During dinner, Thomas had once again reproached me for my unsociability and impossible hours: “I know everyone has to give his utmost, but you’re going to ruin your health if you go on like that. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that Germany isn’t going to lose the war if you take your evenings and Sundays off. This is going to last a while, you should pace yourself, otherwise you’ll collapse. And look, you’re even getting a belly.” It was true: I wasn’t getting fat, but my abdominal muscles were sagging. “At least come and get some exercise,” Thomas insisted. “Twice a week I fence, and on Sunday I go to the pool. You’ll see, it will do you good.” As always, he was right. I soon regained my taste for fencing, which I had practiced a little at university; I took up the saber, I liked the keen, nervous aspect of this weapon. What I liked in this sport was that, despite its aggressiveness, it’s not a brute’s sport: as much as the good reflexes and agility required to handle the weapon, it’s the mental work before the pass that counts, the intuitive anticipation of the other’s movements, the swift calculation of possible responses, a physical chess game where you have to foresee several moves, for once a decision has been made, there’s no more time to think, and one can often say that the pass is won or lost even before it began, according to whether one saw rightly or not, the thrusts themselves only confirming or refuting the calculation. We practiced in the arms room of the RSHA, at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais; but for swimming we went to a public pool in Kreuzberg, instead of the Gestapo’s: first of all, an essential point for Thomas, there were women there (and not just the unavoidable secretaries); it was bigger too, so that after swimming one could go in a bathrobe and sit down at wooden tables, on a wide balcony upstairs, to drink cold beer while watching the swimmers, whose happy shouts and splashes resounded throughout the vast dome. The first time I went there, I had a violent shock that left me for the rest of the day with a distressing anguish. We were getting undressed in the changing room: I looked at Thomas and saw that a wide forked scar ran across his belly. “Where did you get that?” I exclaimed. Thomas looked at me, surprised: “In Stalingrad of course. Don’t you remember? You were there.” A memory, yes, I had one, and I wrote it down with the others, but I had filed it away in the back of my head, in the attic of hallucinations and dreams; now this scar came to turn everything upside down, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. I kept staring at Thomas’s belly; he slapped his abdominal muscles with the flat of his hand, smiling widely: “It’s all right, don’t get upset, it’s all better. And also it drives the girls wild, it must excite them.” He closed one eye and pointed at my head, his thumb up, like a child playing cowboy: “Pow!” I almost felt the shot in my forehead, my anguish grew like a gray, flaccid, endless thing, a monstrous body that occupied the limited space of the changing room and prevented me from moving, a terrified Gulliver stuck in a Lilliputian house. “Don’t look like that,” Thomas shouted cheerfully, “come swim!” The water, heated but still a little cool, did me good; tired after just a few laps—I had definitely let myself get out of shape—I stretched out on a deck chair while Thomas frolicked, bellowing and letting his head be dunked underwater by spirited young women. I watched these people letting off steam, having fun, taking pleasure in their own strength; I felt far away. Bodies, even the handsomest ones, no longer threw me into a panic, as the ballet dancers’ had a few months before; they left me indifferent, boys’ as well as girls’. I could admire with detachment the play of muscles under the white skin, the curve of a hip, water streaming down a neck: the crumbling bronze Apollo in Paris had excited me much more than all this insolent young musculature, which was deployed casually, as if jeering at the flabby, yellowing flesh of the few old people who came there. My attention was drawn to a young woman who stood out from the others by her serenity; as her girlfriends ran or splashed around Thomas, she remained motionless, her arms folded on the edge of the pool, her body floating in the water, and her head, oval beneath an elegant black rubber cap, resting on her forearms, her large somber eyes calmly directed at me. I couldn’t tell if she was really looking at me; without moving, she seemed to be contemplating with pleasure everything that was in her field of vision; after a long while, she raised her arms and let herself slowly sink down. I waited for her to come back to the surface, but the seconds passed; finally she reappeared at the other end of the pool, which she had crossed underwater, as calmly as I had once crossed the Volga. I leaned back on my chaise and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sensation of the chlorinated water slowly evaporating on my skin. My anguish, that day, was slow to relax its asphyxiating embrace. The next Sunday, though, I went back to the pool with Thomas.
