald, oval head, had turned out to be the most skillful of the shuckers: “That or a thorax, they’re pretty much the same thing,” he laughed. Schellenberg had gashed the entire base of his thumb, and was bleeding quietly onto the snow, drinking Champagne, without anyone thinking to bandage it. Seized with happiness, I began running around and throwing snowballs too; the more we drank, the more frenzied the game became—we tackled one another by the legs, as in rugby, rammed fistfuls of snow down each other’s necks, our coats were soaking, but we didn’t feel the cold. I pushed Helene into the powdery snow, stumbled, and collapsed next to her; lying on her back, her arms stretched out in the snow, she laughed; when she fell, her long skirt had ridden up, and without thinking, I rested my hand on her bare knee, protected only by a stocking. She turned her head to me and looked at me, still laughing. Then I removed my hand and helped her get up. We didn’t go back until after we’d emptied the last bottle; we had to hold back Schellenberg, who wanted to shoot at the empties; walking in the snow, Helene held my arm. In the house, Thomas gallantly gave up his bedroom as well as the guest room to the tired girls, who fell asleep still dressed, three to a bed. I ended the night playing chess and discussing Augustine’s Trinity with Hohenegg, who had dunked his head in cold water and was drinking tea. So began the year 1944.

Speer hadn’t gotten back in touch with me since the visit to Mittelbau; in the beginning of January, he called to wish me a happy New Year and to ask me a favor. His ministry had submitted a request to the RSHA to forego deportation of a few Jews from Amsterdam, specialists in metals purchasing with precious contacts in neutral countries; the RSHA had refused the request, pleading the deterioration of the situation in Holland and the need to appear especially severe there. “It’s ridiculous,” Speer said to me in a voice heavy with fatigue. “What risk can three Jews dealing in metals pose to Germany? Their services are precious to us right now.” I asked him to send me a copy of the correspondence, promising to do my best. The refusal letter from the RSHA was signed by Müller but bore the dictation mark IV B 4a. I telephoned Eichmann and began by wishing him a happy New Year. “Thank you, Obersturmbannführer,” he said with his curious blend of Austrian and Berlin accents. “Congratulations on your promotion, by the way.” Then I explained Speer’s problem to him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it myself,” said Eichmann. “It must have been Hauptsturmführer Moes, he’s in charge of individual cases. But of course he’s right. Do you know how many requests we receive like that? If we said yes every time, we might as well just close up shop, we couldn’t touch a single Jew.”—“I understand, Obersturmbannführer. But this is a request from the Minister of Armaments and War Production in person.”—“Yeah. It must be their guy in Holland who’s a little overeager, and then little by little it reached the Minister. But it’s all just about interdepartmental rivalry. No, you know, we can’t agree. What’s more, the situation in Holland is rotten. There are all sorts of groups wandering around free, it just won’t do.” I insisted some more, but Eichmann was obstinate. “No. If we agree, you know, people will just say again that besides the Führer there isn’t a single anti-Semite of conviction left among the Germans. It’s impossible.”

What could he have meant by that? In any case, Eichmann couldn’t decide on his own, and he knew it. “Listen, send it to us in writing,” he ended up saying grudgingly. I decided to write directly to Müller, but Müller told me the same thing: they couldn’t make any exceptions. I was hesitant to ask the Reichsführer; I decided to contact Speer again, to see how much he really needed these Jews. But at the ministry they told me he was on sick leave. I made inquiries: he had been hospitalized in Hohenlychen, the SS hospital where I had been treated after Stalingrad. I found a bouquet of flowers and went to see him. He had requisitioned an entire suite in the private wing and had installed his personal secretary and some assistants there. The secretary told me that an old inflammation of the knee had flared up after a Christmas trip to Lapland; his condition was worsening, Dr. Gebhardt, the famous knee specialist, thought it was a rheumatoid inflammation. I found Speer in a wretched mood: “Obersturmbannführer, it’s you. Happy New Year. So?” I explained to him that the RSHA was maintaining its position; possibly, I suggested, if he saw the Reichsführer, he could have a word with him about it. “I think the Reichsführer has other fish to fry,” he replied abruptly. “So do I. I have to run my ministry from here, as you can see. If you can’t resolve the matter yourself, drop it.” I stayed a few more minutes, then withdrew: I could feel I was in the way.

His condition did in fact deteriorate rapidly; when I called back a few days later to ask after him, his secretary informed me that he wasn’t taking any phone calls. I made a few calls: apparently he was in a coma, close to death. I found it strange that an inflammation of the knee, even a rheumatoid one, could reach that point. Hohenegg, to whom I talked about it, had no opinion. “But if he passes away,” he added, “and if they let me do an autopsy, I’ll tell you what he had.” I too had other fish to fry. The night of January 30, the English inflicted on us their worst air raid since November; I lost my windows again, and part of my balcony collapsed. The next day, Brandt summoned me and informed me, amiably, that the SS-Gericht had asked the Reichsführer for permission to investigate me in connection with my mother’s murder. I reddened and leaped out of my seat: “Standartenführer! That business is a disgrace born from the sick minds of careerist policemen. I’m willing to accept an investigation to clear my name of all suspicion. But in that case, I ask to be put on leave until I’m found innocent. It would be inappropriate for the Reichsführer to keep a man suspected of such a horror in his personal staff.”—“Calm down, Obersturmbannführer. No decision has been made yet. Tell me what happened instead.” I sat down and recounted the events, sticking to the version I had given the policemen. “It’s my visit to Antibes that’s made them crazy. It’s true that my mother and I had been on bad terms for a long time. But you know what kind of wound I received in Stalingrad. Being so close to death makes you think: I said to myself that we had to settle things between us once and for all. Unfortunately she’s the one who died, in a horrible, unexpected way.”—“And how do you think it happened?”—“I have no idea, Standartenführer. I began working for the Reichsführer soon afterward, and I haven’t returned there. My sister, who went to the funeral, mentioned terrorists, a settling of accounts; my stepfather supplied a number of items to the Wehrmacht.”—“That’s unfortunately entirely possible. This sort of thing is happening more and more often, in France.” He pinched his lips and tilted his head, making the light play on his glasses. “Listen, I think the Reichsführer will want to talk with you before he makes a decision. In the meantime, allow me to suggest that you visit the judge who wrote the request. It’s Judge Baumann, of the Berlin SS and Police Court. He’s a perfectly honorable man: if you really are the victim of special malice, maybe you can convince him of that yourself.”

I immediately made an appointment with Judge Baumann. He received me in his office at court: a jurist in a Standartenführer’s uniform, getting on in years, with a square face and a crooked nose, and a fighter’s look. I had put on my best uniform and all my medals. After I had saluted him, he asked me to sit down. “Thank you for receiving me, Herr Richter,” I said, using the customary address instead of his SS rank. “Not at all, Obersturmbannführer. It’s the least I could do.” He opened a folder on his desk. “I asked for your personal file. I hope you don’t mind.”—“Not at all, Herr Richter. Allow me to tell you what I plan on telling the Reichsführer: I regard these accusations, which touch me in such a personal question, hateful. I am ready to cooperate with you in every way possible so they can be completely refuted.” Baumann gave a discreet cough: “You understand that I haven’t yet ordered an investigation. I can’t do so without the Reichsführer’s agreement. The case file I have is very meager. I made the request based on an appeal from the Kripo, which states they have convincing information that their investigators would like to look into.”—“Herr Richter, I spoke twice with those investigators. All they gave me by way of information was groundless insinuations without proof, some—excuse me—delirious fabrication of their own fantasy.”—“That is possible,” he said pleasantly. “I see here that you attended the best universities. If you had gone on with law, we might have ended up colleagues. I know Dr. Jessen very well, your old professor. A very good jurist.” He went on leafing through the file. “Excuse me, but did your father fight with the Freikorps Rossbach, in Courland? I remember an officer named Aue.” He said the Christian name. My heart began beating violently. “That is my father’s name, Herr Richter. But I don’t know anything about what you ask. My father disappeared in 1921, and I haven’t heard anything about him since. It’s possible it’s the same man. Do you know what became of him?”—“Unfortunately not. I lost sight of him during the retreat, in December of ’nineteen. He was still alive, at the time. I also heard that he had taken part in the Kapp putsch. Many Baltikumer were there.” He thought. “You could do some research. There are still Freikorps veterans’ associations.”—“Yes, Herr Richter. That’s an excellent idea.” He coughed again and settled into his armchair. “Good. Let’s return, if you don’t mind, to your affair. What can you tell me about it?” I gave him the same narrative I had given Brandt. “It’s a horrible business,” he said at the end. “You must have been extremely upset.”—“Of course, Herr Richter. And I was even more so by the accusations of those two defenders of the public order who have never, I am sure, spent a day at the front and who allow themselves to slander the name of an SS officer.” Baumann scratched his chin: “I can understand how wounding that is for you, Obersturmbannführer. But perhaps the best solution would be to shed the full light of day on the affair.”—“I have nothing to fear, Herr Richter. I will accept the decision of the Reichsführer.”—“You are right.” He got up and accompanied me to the door. “I still have some old photographs from Courland. If you like, I can take a look and see if there’s one of that Aue.”—“Herr Richter, I’d be delighted.” In the hallway he shook my hand. “Don’t worry about all this, Obersturmbannführer. Heil Hitler!” My interview with the Reichsführer took place the next day and was brief and conclusive. “What is this ridiculous story, Obersturmbannführer?”—“They’re accusing me of being a murderer, my Reichsführer. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.” I briefly explained the circumstances to him. Himmler quickly made up his mind: “Obersturmbannführer, I’m beginning to know you. You have your faults: you are, excuse me for saying so, stubborn and sometimes pedantic. But I don’t see the slightest trace of a moral defect in you. Racially, you are a perfect Nordic specimen, with perhaps just a touch of alpine blood. Only the racially degenerate nations, Poles, Gypsies, can commit matricide. Or else a hot-blooded Italian, during a quarrel, not in cold blood. No, it’s ridiculous. The Kripo is completely lacking in discernment. I’ll have to give instructions to Gruppenführer Nebe to have his men trained in racial analysis, they’ll waste much less time that way. Of course I won’t authorize the investigation. That’s all we need.”

Baumann called me a few days later. It must have been around mid-February, since I remember it was right after the massive bombing in which the Bristol Hotel was hit during an official banquet: some sixty people died, crushed under the rubble, including a number of well-known generals. Baumann seemed in a good mood and congratulated me warmly. “Personally,” his voice said at the other end of the line, “I thought the whole business was ridiculous. I’m happy for you that the Reichsführer settled it. It will avoid problems.” As for the photographs, he had found one showing Aue, but blurred and barely visible; he wasn’t even sure it was he, but he promised to have a copy of it made and to send it to me.

The only people who were unhappy with the Reichsführer’s decision were Clemens and Weser. I found them one night in the street in front of the SS-Haus, hands in the pockets of their long coats, their shoulders and hats covered with fine snow. “Well,” I said mockingly, “Laurel and Hardy. What brings you here?” This time, they didn’t salute me. Weser replied: “We wanted to say hello to you, Obersturmbannführer. But your secretary didn’t want to give us an appointment.” I didn’t react to the omission of the Herr. “She was entirely right,” I said haughtily. “I think we have nothing more to say to each other.”—“Well, see, Obersturmbannführer,” Clemens grumbled, “we think we do, actually.”—“In that case, meine Herren, I suggest you go ask for an authorization from Judge Baumann.” Weser shook his head: “We realize, Obersturmbannführer, that Judge Baumann will say no. We realize that you are, so to speak, an untouchable.”—“But still,” Clemens went on, the steam from his breath masking his fat pug-nosed face, “it’s not normal, Obersturmbannführer, you can see that. There should be some justice, all the same.”—“I agree with you completely. But still, your insane calumnies have nothing to do with justice.”—“Calumnies, Obersturmbannführer?” Weser rapped out, raising his eyebrows. “Calumnies? Are you so sure? In my opinion, if Judge Baumann had really read the file, he’d be less certain than you.”—“Yeah,” said Clemens. “For instance, he could have wondered about the clothes.”—“The clothes? What clothes are you talking about?” Weser replied in his place: “Clothes the French police found in the bathtub, on the second floor. Civilian clothes…” He turned to Clemens: “Notebook.” Clemens pulled the notebook out of an inner pocket and handed it to him. Weser leafed through it: “Oh yes, here it is: clothing splattered with blood. Splattered. That’s the word I was looking for.”—“It means ‘soaked,’” Clemens explained.—“The Obersturmbannführer knows what it means, Clemens,” Weser grunted. “The Obersturmbannführer is an educated man. He has a good vocabulary.” He dove back into the notebook. “Civilian clothing, then, splattered, thrown into the bathtub. There was also blood on the tile floor, on the walls, in the sink, on the towels. And downstairs, in the living room and the entrance, there were traces of footsteps pretty much everywhere, because of the blood. There were prints of shoes, we found the shoes with the clothes, but there were also prints of boots. Heavy boots.”—“Well,” I said, shrugging, “the murderer changed before he left, to avoid attracting attention.”—“You see, Clemens, when I tell you that the Obersturmbannführer is an intelligent man. You should listen to me.” He turned to me and looked at me under his hat. “Those clothes were all of German make, Obersturmbannführer.” He leafed again through the notebook: “A brown two-piece suit, wool, good quality, label of a German tailor. A white shirt, German make. A silk tie, German make, a pair of cotton socks, German make, a pair of underwear, German make. A pair of brown leather town shoes, size forty-two, German make.” He raised his eyes to me: “What’s your shoe size, Obersturmbannführer? If you allow me the question. What’s your suit size?” I smiled; “Gentlemen, I don’t know what godforsaken hole you crawled out of, but I advise you to go back to it on the double. Vermin aren’t allowed to remain in Germany anymore.” Clemens frowned: “Say, Weser, he’s insulting us, isn’t he?”—“Yes. He’s insulting us. He’s threatening us too. Actually, you might be right. He might be less intelligent than he seems, this Obersturmbannführer.” Weser put a finger on his hat: “Good night, Obersturmbannführer. See you soon, maybe.”

I watched them walk away under the snow toward the Zimmerstrasse. Thomas, whom I had come to meet, had joined me. “Who’s that?” he said, motioning with his head at the two silhouettes.—“Pains in the ass. Lunatics. Couldn’t you have them put into a concentration camp, to calm them down?” He shrugged: “If you have a valid reason, it’s possible. Shall we go eat?” Thomas, in fact, took hardly any interest in my problems; but he was very interested in Speer’s. “Things are hopping over there,” he said to me at the restaurant. “At the OT too. It’s very hard to follow. But obviously some people see his hospitalization as an opportunity.”—“An opportunity?”—“To replace him. Speer has made himself a lot of enemies. Bormann is against him, Sauckel too, all the Gauleiters, except Kaufmann and maybe Hanke.”—“And the Reichsführer?”—“The Reichsführer more or less supported him up to now. But that could change.”—“I have to confess that I don’t really understand the sense of all these intrigues,” I said slowly. “You just have to look at the numbers: without Speer, we’d probably already have lost the war. Now the situation is clearly critical. All of Germany should be united to confront this peril.” Thomas smiled: “You really still are an idealist. That’s fine! But most of the Gauleiters don’t see further than their own personal interests, or those of their Gau.”—“Well, instead of opposing Speer’s efforts to increase production, they’d do better to remember that if we lose, they too will all end up at the end of a rope. I’d call that their personal interest, wouldn’t you?”—“Certainly. But you must see that there’s something else in all that. There’s also a question of political vision. Schellenberg’s diagnosis isn’t accepted by everyone, nor are the solutions he recommends.” Now we’ve reached the crucial point, I said to myself. I lit a cigarette. “And what is your friend Schellenberg’s diagnosis? And the solutions?” Thomas looked around him. For the first time I could remember, he looked vaguely worried. “Schellenberg thinks that if we continue on like this, the war is lost, whatever Speer’s industrial prowess may be. He thinks the only viable solution is a separate peace with the West.”—“And you? What do you think?” He thought: “He isn’t wrong. I’m beginning to get into trouble at the Staatspolizei, among certain circles, because of this business. Schellenberg has the Reichsführer’s ear, but he hasn’t convinced him yet. And a lot of other people don’t agree, such as Müller and Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner is trying to move closer to Bormann. If he succeeds, he could pose problems for the Reichsführer. At that level, Speer is a secondary problem.”—“I’m not saying Schellenberg is right. But what sort of solution do the others envisage? Given the industrial potential of the Americans, no matter what Speer does, time is against us.”—“I don’t know,” Thomas said dreamily. “I imagine they believe in the miracle weapons. You saw them. What do you think of them?” I shrugged: “I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re worth.” The food arrived and conversation turned to other things. During dessert, though, Thomas reverted to Bormann, with a mischievous smile. “You know, Kaltenbrunner is putting together a file on Bormann. I’m handling part of it for him.”—“On Bormann? You just told me he wanted to move closer to him.”—“That’s not a reason. Bormann has files on everyone, on the Reichsführer, on Speer, on Kaltenbrunner, even on you possibly.” He had put a toothpick in his mouth and was rolling it around on his tongue. “So, what I wanted to tell you…It’s between us, all right? Seriously…so Kaltenbrunner, then, has intercepted quite a few letters between Bormann and his wife. And we found some real gems there. Worthy of an anthology.” He leaned forward, looking cheeky. “Bormann was after some little actress. You know how hot-blooded he is, the top secretary-stud of the Reich. Schellenberg calls him The Typist Fucker. Well, he got her. But the great thing is that he wrote about it to his wife, who is Buch’s daughter, you know, the head of the Party Court? She’s already given him nine or ten kids, I’ve lost count. And she answers, basically: That’s fine, I’m not angry, I’m not jealous. And she suggests he bring the girl home. And then she writes: Given the terrible decline in child production caused by this war, we will work out a system of motherhood by shifts, so that you will always have a wife who is usable.” Thomas paused, smiling, while I burst out laughing: “No kidding! She really wrote that?”—“I swear it. A wife who is usable. Can you believe it?” He was laughing too. “And Bormann, do you know what he answered?” I asked.—“Oh, he congratulated her, of course. Then he fed her some ideological platitudes. I think he called her a pure child of National Socialism. But it’s obvious that he was saying that to make her happy. Bormann doesn’t believe in anything. Aside from the absolute elimination of anything that could come between him and the Führer.” I looked at him, mocking: “And you, what do you believe in?” I wasn’t disappointed by his answer. Straightening up on his banquette, he declared: “To quote a passage written by our illustrious Minister of Propaganda in his youth: The important thing is not so much what one believes; the important thing is to believe.” I smiled; Thomas sometimes impressed me. I said so to him: “Thomas, you impress me.”—“What do you expect? I’m not satisfied with stagnating in back offices. I’m a real National Socialist, I am. And Bormann too, in his own way. Your Speer, I’m not so sure. He has talent, but I don’t think he’s very devoted to the regime he’s serving.” I smiled again, thinking about Schellenberg. Thomas went on: “The more difficult things become, the more we’ll be able to count only on the real National Socialists. The rats are all going to start to jump ship. You’ll see.”

In fact, deep in the hold of the Reich, the rats were getting agitated, squealing, swarming, bristling with a formidable anxiety. Ever since Italy’s defection, tensions with our other allies let networks of fine cracks appear on the surface of our relations. Each, in his own way, was beginning to look for a way out, and that way was not German. Schellenberg, according to Thomas, believed the Romanians were negotiating with the Soviets in Stockholm. But mostly people talked about the Hungarians. Russian forces had taken Lutsk and Rovno; if Galicia fell into their hands, they would find themselves at Hungary’s gates. For more than a year, in diplomatic circles, Prime Minister Kállay had conscientiously been forging for himself a reputation as the worst friend of Germany. The Hungarian attitude on the Jewish question also posed problems: not only did they not want to go beyond a discriminatory legislation that was, given the circumstances, particularly inadequate—the Jews of Hungary maintained important positions in industry; and half-Jews, or men married to Jews, in government—but, still having a considerable supply of Jewish labor, much of it highly skilled, they refused all German requests to make part of this force available for the war effort. Already in the beginning of February, during conferences involving experts from different departments, these questions were beginning to be discussed: I sometimes attended them myself or sent one of my specialists. The RSHA advocated a change of regime; my participation was limited to studies on the possible employment of Hungarian Jewish workers in case the situation evolved favorably. Within that framework, I held a series of consultations with Speer’s collaborators. But their positions were often strangely contradictory and hard to reconcile. Speer himself remained inaccessible; he was said to be in critical condition. It was rather disconcerting: I felt as if I were making plans in the void, accumulating studies that were worth scarcely more than pieces of fiction. Yet my office was filling out: I now had three specialist officers, and Brandt had promised me a fourth; but the awkwardness of my position made itself felt; to drive my suggestions forward, I had little support, neither from the RSHA, despite my connections at the SD, nor from the WVHA, aside from Maurer sometimes, when it suited him.

In the beginning of March, things began to speed up, but not to get any clearer. Speer, I had learned from a phone call from Thomas at the end of February, had pulled through and, even though he was still in Hohenlychen for now, was slowly resuming control of his ministry. Together, with Field Marshall Milch, he had decided to set up a Jägerstab, a special staff to coordinate the production of fighter planes; from a certain point of view, it was a great step forward toward the consolidation of the last sector of war production that still escaped his ministry; on the other hand, intrigues were proliferating, it was said that Göring had opposed the creation of the Jägerstab, that Saur, Speer’s deputy appointed to head it, was not the person he would have chosen, and other things besides. What’s more, the men in Speer’s ministry were now openly discussing a fabulous, outlandish idea: burying the entire production of planes underground to shelter it from the Anglo-American bombers. That would involve the construction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of underground workshops. Kammler, they said, passionately supported this project, and his offices had already almost completed the necessary studies: it was clear to everyone that in the present state of affairs, only the SS could carry out such a mad concept successfully. But it greatly exceeded the capacities of the labor available: new sources had to be found, and in the present situation—especially since the agreement between Speer and Minister Bichelonne forbade any more siphoning off of French labor—only Hungary was left. The resolution of the Hungarian problem, then, was taking on new urgency. Speer’s and Kammler’s engineers, gradually, were already integrating the Hungarian Jews into their calculations and plans, although no agreement with the Kállay government had been achieved yet. At the RSHA, they were studying alternative solutions now: the details I had were sketchy, but Thomas sometimes informed me of the evolution of the plans, so that I could adjust my own. Schellenberg was closely involved in these projects. In February, a shady currency traffic affair with Switzerland had led to the fall of Admiral Canaris; the entire Abwehr had then been incorporated into the RSHA, fusing with the Amt VI to form an Amt Mil under the control of Schellenberg, who now thus headed all the foreign intelligence services of the Reich. He didn’t have much time to exploit this position: the career officers of the Abwehr weren’t particularly fond of the SS, and his control over them was far from being assured. Hungary, from this perspective, would allow him to test the limits of his new tool. As for labor, a change of policy would open up considerable prospects: the optimists spoke of four hundred thousand workers available and easy to mobilize, most of whom were already skilled workers or specialists. Given our needs, that would represent a considerable contribution. But their allocation, I saw already, would be the object of fierce controversy: against Kammler and Saur, I heard a number of experts, sober, clear-headed men, tell me that the concept of underground factories, tempting as it might sound, was illusory, for they would never be ready soon enough to change the course of events; and in the meantime, it would represent an inadmissible waste of labor, workers who would be much more useful, trained in brigades, to repair the factories that had been hit, to construct housing for our workers or the homeless, or to help decentralize certain vital industries. Speer, according to these men, was also of that opinion; but I no longer had access to Speer at the time. For my own part, these arguments seemed sensible to me, yet to the tell the truth, it didn’t really concern me.

At bottom, the more I managed to observe clearly the maelstrom of intrigues in the high spheres of government, the less interested I was in taking part in them. Before reaching my present position, I had, naïvely no doubt, thought that major decisions were made on the basis of ideological correctness and rationality. I now saw that, even if that remained partially true, many other factors were involved, conflicts of bureaucratic precedence, special interests, or the personal ambition of some. The Führer, of course, couldn’t settle all questions himself; and his intervention aside, a large part of the mechanisms to achieve consensus seemed distorted, even warped. Thomas, in these situations, was like a fish in water; but I felt ill at ease, and not only because I lacked talent for intrigue. It had always seemed to me that these lines of Coventry Patmore would be borne out: The truth is great, and shall prevail, / When none cares whether it prevail or not; and that National Socialism could be nothing but the common search for this truth, in good faith. For me it was all the more necessary since the circumstances of my troubled life, divided between two countries, placed me apart from other men: I too wanted to bear my stone to the common edifice, I too wanted to be able to feel a part of the whole. Alas, in our National Socialist State, and especially outside the circles of the SD, few people thought as I did. In this sense, I could admire the brutal frankness of an Eichmann: he had his own idea—about National Socialism, about his own place, and about what was to be done—and he stood by this idea, he put all his talent and stubbornness at its service, and so long as his superiors confirmed him in this idea, it was the right one, and Eichmann remained a happy man, sure of himself, leading his office with a firm hand. That was far from being my case. My misfortune, perhaps, came from the fact that they had assigned me to tasks that did not correspond to my natural inclination. Ever since Russia, already, I felt out of place, capable of doing what was asked of me, but as if I were limited in terms of initiative, for I had indeed studied these tasks—first police-related and then economic—and mastered them, but I hadn’t yet succeeded in convincing myself of their rightness, I couldn’t manage fully to grasp the profound necessity that guided them, and so find my path with the precision and sureness of a sleepwalker, as did the Führer and so many of my colleagues and comrades who were more gifted than I. Could there have been another realm of activity that might have agreed with me better, where I would have felt more at home? There might have been, but it’s hard to say, for it didn’t happen, and in the end, the only thing that counts is what was, and not what could have been. From the very beginning, things weren’t as I would have liked them: I had resigned myself to that a long time ago (yet at the same time, it seems to me, I never accepted things as they are, so wrong and so bad; at the most, I finally came to acknowledge my powerlessness to change them). It is also true that I have changed. When I was young, I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what it should be and what it actually was, and about my own place in that world; and with all the madness and the arrogance of that youth, I had thought it would always be so; that the attitude induced by my analysis would never change; but I had forgotten, or rather I did not yet know, the force of time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological confusion, my inability to take a clear position on the questions I was dealing with, and to hold to it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground away from under my feet. Such a fatigue has no end, only death can put an end to it, it still lasts today, and for me it will always last.

I never spoke of these things with Helene. When I saw her, in the evenings or on Sundays, we chatted about current events, the hardships of life, the bombings, or else about art, literature, cinema. At times I spoke to her about my childhood, my life; but I didn’t talk about everything—I avoided the distressing, difficult things. Sometimes I was tempted to talk to her more openly: but something stopped me. Why? I don’t know. You might say I was afraid of shocking her, of offending her. But it wasn’t that. I still didn’t know very much about this woman, at bottom, just enough to understand that she must have known how to listen, to listen without judging (writing that now, I am thinking of the personal failings of my life; what her reaction might have been in learning the whole extent and implications of my work, I had no way at the time of telling, but in any case, talking about that was out of question, because of the rule of secrecy first of all, but also by a tacit agreement between us, I think, a kind of “tact” also). So what blocked the words in my throat when, at night after dinner, in a fit of fatigue and sadness, they began to rise up? Fear, not of her reaction but simply of laying myself bare? Or else simply fear of letting her come even closer to me than she already had and than I had let her, without even wanting to? For it was becoming clear that if our relationship remained that of good but new friends, in her, slowly, something was happening, the thought of the bed and maybe something else besides. Sometimes that made me sad; I felt overwhelmed by my powerlessness to offer her anything, or even to accept what she had to offer me: she looked at me with that long, patient gaze that so impressed me, and I said to myself, with a violence that increased with each thought, At night, when you go to bed, you think of me, maybe you touch your body, your breasts, thinking about me, you place your hand between your legs thinking about me, maybe you sink into the thought of me, and I, I love only one person, the very one I cannot have, the thought of whom never releases me and leaves my head only to seep into my bones, the one who will always be there between the world and me and thus between you and me, the one whose kisses will always mock yours, the one whose very marriage makes it so that I can never marry you except to try to feel what she feels in marriage, the one whose simple existence makes it so that you will never completely exist for me, and for the rest—for the rest exists too—I still prefer having my ass drilled by unknown boys, paid if necessary, it brings me closer to her, in my own way, and I still prefer fear and emptiness and the sterility of my thinking, than to give way to weakness.

