The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae—what do we do with such an appalling realization?

Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn’t tempt me much. Of course I have thought about it over the years; and if I were to resort to it, here’s how I’d go about it: I’d hold a grenade right up against my heart and go out in a bright burst of joy. A little round grenade whose pin I’d delicately pluck out before I released the catch, smiling at the little metallic noise of the spring, the last sound I’d hear, aside from the heartbeat in my ears. And then at last, happiness, or in any case peace, as the shreds of my flesh slowly dripped off the walls.

I do not regret anything: I did my work, that’s all; as for my family problems, which I might also talk about, they concern no one but me; and as for the rest, I probably did go a little far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me, I wasn’t the only one who lost his head, admit it.

In spite of my shortcomings, and they have been many, I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink, and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

Calm? Yes, I remain calm, whatever happens, I don’t let anything show, I stay quiet, impassive, like the empty windows of burned-out cities, like the little old men on park benches with their canes and their medals, like the faces of the drowned just beneath the surface of the water, never to be found. I couldn’t break this terrifying calm even if I wanted to.

The worst thing is not necessarily those images I’ve just described; fantasies like these have lived in me for a long time, ever since my childhood probably, or in any case long before I actually ended up in the heart of the slaughterhouse. The war, in that sense, was only a confirmation,

Our tulle makers, up here, are something of a proletarian aristocracy. Apprenticeship is lengthy, the work delicate; a century ago, the weavers of Calais came to work in buggies, wearing top hats, and called the boss by his first name.

I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth.

To tell the truth, there isn’t much that has kept an interest for me. Literature, possibly, but even then, I’m not sure if that’s not just out of habit. Maybe that’s why I am writing these memoirs: to get my blood flowing, to see if I can still feel anything, if I can still suffer a little.

We babble, we simper, we flounder through an insipid morass made of words such as glory, honor, heroism

Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war is over? In a manner of speaking, the war is never over, or else it will be over only when the last child born on the last day of the war is safely dead and buried, and even then it will live on, in his or her children and then in theirs, till finally the legacy will be diluted, the memories will fray and the pain will fade away, even though by then everyone will probably have forgotten, and all this will have long gone to gather dust with all the other old stories, those not even fit to frighten children, much less the children of the dead or of those who wish they were, dead I mean.

What I did, I did with my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame?

I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did. With less zeal, perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair, in any case one way or another. I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was.

We like to contrast the State, totalitarian or not, with the ordinary man, that insect or trembling reed. But then we forget that the State is made up of individuals, all more or less ordinary, each one with his life, his story, the sequence of accidents that led him one day to end up on the right side of the gun or the sheet of paper while others ended up on the wrong side. This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil.

the machinery of State is made of the same crumbling agglomeration of sand as what it crushes, grain by grain. It exists because everyone—even, down to the last minute, its victims—agrees that it must exist.

I dreamed of being a pianist, a great concert pianist: cathedrals at my fingertips, airy as foam.

Just like my male lovers: the fact of the matter, I’m not ashamed to say, is that I probably would rather have been a woman. Not necessarily a woman living and functioning in this world as a wife or a mother; no, a woman naked, on her back, her legs spread wide open, crushed beneath the weight of a man, clinging to him and pierced by him, drowning in him as she becomes the limitless sea in which he himself is drowned, pleasure that’s endless, and beginningless too. But things did not turn out that way. Instead I ended up a jurist, a State security official, an SS officer, and then a director of a lace factory. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.

The dead were already swelling up, I gazed at their green and yellowish skin, their faces gone shapeless, as if they’d been beaten to death. The smell was vile; and this smell, I knew, was the beginning and the end of everything, the very signification of our existence.

In theory, he said, we shouldn’t be afraid of war; war was the logical outcome of our Weltanschauung. Quoting from Hegel and Jünger, he argued that the State could reach its ideal point of unity only in and through war: “If the individual is the negation of the State, then war is the negation of that negation. War is the moment of absolute socialization of the collective existence of the people, the Volk.”

whereas at a distance he presented the very embodiment of the Nordic Übermensch, up close he gave a curious impression, somewhat blurred. I finally decided that it must be a question of proportion: beneath an abnormally high, domed forehead, his mouth was too wide, his lips too thick for his narrow face; his hands seemed too long, like nervous algae attached to his arms. When he raised his little eyes, set too close together, toward me, they didn’t stay in place; and when he finally spoke to me, his voice seemed much too high for a man with such a powerful body. He gave me a disturbing feeling of femininity, which only made him more sinister.