In the meantime, I had once again been summoned by the Reichsführer. He asked me to explain how we had arrived at our results; I launched into a detailed explanation, since there were technical points that were difficult to summarize; he let me talk, looking cold and unforthcoming, and when I had finished he asked me curtly: “And the Reichssicherheitshauptamt?”—“Their specialist agrees in principle, my Reichsführer. He is still waiting for Gruppenführer Müller’s confirmation.”—“We have to be careful, Sturmbannführer, very careful,” he rapped out in his most pedantic voice. Another Jewish rebellion, I knew, had just taken place in the GG, at Sobibor this time; again, some SS had been killed, and despite a vast manhunt, some of the fugitives hadn’t been recaptured; and these were Geheimnisträger, witnesses of the extermination operations: if they managed to join the partisans in the Pripet Marshes, chances were good that the Bolsheviks would then pick them up. I understood the Reichsführer’s anxiety, but he had to make up his mind. “You have met Reichsminister Speer, I think?” he said suddenly.—“Yes, my Reichsführer. I was introduced by Dr. Mandelbrod.”—“Did you talk to him about your project?”—“I didn’t go into details, my Reichsführer. But he knows that we are working to improve the state of health of the Häftlinge.”—“And what does he say about it?”—“He seemed satisfied, my Reichsführer.” He leafed through some papers on his desk: “Dr. Mandelbrod wrote me a letter. He tells me that Reichsminister Speer seemed to like you. Is that true?”—“I don’t know, my Reichsführer.”—“Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland very much want me to move closer to Speer. In principle, that’s not a bad idea, since we have interests in common. Everyone always thinks Speer and I are in conflict. But that’s not true at all. Why, as long ago as 1937, I created the DESt and set up camps especially for Speer, to provide him with construction materials, bricks, and granite for the new capital he was going to build for the Führer. At the time, the whole of Germany could provide him with only four percent of his needs in granite. He was very grateful for my help and delighted to cooperate. But of course you can’t trust him. He’s not an idealist, and he doesn’t understand the SS. I wanted to make him one of my Gruppenführers, and he refused. Last year, he took the liberty of criticizing our labor organization to the Führer: he wanted to obtain jurisdiction over our camps. Even today he dreams of having the right to look into our internal functioning. But still, it’s important to cooperate with him. Did you consult his ministry, as you prepared your project?”—“Yes, my Reichsführer. One of their people came and gave us a presentation.” The Reichsführer slowly nodded: “Fine, fine…” Then he seemed to come to a decision: “We don’t have much time to lose. I’ll tell Pohl that I approve the project. You’ll send a copy to Reichsminister Speer, directly, with a personal note signed by you reminding him of your meeting and indicating to him that the project will be implemented. And of course send a copy to Dr. Mandelbrod.”—“Zu Befehl, my Reichsführer. And what would you like me to do regarding the foreign workers?”—“For now, nothing. Study the question, from the angle of nutrition and productivity, but confine yourself to that. We’ll see how things turn out. And if Speer or one of his associates makes contact with you, inform Brandt and react favorably.”
I followed the Reichsführer’s instructions to the letter. I don’t know what Pohl did
with our project, so lovingly conceived: a few days later, around the end of the month, he sent another order to all the KLs, instructing them to diminish the mortality and morbidity rate by ten percent, but without giving the slightest concrete suggestion; to my knowledge, Isenbeck’s rations were never applied. Nevertheless I received a very flattering letter from Speer, who was pleased with the project’s adoption, concrete proof of our new, recently inaugurated cooperation. He ended: I hope to have the opportunity to see you again soon to discuss these problems. Yours, Speer. I forwarded this letter to Brandt. In the beginning of November, I received a second letter: the Gauleiter of the Westmark had written to Speer to demand that the five hundred Jewish workers delivered by the SS to a weapons factory in Lorraine be withdrawn immediately: Thanks to my care, Lorraine is Judenfrei and will remain so, wrote the Gauleiter. Speer asked me to forward this letter to the relevant authority to settle the problem. I consulted Brandt; a few days later, he sent me an internal memo, asking me to answer the Gauleiter myself in the Reichsführer’s name, negatively. Tone: abrupt, wrote Brandt. I pulled out all the stops:
Dear Party Comrade Bürckel!