The plans for Hungary were taking shape; in the beginning of March, the Reichsführer summoned me. The day before, the Americans had launched their first daytime raid on Berlin; it was a very small raid, there were just thirty or so bombers, and Goebbels’s press had crowed about the minimal damage, but these bombers, for the first time, came accompanied by long-range fighter planes, a new weapon that was terrifying in its implications, since our own fighter planes had been driven back with losses, and you had to be a fool not to understand that this raid was just a test, a successful test, and that from then on there would be no more respite, neither by day nor on nights with a full moon, and that the front was everywhere now, all the time. The failure of our Luftwaffe, incapable of mounting an effective counterattack, was complete. This analysis was confirmed for me by the Reichsführer’s dry, precise statements: “The situation in Hungary,” he informed me without any further details, “will soon rapidly evolve. The Führer has decided to intervene, if necessary. New opportunities will arise, which we must seize vigorously. One of these opportunities concerns the Jewish question. At the right time, Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner will send his men. They’ll know what they have to do and you are not to get involved in that. But I want you to go with them to assert the interests of the Arbeitseinsatz. Gruppenführer Kammler”—Kammler had just been promoted at the end of January—“will need men, a great many men. The Anglo-Americans are innovating”—he pointed at the sky—“and we have to react quickly. The RSHA must take this into account. I have given instructions concerning this to Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, but I want you to make sure they’re rigorously applied by his specialists. More than ever, the Jews owe us their labor force. Is that clear?” Yes, it was. Brandt, after this meeting, filled me in on the details: the special intervention group would be headed by Eichmann, who would more or less have carte blanche as regards the settlement of this question; as soon as the Hungarians had accepted the principle and their collaboration was assured, the Jews would be directed to Auschwitz, which would serve as a sorting center; from there, all those who were fit for work would be allocated as needed. At each stage, the number of potential workers had to be maximized.

A new round of preparatory conferences took place at the RSHA, much more focused than those of the month before; soon only the date had yet to be decided. Excitement became palpable; for the first time in a long time, the officials concerned had the clear feeling of regaining initiative. I saw Eichmann again several times, at these conferences and in private. He assured me that the Reichsführer’s instructions had been perfectly understood. “I’m happy you’re the one who’s taking care of this aspect of the question,” he said to me, chewing the inside of his left cheek. “With you, we can work, if you permit me to say so. Which isn’t the case with everyone.” The question of the air war dominated everyone’s thoughts. Two days after the first raid, the Americans sent more than 800 bombers, protected by nearly 650 of their new fighter planes, to strike Berlin at lunchtime. Thanks to bad weather, the bombing lacked precision and the damage was limited; what’s more, our fighter planes and flak shot down 80 enemy aircraft, a record; but these fighter planes were heavy and ill-adapted against the new Mustangs, and our own losses came to 66 aircraft, a catastrophe, with the dead pilots being even harder to replace than the planes. Not discouraged in the least, the Americans returned for several days running; each time, the population spent hours in shelters, all work was interrupted; at night, the English sent their Mosquitos, which didn’t do much damage but again forced the people down into the shelters, ruining their sleep, sapping their strength. Human losses fortunately remained lower than in November: Goebbels had decided to evacuate a large part of the city center, and most of the office employees, now, came in to work every day from the suburbs; but that involved hours of exhausting commutes. The quality of work suffered: when preparing correspondence, our Berlin specialists, insomniac now, made more and more mistakes, I had to have the letters retyped three, five times before I could send them.

One evening, I was invited to Gruppenführer Müller’s place. The invitation was passed on to me, after an air-raid alert, by Eichmann, in whose offices an important planning meeting was taking place that day. “Every Thursday,” he came over to tell me, “the Amtschef likes to gather some of his specialists together at his place, to talk things over. He would be delighted if you could come.” I would have to cancel my fencing session, but I agreed: I scarcely knew Müller, and it would be interesting to see him close up. Müller lived in an SS apartment a little ways out of town, spared by the bombs. A rather self-effacing woman with a bun and eyes set close together opened the door to me; I thought she might be a maid, but she was in fact Frau Müller. She was the only woman present. Müller himself was in civilian clothes; and instead of returning my salute, he shook my hand with his massive grip, with thick, square-tipped fingers; apart from this demonstration of familiarity, though, the ambiance was much less gemütlich than at Eichmann’s. Eichmann had also donned civilian clothes, but most of the officers were in uniform, like me. Müller, a rather short-legged, thickset man with the square skull of a farmer, yet nicely, almost elegantly dressed, wore a knitted cardigan over a silk open-collared shirt. He poured me some Cognac and introduced me to the other guests, almost of them Gruppenleiter or Referenten from Amt IV: I remember two men from IV D, who were in charge of Gestapo services in occupied countries, and a certain Regierungsrat Berndorff, who headed the Schutzhaftreferat. There was also an officer from the Kripo, and Litzenberg, a colleague of Thomas’s. Thomas himself, casually sporting his new Standartenführer stripes, arrived a little late and was cordially welcomed by Müller. The conversation dealt mostly with the Hungarian problem: the RSHA had already identified Magyars ready to cooperate with Germany; the main question was to find out how the Führer would bring about Kállay’s fall. When Müller wasn’t taking part in the conversation, he surveyed his guests with his restless, mobile, penetrating little eyes. Then he spoke in curt, simple sentences, drawled in a coarse Bavarian accent with a show of cordiality that did little to mask his innate coldness. From time to time, though, he let down his guard. With Thomas and Dr. Frey, a former member of the SD who, like Thomas, had gone on to the Staatspolizei, I had started discussing the intellectual origins of National Socialism. Frey remarked that he thought the name itself was ill-chosen, since the term national for him referred to the tradition of 1789, which National Socialism rejected. “What would you suggest in its place?” I asked him.—“In my opinion, it should have been Völkisch Socialism. That’s much more precise.” The man from the Kripo had joined us: “If you follow Möller van der Bruck,” he declared, “it could be Imperial Socialism.”—“Yes, actually that’s closer to Strasser’s deviation, isn’t it?” Frey retorted stiffly. That’s when I noticed Müller: he was standing behind us, a glass clutched in his big paw, and listening to us, blinking rapidly. “We should really push all the intellectuals into a coal mine and blow it up…” he blurted out in a grating, harsh voice.—“The Gruppenführer is absolutely right,” Thomas said. “Meine Herren, you’re even worse than Jews. Follow his example: action, not words.” His eyes were sparkling with laughter. Müller nodded; Frey seemed confused: “It’s clear that with us the sense of initiative has always taken precedence over theoretical elaboration…” the man from the Kripo mumbled. I moved off and went to the buffet to fill my plate with salad and sausages. Müller followed me. “And how is Reichsminister Speer doing?” he asked me.—“Actually, Gruppenführer, I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch with him since his illness began. I hear he’s doing better.”—“Apparently he’ll get out soon.”—“That’s likely. It would be a good thing. If we manage to get workers from Hungary, it will very quickly open new possibilities for our armaments industries.”—“Maybe,” Müller grunted. “But it will mostly be Jews, and Jews are forbidden in Altreich territory.” I swallowed a little sausage and said: “Then that rule will have to change. We are now at our maximum capacity. Without those Jews, we can’t go any further.” Eichmann had drawn closer and listened to my last words as he drank his Cognac. He interrupted without even giving Müller time to respond: “Do you truly believe that between victory and defeat, the balance depends on the work of a few thousand Jews? And if that were the case, would you want Germany’s victory to be due to Jews?” Eichmann had drunk a lot, his face was red and his eyes moist; he was proud of uttering such words in front of his superior. I listened to him as I picked sausage slices off the plate I was holding. I remained calm, but his nonsense irritated me. “You know, Obersturmbannführer,” I replied evenly, “in 1941, we had the most modern army in the world. Now we’ve gone almost half a century back. All our transports, at the front, are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they’re also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they’re producing a cargo ship a day. That’s many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we’re in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren’t suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren’t made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.” Eichmann puffed himself out: “You’re in a defeatist mood tonight!” Müller observed us in silence, unsmiling; his mobile eyes flew from one of us to the other. “I’m not a defeatist,” I retorted. “I’m a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.” But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: “You reason like a capitalist, a materialist…This war isn’t a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we’d never have attacked Russia.” I wasn’t following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn’t stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. “We’re not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. We’re waging war to purify Germany, to create a Germany in which you’d want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?” I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn’t any point in talking with him. Müller put his hand on his shoulder: “Eichmann, my friend, you’re right.” He turned to me: “That’s why our dear Eichmann is so gifted for his work: he sees only what is essential. That’s what makes him such a good specialist. And that’s why I’m sending him to Hungary: for Jewish affairs, he’s our Meister.” Eichmann, presented with these compliments, blushed with pleasure; for my part, I found him rather narrow-minded, at that moment. But that didn’t prevent Müller from being right: he truly was quite effective, and in the end, it’s often the narrow-minded ones who are the most effective. Müller went on: “The only thing, Eichmann, is that you shouldn’t think just about the Jews. The Jews are among our great enemies, that’s true. But the Jewish question is already almost settled in Europe. After Hungary there won’t be many left. We have to think of the future. And we have a lot of enemies.” He spoke softly, his monotonous voice, cradled by his rustic accent, seemed to flow through his thin, nervous lips. “You have to think about what we’re going to do with the Poles. Eliminating the Jews but leaving the Poles makes no sense. And here too, in Germany. We’ve already begun, but we have to follow it through to the end. We also need an Endlösung der Sozialfrage, a “Final Solution to the Social Question.” There are still far too many criminals, asocials, vagabonds, Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals. We have to think about people with tuberculosis, who contaminate healthy people. About the heart patients, who pass on defective blood and cost a fortune in medical care: them at least we can sterilize. We have to take care of all of them, category by category. All our good Germans oppose it, they always have good reasons. That’s why Stalin is so strong: he knows how to make himself obeyed, and he knows how to go all the way.” He looked at me: “I know the Bolsheviks very well. Since the executions of hostages in Munich, during the Revolution. After that, I fought them for fourteen years, until the Seizure of Power, and I’m still fighting them. But you know, I respect them. They are people who have an innate sense of organization, of discipline, and who don’t shrink back from anything. We could learn lessons from them. Don’t you think so?” Müller didn’t wait for the reply to his question. He took Eichmann by the arm and led him to a low table, where he set up a chess game. I watched them play from afar while I finished my plate. Eichmann played well, but he couldn’t hold his own against Müller: Müller, I said to myself, plays as he works, methodically, with stubbornness and a cold, thought-out brutality. They played several games, I had time to observe them. Eichmann tried cunning, calculated combinations, but Müller never let himself be trapped, and his defenses always remained just as strong as his attacks, systematically planned, irresistible. And Müller always won.

The following week, I put together a small team for the Einsatz in Hungary. I appointed a specialist, Obersturmführer Elias; a few clerks, orderlies, and administrative assistants; and of course Piontek. I left my office under Asbach’s responsibility, with precise instructions. On Brandt’s orders, on March 17, I set out for the KL Mauthausen, where a Sondereinsatzgruppe of the SP and the SD was assembling, under the command of Oberführer Dr. Achamer-Pifrader, the former BdS of the Ostland. Eichmann was already there, at the head of his own Sondereinsatzkommando. I presented myself to Oberführer Dr. Geschke, the officer in charge, who set me up with my team in a barracks. I already knew when I left Berlin that the Hungarian leader, Horthy, was meeting the Führer at Klessheim Palace, near Salzburg. Since the war, the events at Klessheim are well known: confronted with Hitler and von Ribbentrop, who bluntly gave him the choice between the formation of a new pro-German government or the invasion of his country, Horthy—admiral in a country without a navy, regent of a kingdom without a king—decided, after a brief heart attack, to avoid the worst. At the time, though, we knew nothing of that: Geschke and Achamer-Pifrader contented themselves with summoning the superior officers on the night of the eighteenth, to inform us that we were leaving the next day for Budapest. Rumors, of course, were flying; many people expected Hungarian resistance at the border, they had us put on our field uniforms and they handed out submachine guns. The camp was simmering with excitement: for many of these functionaries of the Staatspolizei or the SD, it was their first experience of the field; and even I, after almost a year in Berlin, and the dullness of bureaucratic routine, the permanent tension of underhand intrigues, the fatigue of bombings you had to undergo without reacting, I let myself be caught up in the general exhilaration. That evening, I went to have a few drinks with Eichmann, whom I found surrounded by his officers, beaming and strutting about in a new field gray uniform, tailored as elegantly as a parade uniform. I knew only a few of his colleagues; he explained to me that for this operation he had sent for his best specialists from all over Europe, from Italy, Croatia, Litzmannstadt, Theresienstadt. He introduced me to his friend Hauptsturmführer Wisliceny (the godfather of his son Dieter), a frightfully fat, placid, serene man, who had come from Slovakia. The mood was cheerful, there wasn’t much drinking; everyone was champing at the bit. I went back to my barracks to sleep a little, since we were leaving around midnight, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I thought about Helene: I had left her two days earlier, telling her I didn’t know when I’d return to Berlin; I had been somewhat abrupt, giving few explanations and not making any promises; she had accepted it gently, gravely, without any obvious anxiety, and yet, it was clear I think to both of us, a connection had been formed, tenuous perhaps, but solid, which wouldn’t dissolve by itself; it was already a relation, in some way.

I must have dozed off a little: Piontek shook me awake around midnight. I had lain down fully dressed, with my kit ready; I went out to take the air while they checked the vehicles. I ate a sandwich and drank some coffee that Fischer, an orderly, had brewed for me. It was late winter, bitter cold out, and I gladly inhaled the pure mountain air. A little farther on, I heard the sound of engines: the Vorkommando, led by a deputy of Eichmann’s, was starting out. I had decided to join the convoy of the Sondereinsatzkommando, which included, aside from Eichmann and his officers, more than 150 men, most of them Orpos and representatives of the SD and the SP, as well as some Waffen-SS. Geschke’s and Achamer-Pifrader’s convoy brought up the rear. When our two cars were ready, I sent them to join the staging area and went on foot to find Eichmann. He was wearing a tank soldier’s goggles on his cap and was holding a Steyr machine pistol under his arm: with his riding breeches, it made him look a little ridiculous, almost as if he were wearing a disguise. “Obersturmbannführer,” he cried out when he saw me. “Your men are ready?” I signed yes and went to join them. At the assembly area, it was still that last-minute confusion, the shouts and commands before a mass of vehicles can get under way in good order. Eichmann finally made his appearance, surrounded by many of his officers, including Regierungsrat Hunsche, whom I knew from Berlin; after having given some more contradictory orders, he got into his Schwimmwagen, a kind of amphibious all-terrain vehicle, driven by a Waffen-SS; I wondered amusedly if he was afraid the bridges would be dynamited, if he planned on crossing the Danube in his tub, with his Steyr and his chauffeur, to sweep away the Magyar hordes on his own. Piontek, at the steering wheel of my car, exuded sobriety and seriousness. Finally, under the harsh light of the camp searchlights, in a thunder of engines and a cloud of dust, the column set off. I had put Elias and Fischer in the back, with the weapons they had distributed to us; I sat in front, next to Piontek, and he started up. The sky was clear, the stars shining, but there was no moon; going down the winding road toward the Danube, I clearly saw the gleaming expanse of the river at my feet. The convoy crossed over to the right bank and headed toward Vienna. We drove in single file, our headlights kept low because of enemy fighter planes. I soon fell asleep. From time to time an alert woke me up, forced the vehicles to stop and douse the headlights, but no one left the car, we waited in the dark. There was no attack. In my interrupted half-sleep I had strange dreams, vivid and evanescent, which disappeared like a soap bubble as soon as a jolt or a siren woke me up. Around three o’clock, as we were skirting Vienna from the south, I shook myself awake and drank some coffee from a thermos readied by Fischer. The moon had risen, a thin crescent that made the wide water of the Danube gleam whenever we glimpsed it on our left. The alerts forced us to pause again, a long line of disparate vehicles that we could now distinguish in the moonlight. To the east, the sky was turning pink, outlining, higher up, the summits of the Little Carpathians. One of these pauses found us above the Neusiedler See, just a few kilometers from the Hungarian border. The fat Wisliceny passed by my car and rapped on my window: “Take your rum and come with us.” They had delivered a few measures of rum to us for the march, but I hadn’t touched it. I followed Wisliceny, who was going from car to car, getting other officers to come out. In front of us, the red ball of the sun weighed on the summits, the sky was pale, a luminous blue tinged with yellow, without a cloud. When our group reached Eichmann’s Schwimmwagen, near the head of the column, we surrounded it and Wisliceny asked him to get out. He had brought along the officers from IV B 4, as well as the commanders of the seconded companies. Wisliceny raised his flask, congratulated Eichmann, and drank his health: Eichmann was celebrating his thirty-eighth birthday that day. He hiccupped with pleasure: “Meine Herren, I am touched, very touched. Today is my seventh birthday as an SS officer. I can’t imagine a better gift than your company.” He was beaming, all red, smiling at everyone, drinking in little sips to the cheers.

Crossing the border took place without incident: by the roadside, customs officials or soldiers of the Honvéd, glum or indifferent, watched us pass, showing nothing. The morning turned into a luminous one. The column paused in a village to breakfast on coffee, rum, white bread, and Hungarian wine bought on the spot. Then it started up again. We now drove much more slowly, the road was congested with German vehicles, troop trucks and tanks, which we had to follow at a crawl for kilometers before we could pass them. But it didn’t look like an invasion, everything happened in a calm, orderly way; the civilians by the side of the road lined up to watch us pass, some even made friendly gestures at us.

We arrived in Budapest around the middle of the afternoon and settled in quarters on the right bank, behind the castle, on the Schwabenberg where the SS had requisitioned the big hotels. I was temporarily assigned a suite at the Astoria, with two beds and three sofas for eight men. The next morning I went to find out what I could. The city was swarming with German personnel, officers from the Wehrmacht and from the Waffen-SS, diplomats from the Auswärtiges Amt, police functionaries, engineers from the OT, economists from the WVHA, agents from the Abwehr whose names were always changing. In all this confusion I didn’t even know to whom I was subordinate, and I went to see Geschke, who told me he had been named BdS, but that the Reichsführer had also appointed an HSSPF, Obergruppenführer Winkelmann, and that Winkelmann would explain everything to me. But Winkelmann, a plump career policeman with a crew cut and a jutting jaw, hadn’t even been informed of my existence. He explained to me that, despite appearances, we hadn’t occupied Hungary, but had come at Horthy’s invitation to advise and support the Hungarian services: despite the presence of an HSSPF, a BdS, a BdO, and all the related structures, we had no executive function, and the Hungarian authorities preserved the full prerogatives of their sovereignty. Any serious dispute should be submitted to our new ambassador, Dr. Veesenmayer, an honorary SS-Brigadeführer, or to his colleagues at the Auswärtiges Amt. Kaltenbrunner, according to Winkelmann, was also in Budapest; he had come in Veesenmayer’s special train car, which had been linked up to Horthy’s train on his return from Klessheim, and he was negotiating with Lieutenant General Döme Sztójay, the former Hungarian ambassador to Berlin, about the formation of a new government (Kállay, the fallen prime minister, had sought refuge in the Turkish legation). I had no reason to go see Kaltenbrunner, so instead I went over to introduce myself at the German legation: Veesenmayer was busy, and I was received by his chargé d’affaires, Legationsrat Feine, who took note of my mission, suggested I wait for the situation to become clearer, and advised that I stay in contact with them. It was a fine mess.

At the Astoria, I saw Obersturmbannführer Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy. He had already held a meeting with the leaders of the Jewish community and had emerged from it very satisfied. “They came with suitcases,” he explained to me with a big laugh. “But I reassured them and told them no one was going to be arrested. They were terrified of far right hysteria. We promised them that if they cooperated, nothing would happen, that calmed them down.” He laughed again. “They must think we’re going to protect them from the Hungarians.” The Jews were to form a council; so as not to frighten them—the term Judenrat, used in Poland, was known here well enough to provoke a certain anxiety—it would be called the Zentralrat. In the days that followed, as members of this new council brought mattresses and blankets to the Sondereinsatzkommando—I requisitioned several for our suite—then, in response to various requests, typewriters, mirrors, cologne, lingerie, and some very pretty little paintings by Watteau, or at least his school, I held meetings with them, especially with the president of the Jewish community, Dr. Samuel Stern, and had a series of consultations so that I could form an idea of the resources available. There were Jews, men and women, employed in Hungarian armaments factories, and Stern could provide me with approximate figures. But a major problem arose immediately: all the able-bodied Jewish men, who were without essential jobs and of working age, had for several years already been drafted into the Honvéd, to serve in labor battalions behind the lines. And it was true, I remembered, when we had entered Zhitomir, which was still held by the Hungarians, I had heard talk of these Jewish battalions; they infuriated my colleagues in Sk 4a. “Those battalions have nothing to do with us,” Stern explained. “You’ll have to see about that with the government.”

A few days after the formation of Sztójay’s government, the new cabinet, in a single eleven-hour legislative session, promulgated a series of anti-Jewish laws that the Hungarian police began to apply immediately. I saw little of Eichmann: he was always hidden away with officials, or else visiting the Jews, taking an interest, according to Krumey, in their culture, taking tours of their library, their museum, their synagogues. At the end of the month he addressed the Zentralrat himself. His whole SEk had just moved to the Majestic Hotel; I had remained at the Astoria, where I had been able to obtain two more rooms to set up offices. I wasn’t invited to the meeting, but I saw him afterward: he looked very pleased with himself, and assured me that the Jews would cooperate and submit to German demands. We discussed the question of workers; the new laws would allow the Hungarians to augment the civilian labor battalions—all Jewish civil servants, journalists, notaries, lawyers, accountants who were going to lose their jobs could be drafted, and that made Eichmann snigger: “Imagine, my dear Obersturmbannführer, Jewish lawyers digging antitank ditches!”—but we had no idea about what they would agree to give us; Eichmann feared as I did that they would try to keep the best for themselves. But Eichmann had found himself an ally, a functionary of the county of Budapest, Dr. Lászlo Endre, a fanatical anti-Semite whom he hoped to have appointed to the Ministry of the Interior. “We have to avoid repeating the mistake of Denmark, you know,” he explained to me, his head resting on his large veined hand as he chewed on his pinky. “The Hungarians must do everything themselves, they have to offer us their Jews on a plate.” Already, the SEk, along with the Hungarian police and the forces of the BdS, were arresting Jews who violated the new rules; a transit camp, guarded by the Hungarian police, had been set up in Kistarcsa, near the city; more than three thousand Jews had been interned there. On my side, I didn’t remain inactive: via the legation, I had made contact with the ministries of Industry and Agriculture to sound out their views; and I studied the new legislation in the company of Herr von Adamovic, the legation expert, an affable, intelligent man almost paralyzed by sciatica and arthritis. In the meantime I stayed in contact with my Berlin office. Speer, who by coincidence celebrated his birthday on the same day as Eichmann, had left Hohenlychen to spend his convalescence in Meran, in Italy; I had sent a congratulatory telegram and some flowers to him, but hadn’t received a reply. I had also been invited to attend a conference in Silesia, on the Jewish question, headed by Dr. Franz Six, my very first department head in the SD. He now worked at the Auswärtiges Amt, but from time to time still lent a hand to the RSHA. Thomas had also been invited, along with Eichmann and some of his specialists. I arranged to travel with them. Our group left by train, passing through Pressburg, then changing in Breslau for Hirschberg; the conference was being held in Krummhübel, a well-known ski resort in the Silesian Sudeten Mountains, now largely occupied by the foreign ministry’s offices, including Six’s, evacuated from Berlin because of the bombings. We were put up in a crowded Gasthaus; their new barracks weren’t yet ready. I was glad to find Thomas there; he had arrived a little before us and was taking advantage of the occasion to ski in the company of beautiful young secretaries or assistants, including one of Russian origin whom he introduced to me, and who all seemed to have very little work to do. Eichmann had gathered colleagues from all over Europe and was strutting about. The conference began the day after we arrived. Six opened the discussions with a speech on “the tasks and aims of anti-Jewish operations abroad.” He spoke to us about the political structure of world Jewry, asserting that Jewry in Europe has finished playing its political and biological role. He also made an interesting digression on Zionism, which was still not well known at the time in our circles; for Six, the question of the return of the remaining Jews to Palestine should be subordinate to the Arab question, which would take on importance after the war, especially if the British withdrew from part of their empire. His speech was followed by that of the specialist from the Auswärtiges Amt, a certain von Thadden, who explained the standpoint of his ministry on “the political situation of Jews in Europe and the situation in relation to anti-Jewish executive measures.” Thomas spoke about the security problems raised by the Jewish rebellions of the previous year. Other specialists or advisors explained the present situation in the countries where they were posted. But the high point of the day was Eichmann’s speech. The Hungarian Einsatz seemed to have inspired him, and he painted us a nearly complete picture of anti-Jewish operations as they had unfolded from the beginning. He quickly passed over the failure of ghettoization and criticized the inefficiency and confusion of the mobile operations: “Whatever the successes racked up, they remain sporadic, they allow too many Jews to escape, to reach the woods to swell the ranks of the partisans, and they sap the morale of our men.” Success, in foreign countries, depended on two factors: mobilizing local authorities and securing the cooperation, even the collaboration, of the Jewish community leaders. “As to what happens, when we try to arrest the Jews ourselves, in countries where we have insufficient resources, it’s enough to look at the example of Denmark, a complete failure, or the South of France, where we got very mixed results, even after our occupation of the former Italian zone, or Italy, where the population and the Church hide thousands of Jews that we can’t find…. As for the Judenräte, they permit a considerable savings in personnel, and they harness the Jews themselves to the task of their destruction. Of course, these Jews have their own aims, their own dreams. But the dreams of Jews serve us too. They dream of grandiose corruptions, they offer us their money, their property. We take this money and this property and we pursue our own task. They dream of the economic needs of the Wehrmacht, of the protection provided by work certificates, and we, we use these dreams to feed our armaments factories, so that we are offered the labor we need to build our underground complexes, and also to get the weak and the old, the useless mouths, handed over to us. But understand this too: the elimination of the first one hundred thousand Jews is much easier than getting rid of the last five thousand. Look at what happened in Warsaw, or during the other rebellions that Standartenführer Hauser told us about. When the Reichsführer sent me the report on the fighting in Warsaw, he noted that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Jews in a ghetto could fight like that. Yet our late lamented Chief, Obergruppenführer Heydrich, had understood this long before. He knew that the strongest Jews, the toughest, the cleverest, the wiliest, would escape all selections and would be the hardest to destroy. And it is precisely those who form the vital reservoir from which Jewry could spring back, the germ cell for Jewish regeneration, as the late Obergruppenführer said. Our struggle prolongs that of Koch and Pasteur—we have to follow it through to the end…” A thunder of applause welcomed these words. Did Eichmann really believe in them? It was the first time I heard him talk this way, and I had the impression that he had gotten carried away, let himself be swept along by his new role, that he liked the game so much that he ended up becoming one with it. But his practical comments were far from idiotic; it was obvious that he had attentively analyzed all the past experiences to draw the essential lessons from them. At dinner—Six, out of politeness and for old time’s sake, had invited me along with Thomas to a little private supper—I remarked favorably on Eichmann’s speech. But Six, who never abandoned his glum, depressed air, thought much more negatively of it: “Intellectually uninteresting. He’s a relatively simple man, not particularly gifted. Of course, he is snappish, and he’s good at what he does, within the limits of his specialization.”—“Precisely,” I said, “he’s a good officer, motivated and talented in his way. In my opinion, he could go far.”—“That would surprise me,” Thomas dryly interrupted. “He’s too stubborn. He’s a bulldog, a gifted executor. But he has no imagination. He is incapable of reacting to events outside his field, of evolving. He built his career on Jews, on the destruction of Jews, and for that he’s very efficient. But once we’ve done with the Jews—or else if the wind shifts, if the time comes no longer to destroy Jews—then he’ll be unable to adapt, he’ll be lost.”