“All you have to do is read the papers to know who wants war and who doesn’t. What’s more delicate is to gauge the actual influence of the various groups. And especially the actual influence of the Jews. The Führer, apparently, is convinced that they want to lead Germany into another war;

There is no fundamental, irremediable hatred between Frenchmen and Germans. What does exist is a permanent, implacable, Judeo-British machination to prevent at all costs Europe from reforming into a single unified Franco-German nation, as it was before 843. The whole Judeo-Britannic genius lies in leading us from one conflict to another, from one carnage to another, slaughters from which we regularly emerge, always, in an atrocious condition, Frenchmen and Germans, bled dry, completely at the mercy of the Jews of the City.

We don’t understand what’s motivating France to get mixed up in it.” And it was a fact that the French government wanted to get mixed up in it. Those who didn’t credit the Jewish theory blamed England: “They want to protect their Empire. Ever since Napoleon, that’s been their policy: no single continental power.” Others thought that on the contrary England was still reluctant to intervene, that it was the French General Staff that, dreaming of a Russian alliance, wanted to attack Germany before it was too late.

Everyone seemed glumly to accept the fact that war would come, sooner or later. The right blamed the left and the Jews; the left and the Jews, of course, blamed Germany.

Beware the power of armed friendship.”

My conclusions were pessimistic, but lucid: the French right was fundamentally against the war, but had little weight politically. The government, influenced by the Jews and the British plutocrats, had decided that German expansion, even within the limits of its natural Grossraum, constituted a threat to the vital interests of France; it would go to war, in the name not of Poland itself, but of its guarantees to Poland.

“Who gives a damn what will happen? How does that concern us, you and me? The Reichsführer wants just one thing: to be able to reassure the Führer that he can take care of Poland as he intends. What will happen afterward, we’ll deal with afterward.” He shook his head: “The Reichsführer won’t even see your report.” Of course he was right. Heydrich never reacted to what I had sent him. When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, a month later, and France and Great Britain declared war on us, Thomas was posted to one of Heydrich’s new elite Einsatzgruppen, and I was left to vegetate in Berlin.

I soon understood that in the interminable National-Socialist circus games, I had gone seriously astray, I had poorly interpreted the ambiguous signs from above, I hadn’t correctly anticipated the Führer’s will. My analyses were correct, and Thomas’s were mistaken; he had been rewarded with an enviable post doubled with chances for promotion, and I had been shunted aside: that was worth reflecting on.

my friend had a strange and infallible genius for finding himself in the right place not at the right time, but just before; so that it seemed every time as if he had always been there, and that the ups and downs of bureaucratic precedence did nothing but catch up with him. I could have understood this sooner if I had been paying attention. Now, I suspected that my name remained linked with Best’s, and thus equated with the labels bureaucrat, narrow-minded lawyer, not active enough, not tough enough.

Past victories and victories yet to come, he added; had I heard about Russia? “I’ve heard rumors,” I acknowledged, “but that’s all.” He smiled: “We’re attacking. Next month.” He paused to give the news all its weight. “Good God,” I finally let out. “There is no God. There’s just Adolf Hitler, our Führer, and the invincible power of the German Reich. We are in the process of amassing the largest army in the history of humanity. We will crush them in a few weeks.”

What Thomas was suggesting seemed only reasonable to me, even exciting. Put yourself in my place. What man of sane mind could ever have imagined that they’d pick jurists to assassinate people without a trial? My ideas were clear and strong and I scarcely gave it a thought before replying: “No need. I’m bored to death here in Berlin. If you can get me in, I’ll go.” He smiled again: “I always said you were a good guy, that you could be counted on. You’ll see, we’re going to have fun.” I laughed with pleasure and we drank some more Champagne. Thus does the devil expand his kingdom.

