The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  At the Astoria, I saw Obersturmbannführer Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy. He had already held a meeting with the leaders of the Jewish community and had emerged from it very satisfied. “They came with suitcases,” he explained to me with a big laugh. “But I reassured them and told them no one was going to be arrested. They were terrified of far right hysteria. We promised them that if they cooperated, nothing would happen, that calmed them down.” He laughed again. “They must think we’re going to protect them from the Hungarians.” The Jews were to form a council; so as not to frighten them—the term Judenrat, used in Poland, was known here well enough to provoke a certain anxiety—it would be called the Zentralrat. In the days that followed, as members of this new council brought mattresses and blankets to the Sondereinsatzkommando—I requisitioned several for our suite—then, in response to various requests, typewriters, mirrors, cologne, lingerie, and some very pretty little paintings by Watteau, or at least his school, I held meetings with them, especially with the president of the Jewish community, Dr. Samuel Stern, and had a series of consultations so that I could form an idea of the resources available. There were Jews, men and women, employed in Hungarian armaments factories, and Stern could provide me with approximate figures. But a major problem arose immediately: all the able-bodied Jewish men, who were without essential jobs and of working age, had for several years already been drafted into the Honvéd, to serve in labor battalions behind the lines. And it was true, I remembered, when we had entered Zhitomir, which was still held by the Hungarians, I had heard talk of these Jewish battalions; they infuriated my colleagues in Sk 4a. “Those battalions have nothing to do with us,” Stern explained. “You’ll have to see about that with the government.”

  A few days after the formation of Sztójay’s government, the new cabinet, in a single eleven-hour legislative session, promulgated a series of anti-Jewish laws that the Hungarian police began to apply immediately. I saw little of Eichmann: he was always hidden away with officials, or else visiting the Jews, taking an interest, according to Krumey, in their culture, taking tours of their library, their museum, their synagogues. At the end of the month he addressed the Zentralrat himself. His whole SEk had just moved to the Majestic Hotel; I had remained at the Astoria, where I had been able to obtain two more rooms to set up offices. I wasn’t invited to the meeting, but I saw him afterward: he looked very pleased with himself, and assured me that the Jews would cooperate and submit to German demands. We discussed the question of workers; the new laws would allow the Hungarians to augment the civilian labor battalions—all Jewish civil servants, journalists, notaries, lawyers, accountants who were going to lose their jobs could be drafted, and that made Eichmann snigger: “Imagine, my dear Obersturmbannführer, Jewish lawyers digging antitank ditches!”—but we had no idea about what they would agree to give us; Eichmann feared as I did that they would try to keep the best for themselves. But Eichmann had found himself an ally, a functionary of the county of Budapest, Dr. Lászlo Endre, a fanatical anti-Semite whom he hoped to have appointed to the Ministry of the Interior. “We have to avoid repeating the mistake of Denmark, you know,” he explained to me, his head resting on his large veined hand as he chewed on his pinky. “The Hungarians must do everything themselves, they have to offer us their Jews on a plate.” Already, the SEk, along with the Hungarian police and the forces of the BdS, were arresting Jews who violated the new rules; a transit camp, guarded by the Hungarian police, had been set up in Kistarcsa, near the city; more than three thousand Jews had been interned there. On my side, I didn’t remain inactive: via the legation, I had made contact with the ministries of Industry and Agriculture to sound out their views; and I studied the new legislation in the company of Herr von Adamovic, the legation expert, an affable, intelligent man almost paralyzed by sciatica and arthritis. In the meantime I stayed in contact with my Berlin office. Speer, who by coincidence celebrated his birthday on the same day as Eichmann, had left Hohenlychen to spend his convalescence in Meran, in Italy; I had sent a congratulatory telegram and some flowers to him, but hadn’t received a reply. I had also been invited to attend a conference in Silesia, on the Jewish question, headed by Dr. Franz Six, my very first department head in the SD. He now worked at the Auswärtiges Amt, but from time to time still lent a hand to the RSHA. Thomas had also been invited, along with Eichmann and some of his specialists. I arranged to travel with them. Our group left by train, passing through Pressburg, then changing in Breslau for Hirschberg; the conference was being held in Krummhübel, a well-known ski resort in the Silesian Sudeten Mountains, now largely occupied by the foreign ministry’s offices, including Six’s, evacuated from Berlin because of the bombings. We were put up in a crowded Gasthaus; their new barracks weren’t yet ready. I was glad to find Thomas there; he had arrived a little before us and was taking advantage of the occasion to ski in the company