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 mayb
e 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 b
e 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.
The Kindly Ones Page 64
