Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  That afternoon, I ran into Colonel Nebe and Colonel Blobel again at the Einsatzgruppe headquarters in Minsk. Heydrich had been upset over the day’s events, and I made known his—and my—annoyance with Nebe, accusing him of botching the entire affair. I failed to use his title when I addressed him, and it bothered him.

  “I am Colonel Nebe to you, Major Dorf.”

  “You’re lucky you are not a sergeant after that mess today. Why didn’t you talk the Reichsführer out of his lunatic notion to observe a shooting? And couldn’t you find gunners who could get rid of them all in one volley?”

  He and Blobel were taken aback by my assault.

  “Damn you, Dorf, don’t go barking at me,” Nebe said.

  “Your operation was a disgrace,” I said.

  Blobel, boots on Nebe’s desk, whiskey glass in hand, glowered at me. “Shut up, Dorf. Some of us are sick of your goddamn interference.”

  “Are you? Well, for your information, Blobel, Heydrich is not happy with the results of Babi Yar. We are told that so many bodies are buried there that the gases are erupting the earth. We want those bodies dug up and burned. Burned so that no trace is left.”

  “What? All those bodies? Who the hell are you—”

  I cut him short. These men, deep in their hearts, are cowards.

  “Get your fat ass back to the Ukraine, Blobel, and do as you are told.”

  Nebe nervously paced the floor. Outside the window I could see his men, aided by Lithuanian “volunteers,” parading more Jews to the countryside. “Major Dorf, you have no right to talk to us in this insulting manner.”

  “Sure he does,” Blobel said. “He’s Heydrich’s pet, his favorite shyster. You and that half-Jew think you can—”

  “That is a lie. Anyone who spreads such lies will have to answer for them.”

  “Go to hell,” Blobel said. He shook the dregs from his bottle. “I need a drink.”

  They got up. I was not invited. But Nebe was still trying to placate me. A weak man. “Listen, Major. I think I have some good ideas on what Himmler has in mind. I mentioned dynamiting large numbers of undesirables to him. But there are other ways. Injections. Gas. It’s been tried in a few places, you know.”

  “To hell with him, Nebe,” Blobel said. As they walked out, I could hear Blobel, in a voice intentionally loud, saying to his fellow officer, “We’ve got to do something about that scheming little bastard.”

  Berlin

  May 1942

  Exhausted from this past tour of the occupied territories, I’m back in Berlin. At last a chance to hold Marta in my arms, kiss her beloved fair face, stroke her hair, join our bodies in that sweetest of unions.

  I can’t wait to see the children. Peter is in training with his Jungvolk unit, the preparatory organization for the Hitler Jugend. He says he wants to join the SS when he is old enough, a combat unit, such as a Panzer division. I told him the war will long have ended by then, with Germany victorious. Little Laura is getting top grades in school. Her teachers adore her—so pretty, so vivacious, so obedient.

  My work is mounting, my areas of responsibility broadening each day. Heydrich says I am a glutton for work. I get more done in a day than any of his other aides do in a week. Major “Heart-of-the-Matter,” he calls me.

  We discussed alternative methods this morning, May 21, in his office.

  Two months ago, the new camp at Belzec began using carbon monoxide gas, but the results are not too good. Heydrich wants a full report. And at Chelmno, near Lodz, an ingenious method is being tried—huge mobile vans, in which the exhaust is passed into the sealed body of the truck. There is some question about the efficiency of this method also.

  We enjoyed a good laugh about Blobel. I must have scared the pants off him. He went back to Babi Yar and dug up a great many bodies, burning them to nothingness on giant pyres of railroad ties soaked with gasoline. Amazing, what with wartime shortages, and the army demanding every drop of motor fuel, that Blobel was able to get the stuff. But the army jumps when we give orders. And I may have underestimated Blobel. His method of disposing of corpses is remarkable, so that, as Himmler has decreed, “even the ashes disappear.”

  As I was about to leave, Heydrich called me back and handed me a single sheet of paper. “What do you make of this, Dorf?”

