The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  I slept little and returned early to the Bendlerstrasse. The sky had cleared and there were Sturmoviks everywhere. The next day it was even nicer out, the gardens, in the ruins, were flowering. I didn’t see Thomas, he had gotten caught up in some business between Wolff and Kaltenbrunner, I don’t know too much about it, Wolff had come up from Italy to discuss the possibility of a surrender, Kaltenbrunner had gotten angry and wanted to arrest him or have him hanged, as usual it ended up in front of the Führer, who let Wolff go. When I finally saw Thomas again, the day the Seelow Heights fell, he was furious, raging against Kaltenbrunner, his stupidity, his narrow-mindedness. I myself didn’t understand at all what Kaltenbrunner was playing at, what use it could be to him to turn against the Reichsführer, to intrigue with Bormann, to maneuver to become the Führer’s new favorite. Kaltenbrunner wasn’t an idiot, he must have known, better than anyone, that the game was coming to an end; but instead of positioning himself for what would come after, he was wasting his energy in pointless, futile quarrels, affecting a hard-line attitude that he would never, as was obvious to anyone who knew him, have the courage to bring to its logical conclusion. Yet Kaltenbrunner was far from being the only one to lose all sense of moderation. Everywhere, in Berlin, Sperrkommandos were appearing, blocking units made up of men from the SD, the police, various Party organizations, Feldgendarmen, who administered an extremely summary justice to those who, more reasonable than they, just wanted to live, and sometimes even to some who had nothing to do with anything, but who just had the misfortune to be there. The little fanatics of the Leibstandarte hauled wounded soldiers out of basements to execute them. Everywhere, exhausted veterans from the Wehrmacht, recently called-up civilians, sixteen-year-old kids, their faces purplish-blue, decorated lampposts, trees, bridges, S-Bahn elevated tracks, anyplace from which a man can be hanged, and always with the invariable sign around their necks: I AM HERE BECAUSE I ABANDONED MY POST WITHOUT ORDERS. Berliners had a resigned attitude: “Instead of getting hanged, I’d rather believe in victory.” I myself had problems with these maniacs; since I moved around a lot, they were constantly checking my papers, I thought of asking for an armed escort to defend myself. At the same time, I almost pitied these men, drunk with fury and bitterness, devoured by an impotent hatred that, as it could no longer be directed at the enemy, they turned against their own, like rabid wolves devouring one another. At the Kurfürstenstrasse, a young Obersturmführer from the Staatspolizei, Gersbach, hadn’t shown up one morning; he didn’t have any work to do, true, but it had been noticed; some policemen finally found him at his home, dead drunk; Müller waited for him to sober up, then had him shot with a bullet in the neck in front of the officers gathered in the building’s courtyard. Afterward, his corpse was thrown out onto the asphalt, while a young SS recruit, almost hysterical, emptied the magazine of his submachine gun into the poor man’s body.

  The news I was bearing several times a day was rarely good. Day after day, the Soviets were advancing, entering Lichtenberg and Pankow, taking Weissensee. Refugees crossed the city in large columns, many of them were hanged, at random, as deserters. The Russian artillery bombardments caused more victims: on the Führer’s birthday, they had arrived within cannon’s range of the city. It had been a beautiful day, a warm, sunny Friday, the smell of lilacs filled the air of the abandoned gardens with their fragrance. Here and there flags with swastikas had been hung on the ruins, as well as large signs whose irony I hoped was unconscious, like the one that dominated the rubble on the Lützowplatz: WE THANK OUR FüHRER FOR EVERYTHING. But people’s hearts weren’t really in it. In midmorning, the Anglo-Americans had launched one of their massive raids, more than a thousand aircraft in two hours, followed by Mosquitos; after they left, the Russian artillery had taken over. It was certainly a beautiful fireworks display, but few appreciated it, on our side at least. Goebbels did try to have extra rations distributed in the Führer’s honor, but even that turned sour: the artillery caused many victims among the civilians standing in line; the next day, in spite of the heavy rain, it was even worse, a shell struck a line of people waiting in front of the Karstadt department store, the Hermannplatz was full of bloody corpses, scattered pieces of limbs, children screaming and shaking the inert bodies of their mothers, I saw it myself. On Sunday there was a brilliant spring sun, then showers, then sun again that shone on the rubble and the soaking ruins. Birds sang; everywhere tulips and lilacs were blooming, apple trees, plum and cherry trees, and in the Tiergarten, rhododendrons. But these gorgeous flower aromas couldn’t mask the stench of rotting and burned brick floating over the streets. A heavy, stagnant smoke veiled the sky; when it rained, this smoke grew even thicker, filling people’s throats. The streets, despite the artillery strikes, were full of life: at the antitank barricades, children with paper helmets, perched on top of the obstacles, were waving wooden swords; I passed old women pushing strollers full of bricks, and even, crossing the Tiergarten toward the zoo bunker, soldiers chasing a herd of mooing cows before them. At night it rained again; and the Reds, in turn, celebrated Lenin’s birthday with a brutal riot of artillery.

