The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  Before leaving me, Thomas had asked me for a favor: “I’d like you to see someone. A statistician.”—“From the SS?”—“Officially, he’s the statistics inspector for the Reichsführer-SS. But he’s a civil servant, he’s not even a member of the Allgemeine-SS.”—“That’s odd, isn’t it?”—“Not really. The Reichsführer clearly wanted someone from outside.”—“And what would you like me to tell your statistician?”—“He’s in the process of preparing a new report for the Reichsführer. An overview of the diminution of the Jewish population. But he’s questioning the numbers in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen. I’ve already seen him, but it would be good for you to talk with him. You were closer to the field than I was.” He scribbled an address and phone number in a notebook and tore the page out: “His office is right near here, at the SS-Haus, but he’s always closeted at the IV B 4, with Eichmann, you know who that is? That’s where they archive everything on this question. They have an entire building, now.” I looked at the address; it was on the Kurfürstenstrasse: “Oh, that’s near my hotel. Fine.” The conversation with Thomas had depressed me, I felt as if I were sinking into a marsh. But I didn’t want to let myself go, I had to take myself in hand. I made the effort to call this statistician, Dr. Korherr. His assistant set up an appointment. The headquarters of IV B 4 were housed in a handsome building made of stone with four floors, from the end of the last century: no other section of the Staatspolizei, to my knowledge, had such offices; their activities must have been colossal. A large marble staircase led up to the main lobby, a cavernous, dimly lit space; Hofmann, the assistant, was waiting for me to lead me to Korherr. “This is huge here,” I remarked as I climbed another staircase with him.—“Yes. It’s a former Judeo-Masonic lodge, confiscated of course.” He led me into Korherr’s office, a tiny room cluttered with boxes and files: “Excuse the disorder, Sturmbannführer. It’s a temporary office.” Dr. Korherr, a glum little man, was wearing civilian clothes and shook my hand instead of saluting. “Please, have a seat,” he said as Hofmann withdrew. He tried to clear some papers from a desk, then gave up and left things as they were. “The Obersturmbannführer has been very generous with his documentation,” he murmured, “but there’s really no order.” He stopped rummaging, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Is Obersturmbannführer Eichmann here?” I asked.—“No, he’s on assignment. He’ll be back in a few days. Did Obersturmbannführer Hauser explain to you what I do?”—“In general terms.”—“In any case, you’ve come a little late. I’ve almost finished my report, which I have to hand in in a few days.”—“What can I do for you, then?” I retorted with a touch of annoyance.—“You were in the Einsatz, weren’t you?”—“Yes. In a Kommando first…”—“Which one?” he interrupted.—“Four-A.”—“Ah yes. Blobel. Good show.” I couldn’t tell if he meant that seriously or ironically. “Then, I served in the Gruppenstab D, in the Caucasus.” He made a face: “Yes, I’m not so interested in that one. The numbers are negligible. Tell me about Four-A.”—“What do you want to know?” He bent down behind his desk and came back up with a cardboard box, which he put in front of me. “These are the reports from Group C. I went through them in minute detail, with my deputy, Dr. Plate. And we noticed some curious things: sometimes, there are extremely precise numbers—two hundred eighty-one, one thousand four hundred seventy-two, or thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one, as in Kiev; other times, they’re round numbers. Including for a single Kommando. We also found contradictory numbers. For example, a city where twelve hundred Jews were supposed to live, but where the reports mentioned two thousand people convoyed to the special measures. And so on. What interests me, then, are the counting methods. I mean the practical methods, on-site.”—“You should have talked directly to Standartenführer Blobel. I think he’d have been better able to inform you than me.”—“Unfortunately Standartenführer Blobel is in the East again and can’t be reached. But, you know, I have my own idea anyway. Your testimony will only confirm it, I think. Tell me about Kiev, for instance. Such an enormous but precise number is curious.”—“Not at all. On the contrary, the bigger the Aktion, the more means we had, the easier it was to get a precise calculation. In Kiev, there were very tight cordons. Just before the operation site, the…the patients, or rather the condemned, were divided into equal groups, always a round number, twenty or thirty, I don’t remember. A noncom counted the number of groups that passed by his table and noted it down. The first day, they stopped at twenty thousand exactly.”—“And everyone who walked by the table was submitted to the special treatment?”—“In principle, yes. Of course, a few could, let’s say, pretend, then run away under cover of night. But that would be at most a handful of individuals.”—“And the smaller actions?”—“They were under the responsibility of a Teilkommandoführer who was in charge of counting and passing on the numbers to the Kommandostab. Standartenführer Blobel always insisted on exact counts. For the case you mentioned, I mean the one where they took away more Jews than there were in the beginning, I think I can give you an explanation: when we arrived, a lot of Jews fled into the woods or the steppe. The Teilkommando treated those who were found on-site in an appropriate manner, then left. But the Jews couldn’t remain hidden: the Ukrainians chased them out of the villages, sometimes the partisans killed them. So little by little, impelled by hunger, they returned to their towns or villages, often with other refugees. When we found out, we conducted a second operation that liquidated a certain number again. But again others returned. Some villages were declared judenfrei three, four, five times, but each time, more appeared.”