The next day, the conference continued with minor speakers. Eichmann didn’t stay, he had work to do: “I have to go inspect Auschwitz and then go back to Budapest. Things are on the move over there.” I left in turn on April 5. In Hungary, I learned that the Führer had just consented to the use of Jewish workers in Reich territory: now that the ambiguity had been settled, Speer’s men and the men from the Jägerstab came to see me constantly to ask when we could send them the first consignments. I told them to be patient, the operation wasn’t finalized yet. Eichmann returned furious from Auschwitz, railing against the Kommandanten: “Idiots, incompetents. Nothing is ready for reception.” On April 9…ah, but what’s the point of relating all these details day by day? It’s exhausting me, and also it’s boring me, and you too no doubt. How many pages have I already stacked up on these uninteresting bureaucratic episodes? No, I can’t go on like this anymore: the quill falls from my fingers, the pen, rather. I might return to it some other day; but what’s the point of going over that sordid Hungarian business again? It is amply documented in the books, by historians who have a much more coherent overall view than my own. I played only a minor role in it, after all. Although I was able to meet some of the participants, I don’t have much to add to their own memories. The great intrigues that ensued, especially those negotiations between Eichmann, Becher, and the Jews, that whole business of ransoming Jews in exchange for money, trucks, all that, yes, I was more or less aware of them, I discussed it, I even met some of the Jews involved, and Becher too, a disturbing man, who had come to Hungary to buy horses for the Waffen-SS and who had quickly taken over, for the Reichsführer, the largest armaments factory in the country, the Manfred-Weiss Werke, without informing anyone, neither Veesenmayer, nor Winkelmann, nor me, and to whom the Reichsführer had then entrusted tasks that either duplicated or contradicted my own and Eichmann’s too—which, I ended up realizing, was a typical method of the Reichsführer’s, but on the ground it served only to spread discord and confusion, no one coordinated anything, Winkelmann had no influence over Eichmann or over Becher, who never told him about anything, and I must confess that I hardly behaved any better than they, I negotiated with the Hungarians without Winkelmann’s knowing, with the Ministry of Defense especially, where I had made contacts via General Greiffenberg, Veesenmayer’s military attaché, to see if the Honvéd couldn’t also second its Jewish labor battalions to us, even with specific guarantees of a special treatment, which of course the Honvéd refused categorically, leaving us, for potential workers, only civilians who had been pressed into service in the beginning of the month, the ones they could remove from the factories, and their families, in short, a human potential of little value, which is one of the reasons why I had to end up regarding this mission as a total failure, but not the only reason, I’ll talk some more about that, and I might even talk a little about the negotiations with the Jews, for that too in the end fell somewhat within my jurisdiction, or, to be more precise, I used, no, I tried to use these negotiations to push my own objectives forward, with little success, I will readily admit, for a whole jumble of reasons, not just those already mentioned, there was also the attitude of Eichmann, who was becoming more and more difficult, Becher too, the WVHA, the Hungarian police, everyone joined in, you see—whatever the case, what I would like to say more precisely is that if you want to analyze the reasons for which the Hungarian operation yielded such poor results for the Arbeitseinsatz, my main concern after all, you have to take into account all these people and all these institutions, who each played their role, but also kept blaming all the others, and they blamed me too, no one refrained from that, you can believe me, in short, it was a mess, genuine havoc, due to which in the end most of the deported Jews died, right away I mean, gassed even before they could be put to work, for very few of those who reached Auschwitz were fit, considerable losses, 70 percent perhaps, no one is really sure, and because of which people after the war believed, and this is understandable, that it was the true aim of the operation, to kill all those Jews, those women, those old people, those chubby healthy children, and thus people couldn’t understand why the Germans, when they were losing the war (though the specter of defeat may not have been so clear, at the time, from the German standpoint at least), still persisted in massacring Jews, in mobilizing considerable resources, men and trains, especially, to exterminate women and children, and thus since people couldn’t understand, they attributed it to the anti-Semitic madness of the Germans, to a delirium of murder that was very remote from the thinking of most of the participants, for in fact, for me as well as for so many other functionaries and specialists, the stakes were essential, crucial, to find labor for our factories, a few hundred thousand workers who might have let us reverse the course of things, we wanted Jews who were not dead but very much alive, able-bodied, preferably male, but the Hungarians wanted to keep the males or at least a large part of them, and so it was already off to a bad start, and then there were the transport conditions, deplorable, and God knows how much I argued about this with Eichmann, who countered with the same thing every time, “It’s not my responsibility, it’s the Hungarian gendarmerie who load and supply the trains, not us,” and then there was also Höss’s stubbornness, in Auschwitz, because in the meantime, possibly following Eichmann’s report, Höss had returned as Standortälteste in place of Liebehenschel, who had been sent to cool his heels in Lublin, there was thus this obstinate inability of Höss to change his methods, but this I might discuss later on and in more detail, in short, few of us deliberately wanted what happened, and yet, you’ll say, it happened, it’s true, and it’s also true that we sent all those Jews to Auschwitz, not just the ones who could work, but all of them, knowing perfectly well that the old people and the children would be gassed, and so we return to the initial question, why this obstinacy to empty Hungary of its Jews, given the conditions of war and all that, and there, of course, I can only put forward hypotheses, for it wasn’t my personal objective, or rather, I’m not being precise here, I know why we wanted to deport (at the time we said evacuate) all the Jews from Hungary and kill those unfit for work immediately, that was because our authorities, the Führer, the Reichsführer, had decided to kill all the Jews in Europe, that is clear, we knew that, just as we knew that even those who would be put to work would die sooner or later, and the why of all that is a question I’ve talked a lot about and to which I still don’t have an answer, people, in those days, believed all sorts of things about the Jews, the bacillus theory like the Reichsführer and Heydrich, cited at the Krummhübel conference by Eichmann, but for whom in my opinion it must have been a purely theoretical construct, the argument of Jewish uprisings, espionage or fifth column for our enemies who were getting closer, an argument that obsessed a large part of the RSHA and even preoccupied my friend Thomas, the fear too of Jewish omnipotence, in which some still firmly believed, which incidentally gave rise to some comical misunderstandings, as in the beginning of April in Budapest, when we had to move a number of Jews to free up their apartments, and the SP called for the creation of a ghetto, which the Hungarians refused because they were afraid the Allies would bomb around this ghetto and spare it (the Americans had already struck Budapest when I was in Krummhübel), and so the Hungarians scattered the Jews near strategic military and industrial targets, which greatly worried some of our officials, for then if the Americans went ahead and bombed these targets anyway, that would prove that global Judaism was not as powerful as was thought, and I have to add, to be fair, that the Americans did in fact bomb these targets, killing in passing many Jewish civilians, but for me it had been a long time since I believed in the omnipotence of global Judaism, otherwise why would all those countries have refused to take in the Jews, in 1937, ’38, ’39, when we wanted just one thing, for them to leave Germany, the only reasonable solution at bottom? What I mean, returning to the question I asked, for I’ve strayed a little from it, is that even if, objectively, there was no doubt about the final aim, it wasn’t with this aim in mind that most of the participants were working, it wasn’t that which motivated them and drove them to work so energetically and single-mindedly, it was a whole gamut of motivations, and even Eichmann, I’m convinced, he had a very harsh attitude but at bottom it was the same to him whether or not the Jews were killed, the only thing that counted, for him, was to show what he could do, to prove his worth, and also to use the abilities he had developed, for the rest of it, he didn’t give a fuck, either about industry or about the gas chambers for that matter, the only thing he did give a fuck about was that no one fucked with him, and that’s why he was so reluctant in the negotiations with the Jews, but I’ll come back to that, it’s interesting all the same, and for the others it’s the same, everyone had his reasons, the Hungarian bureaucracy that helped us just wanted to see the Jews leave Hungary but didn’t give a fuck about what would happen to them, and Speer and Kammler and the Jägerstab wanted workers and relentlessly pushed the SS to deliver Jews to them, but didn’t give a fuck about what happened to the ones who couldn’t work, and then there were also all sorts of pragmatic motivations, for example, I was concentrating only on the Arbeitseinsatz, but that was far from being the only economic stake, as I learned when I met an expert from our Ministry of Food and Agriculture, a very intelligent young man, passionate about his work, who explained to me one evening, in an old café in Budapest, the alimentary aspect of the question, which was that because of the loss of the Ukraine Germany had to face a grave deficit in food supplies, especially in wheat, and so had turned to Hungary, a major producer, according to him that was even the main reason for our pseudo-invasion, to secure this source of wheat, and so in 1944 we asked the Hungarians for 450,000 tons of wheat, 360,000 tons more than in 1942, or an increase of 400 percent, but the Hungarians had to take this wheat from somewhere, after all they had to feed their own population, but precisely, these 360,000 tons corresponded to rations for about one million people, a little more than the total number of Hungarian Jews, and so the specialists in the Ministry of Food saw the evacuation of the Jews by the RSHA as a measure that would allow Hungary to free up a surplus of wheat for Germany, corresponding to our needs, and as for the fate of the evacuated Jews, who in principle would have to be fed elsewhere if they weren’t killed, that didn’t concern this young and all in all pleasant expert, a little obsessed with his figures though, for there were other departments in the Ministry of Food to take care of that, feeding the inmates and other foreign workers in Germany, that wasn’t his business, and for him the evacuation of the Jews was the solution to his problem, even if it became someone else’s problem in turn. And he wasn’t the only one, this man, everyone was like him, I too was like him, and you too, in his place, you would have been like him.

But perhaps you really don’t care about any of this. Maybe, instead of my unwholesome, abstruse reflections, you would rather have anecdotes, spicy little stories. For my part I don’t know anymore. I’m quite willing to tell you a few stories: but then let me just dig at random among my memories and my notes; I’ve told you, I’m getting tired, I have to start bringing this to an end. And also if I still had to recount the rest of 1944 in detail, a little like I’ve done up to now, I’ll never be done. You see, I’m thinking of you too, not just of me, a little bit in any case, there are limits of course, if I’m putting myself to so much trouble, it’s not to make you happy, I will willingly admit, it’s above all for my own mental hygiene, like when you’ve eaten too much, at some point you have to evacuate the waste, whether or not it smells nice, you don’t always have a choice; but here, you have an irrevocable power, that of closing this book and throwing it in the trash, a final recourse against which I am powerless, so I don’t see why I should wear kid gloves. And that is why, I’ll admit it, if I change my method a little, it’s mostly for me, whether you like it or not, another mark of my boundless selfishness, certainly a fruit of my bad education. Maybe I should have done something else, you’ll tell me, that’s true, maybe I should have done something else, I would have been delighted to play music, if I had known how to put two notes together and recognize a treble clef, but there it is, I’ve already explained my limits in that field, or else painting, why not, that seems a pleasant occupation to me, painting, a quiet occupation, losing yourself that way in forms and colors, but what can I do, in another life maybe, for in this one I never had a choice, maybe a little, of course, a narrow margin for maneuvering, but limited, because of the weight of fate, and lo, we’re back just where we started from. But let us return to Hungary.

About the officers around Eichmann, there’s not much to say. They were, for the most part, peaceable men, good citizens doing their duty, proud and happy bearers of the SS uniform, but timorous, with little initiative, always going “Yes…but,” and admiring their leader as a great genius. The only one who stood out a little was Wisliceny, a Prussian my age, who spoke very good English and had an excellent grasp of history, and with whom I liked to spend my evenings discussing the Thirty Years’ War, the turning point of 1848, or else the moral bankruptcy of the Wilhelmine era. His views weren’t always original, but they were solidly documented and he could work them into a coherent narrative, which is the foremost quality of the historical imagination. He had once been Eichmann’s superior, in 1936 I think, in any case during the time of the SD-Hauptamt, when the Department of Jewish Affairs was still called Abteilung II 112; but his laziness and indolence had quickly led to his being surpassed by his disciple, which he didn’t hold against him, they had remained good friends, Wisliceny was a close family friend, they even publicly called each other by their first names (later on they had a falling-out, for reasons I am unaware of). Wisliceny, a witness at Nuremberg, painted a negative portrait of his old comrade that for a long time helped to distort the image that historians and writers had of Eichmann, some even going so far as to argue in good faith that the poor Obersturmbannführer gave orders to Adolf Hitler. You can’t blame Wisliceny: he was trying to save his neck, and Eichmann had disappeared, at the time it was customary to incriminate the absent, though it didn’t get poor Wisliceny very far; he ended up at the end of a rope in Pressburg, the Bratislava of the Slovaks (and it must have been solid, that rope, to support his corpulence). Another reason that made me appreciate Wisliceny was that he kept a level head, unlike some others, especially the Berlin bureaucrats, who, having been sent to the field for the first time in their lives and seeing themselves suddenly so powerful compared to these Jewish dignitaries, educated men sometimes twice their age, lost all sense of moderation. Some of them insulted the Jews in the coarsest and most unseemly way; others succumbed to the temptation of abusing their position; all of them demonstrated an arrogance that was unbearable and, in my opinion, utterly inappropriate. I remember Hunsche, for example, a Regierungsrat, that is, a career civil servant, a jurist with an accountant’s mentality, the little gray man you never notice behind the desk of a bank where he patiently shuffles paper as he waits till he can draw his pension and go out in a cardigan knitted by his wife and grow Dutch tulips, or else paint Napoleonic lead soldiers, which he will arrange lovingly, in perfect rows, nostalgic for the lost order of his youth, in front of a plaster model of the Brandenburg Gate, what do I know of the dreams that haunt this sort of man? And there, in Budapest, ridiculous in a uniform with an extra-baggy pair of riding breeches, he smoked expensive cigarettes, received Jewish leaders with his dirty boots resting on a velvet armchair, and shamelessly indulged his slightest whims. In the very first few days after our arrival, he had asked the Jews to provide him with a piano, saying negligently to them, “I’ve always dreamed of having a piano”; the Jews, terrified, brought him eight; and Hunsche, right in front of me, planted in his tall boots, reprimanded them in a voice that was trying to sound ironic: “But meine Herren! I don’t want to open a store, I just want to play the piano.” A piano! Germany is groaning under the bombs, our soldiers at the front are fighting with frozen limbs and missing fingers, but Hauptsturmführer Regierungsrat Dr. Hunsche, who has never left his Berlin office, needs a piano, no doubt to calm his frayed nerves. When I watched him prepare orders for the men in the transit camps—the evacuations had begun—I wondered if, as he appended his signature, he didn’t get hard under the table. He was, I’m the first to acknowledge it, a truly poor specimen of the Herrenvolk: and if you are to judge Germany from this kind of man, alas only too common, then, yes, I can’t deny it, we have deserved our fate, the judgment of history, our dikè.

And what, then, is there to say about Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? For as long as I had known him, he had never taken so readily to his role. When he received the Jews, he was the Übermensch from head to foot, he took off his glasses, spoke to them in a brittle, choppy, but polite voice, he had them sit down and called them “meine Herren,” he called Dr. Stern “Herr Hofrat,” and then he would burst into obscenities, deliberately, to shock them, before returning to that icy politeness that seemed to hypnotize them. He was also extremely gifted with the Hungarian authorities, at once friendly and polite, he impressed them and also he had formed solid friendships with some of them, especially Lászlo Endre, who showed him in Budapest a social life till then unknown to him and which ended up dazzling him, inviting him to castles, introducing him to countesses. All this, the fact that everybody merrily let themselves get caught up in the game, Jews and Hungarians, might explain why Eichmann too lapsed into hubris (but never with the stupidity of a Hunsche) and ended up believing he really was der Meister, the Master. He took himself in fact for a condottiere, a von dem Bach-Zelewski, he forgot his deepest nature, that of a bureaucrat of talent, even of great talent in his limited field. Yet as soon as you saw him one-on-one, in his office, or in the evening, if he had had a little to drink, he became the old Eichmann again, the one who scuttled about the offices of the Staatspolizei, respectful, busy, impressed by the slightest stripe superior to his own and at the same time devoured by envy and ambition, the Eichmann who had himself covered, in writing, for each action and each decision, by Müller or Heydrich or Kaltenbrunner, and who kept all these orders in a safe, carefully arranged, the Eichmann who would have been just as happy—and no less efficient—buying and transporting horses or trucks, if that had been his task, as concentrating and evacuating tens of thousands of human beings destined to die. When I came to talk with him about the Arbeitseinsatz, in private, he listened to me, sitting behind his fine desk, in his luxurious room in the Majestic Hotel, with a bored, irritated look, playing with his glasses or with a mechanical pencil he kept pressing, going click-clack, click-clack, compulsively, and before replying, he would rearrange his documents covered with notes and little doodles, blow the dust off his desk, then, scratching his already balding skull, launch into one of his long replies, so muddled that he himself would soon get lost in it. In the beginning, when the Einsatz was finally truly under way, after the Hungarians, around the end of April, had given their consent for the evacuations, he was almost euphoric, seething with energy; at the same time, and even more when the problems piled up, he became more and more difficult, intransigent, even with me, whom he rather liked, he began to see enemies everywhere. Winkelmann, who was his superior only on paper, didn’t like him at all, but in my opinion it was still this severe, gruff policeman, with the innate common sense of an Austrian peasant, who judged him the best. Eichmann’s haughty demeanor, verging on impertinence, drove him into a fury, but he saw right through him: “He has the mentality of a subaltern,” he explained to me when I came to see him once, to ask if he could intervene or at least use his influence to improve the very bad transport conditions of the Jews. “He uses his authority unreservedly, he doesn’t know any moral or mental restraints on the exercise of his power. Nor does he have the slightest scruple about exceeding the limits of his authority, if he believes he’s acting in the spirit of the person giving him his orders and protecting him, as Gruppenführer Müller and Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner do.” That is probably quite right, all the more so since Winkelmann didn’t deny Eichmann’s abilities. Eichmann, at the time, was no longer living at the hotel, but was occupying the beautiful villa of a Jew on Apostol Street, on the Rosenberg, a house with two stories and a tower overlooking the Danube, surrounded by a superb orchard unfortunately disfigured by the trenches dug for the air-raid shelter. He was living it up and spending most of his time with his new Hungarian friends. The evacuations were already well under way, zone by zone according to a very strict plan, and complaints were flowing in from everywhere, from the Jägerstab, from Speer’s offices, from Saur himself, they were flying every which way, at Himmler, Pohl, Kaltenbrunner, but in the end everything came back to me, and indeed, it was a catastrophe, a real scandal, the work-sites were receiving only skinny young girls or men already half dead, whereas they were hoping for an influx of healthy, solid, strapping fellows well used to work, they were outraged, no one understood what was happening. Part of the fault, I’ve already explained, was the Honvéd’s, which despite all our remonstrances jealously kept its labor battalions. But among those who remained there were still some men, who not long before had been living a normal life, eating their fill, they must have been in good health. But it turned out that the conditions of the concentration points, where the Jews sometimes had to wait for days or weeks, barely fed, before being transported, crammed into overloaded cattle cars, without water, without food, with one slop pail per car, these conditions were exhausting their strength, illnesses were spreading, many people died on the way, and those who arrived looked awful, few passed selection, and even these were turned down or else rapidly returned by the factories and work sites, especially the ones run by the Jägerstab, who howled that they were being sent girls incapable of lifting a pickaxe. When I transmitted these complaints to Eichmann, as I’ve said, he rejected them curtly, stating that it wasn’t his responsibility, that only the Hungarians could change anything in these conditions. So I went to see Major Baky, the Secretary of State in charge of the Gendarmerie; Baky swept aside my complaints with a single sentence, “Just take them more quickly,” and sent me to Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenczy, the officer in charge of the technical management of the evacuations, a bitter, closed man, who talked to me for more than an hour to explain that he would be delighted to feed the Jews better, if he were provided with food, and to pack the cars less, if he were sent more trains, but that his main mission consisted of evacuating them, not coddling them. With Wisliceny, I went to one of these “collection points,” I forget where, in the region of Kaschau maybe: it was a depressing sight, the Jews were parked by whole families into an open-air brickworks, under the spring rain, children in shorts were playing in the puddles of water, the adults, apathetic, sat on their suitcases or paced up and down. I was struck by the contrast between these Jews and the ones, the only ones I had really known till then, from Galicia and the Ukraine; these were well-educated people, often middle-class, and even the craftsmen and the farmers, quite numerous, had a proper and dignified bearing, the children were washed, combed, well dressed in spite of the conditions, sometimes wearing the green national costume, with black frogging and little caps. All that made the scene even more oppressive, despite their yellow stars, they could have been German or at least Czech villagers, and it gave me sinister thoughts, I imagined those neat, tidy boys or those young women with their discreet charm being gassed—thoughts that turned my stomach, but there was nothing to be done, I looked at the pregnant women and imagined them in the gas chambers, their hands on their rounded bellies, I wondered with horror what happened to the fetus of a gassed woman, if it died right away with its mother or else survived a little, imprisoned in its dead cocoon, its suffocating paradise, and from that thought memories of the Ukraine flowed in, and for the first time in a long time I wanted to vomit, vomit my powerlessness, my sadness, my useless life. By chance I ran into Dr. Grell there, a Legationsrat appointed by Feine to identify foreign Jews arrested by mistake by the Hungarian police, especially those from allied or neutral countries, and to remove them from the transit centers so that they could eventually be sent back to their own countries. This poor Grell, a wounded veteran of the Great War disfigured by a head wound and horrible burns that terrified the children, who ran away screaming when they saw him, waded through the mud from one group to the other, his hat dripping water, politely asking if there were any holders of foreign passports, examining their papers, ordering the Hungarian gendarmes to take some of them aside. Eichmann and his colleagues hated him, accused him of indulgence, of lack of discernment, and it was true, too, that many Hungarian Jews, for a few thousand pengö, bought foreign passports, Romanian ones especially, the easiest to get, but Grell was just doing his job, it wasn’t up to him to judge whether or not these passports had been obtained legally, and after all, if the Romanian attachés were corrupt, that was the problem of the authorities in Bucharest, not our own, if they wanted to accept or tolerate all these Jews, so much the worse for them. I knew Grell a little, for in Budapest, from time to time, I had a drink or went out to dinner with him; among the German officials, almost everyone avoided him or fled him, even his own colleagues, probably because of his atrocious appearance, but also because of his severe and extremely disconcerting fits of depression; as for me, that didn’t bother me so much, maybe because his wound was in the end rather similar to my own, he too had received a bullet in the head, but with much worse consequences than me, we didn’t talk, by tacit agreement, about the circumstances, but when he had had a little to drink he said I was lucky, and he was right, I was insanely lucky, to have an intact face and a pretty much intact head too, whereas he, if he drank too much, and he often drank too much, exploded into extraordinary fits of rage, almost epileptic attacks, he changed color, began screaming, once, with a café waiter, I even had to restrain him forcibly from breaking all the dishes, he came to apologize the next day, contrite, depressed, and I tried to reassure him, I understood him well. There, in that transit center, he came to see me, looked at Wisliceny, whom he also knew, and just said: “Filthy business, isn’t it?” He was right, but there was worse. To try to understand what happened during the selections, I went to Auschwitz. I arrived at night, by the Vienna-Cracow train; well before the station, to the left of the train, you could see a line of points of white light, the barbed-wire spotlights perched on whitewashed poles, and behind that line, more darkness, an abyss giving off that abominable stench of burned flesh, which wafted through the car. The passengers, mainly soldiers or functionaries returning to their posts, crowded around the windows, often with their wives. Comments flew: “It’s burning nicely,” a civilian said to his wife. At the station, I was welcomed by an Untersturmführer who quartered me in a room at the Haus der Waffen-SS. The next morning I saw Höss again. In the beginning of May, after Eichmann’s inspection, as I said, the WVHA had again drastically modified the organization of the Auschwitz complex. Liebehenschel, certainly the best Kommandant the camp had known, had been replaced by a useless idiot, Sturmbannführer Bär, a former pastry cook who had for a time been Pohl’s adjutant; Hartjenstein, in Birkenau, had swapped places with the Kommandant of Natzweiler, Hauptsturmführer Kramer; and Höss, finally, for the duration of the Hungarian Einsatz, supervised the others. It seemed obvious to me, speaking to him, that he thought his appointment concerned only extermination: while the Jews were arriving at the rate of sometimes four trains of three thousand units each every day, he hadn’t had any new barracks built to receive them, but on the contrary had put all his considerable energy into repairing the crematoriums and extending the tracks into the very midst of Birkenau, of which he was especially proud, so they were able to unload the cars at the foot of the gas chambers. With the first convoy of the day, he took me to watch the selection and the rest of the operations. The new ramp passed under the guard tower of the entrance building to Birkenau and went on, with three branches, to the crematoriums at the rear. A huge crowd was swarming on the dirt platform—noisy, poorer and more colorful than the people I had seen in the transit center, these Jews must have come from Transylvania, the women and girls wore multicolor scarves, the men, still in coats, had big, bushy moustaches and unshaven cheeks. There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodied to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best, in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk sense to this man than to Eichmann. He insisted on showing me the killing installations and explaining everything to me: he had increased the Sonderkommandos from 220 to 860 men, but they had overestimated the capacity of the Kremas; it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded, and to remedy that he had had to have incineration trenches dug, and by driving the Sonderkommandos on, that did the trick, he had reached an average of six thousand units per day, which meant that some had to wait sometimes till the next day, if they were especially overwhelmed. It was appalling, the smoke and the flames in the trenches, fed by gasoline and the fat from the bodies, must have been visible for miles all around, I asked him if he didn’t think it might make trouble: “Oh, the authorities of the Kreis are worried, but that’s not my problem.” To listen to him, nothing of what should have been was his problem. Exasperated, I asked to see the barracks. The new sector, planned originally as a transit camp for Hungarian Jews, was still incomplete; thousands of women, already haggard and thin although they hadn’t been there long, were herded into long, stinking stables; many couldn’t find a place and slept outside, in the mud; even though they didn’t have enough striped uniforms to clothe them, they still didn’t let them keep their own clothes, but dressed them in rags taken from the Kanada; and I saw some women completely naked, or dressed just in a shirt from which two yellow, flabby legs stuck out, sometimes covered in excrement. Hardly surprising that the Jägerstab was complaining! Höss vaguely shifted the blame to the other camps, which according to him were refusing to accept the transports, out of lack of room. All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently. I continued on till evening. It rained several times during the day, brief and refreshing spring rains, which made the dust die down but also increased the misery of the inmates who stayed out in the open, even if most of them thought above all of collecting a few drops to drink. The entire rear of the camp was dominated by fire and smoke, even beyond the quiet expanse of the Birkenwald. At night, endless columns of women, children, and old people kept coming up from the ramp along a long barbed-wire corridor, toward Kremas III and IV, where they would wait their turn patiently under the birch trees, and the beautiful light of the setting sun skimmed the treetops of the Birkenwald, stretched to infinity the shadows of the rows of barracks, made the dark gray of the smoke gleam with the opalescent yellow of Dutch paintings, cast gentle reflections on the puddles and pools of water, tinted the bricks of the Kommandantur a bright, cheerful orange, and suddenly I had had enough and I ditched Höss there and went back to the Haus, where I spent the night writing a virulent report on the deficiencies of the camp. While I was at it, I wrote another one on the Hungarian part of the operation and, in my anger, didn’t hesitate to describe Eichmann’s attitude as obstructionism. (The negotiations with the Hungarian Jews had already been under way for two months, the offer for the trucks must have taken place a month earlier, for my visit to Auschwitz happened a few days before the Normandy landings; Becher had been complaining for a long time about the uncooperative attitude of Eichmann, who seemed to both of us to be conducting the negotiations only for the sake of form.) Eichmann is clouded by his logistician’s mentality, I wrote. He is incapable of understanding or integrating complex aims into his approach. And I know on good authority that after these reports, which I sent to Brandt for the Reichsführer and directly to Pohl, Pohl summoned Eichmann to the WVHA and reprimanded him in direct and blunt terms about the condition of the consignments and the unacceptable number of dead and sick people; but Eichmann, in his stubbornness, contented himself with replying that that was the jurisdiction of the Hungarians. Against such inertia, there was nothing to be done. I was sinking into depression, and my body felt its effect: I slept badly, a sleep troubled by unpleasant dreams and interrupted three or four times a night by thirst, or else a desire to urinate that turned into insomnia; in the morning, I woke up with splitting headaches, which ruined my concentration for the day, sometimes forcing me to interrupt work and stretch out on a sofa for an hour with a cold compress on my forehead. But no matter how tired I was, I feared the return of night: periods of insomnia during which I vainly went over my problems, or my increasingly anguished dreams, I don’t know what tormented me the most. Here is one of these dreams, which struck me especially: the Rabbi of Bremen had emigrated to Palestine. But when he heard that the Germans were killing the Jews, he refused to believe it. He went to the German consulate and asked for a visa for the Reich, to see for himself if the rumors were justified. Of course, he came to a bad end. In the meantime, the scene changed: I found myself, a specialist in Jewish affairs, waiting for an audience with the Reichsführer, who wants to learn certain things from me. I am quite nervous, for it is obvious that if he is not satisfied with my replies, I am a dead man. This scene takes place in a large, dark castle. I meet Himmler in one room; he shakes my hand, a small, unremarkable, calm man, dressed in a long coat, with his eternal pince-nez with its round lenses. Then I lead him down a long hallway whose walls are covered with books. These books must belong to me, for the Reichsführer seems very impressed by the library and congratulates me on it. Then we find ourselves in another room in the process of discussing things he wants to know. Later on, it seems to me that we are outside, in the midst of a city in flames. My fear of Heinrich Himmler is gone, I feel entirely safe with him, but now I’m afraid of the bombs, of the fire. We have to sprint through the burning courtyard of a building. The Reichsführer takes my hand: “Trust me. Whatever happens, I won’t let you go. We’ll cross together or we’ll fail together.” I don’t understand why he wants to protect the Judelein, the little Jew I am, but I trust him, I know he’s sincere, I could even feel love for this strange man.