  The public services were shutting down one by one, their personnel evacuating. A day before being dismissed, General Reynmann, the city Kommandant, had distributed to NSDAP officials two thousand passes to leave Berlin. Whoever hadn’t been lucky enough to get one could still buy his way out: at the Kurfürstenstrasse, a Gestapo officer explained to me that a complete set of valid papers fetched around eighty thousand reichsmarks. The U-Bahn ran until April 23, the S-Bahn until the twenty-fifth, the interurban telephone worked until the twenty-sixth (they say a Russian managed to reach Goebbels at his office, from Siemensstadt). Kaltenbrunner had left for Austria immediately after the Führer’s birthday, but Müller stayed on, and I continued my liaisons for him. I usually went by the Tiergarten, because the streets south of the Bendlerstrasse, by the Landwehrkanal, were blocked; in the Neue Siegesallee, repeated explosions had smashed the statues of the sovereigns of Prussia and Brandenburg, the street was strewn with Hohenzollern heads and limbs; at night, the fragments of white marble gleamed in the moonlight. At the OKW, where the city Kommandant now had his HQ (someone named Käther had replaced Reynmann, then two days later, Käther had in turn been dismissed to make way for Weidling), they often made me wait for hours before finally granting me a few useless fragments of information. To avoid being too much in the way, I waited with my driver in my car, beneath a cement roof in the courtyard, I watched, as they scurried about, overexcited, haggard officers, exhausted soldiers dawdling so as not to go back under fire too quickly, Hitlerjugend greedy for glory come to beg for a few Panzerfäuste, lost Volkssturm waiting for orders. One night, I was searching through my pockets for a cigarette when I came across Helene’s letter, pocketed at Hohenlychen and forgotten since then. I tore open the envelope and read the letter as I smoked. It was a brief, direct declaration: she didn’t understand my attitude, she wrote, she didn’t want to understand it, she wanted to know if I wished to join her, she asked if I was planning on marrying her. The honesty and frankness of this letter overwhelmed me; but it was much too late, and I threw the crumpled paper out of the lowered car window into a puddle.

  The noose was tightening. The Adlon had closed its doors; my only diversion was drinking schnapps at the Kurfürstenstrasse, or at Wannsee with Thomas, who, laughing, filled me in on the most recent events. Müller now was looking for a mole: an enemy agent, apparently in the entourage of a high-ranking SS official. Schellenberg saw in this a conspiracy to destabilize Himmler, and so Thomas had to follow the developments of the affair. The situation was degenerating into vaudeville: Speer, who had lost the Führer’s confidence, had returned, dodging Sturmoviks to land his crate on the Ost-West-Achse, to beg for his grace; Göring had been stripped of all his offices and placed under arrest in Bavaria, for having somewhat hastily anticipated the death of his lord and master; the more sober people, von Ribbentrop and the military, were laying low or
evacuating toward the Americans; the countless candidates for suicide were putting the finishing touches on their final scene. Our soldiers kept conscientiously getting themselves killed, a French battalion from the Charlemagne Division somehow found a way to enter Berlin on the twenty-fourth to reinforce the Nordland Division, and the administrative center of the Reich was now defended only by Finns, Estonians, Dutchmen, and young Parisian toughs. Elsewhere, people were keeping a cool head: a powerful army, it was said, was on the way to save Berlin and cast the Russians beyond the Oder, but at the Bendlerstrasse my interlocutors remained perfectly vague about the position and progression of the divisions, and the promised Wenck offensive was taking just as long to materialize as the one by Steiner’s Waffen-SS, a few days earlier. As for me, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much tempted by Götterdämmerung, and I would have prefered to be somewhere else, to reflect calmly on my situation. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of dying, believe me, I had few reasons to keep on living, after all, but the idea of being killed in this way, somewhat at the mercy of events, by a shell or a stray bullet, displeased me exceedingly, I would have liked to sit down and contemplate things rather than let myself be carried away by this black current. But such a choice was not offered me, I had to serve, like everyone else, and since it was necessary, I did it loyally, I collected and transmitted this useless information that seemed to serve only one purpose, to keep me in Berlin. As for our enemies, they remained supremely indifferent to all this commotion and kept advancing.

