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The Kindly Ones

Page 91

by Jonathan Littell


  One evening, I was invited to Gruppenführer Müller’s place. The invitation was passed on to me, after an air-raid alert, by Eichmann, in whose offices an important planning meeting was taking place that day. “Every Thursday,” he came over to tell me, “the Amtschef likes to gather some of his specialists together at his place, to talk things over. He would be delighted if you could come.” I would have to cancel my fencing session, but I agreed: I scarcely knew Müller, and it would be interesting to see him close up. Müller lived in an SS apartment a little ways out of town, spared by the bombs. A rather self-effacing woman with a bun and eyes set close together opened the door to me; I thought she might be a maid, but she was in fact Frau Müller. She was the only woman present. Müller himself was in civilian clothes; and instead of returning my salute, he shook my hand with his massive grip, with thick, square-tipped fingers; apart from this demonstration of familiarity, though, the ambiance was much less gemütlich than at Eichmann’s. Eichmann had also donned civilian clothes, but most of the officers were in uniform, like me. Müller, a rather short-legged, thickset man with the square skull of a farmer, yet nicely, almost elegantly dressed, wore a knitted cardigan over a silk open-collared shirt. He poured me some Cognac and introduced me to the other guests, almost of them Gruppenleiter or Referenten from Amt IV: I remember two men from IV D, who were in charge of Gestapo services in occupied countries, and a certain Regierungsrat Berndorff, who headed the Schutzhaftreferat. There was also an officer from the Kripo, and Litzenberg, a colleague of Thomas’s. Thomas himself, casually sporting his new Standartenführer stripes, arrived a little late and was cordially welcomed by Müller. The conversation dealt mostly with the Hungarian problem: the RSHA had already identified Magyars ready to cooperate with Germany; the main question was to find out how the Führer would bring about Kállay’s fall. When Müller wasn’t taking part in the conversation, he surveyed his guests with his restless, mobile, penetrating little eyes. Then he spoke in curt, simple sentences, drawled in a coarse Bavarian accent with a show of cordiality that did little to mask his innate coldness. From time to time, though, he let down his guard. With Thomas and Dr. Frey, a former member of the SD who, like Thomas, had gone on to the Staatspolizei, I had started discussing the intellectual origins of National Socialism. Frey remarked that he thought the name itself was ill-chosen, since the term national for him referred to the tradition of 1789, which National Socialism rejected. “What would you suggest in its place?” I asked him.—“In my opinion, it should have been Völkisch Socialism. That’s much more precise.” The man from the Kripo had joined us: “If you follow Möller van der Bruck,” he declared, “it could be Imperial Socialism.”—“Yes, actually that’s closer to Strasser’s deviation, isn’t it?” Frey retorted stiffly. That’s when I noticed Müller: he was standing behind us, a glass clutched in his big paw, and listening to us, blinking rapidly. “We should really push all the intellectuals into a coal mine and blow it up…” he blurted out in a grating, harsh voice.—“The Gruppenführer is absolutely right,” Thomas said. “Meine Herren, you’re even worse than Jews. Follow his example: action, not words.” His eyes were sparkling with laughter. Müller nodded; Frey seemed confused: “It’s clear that with us the sense of initiative has always taken precedence over theoretical elaboration…” the man from the Kripo mumbled. I moved off and went to the buffet to fill my plate with salad and sausages. Müller followed me. “And how is Reichsminister Speer doing?” he asked me.—“Actually, Gruppenführer, I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch with him since his illness began. I hear he’s doing better.”—“Apparently he’ll get out soon.”—“That’s likely. It would be a good thing. If we manage to get workers from Hungary, it will very quickly open new possibilities for our armaments industries.”—“Maybe,” Müller grunted. “But it will mostly be Jews, and Jews are forbidden in Altreich territory.” I swallowed a little sausage and said: “Then that rule will have to change. We are now at our maximum capacity. Without those Jews, we can’t go any further.” Eichmann had drawn closer and listened to my last words as he drank his Cognac. He interrupted without even giving Müller time to respond: “Do you truly believe that between victory and defeat, the balance depends on the work of a few thousand Jews? And if that were the case, would you want Germany’s victory to be due to Jews?” Eichmann had drunk a lot, his face was red and his eyes moist; he was proud of uttering such words in front of his superior. I listened to him as I picked sausage slices off the plate I was holding. I remained calm, but his nonsense irritated me. “You know, Obersturmbannführer,” I replied evenly, “in 1941, we had the most modern army in the world. Now we’ve gone almost half a century back. All our transports, at the front, are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they’re also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they’re producing a cargo ship a day. That’s many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we’re in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren’t suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren’t made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.” Eichmann puffed himself out: “You’re in a defeatist mood tonight!” Müller observed us in silence, unsmiling; his mobile eyes flew from one of us to the other. “I’m not a defeatist,” I retorted. “I’m a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.” But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: “You reason like a capitalist, a materialist…This war isn’t a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we’d never have attacked Russia.” I wasn’t following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn’t stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. “We’re not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. We’re waging war to purify Germany, to create a Germany in which you’d want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?” I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn’t any point in talking with him. Müller put his hand on his shoulder: “Eichmann, my friend, you’re right.” He turned to me: “That’s why our dear Eichmann is so gifted for his work: he sees only what is essential. That’s what makes him such a good specialist. And that’s why I’m sending him to Hungary: for Jewish affairs, he’s our Meister.” Eichmann, presented with these compliments, blushed with pleasure; for my part, I found him rather narrow-minded, at that moment. But that didn’t prevent Müller from being right: he truly was quite effective, and in the end, it’s often the narrow-minded ones who are the most effective. Müller went on: “The only thing, Eichmann, is that you shouldn’t think just about the Jews. The Jews are among our great enemies, that’s true. But the Jewish question is already almost settled in Europe. After Hungary there won’t be many left. We have to think of the future. And we have a lot of enemies.” He spoke softly, his monotonous voice, cradled by his rustic accent, seemed to flow through his thin, nervous lips. “You have to think about what we’re going to do with the Poles. Eliminating the Jews but leaving the Poles makes no sense. And here too, in Germany. We’ve already begun, but we have to follow it through to the end. We also need an Endlösung der Sozialfrage, a “Final Solution to the Social Question.” There are still far too many criminals, asocials, vagabonds, Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals. We have to think about people with tuberculosis, who contaminate healthy people. About the heart patients, who pass on defective blood and cost a fortune in medical care: them at least we can sterilize. We have to take care of all of them, category by category. All our good Germans oppose it, they always have good reasons. That’s why Stalin is so strong: he knows how to make himself obeyed, and he knows how to go all the way.” He looked at me: “I know the Bolsheviks very well. Since the executions of hostages in Munich,
during the Revolution. After that, I fought them for fourteen years, until the Seizure of Power, and I’m still fighting them. But you know, I respect them. They are people who have an innate sense of organization, of discipline, and who don’t shrink back from anything. We could learn lessons from them. Don’t you think so?” Müller didn’t wait for the reply to his question. He took Eichmann by the arm and led him to a low table, where he set up a chess game. I watched them play from afar while I finished my plate. Eichmann played well, but he couldn’t hold his own against Müller: Müller, I said to myself, plays as he works, methodically, with stubbornness and a cold, thought-out brutality. They played several games, I had time to observe them. Eichmann tried cunning, calculated combinations, but Müller never let himself be trapped, and his defenses always remained just as strong as his attacks, systematically planned, irresistible. And Müller always won.

