Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  ♦

  June 30, 1934. The Night of the Long Knives. The final consolidation of Hitler’s power over the SA, the Army, the church, the great industrialists—over everyone. With Himmler’s SS in charge of the operation and Hitler personally participating in it, many old scores are settled in addition to the total liquidation of SA leadership. Roehm, the SA commander, is dragged from his bed in the Hanslbauer Hotel in Wiessee and shot. So are his companions, many of them homosexuals on leave with their lovers.

  All over Germany, in every one of its major cities, men and sometimes women are aroused from sleep and dragged before the execution squads. Of more than a thousand who are to die this night, over 150 are SA men rounded up in Berlin for summary execution against a wall of the Cadet School at Lichterfelde—among then Gunther Blobel and Klaus Winterfeld.

  Untersturmfuehrer Ludwig Grieben, firing squad command three, has tried to warn them earlier in the night, but they were not in their rooms. His secret instructions have made it clear that real or alleged homosexuality will stand high on the list of crimes which will be used to justify tonight’s slaughter.

  Now, as they appear in the corridor, arms tied behind their backs, hurried on their way by booted Death’s-Head guards, Grieben takes refuge in the shadows of a recessed doorway and watches their approach—Gunther Blobel, the mortician’s son from Forchheim, friend of his childhood years, wartime comrade, Freikorps and SA brother, his oldest and dearest friend: Klaus Winterfeld, delicate as a child, whose only crimes have been to dream of writing better poetry than his talents permit, and of loving illegally and being illegally loved in return.

  As they pass his secret hiding place, Grieben can hear the moans which escape from Klaus’s lips, and Gunther’s gruff yet oddly gentle voice offering consolation; he can see Klaus’s face, rigid with terror, and Gunther’s filled with compassion and concern—concern not merely for himself but for someone else, for another.

  Seeing Gunther thus, and hearing his voice, Grieben suddenly remembers a summer afternoon, a forest, a young girl, and Gunther saying, “Don’t hurt her…”

  The vision passes. The corridor is empty. From the killing wall sharp commands can be heard, then a scream even sharper, then the merciful crash of rifle fire. It is over.

  The squirrel. The doe rabbit. Inge. Helmuth Morgen. Liesel. Klaus Winterfeld. Gunther Blobel. Love and death. Love first and then death. Always and always and always…

  The killer?

  I! Ludwig Grieben! I’m the killer!

  Why?

  Because I love!

  Slowly Grieben climbs the ladder of command. Special training, Death’s-Head Formation. Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Buchenwald. And then, as the war rushes to its insane climax, Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the third level of command.

  Grieben lives with his wife and teen-age children in a cottage outside the camp—a cottage staffed by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the most unconvinced but also the most obedient of the camp’s inmate groups. A cottage with flower and vegetable gardens, fertilized each week by the materials he brings home from the camp—fertilizers which produce gigantic flowers and three-kilo turnips. Even the camp’s great smokestacks, which day and night becloud the sky, sprinkle the hop vines beside his cottage door with a gentle residue that nourishes their vital functions and impels them to larger and much greener growth than vines from the same seeds planted only ten miles distant.

  By day Grieben stolidly, earnestly pursues his chosen patriotic task of extermination.

  ♦ 2 ♦

  Grieben’s Diary

  What follows are selections from approximately forty pages of the diary which, with others, will be interspersed from Chapter 11 of the novel to its end.

  D.T.

  18 May 1939

  Since 1933 we have been saying to the rest of the world, “If you’re so concerned about the fate of our Jews, take them off our hands, they’re all yours, they won’t cost you anything, they’re absolutely free. Take the whole lot of them and settle them wherever you wish—Madagascar, Africa, Alaska, Palestine—we don’t care, all we want is to he rid of them.”

  Every time we have said it, something strange has happened. Yesterday, for example, England announced that the total Jewish population of Palestine must be held to one third that of the Arabian population; and that, in consequence, Jewish immigration to Palestine will be limited to a total of 75,000 Yidischer over the next five years: 15,000 Jews a year—and we have over 800,000 of them waiting for a place to go to!

  Having watched the rest of the world’s statesmen in speech and action for more than six years since this particular crisis threatened, I am more convinced than ever that Adolf Hitler is the only honest head of state on earth. The others may not agree with what he says, but as to forthright statement of future intentions they have not yet caught him in a lie.

  I pledge my honor on a prediction that they never will.

  6 August 1939

  Goebbels keeps a sharp eye on the American press, which is filled with Jewish atrocity propaganda, and publishes his findings almost daily in Der Angriff. Some time ago a piece of legislation called the Child Refugee Bill was introduced in their Congress. It proposed to admit into the United States ten thousand German (read “Jewish”) children under the age of fourteen during the present year, and another ten thousand in 1940, their migration to be supervised by a religious group called the American Friends Service Committee.

