The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  Leaving, she had paused on the threshold and looked at me again. I was going to speak, but she put a finger on my lips: “Don’t say anything.” She left that finger on an instant too long. Then she turned heel and quickly went downstairs. I didn’t understand what she wanted, she seemed to be revolving around something without daring either to approach it or leave it. This ambiguity troubled me, I would have liked her to declare herself openly; then I could have chosen, said yes or no, and it would have been settled. But she herself must not have known what it was. And what I had told her during my fit must not have made things any easier; no bath, no swimming pool would be enough to wash away such words.

  I had also begun reading again. But I would have been quite incapable of reading serious books, literature; I went over the same sentence ten times before realizing I hadn’t understood it. That’s how I found on my shelves the Martian adventures of E. R. Burroughs, which I had brought back from the attic of Moreau’s house and carefully put away without ever opening them. I read these three books at one go; but to my regret I found none of the emotion that had gripped me when I read them as a teenager, when, locked in the bathroom or buried in my bed, I forgot the external world for hours to lose myself voluptuously in the meanderings of this barbaric universe with its confused eroticism, peopled with warriors and princesses wearing nothing but weapons and jewelry, a whole weird jumble of monsters and machines. I made some surprising discoveries, though, in them, unsuspected by the dazzled boy I had been: certain passages in these science fiction novels, in fact, revealed this American prose writer as one of the unknown precursors of völkisch thinking. His ideas, in my idleness, led me to others; remembering Brandt’s advice, which I had till then been much too busy to follow, I sent for a typewriter and wrote a brief memo for the Reichsführer, quoting Burroughs as a model for the profound social reforms that the SS should envisage after the war. Thus, to increase the birthrate after the war and force men to marry young, I took as an example the red Martians, who recruited their forced labor not just from criminals and prisoners of war, but also from confirmed bachelors who were too poor to pay the high celibacy tax which all red-Martian governments impose; and I devoted an entire chapter to this celibacy tax that, if it were ever imposed, would put a heavy strain on my own finances. But I reserved even more radical suggestions for the SS elite, which should follow the example of the green Martians, those three-meter-tall monsters with four arms and fangs: All property among the green Martians is owned in common by the community, except the personal weapons, ornaments, and sleeping silks and furs of the individuals…. The women and children of a man’s retinue may be likened to a military unit for which he is responsible in various ways, as in matters of instruction, discipline, sustenance, etc…. His women are in no sense wives…. Their mating is a matter of community interest solely, and is directed without reference to natural selection. The council of chieftains of each community control the matter as surely as the owner of a Kentucky racing stud directs the scientific breeding of his stock for the improvement of the whole. I drew inspiration from this to suggest progressive reforms of the Lebensborn. I was actually digging my own grave, and part of me almost laughed as I wrote it, but it also seemed to me to stem logically from our Weltanschauung; what’s more I knew that it would please the Reichsführer; the passages from Burroughs reminded me obscurely of the prophetic utopia he had revealed to us in Kiev, in 1941. In fact, ten days after I sent my memorandum, I received a reply signed by his hand (his instructions, most of the time, were signed by Brandt or even Grothmann):

  Very Dear Doktor Aue!

  I read your memorandum with keen interest. I’m happy to know that you are recovering and that you are devoting your convalescence to useful research; I didn’t know you were interested in these questions, so vital for the future of our race. I wonder if Germany, even after the war, will be ready to accept such profound and necessary ideas. A lot of work still has to be done on ways of thinking. Whatever the case, when you’re all better, I’ll be happy to discuss these projects and this visionary author with you in more detail.

  Heil Hitler!