Your request is inopportune and cannot be accepted. In this difficult hour for Germany, the Reichsführer is aware of the need to use the labor of the enemies of our Nation to the utmost. Decisions about assignment of workers are made in consultation with the RMfRuK, the only authority competent today to deal with this question. Since the prohibition presently in force not to employ Jewish inmate workers concerns only the Altreich and Austria, I cannot avoid the impression that your request stems chiefly from your desire to avoid being ignored in the overall handling of the Jewish question.
Heil Hitler! Yours, etc.
I sent a copy to Speer, who thanked me. Little by little, this began to be repeated: Speer had irritating demands and requests sent to me, and I replied to them in the Reichsführer’s name; for more complicated cases, I referred to the SD, going through acquaintances rather than the official route, to speed things up. In this way I again saw Ohlendorf, who invited me to dinner, and inflicted on me a long tirade against the industry self-management system set in place by Speer, which he regarded as a simple usurpation of the powers of the State by capitalists without the slightest responsibility toward the community. If the Reichsführer approved of it, according to him, that was because he didn’t understand anything about economics, and moreover he was under the influence of Pohl, himself a pure capitalist obsessed with the expansion of his industrial SS empire. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much about economics, either, or about Ohlendorf’s violent arguments on the subject, for that matter. But it was always a pleasure just to listen to him: his frankness and intellectual honesty were as refreshing as a glass of cold water, and he was right to stress that the war had caused or accentuated a number of abuses; afterward, we would have to reform the structures of the State in depth.
I began to regain a taste for life outside work: whether this was thanks to the beneficial effects of exercise or to something else, I don’t know. One day I realized that I hadn’t been able to bear Frau Gutknecht for a long time now; the next day, I set to work looking for another apartment. This was a little complicated, but finally Thomas helped me find something: a small furnished bachelor apartment on the top floor of a fairly new building. It belonged to a Hauptsturmführer who had just gotten married and was leaving for a post in Norway. I quickly settled with him on a reasonable rent, and in one afternoon, with Piontek’s help, and under salvos of Frau Gutknecht’s squeals and entreaties, I transferred my few belongings. My new apartment wasn’t very big: two square rooms separated by a double door, a little kitchen, and a bathroom; but it had a balcony, and since the living room was at the corner of the building, the windows opened onto two sides; the balcony looked out over a little park, where I could watch children playing. It was quiet too, and I wasn’t disturbed by car noises; from my windows, I had a fine view over a landscape of roofs, a comforting tangle of shapes, constantly changing with the weather and the light. On days when it was nice out, the apartment was bright from morning to night: on Sunday, I could watch the sun rise from my bedroom and set from the living room. To make it even brighter, I had the faded old wallpaper stripped, with the owner’s permission, and the walls painted white; in Berlin, this wasn’t very common, but I had known apartments like that in Paris, and I liked it, with the wooden floor it was almost ascetic, it corresponded to my state of mind: quietly smoking on my sofa, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of moving sooner. In the morning, I got up early, before sunrise, in that season, ate a few pieces of toast and drank some genuine black coffee; Thomas had it sent to him from Holland by an acquaintance, and he sold me some of it. To get to work I took the trolley. I liked watching the streets go by, contemplating the faces of my neighbors in the light of day, sad, closed, indifferent, tired, but also sometimes surprisingly happy, and if you pay attention to such things, you know that it’s rare to see a happy face in the street or on the trolley, but when it happened, I was happy too, I felt I was rejoining the community of men, these people for whom I was working but from whom I had been living so far apart. For several days in a row, on the trolley, I noticed a beautiful blond woman who took the same line that I did. She had a quiet and grave face; I noticed her mouth first, especially her upper lip, two muscular, aggressive wings. Sensing my gaze, she had looked at me: under high-arched, thin eyebrows, she had dark, almost black eyes, asymmetrical and Assyrian (but perhaps this last likeness only came to my mind through assonance). Standing, she held on to a strap and stared at me with a calm, serious look. I had the impression that I had already seen her somewhere, at least her gaze, but I couldn’t remember where. The next day she spoke to me: “Hello. You don’t remember me,” she added, “but we’ve already seen each other. At the swimming pool.” She was the young woman leaning on the edge of the pool. I didn’t see her every day; when I saw her, I greeted her amiably, and she smiled, gently. At night, I went out more often: I went to dinner with Hohenegg, whom I introduced to Thomas, I saw old university friends again, I let myself be invited out to suppers and little parties where I drank and chatted happily, without horror, without anguish. This was normal life, everyday life, after all, this too was worth living.