  I read it, and as I did, it was an effort to keep my composure.

  “Aloud,” Heydrich said.

  “‘Major Erik Dorf of your staff was in the early thirties a member of a Communist youth group at the University of Berlin. His father was a Communist Party member who took his own life in a scandal involving money. Dorf’s mother’s family may contain a Jew in the background. All these matters are worth an investigation.’”

  “Well?”

  “It’s not signed,” I said.

  “They never are. What about it, Erik?”

  “Lies. As we say in court, in its parts, and in the whole. My father was briefly a Socialist. Nothing serious. He and his brother. They got over it. Oh, excuse me. One part is true. He did take his life, but there was no scandal. He was wiped out in the depression. My mother’s family is free of taint.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “The usual check was made on me in 1935. My God, General, why after seven years of faithful service a thing like this has to surface …”

  “Oh, I agree. Unfortunately, Himmler got one of these also. I’m afraid he wants another report on you. Family records and so on.”

  “Didn’t you reassure him about me?”

  “You know how it is in the service. Himmler and I have had our rivalries. I’m afraid you got caught in the middle.”

  “Do you have any idea who sent out this poison?”

  “It could be any of a dozen. A way of striking at me.”

  I was stunned. “But you’re second in command. Everyone knows you run the SS and the SD, and the Jewish Resettlement program.”

  “That’s why they’re wary of me. You see, Erik, I know a great deal about all of them—top to bottom. I know what a collection of thugs and scum many of them are. Useful to us, but not really to the taste of men like us. We’re intellectuals, Erik—armed intellectuals, if you will. But most of them—a bloody rogues’ gallery.”

  There were photographs on the wall of some of our leaders, and Heydrich ticked them off as he walked by them. “Goering, drug addict and bribe taker. You should see him in his Roman toga, perfumed, toenails painted, rouge on his cheeks. Rosenberg—a Jewish mistress. Goebbels—scandals on top of scandals. Himmler? Something fishy on his wife’s side. And then we come to dignitaries like Streicher and Kaltenbrunner who aren’t much better than common criminals. That’s why the Führer needs a few brains around him, Erik. People like us.”

  “I trust I’ll never become a member of your rogues’ gallery,” I said.

  He returned to his desk, smiled, dropped the paper with the false charges. “Why should you?” And as I trembled inwardly, he added, “Assuming this letter is—as you claim—a pack of lies.”

  I am disturbed. As much by the campaign of slander that has been launched against me as by Heydrich’s revelations about our leaders.

  How much of it is true? And how much intended to frighten me, to show me how wide-ranging his powers are? I cannot resolve the matter in my mind. I tell myself that all men of greatness have failings. For example, in SS circles, it is firmly believed that Roosevelt is a syphilitic. Hence his confinement to a wheelchair. The world knows Churchill is a drunkard.

  But it is strange to me that Heydrich would talk so freely, with such mockery, of our chiefs. They hold the power of life and death over millions.

  Is there a vague, faint possibility that there is something out of kilter in some of our leaders, and the kind of wars they wage, the government they have created? But, look how we have won support from every level of German life—church, business, corporations, labor unions, educators! The German people, the heirs of Goethe and Beethoven, would not countenance criminals as th
eir prophets and kings. Heydrich exaggerated, perhaps to scare me a little. Or was the secret part-Jew in him at work?

  Chelmno,

  Poland June 1942

  Today, June 17, I rode with Colonel Artur Nebe behind one of those experimental vans. It was quite an experience. Indeed, so profound was it that I forgot my unease over the campaign of slander against me.

  Nebe and I rode in a chauffeured staff car, along a secondary dirt road. Some distance ahead of us, a huge van labored to make the grade. It was a drab-green vehicle, totally enclosed, windowless, bearing the sign GHETTO AUTOBUS.

  “He’s laboring,” Nebe said. “Close to forty inside. Too many.”

  “How long does the process take?”