  Yours,

  Heinrich Himmler

  Flattered, I waited for Thomas to visit me to show him this letter, as well as my memorandum; but to my surprise, he reacted angrily to it: “You really think this is the right time for such childishness?” He seemed to have lost all his sense of humor; when he started to describe the latest arrests to me, I began to understand why. Even in my own circle some men were implicated: two of my university friends and my former professor in Kiel, Jessen, who had apparently grown closer to Goerdeler in recent years. “We also found evidence against Nebe, but he’s disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Well, if anyone knows how to do that, it’s he. He must have been a little twisted: at his place, there was a movie of a gassing in the East, can you imagine him putting that on at night?” I had rarely seen Thomas so nervous. I made him drink, offered him cigarettes, but he didn’t let much drop; I was just able to divine that Schellenberg had had contact with certain opposition circles, before the attempt. At the same time, Thomas ranted angrily against the conspirators: “Killing the Führer! How could they think that would be a solution? That he be removed from command of the Wehrmacht, all right, he’s ill anyway. One could even have imagined, I don’t know, forcing him into retirement, if it was really necessary, letting him remain President but handing over power to the Reichsführer…According to Schellenberg, the British would agree to negotiate with the Reichsführer. But killing the Führer? It’s insane, they didn’t realize…They swore an oath to him, then they try to kill him!” It seemed really to bother him; as for me, the very idea that Schellenberg or the Reichsführer had thought of putting the Führer aside shocked me. I didn’t see much difference between that or killing him, but I didn’t say so to Thomas; he was already too depressed.

  Ohlendorf, whom I saw toward the end of the month, when I finally began to go out again, seemed to think as I did. I found him—he who had already been so glum to begin with—even more despondent than Thomas. He confessed to me that the night before the execution of Jessen, to whom he had remained close in spite of everything, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. “I kept thinking about his wife and children. I’ll try to help them, I’m going to give them part of my salary.” He still thought, though, that Jessen deserved the death sentence. For years, he explained to me, our professor had broken his ties to National Socialism. They had continued to see each other, to talk, and Jessen had even tried to recruit his former student. Ohlendorf agreed with him on a number of points: “It’s obvious—the widespread corruption within the Party, the erosion of the rule of law, the pluralist anarchy that’s replaced the Führerstaat, all that’s unacceptable. And the measures against the Jews, the Endlösung, were a mistake. But overthrowing the Führer and the NSDAP, that’s unthinkable. We have to purge the Party, bring up the veterans of the front, who have a realistic vision of things, the leaders of the Hitlerjugend, maybe the only idealists we have left. It’s those young people who will have to spur the Party on after the war. But we can’t dream of going backward, to the middle-class conservatism of the career soldiers and the Prussian aristocrats. This deed discredits them forever. What’s more, the people understand this.” It was true: all the SD reports showed that ordinary people and soldiers, despite their concerns, their fatigue, their anxieties, their demoralization, even their defeatism, were scandalized by the conspirators’ treason. The war effort and the campaign for austerity had received a jolt of energy; Goebbels, finally authorized to truly declare the “total war” he held so dear, went to great lengths to whip it up, without it really being necessary. The situation, though, was only getting worse: the Russians had retaken Galicia and gone beyond their 1939 border, Lublin was falling, and the wave had finally died down on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Bolshevik command was obviously just waiting for us to crush for them the Polish insurrection, launched at the beginning of the
month. “We’re playing Stalin’s game there,” Ohlendorf commented. “It would be better to explain to the AK that the Bolsheviks represent a much greater danger than we do. If the Poles fought at our side, we could still hold the Russians back. But the Führer doesn’t want to hear about it. And the Balkans are going to fall like a house of cards.” In Bessarabia, in fact, the Sixth Army, reconstituted from scratch under Fretter-Pico, was getting itself cut into pieces a second time around: the gates to Romania gaped wide open. France was obviously lost; after having opened another front in Provence and taken Paris, the Anglo-Americans were getting ready to clear the rest of the country, while our bruised troops ebbed back to the Rhine. Ohlendorf was very pessimistic: “The new rockets are almost ready, according to Kammler. He’s convinced they will change the course of the war. But I don’t see how. A rocket carries fewer explosives than an American B-17, and can be used only once.” Unlike Schellenberg, about whom he refused to speak, he didn’t have any plans or concrete solutions: he could only talk about a “final National Socialist leap forward, a giant surge,” which to me resembled Goebbels’s rhetoric a little too much. I had the impression that he was secretly resigned to defeat. But I don’t think he had yet admitted that to himself.