  Soon the Kurfürstenstrasse too had to be evacuated. The remaining officers were dispersed; Müller withdrew to his emergency HQ, in the crypt of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche on Mauerstrasse. The Bendlerstrasse was practically on the front line, the liaisons had become very complicated: to reach the building, I had to thread my way through the rubble to the edge of the Tiergarten, then continue on foot, guided through basements and ruins by Kellerkinder, filthy little orphans who knew every nook and crany. The thunder of the bombardments was like a living thing, a multifaceted and tireless assault on hearing; but when the immense silence of the pauses descended, it was worse. Entire sections of the city were burning, giant phosphorous fires that sucked in the air and provoked violent storms that fed the flames even more. Heavy, violent, brief rains sometimes extinguished a few fires, but mostly intensified the smell of burning. A few planes were still trying to land on the Ost-West-Achse; twelve Ju-52s transporting SS cadets were shot down on approach, one after the other. Wenck’s army, according to the information they deigned to pass on to me, seemed to have vanished into the woodworks somewhere to the south of Potsdam. On April 27, it was very cold out, and after a violent Soviet assault on the Potsdamer Platz, driven back by the Leibstandarte AH, there were several hours of quiet. When I returned to the church on Mauerstrasse to report to Müller, I was told he was in one of the annexes of the Ministry of the Interior, and that I should join him there. I found him in a large, almost bare room with water-stained walls, in the company of Thomas and thirty or so officers from the SD and the Staatspolizei. Müller had us wait for half an hour, but only five more men arrived (he had summoned fifty in all). Then we all lined up, at ease, for a brief speech: the day before, after a telephone discussion with Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, the Führer had decided to honor the RSHA for its services and its staunch loyalty. He had asked that the German Cross in Gold be bestowed on ten officers remaining in Berlin who had particularly distinguished themselves during the war. The list had been drawn up by Kaltenbrunner; the ones who didn’t hear their names called should not be disappointed, since the honor fell upon them too. Then Müller read the list, at the head of which he himself figured; I wasn’t surprised to hear Thomas’s name; but to my astonishment, Müller named me too, second to last. What could I have done to be distinguished in this way? I wasn’t in Kaltenbrunner’s good books, far from it. Thomas, across the room, gave me a quick wink; already we were regrouping to go to the chancellery. In the car, Thomas explained the business to me: among the people they had still been able to find in Berlin, I was one of the few, along with him, who had served at the front, and that’s what had counted. The trip to the chancellery along the Wilhelmstrasse had gotten difficult, the water mains had burst, the street was flooded, corpses were floating in the water and swayed gently as our cars went by; we had to finish our trip on foot, soaking wet up to our knees. Müller led us into the ruins of the Auswärtiges Amt: from there, an underground tunnel led to the Führer’s bunker. In this tunnel too water was flowing, up to our ankles. Some Waffen-SS from the Leibstandarte were guarding the entrance to the bunker: they let us pass, but took our service pistols. We were led through a first bunker and then, via a spiral staircase streaming with water, to a second one, even lower down. We waded through the stream from the AA, at the bottom of the steps it soaked the red carpets of a wide hallway, where they had us sit down along a wall, on wooden school chairs. In front of us, a general from the Wehrmacht was shouting to another, who wore a Generaloberst’s epaulettes: “We’re all going to drown down here!” The Generaloberst was trying to calm him down and assured him a pump was on the way. An abominable stench of urine filled the bunker, mixed with the musty effluvia of mildew, sweat, and wet wool, which they had tried in vain to mask with disinfectant. We were kept waiting for a while; officers came and went, crossing the waterlogged carpets with loud thwacks before disappearing into another room in the back, or climbing the spiral staircase; the room resounded with the continuous throbbing of a diesel generator. Two elegant young officers walked by, talking animatedly; behind them emerged my old friend Dr. Hohenegg. I leaped up and seized his arm, overjoyed at seeing him there. He took me by the hand and led me into a room where several Waffen-SS were playing cards or sleeping on bunk beds. “I was sent here as a backup doctor for the Führer,” he explained gloomily. His bald, sweating head gleamed beneath the yellowish lightbulb.—“And how is he doing?”