The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  At Auschwitz, at the Kommandantur, I met Sturmbannführer Kraus, a liaison officer sent by Schmauser with an SD Sonderkommando, and set up in the camp as the head of a “Liaison and Transition Office.” This Kraus, a pleasant, competent young officer, whose neck and left ear bore traces of severe burns, explained to me that he was mainly responsible for the “Immobilization” and “Destruction” phases: he especially had to ensure that the extermination installations and the warehouses didn’t fall intact into the hands of the Russians. The responsibility for the implementation of the evacuation order, when it was given, fell to Bär. Bär received me somewhat unpleasantly; obviously to him I was yet another bureaucrat from the outside who was coming to hinder his work. He struck me with his piercing, anxious eyes, a fleshy nose, a thin but curiously sensual mouth; his thick, wavy hair was carefully combed back with brilliantine, like a Berlin dandy’s. I thought him astonishingly dull and narrow-minded, even more than Höss who at least kept the flair of a former Freikorps soldier. Taking advantage of my rank, I reprimanded him severely for his lack of open cooperation with the services of the HSSPF. He retorted with an ill-concealed arrogance that Pohl fully supported his position. “When Fall-A is declared, I will obey the orders of Obergruppenführer Schmauser. Until then, I report to Oranienberg alone. You have no authority to give me orders.”—“When Fall-A is declared,” I replied angrily, “it will be too late to make up for your incompetence. I warn you that in my report to the Reichsführer I will hold you personally responsible for all excessive losses.” My threats seemed to have no effect on him; he listened to me in silence, with barely hidden contempt.

  Bär assigned me an office in the Kommandantur in Birkenau, and I had Obersturmführer Elias and one of my new subordinates, Untersturmführer Darius, come from Oranienburg. I took my quarters at the Haus der Waffen-SS; they gave me the same room as during my first visit, a year and a half before. The weather was horrible—cold, damp, fickle. The whole region lay beneath snow, a thick layer of it, often dusted with the soot from the mines and factory chimneys, a dirty gray lace. In the camp it was almost black, packed down by the footsteps of thousands of inmates, and mixed with mud frozen by frost. Violent snow squalls came down without warning from the Beskids and for twenty minutes or so smothered the camp under a white, swirling veil, before disappearing with the same swiftness, leaving everything immaculate for a few moments. In Birkenau only one chimney was still smoking, in fits and starts, the Krema IV, which was being kept active to dispose of the inmates who died in the camp; Krema III was in ruins since the October uprising, and the other two, following Himmler’s instructions, were partially dismantled. The new construction zone had been abandoned and most of the barracks removed, and the vast, empty terrain left to the snow; the problems of overpopulation had been solved by the preliminary evacuations. When the clouds lifted on rare occasions, the blue-tinted line of the Beskids appeared behind the geometric rows of the barracks: and the camp, beneath the snow, seemed as if peaceful and tranquil. I went almost every day to inspect the different satellite camps, Günthergrube, Fürstergrube, Tschechowitz, Neu Dachs, the little camps of Gleiwitz, to check the state of the preparations. The long, flat roads were almost deserted, scarcely disturbed by Wehrmacht trucks; I would come home at night under a dark sky, a heavy, gray mass; beyond it, snow fell sometimes like a sheet on the distant villages, and beyond that a delicate sky, blue and pale yellow, with just a few clouds of muted purple, rimmed by the light of the setting sun, colored the snow and the ice of the marshes that soak the Polish earth. The night of December 31, the Haus organized a quiet celebration for the officers passing through and some camp officers: people sang melancholy carols, the men drank slowly and spoke in low voices; everyone understood it was the last New Year’s Eve of the war, and that it wasn’t very likely the Reich would survive till the next one. I found Dr. Wirths there, profoundly depressed, he had sent his family back to Germany; and I met Untersturmführer Schurz, the new head of the Politische Abteilung, who treated me with much more deference than his Kommandant. I talked for a long time with Kraus; he had served several years in Russia, until he was seriously wounded in Kursk, where he had just barely managed to drag himself out of his burning tank; after his convalescence, he had been assigned to the Southeast SS District, in Breslau, and he had ended up on Schmauser’s staff. This officer, who bore the same first names, Franz Xaver, as another Kraus, a well-known Catholic theologian from the previous century, gave me the impression of being a serious man, open to others’ opinions, but fanatically determined to see his mission through; although he said he understood my aims, he maintained that