The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

The previous autumn, when I arrived in Kharkov, the Führer had signed a decree, “On the Maintenance of Purity Within the SS and the Police,” condemning to death any SS man or police employee who engaged in indecent behavior with another man or even permitted himself to be abused. This decree, out of fear it might give rise to misinterpretation, had not been published, but in the SD we had been informed of it. For my part, I thought it was mostly rhetorical posturing; in actual fact, if you stayed discreet, there were rarely any problems. It all depended on not compromising yourself with a personal enemy; but I didn’t have any personal enemies. Partenau, however, must have been influenced by the hysterical rhetoric of the Schwarzes Korps and other SS publications. But my intuition told me that if one could provide him with the necessary ideological framework, the rest would come on its own.