  “Oh, it varies. Ten, twelve minutes. Longer when the truck is so heavily loaded. The gas pressure can be irregular, and sometimes it can take a long time to finish them off.”

  “And this is your more efficient method?”

  “We’re trying, Dorf, we’re trying.”

  I don’t care for it. It seems a makeshift way of disposing of our problem. Vans and trucks all over Poland and Russia, grunting and groaning their way around the countryside? Instead of letting the carbon monoxide escape into the atmosphere, it can be circulated inside an enclosed space and used to “resettle” Jews. There are permanent installations using carbon monoxide from diesel engines at several camps, but they are also in the more or less experimental stage. Almost all the Jews of Lublin, for example, were given this special treatment with engine-exhaust gases at the Belzec camp. Other such centers are now ready to begin to operate—Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor. But as yet we have found no perfect method, one that combines speed, efficiency, disposal and, if I may be candid, a certain humane element, so as to end suffering quickly.

  “The design of those trucks will have to be changed,” I said.

  “They weren’t built for this sort of thing,” Nebe said.

  Again, the van labored, nearly halted, as the driver shifted into a lower gear.

  “What is it like inside?” I asked.

  “Oh, a great deal of clawing and scratching goes on. Sometimes you can hear them pounding on the sides.”

  I cocked an ear, listened.

  “Not now. The truck motor is too loud.”

  After another five minutes along the dirt road—the grade had lessened, so the driver was able to make better time along a level stretch—the van veered off into a field, then into a grove of scrub trees. A familiar stench assailed my nose: rotting bodies. Flies swarmed around us.

  Nebe looked at his watch. “Not bad. A half-hour from the Chelmno camp. They should certainly all be finished.”

  I was shaking my head. “It isn’t what we have in mind. We’ll be burning out truck engines all over Poland. Far too expensive, laborious.”

  Nebe agreed with me. “Yes, new methods are needed. Colonel Blobel, Colonel Ohlendorf and I discuss the matter frequently.”

  “Do you? What else do you discuss in these meetings?”

  “Many things.”

  “Do you ever compose anonymous letters to Himmler and Heydrich about some of your colleagues?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Major.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He did not want to finish the conversation. Instead he motioned for me to follow him to the van, where the driver and another SS man, assisted by some Polish workmen, were pulling naked bodies from the rear of the van. We covered our faces with handkerchiefs. The stench of feces and blood was overwhelming. The bodies were grotesque, stained brown and red, eyes popping, mouths twisted, as if they had died in agony.

  Suddenly, I could see the sergeant yanking at a small form, pulling it away from a corpse. Then he pulled and tugged at another. These were children, perhaps six or seven years old. One of them was a male child with the odd shaved head and curling earlocks I had seen among Orthodox Jews of the East. They were alive, mumbling, crawling.

  The sergeant quickly killed each one with a shot in the base of their necks.

  He came up to Colonel Nebe and saluted. “All dead, sir, except for the two children. Sometimes the mothers protect them.”

  We walked back to the staff car.

  “Bad, bad business,” I said.

  “Yes, one can be touched by it, even if they are Jews. Some of the men break down.”

  I looked at Nebe with contempt. He had ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands. Surely these were the hugest crocodile tears ever shed by anyone. Hard and cold, like my masters, I suppressed any sense of pity. It has become relatively easy for me to dismiss the humanity of those we rid the world of. One can accomplish miracles with the will.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “It’s utterly inefficient and wasteful.”

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  At Theresienstadt, Karl had now been drawn into the circle of artists who were working secretly, at great risk to themselves and their families, to leave a truthful record of the camp.

  He joined Frey, Felsher and the other artists with vigor and all his artistic skills. He no longer heard from Inga, and he pretended not to care.

  Maria Kalova, one of the artists, remembered him looking angrily as another “inspection team” toured the camp and agreed that Jews really had no cause for complaint.

  “Another Red Cross inspection,” Maria said.