  The following week, I put together a small team for the Einsatz in Hungary. I appointed a specialist, Obersturmführer Elias; a few clerks, orderlies, and administrative assistants; and of course Piontek. I left my office under Asbach’s responsibility, with precise instructions. On Brandt’s orders, on March 17, I set out for the KL Mauthausen, where a Sondereinsatzgruppe of the SP and the SD was assembling, under the command of Oberführer Dr. Achamer-Pifrader, the former BdS of the Ostland. Eichmann was already there, at the head of his own Sondereinsatzkommando. I presented myself to Oberführer Dr. Geschke, the officer in charge, who set me up with my team in a barracks. I already knew when I left Berlin that the Hungarian leader, Horthy, was meeting the Führer at Klessheim Palace, near Salzburg. Since the war, the events at Klessheim are well known: confronted with Hitler and von Ribbentrop, who bluntly gave him the choice between the formation of a new pro-German government or the invasion of his country, Horthy—admiral in a country without a navy, regent of a kingdom without a king—decided, after a brief heart attack, to avoid the worst. At the time, though, we knew nothing of that: Geschke and Achamer-Pifrader contented themselves with summoning the superior officers on the night of the eighteenth, to inform us that we were leaving the next day for Budapest. Rumors, of course, were flying; many people expected Hungarian resistance at the border, they had us put on our field uniforms and they handed out submachine guns. The camp was simmering with excitement: for many of these functionaries of the Staatspolizei or the SD, it was their first experience of the field; and even I, after almost a year in Berlin, and the dullness of bureaucratic routine, the permanent tension of underhand intrigues, the fatigue of bombings you had to undergo without reacting, I let myself be caught up in the general exhilaration. That evening, I went to have a few drinks with Eichmann, whom I found surrounded by his officers, beaming and strutting about in a new field gray uniform, tailored as elegantly as a parade uniform. I knew only a few of his colleagues; he explained to me that for this operation he had sent for his best specialists from all over Europe, from Italy, Croatia, Litzmannstadt, Theresienstadt. He introduced me to his friend Hauptsturmführer Wisliceny (the godfather of his son Dieter), a frightfully fat, placid, serene man, who had come from Slovakia. The mood was cheerful, there wasn’t much drinking; everyone was champing at the bit. I went back to my barracks to sleep a little, since we were leaving around midnight, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I thought about Helene: I had left her two days earlier, telling her I didn’t know when I’d return to Berlin; I had been somewhat abrupt, giving few explanations and not making any promises; she had accepted it gently, gravely, without any obvious anxiety, and yet, it was clear I think to both of us, a connection had been formed, tenuous perhaps, but solid, which wouldn’t dissolve by itself; it was already a relation, in some way.