  The events of July 20 had another consequence—minor, but unfortunate for me: in mid-August, the Gestapo arrested Judge Baumann, of the Berlin SS court. I learned of it fairly rapidly from Thomas, but didn’t immediately realize all the consequences. At the beginning of September, I was summoned by Brandt, who was accompanying the Reichsführer on an inspection in Schleswig-Holstein. I joined the special train near Lübeck. Brandt began by announcing that the Reichsführer wanted to confer the first-class distinction on my War Service Cross: “Whatever you may have thought of it, your action in Hungary was very positive. The Reichsführer is pleased with it. He was also favorably impressed by your recent initiative.” Then he informed me that the Kripo had asked Baumann’s replacement to reopen the case against me; the latter had written to the Reichsführer: in his opinion, the accusations deserved an investigation. “The Reichsführer hasn’t changed his mind, and you have all his confidence. But he thinks it would be detrimental to you to prevent an investigation again. Rumors are beginning to circulate, you must know that. The best thing would be for you to defend yourself and prove your innocence: that way, we can close the case once and for all.” I didn’t like this idea at all, I was beginning to know the manic stubbornness of Clemens and Weser too well, but I didn’t have a choice. Back in Berlin, I went on my own initiative to introduce myself to Judge von Rabingen, a fanatical National Socialist, and explained my version of the facts to him. He retorted that the case put together by the Kripo contained disturbing elements, he kept going back to the bloodstained German clothes, made to my size, and he was also intrigued by the business with the twins, which he wanted to clear up at all costs. The Kripo had finally questioned my sister, who was back in Pomerania: she had placed the twins in a private institution, in Switzerland; she affirmed they were our orphaned second cousins, born in France, whose birth certificates had disappeared in the French rout in 1940. “That could be true,” von Rabingen superciliously declared. “But for now it’s unverifiable.”

  This permanent suspicion haunted me. For many days running, I almost succumbed to a relapse of my illness; I remained locked up at home in a black prostration, even going so far as to refuse to answer the door to Helene, who came to visit me. At night, Clemens and Weser, animated marionettes, poorly made and badly painted, jumped on my sleep, creaked through my dreams, buzzed around me like dirty little mocking creatures. My mother herself sometimes joined this chorus, and in my anguish I came to believe these two clowns were right, that I had gone mad and had in fact killed her. But I wasn’t insane, I felt it, and the whole business came down to a monstrous misunderstanding. When I got hold of myself a little, I had the idea of contacting Morgen, the upright judge I had met in Lublin. He worked in Oranienburg: he immediately invited me to come see him, and received me affably. He talked to me first about his activities: after Lublin, he had set up a commission in Auschwitz, and charged Grabner, the head of the Politische Abteilung, for two thousand illegal murders; Kaltenbrunner had had Grabner released; Morgen had re-arrested him and the investigation was following its course, along with that of numerous accomplices and other corrupt subalterns; but in January a fire of criminal origin had destroyed the barracks where the commission stored all the evidence and some of the files, which complicated things quite a bit. Now, he confessed to me in confidence, he was aiming for Höss himself: “I’m convinced he’s guilty of diversion of State property and of murder, but it will be hard for me to prove it; Höss has powerful protections. What about you? I heard you were having some problems.” I explained my case to him. “Accusing you isn’t enough,” he said thoughtfully, “they have to prove it. Personally, I trust your sincerity: I know the worst elements of the SS only too well, and I know you’re not like them. Whatever the case, to charge you, they have to prove concrete things, that you were there at the time of the murder, that those famous clothes were yours. Where are those clothes? If they stayed in France, it seems to me that the prosecution doesn’t have much to go on. And also, the French authorities who sent the request for legal assistance are now under the control of an enemy power: you should ask an expert in international law to study that aspect of things.” I left this interview a little reassured: the obsessive stubbornness of the two investigators was making me paranoid, I could no longer see what was true and what was false, but Morgen’s good legal sense was helping me find terra firma again.

  In the end, and as always with the course of justice, this business lasted for many more months. I won’t go into it in detail. I had several more confrontations with von Rabingen and the two investigators; my sister, in Pomerania, had to testify: she was on her guard, she never revealed that I had informed her of the murders; she just claimed that she had received a telegram from Antibes, from an associate of Moreau’s. Clemens and Weser were forced to acknowledge that they had never seen the famous clothes: all their information came from letters from the French criminal police, which had little legal value, especially now. What’s more, since the murders had been committed in France, an indictment could only have led to my extradition, which had obviously become impossible—although one lawyer did suggest to me, not at all unpleasantly, that before an SS court I could risk being sentenced to death for breach of honor, without any reference to the civil criminal code.