—“Oh, not very well. But I’m not looking after him, they’ve entrusted me with the children of our dear Propaganda Minister. They’re in the first bunker,” he added, pointing to the ceiling. He looked around and went on in a low voice: “It’s something of a waste of time: as soon as I find their mother alone, she swears to God that she’s going to poison them all and then commit suicide herself. The poor kids don’t suspect a thing, they’re charming, it breaks my heart, let me tell you. But our limping Mephistopheles has his mind firmly made up to form an honor guard to accompany his master to Hell. All the better for him.”—“So that’s where we’re at, then?”—“Certainly. That fat Bormann, who doesn’t much like the idea, has tried to get him to leave, but he refused. In my humble opinion, there’s not much time left.”—“And you, my dear Doktor?” I asked, smiling. I really was happy to see him again. “Me? Carpe diem, as the British public school boys say. We’re having a party tonight. Upstairs, in the chancellery, so as not to disturb him. Come if you can. It’ll be full of lusty young virgins who would rather offer their maidenhood to a German, whatever his appearance, than to a hairy, stinking Kalmyk.” He patted his paunch: “At my age, you don’t turn down offers like that. Afterward,” his eyebrows went up comically on his egg-shaped skull—“afterward we’ll see.”—“Doktor,” I said solemnly, “you are wiser than I am.”—“I never doubted it for an instant, Obersturmbannführer. But I don’t have your mad luck.”—“In any case, believe me, I’m delighted to see you again.”—“Me too, me too!” We were back in the hallway already. “Come if you can!” he said before scurrying away on his squat legs.

  Soon afterward, they had us go into the back room. We pushed back the map-covered tables ourselves and lined up against the wall, our feet in the wet carpet. The two generals who had just been shouting about the water went and stood at attention in front of a door opposite us; on one of the tables, an adjutant was preparing the boxes with the medals. Then the door opened and the Führer appeared. All of us stiffened simultaneously, launched our arms into the air, and bellowed our salute. The
two generals were also saluting. The Führer tried to raise his arm in response but it was shaking too much. Then he came forward with a hesitant, jerky, unstable step. Bormann, buttoned up tight in his brown uniform, emerged from the room behind him. I had never seen the Führer so close up. He wore a simple gray uniform and cap; his face looked yellow, haggard, puffy, his eyes remained fixed on one spot, inert, then began blinking violently; a drop of spittle stood out at the corner of his mouth. When he tottered, Bormann held out his hairy paw and supported him by the elbow. He leaned on the corner of a table and gave a brief, somewhat disjointed speech that included Frederick the Great, eternal glory, and the Jews. Then he went over to Müller. Bormann followed him like a shadow; the adjutant was holding open a box with a medal. The Führer took it slowly between his fingers, placed it without pinning it on Müller’s right pocket, shook his hand, calling him “My good Müller, my faithful Müller,” and patted his arm. I kept my head straight but watched from the corner of my eye. The ceremony was repeated for the next man: Müller barked out his name, rank, and service, then the Führer decorated him. Thomas was decorated next. As the Führer approached me—I was almost at the end of the line—my attention was caught by his nose. I had never noticed how broad and ill-proportioned this nose was. In profile, the little moustache was less distracting and the nose could be seen more clearly: it had a wide base and flat bridges, a little break in the bridge emphasized the tip; it was clearly a Slavonic or Bohemian nose, nearly Mongolo-Ostic. I don’t know why this detail fascinated me, but I found it almost scandalous. The Führer approached and I kept observing him. Then he was in front of me. I saw with surprise that his cap scarcely reached my eyes; and yet I am not tall. He muttered his compliment and groped for the medal. His foul, fetid breath overwhelmed me: it was too much to take. So I leaned forward and bit into his bulbous nose, drawing blood. Even today I would be unable to tell you why I did this: I just couldn’t restrain myself. The Führer let out a shrill cry and leaped back into Bormann’s arms. There was an instant when no one moved. Then several men lay into me. I was struck and thrown to the ground; rolled into a ball on the wet carpet, I tried to protect myself from the kicks as well as I could. Everyone was shouting, the Führer was bellowing. Finally they pulled me back to my feet. My cap had fallen; I at least wanted to adjust my tie, but they held my arms firmly. Bormann was pushing the Führer toward his room and shouting: “Shoot him!” Thomas, behind the crowd, was observing me in silence, looking both disappointed and mocking. They dragged me toward a door at the back of the room. Then Müller interrupted in his loud, harsh voice: “Wait! I want to question him first. Take him to the crypt.”