But I really should tell you about those famous negotiations. I didn’t participate in them directly: only once did I meet Kastner, with Becher, when Becher was negotiating one of those private agreements that made Eichmann so upset. But I took a keen interest in them because one of the propositions consisted in putting a certain number of Jews “on ice,” that is, sending them to work without going through Auschwitz, which would have suited me perfectly. This Becher was the son of a high-society businessman in Hamburg, a cavalryman who had ended up as an officer in the Reiter-SS and had distinguished himself several times in the East, especially in the beginning of 1943, on the Don front, where he had gotten the German Cross in gold; since then, he occupied important logistical functions at the SS-Führungshauptamt, the FHA that supervised the entire Waffen-SS. After he had gotten his hands on the Manfred-Weiss Werke—he never spoke to me about it, and I know how it happened just from books, but apparently it began entirely by chance—the Reichsführer ordered him to continue negotiations with the Jews, while giving similar instructions to Eichmann, no doubt on purpose, so that they would compete with each other. And Becher could promise a lot, he had the Reichsführer’s ear, but wasn’t in principle responsible for Jewish affairs and had no direct authority over the matter, even less than I did. All sorts of other people were mixed up in this business: a team of Schellenberg’s guys, noisy, undisciplined, some from the former Amt VI, such as Höttl, who went by the name of Klages and later on published a book under yet another name, others from Canaris’s Abwehr, Gefrorener (alias Dr. Schmidt), Durst (alias Winniger), Laufer (alias Schröder), but maybe I’m mixing up the names and the pseudonyms, there was also that odious Paul Carl Schmidt, the future Paul Carrell whom I’ve already mentioned, and who I don’t think I’m confusing with Gefrorener alias Dr. Schmidt, but I’m not so sure about that. And the Jews gave money and jewelry to all these people, and they all took it, in the name of their respective services or else for themselves, impossible to know; Gefrorener and his colleagues, who in March had placed Joel Brandt under arrest to “protect” him from Eichmann, had asked him for several thousand dollars to introduce him to Wisliceny, and then Wisliceny, Krumey, and Hunsche had received a lot of money from him, before the matter of the trucks came up. But I never met Brandt, it was Eichmann who dealt with him, then he left quite quickly for Istanbul and never came back. I saw his wife, once, at the Majestic, with Kastner; she was a girl of a pronounced Jewish type, not really beautiful, but with a lot of character, it was Kastner who introduced her to me as Brandt’s wife. The idea of the trucks, no one really knows who had it first, Becher said it was he, but I’m convinced it was Schellenberg who whispered the idea to the Reichsführer, or else if it really was an idea of Becher’s then Schellenberg developed it, whatever the case at the beginning of April the Reichsführer summoned Becher and Eichmann to Berlin (it was Becher who told me this, not Eichmann) and gave Eichmann the order to motorize the Eighth and Twenty-second SS Cavalry Divisions, with trucks, about ten thousand, that he was to get from the Jews. And so this is the famous story of the proposition known as “goods for blood,” ten thousand trucks equipped for winter in exchange for a million Jews, which has made a lot of ink flow and will continue to do so. I don’t have a lot to add to what has already been said: the main participants, Becher, Eichmann, the Brandt-Kastner pair, all survived the war and testified about this affair (though the unfortunate Kastner was killed three years before Eichmann’s arrest, in 1957, by Jewish extremists in Tel Aviv—for his “collaboration” with us, which is sadly ironic). One of the clauses of the proposition made to the Jews stipulated that the trucks would be used solely on the Eastern Front, against the Soviets, but not against the Western powers; and these trucks, of course, could only have come from the American Jews. Eichmann, I’m convinced, took this proposition literally, all the more so since the commander of the Twenty-second Division, SS-Brigadeführer August Zehender, was one of his good friends: he really thought that motorizing these divisions was the objective, and even if he grumbled at “letting go” of so many Jews, he wanted to help his friend Zehender. As if some trucks could have changed the course of the war. How many trucks or tanks or planes could a million Jews have built, if we had ever had a million Jews in the camps? The Zionists, I suspect, and Kastner in the lead, must have understood right away that it was a lure, but a lure that could also serve their own interests, let them gain time. They were lucid, realistic men, they must have known as well as the Reichsführer that not only would no enemy country ever agree to deliver ten thousand trucks to Germany, but also that no country, even at that time, was ready to welcome a million Jews, either. For my part, it was in the stipulation according to which the trucks would not be used in the West that I see Schellenberg’s hand. For him, as Thomas had led me to understand, there was only one solution left, breaking the unnatural alliance between the capitalist democracies and the Stalinists, and playing the “bulwark of Europe against Bolshevism” card to the end. Postwar history has since proven that he was entirely right, and that he was only ahead of his time. The proposition of the trucks could have had several meanings. Of course, you never knew, a miracle could happen, the Jews and Allies could agree to the deal, and then it would have been easy to use those trucks to create dissension between the Russians and the Anglo-Americans, even incite them to turn against each other. Himmler possibly dreamed about that; but Schellenberg was much too realistic to place his hopes in that scenario. For him, the whole affair must have been much simpler, it was a question of sending a diplomatic signal, via the Jews who still had a certain influence, that Germany was ready to discuss anything, a separate peace, a cessation of the extermination program, and then to watch how the English and the Americans reacted so as to pursue other approaches: a trial balloon, in other words. And what’s more the Anglo-Americans interpreted it that way at once, as their reaction proves: information about the proposition was published in their newspapers and denounced. It is also possible that Himmler thought that if the Allies refused the offer, that would demonstrate that they didn’t care about the lives of the Jews, or even that they secretly approved of our measures; at the very least, that would throw part of the responsibility onto them, it would drag them in as Himmler had already dragged in the Gauleiters and the other dignitaries of the regime. Whatever the case, Schellenberg and Himmler didn’t give up, and negotiations continued until the end of the war, as we know, always with the Jews as stake; Becher even managed, thanks to intervention of the Jews, to meet McClellan, Roosevelt’s man, in Switzerland, a violation by the Americans of the Tehran agreements, which led to nothing for us. For a long time already I had had nothing to do with this: from time to time, rumors reached me, via Thomas or Eichmann, but that was all. Even in Hungary, as I’ve explained, my role remained peripheral. I got especially interested in these negotiations after my visit to Auschwitz, at the time of the Anglo-American Normandy landings, around the beginning of June. The mayor of Vienna, the (honorary) SS-Brigadeführer Blaschke, had asked Kaltenbrunner to send him some Arbeitsjuden for his factories, which desperately lacked workers; and I saw this as an occasion both to advance Eichmann’s negotiations—these Jews, delivered to Vienna, could have been considered as “on ice”—and to obtain labor. So I set about pushing the negotiations in that direction. It was at that time that Becher introduced me to Kastner, an impressive man, always perfectly elegant, who dealt with us as equals, with a complete disregard for his own life, which gave him a certain strength when confronted with us: no one could make him afraid (there were attempts, he was arrested many times, by the SP or by the Hungarians). He sat down without being invited to do so by Becher, took an aromatic cigarette out of a silver case, and lit it without asking us for permission, and without offering us one, either. Eichmann claimed he was very impressed by his coldness and his ideological rigor and thought that if Kastner had been a German, he would have made a very good officer in the Staatspolizei, which for him was probably the highest compliment possible. “He thinks like us, that Kastner,” he said to me one day. “He thinks only about the biological potential of his race, he is ready to sacrifice all the old to save the young, the strong, the fertile women. He thinks about the future of his race. I said to him: ‘Me, if I were Jewish, I’d have been a Zionist, a fanatical Zionist, like you.’” The Viennese offer interested Kastner: he was ready to put down money, if the security of the Jews being sent could be guaranteed. I transmitted this offer to Eichmann, who was worried sick because Joel Brandt had disappeared and there was no reply about the trucks. Becher, during this time, was negotiating his own arrangements, evacuating Jews in small groups, especially via Romania, for money of course, gold, merchandise, Eichmann was mad with rage, he even ordered Kastner to stop talking to Becher; Kastner, of course, didn’t pay any attention to him, and Becher arranged for his family to get out. Eichmann, seething with indignation, told me that Becher had shown him a gold necklace he was planning on offering the Reichsführer for his mistress, a secretary with whom he had a child: “Becher has a hold on the Reichsführer, I don’t know what to do anymore,” he groaned. In the end, my maneuverings had some success: Eichmann got sixty-five thousand reichsmarks and some rather rancid coffee, which he regarded as an advance on the five million Swiss francs he had asked for, and eighteen thousand young Jews left to work in Vienna. I proudly reported this to the Reichsführer, but received no reply. In any case, the Einsatz was already reaching its end, even though we didn’t know that yet. Horthy, apparently terrified by BBC broadcasts and American diplomatic cables intercepted by his services, had summoned Winkelmann to ask him what was happening to the evacuated Jews, who were still, after all, Hungarian citizens; Winkelmann, not knowing what to reply, had in turn summoned Eichmann. Eichmann told us about this episode, which he found hilarious, one night at the bar in the Majestic; Wisliceny and Krumey were there, along with Trenker, the KdS for Budapest, an affable Austrian, a friend of Höttl’s. “I told him: we’re sending them to work,” Eichmann said, laughing. “He didn’t ask me anything else.” Horthy wasn’t satisfied with this rather evasive response: on June 30, he put off the evacuation of Budapest, which was supposed to begin the next day; a few days later, he completely forbade it. Eichmann still managed, despite the prohibition, to empty Kistarcsa and Szarva: but that was only a gesture to save face. The evacuations were over. There were a few more episodes: Horthy dismissed Endre and Baky, but was forced under German pressure to take them back; later on, at the end of August, he removed Sztójay and replaced him with Lakatos, a conservative general. But by then I had been gone for some time: sick, exhausted, I had returned to Berlin, where I ended up collapsing. Eichmann and his colleagues had managed to evacuate four hundred thousand Jews; out of those, barely fifty thousand had been retained for industry (plus the eighteen thousand in Vienna). I was shattered, horrified by so much incompetence, obstruction, ill will. Eichmann was doing hardly any better than I. I had seen him one last time before I left, in his office at the beginning of July: he was both elated and gnawed by doubts. “Hungary, Obersturmbannführer, is my masterpiece. Even if we have to stop here. You know how many countries I’ve already emptied of their Jews? France, Holland, Belgium, Greece, part of Italy, Croatia. Germany too of course, but that was easy, it was simply a technical question of transport. My only failure is Denmark. But here I gave Kastner more Jews than I let go in Denmark. What’s a thousand Jews? Dust. Now, I’m sure, the Jews will never get over it. Here it’s been magnificent, the Hungarians offered them to us like sour beer, we just couldn’t work fast enough. Too bad we had to stop, maybe we’ll be able to continue later.” I listened to him without saying anything. Tics were distorting his face even more than usual, he rubbed his nose, twisted his neck. Despite these proud words, he seemed very despondent. Suddenly he asked me: “And what about me, in all this? What’s going to become of me? What’s going to become of my family?” A few days before, the RSHA had intercepted a radio broadcast from New York that gave the numbers of Jews killed in Auschwitz, numbers that were quite close to the truth. Eichmann must have known, as he must have known that his name figured on all our enemies’ lists. “You want my honest opinion?” I said gently.—“Yes,” replied Eichmann. “You know that despite our differences, I’ve always respected your opinion.”—“Well, if we lose the war, you’re finished.” He raised his head: “I know that. I don’t plan on surviving. If we’re vanquished, I’ll put a bullet in my head, proud of having done my duty as an SS officer. But if we don’t lose?”—“If we don’t lose,” I said even more softly, “you’ll have to evolve. You can’t always go one like this. Postwar Germany will be different, a lot of things will change, there will be new tasks. You’ll have to adapt.” Eichmann remained silent, and I took my leave to return to the Astoria. Along with the insomnia and the migraines, I was beginning to have strong spikes of fever, which vanished as abruptly as they had come. But what ended up completely depressing me was the visit of the two bulldogs, Clemens and Weser, who presented themselves at my hotel without prior notice. “But what are you doing here?” I exclaimed.—“Well, Obersturmbannführer,” said Weser, or maybe Clemens, I forget which, “we came to talk with you.”—“But what do you want to talk about?” I said, exasperated. “The case is closed.”—“Ah, but actually, it isn’t,” said Clemens, I think. Both of them had taken off their hats and sat down without asking leave, Clemens on a rococo chair too small for his bulk, Weser perching on a long sofa. “You’re not implicated, fine. We completely accept that. But the investigation into these murders is continuing. We’re still looking for your sister and those twins, for example.”—“Can you believe, Obersturmbannführer, that the French sent us the make of the clothes they found, you remember? In the bathroom. Thanks to that, we worked our way back to a well-known tailor, a certain Pfab. You’ve ordered some suits from Herr Pfab before, Obersturmbannführer?” I smiled: “Of course. He’s one of the best tailors in Berlin. But I warn you: if you continue to investigate me, I’ll ask the Reichsführer to have you dismissed for insubordination.”—“Oh!” Weser exclaimed. “No need to threaten us, Obersturmbannführer. We have nothing against you. We just want to continue to interview you as a witness.”—“Precisely,” Clemens said in his coarse voice. “As a witness.” He handed his notebook to Weser, who leafed through it, then returned it to him, indicating a page. Clemens read, then passed the notebook back to Weser. “The French police,” whispered the latter, “found the late Herr Moreau’s last will. I can assure you right now, you’re not named. Nor is your sister. Herr Moreau leaves everything, his fortune, his companies, his house, to the two twins.”—“We,” grumbled Clemens, “find that strange.”—“Quite,” continued Weser. “After all, from what we understand, they’re just children who were taken in, maybe from your mother’s family, maybe not, but not in any case from his own family.” I shrugged: “I’ve already told you that Moreau and I didn’t get along. I’m not surprised that he didn’t leave me anything. But he didn’t have any children, or any family. He must have ended up feeling close to those twins.”—“Let’s suppose so,” said Clemens. “Let’s suppose so. But still: they may have been witnesses to the crime, they inherit, and they disappear, thanks to your sister who has apparently not returned to Germany. And you, couldn’t you enlighten us a little about it? Even if you have nothing to do with any of that.”—“Meine Herren,” I replied, clearing my throat, “I’ve already told you everything I know. If you came to Budapest to ask me that, you’ve wasted your time.”—“Oh, you know,” said Weser venomously, “we never completely waste our time. We always find something useful. And also, we like talking with you.”—“Yeah,” ejected Clemens. “It’s very pleasant. What’s more, we’ll keep at it.”—“Because, you see,” said Weser, “once we begin something, we have to follow it through to the end.”—“Yes,” approved Clemens, “otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense.” I didn’t say anything, just looked at them coldly, and at the same time I was full of fear, for I saw that these lunatics were convinced I was guilty, they wouldn’t stop persecuting me, something had to be done. But what? I was too depressed to react. They asked me some more questions about my sister and her husband, to which I replied absentmindedly. Then they got up to leave. “Obersturmbannführer,” said Clemens, his hat already on his head, “it’s a real pleasure chatting with you. You’re a reasonable man.”—“We hope very much it won’t be the last time,” said Weser. “Do you plan on returning to Berlin soon? You’re going to have a shock: the city isn’t what it used to be.”

Weser wasn’t wrong. I returned to Berlin in the second week of July to report on my activities and await new instructions. I found the Reichsführer’s and the RSHA’s offices hard hit by the March and April bombings. The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais had been completely destroyed by high-explosive bombs; the SS-Haus was still standing, but only partly, and my office had had to move again, to another annex of the Ministry of the Interior. An entire wing of the Staatspolizei headquarters had burned down, giant cracks zigzagged through the walls, boards blocked up the gaping windows; most of the departments and sections had moved to the suburbs or even distant villages. Häftlinge were still working to repaint the hallways and stairways and clear away the rubble of the destroyed offices; several of them had been killed during a raid in the beginning of May. In town, for the people who stayed, life was hard. There was almost no running water, soldiers delivered two buckets a day to destitute families, no electricity, no gas. The functionaries who still laboriously came to work wrapped scarves around their faces to protect themselves from the perpetual smoke of the fires. Obeying Goebbels’s patriotic propaganda, women no longer wore hats, nor elegant clothing; those who ventured out into the streets wearing makeup were scolded. The big raids with several hundred aircraft had stopped sometime ago; but the little Mosquito attacks continued, unpredictable, exhausting. We had finally launched our first rockets against London, not Speer’s and Kammler’s, but little ones from the Luftwaffe that Goebbels had baptized V-1, for Vergeltungswaffen, “retribution weapons”; they had little effect on English morale, even less on that of our own civilians, much too downcast by the bombings in central Germany and the disastrous news from the front, the successful landings in Normandy, the surrender of Cherbourg, the loss of Monte Cassino, and the debacle at Sebastopol at the end of May. The Wehrmacht was still keeping quiet about the terrible Soviet breakthrough in Byelorussia, few people knew about it, even though rumors were already flying, still short of the truth, but I knew everything, especially that in three weeks the Russians had reached the sea, that the Army Group North was cut off on the Baltic, and that the Army Group Center no longer existed at all. In this glum atmosphere, Grothmann, Brandt’s deputy, gave me a cold, almost scornful welcome, he seemed to want to blame me personally for the poor results of the Hungarian Einsatz, and I let him talk, I was too demoralized to protest. Brandt himself was in Rastenburg with the Reichsführer. My colleagues seemed in utter confusion, no one really knew where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to be doing. Speer, after his illness, had never tried to contact me again, but I still received copies of his furious letters to the Reichsführer: since the beginning of the year, the Gestapo had arrested more than three hundred thousand people for various offences, including two hundred thousand foreign workers, who had gone to increase the workforce in the camps; Speer was accusing Himmler of poaching his labor and was threatening to go to the Führer. Our other interlocutors were piling up complaints and criticisms, especially the Jägerstab, which believed itself deliberately wronged. Our own letters or requests received only indifferent replies. But that was all the same to me, I read through this correspondence without understanding half of it. Among the pile of mail awaiting me, I found a letter from Judge Baumann: I hastily tore open the envelope, took out a brief note and a photograph. It was a reproduction of an old picture, grainy, slightly blurry, with strongly contrasting tones; one could make out men on horseback in the snow, with disparate uniforms, metal helmets, navy caps, astrakhan hats; Baumann had drawn a cross in ink over one of these men, who was wearing a long coat with an officer’s stripes; his oval, minuscule face was completely indistinct, unrecognizable. On the back, Baumann had written COURLAND, NEAR WOLMAR, 1919. His polite note told me nothing more.

Luck had been with me: my apartment had survived. Once again not a window remained, my neighbor had blocked the openings as well as she could with boards and canvas tarps; in the living room, the windows of the sideboard had been blown out, the ceiling had cracked, and the chandelier fallen; a burned smell stubbornly suffused my bedroom, for the apartment next to mine had caught fire when a firebomb had gone through the window; but it was livable and even tidy: my neighbor, Frau Zempke, had cleaned everything and re-whitewashed the walls to mask the traces of smoke; oil lamps, polished and filled, were lined up on the sideboard; a barrel and several cans of water cluttered up the bathroom. I opened the French windows and all the windows whose frames hadn’t been nailed shut, to take advantage of the late afternoon light, then went downstairs to thank Frau Zempke, to whom I gave some money for her trouble—she would probably have preferred Hungarian sausages, but once again I hadn’t even thought of that—and also coupons, so she could prepare food for me: these, she explained, wouldn’t be of much use, the store where most of them were registered no longer existed, but if I gave her a little more money, she would make do. I went back upstairs. I pulled an armchair in front of the open balcony, it was a calm, beautiful summer evening; of half of the surrounding buildings, only empty, silent façades remained, or piles of rubble, and I contemplated this end-of-the-world landscape for a long time; the park at the foot of the building remained silent, all the children must have been sent out to the country. I didn’t even put on any music, so I could take advantage of this quietness and calm a little. Frau Zempke brought me some sausage, bread, and a little soup, apologizing for not being able to do any better, but that suited me very well, I had gotten some beer at the Staatspolizei bar and I ate and drank with pleasure, caught in the curious illusion of floating on an island, a peaceful haven in the midst of the disaster. After clearing the table, I poured myself a large glass of cheap schnapps, lit a cigarette, and sat down, feeling in my pocket for Baumann’s envelope. But I didn’t take it out right away; I looked at the evening light playing on the ruins, a long, slanting light that turned the limestone façades yellow and passed through the gaping windows to illumine the chaos of charred beams and collapsed walls. In some apartments, you could see traces of the life that had gone on there: a frame with a photograph or a reproduction still hanging on the wall, torn wallpaper, a table half suspended in the void with its red-and-white-checked tablecloth, a column of tile stoves still recessed in the wall on each floor, while all the floors had disappeared. Here and there, people went on living: one could see laundry hanging from a window or a balcony, flowerpots, smoke from a stovepipe. The sun set quickly behind the ravaged buildings, projecting huge, monstrously deformed shadows. This, I said to myself, is what the capital of our eternal Reich is reduced to; whatever happens, we won’t have enough of the rest of our lives to rebuild. Then I set up a few oil lamps next to me and finally took the photograph out of my pocket. This image, I must confess, frightened me: no matter how much I gazed at it, I didn’t recognize this man whose face, under his helmet, was reduced to a white spot, not completely shapeless, you could make out a nose, a mouth, two eyes, but featureless, without distinctive markings, it could have been anyone’s face, and I didn’t understand, as I drank my schnapps, how that could be possible, how, looking at this poorly reproduced, bad photograph, I couldn’t say to myself, instantly, without hesitation, Yes, that is my father, or else, No, that is not my father, such doubt was unbearable to me, I had finished my drink and poured myself another, I still examined the photo, wracked my memory to collect scraps about my father, about his appearance, but it was as if the details were fleeing each other and escaping me, the white spot on the photograph drove them away like two magnet tips with the same polarity, scattered them, corroded them. I didn’t have a single picture of my father: sometime after his departure, my mother had destroyed them all. And now this ambiguous, elusive photograph was ruining whatever memories remained in me, was replacing his living presence with a blurry face and a uniform. Overcome with rage, I tore the photograph into pieces and threw them off the balcony. Then I emptied my glass and immediately poured another. I was sweating, I wanted to jump out of my skin, which felt too tight for my anger and my anguish. I got undressed and sat down naked in front of the open balcony, without even bothering to put out the lamps. Holding my sex and my scrotum in one hand, like a little wounded sparrow picked up in a field, I emptied glass after glass and smoked furiously; when the bottle was empty, I took it by the neck and hurled it far away, toward the park, without worrying about possible passersby. I wanted to keep throwing things, to empty the apartment, toss out the furniture. I went to splash a little water on my face and, raising an oil lamp, looked at myself in the mirror: my features were pale, distraught, I had the impression that my face was melting like wax deformed by the heat of my ugliness and hatred, my eyes were gleaming like two black pebbles stuck in the middle of these hideous, insane shapes, nothing held together anymore. I flung my arm back and hurled the lamp against the mirror, which shattered, a little hot oil gushed out and burned my shoulder and neck. I returned to the living room and lay down in a ball on the sofa. I was trembling, my teeth were chattering. I don’t know where I found the strength to go over to my bed, it was certainly because I was dying of cold, I rolled up under the blankets, but that didn’t change much. My skin was crawling, shivers shook my spine, cramps streaked through my neck and made me moan with discomfort, and all these sensations rose up in great waves, carried me away into murky, agitated water, and at each movement I thought it couldn’t get any worse, then I was carried off again and found myself in a place where the previous pains and sensations seemed almost pleasant, a child’s exaggeration. My mouth was dry, I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the pasty coating surrounding it, but I couldn’t even dream of standing up to get some water. I wandered this way for a long time through the dense woods of fever, my body haunted by old obsessions: with the shivers and cramps, a kind of erotic furor traversed my paralyzed body, my anus tingled, I had a painful hard-on, but I couldn’t make the slightest gesture to relieve myself, it was as if I were jerking off with my hand full of ground glass, I let myself be carried by that as by the rest. At certain times, these violent and contradictory currents made me slide into sleep, for anguishing images filled my mind, I was a little naked child crouching and shitting in the snow, and I raised my head to see myself surrounded by riders with stony faces, in coats from the Great War but carrying long spears rather than rifles, and silently judging me for my inadmissible behavior, I wanted to flee, but it was impossible, they formed a circle around me, and in my terror I floundered in my shit, I soiled myself as one of the riders, with blurry features, detached from the group and advanced toward me. But that image disappeared, I must have drifted in and out of sleep and these oppressive dreams the way a swimmer, on the sea’s surface, rises above and sinks below the limit between air and water, sometimes I rediscovered my useless body, which I would have liked to get rid of the way you shed a wet coat, then I set off into another muddled, confused narrative, where foreign policemen were pursuing me, bundling me into a patrol wagon that went over a cliff, I’m not sure, there was a village, stone houses stacked in tiers on a slope, and around them pine trees and maquis, a village perhaps in the Provençal backcountry, and I wanted that, a house in this village and the peace it could have brought me, and at the end of long adventures my situation found its resolution, the threatening policemen disappeared, I had bought the lowest house in the village, with a garden and a terrace and then the pine forest around it, oh sweet cliché country postcard image, and then it was night, there was a shower of shooting stars in the sky, meteorites burned with a pink or red gleam and fell slowly, vertically, like the dying sparks of fireworks, a large shimmering curtain, and I watched that, and the first of these cosmic projectiles touched the earth and at that place strange plants began to grow, multicolor organisms, red, white, spotted, thick and fat like certain kinds of seaweed, they grew larger and rose to the sky at a crazed speed, till they were several hundred meters high, scattering clouds of seeds that in turn gave birth to similar plants that grew upward but crushed everything around them by the force of their irresistible growth, trees, houses, cars, and terrified, I watched a giant wall of these plants filling the horizon of my sight and stretching in all directions, and I understood that this event that had seemed so harmless to me was in fact the final catastrophe, these organisms, come from outer space, had found our earth and our atmosphere to be an environment that was infinitely favorable to them and they were multiplying at an insane rate, occupying all the free space and crushing everything beneath them, blindly, without animosity, simply by the force of their urge to live and grow, nothing could check them, and in a few days the earth would disappear beneath them, everything that had made our life and our history and our civilization was going to be wiped away by these greedy vegetables, it was idiotic, an unfortunate accident, but there would never be time to find a way to counterattack, humanity was going to be erased. The meteorites continued falling and shimmering, the plants, moved by the mad, out-of-control life within them, rose to the sky, strove to fill the entire atmosphere, so intoxicating to them. And I understood then, but perhaps it was later on, when I came up from this dream, that this was right, that it was the law of every living thing, every organism just wants to live and reproduce, without malice, Koch’s bacilli, which had eaten away the lungs of Pergolesi and of Purcell, of Kafka and of Chekhov, had no animosity for us, they didn’t wish their hosts harm, but it was the law of their survival and their development, just as we fight those bacilli with medicines that we invent every day, without hatred, for our own survival, and our whole life is thus built on the murder of other creatures who also want to live, the animals we eat, the plants too, the insects we exterminate, whether they’re actually dangerous, like scorpions or fleas, or simply annoying, like flies, that scourge of mankind, which one of us hasn’t killed a fly whose irritating buzzing was disturbing his reading, that’s not cruelty, it’s the law of our life, we are stronger than other living beings and we do as we please with their lives and their deaths, cows, chickens, ears of wheat are on earth to serve us, and it’s normal that among ourselves we act the same way, that each human group wants to exterminate those who challenge it over land, water, air, why, indeed, treat a Jew better than a cow or a Koch’s bacillus, if we could, and if the Jew could he’d do the same with us, or with others, to guarantee his own life, that’s the law of all things, the permanent war of all against all, and I know there’s nothing original about this thought, that it’s almost a commonplace of biological or social Darwinism, but that night in my fever its force of truth struck me as never before or since, stimulated by that dream where humanity succumbed to another organism whose life power was greater than our own, and I understood of course that this rule was true for everyone, that if others turned out to be stronger than we, they would do to us in turn what we had done to others, and that faced with these drives, the frail barriers that men erect to try to regulate common life, laws, justice, morality, ethics count for little, that the slightest fear or the slightest strong surge bursts them like straw fences, but that then too those who took the first step should not expect that the others, when their time comes, will respect justice or the laws, and I was afraid, for we were losing the war.

