Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  417 For a full version of Gerstein’s affidavit, see Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst: Dokumentation zur Massen-Vergasung, Heft 9 (Bonn: Printed by Oberfränkische Verlangsaft und Druckerei G.m.b.H, Hof/ Saale, 1955), pp. 7-16 (affidavit of 4 May 1945).

  421 Gerstein’s journey to Belzec—In fact, he, Günther and Pfannenstiel traveled together by truck. Since literal faithfulness here would have made it impossible to introduce Berthe’s Doppelgänger, I gave him a train trip.

  422 S.S. Brigade Chief Otto Globocnik: “Now, you’re going to have two jobs at Belzec . . .” —Ibid., p. 311 (altered and expanded).

  423 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “The whole procedure is not entirely satisfactory . . .”—Closely after Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 244 (“‘The camp had clean sanitary facilities’: Professor Wilhem Pfannanstiel, Waffen-S.S. hygienist, on a gassing at Belzec”).

  424 Captain Wirth to Gerstein: “There are not ten people alive . . .”—Friedländer, pp. 108-09.

  425 Gerstein to the Swedish attaché: “The people stand together . . . You can hear them crying, sobbing . . .”—Abridged from Gerstein’s report of 4 May 1945 (presumably to the Americans); in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 242. In Friedländer this testimony appears in the past tense.

  426 Working capacity of Belzec and other extermination camps—According to Gerstein’s 1945 estimate, as reproduced in Friedländer, p. 104. Given the statistics which have since been more or less agreed upon for the number of people murdered in the Holocaust, Gerstein’s count is far too high. For instance, based on his figure for Sobibor, the yearly “output” of that camp would be more than 7,000,000 victims. In fact, one of the murderers estimates that a total of “only” 350,000 Jews died there (Erich Bauer, “the Gasmeister”; in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 232). The commandant of Auschwitz states that “the highest number of gassings in one day was 10,000. That was the most that could be carried out . . . with modern facilities” (ibid., p. 273). According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, “of the circa 50 million people who died during World War II, around twenty million were victims of the unprecedented policy of extermination of the Third Reich” (p. 11; Franciszek Piper, “The Political and Racist Principles of the Nazi Policy of Extermination and Their Realization at Auschwitz”). In order to better respect and re-create Gerstein’s thought processes, I have let his count stand. About Maidanek Gerstein writes only “seen in preparation,” so for quantification of its “productivity” I have relied on the 1944 account of Alexander Werth (op. cit., pp. 890-94, which includes that grisly detail about the cabbages). Werth seems to have been the first credentialed Western journalist to see the camp.

  427 “How many Jews remained above the ground in Europe?”—The protocols of the Wannsee Conference inform the “Herr Undersecretary of State Luther” that 131,800 Jews remained in the Old Reich, 43,700 in the Ostmark, 2,284,000 in the General Government of the former Poland, around 5,000,000 in the USSR; it all added up to the following total: “zusammen: über 11.000.000”—Peter Longerich, Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20. Januar 1942: Planung und Beginn des Genozids an den europäischen Juden (Berlin: Gedenk und Bildungsstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, Band Nr. 7, series ed. by Norbert Kampe; Edition Hentrich, 1998), facsimile p. 6 (also stamped 171), Besprechungs-protokoll (with cover letter on SD stationery to Undersecretary of State Luther, dated 16 February 1942, date-stamped by Luther’s office 2 March 1942), sec. III.

  427 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “When one sees the bodies of these Jews . . .”—Slightly abridged from Gerstein’s report (Friedländer, p. 113).

  428 Conversation of Wirth and Gerstein: “We don’t need any modifications” and “the prussic acid has deteriorated in transit”—Very loosely after Gerstein’s report (Friedländer, p. 112), expanded and embellished. Wirth never offered Gerstein an outright bribe.

  429 Wirth to Gerstein: “Two in the head is too much; two will practically tear the head off” —Fairly closely after the war diary of Blutenordenträger Felix Landau, in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 97 (entry for 12 July 1941; he was shooting Jews).

  429 Footnote: “What harms love more than doubt and suspicion?,” etc.—Strassburg, p. 223.

  430 “They have already adopted . . .” and “Supplies for Tunis.”—S. L. Mayer, ed., Signal: Years of Retreat 1943-44: Hitler’s Wartime Picture Magazine (London: Mayer Hamlyn: A Bison Book, 1979). The issues selected by Mayer were all intended for the Channel Islands and therefore appeared in English. The pages of this volume are unnumbered, so they cannot be cited. I have also drawn on some of the illustrations in Signal for “The Last Field-Marshal.” Since the dates of the various issues have not been indicated, there may be minor anachronisms.