  I must have dozed off a little: Piontek shook me awake around midnight. I had lain down fully dressed, with my kit ready; I went out to take the air while they checked the vehicles. I ate a sandwich and drank some coffee that Fischer, an orderly, had brewed for me. It was late winter, bitter cold out, and I gladly inhaled the pure mountain air. A little farther on, I heard the sound of engines: the Vorkommando, led by a deputy of Eichmann’s, was starting out. I had decided to join the convoy of the Sondereinsatzkommando, which included, aside from Eichmann and his officers, more than 150 men, most of them Orpos and representatives of the SD and the SP, as well as some Waffen-SS. Geschke’s and Achamer-Pifrader’s convoy brought up the rear. When our two cars were ready, I sent them to join the staging area and went on foot to find Eichmann. He was wearing a tank soldier’s goggles on his cap and was holding a Steyr machine pistol under his arm: with his riding breeches, it made him look a little ridiculous, almost as if he were wearing a disguise. “Obersturmbannführer,” he cried out when he saw me. “Your men are ready?” I signed yes and went to join them. At the assembly area, it was still that last-minute confusion, the shouts and commands before a mass of vehicles can get under way in good order. Eichmann finally made his appearance, surrounded by many of his officers, including Regierungsrat Hunsche, whom I knew from Berlin; after having given some more contradictory orders, he got into his Schwimmwagen, a kind of amphibious all-terrain vehicle, driven by a Waffen-SS; I wondered amusedly if he was afraid the bridges would be dynamited, if he planned on crossing the Danube in his tub, with his Steyr and his chauffeur, to sweep away the Magyar hordes on his own. Piontek, at the steering wheel of my car, exuded sobriety and seriousness. Finally, under the harsh light of the camp searchlights, in a thunder of engines and a cloud of dust, the column set off. I had put Elias and Fischer in the back, with the weapons they had distributed to us; I sat in front, next to Piontek, and he started up. The sky was clear, the stars shining, but there was no moon; going down the winding road toward the Danube, I clearly saw the gleaming expanse of the river at my feet. The convoy crossed over to the right bank and headed toward Vienna. We drove in single file, our headlights kept low because of enemy fighter planes. I soon fell asleep. From time to time an alert woke me up, forced the vehicles to stop and douse the headlights, but no one left the car, we waited in the dark. There was no attack. In my interrupted half-sleep I had strange dreams, vivid and evanescent, which disappeared like a soap bubble as soon as a jolt or a siren woke me up. Around three o’clock, as we were skirting Vienna from the south, I shook myself awake and drank some coffee from a thermos readied by Fischer. The moon had risen, a thin crescent that made the wide water of the Danube gleam whenever we glimpsed it on our left. The alerts forced us to pause again, a long line of disparate vehicles that we could now distinguish in the moonlight. To the east, the sky was turning pink, outlining, higher up, the summits of the Little Carpathians. One of these pauses found us above the Neusiedler See, just a few kilometers from the Hungarian border. The fat Wisliceny passed by my car and rapped on my window: “Take your rum and come with us.” They had delivered a few measures of rum to us for the march, but I hadn’t touched it. I followed Wisliceny, who was going from car to car, getting other officers to come out. In front of us, the red ball of the sun weighed on the summits, the sky was pale, a luminous blue tinged with yellow, without a cloud. When our group reached Eichmann’s Schwimmwagen, near the head of the column, we surrounded it and Wisliceny asked him to get out. He had brought along the officers from IV B 4, as well as the commanders of the seconded companies. Wisliceny raised his flask, congratulated Eichmann, and drank his health: Eichmann was celebrating his thirty-eighth birthday that day. He hiccupped with pleasure: “Meine Herren, I am touched, very touched. Today is my seventh birthday as an SS officer. I can’t imagine a better gift than your company.” He was beaming, all red, smiling at everyone, drinking in little sips to the cheers.