of beautiful young secretaries or assistants, including one of Russian origin whom he introduced to me, and who all seemed to have very little work to do. Eichmann had gathered colleagues from all over Europe and was strutting about. The conference began the day after we arrived. Six opened the discussions with a speech on “the tasks and aims of anti-Jewish operations abroad.” He spoke to us about the political structure of world Jewry, asserting that Jewry in Europe has finished playing its political and biological role. He also made an interesting digression on Zionism, which was still not well known at the time in our circles; for Six, the question of the return of the remaining Jews to Palestine should be subordinate to the Arab question, which would take on importance after the war, especially if the British withdrew from part of their empire. His speech was followed by that of the specialist from the Auswärtiges Amt, a certain von Thadden, who explained the standpoint of his ministry on “the political situation of Jews in Europe and the situation in relation to anti-Jewish executive measures.” Thomas spoke about the security problems raised by the Jewish rebellions of the previous year. Other specialists or advisors explained the present situation in the countries where they were posted. But the high point of the day was Eichmann’s speech. The Hungarian Einsatz seemed to have inspired him, and he painted us a nearly complete picture of anti-Jewish operations as they had unfolded from the beginning. He quickly passed over the failure of ghettoization and criticized the inefficiency and confusion of the mobile operations: “Whatever the successes racked up, they remain sporadic, they allow too many Jews to escape, to reach the woods to swell the ranks of the partisans, and they sap the morale of our men.” Success, in foreign countries, depended on two factors: mobilizing local authorities and securing the cooperation, even the collaboration, of the Jewish community leaders. “As to what happens, when we try to arrest the Jews ourselves, in countries where we have insufficient resources, it’s enough to look at the example of Denmark, a complete failure, or the South of France, where we got very mixed results, even after our occupation of the former Italian zone, or Italy, where the population and the Church hide thousands of Jews that we can’t find…. As for the Judenräte, they permit a considerable savings in personnel, and they harness the Jews themselves to the task of their destruction. Of course, these Jews have their own aims, their own dreams. But the dreams of Jews serve us too. They dream of grandiose corruptions, they offer us their money, their property. We take this money and this property and we pursue our own task. They dream of the economic needs of the Wehrmacht, of the protection provided by work certificates, and we, we use these dreams to feed our armaments factories, so that we are offered the labor we need to build our underground complexes, and also to get the weak and the old, the useless mouths, handed over to us. But understand this too: the elimination of the first one hundred thousand Jews is much easier than getting rid of the last five thousand. Look at what happened in Warsaw, or during the other rebellions that Standartenführer Hauser told us about. When the Reichsführer sent me the report on the fighting in Warsaw, he noted that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Jews in a ghetto could fi
ght like that. Yet our late lamented Chief, Obergruppenführer Heydrich, had understood this long before. He knew that the strongest Jews, the toughest, the cleverest, the wiliest, would escape all selections and would be the hardest to destroy. And it is precisely those who form the vital reservoir from which Jewry could spring back, the germ cell for Jewish regeneration, as the late Obergruppenführer said. Our struggle prolongs that of Koch and Pasteur—we have to follow it through to the end…” A thunder of applause welcomed these words. Did Eichmann really believe in them? It was the first time I heard him talk this way, and I had the impression that he had gotten carried away, let himself be swept along by his new role, that he liked the game so much that he ended up becoming one with it. But his practical comments were far from idiotic; it was obvious that he had attentively analyzed all the past experiences to draw the essential lessons from them. At dinner—Six, out of politeness and for old time’s sake, had invited me along with Thomas to a little private supper—I remarked favorably on Eichmann’s speech. But Six, who never abandoned his glum, depressed air, thought much more negatively of it: “Intellectually uninteresting. He’s a relatively simple man, not particularly gifted. Of course, he is snappish, and he’s good at what he does, within the limits of his specialization.”—“Precisely,” I said, “he’s a good officer, motivated and talented in his way. In my opinion, he could go far.”—“That would surprise me,” Thomas dryly interrupted. “He’s too stubborn. He’s a bulldog, a gifted executor. But he has no imagination. He is incapable of reacting to events outside his field, of evolving. He built his career on Jews, on the destruction of Jews, and for that he’s very efficient. But once we’ve done with the Jews—or else if the wind shifts, if the time comes no longer to destroy Jews—then he’ll be unable to adapt, he’ll be lost.”