  430 Ludwig Gerstein’s tale about the “Yid who tried to steal our name,” and subsequent conversation—Based on the following, written by Ludwig in the family album: “During the 1890s, a Jewish doctor, Richard Goldstein of Hamburg, changed his name to Gerstein. A complaint lodged by my brother Karl with the city Senate was unsuccessful, but he was promised that this would not be allowed to happen again. A renewed complaint on my part in 1933 went unanswered” (Friedländer, p. 10), and then Ludwig Gerstein mentions “an expatriate student” at the Technical University in Berlin. The part about a Jew under an assumed name being discovered and deported is my invention. Ludwig Gerstein closes the album with an exhortation to his descendants to safeguard the purity of their Aryan blood. Since people generally speak more crassly than they write, I haven’t hesitated to make him still more fearsomely anti-Semitic than the record proves him to have been.

  430 Gerstein on his father: “He used to say that he regretted what was being done” —Closely based on the testimony of the Jewish lawyer R. Coste, in Friedländer, p. 11.

  431 Gerstein’s service record “from this period”: “G. is especially suitable . . .”—Actually, his training report from 5 May 1941, somewhat altered (Friedländer, p. 90).

  432 Complaints of the gassing van inspectors: After the statement of August Becker, Ph.D., gas-van inspector (Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 71). I have not seen any evidence that such people actually went to Gerstein.

  433 Recollection of Pastor Otto Wehr: Gerstein: “Every half hour those trainloads of doomed Jews come chasing me . . .”—Very loose rephrasing of Friedländer, p. 134 (Otto Wehr).

  433 Gerstein to Bishop Dibelius: “Help us, help us! These things must become the talk of the world—”—Friedländer, p. 136 (testimony of Otto Dibelius, abridged).

  435 Ludwig Gerstein: “Leave bad manners to their own quarrel”—Actually, this is part of the advice given to the knight Parzifal by one of his first teachers, Gurnemanz de Graharz. See von Eschenbach, p. 94.

  435 “Word of the Week” street poster: “Who wears this symbol is an enemy of our people” —Hans Bohrmann, comp., Politische Plakate, with essays by Ruth Malhotra and Manfred Hagen (Dortmund, Germany: Harenberg Kommunikation; Die bibliophilien Taschenbücher, no. 435, 1984), p. 374, item no. 278 (trans. by WTV). The note on p. 643 identifies this item as “Parole der Woche 1942 Nr. 27 (1.-7.7.),” in other words, the “Word of the Week” for the first week of July.

  436 Baron von Otter to Gerstein: “. . . a great influence on the relations between Sweden and Germany”—Gerstein believed or wanted to believe that the Baron said this; these are the words of his report to the Allies at the end of the war (Friedländer, p. 124).

  439 Edmund: “Long and wide went the forest . . .”—von Eschenbach, p. 214 (“retranslated” by WTV).

  439 Gerstein to Helmut Franz: “The times leave me no choice . . .”—Friedländer, p. 91 (recast as direct speech).

  439 The Hitler Youth actor in Hagen: “We’ll have no Savior who weeps and laments!” and Gerstein’s reply: “We shall not allow our faith to be publicly mocked without protest!” —Friedländer, p. 37, slightly “retranslated.”

  440 Gerstein’s final inteview with the Swiss consul Hochstrasser—A fiction, like the fi
rst one. According to Balfour (loc. cit.), Gerstein did at some point tell Hochstrasser about the Holocaust, and Hochstrasser passed this information on to his country. I know nothing about his own attitude to Gerstein.

  440 Conversation between Gerstein and his wife: “How can you, a man of honor . . . testify about them”—Considerably altered from Friedländer, p. 131 (Gerstein’s interlocutor was actually the architect Otto Völkers). According to Friedländer, Gerstein might in fact have tried to protect his wife during this period from full knowledge of what he’d seen at Belzec; but from her testimony (p. 132), it seems clear that she was aware that massive numbers of people were being murdered by the Nazis.

  442 Ludwig Gerstein: “For whoever desires the Grail must approach that prize with the sword”—Actually, Eschenbach, p. 269, slightly “retranslated.”

