The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  In fact, deep in the hold of the Reich, the rats were getting agitated, squealing, swarming, bristling with a formidable anxiety. Ever since Italy’s defection, tensions with our other allies let networks of fine cracks appear on the surface of our relations. Each, in his own way, was beginning to look for a way out, and that way was not German. Schellenberg, according to Thomas, believed the Romanians were negotiating with the Soviets in Stockholm. But mostly people talked about the Hungarians. Russian forces had taken Lutsk and Rovno; if Galicia fell into their hands, they would find themselves at Hungary’s gates. For more than a year, in diplomatic circles, Prime Minister Kállay had conscientiously been forging for himself a reputation as the worst friend of Germany. The Hungarian attitude on the Jewish question also posed problems: not only did they not want to go beyond a discriminatory legislation that was, given the circumstances, particularly inadequate—the Jews of Hungary maintained important positions in industry; and half-Jews, or men married to Jews, in government—but, still having a considerable supply of Jewish labor, much of it highly skilled, they refused all German requests to make part of this force available for the war effort. Already in the beginning of February, during conferences involving experts from different departments, these questions were beginning to be discussed: I sometimes attended them myself or sent one of my specialists. The RSHA advocated a change of regime; my participation was limited to studies on the possible employment of Hungarian Jewish workers in case the situation evolved favorably. Within that framework, I held a series of consultations with Speer’s collaborators. But their positions were often strangely contradictory and hard to reconcile. Speer himself remained inaccessible; he was said to be in critical condition. It was rather disconcerting: I felt as if I were making plans in the void, accumulating studies that were worth scarcely more than pieces of fiction. Yet my office was filling out: I now had three specialist officers, and Brandt had promised me a fourth; but the awkwardness of my position made itself felt; to drive my suggestions forward, I had little support, neither from the RSHA, despite my connections at the SD, nor from the WVHA, aside from Maurer sometimes, when it suited him.

  In the beginning of March, things began to speed up, but not to get any clearer. Speer, I had learned from a phone call from Thomas at the end of February, had pulled through and, even though he was still in Hohenlychen for now, was slowly resuming control of his ministry. Together, with Field Marshall Milch, he had decided to set up a Jägerstab, a special staff to coordinate the production of fighter planes; from a certain point of view, it was a great step forward toward the consolidation of the last sector of war production that still escaped his ministry; on the other hand, intrigues were proliferating, it was said that Göring had opposed the creation of the Jägerstab, that Saur, Speer’s deputy appointed to head it, was not the person he would have chosen, and other things besides. What’s more, the men in Speer’s ministry were now openly discussing a fabulous, outlandish idea: burying the entire production of planes underground to shelter it from the Anglo-American bombers. That would involve the construction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of underground workshops. Kammler, they said, passionately supported this project, and his offices had already almost completed the necessary studies: it was clear to everyone that in the present state of affairs, only the SS could carry out such a mad concept successfully. But it greatly exceeded the capacities of the labor available: new sources had to be found, and in the present situation—especially since the agreement between Speer and Minister Bichelonne forbade any more siphoning off of French labor—only Hungary was left. The resolution of the Hungarian problem, then, was taking on new urgency. Speer’s and Kammler’s engineers, gradually, were already integrating the Hungarian Jews into their calculations and plans, although no agreement with the Kállay government had been achieved yet. At the RSHA, they were studying alternative solutions now: the details I had were sketchy, but Thomas sometimes informed me of the evolution of the plans, so that I could adjust my own. Schellenberg was closely involved in these projects. In February, a shady currency traffic affair with Switzerland had led to the fall of Admiral Canaris; the entire Abwehr had then been incorporated into the RSHA, fusing with the Amt VI to form an Amt Mil under the control of Schellenberg, who now thus headed all the foreign intelligence services of the Reich. He didn’t have much time to exploit this position: the career officers of the Abwehr weren’t particularly fond of the SS, and his control over them was far from being assured. Hungary, from this perspective, would allow him to test the limits of his new tool. As for labor, a change of policy would open up considerable prospects: the optimists spoke of four hundred thousand workers available and easy to mobilize, most of whom were already skilled workers or specialists. Given our needs, that would represent a considerable contribution. But their allocation, I saw already, would be the object of fierce controversy: against Kammler and Saur, I heard a number of experts, sober, clear-headed men, tell me that the concept of underground factories, tempting as it might sound, was illusory, for they would never be ready soon enough to change the course of events; and in the meantime, it would represent an inadmissible waste of labor, workers who would be much more useful, trained in brigades, to repair the factories that had been hit, to construct housing for our workers or the homeless, or to help decentralize certain vital industries. Speer, according to these men, was also of that opinion; but I no longer had access to Speer at the time. For my own part, these arguments seemed sensible to me, yet to the tell the truth, it didn’t really concern me.