  The next day, the conference continued with minor speakers. Eichmann didn’t stay, he had work to do: “I have to go inspect Auschwitz and then go back to Budapest. Things are on the move over there.” I left in turn on April 5. In Hungary, I learned that the Führer had just consented to the use of Jewish workers in Reich territory: now that the ambiguity had been settled, Speer’s men and the men from the Jägerstab came to see me constantly to ask when we could send them the first consignments. I told them to be patient, the operation wasn’t finalized yet. Eichmann returned furious from Auschwitz, railing against the Kommandanten: “Idiots, incompetents. Nothing is ready for reception.” On April 9…ah, but what’s the point of relating all these details day by day? It’s exhausting me, and also it’s boring me, and you too no doubt. How many pages have I already stacked up on these uninteresting bureaucratic episodes? No, I can’t go on like this anymore: the quill falls from my fingers, the pen, rather. I might return to it some other day; but what’s the point of going over that sordid Hungarian business again? It is amply documented in the books, by historians who have a much more coherent overall view than my own. I played only a minor role in it, after all. Although I was able to meet some of the participants, I don’t have much to add to their own memories. The great intrigues that ensued, especially those negotiations between Eichmann, Becher, and the Jews, that whole business of ransoming Jews in exchange for money, trucks, all that, yes, I was more or less aware of them, I discussed it, I even met some of the Jews involved, and Becher too, a disturbing man, who had come to Hungary to buy horses for the Waffen-SS and who had quickly taken over, for the Reichsführer, the largest armaments factory in the country, the Manfred-Weiss Werke, without informing anyone, neither Veesenmayer, nor Winkelmann, nor me, and to whom the Reichsführer had then entrusted tasks that either duplicated or contradicted my own and Eichmann’s too—which, I ended up realizing, was a typical method of the Reichsführer’s, but on the ground it served only to spread discord and confusion, no one coordinated anything, Winkelmann had no influence over Eichmann or over Becher, who never told him about anything, and I must confess that I hardly behaved any better than they, I negotiated with the Hungarians without Winkelmann’s knowing, with the Ministry of Defense especially, where I had made contacts via General Greiffenberg, Veesenmayer’s military attaché, to see if the Honvéd couldn’t also second its Jewish labor battalions to us, even with specific guarantees of a special treatment, which of course the Honvéd refused categorically, leaving us, for potential workers, only civilians who had been pressed into service in the beginning of the month, the ones they could remove from the factories, and their families, in short, a human potential of little value, which is one of the reasons why I had to end up regarding this mission as a total failure, but not the only reason, I’ll talk some more about that, and I might even talk a little about the negotiations with the Jews, for that too in the end fell somewhat within my jurisdiction, or, to be more precise, I used, no, I tried to use these negotiations to push my own objectives forward, with little success, I will readily admit, for a whole jumble of reasons, not just those already mentioned, there was also the attitude of Eichmann, who was becoming more and more difficult, Becher too, the WVHA, the Hungarian police, everyone joined in, you see—whatever the case, what I would like to say more precisely is that if you want to analyze the reasons for which the Hungarian operation yielded such poor results for the Arbeitseinsatz, my main concern after all, you have to take into account all these people and all these institutions, who each played their role, but also kept blaming all the others, and they blamed me too, no one refrained from that, you can believe me, in short, it was a mess, genuine havoc, due to which in the end most of the deported Jews died, right away I mean, gassed even before they could be put to work, for very few of those who reached Auschwitz were fit, considerable losses, 70 percent perhaps, no one is really sure, and because of which people after the war believed, and this is understandable, that it was the true aim of the operation, to kill all those Jews, those women, those old people, those chubby healthy children, and thus people couldn’t understand why the Germans, when they were losing the war (though the specter of defeat may not have been so clear, at the time, from the German standpoint at least), still persisted in massacring Jews, in mobilizing considerable resources, men and trains, especially, to exterminate women and children, and thus since people couldn’t understand, they attributed it to the anti-Semitic madness of the Germans, to a delirium of murder that was very remote from the thinking of most of the participants, for in fact, for me as well as for so many other functionaries and specialists, the stakes were essential, crucial, to find labor for our factories, a few hundred thousand workers who might have let us reverse the course of things, we wanted Jews who were not dead but very much alive, able-bodied, preferably male, but the Hungarians wanted to keep the males or at least a large part of them, and so it was already off to a bad start, and then there were the transport conditions, deplorable, and God knows how much I argued about this with Eichmann, who countered with the same thing every time, “It’s not my responsibility, it’s the Hungarian gendarmerie who load and supply the trains, not us,” and then there was also Höss’s stubbornness, in Auschwitz, because in the meantime, possibly following Eichmann’s report, Höss had returned as Standortälteste in place of Liebehenschel, who had been sent to cool his heels in Lublin, there was thus this obstinate inability of Höss to change his methods, but this I might discuss later on and in more detail, in short, few of us deliberately wanted what happened, and yet, you’ll say, it happened, it’s true, and it’s also true that we sent all those Jews to Auschwitz, not just the ones who could work, but all of them, knowing perfectly well that the old people and the children would be gassed, and so we return to the initial question, why this obstinacy to empty Hungary of its Jews, given the conditions of war and all that, and there, of course, I can only put forward hypotheses, for it wasn’t my personal objective, or rather, I’m not being precise here, I know why we wanted to deport (at the time we said evacuate) all the Jews from Hungary and kill those unfit for work immediately, that was because our authorities, the Führer, the Reichsführer, had