  442 “His son Christian”—I have not been able to find out the names of Gerstein’s children.

  443 Gerstein to his family: “The Allies have devices with which they can pinpoint their targets in the dark . . .”—Testimony of Nieuwenhuisen, to whom Gerstein was in fact speaking; in Friedländer, p. 163.

  446 Captain Wirth, on the capacity of Auschwitz’s crematoria and open pyres: After The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, pp. 169-70 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).

  447 “Our fiendish enemy on the Ostfront,” on the German mood after Stalingrad: “Bitter resistance, bordering on unthinking rashness; and timidity shading into morbid cowardice” —Chuikov, p. 15.

  448 Bishop Dibelius, who “advocated only the exclusion of the Jews from our economic life”—Information given in Friedländer, pp. 38-39. This is a heartbreaking datum; Gerstein was so far from Germany normalcy, such a crier in the wilderness, that he had to consider somebody like Dibelius his ally!

  449 The typist from the motor pool: “What you are under the uniform is nobody’s business” —Actually, this was an old woman whose slightly anti-Nazi son had joined a Nazi group just to get some peace. She is quoted in Karl Billinger, Fatherland (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935; no date given for what must have been the original German publication), p. 243. Billinger was a rather dreary German Communist who was lucky enough to be amnestied after about a year in a camp. I have stolen two or three details from him for my scenes of Gerstein’s 1936 arrest and internment.

  451 “The historian-ethicist Michael Balfour”: “One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer . . .”—Michael Balfour, Withstanding Hitler in Germany 1933-45 (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 240-41 (entry on Gerstein).

  452 “Whoever gazes into Isolde’s eyes feels both heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame.”—Strassburg, p. 150, slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

  452 Colloquy between Gerstein and Berthe—Very loosely based on the dialogue between Svipdag and his dead mother Gróa in the Poetic Edda, pp. 141-43 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanzas 1-16). Gróa is giving her son spells and guidance for travel in the other world to win his bride.

  453 Michal Chilczuk, Polish People’s Army: “But what I saw were people I call humans . . .”—Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, ed., The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945 (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987), p. 38 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

  454 “In theory, he was saving a hundred thousand lives”—It is unknown how much prussic acid Gerstein destroyed, and exactly by what manner. Friedländer (p. 181) quotes Gerstein as saying in one of his affidavits that “the actual amount involved was approximately 9 tons 7 cwt, enough to kill 8,000,000 people.” Of course the Germans used metric measures: 18,700 pounds equals 8,500 kilograms. Since 8,500 goes 941.2 times into 8,000,000, we might as well say that 1 kilogram of Zyklon B can kill 1,000 people; hence Gerstein’s desperately theoretical computation that withholding 100 kilograms saved 100,000 people. Like most of Gerstein’s computations, this one would have exaggerated Holocaust numbers. According to Commandant Höss, who ought to have known, “five to seven kilograms of Zyklon B sufficed to murder 1,500 people” (The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 171), so Gerstein was off by a factor of five to seven. Once again, I’ve thought it best to be faithful to his thought processes, and to the information available to him at the time, rather than give hindsight’s corrected statistics.

  455 Ludwig Gerstein: “If you want to live a worthy life, Kurt, you must never treat a woman badly. A woman, you know, bears no weapons in her hands”—Substantially “retranslated” and abridged from von Eschenbach, p. 268 (the hermit Trevrizent to Parzifal).

  457 Die Ostschweiz headline on the Hungarian Jews: “People are Disappearing” —Mentioned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 254 (Henryk Swiebocki, “Disclosure and Denunciation of SS Crimes”).

  458 Description of Roman Karmen’s body language as he filmed the captured Nazis of Maidanek—After a photo in Ognev.

  458 Details on the suppliers on Zyklon B and Gerstein’s own shadowy but probably negligible role in supplying Asuchwitz—Friedländer, pp. 184-88. There is no record of Gerstein’s ever having any such conversation with Höss as the one which I have imagined. Presumably he must have had close calls here or elsewhere.

  460 Gerstein to his wife: “What action against Nazism . . .”—Gerstein testimony of 1945; in Friedländer, p. 160.

  461 Signal magazine: “‘I’ll have the second from the right,’” says Hilde . . .”—Mayer, op. cit. The following sentence, “I don’t care how many bombs they drop . . .” is my invention. The repaired shop window through which Hilde is bravely peering was damaged by an Allied air raid.