  Today’s Der Angriff tells what happened. A man named Kinnicutt, president of the Allied Patriotic Societies, which were said to include the New York County organizations of the American Legion, the American Women Against Communism, the Dames of the Loyal Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of the Defenders of the Republic, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Lords’ Day Alliance of the United States, attacked the proposed legislation on the grounds that “most of those to be admitted would be of the Jewish race.” A Mrs. Waters of the Widows of World War I Veterans denounced the idea of admitting “thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners.” The Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic called on the women of America to “arise and defend their own children.” Other organizations which opposed the legislation were the Colonial Order of the Acorn, the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America, and the Defenders of the Constitution.

  The law didn’t pass. Julius Streicher published a very funny cartoon about it in Der Stuermer. The Americans don’t want Jew kids any more than we do—and for the same reasons!

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Two diary entries immediately preceding the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.

  D.T.

  28 May 1941

  Have been in Pretzsch, Saxony (near Leipzig), for three days now. We are, in all, just over one hundred junior officers sworn to absolute secrecy, ordered here for what has been described as a special training course that will take from three to four weeks, and billeted in Frontier Police School barracks. About a third of our number have served in the Government General of the Polish territories rounding up dissident intellectuals (including priests), sanitizing the larger ghetto areas, and resettling Jews. The rest of us have been detached from SS duty in France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Protectorate of Bohemia, or the Reich itself.

  The importance of whatever it is we are to be trained for may he judged by the Party standing of certain persons who are participating in the project at the highest level, and who may become our leaders, although nothing so specific as actual leadership of an actual enterprise has yet been hinted at: Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski, for example, not to mention such senior SS officers as Franz Jaeckeln, Otto Ohlendorf, Otto Rasch, Artur Nebe, Erich Naumann and Franz Stahlecker. We do know, however, that the project has been initiated by direct order of Obergruppenfuehrer and Police-General Reinhard Heydric
h, which means, ultimately, Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler himself. I consider my selection for whatever duties may be imposed upon me here to be the greatest honor thus far in my career.

  29 May 1941

  We are completely isolated here. Incoming and outgoing mail is censored. The telephone is forbidden. No contact with outsiders—not even local service personnel—is permitted. An order has just been received for the surrender of all writing materials—portable typewriters, pens, pencils, paper—as well as certificates of identification, personal papers, diaries and journals. Even Party cards! Everything will be returned to us, of course, but I have the strangest feeling that what they confiscate from us in this world will be returned to us in a world that is new and altogether different.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Immediately after the preceding entry, they learn that the invasion of the USSR is at hand, and that they are to form four Einsatzgruppen whose tasks will be to operate immediately behind the Wehrmacht and SS rounding up and exterminating Jews, Communists, guerillas, and “unreliable elements.” Grieben is assigned to Einsatzgruppe B, whose ultimate assignment is to police the city of Moscow. The following diary entries are made during his service with Einsatzgruppe B.

  D.T.

  13 August 1941

  There are a number of reasons why these Jews are so easy to round up and kill:

  1. Having lived within yet apart from the host populations on which they prey, they have developed a strong sense of social organization. In time of emergency, they will invariably do what their most respected leaders tell them to do. Thus by skillful manipulation of local leaders we are able to control and dictate the activities of an entire community.

  2. They are obsessed with family loyalty. No emergency can induce them to abandon their aged, their infirm, or their children. Youthful members of the community, who are always the strongest, most active, and hence most capable of escaping and fending for themselves, invariably remain with their families, which means, quite naturally, that they share the family fate. With them, of course, dies the best breeding stock.

  3. For centuries the European Jew has lived as a social parasite outnumbered by his host population in a ratio of one or two hundred to one. Because the use of violence to achieve his ends would have resulted in immediate and overwhelming retaliation, he has survived (and prepared!) by means of secrecy, treachery, subversion, racial defilement, bribery, acquiescence, physical submission, etc., etc. It follows that he is fundamentally non-violent, hence completely incapable of resorting to organized physical resistance, or even individual personal defense.

  4. For thousands of years the Jew has been taught, as an article of personal, racial, and religious faith, to endure, and through endurance to survive. Throughout his long history it has worked: i.e., by enduring he has survived. Such a philosophy, carried to the extreme as it has been by Jews, becomes not a philosophy but a fact of life: i.e., if you endure, you will survive. Because of this they cannot believe—indeed, they find it inconceivable—that we intend to exterminate them as systematically as any other breed of disease-carrying vermin. Being unable to comprehend this fundamental fact, they endure us—i.e., obey our orders—as a necessary, though unpleasant, precondition for survival. Thus, at the last moment, when they discover the purpose of our game is not survival but extermination, it is too late for them to do anything but die.

  28 September 1941

  Driving through the village of…we passed eleven dead partisans dangling from a trestle gallows in front of temporary Wehrmacht Command Headquarters. Hands tied behind their backs, heads tilted forward as if in prayer, or leaning sideward as if in solemn attention to the next cadaver’s words, they hung straight and still, as if frozen by the chill autumnal air. Three of them were women (one no more than 16) whose skirts had been torn off for reasons that did no honor to the Wehrmacht. However, their underwear was intact and still properly positioned, so there was nothing indecent about them except the stomach-turning ooze of death’s incontinence seeping down their legs and, in the case of the girl (who obviously had been hanged on a full stomach), onto the earth below. We observed with interest that passing villagers—even the children—did not react in any way to the sight of their dead compatriots. Some, indeed, appeared not even to see them. There is a lack of human feeling in these Slavs I find it hard to understand.