—“I see. That’s an interesting explanation.”—“If I understand correctly,” I said, a little annoyed, “you think the Groups inflated the figures?”—“To be frank with you, yes. For several reasons, no doubt, advancement being only one. There are also bureaucratic habits. In statistics, we’re used to seeing agencies get fixated on some number, no one really knows how, and then this number is taken up and repeated as fact, without any criticism or modification in time. We call that a house number. But it also differs from Group to Group and from Kommando to Kommando. The worst case is clearly that of Einsatzgruppe B. There are also gross irregularities among certain Kommandos in Group D.”—“In ’forty-one or ’forty-two?”—“In 1941 especially. At the beginning, then in the Crimea too.”—“I was in the Crimea briefly, but I didn’t have anything to do with the actions then.”—“And in your experience of Four-A?” I thought for a minute before replying: “I think the officers were honest. But in the beginning, things were badly organized, and some figures might be a little arbitrary.”—“In any case it’s not very serious,” Korherr said sententiously. “The Einsatzgruppen represent only a fraction of the overall numbers. Even a deviation of ten percent would scarcely affect the overall results.” I felt something tighten around my diaphragm. “Do you have the figures for all of Europe, Herr Doktor?”—“Yes, of course. Up to December thirty-first, 1942.”—“Can you tell me what they add up to?” He looked at me through his little glasses: “Of course not. That’s a secret, Herr Sturmbannführer.” We talked some more about the work of the Kommando; Korherr asked precise, meticulous questions. In the end, he thanked me. “My report will go directly to the Reichsführer,” he explained. “If your responsibilities require it, you’ll have access to it then.” He accompanied me back to the main entrance. “Good luck! And Heil Hitler.”

  Why had I asked him that idiotic, useless question? How did that concern me? It had been nothing but morbid curiosity, and I regretted it. I wanted to take an interest in nothing but positive things now: National Socialism still had a lot to build; that’s where I wanted to direct my energies. But the Jews, unser Unglück, kept pursuing me like a bad dream in early morning, stuck in the back of my head. In Berlin, though, not many were left: all the so-called protected Jewish workers in the arms factories had just been rounded up. Yet fate decreed that I would meet up with them in the most incongruous places.

  On March 21, Heroes
’ Memorial Day, the Führer gave a speech. It was his first public appearance since the defeat at Stalingrad, and like everyone else, I awaited his words with impatience and anxiety: What was he going to say, how would he seem? The wave of shock from the catastrophe was still vividly felt; the most varied rumors were running rampant. I wanted to be present at this speech. I had seen the Führer in person only once, a dozen years before (I had since then heard him often on the radio and seen him in newsreels); that had been during my first trip back to Germany, in the summer of 1930, before the Seizure of Power. I had extorted that trip from my mother and Moreau, in exchange for my consent to continue the course of study they demanded. Once I had passed my baccalauréat (without honors, which meant I had to take a preparatory class to pass the ELSP entrance exam), they let me go. It was a wonderful trip, from which I came back dazzled, bewitched. I had gone accompanied by two high-school friends, Pierre and Fabrice; and we, who didn’t even know what the Wandervögel were, followed their traces as if instinctively, heading for the forests, walking during the day, talking at night around little campfires, sleeping on hard earth and pine needles. Then we went south to visit the cities of the Rhine and ended up in Munich, where I spent many hours in the Pinakotek or wandering through the streets. Germany, that summer, was growing turbulent again: the aftereffect of the previous year’s American stock market crash was making itself harshly felt; elections in the Reichstag, planned for September, would decide the future of the nation. All the political parties were agitating, using speeches, parades, sometimes violence and brawls. In Munich, one party clearly set itself apart from the others: the NSDAP, which I heard about then for the first time. I had already seen Italian Fascists on the news, and these National Socialists seemed to draw inspiration from their style; but their message was specifically German, and their leader, a frontline soldier who was a veteran of the Great War, spoke of a German renewal, of German glory, of a rich, vibrant German future. This, I said to myself as I watched them march by, was what my father had fought for during four long years, until he was finally betrayed, he and all his comrades, and lost his land, his house, our house. This was also everything that Moreau, that good French patriot and radical, who drank to the health of Clemenceau, Foch, and Pétain every year on their birthdays, detested. The leader of the NSDAP was going to give a speech in a Braukeller: I left my French friends in our little hotel. I found myself at the back, behind the crowd, and could scarcely hear the speakers; as for the Führer, I just remember his gestures, made frenetic by emotion, and the way his hair kept falling over his forehead. But he was saying, as I knew with absolute certainty, the things that my father would have said, if he had been present; if he had still been there, he would certainly have been on the platform, one of the men close to that man, one of his foremost companions; he might even, if such had been his fate, who knows, have been there in his place. What’s more, the Führer looked like him, when he stood still. I returned from that trip now for the first time with the idea that something was possible besides the narrow and stifling path outlined for me by my mother and her husband, and that my future was there, with this unfortunate people, my father’s people, my people too.