  462 Gerstein to Hochstrasser: “If Hitler should lose, he’ll slam the door . . .”—Loosely after Gerstein to Nieuwenhuisen, to whom Gerstein was in fact speaking; in Friedländer, p. 163.

  462 “They” at Oranienburg: “What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental” —Klee et al, p. 163 (letter from S.S.-Obersturmführer Karl Kretchmer, Sonderkommando 4a, 27 September 1942).

  463 Details on Ravensbrück concentration camp—Based on Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück: An Eyewitness Account of a Women’s Concentration Camp, trans. by Gerald Satter-white (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975).

  464 Gerstein’s father: “Hard times demand hard methods”—Friedländer, p. 203.

  466 Dr. Pfannenstiel to Gerstein: “You’re the man who invented the gas chamber”—An allegation (not made specifically by Dr. Pfannenstiel or anyone) quoted by Balfour.

  466 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “I noticed nothing special about the corpses . . .”—Friedländer, p. 118 (Pfannenstiel’s testimony before the Darmstadt Court, 1950, slightly abridged).

  466 Gerstein on the pink color of the corpses killed by Zyklon B—Described in The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 168 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).

  466 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “Can science devise a way to render this process of exterminating human beings devoid of cruelty?”—In his postwar testimony before the Darmstadt Court, Pfannenstiel actually said: “I wanted to know in particular if this process of exterminating human beings was accompanied by any acts of cruelty” (Friedländer, p. 118). I would think that my alteration does perfect justice to his thought processes during the days when he could participate in the Holocaust with impunity.

  466 Gerstein and Helmut Franz on Kollwitz’s “Volunteers”—Imagined by me. Helmut Franz’s views on the need to respect evil and leave it alone are based in part on the argument in von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales.

  466 The same conversation, on voluntarism and willing Hitler to be good—Somewhat based on Rudolf Hess’s notion of loyalty to Hitler, as quoted in Krebs, pp. 206-07. Hess actually does compare himself to Hagen.

  468 “Let gape the gates!”—Poetic Edda, p. 151 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanza 43).

  470 “Clever Hans” Günther’s victims: two hundred thousand Jews in Bohemia and Moravia—Richard Overy, Interrogations:
The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 369 (HQ BAOR, interrogation reports from No. 1 Sub-Centre, 3-10 December 1945).

  470 Gerstein to his father: “You are wrong about one thing . . .”—Levin, p. 310; Friedländer, p. 208 (“retranslated” a little).

  470 Gerstein to his wife: “People will hear about me . . .”—Friedländer, p. 211.

  471 “It may be that the mere fact of making such efforts . . .”—Friedländer, pp. 198-99 (Frankfurt court document, 1955).

  471 Göring: “Anybody can make an atrocity film . . .”—G. M. Gilbert, Ph.D., Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo, 1995, repr. of 1947 ed.), p. 152 (15 February 1946). Göring was of course sentenced to death. It may be worth noting here that his wife told him: “I shall think you died for Germany!” and “then all suffering vanished from his face.” Her verdict: “He was devotion and goodness incarnate.”—Emmy Goering, My Life with Goering (London: Bruce and Watson Ltd., 1972), pp. 157, 159.

  THE SECOND FRONT

  472 Epigraph—Vladimir Karpov, ed. [photos; with text by Georgii Drozdov and Evgenii Ryabko, trans. Lydia Kmetyuk], Russia at War: 1941-45 (London: Stanley Paul, 1987), p. 17.

  472 Chuikov’s decorations—He also received eight Orders of Lenin and one order of the Red Star. He was not promoted to Field-Marshal until 1955.

  472 Assessment of Chuikov’s military prowess—After the brief biography by Richard Woff, in Shukman, pp. 67-74. I forgot to mention that during the Nazi-Soviet Pact he’d participated in the heroic liberation of East Poland from the Poles.

  472 Chuikov: “The black humped shapes, like camels on their knees, of dead enemy tanks.”—Op. cit., p. 18.

  473 Chuikov: “The spring was with us, but behind the enemy’s lines it was autumn”—Ibid., p. 17.

  473 Chuikov: “This long delay in the opening of the second front . . .”—Ibid., p. 20.

  473 The stanza from Marina Tsvetaeva: “You can’t withstand me . . .”—Tsvetaeva, p. 43 (“Where you are I can reach you” [1923]), “retranslated” and slightly truncated by WTV.