The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  Trains had been leaving Gleiwitz every day since January 19, taking inmates as they arrived from the closest camps. The first trains, I knew, had been sent to Gross-Rosen, where Bär had gone to prepare for reception, but Gross-Rosen, soon overwhelmed, had refused to take any more; the convoys were now passing through the Protektorat, then shunted either to Vienna (for the KL Mauthausen) or to Prague to then be scattered among the KLs of the Altreich. They were loading another train when I arrived at the Gleiwitz station. To my great horror, I saw that all the cars were open, already full of snow and ice before the exhausted inmates were driven into them with rifle butts; inside, no water, no provisions, no sanitary bucket. I questioned the inmates: they came from Neu Dachs and hadn’t received anything since their departure from the camp; some hadn’t eaten in four days. Alarmed, I looked at these skeletal phantoms, wrapped in soaking, frozen blankets, standing up, squeezed against each other in the car full of snow. I shouted at one of the guards: “Who’s in charge here?” He shrugged angrily: “I don’t know, Obersturmbannführer. We were just told to load them in.” I went into the main building and asked for the station chief, a tall, thin man with a toothbrush moustache and a teacher’s round glasses: “Who is responsible for these trains?” He pointed at my stripes with his red flag, which he was holding rolled up in one hand: “It isn’t you, Herr Offizier? In any case, I think it’s the SS”—“Who, exactly? Who’s organizing the convoys? Who’s allocating the cars?”—“In principle,” he replied, slipping his flag under his arm, “for the cars, it’s the Kattowitz Reichsbahndirektion. But for these Sonderzüge, they sent an Amtsrat down here.” He led me out of the station and pointed to a barracks a little lower down, alongside the tracks. “He set himself up in there.” I went over and entered without knocking. A man in civilian clothes, fat, poorly shaved, was sprawled behind a desk covered with papers. Two railroad men were warming themselves by a stove. “Are you the Amtsrat from Kattowitz?” I barked. He raised his head: “That’s me, the Amtsrat from Kattowitz. Kehrling, at your service.” An unbearable reek of schnapps emanated from his mouth. I pointed at the tracks: “Are you the one responsible for this Schweinerei?”—“Which Schweinerei are you talking about, precisely? Because at the moment there are quite a few.” I controlled myself: “The trains, the open cars for the Häftlinge from the KLs.”—“Ah, that Schweinerei. No, that’s your colleagues. I coordinate the assembling of the trains, that’s all.”—“So you’re the one who allocates the cars.” He leafed through his papers. “I’ll explain to you. Have a seat, old man. Here. These Sonderzüge are allocated by the Generalbetriebsleitung Ost, in Berlin. We have to find the cars on-site, among the available rolling stock. Now, you may have noticed”—he waved his hand at the outside—“that it’s something of a mess these days. The open cars are the only ones left. The Gauleiter requisitioned all the closed cars for the evacuation of civilians or for the Wehrmacht. If you don’t like it, just have them covered.” I had remained standing during his explanation: “And where am I supposed to find tarpaulins?”—“Not my problem.”—“You could at least have the cars cleaned out!” He sighed: “Listen, old man, at the moment, I have to organize twenty, twenty-five special trains per day. My men scarcely have the time to couple the cars together.”—“And the supplies?”—“Not my job. But if you’re interested in that, there’s an Obersturmführer somewhere who’s supposed to take care of all that.” I went out, slamming the door. Near the trains, I found an Oberwachtmeister from the Schupo: “Ah, yes, I saw an Obersturmführer who was giving orders. He’s probably at the SP.” In the offices, I was told there was in fact an Obersturmführer from Auschwitz who was coordinating the evacuation of inmates, but that he had gone out to eat. I sent for him. When he arrived, scowling, I showed him Schmauser’s orders and began assailing him with reprimands about the state of the convoys. He listened to me, standing at attention, red as a poppy; when I had finished, he answered, stammering: “Obersturmbannführer, Obersturmbannführer, it’s not my fault. I have nothing, no provisions at all. The Reichsbahn refuses to give me closed cars, there are no supplies, nothing. I keep getting phone calls asking me why the trains aren’t leaving faster. I’m doing what I can.”