  Since then, many things had changed. The Führer still had all the confidence of the Volk, but the certainty of final victory was beginning to ebb away among the masses. The people blamed the High Command, the Prussian aristocrats, Göring and his Luftwaffe; but I knew too that within the Wehrmacht some were blaming the interference of the Führer. Within the SS, it was being whispered that he had had a nervous breakdown after Stalingrad, that he wasn’t talking to anyone anymore; that at the beginning of the month, when Rommel had tried to convince him to evacuate North Africa, he had listened to him without comprehension. As for the public rumors, in the trains, the tramways, the lines, they were becoming downright ludicrous: according to the SD reports that Thomas received, people were saying that the Wehrmacht had put the Führer under house arrest in Berchtesgaden, that he had lost his reason and was kept under guard, drugged, in an SS hospital, that the Führer we saw was just a double. The speech was going to be given in the Zeughaus, the former arsenal at the end of Unter den Linden, right next to the Spree Canal. As a Stalingrad veteran, wounded and decorated, I didn’t have any trouble getting an invitation; I suggested to Thomas that he come with me, but he replied, laughing: “I’m not on leave, I have work to do.” So I went alone. They had taken considerable security precautions; the invitation said that service weapons would be forbidden. The possibility of a British raid frightened some: in January, the English had reveled at launching a Mosquito attack on the anniversary of the Seizure of Power, producing many victims; yet now the chairs had been set up in the Zeughaus courtyard, under the large glass cupola. I found myself seated in the center, between an Oberstleutnant covered with decorations and a civilian wearing the Gold Badge of the Party on his lapel. After the introductory speeches, the Führer made his appearance. I opened my eyes wide: on his head and shoulders, over his simple feldgrau uniform, I seemed to see a large blue-and-white striped rabbi’s shawl. The Führer had started speaking right away in his rapid, monotone voice. I examined the glass roof: Could it be a play of the light? I could clearly see his cap; but underneath it, I thought I made out long side curls, unrolling along his temples down over his lapel, and on his forehead, the tefillin, the little leather box containing verses of the Torah. When he raised his arm, I thought I could make out other leather straps bound around his wrist; and under his jacket, weren’t those the white fringes of what the Jews call the little tallith showing through? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized my neighbors: they were listening to the speech with solemn attention, the civil servant was studiously nodding his head. Didn’t they notice anything? Was I the only one to see this unprecedented spectacle? I looked at the dignitaries’ stand: behind the Führer, I recognized Göring, Goebbels, Ley, the Reichsführer, Kaltenbrunner, other well-known leaders, high-ranking Wehrmacht officers; they were all contemplating the Führer’s back or the audience, impassive. Maybe, I said to myself, panic-stricken, it’s the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone sees how it really is, but hides it, counting on his neighbor to do the same. No, I reasoned, I must be hallucinating, with a wound like mine, that’s entirely possible. Yet I felt perfectly sound of mind. I was far from the platform, though, and the Führer was lit from the side; maybe it was simply an optical illusion? But I still saw it. Maybe my “pineal eye” was playing a trick on me? But there was nothing dreamlike about it. It was also possible that I had gone mad. The speech was short, and I found myself standing in the midst of the crowd trying to head for the exit, unable to make any headway in my thoughts. The Führer would now go to the galleries in the Zeughaus to visit an exhibition of war trophies captured from the Bolsheviks, before going on to inspect an honor guard, and place a wreath at the Neue Wache; I could have followed him, since this was included in my invitation, but I was too rattled and disoriented; I extricated myself from the crowd as quickly as possible and headed back up the avenue toward the S-Bahn station. I crossed the avenue and went to sit in a café, under the arcades of the Kaiser Gallerie, where I ordered a schnapps, drained it in one swallow, then ordered another. I had to think, but the meaning of my thinking escaped me, I was having trouble breathing, I undid my collar and drank some more. There was one way to discover the truth of the matter: in the evening, at the movies, the newsreels would show excerpts from his speech; that would set me straight. I ordered a paper with a list of showings: at seven o’clock, not far away, they were showing Uncle Krüger. I ordered a sandwich and then went for a walk in the Tiergarten. It was still cold, and not many people were strolling under the bare trees. Different interpretations were whirling around in my head, I was impatient for the film to start, even if the prospect of seeing nothing there wasn’t any more reassuring than the opposite. At six o’clock, I headed for the movie theater and took my place in the line to buy my ticket. In front of me, a gr