  At bottom, the more I managed to observe clearly the maelstrom of intrigues in the high spheres of government, the less interested I was in taking part in them. Before reaching my present position, I had, naïvely no doubt, thought that major decisions were made on the basis of ideological correctness and rationality. I now saw that, even if that remained partially true, many other factors were involved, conflicts of bureaucratic precedence, special interests, or the personal ambition of some. The Führer, of course, couldn’t settle all questions himself; and his intervention aside, a large part of the mechanisms to achieve consensus seemed distorted, even warped. Thomas, in these situations, was like a fish in water; but I felt ill at ease, and not only because I lacked talent for intrigue. It had always seemed to me that these lines of Coventry Patmore would be borne out: The truth is great, and shall prevail, / When none cares whether it prevail or not; and that National Socialism could be nothing but the common search for this truth, in good faith. For me it was all the more necessary since the circumstances of my troubled life, divided between two countries, placed me apart from other men: I too wanted to bear my stone to the common edifice, I too wanted to be able to feel a part of the whole. Alas, in our National Socialist State, and especially outside the circles of the SD, few people thought as I did. In this sense, I could admire the brutal frankness of an Eichmann: he had his own idea—about National Socialism, about his own place, and about what was to be done—and he stood by this idea, he put all his talent and stubbornness at its service, and so long as his superiors confirmed him in this idea, it was the right one, and Eichmann remained a happy man, sure of himself, leading his office with a firm hand. That was far from being my case. My misfortune, perhaps, came from the fact that they had assigned me to tasks that did not correspond to my natural inclination. Ever since Russia, already, I felt out of place, capable of doing what was asked of me, but as if I were limited in terms of initiative, for I had indeed studied these tasks—first police-related and then economic—and mastered them, but I hadn’t yet succeeded in convincing myself of their rightness, I couldn’t manage fully to grasp the profound necessity that guided them, and so find my path with the precision and sureness of a sleepwalker, as did the Führer and so many of my colleagues and comrades who were more gifted than I. Could there have been another realm of activity that might have agreed with me better, where I would have felt more at home? There might have been, but it’s hard to say, for
it didn’t happen, and in the end, the only thing that counts is what was, and not what could have been. From the very beginning, things weren’t as I would have liked them: I had resigned myself to that a long time ago (yet at the same time, it seems to me, I never accepted things as they are, so wrong and so bad; at the most, I finally came to acknowledge my powerlessness to change them). It is also true that I have changed. When I was young, I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what it should be and what it actually was, and about my own place in that world; and with all the madness and the arrogance of that youth, I had thought it would always be so; that the attitude induced by my analysis would never change; but I had forgotten, or rather I did not yet know, the force of time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological confusion, my inability to take a clear position on the questions I was dealing with, and to hold to it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground away from under my feet. Such a fatigue has no end, only death can put an end to it, it still lasts today, and for me it will always last.

  I never spoke of these things with Helene. When I saw her, in the evenings or on Sundays, we chatted about current events, the hardships of life, the bombings, or else about art, literature, cinema. At times I spoke to her about my childhood, my life; but I didn’t talk about everything—I avoided the distressing, difficult things. Sometimes I was tempted to talk to her more openly: but something stopped me. Why? I don’t know. You might say I was afraid of shocking her, of offending her. But it wasn’t that. I still didn’t know very much about this woman, at bottom, just enough to understand that she must have known how to listen, to listen without judging (writing that now, I am thinking of the personal failings of my life; what her reaction might have been in learning the whole extent and implications of my work, I had no way at the time of telling, but in any case, talking about that was out of question, because of the rule of secrecy first of all, but also by a tacit agreement between us, I think, a kind of “tact” also). So what blocked the words in my throat when, at night after dinner, in a fit of fatigue and sadness, they began to rise up? Fear, not of her reaction but simply of laying myself bare? Or else simply fear of letting her come even closer to me than she already had and than I had let her, without even wanting to? For it was becoming clear that if our relationship remained that of good but new friends, in her, slowly, something was happening, the thought of the bed and maybe something else besides. Sometimes that made me sad; I felt overwhelmed by my powerlessness to offer her anything, or even to accept what she had to offer me: she looked at me with that long, patient gaze that so impressed me, and I said to myself, with a violence that increased with each thought, At night, when you go to bed, you think of me, maybe you touch your body, your breasts, thinking about me, you place your hand between your legs thinking about me, maybe you sink into the thought of me, and I, I love only one person, the very one I cannot have, the thought of whom never releases me and leaves my head only to seep into my bones, the one who will always be there between the world and me and thus between you and me, the one whose kisses will always mock yours, the one whose very marriage makes it so that I can never marry you except to try to feel what she feels in marriage, the one whose simple existence makes it so that you will never completely exist for me, and for the rest—for the rest exists too—I still prefer having my ass drilled by unknown boys, paid if necessary, it brings me closer to her, in my own way, and I still prefer fear and emptiness and the sterility of my thinking, than to give way to weakness.