I had left my windows open and little by little dawn spilled into the apartment. Slowly, the fluctuations of my fever brought me back to an awareness of my body, of the soaking sheets wrapped around it. A violent urge finally finished waking me up. I don’t really know how, but I managed to drag myself to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and empty myself, a long diarrhea that seemed never to end. When it finally stopped I wiped myself as well as I could, took the slightly dirty glass where I kept my toothbrush, and drew some water from the bucket to drink greedily the bad water that seemed to come from the purest spring to me; but pouring the rest of the bucket into the toilet bowl full of waste (the flush had stopped working a long time ago) was beyond me. I went back to roll myself up in the blankets and shivered violently, for a long time, overwhelmed by the effort. Later on I heard someone knocking on the door: it must have been Piontek, whom I usually met in the street, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. The fever came and went, at times dry and almost gentle, at other times a blaze raging through my body. The telephone rang several times, each ring pierced my eardrums like a knife, but I couldn’t do anything, could neither answer it nor disconnect it. The thirst had returned immediately and absorbed most of my attention, which, now almost detached from everything, coldly studied my symptoms, as if from without. I knew that if I didn’t do something, if no one came, I would die here, on this bed, in pools of excrement and urine, for, incapable of getting up, I was soon going to have to go in my bed. But that idea didn’t bother me, didn’t arouse any pity or fear in me, I felt nothing but scorn for what I had become and wished neither that it stop nor that it continue. In the midst of the wanderings of my sick mind, daylight now lit up the apartment, the door opened and Piontek came in. I took him for another hallucination and just smiled foolishly when he spoke to me. He came over to my bed, touched my forehead, distinctly uttered the word “Shit,” and called Frau Zempke, who must have opened the door for him. “Go get something to drink,” he said to her. Then I heard him telephoning. He came back to see me: “Can you hear me, Obersturmbannführer?” I signed yes. “I called the office. A doctor is coming. Unless you’d rather I take you to the hospital?” I signed no. Frau Zempke returned with a jug of water; Piontek poured some into a glass, raised my head, and had me drink a little. Half of the glass spilled onto my chest and the sheets. “More,” I said. Frau Zempke closed the windows. “Leave them open,” I ordered.—“Do you want to eat something?” asked Piontek.—“No,” I replied, and let myself fall back onto my soaking pillow. Piontek opened the wardrobe, took out some clean sheets, and began changing the bed. The dry sheets were cool, but too rough for my skin which had become hypersensitive, I couldn’t find a comfortable position. A little later, an SS doctor arrived, a Hauptsturmführer I didn’t know. He examined me from head to foot, palpated me, listened to my chest—the cold metal of the stethoscope burned my skin—took my temperature, tapped my chest. “You should be in the hospital,” he finally declared.—“I don’t want to,” I said. He made a face: “Do you have someone who can take care of you? I’ll give you a shot, but you will have to take some pills, drink some fruit juice, some broth.” Piontek went to talk with Frau Zempke, who had gone back downstairs, then returned to say she could take care of that. The doctor explained to me what I had but either I didn’t understand any of his words or I forgot them immediately, I retained nothing of his diagnosis. He gave me a shot, abominably painful. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “If the fever hasn’t gone down, I’ll have you hospitalized.”—“I don’t want to be hospitalized,” I mumbled.—“I assure you it’s all the same to me,” he said sternly. Then he left. Piontek looked upset. “All right, Obersturmbannführer, I’m going to see if I can find some things for Frau Zempke.” I nodded, and he left too. A little later, Frau Zempke appeared with a bowl of broth and forced me to swallow a few spoonfuls. The lukewarm liquid overflowed from my mouth and dribbled onto my chin, which had been invaded by a rough beard; Frau Zempke patiently wiped me and began again. Then she had me drink some water. The doctor had helped me urinate, but my diarrhea was coming back; after my stay in Hohenlychen, I had lost all shyness about this, I asked Frau Zempke to help me, apologizing, and this already elderly woman did it without disgust, as if I were a little child. Finally she left me and I floated on my bed. I felt light now, calm, the shot must have relieved me a little, but I was drained of all energy, conquering the weight of the sheet to raise my arm would have been beyond my strength. It was all the same to me, I let myself go, I calmly sank into my fever and the gentle summer light, the blue sky that filled the frames of the open windows, empty and serene. In thought, I drew around me not just my sheets and my blankets but also the entire apartment, I surrounded my body with it, it was warm and reassuring, like a uterus from which I never wanted to emerge, a dark, silent, elastic paradise, agitated only by the rhythm of my heartbeats and my blood flowing, an immense organic symphony, it wasn’t Frau Zempke I needed, but a placenta, I bathed in my sweat as in amniotic fluid, and I would have liked birth not to exist. The sword of fire that chased me out of this Eden was Thomas’s voice: “Well! You don’t look so great.” He too lifted me up, made me drink a little. “You should be in the hospital,” he said like the others.—“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I repeated stupidly, obstinately. He looked around, went out onto the balcony, came back. “What’ll you do in case of an alert? You could never go down into the basement.”—“I don’t care.”—“At least come to my place, then. I’m in Wannsee now, you’ll be quiet. My housekeeper will take care of you.”—“No.” He shrugged: “As you like.” I wanted to piss again, I took advantage of his presence to ask him to help. He wanted to talk some more to me, but I didn’t reply. Finally he left. A little later, Frau Zempke returned to fuss around me: I gave in with gloomy indifference. Toward evening, Helene appeared in my room. She was carrying a little suitcase that she put near the door; then, slowly, she took the pin out of her hat and shook her thick, slightly wavy blond hair, without taking her eyes off me. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked coarsely.—“Thomas told me. I came to take care of you.”—“I don’t want anyone to take care of me,” I said cantankerously. “Frau Zempke is good enough.”—“Frau Zempke has a family and can’t come here all the time. I’m going to stay with you until you’re better.” I stared at her coldly: “Go away!” She came to sit down by the bed and took my hand; I wanted to remove it but didn’t have the strength. “You’re burning up.” She rose, took off her jacket, hung it on the back of a chair, and then went to wet a towel and returned to put it on my forehead. I let her do it in silence. “Anyhow,” she said, “I don’t have much to do at work. I can take the time off. Someone has to stay with you.” I said nothing. Daylight was fading. She had me drink some water, tried to give me a little cold broth, then sat down next to the window and opened a book. The summer sky was turning pale, it was evening. I looked at her: she was like a stranger. Since my departure for Hungary more than three months ago, I hadn’t had any contact with her, hadn’t written her one letter, and it seemed to me I had almost forgotten her. I examined her gentle, serious profile and told myself it was beautiful; but this beauty had neither sense nor usefulness to me. I turned my eyes to the ceiling and let myself go for a while, I was very tired. Finally, an hour later maybe, I said without looking at her: “Go get me Frau Zempke.”—“Why?” she asked, closing her book.—“I need something,” I said.—“What? I’m here to help you.” I looked at her: the calmness of her brown eyes irritated me like an insult. “I need to shit,” I said brutally. But provoking her seemed impossible: “Explain to me what I have to do,” she said calmly. “I’ll help you.” I explained it to her, without coarse words but without euphemisms, and she did what needed to be done. I told myself bitterly that it was the first time she saw me naked, I had no pajamas, and that she must never have imagined she would see me naked in these conditions. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I was disgusted with myself and this disgust extended to her, to her patience and her gentleness. I wanted to offend her, to masturbate in front of her, ask her for obscene favors, but it was just an idea, I would have been incapable of getting an erection, incapable of making a gesture requiring a little strength. In any case the fever was rising again, I began trembling again, sweating. “You’re cold,” she said when she had finished cleaning me. “Wait.” She left the apartment and returned after a few minutes with a blanket which she spread over me. I was rolled up in a ball, my teeth were chattering, I felt as if my bones were banging against each other like a handful of jacks. Night still didn’t come, the interminable summer day prolonged itself, it threw me into a panic, but at the same time I knew that night would bring no respite, no appeasement. Again, with great gentleness, she forced me to drink. But this gentleness made me mad with rage: What did this girl want with me? What was she thinking about, with her kindness and her goodness? Was she hoping to convince me of something this way? She was treating me as if I were her brother, her lover, or her husband. But she was neither my sister nor my wife. I shivered, waves of fever shook me, and she wiped my forehead. When her hand approached my mouth, I didn’t know if I should bite it or kiss it. Then everything became completely muddled. Images came to me, I couldn’t say if they were dreams or thoughts, they were the same as the ones that had so preoccupied me in the first months of the year, I saw myself living with this woman, settling my life this way, I left the SS and all the horrors that had surrounded me for so many years, my own failings fell away from me like a snakeskin during molt, my obsessions dissolved like a summer cloud, I joined the common stream. But these thoughts, far from pacifying me, revolted me: What! Bleed my dreams dry to bury my penis in her blond vagina, kiss her belly that would swell up, bearing handsome, healthy children? I saw the young pregnant women again, sitting on their suitcases in the mud of Kachau or Munkacs, I thought about their sexes discreetly nestled between their legs, beneath their round bellies, those female sexes and bellies that they would carry to the gas like a badge of honor. It’s always in a woman’s belly that children are made, that’s what’s so terrible. Why this atrocious privilege? Why must relations between men and women always come down, in the end, to impregnation? A semen bag, an incubator, a milk cow, there you have her, woman in the sacrament of marriage. As unattractive as my habits might be, they at least remained pure of such corruption. A paradox maybe, I see now as I write it, but one that at that time, in the vast spirals drawn by my overheated mind, seemed perfectly logical and coherent to me. I wanted to get up, to shake Helene, to explain all that to her, but maybe I also dreamed of that desire, for I would have been quite incapable of making a gesture. With the morning, the fever went down a little. I don’t know where Helene slept, probably on the sofa, but I know she came to see me every hour, to wipe my face and make me drink a little. With the sickness all energy had withdrawn from my body, I lay there, my limbs broken and without strength, oh what a fine old school memory. My panic-stricken thoughts had finally dissipated, leaving behind them only a profound bitterness, a sharp desire to die quickly, to put an end to it. In the morning, Piontek arrived with a full basket of oranges, an unheard-of treasure in Germany at the time. “Herr Mandelbrod sent them to the office,” he explained. Helene took two and went downstairs to Frau Zempke’s to squeeze them; then, aided by Piontek, she sat me up on some pillows and had me drink the juice in small sips; it left a strange, almost metallic taste in my mouth. Piontek had a brief consultation with her that I couldn’t hear, then he left. Frau Zempke came up; she had washed and dried my sheets from the day before, and she helped Helene change my bed, again soaked with the night’s sweat. “It’s very good you’re sweating,” she said, “that chases the fever away.” It was all the same to me, I just wanted to rest, but I didn’t have a moment of peace, the Hauptsturmführer from the day before returned and examined me glumly: “You still don’t want to go to the hospital?”—“No, no, no.” He went into the living room to talk with Helene, then reappeared: “Your fever has gone down a little,” he said. “I told your friend to take your temperature frequently: if you go back over forty-one degrees, we’ll have to send you to the hospital. Is that understood?” He gave me a shot in the buttocks, as painful as the one the day before. “I’m leaving another one here, your friend will give it to you tonight—that will reduce the fever during the night. Try to eat a little.” After he left, Helene brought me some broth: she took a piece of bread, crumbled it up, soaked it in the liquid, and tried to make me swallow it, but I shook my head, it was impossible. I still managed to drink a little broth. As after the first shot, my head was clearer, but I felt drained, empty. I didn’t even resist when Helene patiently washed my body with a sponge and some warm water, then dressed me in pajamas borrowed from Herr Zempke. It wasn’t until she tucked me in and wanted to sit down to read that I exploded. “Why are you doing all this?” I said meanly. “What do you want from me?” She closed her book and stared at me with her large, calm eyes: “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to help you.”—“Why? What are you hoping for?”—“Nothing whatsoever.” She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “I came to help you out of friendship, that’s all.” Her back was to the window, so her face was in the shadow; I examined it greedily, but couldn’t read anything in it. “Out of friendship?” I barked. “What friendship? What do you know about me? We went out together a few times, that’s all, and now you’ve settled here as if you lived here.” She smiled: “Don’t get excited like that. You’re going to tire yourself out.” This smile enraged me: “But what do you know about fatigue? What! What do you know about it?” I had sat up; I fell back, exhausted, my head against the wall. “You have no idea, you don’t know anything about fatigue, you live your nice German girl’s life, with your eyes closed, you don’t see anything, you go to work, you look for a new husband, you don’t see anything that’s happening around you.” Her face remained calm, she didn’t notice the brutality of the du form I was using, I went on, spluttering through my shouts: “You know nothing about me, nothing about what I do, nothing about my fatigue, for the three years we’ve been killing people, yes, that’s what we do, we kill, we kill the Jews, we kill the Gypsies, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the sick, the old, the women, young women like you, the children!” She was clenching her teeth now, and still she didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t stop: “And the people we don’t kill, we send them to work in our factories, like slaves, don’t you see, that’s what an economic question is. Don’t act all innocent! Where do you think your clothes come from? And the flak shells that protect you from enemy planes, where do they come from? The tanks that are holding the Bolsheviks back, in the East? How many slaves died to make them? You’ve never asked yourself that kind of question?” She still wasn’t reacting, and the more she remained calm and silent, the more I got carried away: “Or maybe you didn’t know? Is that it? Like all the other good Germans. No one knows anything, except the ones doing the dirty work. Where did they go, your Jewish neighbors in Moabit? You’ve never asked yourself? To the East? We sent them to work in the East? Where? If there were six or seven million Jews working in the East, we’d have built entire cities! You don’t listen to the BBC? They know! Everyone knows, everyone except the good Germans who don’t want to know anything.” I was raging, I must have been ashen-faced, she seemed to be listening attentively, she didn’t move. “And your husband, in Yugoslavia, what was he doing, in your opinion? In the Waffen-SS? Fighting the partisans? You know what that is, fighting the partisans? We hardly ever see any partisans, so we destroy the environment where they survive. You understand what that means? Can you imagine your Hans killing women, killing their children in front of them, burning their houses with their corpses inside?” For the first time she reacted: “Be quiet! You don’t have the right!”—“And why don’t I have the right?” I jeered. “You think maybe I’m better? You come to take care of me, you think I’m a nice man, with a law degree, a perfect gentleman, a good catch? We’re murdering people, you understand, that’s what we do, all of us, your husband was a murderer, I’m a murderer, and you, you’re a murderer’s accomplice, you wear and you eat the fruit of our labor.” She was livid, but her face showed only infinite sadness: “You are an unhappy man.”—“And why’s that? I like what I am. I’m rising in the ranks. Of course, it won’t last. It’s no use killing everybody, there are too many of them, we’re going to lose the war. Instead of wasting your time playing the nurse and the nice patient, you’d do better to start thinking about getting out of here. And if I were you, I’d head west. The Yankees won’t be so quick to pull out their cocks as the Ivans. At least they’ll wear rubbers: those brave boys are afraid of diseases. Unless you’d prefer a stinking Mongol? Maybe that’s what you dream of at night?” She was still white, but she smiled at these words: “You’re delirious. It’s the fever, you should hear yourself.”—“I hear myself very well.” I was panting, the effort had exhausted me. She went to wet a compress and returned to wipe my forehead. “What if I asked you to strip naked, would you do that? For me? Masturbate in front of me? Suck my cock? Would you do that?”—“Calm down,” she said. “You’re going to make the fever rise.” There was nothing for it, this girl was too stubborn. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the sensation of the cold water on my forehead. She readjusted the pillows, pulled up the blanket. My breath came in wheezes, once again I wanted to beat her, to kick her in the belly, for her obscene, her inadmissible kindness.

In the evening, she came to give me a shot. I turned over onto my stomach with difficulty; when I pushed down my pants, the memory of certain vigorous adolescents shot briefly through my head, then crumpled, I was too tired. She hesitated, she had never given a shot before, but when she stuck the needle in, it was with a firm, sure hand. She had a little cotton soaked in alcohol and she wiped my buttocks after the injection, I found that touching, she must have remembered nurses doing that. Lying on my side, I planted the thermometer into my rectum myself to take my temperature, without paying attention to her but without trying especially to provoke her either. I must have had a little over forty degrees. Then the night began again, the third of that stone eternity, I wandered again through the underbrush and the collapsed cliffs of my thoughts. In the middle of the night, I began sweating profusely, the soaking pajamas stuck to my skin, I was barely conscious, I remember Helene’s hand on my forehead and cheek, pushing back my soaking hair, brushing against my beard, she told me later that I had begun talking out loud, it drew her out of her sleep and brought her to my side, scraps of phrases, mostly incoherent, she said, but she never wanted to tell me what she had understood. I didn’t insist, I felt it was better that way. The next morning, the fever had fallen below thirty-nine. When Piontek came to ask about me, I sent him to the office to get some real coffee, which I kept in reserve, for Helene. The doctor, when he came to examine me, congratulated me: “You’ve come through the worst, I think. But it’s not over yet and you should regain your strength.” I felt like the victim of a shipwreck who, after a fierce, exhausting battle with the sea, finally lets himself roll onto the sand of a beach: maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. But that’s a bad comparison, for a shipwrecked person swims, fights to survive, and I hadn’t done anything, I had let myself be carried along and it was only death that hadn’t wanted me. I greedily drank the orange juice Helene brought me. Around noon, I sat up a little: Helene was standing in the open doorway between my bedroom and the living room, leaning on the doorframe, a summer pullover on her shoulders; she was looking at me absentmindedly, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “I envy you, being able to drink coffee,” I said.—“Oh! Wait, I’ll help you.”—“That’s all right.” I was more or less sitting up, I had managed to pull a pillow behind my back. “Please forgive me for what I said yesterday. I was despicable.” She made a little sign with her head, drank some coffee, and turned her face aside, toward the French window to the balcony. After a little while, she looked at me again: “What you said…about the dead. Was that true?”—“You really want to know?”—“Yes.” Her beautiful eyes were examining me, I seemed to glimpse a worried glint in them, but she remained calm, in control of herself. “Everything I said is true.”—“The women, the children too?”—“Yes.” She turned her head away, bit her upper lip; when she looked at me again, her eyes were full of tears: “It’s sad,” she said.—“Yes. It’s horribly sad.” She thought before she spoke again: “You know we are going to pay for that.”—“Yes. If we lose the war, our enemies’ revenge will be pitiless.”—“I wasn’t talking about that. Even if we don’t lose the war, we are going to pay. We will have to pay.” She hesitated again. “I pity you,” she concluded. She didn’t speak of it again, she continued her ministrations, even the most humiliating ones. But her gestures seemed to have another quality—colder, more functional. As soon as I could walk, I asked her to go home. She protested a little, but I insisted: “You must be exhausted. Go get some rest. Frau Zempke can take care of what I need.” Finally she agreed and put her things into her little suitcase. I called Piontek to take her home. “I’ll phone you,” I said to her. When Piontek arrived, I accompanied her to the apartment door. “Thank you for taking care of me,” I said, shaking her hand. She nodded but didn’t say anything. “See you later,” I added coldly.

I spent the following days sleeping. I still had a fever, around thirty-eight, sometimes thirty-nine; but I drank orange juice and meat broth, I ate bread, a little chicken. At night, there were frequent alerts and I ignored them (there may have been alerts during my three nights of delirium, but I don’t know). These were little raids, a handful of Mosquitos that dropped a few bombs haphazardly, mostly on the administrative center. But one night Frau Zempke and her husband forced me to go down to the basement, after putting me into my bathrobe; the effort exhausted me so much that I had to be carried back up. A few days after Helene’s departure, Frau Zempke burst in in the early evening, red, in curlers and a dressing gown: “Herr Obersturmbannführer! Herr Obersturmbannführer!” She had woken me up and I was annoyed: “What is it, Frau Zempke?”—“They tried to kill the Führer!” She clumsily explained to me what she had heard on the radio: there had been an assassination attempt, at the Führer’s HQ, in eastern Prussia, he was unhurt, had received Mussolini in the afternoon and had already returned to work. “And so?” I asked.—“Well, it’s horrible!”—“Indeed,” I retorted dryly. “But the Führer is alive, you say, that’s the main thing. Thank you.” I went back to bed; she waited a bit, a little at a loss, then beat a retreat. I must confess that I didn’t even think about this piece of news: I no longer thought about anything. A few days later, Thomas came to see me. “You look like you’re getting better.”—“A little,” I replied. I had finally shaved, I must have vaguely resumed a human appearance; but I had trouble formulating coherent thoughts, they broke up with the effort, only scraps remained, without any link between them, Helene, the Führer, my work, Mandelbrod, Clemens and Weser, an inextricable jumble. “You heard the news,” said Thomas, who had sat down by the window and was smoking. “Yes. How is the Führer doing?”—“The Führer is doing fine. But it was more than a failed assassination. The Wehrmacht, or at least part of it, wanted to pull a coup d’état.” I grunted in surprise, and Thomas gave me the details of the affair. “In the beginning we thought it was limited to an officers’ plot. Actually it branched out in every direction: there were cliques in the Abwehr, at the Auswärtiges Amt, among the old aristocrats. Even Nebe, apparently, was in on it. He disappeared yesterday after trying to cover himself by arresting some conspirators. Like Fromm. In short, it’s a bloody mess. The Reichsführer was appointed head of the Ersatzheer, in place of Fromm. It’s clear that now the SS is going to have a crucial role to play.” His voice was tense, but sure and determined. “What happened at the Auswärtiges Amt?” I asked.—“You’re thinking of your girlfriend? We’ve already arrested quite a few people, including some of her superiors; we should be arresting von Trott zu Solz any day now. But I don’t think you have to worry about her.”—“I wasn’t worrying. I was asking, that’s all. Are you looking into all that?” Thomas nodded yes. “Kaltenbrunner has created a special commission to investigate the ramifications of the affair. Huppenkothen is in charge, I’ll be his deputy. Panzinger is probably going to replace Nebe at the Kripo. We’d already begun reorganizing everything at the Staatspolizei anyway; this will just speed things up.”—“And what were your conspirators aiming for?”—“They’re not my conspirators,” he hissed. “And it varies. Most of them apparently thought that without the Führer and the Reichsführer, the West would accept a separate peace. They wanted to dismantle the SS. They didn’t seem to realize that it was just another Dolchstoss, a stab in the back like in ’eighteen. As if Germany would have followed them, the traitors. I have the impression that a lot of them were a little in the clouds: some of them even thought they’d be allowed to keep Alsace and Lorraine, once they’d dropped their pants. And the Incorporated Territories, of course. You know, dreamers. But we’ll see all that—they were so stupid, the civilians especially, that they put almost everything down in writing. We found masses of projects, lists of ministers for their new government. They had even put your friend Speer on one of the lists: I can tell you he’s feeling the heat a little right now.”—“And who was supposed to take the lead?”—“Beck. But he’s dead. He killed himself. Fromm also had quite a few guys shot right away, to try to cover himself.” He explained the details of the attempt and the failed putsch to me. “It could have gone either way. We’ve never had such a close shave before. You have to get better: there’s going to be work to do.”