  I think I should note here that the victims’ shoes had been removed and apparently taken from the area before execution, and that their bare or sock-covered feet had been chopped off just above the ankle joints. Three or four of the severed feet still remained where they had fallen. Fifty yards down the road a surly mongrel gnawing at the remains of a human foot told us what had happened to the rest. Lieutenant Richter, with whom I rode, has decided to report this public example of Wehrmacht sadism to […]. It is hard enough for us of the SS to deal with these people as duty compels us to: it is not permissible to enjoy or make a public spectacle of it.

  18 October 1941

  It goes on and on and on, each of us participating, each taking his turn at the gun so that none will feel more “innocent,” less “guilty,” than his comrades. We have all been driven mad in one degree or another. Yet no amount of schnapps (we drink shocking amounts, all of us, we have to) can dull the knowledge that even as we swore our oaths we knew it would be this way. We few—there were never more than four thousand men in all the Einsatzgruppen—have accepted in behalf of the German race a burden of horrors so awful that they cannot even be dreamed of without a howl, a rage for death, a loosening of the bowels, a creeping mantle of shit to hide the rubies and brightly burning diamonds of Jerusalem.

  Yet, as I say, we knew from the beginning that it would be so: Himmler himself told us at the outset. Only by remembering his words do I prevent myself from going mad:

  It is easier to lead a company into battle than to deport people, to remove shrieking, weeping women, to carry out executions. When a unit covers itself with glory in battle, that can be talked about openly and the unit can be suitably rewarded. But for you to do this unseen duty, to maintain this silent activity, to be at all times the consistent and uncompromising guardian of our ideology, to commit day after day such frightful deeds that even in our inmost circles we cannot really speak of them, and to carry the secret of all you have done for the German race and Reich into the grave itself—that is a fate harder than death, more heroic than victory in open combat.

  That is the burden I have consciously accepted. So be it. We have been here in Borisov since October 8. Central Army Group Headquarters were transferred to Smolensk two days ago, leaving the way much clearer for local action. The ghetto is organized. Tomorrow we move: one Sonderkommando, four hundred White Russian militia, and as many Ukrainian volunteers as we can use.

  21 October 1941

  Borisov, the accursed, has been cleansed. Its entire Jewish population—7,620 in all—went to the pits two days ago. It was like a dream. On they came to the killing ground, Jew after Jew after Jew, all of them naked as newborn children: skinny old men with beards; women with thick legs and stout, rolling, postmenopausal haunches; mothers herding their huddled, bare-skinned children; limp-penised fathers shamed by their helplessness; boys white as newly dug grubs; girls in bud with huge eyes, if right-handed covering genitals with their left, if left-handed with their right, the other clutching at tough little breasts—and looking at us—all of them looking at us as if we weren’t there—or if there, weren’t human, as if we were beasts—not recognizing that we, like them, are under orders; that we, like them, must obey and finally die; that we, like them, or perhaps unlike them, are also human beings.

  I saw a father moving in the front ranks toward the pit. I saw a little boy break free from his mother and thrust his way through those naked marching bodies crying “Wait for me, Father—wait for me!” And the father waited, and the boy arrived at his side, and the father took the boy’s hand, and they walked together. Toward what? Toward death. Why?

&nbs
p; Well behind the father and son a pale, knob-jointed, speckle-skinned, blue-veined old man, revolting in his nakedness, really indecent, his scrotum a doughy crepe hag, hare, bald, truly obscene, yet swinging lower than his dangling penis—he presses forward with the anxious, urgent eyes of an old dog, turns and twists through the crowd like a demented goat crying “Wait for me! Wait for me!”

  The father and son wait. The naked old horror catches up with them. Hand in hand they arrive at the lip of the pit and turn their backs to it and look straight at the guns. Why don’t their eyes search instead for a wife, a child, a mother? Or is it really possible to separate one’s own from someone else’s in this dense-packed seeping clot of Jewesses, each like every other in despair and weeping nakedness?

  The guns bark. Father, son, and old bald-balls fall backward into the pit. The women arrive feeling they are not themselves because for the first time, naked and together, they are themselves. They turn to face the guns, nervously arranging their silent, ox-eyed offspring in the proper order, eager that the children give no one any trouble, that they draw no attention to themselves through misbehavior, that they give evidence of their humanity by accepting death with a decorum it was not possible for them to manifest in that other traumatic instant when, quite involuntarily, they were made to accept life.

  Questions. Questions and questions and questions.

  In those last seconds of life, why didn’t the doomed men at the pit’s edge lift their eyes even once for a last glimpse of their lost and moaning women? Because suddenly the women were all, they were everything, they were earth and sun and sky and life, and the men were nothing and ashamed of their nothingness, and they could not bear to look once more on the blinding beauty it had been their life’s most urgent duty to protect. With manhood one can look at anything; deprived of it, at nothing except that nothing that comes as death from the barrel of a gun.