no inmate should, naturally, fall alive into the hands of the Russians, and thought that these two constraints were not incompatible. He was probably right in principle, but for my part I was worried—rightly so, as we will see—that overly severe orders would rouse the brutality of the camp guards, made up in this sixth year of the war from the dregs of the SS, men too old or too sick to serve at the front, Volksdeutschen who barely spoke German, veterans suffering from psychiatric disorders but deemed fit for service, alcoholics, drug addicts, degenerates clever enough to have avoided the punitive battalion or the firing squad. Many officers were hardly any better than their men: with the enormous expansion, this last year, of the system of KLs, the WVHA had been forced to recruit just about anyone, to promote notoriously incompetent subalterns, to reappoint officers who had been cashiered for serious offenses, or to appoint people no one else wanted. Hauptsturmführer Drescher, an officer I also met that night, confirmed me in my pessimistic outlook. Drescher directed the branch of the Morgen commission still operating in the camp, and had seen me once with his superior in Lublin; that night, in an alcove set a little back from the restaurant dining room, he opened up to me quite frankly about the investigations under way. The case against Höss, which was nearly wrapped up in October, had suddenly collapsed in November, despite the testimony of a female inmate, an Austrian prostitute Höss had seduced and then tried to kill by locking her up in a disciplinary cell of the PA. After his transfer to Oranienburg at the end of 1943, Höss had left his family in the Kommandant’s house, forcing his successive replacements to take quarters elsewhere; he had only finally moved them the previous month, probably because of the Russian threat, and it was common knowledge, in the camp, that Frau Höss had required four whole trucks to carry their belongings. Drescher was appalled, but Morgen had come up against Höss’s protectors. The investigations were continuing, but concerned only small fry. Wirths had joined us, and Drescher went on talking without being bothered by the doctor’s presence; obviously, he wasn’t telling him anything new. Wirths was worried about the evacuation: despite Boesenberg’s plan, no measures had been taken in the Stammlager or in Birkenau to prepare rations or warm clothing for the journey. I too was worried.

  Yet the Russians still weren’t moving. In the West, our forces were still struggling to break through (the Americans were clinging to Bastogne), and we also had gone over to the offensive in Budapest, which gave us a little hope again. But the famous V-2 rockets had turned out, if you knew how to read between the lines, to be ineffective, our secondary offensive in Northern Alsace had immediately been contained, and it was obvious that it was just a question of time now. At the beginning of January, I gave Piontek a day off so he could evacuate his family from Tarnowitz, at least as far as Breslau; I didn’t want him worrying himself sick about them when the time came. Snow fell steadily, and when the sky did clear, the heavy, dirty smoke from the foundries dominated the Silesian landscape, bearing witness to a production of tanks, cannons, and munitions that would continue till the last minute. A dozen days went by like this in anxious tranquility, punctuated by bureaucratic quarrels. I finally managed to persuade Bär to prepare special rations, to be distributed to the inmates at the time of departure; as for warm clothing, he told me they would take them from the Kanada, whose warehouses, for lack of transport, were still full. A good piece of news bri
efly came to lighten this tension. One night, at the Haus, Drescher presented himself at my table with two glasses of Cognac, smiling into his goatee: “Congratulations, Obersturmbannführer,” he declared, handing me a glass and raising the other.—“That’s fine with me, but why?”—“I spoke to Sturmbannführer Morgen today. He asked me to tell you that your affair is closed.” That Drescher knew about it scarcely bothered me, I was so relieved by the news. Drescher went on: “In the absence of any material evidence, Judge von Rabingen decided to dismiss the case against you. Von Rabingen told the Sturmbannführer that he’d never seen such a shoddy case with so little to back it up, and that the Kripo had done an abominable job. He was close to thinking it all stemmed from some plot against you.” I breathed in: “That’s what I always said. Fortunately, the Reichsführer kept his confidence in me. If what you say is true, then my honor is cleared.”—“That’s right,” said Drescher, nodding. “Sturmbannführer Morgen even told me that Judge von Rabingen was thinking of taking disciplinary measures against the inspectors who were working against you.”—“I’d be delighted.” The news was confirmed to me three days later by a letter from Brandt, which included a copy of a letter to the Reichsführer in which von Rabingen stated he was fully convinced of my innocence. Neither of the two letters mentioned Clemens or Weser, but that was enough for me.

