In my relations, as I may have said, I always took care to avoid intellectuals or men of my social class: they always wanted to talk, and had an annoying tendency to fall in love. With Mihaï, I made an exception, but there weren’t too many risks; he was a cynic, frivolous and amoral. He had a little house west of Charlottenburg; I let him invite me over there the first night, after dinner, under the pretext of having a last drink, and I spent the night there. Beneath his eccentric mannerisms, he had the hard, taut body of an athlete, no doubt inherited from his peasant origins, brown, curly, luxuriant body hair, a rough, male odor. It greatly amused him to have seduced an SS officer: “The Wehrmacht or the Auswärtiges Amt, they’re too easy.” I saw him again from time to time. Sometimes I went to see him after dining with Helene; I used him brutally, as if to wash her silent desires out of my head, or my own ambiguity.
In October, just after my birthday, I was sent back to Hungary. Horthy had been overthrown by a coup organized by von dem Bach-Zelewski and Skorzeny; now Szálasi’s Arrow Cross Party was in power. Kammler was clamoring for labor for his underground factories and his V-2s, the first models of which had just been launched in September. Soviet troops were already penetrating Hungary, from the south, as well as the Reich’s own territory, in eastern Prussia. In Budapest, the SEk had been dissolved in September, but Wisliceny was still there and Eichmann quickly made another appearance. Once more, it was a disaster. The Hungarians agreed to give us fifty thousand Jews from Budapest (in November, Szálasi was already insisting on the fact that they were only “on loan”), but they had to be conveyed to Vienna, for Kammler and for the construction of an Ostwall, and there was no more transport available: Eichmann, probably with Veesenmayer’s agreement, decided to send them there on foot. The story is well known: many died on the road, and the officer in charge of reception, Obersturmbannführer Höse, refused most of the ones who arrived, for once again he could not employ women for excavation work. I could do absolutely nothing, no one listened to my suggestions, not Eichmann, not Winkelmann, not Veesenmayer, not the Hungarians. When Obergruppenführer Jüttner, the head of the SS-FHA, arrived in Budapest with Becher, I tried to intercede with him; Jüttner had passed the marchers, who were falling like flies in the mud, the rain, and the snow; this spectacle had scandalized him and he did in fact go and protest to Winkelmann; but Winkelmann sent him to Eichmann, over whom he had no control, and Eichmann bluntly refused to see Jüttner—he sent one of his subordinates, who haughtily brushed aside the complaints. Eichmann, obviously, was so full of himself that he no longer listened to anyone, except maybe Müller and Kaltenbrunner, and Kaltenbrunner no longer seemed to listen even to the Reichsführer anymore. I spoke about it with Becher, who was to see Himmler; I asked him to intervene, and he promised to do what he could. As for Szálasi, he soon took fright: the Russians were advancing; in mid-November he put an end to the marches, they hadn’t even sent thirty thousand, one more senseless waste, on top of the others. No one seemed to know what he was doing anymore, or rather everyone did just as he pleased, alone and separately; it was becoming impossible to work in such conditions. I made one final attempt to approach Speer, who had taken over complete control of the Arbeitseinsatz in October, including the use of the WVHA inmates; he finally agreed to see me, but he rushed through the interview, in which he hadn’t the slightest interest. It’s true that I didn’t have anything concrete to offer him. As for the Reichsführer, I no longer understood his position at all. At the end of October, he gave Auschwitz the order to stop gassing the Jews, and at the end of November, declaring the Jewish question resolved, he ordered the destruction of the camp’s extermination installations; at the same time, at the RSHA and at the Persönlicher Stab, they were actively discussing the creation of a new extermination camp in Alteist-Hartel, near Mauthausen. It was also said that the Reichsführer was conducting negotiations with the Jews, in Switzerland and Sweden; Becher seemed to know all about it, but eluded my questions when I asked him for clarification. I also learned that he finally got the Reichsführer to agree to summon Eichmann (that was later on, in December); but I didn’t find out what was said on that occasion until seventeen years later, during the good Obersturmbannführer’s trial in Jerusalem: Becher, having become a businessman and a millionaire in Bremen, stated in his deposition that the meeting had taken place in the Reichsführer’s special train, in the Black Forest, near Triberg, and that the Reichsführer had spoken to Eichmann with both kindness and anger. One sentence in particular, that the Reichsführer, according to Becher, supposedly threw at his stubborn subordinate has often been quoted since in books: “Though you have been exterminating Jews up to now, from now on, if I give you the order, as I do now, you will be a nursemaid to the Jews. I should remind you that in 1933 it was I who set up the RSHA, and not Gruppenführer Müller or you. If you cannot obey me, tell me so!” This could be true. But Becher’s testimony should certainly be treated with caution; he takes credit himself, for example, thanks to his influence over Himmler, for the cessation of the forced marches from Budapest—whereas the order actually came from the panicking Hungarians—and also, an even more outrageous claim, the initiative for the order to interrupt the Endlösung: yet if anyone could have slipped that idea to the Reichsführer, it was certainly not that clever wheeler-dealer (Schellenberg, maybe).