—“You mean that in all of Gleiwitz there’s no food stock you can requisition? Tarps? Shovels to clean out the cars? These Häftlinge are a resource of the Reich, Obersturmführer! Aren’t SS officers taught to show initiative anymore?”—“Obersturmbannführer, I don’t know. I can find out.” I raised my eyebrows: “Then go find out. I want suitable convoys for tomorrow. Understood?”—“Zu Befehl, Obersturmbannführer.” He saluted me and went out. I sat down and had some tea brought to me by an orderly. As I was blowing on it, a Spiess came to find me: “Excuse me, Obersturmbannführer. Are you from the Reichsführer’s staff?”—“Yes.”—“There are two gentlemen from the Kripo who are looking for an Obersturmbannführer from the Persönlicher Stab. That must be you?” I followed him and he showed me into an office: Clemens was resting both his elbows on a table; Weser was perched on a chair, hands in his pockets, leaning back against the wall. I smiled and leaned on the doorframe, my cup of tea still steaming in my hand. “Look at this,” I said, “old friends. What fair wind brings you here?” Clemens aimed a thick finger at me: “You, Aue. We’re looking for you.” Still smiling, I tapped my epaulettes: “Are you forgetting I have a rank, Kriminalkommissar?”—“We couldn’t care less about your rank,” Clemens muttered. “You don’t deserve it.” Weser spoke for the first time: “You must have said to yourself, when you got Judge von Rabingen’s decision: That’s it, it’s over, right?”—“Indeed, I took it that way. If I’m not mistaken, your case was deemed extremely open to criticism.” Clemens shrugged: “No one knows what judges want. But that doesn’t mean they’re right.”—“Unfortunately for you,” I said pleasantly, “you’re in the service of the law.”—“Precisely,” Clemens grunted, “we serve the law. We sure are the only ones.”—“And you came all the way here just to tell me that? I’m flattered.”—“Not entirely,” said Weser, bringing his chair back to the ground. “You see, we had an idea.”—“That’s novel,” I said, bringing the teacup to my lips.—“I’m going to tell you about it, Aue. Your sister told us she had gone to Berlin, not long before the murder, and that she had seen you. That she had stayed at the Kaiserhof. So we went to the Kaiserhof. They know Freiherr von Üxküll very well at the Kaiserhof, he’s an old customer who has his habits. At the front desk, one of the employees remembered that a few days after his departure, an SS officer had come by to send a telegram to Frau von Üxküll. And you see, when you send a telegram from a hotel, it’s noted down in a register. There’s a number for every telegram. And at the post office, they keep a copy of telegrams. Three years, that’s the law.” He pulled a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his coat and unfolded it. “You recognize this, Aue?” I was still smiling. “The investigation is closed, meine Herren.”—“You lied to us, Aue!” Clemens thundered.—“Yes, it’s not good to lie to the police,” Weser said. I calmly finished my tea, motioned politely to them with my head, wished them a good afternoon, and closed the door on them.

  Outside, it was snowing again, harder than ever. I returned to the station. A mass of inmates was waiting in an empty lot, sitting in the snow and the mud under the gusts of wind. I tried to have them come into the station, but the waiting rooms were occupied by soldiers from the Wehrmacht. I slept with Piontek in the car, overcome with fatigue. The next morning, the lot was deserted, aside from a few dozen snow-covered corpses. I tried to find the Obersturmführer from the day before, to see if he was following my instructions, but the immense futility of it all oppressed me and paralyzed my movements. At noon, I had made my decision. I ordered Piontek to find some gas, then, through the SP, I contacted Elias and Darius. By early afternoon I was on my way to Berlin.