“What I don’t understand,” Oberländer at last went on, pointing his fork at us, “is why the Bolsheviks repressed the Poles but not the Jews. As Weber said, they’ve always been closely associated.”—“I think the answer is obvious,” Thomas said. “Stalinist power is dominated by the Jews in any case. When the Bolsheviks occupied the region, they took the place of the Polish gentry, but maintained the same configuration—that is, they continued to depend on the Jews to exploit the Ukrainian peasantry. Hence the legitimate anger of the people, as you could witness today.”

The work was simple: I was to send reports, on what was being said, on rumors, jokes, the reactions of people to the advances of National Socialism. In Berlin, Ohlendorf had explained to me, the reports of the thousands of V-Männer were compiled, then the SD distributed a summary to the different branches of the Party, in order to allow them to gauge the feelings of the Volk and to formulate their policies accordingly. This replaced elections, in a way;

At university, I had had one or two relationships, necessarily discreet ones and in any case brief; but I preferred proletarian lovers, I didn’t like to talk.

Höhn had asked me—quite innocently—to review a book by the lawyer Rudolf Klare, Homosexuality and Criminal Law. This remarkably well-informed man had established a surprisingly precise typology of practices, then, on their basis, a classification of offenses, beginning with abstract coitus or contemplation (Level 1), moving past pressure of the naked penis on a part of the partner’s body (Level 5) and rhythmic friction between the knees or legs or in the armpit (Level 6), and ending with touching of the penis by the tongue, penis in the mouth, and penis in the anus (Levels 7, 8, and 9, respectively). To each level of offense corresponded a punishment of increasing severity.

Now it just so happens that the Reichsführer-SS has a particular obsession about homosexuality. Homosexuals frighten him, he hates them. He thinks a hereditary homosexual can contaminate dozens of young men with his disease, and that all those young men will then be lost to the race. He also believes that inverts are congenital liars, who believe in their own lies—hence a mental irresponsibility that renders them incapable of loyalty, causes them to blab, and can lead to treason. Thus, this potential threat that the homosexual represents signifies that the question, for the Reichsführer, is not a medical question that can be remedied by therapy, but a political question, to be treated by the methods of the SP. He even recently expressed enthusiasm for the suggestion of one of our best legal historians, Professor and SS-Untersturmführer Eckhardt, whom you must know, to return to the old Germanic custom of drowning effeminate men in peat bogs.

On the road, I lost myself with pleasure in the softness of the Galician countryside; we advanced slowly, in the dust of columns of trucks and equipment heading toward the front; from time to time the sun pierced through the long rows of white clouds that scrolled across the sky, a vast roof of shadows, cheerful and calm.

Now it was the Ukrainian steppe, an immense undulating prairie, intensively cultivated. In the fields of grain the poppies had just died, but the rye and barley were ripening, and for kilometers on end, the sunflowers, raised toward the sky, tracked the wave of the sun. Here and there, as if thrown haphazardly, a line of isbas in the shade of acacia trees or little groves of oak, maple, and ash broke the dazzling perspectives. The country paths were bordered with lindens, the rivers with aspen and willow; in the towns they had planted chestnut trees along the boulevards.

The brief summer storms were turning more and more often into showers, transforming the loess dust, fine as flour, into a sticky mud, thick and black, that the soldiers called buna. Endless stretches of swamp formed then, where the corpses and carcasses of horses scattered by the fighting slowly decomposed. Men were succumbing to endless diarrhea, and lice were making their appearance; even the trucks were getting stuck, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to move around.

But on the Ukrainian side of the Sbrutch, our actions were often frustrated by the apathy of the local population, which did not inform on the movements of the Jews: the Jews took advantage of this to move around illegally, hiding in the forests to the North. Our Brigadeführer, Rasch, gave the order then to have the Jews parade in public before executions, in order to destroy in the eyes of the Ukrainian peasants the myth of Jewish political power. But such measures didn’t seem to have much effect.