My legal case continued its course; Judge von Rabingen regularly summoned me to clear up one point or another. From time to time I saw Mihaï; as for Helene, she seemed to be growing increasingly transparent, not from fear, but from pent-up emotion. When, back from Hungary, I told her about the atrocities of Nyíregyháza (the Third Armored Corps had retaken the city from the Russians at the end of October, and had found women of all ages raped, parents nailed alive to doors in front of their mutilated children; and these had been Hungarians, not Germans), she looked at me for a long time, then said gently: “And in Russia, was it very different?” I didn’t say anything. I looked at the extraordinarily thin wrists her sleeves revealed; I could easily have looped my thumb and index finger around them. “I know their revenge will be terrible,” she said then. “But we’ll have deserved it.” In the beginning of November, my apartment, miraculously preserved till then, disappeared in a bombing: a bomb came through the roof and took the top two floors with it; poor Herr Zempke succumbed to a heart attack as he left the half-collapsed cellar. Fortunately, I had gotten into the habit of keeping some of my clothes and my underwear at the office. Mihaï suggested I move to his apartment; I preferred to go to Wannsee, to Thomas’s place, where he had moved after his Dahlem house burned down in May. He led a wild life there, there were always a few fire-brands from the Amt VI around, one or two of Thomas’s colleagues, Schellenberg, and of course girls. Schellenberg often talked in private with Thomas but obviously mistrusted me. One day I came home a little early and heard an animated discussion in the living room, loud voices, Schellenberg’s mocking, insistent intonation: “If that Bernadotte agrees…” He interrupted himself as soon as he saw me on the doorstep and greeted me in a pleasant tone: “Aue, nice to see you.” But he didn’t continue his conversation with Thomas. When I wearied of my friend’s parties, I sometimes let myself be taken around by Mihaï. He often attended the daily farewell parties of Dr. Kosak, the Croatian ambassador, which took place either at the legation or in his villa in Dahlem; the upper crust of the diplomatic corps and the Auswärtiges Amt went there to stuff themselves, get drunk, and meet the prettiest UFA starlets, Maria Milde, Ilse Werner, Marikka Rökk. Around midnight, a choir sang traditional Dalmatian songs; after the usual Mosquito raid, the artillerymen from the Croatian flak battery stationed next door came to drink and play jazz till dawn; among them was an officer who had escaped from Stalingrad, but I took care not to tell him I had been there too, he would never have left me alone. These bacchanales sometimes degenerated into orgies, couples intertwined in the alcoves of the legation and frustrated idiots went out to empty their pistols in the garden: one night, dru
nk, I made love with Mihaï in the bedroom of the ambassador, who was snoring downstairs on a sofa; then, overexcited, Mihaï came back up with a little actress and took her in front of me as I finished a bottle of slivovitz and meditated on the servitudes of the flesh. This vain, frenetic gaiety couldn’t last. At the end of December, as the Russians were attacking Budapest and our last offensive was getting bogged down in the Ardennes, the Reichsführer sent me to inspect the evacuation of Auschwitz.
In the summer, the hurried, belated evacuation of KL Lublin had caused us a lot of concern: the Soviets had taken the installations intact, with the warehouses full, grist for the mill of their atrocity propaganda. Since the end of August, their forces had been camping on the Vistula, but it was obvious they wouldn’t linger there. Measures had to be taken. The evacuation of the camps and the subcamps of the Auschwitz complex, should the need arise, fell under the responsibility of Obergruppenführer Ernst Schmauser, the HSSPF for Military District VIII, which included Upper Silesia; the operations, Brandt explained to me, would be conducted by the camp personnel. My task would be to ensure that priority was given to the evacuation of the utilizable workforce, in good condition, to be put back to use within the Reich. After my Hungarian tribulations, I was on my guard: “What will my authority be?” I asked Brandt. “Can I give the necessary orders?” He eluded the question: “Obergruppenführer Schmauser has full authority. If you see that the camp personnel aren’t cooperating in the right spirit, refer to him and he’ll give the necessary orders.”—“What if I have problems with the Obergruppenführer?”—“You won’t have any problems with the Obergruppenführer. He’s an excellent National Socialist. Anyway, you’ll be in contact with the Reichsführer or me.” I knew from experience that this was a feeble guarantee. But I had no choice.