  Finally, after this brief respite, the Soviets launched the long-dreaded offensive from their bridgeheads over the Vistula. Our meager covering forces were swept aside. The Russians, during their pause, had accumulated incredible firepower; their T-34s rushed in columns across the Polish plains, smashing our divisions, imitating our 1941 tactics with brio; in many places, our troops were surprised by enemy tanks when they thought the lines were a hundred kilometers away. On January 17, Generalgouverneur Frank and his administration evacuated Cracow, and our last units withdrew from the ruins of Warsaw. The first Soviet tanks were already penetrating Silesia when Schmauser launched Fall-A. For my part, I had done everything I thought possible: stored cans of gasoline, sandwiches, and rum in our two vehicles, and destroyed all the copies of my reports. On the night of the seventeenth, I was summoned by Bär along with all the other officers; he announced that according to Schmauser’s instructions, all fit inmates would be evacuated, by foot, starting the following morning: the roll call under way that night would be the last one. The evacuations would take place according to the plan. Each column commander was to make sure no inmate escaped or stayed behind on the road; any attempt would be pitilessly punished; Bär urged them, though, to avoid shooting inmates as they passed through villages, so as not to shock the populace. One of the column commanders, an Obersturmführer, spoke: “Sturmbannführer, isn’t that order too severe? If a Häftling tries to escape, it’s normal to shoot him. But what if he’s simply too weak to walk?”—“All the Häftlinge who are leaving are classified as fit for work and must be able to do fifty kilometers without any problems,” Bär retorted. “The sick and the unfit will remain in the camps. If there are sick prisoners in the columns, they must be eliminated. These orders must be applied.”

  That night, the camp SS men slept little. From the Haus, near the train station, I watched pass by the long columns of German civilians fleeing the Russians; after crossing the city and the bridge over the Sola, they poured into the station, or else laboriously continued westward on foot. SS men were guarding a special train reserved for the families of the camp personnel; it was already packed, husbands were trying to heap bundles in next to their wives and children. After dinner, I went to inspect the Stammlager and Birkenau. I visited some of the barracks: the inmates were trying to sleep, the kapos told me that no additional clothes had been handed out, but I still hoped it would happen the next day, before they left. In the lanes, piles of documents were burning: the incinerators were overflowing. In Birkenau, I noticed a big commotion near the Kanada: under the glare of spotlights, inmates were loading all sorts of merchandise onto trucks; an Untersturmführer supervising the operation assured me they were being directed toward the KL Gross-Rosen. But I could see that the SS guards were also helping themselves, sometimes openly. Everyone was shouting, running about frantically, uselessly, and I felt that panic was overtaking these men, that all sense of moderation and discipline was escaping them. As always, they had waited till the last minute to do everything, for acting earlier would have been showing defeatism; now, the Russians were upon us, the Auschwitz guards remembered the fate of the SS captured in the Lublin camp, they were losing all notion of priorities and sought only one thing, to escape. Depressed, I went to see Drescher in his office at the Stammlager. He too was burning his documents. “Have you seen how they’re looting?” he said to me, laughing into his goatee. From a drawer, he took out a bottle of expensive Armagnac: “What do you think of this? An Untersturmführer I’ve been investigating for four months but haven’t managed to nab offered this to me as a goodbye present, the bastard. He stole it, of course. Will you have a drink with me?” He poured two measures into water glasses: “Sorry, I don’t have anything better.” He raised his glass and I imitated him. “Go on,” he said, “make a toast.” But nothing came to mind. He shrugged: “Me neither. Let’s drink, then.” The Armagnac was exquisite, a light, sweet, burned sensation. “Where are you going?” I asked him.—“To Oranienburg, to make my report. I have enough already to prosecute eleven more men. Afterward, they can send me wherever they like.” As I was getting ready to leave, he handed me the bottle: “Here, keep it. You’ll need it more than I.” I put it into my coat pocket, shook his hand, and left. I went to the HKB, where Wirths was supervising the evacuation of the medical material. I spoke to him about the problem of warm clothes. “The warehouses are full,” he assured me. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to have blankets, boots, coats distributed.” But Bär, whom I found around 2:00 a.m. at the Kommandantur in Birkenau in the process of planning the order of departure for the columns, didn’t seem to be of that opinion. “The goods stored are the property of the Reich. I have no orders to distribute them to the inmates. They’ll be evacuated by truck or by train, when possible.” Outside, it must have been ten degrees below zero, the lanes were frozen over, slippery. “Dressed like that, your inmates won’t survive. Many of them are almost barefoot.”—“The ones who are fit will survive,” he asserted. “The others, we don’t need.” More and more furious, I went down to the communications center and got in contact with Breslau; but Schmauser wasn’t reachable, nor was Boesenberg. An operator showed me a telegram from the Wehrmacht: Tschenstochau had just fallen, the Russian troops were at the gates of Cracow. “It’s getting hot,” he said laconically. I thought of sending a telex to the Reichsführer, but that wouldn’t do any good; better to find Schmauser the next day, with the hope he’d have more common sense than that fool Bär. Suddenly tired, I went back to the Haus to go to bed. The columns of civilians, mixed with soldiers from the Wehrmacht, were still flowing in, exhausted peasants all bundled up, their things piled up on a cart with their children, pushing their livestock in front of them.