  The plans for Hungary were taking shape; in the beginning of March, the Reichsführer summoned me. The day before, the Americans had launched their first daytime raid on Berlin; it was a very small raid, there were just thirty or so bombers, and Goebbels’s press had crowed about the minimal damage, but these bombers, for the first time, came accompanied by long-range fighter planes, a new weapon that was terrifying in its implications, since our own fighter planes had been driven back with losses, and you had to be a fool not to understand that this raid was just a test, a successful test, and that from then on there would be no more respite, neither by day nor on nights with a full moon, and that the front was everywhere now, all the time. The failure of our Luftwaffe, incapable of mounting an effective counterattack, was complete. This analysis was confirmed for me by the Reichsführer’s dry, precise statements: “The situation in Hungary,” he informed me without any further details, “will soon rapidly evolve. The Führer has decided to intervene, if necessary. New opportunities will arise, which we must seize vigorously. One of these opportunities concerns the Jewish question. At the right time, Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner will send his men. They’ll know what they have to do and you are not to get involved in that. But I want you to go with them to assert the interests of the Arbeitseinsatz. Gruppenführer Kammler”—Kammler had just been promoted at the end of January—“will need men, a great many men. The Anglo-Americans are innovating”—he pointed at the sky—“and we have to react quickly. The RSHA must take this into account. I have given instructions concerning this to Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, but I want you to make sure they’re rigorously applied by his specialists. More than ever, the Jews owe us their labor force. Is that clear?” Yes, it was. Brandt, after this meeting, filled me in on the details: the special intervention group would be headed by Eichmann, who would more or less have carte blanche as regards the settlement of this question; as soon as the Hungarians had accepted the principle and their collaboration was assured, the Jews would be directed to Auschwitz, which would serve as a sorting center; from there, all those who were fit for work would be allocated as needed. At each stage, the number of potential workers had to be maximized.

  A new round of preparatory conferences took place at the RSHA, much more focused than those of the month before; soon only the date had yet to be decided. Excitement became palpable; for the first time in a long time, the officials concerned had the clear feeling of regaining initiative. I saw Eichmann again several times, at these conferences and in private. He assured me that the Reichsführer’s instructions had been perfectly understood. “I’m happy you’re the one who’s taking care of this aspect of the question,” he said to me, chewing the inside of his left cheek. “With you, we can work, if you permit me to say so. Which isn’t the case with everyone.” The question of the air war dominated everyone’s thoughts. Two days after the first raid, the Americans sent more than 800 bombers, protected by nearly 650 of their new fighter planes, to strike Berlin at lunchtime. Thanks to bad weather, the bombing lacked precision and the damage was limited; what’s more, our fighter planes and flak shot down 80 enemy aircraft, a record; but these fighter planes were heavy and ill-adapted against the new Mustangs, and our own losses came to 66 aircraft, a catastrophe, with the dead pilots being even harder to replace than the planes. Not discouraged in the least, the Americans returned for several days running; each time, the population spent hours in shelters, all work was interrupted; at night, the English sent their Mosquitos, which didn’t do much damage but again forced the people down into the shelters, ruining their sleep, sapping their strength. Human losses fortunately remained lower than in November: Goebbels had decided to evacuate a large part of the city center, and most of the office employees, now, came in to work every day from the suburbs; but that involved hours of exhausting commutes. The quality of work suffered: when preparing correspondence, our Berlin specialists, insomniac now, made more and more mistakes, I had to have the letters retyped three, five times before I could send them.