  Karl laughed bitterly. “They have fooled the world. Or else the world doesn’t give a damn. What confounds me is that no one seems to ask what right they have to put us in prisons at all. The assumption seems to be that it’s all right for Jews to be jailed and treated like dogs, provided they aren’t murdered.”

  Frey walked to the studio window. “I am not so sure we are not being murdered. And I don’t mean the deaths here from disease and hunger, the reprisal hangings.”

  “What do you mean?” Karl asked.

  “Systematic murder. Large groups of people. One of the Czech police told me something about trains being sent to Poland … stories about new camps.”

  They returned to their drawing boards.

  Karl was working on a large poster. Happy faces. People at work. It read: WORK, OBEY, BE THANKFUL. Suddenly he tossed his brush down, held his head in his hands.

  Maria tried to comfort him. “I don’t blame you. We all feel that way sometimes.”

  “Why did they take over the way they did? Doesn’t anyone ever say no to them?” He looked up. “Did I ever tell you about my kid brother, Rudi?”

  “No. Just about your parents, and your little sister.” She hesitated. “And about Inga.”

  “That Rudi. He ran away. Braver than any of us, or maybe a little crazy. He’s dead by now, or maybe he’s killed some of them. Four years my junior, but he used to defend me in street fights. I think about him a lot.”

  “It sounds as if you had a marvelous family. I wish I knew them.”

  “I’ll never see them again. And Inga, damn her. I never want to see her again.”

  She touched his hand. She was a woman in her late forties, still attractive, with a warm heart. Her husband had been a leader of the Jewish community in Bratislava. He had been taken out and shot on the first day of the German occupation. (She now lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, and is the director of an art school; we have become friends.)

  “Karl, you mustn’t condemn her simply because she is a German, a Christian.”

  “That’s not why. She brought me letters when I was in Buchenwald, accepted my letters. There was this SS sergeant she’d known before the war—a family friend. He was our mailman.”

  “That is no crime.”

  “He had a price for his services. She obliged him.”

  “She did it for you, Karl. So she could hear from you, write to you. From what you tell me, that was her only reason.”

  Karl sighed, leaned back. “The hell of it is, Maria, she was always stronger than I was. I wanted her to be stronger. And then … to give in to that bastard Muller …�
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  “You are not as weak as you think you are,” Maria Kalova said. “You are a superb artist.”

  “A hack. A dauber. I was a disappointment to my parents, especially Papa. Rudi and me both. We never lived up to what they expected.”

  “I am sure they loved you very much. Just as Inga still loves you.”

  “She should have said no to Muller.”

  “You must not hate her for it. When you see her again, and I know you will, you must tell her she is forgiven.”

  Karl could not be comforted. “You heard what Frey said. We’ll all die. There will be no happy reunions.”

  “You must be more hopeful.”

  Karl lifted the poster he was finishing. Under it was a charcoal sketch, one of the secret drawings the artists were creating, pictorial histories of the appalling conditions in the camps, the bestial inhumanity of the Germans.

  It was called “Ghetto Faces,” and it was a mass of starved, hollow-eyed children, holding out their dinner plates, begging for more food. It is a haunted, terrifying picture. I saw it at Theresienstadt when I went there after the war.

  “Be careful, Weiss,” Frey said.

  “Let them catch me.”

  “It won’t be just you,” he said. “Several of us are involved. When you joined us, you agreed to keep that stuff hidden, work only at night.”

  He stared at the faces he had drawn. Maria swears she remembers him asking, of no one in particular: “Rudi … where are you, brother?”

  By July 1942, we had enough guns to begin raids against our enemy. Or rather, our enemies. Much of the Ukraine was patrolled by local militia. They wore the same uniforms as the SS, with a special insignia, and they entered energetically into the murder and torture of Jews, and anyone else the Nazis felt were threats to their rule of the Soviet Union.

  On a sticky humid night, I crouched in a thicket at the side of a road leading to the nearest town, along with Uncle Sasha, Yuri and four others of our band. Our faces were blackened. Each of us had an old bolt-action rifle.

  “Scared?” Sasha asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Never been more scared.”