The possibility of an enemy advance threatening a concentration camp had been raised by the Reichsführer on June 17, 1944, in a directive titled Fall-A, “Plan A,” which granted the HSSPF of the region, in case of crisis, extensive powers over camp personnel. So if Schmauser understood the importance of preserving the maximum quantity of labor, things might just possibly unfold correctly. I went to see him at his HQ in Breslau. He was a man of the older generation, he must have been about fifty or fifty-five, severe, stiff, but professional. The evacuation plan for the camps, he explained, fell within the general framework of the ARLZ retreat strategy: Auflockerung-Raümung-Lähmung-Zerstörung (“Dismantling-Evacuation-Immobilization-Destruction”), formulated at the end of 1943 “and applied with so much success in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia, where the Bolsheviks not only found no housing or food, but couldn’t even, in certain districts like Novgorod, recover even a single potentially useful human being.” District VIII had promulgated the order to carry out ARLZ on September 19. With this in view, sixty-five thousand Häftlinge had already been evacuated to the Altreich, including all the Polish and Russian inmates, who were liable to present a danger in the rear in case of enemy approach. Sixty-seven thousand inmates remained, of whom thirty-five thousand were still working in the factories of Upper Silesia and neighboring regions. Already in October, Schmauser had entrusted the plans for the final evacuation as well as the last two phases of ARLZ to his liaison officer, Major der Polizei Boesenberg; I would see to the details with him, while keeping in mind that only Gauleiter Bracht, in his capacity as Reichskommissar for Defense of the Gau, could make the decision to implement the plans. “You understand,” Schmauser declared in conclusion, “we all know how important the preservation of the labor potential is. But for us, and for the Reichsführer too, questions of security are still top priority. Such an enemy human mass, within our lines, represents a formidable risk, even if they’re not armed. Sixty-seven thousand inmates is almost seven divisions: imagine seven enemy divisions roaming free behind our troops during an offensive! In October, as you may know, we had an uprising in Birkenau, among the Jews of the Sonderkommando. Fortunately it was brought under control, but we lost some men and one of the crematoriums was dynamited. Imagine that: if they had been able to link up with the Polish partisans constantly prowling around the camp, they could have caused incalculable damage, allowed thousands of inmates to escape! And since August, the Americans come to bomb the IG Farben factory, and each time, inmates take advantage of it to try to escape. For the final evacuation, if it takes place, we must do everything we can to prevent such a situation from occurring again. We’ll have to keep our eyes open.” I understood this point of view very well, but I was afraid of the practical consequences that might result from it. Boesenberg’s briefing didn’t do much to reassure me. On paper, his plan had been meticulously prepared, with precise maps for all the evacuation routes; but Boesenberg harshly criticized Sturmbannführer Bär, who had refused to participate in consultations about the development of this plan (a final administrative reorganization, at the end of November, had left the former baker as Kommandant of the recombined camps I and II, as well as Standortältester of the three camps and of all the Nebenlager); Bär had given as pretext that the HSSPF had no authority over the camp, which was technically true until Fall-A was declared, and he would only accept to report to Amtsgruppe D. A close, flexible cooperation of the authorities in charge, during an evacuation, didn’t look very likely. Furthermore—and this worried me even more after my experiences in October and November—Boesenberg’s plan anticipated an evacuation of the camps on foot, with the inmates having to walk between fifty-five and sixty-three kilometers before being put on trains in Gleiwitz and Loslau. This plan was logical: the war situation anticipated by the plan wouldn’t allow full use of the railroads close to the front; in any case the rolling stock was desperately scarce (in all of Germany, only some two hundred thousand cars were left, a loss of more than 70 percent of the railway equipment in two months). The evacuation of German civilians, who had priority, also had to be considered, along with foreign workers and war prisoners. On December 21, Gauleiter Bracht had promulgated a complete U-Plan/Treckplan for the province, incorporating into it Boesenberg’s plan, according to which the inmates of the KL, for security reasons, would have priority for crossing the Oder, the main bottleneck on the evacuation routes. Once again, on paper it looked fine, but I knew what could result from a forced march in the middle of winter, without any preparation; what’s more, the Jews of Budapest had left in good health, whereas here we would have exhausted, weakened, undernourished, and poorly dressed Häftlinge, in a panic situation that, even if it were well planned, could easily degenerate into a rout. I questioned Boesenberg at length on the key points: he assured me that before departure, warm clothing and additional blankets would be distributed, and that stores of provisions would be prepositioned on the routes. One couldn’t do any better, he asserted. I had to agree he was probably right.
The Kindly Ones Page 99