But I didn’t want to get better right away, I was happy to vegetate a little. I began listening to music again. Slowly, I regained my strength, relearned gestures. The SS doctor had granted me a month’s leave for my convalescence, and I intended to take full advantage of it, whatever happened. In the beginning of August, Helene came back to see me. I was still weak but I could walk; I received her in pajamas and a bathrobe and made her some tea. It was extraordinarily hot out, not a breath of air circulated through the open windows. Helene was very pale and had a lost look I had never seen on her before. She asked about my health; I saw then that she was crying: “It’s horrible,” she said, “horrible.” I was embarrassed, I didn’t know what to say. Many of her colleagues had been arrested, people with whom she had been working for years. “It’s not possible, they must have made a mistake…I heard that your friend Thomas was in charge of the investigations, couldn’t you talk to him?”—“That wouldn’t do any good,” I said gently. “Thomas is doing his duty. But don’t worry too much about your friends. They might just want to ask them some questions. If they’re innocent, they’ll let them go.” She had stopped crying and was wiping her eyes, but her face was still tense. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But still,” she went on, “we should try to help them, don’t you think?” Despite my fatigue, I remained patient: “Helene, you have to understand what is going on right now. The Führer was nearly assassinated, those men wanted to betray Germany. If you try to intervene, you’ll just attract suspicion. There’s nothing you can do. It’s in the hands of God.”—“Of the Gestapo, you mean,” she replied with an angry movement. She got hold of herself: “I’m sorry, I’m…I’m…” I touched her hand: “It will be all right.” She drank some tea as I contemplated her. “And you?” she asked. “Are you going to go back to your…work?” I looked out the window, the silent ruins, the pale blue sky clouded by the omnipresent smoke. “Not right away. I have to get my strength back.” She held her cup up, with both hands. “What’s going to happen?” I shrugged: “In general? We’ll keep on fighting, people will keep on dying, and then someday it will end, and the ones who are still alive will try to forget all this.” She lowered her head: “I miss the days we went swimming at the pool,” she murmured.—“If you like,” I offered, “when I’m better, we can go back.” She looked out the window in turn: “There aren’t any more pools in Berlin,” she said quietly.

Leaving, she had paused on the threshold and looked at me again. I was going to speak, but she put a finger on my lips: “Don’t say anything.” She left that finger on an instant too long. Then she turned heel and quickly went downstairs. I didn’t understand what she wanted, she seemed to be revolving around something without daring either to approach it or leave it. This ambiguity troubled me, I would have liked her to declare herself openly; then I could have chosen, said yes or no, and it would have been settled. But she herself must not have known what it was. And what I had told her during my fit must not have made things any easier; no bath, no swimming pool would be enough to wash away such words.

I had also begun reading again. But I would have been quite incapable of reading serious books, literature; I went over the same sentence ten times before realizing I hadn’t understood it. That’s how I found on my shelves the Martian adventures of E. R. Burroughs, which I had brought back from the attic of Moreau’s house and carefully put away without ever opening them. I read these three books at one go; but to my regret I found none of the emotion that had gripped me when I read them as a teenager, when, locked in the bathroom or buried in my bed, I forgot the external world for hours to lose myself voluptuously in the meanderings of this barbaric universe with its confused eroticism, peopled with warriors and princesses wearing nothing but weapons and jewelry, a whole weird jumble of monsters and machines. I made some surprising discoveries, though, in them, unsuspected by the dazzled boy I had been: certain passages in these science fiction novels, in fact, revealed this American prose writer as one of the unknown precursors of völkisch thinking. His ideas, in my idleness, led me to others; remembering Brandt’s advice, which I had till then been much too busy to follow, I sent for a typewriter and wrote a brief memo for the Reichsführer, quoting Burroughs as a model for the profound social reforms that the SS should envisage after the war. Thus, to increase the birthrate after the war and force men to marry young, I took as an example the red Martians, who recruited their forced labor not just from criminals and prisoners of war, but also from confirmed bachelors who were too poor to pay the high celibacy tax which all red-Martian governments impose; and I devoted an entire chapter to this celibacy tax that, if it were ever imposed, would put a heavy strain on my own finances. But I reserved even more radical suggestions for the SS elite, which should follow the example of the green Martians, those three-meter-tall monsters with four arms and fangs: All property among the green Martians is owned in common by the community, except the personal weapons, ornaments, and sleeping silks and furs of the individuals…. The women and children of a man’s retinue may be likened to a military unit for which he is responsible in various ways, as in matters of instruction, discipline, sustenance, etc…. His women are in no sense wives…. Their mating is a matter of community interest solely, and is directed without reference to natural selection. The council of chieftains of each community control the matter as surely as the owner of a Kentucky racing stud directs the scientific breeding of his stock for the improvement of the whole. I drew inspiration from this to suggest progressive reforms of the Lebensborn. I was actually digging my own grave, and part of me almost laughed as I wrote it, but it also seemed to me to stem logically from our Weltanschauung; what’s more I knew that it would please the Reichsführer; the passages from Burroughs reminded me obscurely of the prophetic utopia he had revealed to us in Kiev, in 1941. In fact, ten days after I sent my memorandum, I received a reply signed by his hand (his instructions, most of the time, were signed by Brandt or even Grothmann):

Very Dear Doktor Aue!

I read your memorandum with keen interest. I’m happy to know that you are recovering and that you are devoting your convalescence to useful research; I didn’t know you were interested in these questions, so vital for the future of our race. I wonder if Germany, even after the war, will be ready to accept such profound and necessary ideas. A lot of work still has to be done on ways of thinking. Whatever the case, when you’re all better, I’ll be happy to discuss these projects and this visionary author with you in more detail.

Heil Hitler!

Yours,

Heinrich Himmler

Flattered, I waited for Thomas to visit me to show him this letter, as well as my memorandum; but to my surprise, he reacted angrily to it: “You really think this is the right time for such childishness?” He seemed to have lost all his sense of humor; when he started to describe the latest arrests to me, I began to understand why. Even in my own circle some men were implicated: two of my university friends and my former professor in Kiel, Jessen, who had apparently grown closer to Goerdeler in recent years. “We also found evidence against Nebe, but he’s disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Well, if anyone knows how to do that, it’s he. He must have been a little twisted: at his place, there was a movie of a gassing in the East, can you imagine him putting that on at night?” I had rarely seen Thomas so nervous. I made him drink, offered him cigarettes, but he didn’t let much drop; I was just able to divine that Schellenberg had had contact with certain opposition circles, before the attempt. At the same time, Thomas ranted angrily against the conspirators: “Killing the Führer! How could they think that would be a solution? That he be removed from command of the Wehrmacht, all right, he’s ill anyway. One could even have imagined, I don’t know, forcing him into retirement, if it was really necessary, letting him remain President but handing over power to the Reichsführer…According to Schellenberg, the British would agree to negotiate with the Reichsführer. But killing the Führer? It’s insane, they didn’t realize…They swore an oath to him, then they try to kill him!” It seemed really to bother him; as for me, the very idea that Schellenberg or the Reichsführer had thought of putting the Führer aside shocked me. I didn’t see much difference between that or killing him, but I didn’t say so to Thomas; he was already too depressed.

Ohlendorf, whom I saw toward the end of the month, when I finally began to go out again, seemed to think as I did. I found him—he who had already been so glum to begin with—even more despondent than Thomas. He confessed to me that the night before the execution of Jessen, to whom he had remained close in spite of everything, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. “I kept thinking about his wife and children. I’ll try to help them, I’m going to give them part of my salary.” He still thought, though, that Jessen deserved the death sentence. For years, he explained to me, our professor had broken his ties to National Socialism. They had continued to see each other, to talk, and Jessen had even tried to recruit his former student. Ohlendorf agreed with him on a number of points: “It’s obvious—the widespread corruption within the Party, the erosion of the rule of law, the pluralist anarchy that’s replaced the Führerstaat, all that’s unacceptable. And the measures against the Jews, the Endlösung, were a mistake. But overthrowing the Führer and the NSDAP, that’s unthinkable. We have to purge the Party, bring up the veterans of the front, who have a realistic vision of things, the leaders of the Hitlerjugend, maybe the only idealists we have left. It’s those young people who will have to spur the Party on after the war. But we can’t dream of going backward, to the middle-class conservatism of the career soldiers and the Prussian aristocrats. This deed discredits them forever. What’s more, the people understand this.” It was true: all the SD reports showed that ordinary people and soldiers, despite their concerns, their fatigue, their anxieties, their demoralization, even their defeatism, were scandalized by the conspirators’ treason. The war effort and the campaign for austerity had received a jolt of energy; Goebbels, finally authorized to truly declare the “total war” he held so dear, went to great lengths to whip it up, without it really being necessary. The situation, though, was only getting worse: the Russians had retaken Galicia and gone beyond their 1939 border, Lublin was falling, and the wave had finally died down on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Bolshevik command was obviously just waiting for us to crush for them the Polish insurrection, launched at the beginning of the month. “We’re playing Stalin’s game there,” Ohlendorf commented. “It would be better to explain to the AK that the Bolsheviks represent a much greater danger than we do. If the Poles fought at our side, we could still hold the Russians back. But the Führer doesn’t want to hear about it. And the Balkans are going to fall like a house of cards.” In Bessarabia, in fact, the Sixth Army, reconstituted from scratch under Fretter-Pico, was getting itself cut into pieces a second time around: the gates to Romania gaped wide open. France was obviously lost; after having opened another front in Provence and taken Paris, the Anglo-Americans were getting ready to clear the rest of the country, while our bruised troops ebbed back to the Rhine. Ohlendorf was very pessimistic: “The new rockets are almost ready, according to Kammler. He’s convinced they will change the course of the war. But I don’t see how. A rocket carries fewer explosives than an American B-17, and can be used only once.” Unlike Schellenberg, about whom he refused to speak, he didn’t have any plans or concrete solutions: he could only talk about a “final National Socialist leap forward, a giant surge,” which to me resembled Goebbels’s rhetoric a little too much. I had the impression that he was secretly resigned to defeat. But I don’t think he had yet admitted that to himself.

The events of July 20 had another consequence—minor, but unfortunate for me: in mid-August, the Gestapo arrested Judge Baumann, of the Berlin SS court. I learned of it fairly rapidly from Thomas, but didn’t immediately realize all the consequences. At the beginning of September, I was summoned by Brandt, who was accompanying the Reichsführer on an inspection in Schleswig-Holstein. I joined the special train near Lübeck. Brandt began by announcing that the Reichsführer wanted to confer the first-class distinction on my War Service Cross: “Whatever you may have thought of it, your action in Hungary was very positive. The Reichsführer is pleased with it. He was also favorably impressed by your recent initiative.” Then he informed me that the Kripo had asked Baumann’s replacement to reopen the case against me; the latter had written to the Reichsführer: in his opinion, the accusations deserved an investigation. “The Reichsführer hasn’t changed his mind, and you have all his confidence. But he thinks it would be detrimental to you to prevent an investigation again. Rumors are beginning to circulate, you must know that. The best thing would be for you to defend yourself and prove your innocence: that way, we can close the case once and for all.” I didn’t like this idea at all, I was beginning to know the manic stubbornness of Clemens and Weser too well, but I didn’t have a choice. Back in Berlin, I went on my own initiative to introduce myself to Judge von Rabingen, a fanatical National Socialist, and explained my version of the facts to him. He retorted that the case put together by the Kripo contained disturbing elements, he kept going back to the bloodstained German clothes, made to my size, and he was also intrigued by the business with the twins, which he wanted to clear up at all costs. The Kripo had finally questioned my sister, who was back in Pomerania: she had placed the twins in a private institution, in Switzerland; she affirmed they were our orphaned second cousins, born in France, whose birth certificates had disappeared in the French rout in 1940. “That could be true,” von Rabingen superciliously declared. “But for now it’s unverifiable.”

This permanent suspicion haunted me. For many days running, I almost succumbed to a relapse of my illness; I remained locked up at home in a black prostration, even going so far as to refuse to answer the door to Helene, who came to visit me. At night, Clemens and Weser, animated marionettes, poorly made and badly painted, jumped on my sleep, creaked through my dreams, buzzed around me like dirty little mocking creatures. My mother herself sometimes joined this chorus, and in my anguish I came to believe these two clowns were right, that I had gone mad and had in fact killed her. But I wasn’t insane, I felt it, and the whole business came down to a monstrous misunderstanding. When I got hold of myself a little, I had the idea of contacting Morgen, the upright judge I had met in Lublin. He worked in Oranienburg: he immediately invited me to come see him, and received me affably. He talked to me first about his activities: after Lublin, he had set up a commission in Auschwitz, and charged Grabner, the head of the Politische Abteilung, for two thousand illegal murders; Kaltenbrunner had had Grabner released; Morgen had re-arrested him and the investigation was following its course, along with that of numerous accomplices and other corrupt subalterns; but in January a fire of criminal origin had destroyed the barracks where the commission stored all the evidence and some of the files, which complicated things quite a bit. Now, he confessed to me in confidence, he was aiming for Höss himself: “I’m convinced he’s guilty of diversion of State property and of murder, but it will be hard for me to prove it; Höss has powerful protections. What about you? I heard you were having some problems.” I explained my case to him. “Accusing you isn’t enough,” he said thoughtfully, “they have to prove it. Personally, I trust your sincerity: I know the worst elements of the SS only too well, and I know you’re not like them. Whatever the case, to charge you, they have to prove concrete things, that you were there at the time of the murder, that those famous clothes were yours. Where are those clothes? If they stayed in France, it seems to me that the prosecution doesn’t have much to go on. And also, the French authorities who sent the request for legal assistance are now under the control of an enemy power: you should ask an expert in international law to study that aspect of things.” I left this interview a little reassured: the obsessive stubbornness of the two investigators was making me paranoid, I could no longer see what was true and what was false, but Morgen’s good legal sense was helping me find terra firma again.

In the end, and as always with the course of justice, this business lasted for many more months. I won’t go into it in detail. I had several more confrontations with von Rabingen and the two investigators; my sister, in Pomerania, had to testify: she was on her guard, she never revealed that I had informed her of the murders; she just claimed that she had received a telegram from Antibes, from an associate of Moreau’s. Clemens and Weser were forced to acknowledge that they had never seen the famous clothes: all their information came from letters from the French criminal police, which had little legal value, especially now. What’s more, since the murders had been committed in France, an indictment could only have led to my extradition, which had obviously become impossible—although one lawyer did suggest to me, not at all unpleasantly, that before an SS court I could risk being sentenced to death for breach of honor, without any reference to the civil criminal code.

These considerations did not seem to shake the favor the Reichsführer was showing me. During one of his lightning visits to Berlin, he had me come on board his train, and after a ceremony where I received my new decoration in the company of a dozen other officers, most of them from the Waffen-SS, he invited me into his private office to discuss my memorandum, whose ideas, according to him, were sound but required a more thorough examination. “For example, there’s the Catholic Church. If we impose a celibacy tax, they’ll certainly require an exemption for the clergy. And if we grant it to them, that will be another victory for them, another demonstration of their strength. Therefore, I think that a precondition for any positive development, after the war, will be to settle the Kirchenfrage, the question of the two Churches. Radically, if necessary: those Pfaffen, those little monks, are almost worse than the Jews. Don’t you think so? I’m in complete agreement with the Führer about this: the Christian religion is a Jewish religion, founded by a Jewish rabbi, Saul, as a vehicle to bear Judaism to another level, the most dangerous of all, together with Bolshevism. Eliminating the Jews and keeping the Christians would be like stopping halfway.” I listened gravely to all this, taking notes. Only at the end of the interview did the Reichsführer mention my case: “They haven’t produced any evidence, isn’t that right?”—“No, my Reichsführer. There is none.”—“That’s very good. I saw right away it was all nonsense. But it’s better that they convince themselves of that on their own, isn’t that right?” He accompanied me to the door and shook my hand after I had saluted him: “I’m very happy with your work, Obersturmbannführer. You are an officer with a bright future ahead.”

A bright future? The future seemed to me rather to be growing narrower every day, mine as well as Germany’s. When I turned around, I contemplated with horror the long dark corridor, the tunnel leading from the depths of the past to the present moment. What had become of the infinite plains that opened up before us when, just out of childhood, we approached the future with energy and confidence? All that energy seemed to have served only to build ourselves a prison, a gallows, even. Ever since my illness, I had stopped seeing people; sports I had left to others. Most of the time I ate alone at my place, the French windows wide open, taking advantage of the gentle end-of-summer air, of the last green leaves that, slowly, in the midst of the ruins of the city, were preparing their final blaze of color. From time to time, I went out with Helene, but a painful embarrassment colored these meetings; we both must have been seeking the gentleness, the intense sweetness of those first months, but it had disappeared and we didn’t know how to find it again, while at the same time we tried to pretend nothing had changed, it was strange. I didn’t understand why she persisted in staying in Berlin: her parents had gone to a cousin’s house near Baden, but when—with sincerity and not with that inexplicable cruelty I had shown while sick—I urged her to join them, she gave laughable excuses, her work, looking after the apartment. In my moments of lucidity I told myself that she was staying because of me, and I wondered if, precisely, the horror my words must have aroused in her didn’t actually encourage her, if she weren’t hoping, perhaps, to save me from myself, a ridiculous idea if ever there was one, but who knows what goes on in a woman’s head? There must have been something else besides, and I glimpsed it sometimes. One day, we were walking in the street when a car drove through a puddle next to us: the stream of water gushed under Helene’s skirt, spattering her up to her thigh. She let out an incongruous, almost harsh burst of laughter. “Why are you laughing so hard, what’s so funny?”—“You, it’s you,” she let out through her laughter. “You’ve never touched me so far up.” I didn’t say anything, what could I have said? I could have had her read the memo I had sent to the Reichsführer, to put her in her place; but I felt that neither that nor even a frank explanation of my tastes would have discouraged her, she was like that, stubborn, she had made her choice almost at random and now she was obstinately sticking to it, as if the choice itself counted more than the person who had been the object of it. Why didn’t I send her packing? I don’t know. I didn’t have many people to talk to. Thomas was working fourteen, sixteen hours a day, I hardly ever saw him. Most of my colleagues had been relocated. Hohenegg, I learned when I called the OKW, had been sent to the front in July, and was still in Königsberg with part of the OKHG Center. Professionally, and despite the Reichsführer’s encouragements, I had reached a dead end: Speer had nothing more to do with me, I had contact only with subalterns, and my office, which was no longer asked to do anything, served almost solely as a mailbox for the complaints of numerous enterprises, agencies, or ministries. Every now and then, Asbach and the other members of the team would churn out some report that I sent out right and left; I would receive polite responses, or none at all. But I hadn’t fully understood the extent to which I was on the wrong track until the day Herr Leland invited me to tea. It was at the bar of the Adlon, one of the only good restaurants still open, a veritable Tower of Babel, where a dozen languages were spoken; all the members of the foreign diplomatic corps seemed to meet there. I found Herr Leland at a table set a little apart. A maître d’hôtel came over and served me tea with precise gestures, and Leland waited until he had moved away to talk to me. “How is your health?” he enquired.—“Fine, mein Herr. I’m all better.”—“And your work?”—“It’s going well, mein Herr. The Reichsführer seems satisfied. I was recently decorated.” He didn’t say anything, but drank a little tea. “But it’s been several months since I last saw Reichsminister Speer,” I went on. He made an abrupt sign with his hand: “That’s not important. Speer has disappointed us very much. We have to move on now.”—“Toward what, mein Herr?”—“It’s still being worked out,” he said slowly, with his slight, somewhat peculiar accent. “And how is Dr. Mandelbrod, mein Herr?” He stared at me with his cold, severe gaze. As always I was incapable of distinguishing his glass eye from the other one. “Mandelbrod is doing fine. But I should tell you that you disappointed him a little.” I didn’t say anything. Leland drank a little more tea before continuing: “I must say that you haven’t satisfied all our expectations. You haven’t shown much initiative, these past few months. Your performance in Hungary was disappointing.”—“Mein Herr…I did my best. And the Reichsführer congratulated me on my work. But there’s so much interdepartmental rivalry, everyone makes obstructions…” Leland didn’t seem to be paying any attention to my words. “We have the impression,” he said finally, “that you haven’t understood what we expect of you.”—“What do you expect of me, mein Herr?”—“More energy. More creativity. You should produce solutions, not create obstacles. And also, allow me to say, you’re letting yourself go. The Reichsführer forwarded your recent memorandum to us: instead of wasting your time with childish pranks, you should think about Germany’s salvation.” I felt my cheeks burning and made an effort to control my voice. “I am thinking of nothing else, mein Herr. But, as you know, I was very sick. I also had…other problems.” Two days before I had had a difficult interview with von Rabingen. Leland didn’t say anything; he made a sign, and the maître d’hôtel reappeared to serve him. At the bar, a young man with wavy hair, in a plaid suit with a bow tie, was laughing too loudly. A brief look was enough for me to size him up: it had been a long time since I had thought about that. Leland spoke: “We are aware of your problems. It is inadmissible that things have gone this far. If you needed to kill that woman, fine, but you should have done it properly.” The blood had drained from my face: “Mein Herr…,” I managed to articulate in a strangled voice. “I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t me.” He contemplated me calmly: “Very well,” he said. “You should know that it’s all the same to us. If you did it, it was your right, your sovereign right. As old friends of your father, we completely understand it. But what you didn’t have a right to do was compromise yourself. That greatly reduces your usefulness to us.” I was going to protest again, but he cut me off with a gesture. “Let’s wait and see how things develop. We hope you’ll get hold of yourself.” I didn’t say anything and he raised a finger. The maître d’hôtel reappeared; Leland whispered a few words to him and got up. I got up too. “See you soon,” he said in his monotone voice. “If you need something, get in touch with us.” He left without shaking my hand, followed by the maître d’hôtel. I hadn’t touched my tea. I went to the bar and ordered a Cognac, which I drained in one swallow. A pleasant, drawling, strongly accented voice spoke next to me: “It’s a little early in the day to drink like that. You want another one?” It was the young man with the bow tie. I accepted; he ordered two and introduced himself: Mihaï I., third secretary in the Romanian legation. “How are things going, at the SS?” he asked after clinking glasses. “At the SS? All right. And the diplomatic corps?” He shrugged: “Glum. Now there are only”—he made a wide gesture at the room—“the last of the Mohicans left. We can’t really organize cocktail parties, because of the restrictions, so we meet each other here at least once a day. Anyway I don’t even have a government to represent anymore.” Romania, after having declared war on Germany at the end of August, had just capitulated to the Soviets. “That’s true. What does your legation represent, then?”—“In principle, Horia Sima. But that’s a fiction, Herr Sima can represent himself very well on his own. Whatever the case”—he pointed again at several people—“we’re all pretty much in the same bag. Especially my French and Bulgarian colleagues. The Finns have almost all gone. The Swiss and the Swedes are the only real diplomats left.” He looked at me, smiling: “Come have dinner with us, I’ll introduce you to some other ghosts of my friends.”

In my relations, as I may have said, I always took care to avoid intellectuals or men of my social class: they always wanted to talk, and had an annoying tendency to fall in love. With Mihaï, I made an exception, but there weren’t too many risks; he was a cynic, frivolous and amoral. He had a little house west of Charlottenburg; I let him invite me over there the first night, after dinner, under the pretext of having a last drink, and I spent the night there. Beneath his eccentric mannerisms, he had the hard, taut body of an athlete, no doubt inherited from his peasant origins, brown, curly, luxuriant body hair, a rough, male odor. It greatly amused him to have seduced an SS officer: “The Wehrmacht or the Auswärtiges Amt, they’re too easy.” I saw him again from time to time. Sometimes I went to see him after dining with Helene; I used him brutally, as if to wash her silent desires out of my head, or my own ambiguity.

In October, just after my birthday, I was sent back to Hungary. Horthy had been overthrown by a coup organized by von dem Bach-Zelewski and Skorzeny; now Szálasi’s Arrow Cross Party was in power. Kammler was clamoring for labor for his underground factories and his V-2s, the first models of which had just been launched in September. Soviet troops were already penetrating Hungary, from the south, as well as the Reich’s own territory, in eastern Prussia. In Budapest, the SEk had been dissolved in September, but Wisliceny was still there and Eichmann quickly made another appearance. Once more, it was a disaster. The Hungarians agreed to give us fifty thousand Jews from Budapest (in November, Szálasi was already insisting on the fact that they were only “on loan”), but they had to be conveyed to Vienna, for Kammler and for the construction of an Ostwall, and there was no more transport available: Eichmann, probably with Veesenmayer’s agreement, decided to send them there on foot. The story is well known: many died on the road, and the officer in charge of reception, Obersturmbannführer Höse, refused most of the ones who arrived, for once again he could not employ women for excavation work. I could do absolutely nothing, no one listened to my suggestions, not Eichmann, not Winkelmann, not Veesenmayer, not the Hungarians. When Obergruppenführer Jüttner, the head of the SS-FHA, arrived in Budapest with Becher, I tried to intercede with him; Jüttner had passed the marchers, who were falling like flies in the mud, the rain, and the snow; this spectacle had scandalized him and he did in fact go and protest to Winkelmann; but Winkelmann sent him to Eichmann, over whom he had no control, and Eichmann bluntly refused to see Jüttner—he sent one of his subordinates, who haughtily brushed aside the complaints. Eichmann, obviously, was so full of himself that he no longer listened to anyone, except maybe Müller and Kaltenbrunner, and Kaltenbrunner no longer seemed to listen even to the Reichsführer anymore. I spoke about it with Becher, who was to see Himmler; I asked him to intervene, and he promised to do what he could. As for Szálasi, he soon took fright: the Russians were advancing; in mid-November he put an end to the marches, they hadn’t even sent thirty thousand, one more senseless waste, on top of the others. No one seemed to know what he was doing anymore, or rather everyone did just as he pleased, alone and separately; it was becoming impossible to work in such conditions. I made one final attempt to approach Speer, who had taken over complete control of the Arbeitseinsatz in October, including the use of the WVHA inmates; he finally agreed to see me, but he rushed through the interview, in which he hadn’t the slightest interest. It’s true that I didn’t have anything concrete to offer him. As for the Reichsführer, I no longer understood his position at all. At the end of October, he gave Auschwitz the order to stop gassing the Jews, and at the end of November, declaring the Jewish question resolved, he ordered the destruction of the camp’s extermination installations; at the same time, at the RSHA and at the Persönlicher Stab, they were actively discussing the creation of a new extermination camp in Alteist-Hartel, near Mauthausen. It was also said that the Reichsführer was conducting negotiations with the Jews, in Switzerland and Sweden; Becher seemed to know all about it, but eluded my questions when I asked him for clarification. I also learned that he finally got the Reichsführer to agree to summon Eichmann (that was later on, in December); but I didn’t find out what was said on that occasion until seventeen years later, during the good Obersturmbannführer’s trial in Jerusalem: Becher, having become a businessman and a millionaire in Bremen, stated in his deposition that the meeting had taken place in the Reichsführer’s special train, in the Black Forest, near Triberg, and that the Reichsführer had spoken to Eichmann with both kindness and anger. One sentence in particular, that the Reichsführer, according to Becher, supposedly threw at his stubborn subordinate has often been quoted since in books: “Though you have been exterminating Jews up to now, from now on, if I give you the order, as I do now, you will be a nursemaid to the Jews. I should remind you that in 1933 it was I who set up the RSHA, and not Gruppenführer Müller or you. If you cannot obey me, tell me so!” This could be true. But Becher’s testimony should certainly be treated with caution; he takes credit himself, for example, thanks to his influence over Himmler, for the cessation of the forced marches from Budapest—whereas the order actually came from the panicking Hungarians—and also, an even more outrageous claim, the initiative for the order to interrupt the Endlösung: yet if anyone could have slipped that idea to the Reichsführer, it was certainly not that clever wheeler-dealer (Schellenberg, maybe).