oup of people were discussing the speech, which they must have heard on the radio; I listened to them eagerly. “He blamed the Jews for everything again,” said a skinny man wearing a hat. “What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any more Jews in Germany, so how can it be their fault?”—“But no, Dummkopf,” replied a rather vulgar woman with bleached hair stacked in an elaborate permanent, “it’s the international Jews.”—“Yes,” the man retorted, “but if these international Jews are so powerful, why couldn’t they save their Jewish brothers here?”—“They’re punishing us by bombing us,” another grayish, stringy woman said. “Did you see what they did in Münster, the other day? It’s just to make us suffer. As if we weren’t suffering enough already with all our men at the front.”—“What I found scandalous,” said a ruddy, paunchy man dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, “is that he didn’t even mention Stalingrad. It’s shameful.”—“Oh, don’t talk to me about Stalingrad,” said the fake blonde. “My poor sister had her son Hans over there, in the Seventy-sixth Division. She’s almost mad with grief, she doesn’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”—“On the radio,” said the grayish woman, “they said they were all dead. They fought to the last bullet, they said.”—“And you believe everything they say on the radio, you poor thing?” the man with the hat said. “My cousin, who is an Oberst, says there were a lot of prisoners. Thousands. Maybe even a hundred thousand.”—“So Hansi might be a prisoner?” asked the blonde.—“It’s possible.”—“Why don’t they write, then?” asked the fat bourgeois. “Our prisoners in England or America write; it even comes through the Red Cross.”—“That’s true,” said the mouse-faced woman.—“And how could they write when they’re all officially dead? They write, but our people don’t pass on the letters.”—“Excuse me,” another person interrupted, “but that is true. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, she got a letter from the front, it was just signed: A German patriot, which said that her husband, who is a Leutnant in the Panzers, is still alive. The Russians dropped leaflets on our lines, near Smolensk, with lists of names and addresses, printed in tiny letters, and messages to the families. Soldiers collect them and they write anonymous letters, or send the leaflet as is.” A man with a military haircut joined the conversation: “Anyway, even if there are prisoners, they won’t survive for long. The Bolsheviks will send them to Siberia and make them dig canals until they die. Not one of them will come back. And after what we did to them, that will be only fair.”—“What do you mean, after what we did to them?” the fat man asked sharply. The fake blonde had noticed me and was staring at my uniform. The man with the hat spoke before the soldier did: “The Führer said we have lost five hundred and forty-two thousand men since the beginning of the war. Do you believe that? I think he’s just lying.” The blonde elbowed him and glanced in my direction. The man followed her gaze, reddened and stammered: “Or, well, maybe they don’t give him all the figures…” The others were also looking at me and fell silent. I tried to look neutral and absent. Then the fat man tried to restart the conversation on another subject, but the line had begun to move toward the ticket counter. I bought a ticket and found my seat. Soon the lights went out and they played the news, which opened with the Führer’s speech. The film was grainy, it jumped and went blurry at times, they must have rushed to develop it and print the copies. I still seemed to see the large striped shawl over the Führer’s head and shoulders; I couldn’t make out anything else, aside from his moustache; impossible to be sure of anything. My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver; I scarcely noticed the main film, a flimsy Anglophobic thing, I was still thinking about what I had seen, it didn’t make any sense. That it was real seemed impossible to me, but I couldn’t believe that I was hallucinating. What had that bullet done to my head? Had it irremediably blurred the world for me, or had it truly opened a third eye, the one that sees through the opacity of things? Outside, when I exited, it was night, time for dinner, but I didn’t want to eat. I went back to my hotel and locked myself up in my room. For three days I didn’t go out again.