  The fighting forced us to make a considerable detour, via Ostrau and then through Prague and Dresden. Piontek and I took turns driving; it took us two days. D
ozens of kilometers before Berlin, we had to clear a way for ourselves through floods of refugees from the East, whom Goebbels was forcing to skirt round the city. In the center, all that was left of the annex of the Ministry of the Interior where my office had been was a gutted shell. It was raining, a cold, evil rain that soaked into the patches of snow still clinging to the rubble. The streets were dirty and muddy. I finally found Grothmann, who told me that Brandt was at Deutsch Krone, in Pomerania, with the Reichsführer. I then went to Oranienburg, where my office was still functioning, as if detached from the rest of the world. Asbach explained to me that Fräulein Praxa had been wounded during a bombing, with burns to her arm and breast, and that he had had her evacuated to a hospital in Franconia. Elias and Darius had retreated to Breslau during the fall of Kattowitz and were awaiting instructions: I ordered them to return. I started going through my mail, which no one had touched since Fräulein Praxa’s accident. Among the official letters was a private letter: I recognized Helene’s writing. Dear Max, she wrote, my house was bombed and I have to leave Berlin. I am in despair, I don’t know where you are, your colleagues won’t tell me anything. I’m leaving to join my parents in Baden. Write to me. If you want, I’ll come back to Berlin. All is not lost. Yours, Helene. It was almost a declaration, but I didn’t understand what she meant by All is not lost. I quickly wrote to her at the address indicated to tell her I’d returned, but that it was better for now that she stay in Baden.

  I devoted two days to writing a very critical report on the evacuation. I also spoke about it in person to Pohl, who swept aside my arguments: “Anyway,” he declared, “we have no more room to put them, all the camps are full.” In Berlin, I had run into Thomas; Schellenberg had left, he had stopped throwing parties and seemed in a glum mood. According to him, the Reichsführer’s performance as commander of an Army Group was turning out rather pathetic; he wasn’t far from thinking that Himmler’s appointment was a maneuver of Bormann’s to discredit him. But these imbecilic games of the thirteenth hour no longer interested me. I was feeling sick again, my vomiting had resumed, I got nauseated as I sat at my typewriter. When I found out that Morgen was also in Oranienburg, I went to see him and told him about the incomprehensible stubbornness of the two Kripo agents. “It’s true,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s odd. They seem to have something against you personally. But I saw the file, there’s nothing substantial in it. If it had been one of those shiftless types, a man without any education, you could imagine anything, but I know you, it seems ridiculous to me.”—“Maybe it’s some form of class resentment,” I suggested. “They want to bring me down at any cost, it seems.”—“Yes, that’s possible. You’re a cultivated man, there are a lot of prejudices against intellectuals among the dregs of the Party. Listen, I’ll mention it to von Rabingen. I’ll ask him to send them an official reprimand. They shouldn’t be pursuing an investigation against a judge’s decision.”

  Around noon, a speech of the Führer’s was broadcast on the occasion of the twelfth (and, as it turned out, last) anniversary of the Seizure of Power. I listened without paying it much heed in the mess hall in Oranienburg, I don’t even remember what he said, he must still have been talking about the Asiatic flood of Bolshevism or something of the sort; what struck me above all was the reaction of the SS officers present: only some of them stood up to raise their arms when the national anthem was played at the end, a nonchalance that, a few months before, would have been deemed inadmissible, unpardonable. The same day, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm-Gustloff off the coast of Danzig, the jewel of Ley’s “Kraft durch Freude” fleet, which was transporting more than ten thousand evacuees, half of them children. There were almost no survivors. In the time it took me to return to Berlin the next day, the Russians had reached the Oder and had crossed it almost casually to occupy a wide bridgehead between Küstrin and Frankfurt. I was vomiting up almost every meal, I was afraid the fever might return.

