The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

The result of all this was a typical order from Reichenau: referring to our necessary executions of criminals, Bolsheviks, and essentially Jewish elements, he forbade soldiers in the Sixth Army, without orders from a superior officer, from attending, photographing, or participating in the actions. In itself that would probably not have changed much, but Rasch ordered us to conduct the actions outside the towns, and to set a cordon on the perimeter to prevent the presence of spectators. Discretion, it seemed, would henceforth be the rule of the day.

To tell the truth, the soldiers rarely seemed to feel Leontius’s anguish, only his desire, and it must have been this that was disturbing the hierarchy, the idea that the men could take pleasure in these actions. Still, everyone who participated in them took some form of pleasure in them—that seemed obvious to me. Some, visibly, enjoyed the act itself, but these could be regarded as sick men, and it was right to ferret them out and give them other tasks, even punish them if they overstepped the bounds. As for the others, whether the actions repelled them or left them indifferent, they carried them out from a sense of duty and obligation, and thus drew pleasure from their devotion, from their ability to carry out such a difficult task despite their disgust and apprehension: “But I take no pleasure in killing,” they often said, finding their pleasure, then, in their rigor and their righteousness.

This order came directly from the Reichsführer-SS and emanates, I want to emphasize this for you as he emphasized it for us, from the Führer himself.” As he spoke, he winced; between phrases, he chewed the inside of his cheeks. “Our actions against the Jews will henceforth have to include the entire population. There will be no exceptions.” The officers present reacted with consternation; several started talking at the same time. Callsen’s voice rose, incredulous: “All of them?”—“All of them,” Blobel confirmed.—“But look, that’s impossible,” Callsen said. He seemed to be begging.

Now, if we execute only the men, there will be no one left to feed the women and their children. The Wehrmacht doesn’t have the resources to feed tens of thousands of useless Jew females along with their brats. Nor can we leave them to die of hunger: those are Bolshevik methods. To include them in our actions, along with their husbands and their sons, is in fact the most humane solution given the circumstances. What’s more, experience has taught us that the more procreative Eastern Jews are the original breeding ground from which the forces of Judeo-Bolshevism as well as of the capitalist plutocracy are constantly renewed. If we let some of them survive, those products of natural selection will be the source of a renewal even more dangerous for us than the present peril. The Jewish children of today are the saboteurs, the partisans, the terrorists of tomorrow.”

“We are all National Socialists,” he continued, “SS men in the service of our Volk and our Führer. I remind you that Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, the Führer’s word has the force of law. You must resist the temptation to be human.”

In a State like ours, everyone had his assigned role: You, the victim, and You, the executioner, and no one had a choice, no one asked anyone’s consent, since everyone was interchangeable, victims as well as executioners. Yesterday we had killed Jewish men, tomorrow it would be women and children, the day after tomorrow yet others; and after we had fulfilled our role, we would be replaced. Germany, at least, did not liquidate its executioners; on the contrary, it took care of them, unlike Stalin with his mania for purges; but that too was part of the logic of things.

For the Russians, as for us, man counted for nothing; the nation, the State were everything; and in this sense we saw our reflection in each other. The Jews too had this strong feeling of community, of Volk: they mourned their dead, buried them if they could and said Kaddish; but as long as one single Jew remained alive, Israel lived. That, no doubt, was the reason they were our privileged enemies, they resembled us too much.

When the Jew submitted to the Law, he felt that this Law lived in him, and the more terrible, hard, demanding it was, the more he loved it. National Socialism had to be that too: a living Law. Killing was a terrible thing; the reaction of the officers was a good proof of that, even if they didn’t all draw the consequences of their own reactions; and the man for whom killing was not a terrible thing, killing an armed man as well as an unarmed man, and an unarmed man as well as a woman and her child, was nothing but an animal, unworthy of belonging to a community of men. But it was possible that this terrible thing was also a necessary thing; and in that case we had to submit to this necessity.

The next day I awoke distraught, with a sad rage stuck in my head.

“I’ll be sorry to see you leave, Sturmbannführer.”—“Not me. What they want to do is insane. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Schulz, from Kommando Five, broke down when he learned about the Vernichtungsbefehl. He asked to leave right away, and the Obergruppenführer gave his consent.”—“You might be right. But if you leave, if Oberführer Schulz leaves, if all the honorable men leave, only the butchers will be left here, the dregs. We can’t accept that.” He made a grimace of disgust: “Because you think you can change something if you stay? You?” He shook his head. “No, Doktor, follow my advice, leave. Let the butchers take care of the butchering.”

now the condemned, undressed, had to lie on their stomachs in the bottom of the trench, and a few shooters administered a shot in the neck at point-blank range. “I have always been against the Genickschuss,” Blobel reminded us, “but now we no longer have a choice.” After each row, an officer had to perform an inspection and make sure all the condemned were indeed dead; then they were covered with a thin layer of dirt and the next group came to lie down on top of them, head to foot; when five or six layers had accumulated this way, the trench was filled in.