My legal case continued its course; Judge von Rabingen regularly summoned me to clear up one point or another. From time to time I saw Mihaï; as for Helene, she seemed to be growing increasingly transparent, not from fear, but from pent-up emotion. When, back from Hungary, I told her about the atrocities of Nyíregyháza (the Third Armored Corps had retaken the city from the Russians at the end of October, and had found women of all ages raped, parents nailed alive to doors in front of their mutilated children; and these had been Hungarians, not Germans), she looked at me for a long time, then said gently: “And in Russia, was it very different?” I didn’t say anything. I looked at the extraordinarily thin wrists her sleeves revealed; I could easily have looped my thumb and index finger around them. “I know their revenge will be terrible,” she said then. “But we’ll have deserved it.” In the beginning of November, my apartment, miraculously preserved till then, disappeared in a bombing: a bomb came through the roof and took the top two floors with it; poor Herr Zempke succumbed to a heart attack as he left the half-collapsed cellar. Fortunately, I had gotten into the habit of keeping some of my clothes and my underwear at the office. Mihaï suggested I move to his apartment; I preferred to go to Wannsee, to Thomas’s place, where he had moved after his Dahlem house burned down in May. He led a wild life there, there were always a few fire-brands from the Amt VI around, one or two of Thomas’s colleagues, Schellenberg, and of course girls. Schellenberg often talked in private with Thomas but obviously mistrusted me. One day I came home a little early and heard an animated discussion in the living room, loud voices, Schellenberg’s mocking, insistent intonation: “If that Bernadotte agrees…” He interrupted himself as soon as he saw me on the doorstep and greeted me in a pleasant tone: “Aue, nice to see you.” But he didn’t continue his conversation with Thomas. When I wearied of my friend’s parties, I sometimes let myself be taken around by Mihaï. He often attended the daily farewell parties of Dr. Kosak, the Croatian ambassador, which took place either at the legation or in his villa in Dahlem; the upper crust of the diplomatic corps and the Auswärtiges Amt went there to stuff themselves, get drunk, and meet the prettiest UFA starlets, Maria Milde, Ilse Werner, Marikka Rökk. Around midnight, a choir sang traditional Dalmatian songs; after the usual Mosquito raid, the artillerymen from the Croatian flak battery stationed next door came to drink and play jazz till dawn; among them was an officer who had escaped from Stalingrad, but I took care not to tell him I had been there too, he would never have left me alone. These bacchanales sometimes degenerated into orgies, couples intertwined in the alcoves of the legation and frustrated idiots went out to empty their pistols in the garden: one night, drunk, I made love with Mihaï in the bedroom of the ambassador, who was snoring downstairs on a sofa; then, overexcited, Mihaï came back up with a little actress and took her in front of me as I finished a bottle of slivovitz and meditated on the servitudes of the flesh. This vain, frenetic gaiety couldn’t last. At the end of December, as the Russians were attacking Budapest and our last offensive was getting bogged down in the Ardennes, the Reichsführer sent me to inspect the evacuation of Auschwitz.

In the summer, the hurried, belated evacuation of KL Lublin had caused us a lot of concern: the Soviets had taken the installations intact, with the warehouses full, grist for the mill of their atrocity propaganda. Since the end of August, their forces had been camping on the Vistula, but it was obvious they wouldn’t linger there. Measures had to be taken. The evacuation of the camps and the subcamps of the Auschwitz complex, should the need arise, fell under the responsibility of Obergruppenführer Ernst Schmauser, the HSSPF for Military District VIII, which included Upper Silesia; the operations, Brandt explained to me, would be conducted by the camp personnel. My task would be to ensure that priority was given to the evacuation of the utilizable workforce, in good condition, to be put back to use within the Reich. After my Hungarian tribulations, I was on my guard: “What will my authority be?” I asked Brandt. “Can I give the necessary orders?” He eluded the question: “Obergruppenführer Schmauser has full authority. If you see that the camp personnel aren’t cooperating in the right spirit, refer to him and he’ll give the necessary orders.”—“What if I have problems with the Obergruppenführer?”—“You won’t have any problems with the Obergruppenführer. He’s an excellent National Socialist. Anyway, you’ll be in contact with the Reichsführer or me.” I knew from experience that this was a feeble guarantee. But I had no choice.

The possibility of an enemy advance threatening a concentration camp had been raised by the Reichsführer on June 17, 1944, in a directive titled Fall-A, “Plan A,” which granted the HSSPF of the region, in case of crisis, extensive powers over camp personnel. So if Schmauser understood the importance of preserving the maximum quantity of labor, things might just possibly unfold correctly. I went to see him at his HQ in Breslau. He was a man of the older generation, he must have been about fifty or fifty-five, severe, stiff, but professional. The evacuation plan for the camps, he explained, fell within the general framework of the ARLZ retreat strategy: Auflockerung-Raümung-Lähmung-Zerstörung (“Dismantling-Evacuation-Immobilization-Destruction”), formulated at the end of 1943 “and applied with so much success in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia, where the Bolsheviks not only found no housing or food, but couldn’t even, in certain districts like Novgorod, recover even a single potentially useful human being.” District VIII had promulgated the order to carry out ARLZ on September 19. With this in view, sixty-five thousand Häftlinge had already been evacuated to the Altreich, including all the Polish and Russian inmates, who were liable to present a danger in the rear in case of enemy approach. Sixty-seven thousand inmates remained, of whom thirty-five thousand were still working in the factories of Upper Silesia and neighboring regions. Already in October, Schmauser had entrusted the plans for the final evacuation as well as the last two phases of ARLZ to his liaison officer, Major der Polizei Boesenberg; I would see to the details with him, while keeping in mind that only Gauleiter Bracht, in his capacity as Reichskommissar for Defense of the Gau, could make the decision to implement the plans. “You understand,” Schmauser declared in conclusion, “we all know how important the preservation of the labor potential is. But for us, and for the Reichsführer too, questions of security are still top priority. Such an enemy human mass, within our lines, represents a formidable risk, even if they’re not armed. Sixty-seven thousand inmates is almost seven divisions: imagine seven enemy divisions roaming free behind our troops during an offensive! In October, as you may know, we had an uprising in Birkenau, among the Jews of the Sonderkommando. Fortunately it was brought under control, but we lost some men and one of the crematoriums was dynamited. Imagine that: if they had been able to link up with the Polish partisans constantly prowling around the camp, they could have caused incalculable damage, allowed thousands of inmates to escape! And since August, the Americans come to bomb the IG Farben factory, and each time, inmates take advantage of it to try to escape. For the final evacuation, if it takes place, we must do everything we can to prevent such a situation from occurring again. We’ll have to keep our eyes open.” I understood this point of view very well, but I was afraid of the practical consequences that might result from it. Boesenberg’s briefing didn’t do much to reassure me. On paper, his plan had been meticulously prepared, with precise maps for all the evacuation routes; but Boesenberg harshly criticized Sturmbannführer Bär, who had refused to participate in consultations about the development of this plan (a final administrative reorganization, at the end of November, had left the former baker as Kommandant of the recombined camps I and II, as well as Standortältester of the three camps and of all the Nebenlager); Bär had given as pretext that the HSSPF had no authority over the camp, which was technically true until Fall-A was declared, and he would only accept to report to Amtsgruppe D. A close, flexible cooperation of the authorities in charge, during an evacuation, didn’t look very likely. Furthermore—and this worried me even more after my experiences in October and November—Boesenberg’s plan anticipated an evacuation of the camps on foot, with the inmates having to walk between fifty-five and sixty-three kilometers before being put on trains in Gleiwitz and Loslau. This plan was logical: the war situation anticipated by the plan wouldn’t allow full use of the railroads close to the front; in any case the rolling stock was desperately scarce (in all of Germany, only some two hundred thousand cars were left, a loss of more than 70 percent of the railway equipment in two months). The evacuation of German civilians, who had priority, also had to be considered, along with foreign workers and war prisoners. On December 21, Gauleiter Bracht had promulgated a complete U-Plan/Treckplan for the province, incorporating into it Boesenberg’s plan, according to which the inmates of the KL, for security reasons, would have priority for crossing the Oder, the main bottleneck on the evacuation routes. Once again, on paper it looked fine, but I knew what could result from a forced march in the middle of winter, without any preparation; what’s more, the Jews of Budapest had left in good health, whereas here we would have exhausted, weakened, undernourished, and poorly dressed Häftlinge, in a panic situation that, even if it were well planned, could easily degenerate into a rout. I questioned Boesenberg at length on the key points: he assured me that before departure, warm clothing and additional blankets would be distributed, and that stores of provisions would be prepositioned on the routes. One couldn’t do any better, he asserted. I had to agree he was probably right.

At Auschwitz, at the Kommandantur, I met Sturmbannführer Kraus, a liaison officer sent by Schmauser with an SD Sonderkommando, and set up in the camp as the head of a “Liaison and Transition Office.” This Kraus, a pleasant, competent young officer, whose neck and left ear bore traces of severe burns, explained to me that he was mainly responsible for the “Immobilization” and “Destruction” phases: he especially had to ensure that the extermination installations and the warehouses didn’t fall intact into the hands of the Russians. The responsibility for the implementation of the evacuation order, when it was given, fell to Bär. Bär received me somewhat unpleasantly; obviously to him I was yet another bureaucrat from the outside who was coming to hinder his work. He struck me with his piercing, anxious eyes, a fleshy nose, a thin but curiously sensual mouth; his thick, wavy hair was carefully combed back with brilliantine, like a Berlin dandy’s. I thought him astonishingly dull and narrow-minded, even more than Höss who at least kept the flair of a former Freikorps soldier. Taking advantage of my rank, I reprimanded him severely for his lack of open cooperation with the services of the HSSPF. He retorted with an ill-concealed arrogance that Pohl fully supported his position. “When Fall-A is declared, I will obey the orders of Obergruppenführer Schmauser. Until then, I report to Oranienberg alone. You have no authority to give me orders.”—“When Fall-A is declared,” I replied angrily, “it will be too late to make up for your incompetence. I warn you that in my report to the Reichsführer I will hold you personally responsible for all excessive losses.” My threats seemed to have no effect on him; he listened to me in silence, with barely hidden contempt.

Bär assigned me an office in the Kommandantur in Birkenau, and I had Obersturmführer Elias and one of my new subordinates, Untersturmführer Darius, come from Oranienburg. I took my quarters at the Haus der Waffen-SS; they gave me the same room as during my first visit, a year and a half before. The weather was horrible—cold, damp, fickle. The whole region lay beneath snow, a thick layer of it, often dusted with the soot from the mines and factory chimneys, a dirty gray lace. In the camp it was almost black, packed down by the footsteps of thousands of inmates, and mixed with mud frozen by frost. Violent snow squalls came down without warning from the Beskids and for twenty minutes or so smothered the camp under a white, swirling veil, before disappearing with the same swiftness, leaving everything immaculate for a few moments. In Birkenau only one chimney was still smoking, in fits and starts, the Krema IV, which was being kept active to dispose of the inmates who died in the camp; Krema III was in ruins since the October uprising, and the other two, following Himmler’s instructions, were partially dismantled. The new construction zone had been abandoned and most of the barracks removed, and the vast, empty terrain left to the snow; the problems of overpopulation had been solved by the preliminary evacuations. When the clouds lifted on rare occasions, the blue-tinted line of the Beskids appeared behind the geometric rows of the barracks: and the camp, beneath the snow, seemed as if peaceful and tranquil. I went almost every day to inspect the different satellite camps, Günthergrube, Fürstergrube, Tschechowitz, Neu Dachs, the little camps of Gleiwitz, to check the state of the preparations. The long, flat roads were almost deserted, scarcely disturbed by Wehrmacht trucks; I would come home at night under a dark sky, a heavy, gray mass; beyond it, snow fell sometimes like a sheet on the distant villages, and beyond that a delicate sky, blue and pale yellow, with just a few clouds of muted purple, rimmed by the light of the setting sun, colored the snow and the ice of the marshes that soak the Polish earth. The night of December 31, the Haus organized a quiet celebration for the officers passing through and some camp officers: people sang melancholy carols, the men drank slowly and spoke in low voices; everyone understood it was the last New Year’s Eve of the war, and that it wasn’t very likely the Reich would survive till the next one. I found Dr. Wirths there, profoundly depressed, he had sent his family back to Germany; and I met Untersturmführer Schurz, the new head of the Politische Abteilung, who treated me with much more deference than his Kommandant. I talked for a long time with Kraus; he had served several years in Russia, until he was seriously wounded in Kursk, where he had just barely managed to drag himself out of his burning tank; after his convalescence, he had been assigned to the Southeast SS District, in Breslau, and he had ended up on Schmauser’s staff. This officer, who bore the same first names, Franz Xaver, as another Kraus, a well-known Catholic theologian from the previous century, gave me the impression of being a serious man, open to others’ opinions, but fanatically determined to see his mission through; although he said he understood my aims, he maintained that no inmate should, naturally, fall alive into the hands of the Russians, and thought that these two constraints were not incompatible. He was probably right in principle, but for my part I was worried—rightly so, as we will see—that overly severe orders would rouse the brutality of the camp guards, made up in this sixth year of the war from the dregs of the SS, men too old or too sick to serve at the front, Volksdeutschen who barely spoke German, veterans suffering from psychiatric disorders but deemed fit for service, alcoholics, drug addicts, degenerates clever enough to have avoided the punitive battalion or the firing squad. Many officers were hardly any better than their men: with the enormous expansion, this last year, of the system of KLs, the WVHA had been forced to recruit just about anyone, to promote notoriously incompetent subalterns, to reappoint officers who had been cashiered for serious offenses, or to appoint people no one else wanted. Hauptsturmführer Drescher, an officer I also met that night, confirmed me in my pessimistic outlook. Drescher directed the branch of the Morgen commission still operating in the camp, and had seen me once with his superior in Lublin; that night, in an alcove set a little back from the restaurant dining room, he opened up to me quite frankly about the investigations under way. The case against Höss, which was nearly wrapped up in October, had suddenly collapsed in November, despite the testimony of a female inmate, an Austrian prostitute Höss had seduced and then tried to kill by locking her up in a disciplinary cell of the PA. After his transfer to Oranienburg at the end of 1943, Höss had left his family in the Kommandant’s house, forcing his successive replacements to take quarters elsewhere; he had only finally moved them the previous month, probably because of the Russian threat, and it was common knowledge, in the camp, that Frau Höss had required four whole trucks to carry their belongings. Drescher was appalled, but Morgen had come up against Höss’s protectors. The investigations were continuing, but concerned only small fry. Wirths had joined us, and Drescher went on talking without being bothered by the doctor’s presence; obviously, he wasn’t telling him anything new. Wirths was worried about the evacuation: despite Boesenberg’s plan, no measures had been taken in the Stammlager or in Birkenau to prepare rations or warm clothing for the journey. I too was worried.

Yet the Russians still weren’t moving. In the West, our forces were still struggling to break through (the Americans were clinging to Bastogne), and we also had gone over to the offensive in Budapest, which gave us a little hope again. But the famous V-2 rockets had turned out, if you knew how to read between the lines, to be ineffective, our secondary offensive in Northern Alsace had immediately been contained, and it was obvious that it was just a question of time now. At the beginning of January, I gave Piontek a day off so he could evacuate his family from Tarnowitz, at least as far as Breslau; I didn’t want him worrying himself sick about them when the time came. Snow fell steadily, and when the sky did clear, the heavy, dirty smoke from the foundries dominated the Silesian landscape, bearing witness to a production of tanks, cannons, and munitions that would continue till the last minute. A dozen days went by like this in anxious tranquility, punctuated by bureaucratic quarrels. I finally managed to persuade Bär to prepare special rations, to be distributed to the inmates at the time of departure; as for warm clothing, he told me they would take them from the Kanada, whose warehouses, for lack of transport, were still full. A good piece of news briefly came to lighten this tension. One night, at the Haus, Drescher presented himself at my table with two glasses of Cognac, smiling into his goatee: “Congratulations, Obersturmbannführer,” he declared, handing me a glass and raising the other.—“That’s fine with me, but why?”—“I spoke to Sturmbannführer Morgen today. He asked me to tell you that your affair is closed.” That Drescher knew about it scarcely bothered me, I was so relieved by the news. Drescher went on: “In the absence of any material evidence, Judge von Rabingen decided to dismiss the case against you. Von Rabingen told the Sturmbannführer that he’d never seen such a shoddy case with so little to back it up, and that the Kripo had done an abominable job. He was close to thinking it all stemmed from some plot against you.” I breathed in: “That’s what I always said. Fortunately, the Reichsführer kept his confidence in me. If what you say is true, then my honor is cleared.”—“That’s right,” said Drescher, nodding. “Sturmbannführer Morgen even told me that Judge von Rabingen was thinking of taking disciplinary measures against the inspectors who were working against you.”—“I’d be delighted.” The news was confirmed to me three days later by a letter from Brandt, which included a copy of a letter to the Reichsführer in which von Rabingen stated he was fully convinced of my innocence. Neither of the two letters mentioned Clemens or Weser, but that was enough for me.

Finally, after this brief respite, the Soviets launched the long-dreaded offensive from their bridgeheads over the Vistula. Our meager covering forces were swept aside. The Russians, during their pause, had accumulated incredible firepower; their T-34s rushed in columns across the Polish plains, smashing our divisions, imitating our 1941 tactics with brio; in many places, our troops were surprised by enemy tanks when they thought the lines were a hundred kilometers away. On January 17, Generalgouverneur Frank and his administration evacuated Cracow, and our last units withdrew from the ruins of Warsaw. The first Soviet tanks were already penetrating Silesia when Schmauser launched Fall-A. For my part, I had done everything I thought possible: stored cans of gasoline, sandwiches, and rum in our two vehicles, and destroyed all the copies of my reports. On the night of the seventeenth, I was summoned by Bär along with all the other officers; he announced that according to Schmauser’s instructions, all fit inmates would be evacuated, by foot, starting the following morning: the roll call under way that night would be the last one. The evacuations would take place according to the plan. Each column commander was to make sure no inmate escaped or stayed behind on the road; any attempt would be pitilessly punished; Bär urged them, though, to avoid shooting inmates as they passed through villages, so as not to shock the populace. One of the column commanders, an Obersturmführer, spoke: “Sturmbannführer, isn’t that order too severe? If a Häftling tries to escape, it’s normal to shoot him. But what if he’s simply too weak to walk?”—“All the Häftlinge who are leaving are classified as fit for work and must be able to do fifty kilometers without any problems,” Bär retorted. “The sick and the unfit will remain in the camps. If there are sick prisoners in the columns, they must be eliminated. These orders must be applied.”

That night, the camp SS men slept little. From the Haus, near the train station, I watched pass by the long columns of German civilians fleeing the Russians; after crossing the city and the bridge over the Sola, they poured into the station, or else laboriously continued westward on foot. SS men were guarding a special train reserved for the families of the camp personnel; it was already packed, husbands were trying to heap bundles in next to their wives and children. After dinner, I went to inspect the Stammlager and Birkenau. I visited some of the barracks: the inmates were trying to sleep, the kapos told me that no additional clothes had been handed out, but I still hoped it would happen the next day, before they left. In the lanes, piles of documents were burning: the incinerators were overflowing. In Birkenau, I noticed a big commotion near the Kanada: under the glare of spotlights, inmates were loading all sorts of merchandise onto trucks; an Untersturmführer supervising the operation assured me they were being directed toward the KL Gross-Rosen. But I could see that the SS guards were also helping themselves, sometimes openly. Everyone was shouting, running about frantically, uselessly, and I felt that panic was overtaking these men, that all sense of moderation and discipline was escaping them. As always, they had waited till the last minute to do everything, for acting earlier would have been showing defeatism; now, the Russians were upon us, the Auschwitz guards remembered the fate of the SS captured in the Lublin camp, they were losing all notion of priorities and sought only one thing, to escape. Depressed, I went to see Drescher in his office at the Stammlager. He too was burning his documents. “Have you seen how they’re looting?” he said to me, laughing into his goatee. From a drawer, he took out a bottle of expensive Armagnac: “What do you think of this? An Untersturmführer I’ve been investigating for four months but haven’t managed to nab offered this to me as a goodbye present, the bastard. He stole it, of course. Will you have a drink with me?” He poured two measures into water glasses: “Sorry, I don’t have anything better.” He raised his glass and I imitated him. “Go on,” he said, “make a toast.” But nothing came to mind. He shrugged: “Me neither. Let’s drink, then.” The Armagnac was exquisite, a light, sweet, burned sensation. “Where are you going?” I asked him.—“To Oranienburg, to make my report. I have enough already to prosecute eleven more men. Afterward, they can send me wherever they like.” As I was getting ready to leave, he handed me the bottle: “Here, keep it. You’ll need it more than I.” I put it into my coat pocket, shook his hand, and left. I went to the HKB, where Wirths was supervising the evacuation of the medical material. I spoke to him about the problem of warm clothes. “The warehouses are full,” he assured me. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to have blankets, boots, coats distributed.” But Bär, whom I found around 2:00 a.m. at the Kommandantur in Birkenau in the process of planning the order of departure for the columns, didn’t seem to be of that opinion. “The goods stored are the property of the Reich. I have no orders to distribute them to the inmates. They’ll be evacuated by truck or by train, when possible.” Outside, it must have been ten degrees below zero, the lanes were frozen over, slippery. “Dressed like that, your inmates won’t survive. Many of them are almost barefoot.”—“The ones who are fit will survive,” he asserted. “The others, we don’t need.” More and more furious, I went down to the communications center and got in contact with Breslau; but Schmauser wasn’t reachable, nor was Boesenberg. An operator showed me a telegram from the Wehrmacht: Tschenstochau had just fallen, the Russian troops were at the gates of Cracow. “It’s getting hot,” he said laconically. I thought of sending a telex to the Reichsführer, but that wouldn’t do any good; better to find Schmauser the next day, with the hope he’d have more common sense than that fool Bär. Suddenly tired, I went back to the Haus to go to bed. The columns of civilians, mixed with soldiers from the Wehrmacht, were still flowing in, exhausted peasants all bundled up, their things piled up on a cart with their children, pushing their livestock in front of them.

Piontek didn’t wake me, and I slept until eight o’clock. The kitchen was still working and I had an omelette with sausage. Then I went out. At the Stammlager and in Birkenau, the columns were pouring out of the camp. The Häftlinge, their feet wrapped in whatever they’d been able to find, were walking slowly, at a shuffling pace, surrounded by SS guards and led by well-fed, warmly dressed kapos. All those who had one had taken their blanket, which they generally wore draped over their heads, a little like Bedouins; but that was all. When I asked, I was told they had received a piece of sausage and bread for three days; no one had received any orders about clothes.

The first day, though, despite the ice and the wet snow, it still seemed to be going all right. I studied the columns leaving the camp, talked with Kraus, walked up the roads to observe a little farther on. Everywhere, I noticed abuses: the guards had prisoners pushing carts loaded with their things, or else forced them to carry their suitcases. Here and there by the side of the road I noticed a corpse lying in the snow, the head frequently bloody; the guards were applying Bär’s stern orders. Yet the columns were advancing without confusion and without any attempt at revolt. At midday I managed to make contact with Schmauser to discuss the problem of the clothes. He listened to me briefly and then swept aside my objections: “We can’t give them civilian clothing, they could escape.”—“Then shoes at least.” He hesitated. “Arrange things with Bär,” he said finally. He must have had other preoccupations, I could tell, but I would still have preferred a clear order. I went to find Bär at the Stammlager: “Obergruppenführer Schmauser has given the order to have shoes distributed to the inmates who don’t have any.” Bär shrugged: “Here, I don’t have any more, everything has already been loaded for shipment. Just see about it in Birkenau with Schwarzhuber.” I spent two hours finding this officer, the Lagerführer of Birkenau, who had left to inspect one of the columns. “Very well, I’ll take care of it,” he promised me when I gave him the order. Around nightfall, I found Elias and Darius, whom I had sent to inspect the evacuation of Monowitz and several Nebenlager. Everything was happening in a more or less orderly way, but already, by late afternoon, more and more inmates, exhausted, were stopping and letting themselves be shot by the guards. I left again with Piontek to inspect the nighttime stopover points. Despite Schmauser’s formal orders—there was a fear that inmates would take advantage of the darkness to escape—some columns were still advancing. I criticized the officers, but they replied that they hadn’t yet reached their designated stopping point, and that they couldn’t let their columns sleep outside, in the snow or on the ice. The points I visited turned out to be insufficient in any case: a barn or a school, for two thousand inmates, sometimes; many of them slept outside, huddled next to each other. I asked that fires be lit, but there was no wood, the trees were too damp and no one had tools to cut them down; where boards or old crates could be found, they made little campfires, but these didn’t last till dawn. No soup had been planned, the inmates were supposed to survive on what had been distributed in the camp; farther on, they assured me, there would be rations. Most of the columns hadn’t gone five kilometers; many were still in the almost deserted camp zone; at this pace, the marches would last ten to twelve days.

I went back to the Haus muddy, wet, and tired. Kraus was there, having a drink with some of his colleagues from the SD. He came and sat down with me: “How are things?” he asked.—“Not so good. There are going to be needless losses. Bär could have done a lot more.”—“Bär couldn’t care less. You know he has been named Kommandant at Mittelbau?” I raised my eyebrows: “No, I didn’t know. Who will supervise the closing of the camp?”—“Me. I’ve already received the order to set up an office, after the evacuation, to manage the administrative dissolution.”—“Congratulations,” I said.—“Oh,” he replied, “don’t think I’m happy about it. Frankly, I’d have preferred something else.”—“And your immediate tasks?”—“We’re waiting for the camps to be emptied. Afterward, we’ll start.”—“What will you do with the inmates who are left?” He shrugged and gave an ironic little smile: “What do you think? The Obergruppenführer gave the order to liquidate them. No one must fall alive into the hands of the Bolsheviks.”—“I see.” I finished my drink. “Well, good luck. I don’t envy you.”

Things got gradually worse. The next morning, the columns kept on leaving the camps through the main gates, the guards were still manning the line of watchtowers, order reigned; but a few kilometers farther on, the columns began to grow longer and unravel as the weaker inmates slowed down. More and more corpses could be seen. It was snowing heavily, but it wasn’t too cold, for me in any case, I had seen much worse in Russia, but I was warmly dressed, I was traveling in a heated car, and the guards who had to walk had pullovers, good coats, and boots; as for the Häftlinge, they must have felt pierced through to the bone. The guards were getting more and more frightened, they shouted at the inmates and beat them. I saw one guard beating an inmate who had stopped to defecate; I reprimanded him, then asked the Untersturmführer who was in command of the column to place him under arrest; he replied that he didn’t have enough men to do that. In the villages, the Polish peasants, who were waiting for the Russians, watched the inmates pass by in silence, or shouted something at them in their language; the guards treated harshly those who tried to hand out bread or food; they were nervous, the villages were swarming with partisans, as everyone knew, they were afraid of being attacked. But at night, at the stopping points I visited, there still was no soup or bread, and many inmates had already finished their ration. I figured that at this rate half or two-thirds of the columns would drop off before reaching their destination. I ordered Piontek to drive me to Breslau. Because of the bad weather and the columns of refugees, I didn’t arrive until after midnight. Schmauser was already asleep and Boesenberg, they told me at HQ, had gone to Kattowitz, near the front. A poorly shaven officer showed me an operations map: the Russian positions, he explained, were mostly theoretical, since they were advancing so quickly they couldn’t keep the markings up to date; as for our divisions still shown on the map, some no longer existed at all, while others, according to fragmentary information, must have been moving as roving Kessels behind the Russian lines, trying to meet up with our retreating forces. Tarnowitz and Cracow had fallen in the afternoon. The Soviets were also entering eastern Prussia in force, and there was talk of worse atrocities than in Hungary. It was a catastrophe. But Schmauser, when he received me in midmorning, seemed calm and sure of himself. I described the situation to him and set out my demands: rations and wood for fires at the stopover points, and carts to transport the inmates who were too exhausted, so they could be cared for and put back to work instead of liquidated: “I’m not talking about people sick with typhus or tuberculosis, Obergruppenführer, but just the ones who aren’t up to the cold and hunger.”—“Our soldiers too are cold and hungry,” he retorted sharply. “The civilians too are cold and hungry. You don’t seem to realize the situation, Obersturmbannführer. We have a million and a half refugees on the roads. That’s much more important than your inmates.”—“Obergruppenführer, these inmates, as a labor force, are a vital resource for the Reich. We cannot allow ourselves, in the present situation, to lose twenty or thirty thousand of them.”—“I have no resources to allocate to you.”—“Then at least give me an order so I will be obeyed by the column leaders.” I typed out an order, in several copies for Elias and Darius, and Schmauser signed them in the afternoon; I left again immediately. The roads were horribly congested, endless columns of refugees on foot or in wagons, isolated trucks from the Wehrmacht, lost soldiers. In the villages, mobile canteens from the NSV distributed soup. I reached Auschwitz late; my colleagues had returned earlier and were already asleep. Bär, I was told, had left the camp, probably for good. I went to see Kraus and found him with Schurz, the head of the PA. I had brought along Drescher’s Armagnac, and we drank some together. Kraus explained that he had had Kremas I and II dynamited that morning, leaving IV till the last minute; he had also begun the liquidations that had been ordered, shooting two hundred Jewesses who had stayed in the Frauenlager in Birkenau; but Springorum, the President of the Kattowitz province, had taken away his Sonderkommando for urgent tasks and he didn’t have enough men to continue. All the fit inmates had left the camps, but there remained, according to him, within the entire complex, more than eight thousand inmates who were sick or too weak to walk. Massacring these people seemed to me, in the present state of things, perfectly idiotic and pointless, but Kraus had his orders, and it didn’t fall within my jurisdiction; and I had enough problems as it was with the columns of evacuees.