decided to kill all the Jews in Europe, that is clear, we knew that, just as we knew that even those who would be put to work would die sooner or later, and the why of all that is a question I’ve talked a lot about and to which I still don’t have an answer, people, in those days, believed all sorts of things about the Jews, the bacillus theory like the Reichsführer and Heydrich, cited at the Krummhübel conference by Eichmann, but for whom in my opinion it must have been a purely theoretical construct, the argument of Jewish uprisings, espionage or fifth column for our enemies who were getting closer, an argument that obsessed a large part of the RSHA and even preoccupied my friend Thomas, the fear too of Jewish omnipotence, in which some still firmly believed, which incidentally gave rise to some comical misunderstandings, as in the beginning of April in Budapest, when we had to move a number of Jews to free up their apartments, and the SP called for the creation of a ghetto, which the Hungarians refused because they were afraid the Allies would bomb around this ghetto and spare it (the Americans had already struck Budapest when I was in Krummhübel), and so the Hungarians scattered the Jews near strategic military and industrial targets, which greatly worried some of our officials, for then if the Americans went ahead and bombed these targets anyway, that would prove that global Judaism was not as powerful as was thought, and I have to add, to be fair, that the Americans did in fact bomb these targets, killing in passing many Jewish civilians, but for me it had been a long time since I believed in the omnipotence of global Judaism, otherwise why would all those countries have refused to take in the Jews, in 1937, ’38, ’39, when we wanted just one thing, for them to leave Germany, the only reasonable solution at bottom? What I mean, returning to the question I asked, for I’ve strayed a little from it, is that even if, objectively, there was no doubt about the final aim, it wasn’t with this aim in mind that most of the participants were working, it wasn’t that which motivated them and drove them to work so energetically and single-mindedly, it was a whole gamut of motivations, and even Eichmann, I’m convinced, he had a very harsh attitude but at bottom it was the same to him whether or not the Jews were killed, the only thing that counted, for him, was to show what he could do, to prove his worth, and also to use the abilities he had developed, for the rest of it, he didn’t give a fuck, either about industry or about the gas chambers for that matter, the only thing he did give a fuck about was that no one fucked with him, and that’s why he was so reluctant in the negotiations with the Jews, but I’ll come back to that, it’s interesting all the same, and for the others it’s the same, everyone had his reasons, the Hungarian bureaucracy that helped us just wanted to see the Jews leave Hungary but didn’t give a fuck about what would happen to them, and Speer and Kammler and the Jägerstab wanted workers and relentlessly pushed the SS to deliver Jews to them, but didn’t give a fuck about what happened to the ones who couldn’t work, and then there were also all sorts of pragmatic motivations, for example, I was concentrating only on the Arbeitseinsatz, but that was far from being the only economic stake, as I learned when I met an expert from our Ministry of Food and Agriculture, a very intelligent young man, passionate about his work, who explained to me one evening, in an old café in Budapest, the alimentary aspect of the question, which was that because of the loss of the Ukraine Germany had to face a grave deficit in food supplies, especially in wheat, and so had turned to Hungary, a major producer, according to him that was even the main reason for our pseudo-invasion, to secure this source of wheat, and so in 1944 we asked the Hungarians for 450,000 tons of wheat, 360,000 tons more than in 1942, or an increase of 400 percent, but the Hungarians had to take this wheat from somewhere, after all they had to feed their own population, but precisely, these 360,000 tons corresponded to rations for about one million people, a little more than the total number of Hungarian Jews, and so the specialists in the Ministry of Food saw the evacuation of the Jews by the RSHA as a measure that would allow Hungary to free up a surplus of wheat for Germany, corresponding to our needs, and as for the fate of the evacuated Jews, who in principle would have to be fed elsewhere if they weren’t killed, that didn’t concern this young and all in all pleasant expert, a little obsessed with his figures though, for there were other departments in the Ministry of Food to take care of that, feeding the inmates and other foreign workers in Germany, that wasn’t his business, and for him the evacuation of the Jews was the solution to his problem, even if it became someone else’s problem in turn. And he wasn’t the only one, this man, everyone was like him, I too was like him, and you too, in his place, you would have been like him.