I had doubts about our methods: I had trouble grasping their logic. I had talked with Jewish prisoners; they told me that for them, bad things had always come from the East, and good ones, from the West; in 1918 they had welcomed our troops as liberators, saviors; those troops had behaved very humanely; after their departure, Petliura’s Ukrainians had returned to massacre them. As for Bolshevik power, it starved the people. Now, we were killing them. And undeniably, we were killing a lot of people. That seemed atrocious to me, even if it was inevitable and necessary. But one has to confront atrocity; one must always be ready to look inevitability and necessity in the face, and accept the consequences that result from them; closing your eyes is never an answer.

Nagel approached and bawled at me sharply, pointing to the Jews: “It’s necessary, you understand? Human suffering mustn’t count for anything in all this.”—“Yes, but still it does count for something.” This was what I couldn’t manage to grasp: the yawning gap, the absolute contradiction between the ease with which one can kill and the huge difficulty there must be in dying. For us, it was another dirty day’s work; for them, the end of everything.

At table, at night, the men discussed the actions, told anecdotes, and compared their experiences, some sadly, others cheerfully. Still others were silent; they were the ones who had to be watched. We had already had two suicides; and one night, a man woke up emptying his rifle into the ceiling, he had to be held down by force, and a noncom had almost been killed. Some reacted with brutality, sometimes sadism: they struck at the condemned, tormented them before making them die; the officers tried to control these outbursts, but it was difficult, there were excesses.

Very often our men photographed the executions; in their quarters, they exchanged their photos for tobacco, or stuck them to the wall—anyone could order prints of them. We knew, through the military censors, that many of them sent these photos to their families in Germany; some even made little albums of them, with captions; this phenomenon worried the hierarchy but seemed impossible to control.

I looked at them as if I had X-ray vision: beneath the flesh I could clearly make out the skeletons; when Zorn embraced one of the girls it was as if their bones, separated by a thin gauze, knocked together; when they laughed, the grating sound burst forth from the jaws in the skulls; tomorrow, they would already be old, the girls would grow obese or, on the contrary, their exhausted skin would hang on their bones, their dry, empty teats would fall like a drained wine skin, and then Bohr and Zorn and these girls too would die and be buried under the cold earth, the soft earth, just like all those Jews mowed down in the prime of life, their mouths full of earth would laugh no more, so what was the use of this sad debauchery?

I had nothing against pleasure, I too could take my pleasure when I wanted it, no, it was probably their terrifying lack of self-awareness, that surprising way of never thinking about things, good or bad, of letting themselves be carried along with the current, killing without understanding why and without caring either, groping women because they were willing, drinking without even seeking to be absolved of their bodies. That is what I didn’t understand, but no one was asking me to understand anything.

Von Roques, the commander of the Rear Army Group Area South, had given the order that if the authors of some act of sabotage couldn’t be identified with certainty, we should conduct reprisals against Jews or Russians, since we shouldn’t arbitrarily blame the Ukrainians: We must convey the impression that we are just.

The HQ of one division wanted to set up in a village, but there wasn’t enough room: “We still have the Jews,” their Chief of Staff suggested to us; and the AOK supported his request, so we had to shoot all the male Jews in the village, then regroup the women and children into a few houses so as to free up some quarters for the officers. In the report this was listed as a retaliation. Another division went so far as to ask us to liquidate the patients of an insane asylum they wanted to occupy; the Gruppenstab replied indignantly that the Staatspolizei are not hangmen for the Wehrmacht: “No interest of the SP makes this action necessary. Do it yourselves.”

A policy must be biological or not exist. Listen, listen: Do we want to remain a common polypary? Or do we on the contrary want to move toward a superior stage of organization?” He read in French with an almost singsong accent. “Answer: The cellular associations of elements with complementary tendencies are what have permitted the formation of superior animals, up to man. To refuse that which is now offered to us would be, in a way, a crime against humanity, as well as against biology.”

Ever since I was a child, I had been haunted by a passion for the absolute, for the overcoming of all limits; and now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of the Ukraine. I had always wanted my thinking to be radical; and now the State, the nation had also chosen the radical and the absolute; how, then, just at that moment, could I turn my back, say no, and at the end of the day prefer the comfort of bourgeois laws, the mediocre assurance of the social contract? That was obviously impossible. And if this radicalism was the radicalism of the abyss, and if the absolute turned out to be absolute evil, one still had to follow them to the end, with eyes wide open—of that at least I was utterly convinced.