  At the beginning of February, the Americans reappeared in full daylight above Berlin. Despite the prohibitions, the city was full of sour, aggressive refugees, who settled into the ruins and looted warehouses and stores without any interference from the police. I was passing by the Staatspolizei, it must have been around 11:00 a.m.; with the few officers who were still working there, I was directed to the antiaircraft shelter built in the garden, at the edge of the devastated park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, itself an empty, roofless shell. This shelter, which wasn’t even underground, was basically a long cement hallway; it didn’t seem very reassuring to me, but I didn’t have a choice. Along with the officers from the Gestapo, they brought in some prisoners, scruffy men with chains on their feet, who must have been pulled out of the neighboring cells: I recognized some of them, July conspirators, whose photograph I had seen in the papers or on the news. The raid was incredibly violent; the squat bunker, whose walls were more than a meter thick, swayed from side to side like a linden tree in the wind. I felt as if I were in the heart of a hurricane, a storm not of the elements but of pure, wild noise, all the noise in the world unleashed. The pressure from the explosions pressed painfully on my eardrums, I couldn’t hear anything anymore; it hurt so much I was afraid they’d burst. I wanted to be swept away, crushed, I couldn’t bear it anymore. The prisoners, who had been forbidden to sit down, were lying on the ground, most of them rolled up in a ball. Then I was lifted from my seat as if by a giant hand and hurled in the air. When I opened my eyes, several faces were floating above me. They seemed to be shouting, I didn’t understand what they wanted. I shook my head but felt hands holding it firmly and forcing me to keep still. After the alert, they took me out. Thomas was supporting me. The sky, at high noon, was black with smoke; flames were licking the windows of the Staatspolizei building; in the park, trees were burning like torches, an entire section of the rear façade of the palace had collapsed. Thomas had me sit down on the remains of a pulverized bench. I touched my face: blood was flowing down my cheek. My ears were ringing, but I could distinguish sounds. Thomas turned to me: “Can you hear me?” I signaled that I could; despite the horrible pain in my ears, I understood what he was saying. “Don’t move. You took a bad crack.” A little later they loaded me into an Opel. On the Askanischer Platz, cars and twisted trucks were burning, the Anhalter Bahnhof seemed to have crumpled in on itself and was disgorging a black, acrid smoke, the Europa Haus and the buildings around it were also burning. Soldiers and auxiliaries, their faces black with soot, were vainly fighting the fires. I was driven to the Kurfürstenstrasse, to Eichmann’s offices, which were still standing. There I was laid down on a table, among other wounded. A Hauptsturmführer arrived, the doctor whom I knew but whose name I had again forgotten: “You again,” he said amiably. Thomas told him that my head had hit the wall of the bunker and that I had lost consciousness for about twenty minutes. The doctor had me stick out my tongue and then aimed a dazzling light into my eyes. “You have a concussion,” he said. He turned to Thomas: “Have him get an X-ray of his skull. If there’s no fracture, three weeks’ rest.” He scribbled a note on a piece of paper, gave it to Thomas, and disappeared. Thomas said to me: “I’m going to find you a hospital for the X-ray. If they don’t keep you there, come back to my place to rest. I’ll take care of Grothmann.” I laughed: “What if there is no more ‘your place’?” He shrugged: “Then come back here.”

  I didn’t have a fracture of the skull, Thomas still had his place. He returned around evening and handed me a signed, stamped piece of paper: “Your leave of absence. You’d better leave Berlin.” My head was hurting; I was sipping Cognac diluted with mineral water. “To go where?”—“I don’t know. What if you went to see your girlfriend, in Baden?”—“The Americans could get there before me.”—“Precisely. Take her to Bavaria, or Austria. Find yourself a little hotel, you can have a nice little romantic vacation. If I were you, I’d take advantage of it. You might not have any more for a while.” He described the results of the raid: the offices of the Staatspolizei
were unusable, the old chancellery was destroyed, the new one, Speer’s, had been severely damaged, even the Führer’s private apartments had burned down. A bomb had struck the People’s Court in midtrial, they were trying Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorff, one of the conspirators from the OKHG Center; after the raid, they had found Judge Freisler stone dead, von Schlabrendorff’s file in his hand, his head crushed, they said, by the bronze bust of the Führer, which sat enthroned behind him during his ranting speeches for the prosecution.