Not long after my supper with Ohlendorf, I had received an invitation from Dr. Mandelbrod to come spend the weekend at a country estate belonging to one of the directors of IG Farben, in the north of Brandenburg. The letter made it clear that there would be a hunting party and an informal dinner. Massacring fowl didn’t tempt me much, but I didn’t have to shoot, I could just walk in the woods. The weather was rainy: Berlin was sinking into fall, the beautiful October days had come to an end, the trees were all stripped bare now; sometimes, though, the sky cleared and you could go out and enjoy the already cool air. On November 18, at dinnertime, the sirens wailed and the flak began to thunder, for the first time since the end of August. I was at a restaurant with some friends, including Thomas—we had just left our fencing session. We had to go down into the basement without even eating; the alert lasted for two hours, but they had wine served to us, and the time passed in pleasantries. The raid caused serious damage to the center of town; the English had sent more than four hundred aircraft: they had decided to brave our new tactics. That took place on the Thursday evening; on the Saturday morning, I had Piontek drive me toward Prenzlau, to the village mentioned by Mandelbrod. The house was a few kilometers outside of town, at the end of a long lane bordered with ancient oaks, many of which were missing, however, decimated by disease or storms; it was an old manor house, bought by the director, next to a forest dominated by pine trees mixed in with beech and maple trees, and surrounded by a handsome, open park, and then, farther away, big, empty, muddy fields. It had drizzled during the journey, but the sky, whipped by a bracing little north wind, had cleared up. On the gravel in front of the steps, several sedans had parked side by side, and a uniformed chauffeur was washing the
mud from the bumpers. I was welcomed on the steps by Herr Leland; that day he looked very soldierly, despite his brown woollen knit cardigan: the owner was away, he explained, but he had lent them the house; Mandelbrod wouldn’t arrive till evening, after the hunting party. On his advice, I sent Piontek back to Berlin: the guests would return together, there would certainly be room for me in one of the cars. A black-uniformed servant girl wearing a lace apron showed me my room. A fire was roaring in the chimney; outside it had begun to rain again gently. As the invitation had suggested, I wasn’t wearing my uniform but a country outfit, woollen trousers with boots and a collarless Austrian jacket with bone buttons, made to be water-resistant; for the evening, I had brought a suit that I unfolded, brushed, and hung in the closet before going downstairs. In the living room, several guests were drinking tea or talking with Leland; Speer, sitting in front of a casement window, recognized me right away and got up with a friendly smile to come shake my hand. “Sturmbannführer, what a pleasure to see you again. Herr Leland told me you’d be coming. Come, I’ll introduce you to my wife.” Margret Speer was sitting near the fireplace with another woman, a certain Frau von Wrede, the wife of a general who was going to join us; standing in front of them, I clicked my heels and gave a German salute that Frau von Wrede returned; Frau Speer just held out an elegant little gloved hand to me: “Pleased to meet you, Sturmbannführer. I’ve heard about you: my husband tells me you’ve been a great help to him, in the SS.”—“I do what I can, meine Dame.” She was a thin, blond woman of a decidedly Nordic beauty, with a strong, square jaw and very light blue eyes under blond eyebrows; but she seemed tired and that gave her skin a slightly sallow cast. I was served tea, and chatted a little with her while her husband joined Leland. “Your children didn’t come?” I asked politely.—“Oh! If I had brought them, it wouldn’t have been a vacation. They stayed in Berlin. It’s already so hard for me to tear Albert away from his ministry, once he accepts, I don’t want him to be disturbed. He so needs rest.” The conversation turned to Stalingrad, for Frau Speer knew I had been there; Frau von Wrede had lost a cousin there, a Generalmajor who was commanding a division and was probably in the hands of the Russians: “It must have been terrible!” Yes, I confirmed, it had been terrible, but I didn’t add, out of courtesy, that it had surely been less so for a divisional general than for an ordinary trooper like Speer’s brother, who, if by some miracle he was still alive, would not be benefiting from the preferential treatment that the Bolsheviks, hardly egalitarian for once, gave superior officers, according to our information. “Albert was very affected by the loss of his brother,” Margret Speer said dreamily. “He doesn’t show it, but I know. He gave his name to our last-born child.”
The Kindly Ones Page 82