I could now distinguish three different temperaments among my colleagues. First, there were those who, even if they tried to hide it, killed with sensual pleasure; I have already talked about them, they were criminals who revealed their true nature thanks to the war. Then there were those who were disgusted by it and who killed out of duty, overcoming their repugnance, out of a love of order. Finally, there were those who regarded the Jews as animals and killed them the way a butcher slaughters a cow—a joyful or a difficult task, according to their humor or disposition.

By the roadsides the insomniac dead lay scattered, their eyes open, empty.

Kommando had emptied the ghetto the day of our arrival in Kiev and liquidated the 3,145 remaining Jews. One more number for our reports; there would soon be others. Who, I wondered, will mourn all these killed Jews, all these Jewish children buried with open eyes under the rich black earth of the Ukraine, if their sisters and mothers are killed too? If they were all killed, no one would be left to mourn them, and maybe that also was the idea.

Kiev must at that time have been harboring some 150,000 Jews, permanent residents or refugees from western Ukraine. Jeckeln suggested, as a preliminary measure, shooting 50,000 of them; Eberhard warmly approved and pledged the logistic support of the Sixth Army. Jeckeln turned to us: “Gentlemen,” he declared, “I give you twenty-four hours to prepare a plan for me.”

I smiled to myself, but bitterly: as in the Middle Ages, we were reasoning with syllogisms that proved each other. And these proofs led us down the path of no return.

Through my network of informers, I had contributed to spreading some rumors: the Jews were going to Palestine, they were going to a ghetto, to Germany to work. The local authorities put in place by the Wehrmacht had also done their part to avert panic. I knew that rumors of a massacre had also spread, but all these rumors canceled one another out; people must not have known what to think anymore, and so we could count on their memories of the German occupation of 1918, on their trust in Germany, and on hope too, vile hope.

I got diarrhea, I ran to the outhouse at the back of the garden, lighting my way with a pocket flashlight, and the pit, clean during the day, was swarming with giant brown cockroaches, they filled me with horror, I tried to hold it in and go back to sleep, but the cramps were too strong, there was no chamber pot, I put on my big rain boots and went back to the outhouse, telling myself that I could chase the roaches away with my foot and be quick about my business, I put my head through the door as I lit up the ground, then I noticed a shimmer on the wall, I pointed my flashlight at it, the wall too was swarming with cockroaches, all the walls, the ceiling too, and above the door, I slowly turned my head and they were there on the lintel too, a black swarming mass, then I slowly withdrew my head, very slowly, and went back to my room and held it in till morning. Walking on the bodies of the Jews gave me the same feeling, I fired almost haphazardly, at anything I saw wriggling, then I pulled myself together and tried to pay attention, but in any case I could only finish off the most recent ones, underneath them already lay other wounded, not yet dead, but soon to be.

Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit, then my arm detached itself from me and went off all by itself down the ravine, shooting left and right, I ran after it, waving at it to wait with my other arm, but it didn’t want to, it mocked me and shot at the wounded all by itself, without me; finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry.

Ever since the beginnings of human history, war has always been regarded as the ultimate evil. But we had invented something compared to which war had come to seem clean and pure, something from which many were already trying to escape by taking refuge in the elementary certainties of war and the front. Even the insane butcheries of the Great War, which our fathers or some of our older officers had lived through, seemed almost clean and righteous compared to what we had brought into the world.

Our system, our State couldn’t care less about the thoughts of its servants. It was all the same to the State whether you killed Jews because you hated them or because you wanted to advance your career or even, in some cases, because you took pleasure in it. It did not mind, either, if you did not hate the Jews and the Gypsies and the Russians you were killing, and if you took absolutely no pleasure in eliminating them, no pleasure at all. It did not even mind, in the end, if you refused to kill, no disciplinary action would be taken, since it was well aware that the pool of available killers was bottomless, it could fish new men out at will, and you could just as easily be put to some other use more in keeping with your talents.

A sentence of Chesterton’s ran through my head: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous. Is that what war was, then, a perverted fairyland, the playground of a demented child who breaks his toys and shouts with laughter, gleefully tossing the dishes out the window?