  These considerations did not seem to shake the favor the Reichsführer was showing me. During one of his lightning visits to Berlin, he had me come on board his train, and after a ceremony where I received my new decoration in the company of a dozen other officers, most of them from the Waffen-SS, he invited me into his private office to discuss my memorandum, whose ideas, according to him, were sound but required a more thorough examination. “For example, there’s the Catholic Church. If we impose a celibacy tax, they’ll certainly require an exemption for the clergy. And if we grant it to them, that will be another victory for them, another demonstration of their strength. Therefore, I think that a precondition for any positive development, after the war, will be to settle the Kirchenfrage, the question of the two Churches. Radically, if necessary: those Pfaffen, those little monks, are almost worse than the Jews. Don’t you think so? I’m in complete agreement with the Führer about this: the Christian religion is a Jewish religion, founded by a Jewish rabbi, Saul, as a vehicle to bear Judaism to another level, the most dangerous of all, together with Bolshevism. Eliminating the Jews and keeping the Christians would be like stopping halfway.” I listened gravely to all this, taking notes. Only at the end of the interview did the Reichsführer mention my case: “They haven’t produced any evidence, isn’t that right?”—“No, my Reichsführer. There is none.”—“That’s very good. I saw right away it was all nonsense. But it’s better that they convince themselves of that on their own, isn’t that rig
ht?” He accompanied me to the door and shook my hand after I had saluted him: “I’m very happy with your work, Obersturmbannführer. You are an officer with a bright future ahead.”