I spent the next four days running after the columns. I felt as if I were struggling against a mudslide: I spent hours advancing, and when I finally found an officer in charge and showed him my orders, he would apply my instructions as grudgingly as possible. Here and there I managed to organize distributions of rations (elsewhere, too, they were being distributed without my intervention); I had the blankets of the dead collected to give to the living; I was able to confiscate carts from Polish peasants and pile exhausted inmates on them. But the next day, when I found these same columns again, the officers had had shot all those who could no longer get up, and the carts were almost empty. I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward. The farther away we got from the Vistula, the colder it was and the more inmates we lost. Sometimes, to make room for the Wehrmacht, columns had to wait for hours by the side of the road, or else cut across frozen fields, struggle to cross the innumerable canals and embankments, before finding the road again. As soon as a column paused, the inmates, dying of thirst, fell to their knees to lick the snow. Each column, even the ones where I had put carts, was followed be a team of guards who, with a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt, finished off the inmates who had fallen or simply stopped; the officers left up to the municipalities the job of burying the bodies. As always in this kind of situation, the natural brutality of some was aroused, and their murderous zeal went beyond orders; their young officers, as frightened as they, controlled them with difficulty. It wasn’t just the simple soldiers who were losing all sense of limits. On the third or fourth day, I went to find Elias and Darius on the roads; they were inspecting a column from Laurahütte whose itinerary had changed because of the swiftness of the advance of the Russians, who were coming not just from the east but also from the north, almost reaching Gross Strehlitz, according to my information, a little before Blechhammer. Elias was with the column’s commander, a young, very nervous and agitated Oberscharführer; when I asked him where Darius was, he told me he had gone to the rear and was looking after the sick. I joined him to see what he was doing and found him in the process of finishing off inmates with gunshots. “What the hell are you doing?” He saluted me and replied without losing countenance: “I’m following your orders, Obersturmbannführer. I carefully picked out the sick or weak Häftlinge and had the ones who can still get better loaded onto carts. We’ve just liquidated the ones who are completely unfit.”—“Untersturmführer,” I spat out in an icy voice, “liquidations are not your job. Your orders are to limit them as much as possible, and certainly not to participate in them. Understood?” I also reprimanded Elias; Darius, after all, was under his responsibility.

Sometimes I found more understanding column leaders, who accepted the logic and necessity of what I explained to them. But the resources they were given were limited, and they were commanding narrow-minded, frightened men, hardened by years in the camps, incapable of changing their methods, and, with the relaxation of discipline that resulted from the chaos of the evacuation, returning to all their old failings and habits. Everyone, I imagined, had his reasons for his violent behavior; Darius had no doubt wanted to demonstrate his firmness and resolution in front of these men, most of whom were much older than he. But I had other things to do than analyze motivations, I was just seeking, with the greatest difficulty, to have my orders carried out. Most of the column leaders were simply indifferent—they just had one idea in their heads, getting away from the Russians as quickly as possible with the livestock that had been entrusted to them, without complicating their lives.

During these four days, I slept where I could, in inns, at the village town halls, in local houses. On January 25, a light wind had cleared the clouds, the sky was clean and pure, brilliant, I went back to Auschwitz to see what was going on. At the station, I found an antiaircraft battery unit, most of them Hitlerjugend assigned to the Luftwaffe, children, getting ready to evacuate; their Feldwebel, rolling his eyes, informed me in a monotone that the Russians were on the other side of the Vistula and that there was fighting in the IG Farben factory. I took the road that led to Birkenau and came across a long column of inmates climbing the slope, surrounded by SS men who were firing at them pretty much randomly; behind them, all the way to the camp, the road was strewn with bodies. I stopped and hailed their leader, one of Kraus’s men. “What are you doing?”—“The Sturmbannführer ordered us to empty Sectors IIe and IIf and to transfer the inmates to the Stammlager.”—“And why are you shooting at them like that?” He made a face: “Otherwise they won’t move.”—“Where is Sturmbannführer Kraus?”—“At the Stammlager.” I thought for a minute: “You might as well drop it. The Russians will be here in a few hours.” He hesitated, then made up his mind; he gave a signal to his men and the group left at a trot for Auschwitz I, leaving the Häftlinge there. I looked at them: they weren’t moving, some were looking at me too, others were sitting down. I contemplated Birkenau, whose whole extent I could see from the top of this hill: the Kanada sector, in the back, was burning, sending a thick column of black smoke to the sky, next to which the little plume emerging from the chimney of Krema IV, still in operation, could scarcely be noticed. The snow on the barracks roofs sparkled in the sun; the camp looked deserted, I couldn’t make out a human form, aside from spots scattered in the lanes that must have been bodies; the watchtowers stood empty, nothing moved. I got back into my car and made a U-turn, abandoning the inmates to their fate. At the Stammlager, where I arrived before the Kommando I had encountered, other members of the Kattowitz SD or Gestapo were running all over the place, agitated and worried. The camp’s lanes were full of corpses already covered with snow, garbage, piles of dirty clothing; here and there I glimpsed a Häftling searching the bodies or slipping furtively from one building to another; when he saw me he promptly bolted. I found Kraus at the Kommandantur, its empty hallways strewn with papers and files; he was finishing off a bottle of schnapps and smoking a cigarette. I sat down and imitated him. “You hear it?” he said calmly. In the north, in the east, the hollow, monotonous booming of the Russian artillery resounded dully. “Your men don’t know what they’re doing anymore,” I declared as I poured myself some schnapps.—“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m leaving soon. And you?”—“Me too, probably. Is the Haus still open?”—“No. They left yesterday.”—“And your men?”—“I’ll leave a few to finish the dynamiting tonight or tomorrow. Our troops will hold till then. I’m taking the others to Kattowitz. Did you know the Reichsführer was appointed commander of an Army Group?”—“No,” I said, surprised, “I didn’t know.”—“Yesterday. It was named Army Group Vistula, even though the front is already almost on the Oder, or even past it. The Reds also reached the Baltic. East Prussia is cut off from the Reich.”—“Yes,” I said, “that’s not good news. Maybe the Reichsführer can do something.”—“That would surprise me. In my opinion, we’re done for. But we’ll fight to the end.” He emptied the bottle into his glass. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I finished the Armagnac.”—“That’s all right.” He drank a little and then looked at me: “Why are you so determined? For your workers, I mean. Do you really think a few Häftlinge are going to change anything in our situation?” I shrugged and finished my drink. “I have orders,” I said. “And you? Why are you so determined to liquidate these people?”—“I also have my orders. They are enemies of the Reich, there’s no reason they should get away while our nation is perishing. That said, I’m dropping it. We’ve run out of time.”—“Anyway,” I commented, looking at my empty glass, “most of them will only hold out for a few days. You saw the state they’re in.” He emptied his glass in turn and got up: “Let’s go.” Outside, he gave a few more orders to his men, then turned to me and saluted: “Goodbye, Obersturmbannführer. Good luck.”—“You too.” I got into my car and ordered Piontek to drive me to Gleiwitz.

Trains had been leaving Gleiwitz every day since January 19, taking inmates as they arrived from the closest camps. The first trains, I knew, had been sent to Gross-Rosen, where Bär had gone to prepare for reception, but Gross-Rosen, soon overwhelmed, had refused to take any more; the convoys were now passing through the Protektorat, then shunted either to Vienna (for the KL Mauthausen) or to Prague to then be scattered among the KLs of the Altreich. They were loading another train when I arrived at the Gleiwitz station. To my great horror, I saw that all the cars were open, already full of snow and ice before the exhausted inmates were driven into them with rifle butts; inside, no water, no provisions, no sanitary bucket. I questioned the inmates: they came from Neu Dachs and hadn’t received anything since their departure from the camp; some hadn’t eaten in four days. Alarmed, I looked at these skeletal phantoms, wrapped in soaking, frozen blankets, standing up, squeezed against each other in the car full of snow. I shouted at one of the guards: “Who’s in charge here?” He shrugged angrily: “I don’t know, Obersturmbannführer. We were just told to load them in.” I went into the main building and asked for the station chief, a tall, thin man with a toothbrush moustache and a teacher’s round glasses: “Who is responsible for these trains?” He pointed at my stripes with his red flag, which he was holding rolled up in one hand: “It isn’t you, Herr Offizier? In any case, I think it’s the SS”—“Who, exactly? Who’s organizing the convoys? Who’s allocating the cars?”—“In principle,” he replied, slipping his flag under his arm, “for the cars, it’s the Kattowitz Reichsbahndirektion. But for these Sonderzüge, they sent an Amtsrat down here.” He led me out of the station and pointed to a barracks a little lower down, alongside the tracks. “He set himself up in there.” I went over and entered without knocking. A man in civilian clothes, fat, poorly shaved, was sprawled behind a desk covered with papers. Two railroad men were warming themselves by a stove. “Are you the Amtsrat from Kattowitz?” I barked. He raised his head: “That’s me, the Amtsrat from Kattowitz. Kehrling, at your service.” An unbearable reek of schnapps emanated from his mouth. I pointed at the tracks: “Are you the one responsible for this Schweinerei?”—“Which Schweinerei are you talking about, precisely? Because at the moment there are quite a few.” I controlled myself: “The trains, the open cars for the Häftlinge from the KLs.”—“Ah, that Schweinerei. No, that’s your colleagues. I coordinate the assembling of the trains, that’s all.”—“So you’re the one who allocates the cars.” He leafed through his papers. “I’ll explain to you. Have a seat, old man. Here. These Sonderzüge are allocated by the Generalbetriebsleitung Ost, in Berlin. We have to find the cars on-site, among the available rolling stock. Now, you may have noticed”—he waved his hand at the outside—“that it’s something of a mess these days. The open cars are the only ones left. The Gauleiter requisitioned all the closed cars for the evacuation of civilians or for the Wehrmacht. If you don’t like it, just have them covered.” I had remained standing during his explanation: “And where am I supposed to find tarpaulins?”—“Not my problem.”—“You could at least have the cars cleaned out!” He sighed: “Listen, old man, at the moment, I have to organize twenty, twenty-five special trains per day. My men scarcely have the time to couple the cars together.”—“And the supplies?”—“Not my job. But if you’re interested in that, there’s an Obersturmführer somewhere who’s supposed to take care of all that.” I went out, slamming the door. Near the trains, I found an Oberwachtmeister from the Schupo: “Ah, yes, I saw an Obersturmführer who was giving orders. He’s probably at the SP.” In the offices, I was told there was in fact an Obersturmführer from Auschwitz who was coordinating the evacuation of inmates, but that he had gone out to eat. I sent for him. When he arrived, scowling, I showed him Schmauser’s orders and began assailing him with reprimands about the state of the convoys. He listened to me, standing at attention, red as a poppy; when I had finished, he answered, stammering: “Obersturmbannführer, Obersturmbannführer, it’s not my fault. I have nothing, no provisions at all. The Reichsbahn refuses to give me closed cars, there are no supplies, nothing. I keep getting phone calls asking me why the trains aren’t leaving faster. I’m doing what I can.”—“You mean that in all of Gleiwitz there’s no food stock you can requisition? Tarps? Shovels to clean out the cars? These Häftlinge are a resource of the Reich, Obersturmführer! Aren’t SS officers taught to show initiative anymore?”—“Obersturmbannführer, I don’t know. I can find out.” I raised my eyebrows: “Then go find out. I want suitable convoys for tomorrow. Understood?”—“Zu Befehl, Obersturmbannführer.” He saluted me and went out. I sat down and had some tea brought to me by an orderly. As I was blowing on it, a Spiess came to find me: “Excuse me, Obersturmbannführer. Are you from the Reichsführer’s staff?”—“Yes.”—“There are two gentlemen from the Kripo who are looking for an Obersturmbannführer from the Persönlicher Stab. That must be you?” I followed him and he showed me into an office: Clemens was resting both his elbows on a table; Weser was perched on a chair, hands in his pockets, leaning back against the wall. I smiled and leaned on the doorframe, my cup of tea still steaming in my hand. “Look at this,” I said, “old friends. What fair wind brings you here?” Clemens aimed a thick finger at me: “You, Aue. We’re looking for you.” Still smiling, I tapped my epaulettes: “Are you forgetting I have a rank, Kriminalkommissar?”—“We couldn’t care less about your rank,” Clemens muttered. “You don’t deserve it.” Weser spoke for the first time: “You must have said to yourself, when you got Judge von Rabingen’s decision: That’s it, it’s over, right?”—“Indeed, I took it that way. If I’m not mistaken, your case was deemed extremely open to criticism.” Clemens shrugged: “No one knows what judges want. But that doesn’t mean they’re right.”—“Unfortunately for you,” I said pleasantly, “you’re in the service of the law.”—“Precisely,” Clemens grunted, “we serve the law. We sure are the only ones.”—“And you came all the way here just to tell me that? I’m flattered.”—“Not entirely,” said Weser, bringing his chair back to the ground. “You see, we had an idea.”—“That’s novel,” I said, bringing the teacup to my lips.—“I’m going to tell you about it, Aue. Your sister told us she had gone to Berlin, not long before the murder, and that she had seen you. That she had stayed at the Kaiserhof. So we went to the Kaiserhof. They know Freiherr von Üxküll very well at the Kaiserhof, he’s an old customer who has his habits. At the front desk, one of the employees remembered that a few days after his departure, an SS officer had come by to send a telegram to Frau von Üxküll. And you see, when you send a telegram from a hotel, it’s noted down in a register. There’s a number for every telegram. And at the post office, they keep a copy of telegrams. Three years, that’s the law.” He pulled a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his coat and unfolded it. “You recognize this, Aue?” I was still smiling. “The investigation is closed, meine Herren.”—“You lied to us, Aue!” Clemens thundered.—“Yes, it’s not good to lie to the police,” Weser said. I calmly finished my tea, motioned politely to them with my head, wished them a good afternoon, and closed the door on them.

Outside, it was snowing again, harder than ever. I returned to the station. A mass of inmates was waiting in an empty lot, sitting in the snow and the mud under the gusts of wind. I tried to have them come into the station, but the waiting rooms were occupied by soldiers from the Wehrmacht. I slept with Piontek in the car, overcome with fatigue. The next morning, the lot was deserted, aside from a few dozen snow-covered corpses. I tried to find the Obersturmführer from the day before, to see if he was following my instructions, but the immense futility of it all oppressed me and paralyzed my movements. At noon, I had made my decision. I ordered Piontek to find some gas, then, through the SP, I contacted Elias and Darius. By early afternoon I was on my way to Berlin.

The fighting forced us to make a considerable detour, via Ostrau and then through Prague and Dresden. Piontek and I took turns driving; it took us two days. Dozens of kilometers before Berlin, we had to clear a way for ourselves through floods of refugees from the East, whom Goebbels was forcing to skirt round the city. In the center, all that was left of the annex of the Ministry of the Interior where my office had been was a gutted shell. It was raining, a cold, evil rain that soaked into the patches of snow still clinging to the rubble. The streets were dirty and muddy. I finally found Grothmann, who told me that Brandt was at Deutsch Krone, in Pomerania, with the Reichsführer. I then went to Oranienburg, where my office was still functioning, as if detached from the rest of the world. Asbach explained to me that Fräulein Praxa had been wounded during a bombing, with burns to her arm and breast, and that he had had her evacuated to a hospital in Franconia. Elias and Darius had retreated to Breslau during the fall of Kattowitz and were awaiting instructions: I ordered them to return. I started going through my mail, which no one had touched since Fräulein Praxa’s accident. Among the official letters was a private letter: I recognized Helene’s writing. Dear Max, she wrote, my house was bombed and I have to leave Berlin. I am in despair, I don’t know where you are, your colleagues won’t tell me anything. I’m leaving to join my parents in Baden. Write to me. If you want, I’ll come back to Berlin. All is not lost. Yours, Helene. It was almost a declaration, but I didn’t understand what she meant by All is not lost. I quickly wrote to her at the address indicated to tell her I’d returned, but that it was better for now that she stay in Baden.

I devoted two days to writing a very critical report on the evacuation. I also spoke about it in person to Pohl, who swept aside my arguments: “Anyway,” he declared, “we have no more room to put them, all the camps are full.” In Berlin, I had run into Thomas; Schellenberg had left, he had stopped throwing parties and seemed in a glum mood. According to him, the Reichsführer’s performance as commander of an Army Group was turning out rather pathetic; he wasn’t far from thinking that Himmler’s appointment was a maneuver of Bormann’s to discredit him. But these imbecilic games of the thirteenth hour no longer interested me. I was feeling sick again, my vomiting had resumed, I got nauseated as I sat at my typewriter. When I found out that Morgen was also in Oranienburg, I went to see him and told him about the incomprehensible stubbornness of the two Kripo agents. “It’s true,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s odd. They seem to have something against you personally. But I saw the file, there’s nothing substantial in it. If it had been one of those shiftless types, a man without any education, you could imagine anything, but I know you, it seems ridiculous to me.”—“Maybe it’s some form of class resentment,” I suggested. “They want to bring me down at any cost, it seems.”—“Yes, that’s possible. You’re a cultivated man, there are a lot of prejudices against intellectuals among the dregs of the Party. Listen, I’ll mention it to von Rabingen. I’ll ask him to send them an official reprimand. They shouldn’t be pursuing an investigation against a judge’s decision.”

Around noon, a speech of the Führer’s was broadcast on the occasion of the twelfth (and, as it turned out, last) anniversary of the Seizure of Power. I listened without paying it much heed in the mess hall in Oranienburg, I don’t even remember what he said, he must still have been talking about the Asiatic flood of Bolshevism or something of the sort; what struck me above all was the reaction of the SS officers present: only some of them stood up to raise their arms when the national anthem was played at the end, a nonchalance that, a few months before, would have been deemed inadmissible, unpardonable. The same day, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm-Gustloff off the coast of Danzig, the jewel of Ley’s “Kraft durch Freude” fleet, which was transporting more than ten thousand evacuees, half of them children. There were almost no survivors. In the time it took me to return to Berlin the next day, the Russians had reached the Oder and had crossed it almost casually to occupy a wide bridgehead between Küstrin and Frankfurt. I was vomiting up almost every meal, I was afraid the fever might return.

At the beginning of February, the Americans reappeared in full daylight above Berlin. Despite the prohibitions, the city was full of sour, aggressive refugees, who settled into the ruins and looted warehouses and stores without any interference from the police. I was passing by the Staatspolizei, it must have been around 11:00 a.m.; with the few officers who were still working there, I was directed to the antiaircraft shelter built in the garden, at the edge of the devastated park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, itself an empty, roofless shell. This shelter, which wasn’t even underground, was basically a long cement hallway; it didn’t seem very reassuring to me, but I didn’t have a choice. Along with the officers from the Gestapo, they brought in some prisoners, scruffy men with chains on their feet, who must have been pulled out of the neighboring cells: I recognized some of them, July conspirators, whose photograph I had seen in the papers or on the news. The raid was incredibly violent; the squat bunker, whose walls were more than a meter thick, swayed from side to side like a linden tree in the wind. I felt as if I were in the heart of a hurricane, a storm not of the elements but of pure, wild noise, all the noise in the world unleashed. The pressure from the explosions pressed painfully on my eardrums, I couldn’t hear anything anymore; it hurt so much I was afraid they’d burst. I wanted to be swept away, crushed, I couldn’t bear it anymore. The prisoners, who had been forbidden to sit down, were lying on the ground, most of them rolled up in a ball. Then I was lifted from my seat as if by a giant hand and hurled in the air. When I opened my eyes, several faces were floating above me. They seemed to be shouting, I didn’t understand what they wanted. I shook my head but felt hands holding it firmly and forcing me to keep still. After the alert, they took me out. Thomas was supporting me. The sky, at high noon, was black with smoke; flames were licking the windows of the Staatspolizei building; in the park, trees were burning like torches, an entire section of the rear façade of the palace had collapsed. Thomas had me sit down on the remains of a pulverized bench. I touched my face: blood was flowing down my cheek. My ears were ringing, but I could distinguish sounds. Thomas turned to me: “Can you hear me?” I signaled that I could; despite the horrible pain in my ears, I understood what he was saying. “Don’t move. You took a bad crack.” A little later they loaded me into an Opel. On the Askanischer Platz, cars and twisted trucks were burning, the Anhalter Bahnhof seemed to have crumpled in on itself and was disgorging a black, acrid smoke, the Europa Haus and the buildings around it were also burning. Soldiers and auxiliaries, their faces black with soot, were vainly fighting the fires. I was driven to the Kurfürstenstrasse, to Eichmann’s offices, which were still standing. There I was laid down on a table, among other wounded. A Hauptsturmführer arrived, the doctor whom I knew but whose name I had again forgotten: “You again,” he said amiably. Thomas told him that my head had hit the wall of the bunker and that I had lost consciousness for about twenty minutes. The doctor had me stick out my tongue and then aimed a dazzling light into my eyes. “You have a concussion,” he said. He turned to Thomas: “Have him get an X-ray of his skull. If there’s no fracture, three weeks’ rest.” He scribbled a note on a piece of paper, gave it to Thomas, and disappeared. Thomas said to me: “I’m going to find you a hospital for the X-ray. If they don’t keep you there, come back to my place to rest. I’ll take care of Grothmann.” I laughed: “What if there is no more ‘your place’?” He shrugged: “Then come back here.”

I didn’t have a fracture of the skull, Thomas still had his place. He returned around evening and handed me a signed, stamped piece of paper: “Your leave of absence. You’d better leave Berlin.” My head was hurting; I was sipping Cognac diluted with mineral water. “To go where?”—“I don’t know. What if you went to see your girlfriend, in Baden?”—“The Americans could get there before me.”—“Precisely. Take her to Bavaria, or Austria. Find yourself a little hotel, you can have a nice little romantic vacation. If I were you, I’d take advantage of it. You might not have any more for a while.” He described the results of the raid: the offices of the Staatspolizei were unusable, the old chancellery was destroyed, the new one, Speer’s, had been severely damaged, even the Führer’s private apartments had burned down. A bomb had struck the People’s Court in midtrial, they were trying Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorff, one of the conspirators from the OKHG Center; after the raid, they had found Judge Freisler stone dead, von Schlabrendorff’s file in his hand, his head crushed, they said, by the bronze bust of the Führer, which sat enthroned behind him during his ranting speeches for the prosecution.

Leaving seemed like a good idea to me, but where? Baden, the romantic vacation: they were out of the question. Thomas wanted to have his parents evacuated from the outskirts of Vienna, and suggested I go in his place to take them to a cousin’s farm. “You have parents?” He looked at me, puzzled: “Of course. Everyone has parents. Why?” But the Viennese option seemed terribly complicated to me for a convalescence, and Thomas readily agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll make other arrangements, it’s no problem. Go rest somewhere.” I still had no idea where, yet I asked Piontek to come the next morning, with several cans of gasoline. That night I didn’t sleep much; my head and ears hurt, shooting pains woke me up, I vomited twice, but there was something else besides. When Piontek presented himself, I took my letter of leave—essential to get me through the checkpoints—the bottle of Cognac and four packs of cigarettes that Thomas had given me, my bag with a few things and a change of clothes, and without even offering him a coffee, I gave him the order to start off. “Where are we going, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Take the road to Stettin.”

I had said it without thinking, I’m sure of it; but when I had spoken, it seemed obvious to me that it couldn’t have been otherwise. We had to take complicated detours to reach the autobahn; Piontek, who had spent the night in the garage, explained that Moabit and Wedding had been leveled and that hordes of Berliners had come to swell the ranks of refugees from the East. On the autobahn, the line of carts, most of them surmounted by white tents that people had improvised to protect themselves from the snow and the bitter cold, stretched out endlessly, the nose of each horse on the back of the cart in front, kept to the right by Schupos and Feldgendarmen, to let the military convoys going up to the front pass. From time to time, a Russian Sturmovik made its appearance, and then there was panic, people jumped from the carts and fled into the snow-covered fields while the fighter plane went up the column, letting loose bursts of shells that struck down stragglers, blew open the heads and bellies of panicking horses, burned mattresses and carts. During one of these attacks, my car took several hits, its doors were riddled with holes and the rear window broken; the engine, fortunately, was unharmed, and the Cognac too. I handed the bottle to Piontek, then drank a swig myself as we started up again in the midst of the screams of the wounded and the cries of terrified civilians. At Stettin, we passed the Oder, whose early thaw had been accelerated by the Kriegsmarine with dynamite and icebreakers; then, skirting round the ManüSee from the north, we crossed Stargard, occupied by Waffen-SS with black-gold-red badges, Degrelle’s men. We continued on the main road to the East; I guided Piontek with a map, for I had never been in these parts. Alongside the congested roadway stretched undulating fields, covered with clean, soft, crystalline snow, and then dark, lugubrious birch or pine woods. Here and there, one could see an isolated farm, long, squat buildings, nestled under their thatched, snow-covered roofs. The little redbrick villages, with their gray, steep-sloping roofs and austere Lutheran churches, seemed surprisingly calm, the inhabitants going about their business. After Wangerin, the road rose above wide, cold, gray lakes, only the rims of which had frozen. We crossed Dramburg and Falkenburg; in Tempelburg, a little town on the southern bank of the Dratzig-See, I told Piontek to leave the autobahn and head north, by the road to Bad Polzin. After a long, straight line through wide fields stretching between the fir woods that hid the lake, the road ran atop a steep isthmus crowned with trees, which separates the Dratzig-See from the smaller Sareben-See like a knife blade. Below, forming a long curve between the two lakes, a little village was spread out, Alt Draheim, terraced around a block of square, massive stone, the ruins of an old castle. Beyond the village, a pine forest covered the north bank of the Sareben-See. I stopped and asked my way from a farmer, who showed us almost without a gesture: we had to drive two more kilometers, then turn right. “You can’t miss the turn,” he said. “There’s a big lane of birch trees.” But Piontek almost passed it without seeing it. The lane crossed a little wood and then cut straight through lovely open countryside, a long, clear track between two tall curtains of bare, pale birch trees, serene in the midst of the white, virgin expanse. At the far end was the house.