  Leaving seemed like a good idea to me, but where? Baden, the romantic vacation: they were out of the question. Thomas wanted to have his parents evacuated from the outskirts of Vienna, and suggested I go in his place to take them to a cousin’s farm. “You have parents?” He looked at me, puzzled: “Of course. Everyone has parents. Why?” But the Viennese option seemed terribly complicated to me for a convalescence, and Thomas readily agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll make other arrangements, it’s no problem. Go rest somewhere.” I still had no idea where, yet I asked Piontek to come the next morning, with several cans of gasoline. That night I didn’t sleep much; my head and ears hurt, shooting pains woke me up, I vomited twice, but there was something else besides. When Piontek presented himself, I took my letter of leave—essential to get me through the checkpoints—the bottle of Cognac and four packs of cigarettes that Thomas had given me, my bag with a few things and a change of clothes, and without even offering him a coffee, I gave him the order to start off. “Where are we going, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Take the road to Stettin.”

  I had said it without thinking, I’m sure of it; but when I had spoken, it seemed obvious to me that it couldn’t have been otherwise. We had to take complicated detours to reach the autobahn; Piontek, who had spent the night in the garage, explained that Moabit and Wedding had been leveled and that hordes of Berliners had come to swell the ranks of refugees from the East. On the autobahn, the line of carts, most of them surmounted by white tents that people had improvised to protect themselves from the snow and the bitter cold, stretched out endlessly, the nose of each horse on the back of the cart in front, kept to the right by Schupos and Feldgendarmen, to let the military convoys going up to the front pass. From time to time, a Russian Sturmovik made its appearance, and then there was panic, people jumped from the carts and fled into the snow-covered fields while the fighter plane went up the column, letting loose bursts of shells that struck down stragglers, blew open the heads and bellies of panicking horses, burned mattresses and carts. During one of these attacks, my car took several hits, its doors were riddled with holes and the rear window broken; the engine, fortunately, was unharmed, and the Cognac too. I handed the bottle to Piontek, then drank a swig myself as we started up again in the midst of the screams of the wounded and the cries of terrified civilians. At Stettin, we passed the Oder, whose early thaw had been accelerated by the Kriegsmarine with dynamite and icebreakers; then, skirting round the ManüSee from the north, we crossed Stargard, occupied by Waffen-SS with black-gold-red badges, Degrelle’s men. We continued on the main road to the East; I guided Piontek with a map, for I had never been in these parts. Alongside the congested roadway stretched undulating fields, covered with clean, soft, crystalline snow, and then dark, lugubrious birch or pine woods. Here and there, one could see an isolated farm, long, squat buildings, nestled under their thatched, snow-covered roofs. The little redbrick villages, with their gray, steep-sloping roofs and austere Lutheran churches, seemed surprisingly calm, the inhabitants going about their business. After Wangerin, the road rose above wide, cold, gray lakes, only the rims of which had frozen. We crossed Dramburg and Falkenburg; in Tempelburg, a little town on the southern bank of the Dratzig-See, I told Piontek to leave the autobahn and head north, by the road to Bad Polzin. After a long, straight line through wide fields stretching between the fir woods that hid the lake, the road ran atop a steep isthmus crowned with trees, which separates the Dratzig-See from the smaller Sareben-See like a knife blade. Below, forming a long curve between the two lakes, a little village was spread out, Alt Draheim, terraced around a block of square, massive stone, the ruins of an old castle. Beyond the village, a pine forest covered the north bank of the Sareben-See. I stopped and asked my way from a farmer, who showed us almost without a gesture: we had to drive two more kilometers, then turn right. “You can’t miss the turn,” he said. “There’s a big lane of birch trees.” But Piontek almost passed it without seeing it. The lane crossed a little wood and then cut straight through lovely open countryside, a long, clear track between two tall curtains of bare, pale birch trees, serene in the midst of the white, virgin expanse. At the far end was the house.