The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

in short, few of us deliberately wanted what happened, and yet, you’ll say, it happened, it’s true, and it’s also true that we sent all those Jews to Auschwitz, not just the ones who could work, but all of them, knowing perfectly well that the old people and the children would be gassed, and so we return to the initial question, why this obstinacy to empty Hungary of its Jews, given the conditions of war and all that, and there, of course, I can only put forward hypotheses, for it wasn’t my personal objective, or rather, I’m not being precise here, I know why we wanted to deport (at the time we said evacuate) all the Jews from Hungary and kill those unfit for work immediately, that was because our authorities, the Führer, the Reichsführer, had decided to kill all the Jews in Europe, that is clear, we knew that, just as we knew that even those who would be put to work would die sooner or later, and the why of all that is a question I’ve talked a lot about and to which I still don’t have an answer, people, in those days, believed all sorts of things about the Jews, the bacillus theory like the Reichsführer and Heydrich, cited at the Krummhübel conference by Eichmann, but for whom in my opinion it must have been a purely theoretical construct, the argument of Jewish uprisings, espionage or fifth column for our enemies who were getting closer, an argument that obsessed a large part of the RSHA and even preoccupied my friend Thomas, the fear too of Jewish omnipotence, in which ...