  A bright future? The future seemed to me rather to be growing narrower every day, mine as well as Germany’s. When I turned around, I contemplated with horror the long dark corridor, the tunnel leading from the depths of the past to the present moment. What had become of the infinite plains that opened up before us when, just out of childhood, we approached the future with energy and confidence? All that energy seemed to have served only to build ourselves a prison, a gallows, even. Ever since my illness, I had stopped seeing people; sports I had left to others. Most of the time I ate alone at my place, the French windows wide open, taking advantage of the gentle end-of-summer air, of the last green leaves that, slowly, in the midst of the ruins of the city, were preparing their final blaze of color. From time to time, I went out with Helene, but a painful embarrassment colored these meetings; we both must have been seeking the gentleness, the intense sweetness of those first months, but it had disappeared and we didn’t know how to find it again, while at the same time we tried to pretend nothing had changed, it was strange. I didn’t understand why she persisted in staying in Berlin: her parents had gone to a cousin’s house near Baden, but when—with sincerity and not with that inexplicable cruelty I had shown while sick—I urged her to join them, she gave laughable excuses, her work, looking after the apartment. In my moments of lucidity I told myself that she was staying because of me, and I wondered if, precisely, the horror my words must have aroused in her didn’t actually encourage her, if she weren’t hoping, perhaps, to save me from myself, a ridiculous idea if ever there was one, but who knows what goes on in a woman’s head? There must have been something else besides, and I glimpsed it sometimes. One day, we were walking in the street when a car drove through a puddle next to us: the stream of water gushed under Helene’s skirt, spattering her up to her thigh. She let out an incongruous, almost harsh burst of laughter. “Why are you laughing so hard, what’s so funny?”—“You, it’s you,” she let out through her laughter. “You’ve never touched me so far up.” I didn’t say anything, what could I have said? I could have had her read the memo I had sent to the Reichsführer, to put her in her place; but I felt that neither that nor even a frank explanation of my tastes would have discouraged her, she was like that, stubborn, she had made her choice almost at random and now she was obstinately sticking to it, as if the choice itself counted more than the person who had been the object of it. Why didn’t I send her packing? I don’t know. I didn’t have many people to talk to. Thomas was working fourteen, sixteen hours a day, I hardly ever saw him. Most of my colleagues had been relocated. Hohenegg, I learned when I called the OKW, had been sent to the front in July, and was still in Königsberg with part of the OKHG Center. Professionally, and despite the Reichsführer’s encouragements, I had reached a dead end: Speer had nothing more to do with me, I had contact only with subalterns, and my office, which was no longer asked to do anything, served almost solely as a mailbox for the complaints of numerous enterprises, agencies, or ministries. Every now and then, Asbach and the other members of the team would churn out some report that I sent out right and left; I would receive polite responses, or none at all. But I hadn’t fully understood the extent to which I was on the wrong track until the day Herr Leland invited me to tea. It was at the bar of the Adlon, one of the only good restaurants still open, a veritable Tower of Babel, where a dozen languages were spoken; all the members of the foreign diplomatic corps seemed to meet there. I found Herr Leland at a table set a little apart. A maître d’hôtel came over and served me tea with precise gestures, and Leland waited until he had moved away to talk to me. “How is your health?” he enquired.—“Fine, mein Herr. I’m all better.”—“And your work?”—“It’s going well, mein Herr. The Reichsführer seems satisfied. I was recently decorated.” He didn’t say anything, but drank a little tea. “But it’s been several months since I last saw Reichsminister Speer,” I went on. He made an abrupt sign with his hand: “That’s not important. Speer has disappointed us very much. We have to move on now.”—“Toward what, mein Herr?”—“It’s still being worked out,” he said slowly, with his slight, somewhat peculiar accent. “And how is Dr. Mandelbrod, mein Herr?” He stared at me with his cold, severe gaze. As always I was incapable of distinguishing his glass eye from the other one. “Mandelbrod is doing fine. But I should tell you that you disappointed him a little.” I didn’t say anything. Leland drank a little more tea before continuing: “I must say that you haven’t satisfied all our expectations. You haven’t shown much initiative, these past few months. Your performance in Hungary was disappointing.”—“Mein Herr…I did my best. And the Reichsführer congratulated me on my work. But there’s so much interdepartmental rivalry, everyone makes obstructions…” Leland didn’t seem to be paying any attention to my words. “We have the impression,” he said finally, “that you haven’t understood what we expect of you.”—“What do you expect of me, mein Herr?”—“More energy. More creativity. You should produce solutions, not create obstacles. And also, allow me to say, you’re letting yourself go. The Reichsführer forwarded your recent memorandum to us: instead of wasting your time with childish pranks, you should think about Germany’s salvation.” I felt my cheeks burning and made an effort to control my voice. “I am thinking of nothing else, mein Herr. But, as you know, I was very sick. I also had…other problems.” Two days before I had had a difficult interview with von Rabingen. Leland didn’t say anything; he made a sign, and the maître d’hôtel reappeared to serve him. At the bar, a young man with wavy hair, in a plaid suit with a bow tie, was laughing too loudly. A brief look was enough for me to size him up: it had been a long time since I had thought about that. Leland spoke: “We are aware of your problems. It is inadmissible that things have gone this far. If you needed to kill that woman, fine, but you should have done it properly.” The blood had drained from my face: “Mein Herr…,” I managed to articulate in a strangled voice. “I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t me.” He contemplated me calmly: “Very well,” he said. “You should know that it’s all the same to us. If you did it, it was your right, your sovereign right. As old friends of your father, we completely understand it. But what you didn’t have a right to do was compromise yourself. That greatly reduces your usefulness to us.” I was going to protest again, but he cut me off with a gesture. “Let’s wait and see how things develop. We hope you’ll get hold of yourself.” I didn’t say anything and he raised a finger. The maître d’hôtel reappeared; Leland whispered a few words to him and got up. I got up too. “See you soon,” he said in his monotone voice. “If you need something, get in touch with us.” He left without shaking my hand, followed by the maître d’hôtel. I hadn’t touched my tea. I went to the bar and ordered a Cognac, which I drained in one swallow. A pleasant, drawling, strongly accented voice spoke next to me: “It’s a little early in the day to drink like that. You want another one?” It was the young man with the bow tie. I accepted; he ordered two and introduced himself: Mihaï I., third secretary in the Romanian legation. “How are things going, at the SS?” he asked after clinking glasses. “At the SS? All right. And the diplomatic corps?” He shrugged: “Glum. Now there are only”—he made a wide gesture at the room—“the last of the Mohicans left. We can’t really organize cocktail parties, because of the restrictions, so we meet each other here at least once a day. Anyway I don’t even have a government to represent anymore.” Romania, after having declared war on Germany at the end of August, had just capitulated to the Soviets. “That’s true. What does your legation represent, then?”—“In principle, Horia Sima. But that’s a fiction, Herr Sima can represent himself very well on his own. Whatever the case”—he pointed again at several people—“we’re all pretty much in the same bag. Especially my French and Bulgarian colleagues. The Finns have almost all gone. The Swiss and the Swedes are the only
real diplomats left.” He looked at me, smiling: “Come have dinner with us, I’ll introduce you to some other ghosts of my friends.”