The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  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.