  Crossing the border took place without incident: by the roadside, customs officials or soldiers of the Honvéd, glum or indifferent, watched us pass, showing nothing. The morning turned into a luminous one. The column paused in a village to breakfast on coffee, rum, white bread, and Hungarian wine bought on the spot. Then it started up again. We now drove much more slowly, the road w
as congested with German vehicles, troop trucks and tanks, which we had to follow at a crawl for kilometers before we could pass them. But it didn’t look like an invasion, everything happened in a calm, orderly way; the civilians by the side of the road lined up to watch us pass, some even made friendly gestures at us.

  We arrived in Budapest around the middle of the afternoon and settled in quarters on the right bank, behind the castle, on the Schwabenberg where the SS had requisitioned the big hotels. I was temporarily assigned a suite at the Astoria, with two beds and three sofas for eight men. The next morning I went to find out what I could. The city was swarming with German personnel, officers from the Wehrmacht and from the Waffen-SS, diplomats from the Auswärtiges Amt, police functionaries, engineers from the OT, economists from the WVHA, agents from the Abwehr whose names were always changing. In all this confusion I didn’t even know to whom I was subordinate, and I went to see Geschke, who told me he had been named BdS, but that the Reichsführer had also appointed an HSSPF, Obergruppenführer Winkelmann, and that Winkelmann would explain everything to me. But Winkelmann, a plump career policeman with a crew cut and a jutting jaw, hadn’t even been informed of my existence. He explained to me that, despite appearances, we hadn’t occupied Hungary, but had come at Horthy’s invitation to advise and support the Hungarian services: despite the presence of an HSSPF, a BdS, a BdO, and all the related structures, we had no executive function, and the Hungarian authorities preserved the full prerogatives of their sovereignty. Any serious dispute should be submitted to our new ambassador, Dr. Veesenmayer, an honorary SS-Brigadeführer, or to his colleagues at the Auswärtiges Amt. Kaltenbrunner, according to Winkelmann, was also in Budapest; he had come in Veesenmayer’s special train car, which had been linked up to Horthy’s train on his return from Klessheim, and he was negotiating with Lieutenant General Döme Sztójay, the former Hungarian ambassador to Berlin, about the formation of a new government (Kállay, the fallen prime minister, had sought refuge in the Turkish legation). I had no reason to go see Kaltenbrunner, so instead I went over to introduce myself at the German legation: Veesenmayer was busy, and I was received by his chargé d’affaires, Legationsrat Feine, who took note of my mission, suggested I wait for the situation to become clearer, and advised that I stay in contact with them. It was a fine mess.

 

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