In the war between Peter the Great and Charles the Twelfth, the stakes were small: if you lose, you stop playing. But when it’s the entire nation that’s waging war, it has to wager everything and up the ante over and over again, until total bankruptcy. And that’s the problem. If we don’t take Moscow, we won’t be able to stop and negotiate a reasonable peace. So we’ll have to continue. But do you want to know what I really think? For us, this war is a gamble. A gigantic gamble, which involves the entire nation, the whole Volk, but a gamble all the same. And a gamble is something you either win or lose. The Russians don’t have that luxury. For them it’s not a gamble, it’s a catastrophe that’s come crashing down on their country, a plague. And you can lose a gamble, but you can’t lose when you’re faced with a plague, you have to surmount it, you don’t have any choice.”

The murder of the Jews doesn’t serve any real purpose. Rasch is absolutely right. It has no economic or political usefulness, it has no finality of a practical order. On the contrary, it’s a break with the world of economics and politics. It’s a waste, pure loss. That’s all it is. So it can have only one meaning: an irrevocable sacrifice, which binds us once and for all, prevents us from ever turning back. You understand? With that, we leave the world of the gamble, there’s no way back. It’s the Endsieg or death. You and me, all of us, we’re bound together now, bound to the outcome of this war by acts committed in common.

If they suffered, as I had suffered during the Great Action, it wasn’t just because of the smells and the sight of blood, but because of the terror and the moral suffering of the people they shot; in the same way, their victims often suffered more from the suffering and death, before their eyes, of those they loved, wives, parents, beloved children, than from their own deaths, which came to them in the end like a deliverance. In many cases, I said to myself, what I had taken for gratuitous sadism, the astonishing brutality with which some men treated the condemned before executing them, was nothing but a consequence of the monstrous pity they felt and which, incapable of expressing itself otherwise, turned into rage, but an impotent rage, without object, and which thus almost inevitably had to turn against those who had originally provoked it.

If the terrible massacres of the East prove one thing, paradoxically, it is the awful, inalterable solidarity of humanity. As brutalized and habituated as they may have become, none of our men could kill a Jewish woman without thinking about his wife, his sister, or his mother, or kill a Jewish child without seeing his own children in front of him in the pit. Their reactions, their violence, their alcoholism, the nervous depressions, the suicides, my own sadness, all that demonstrated that the other exists, exists as an other, as a human, and that no will, no ideology, no amount of stupidity or alcohol can break this bond, tenuous but indestructible. This is a fact, not an opinion.

“Gas,” he declared, “is a more elegant method.” The truck, hermetically sealed, used its own exhaust gas to asphyxiate the people locked up inside; this solution, indeed, lacked neither elegance nor economy. As Widmann explained to us, other solutions had been tried out first; he himself had conducted experiments in Minsk, on the patients of an asylum, in the company of his Amtschef, Gruppenführer Nebe; one attempt, using explosives, had given disastrous results. “Indescribable. A catastrophe.” Blobel looked enthusiastic: he liked this new toy and was eager to try it out for the first time.

At the marshalling yards, I watched interminable lines of dirty, oily, muddy freight cars waiting, full of wheat, coal, iron, gasoline, livestock, all the wealth of occupied Ukraine seized to be sent to Germany, all the things men need, moved from one place to another according to a grandiose, mysterious plan of circulation. Was that the reason why we were waging war, why men were dying? But even in everyday life that’s the way it is. Somewhere a man wastes away his life, covered with coal dust, in the stifling depths of a mine; elsewhere, another man rests warmly, clothed in alpaca, buried in a good book in an armchair, without ever thinking whence or how this armchair, this book, this alpaca, this warmth reach him.

National Socialism wanted every German, in the future, to be able to have his modest share of the good things of life; but within the limitations of the Reich, that had turned out to be impossible; so now we were taking these things from others. Was that fair? So long as we had the strength and the power, yes, since as far as justice is concerned, there is no absolute authority, and each people defines its own truth and justice. But if ever our strength weakened, if our power gave out, then we would have to endure the justice of others, terrible as it might be. And that too would be fair.

Now my thoughts shifted: in place of his frail neck other powerful necks appeared, of men I had been with or even just looked at, and I considered these necks with a woman’s eyes, suddenly understanding with a terrifying clarity that men control nothing, dominate nothing, that they are just children and even toys, put there for the pleasure of women, an insatiable pleasure all the more sovereign that the men think they are in charge, think they dominate women, whereas in reality women absorb them, wreck their dominion and dissolve their control, to take far more from them than they give. Men believe in all honesty that women are vulnerable, and that they must either take advantage of this vulnerability or protect it, whereas women laugh, with tolerance and love or else with scorn, at the childish, infinite vulnerability of men, at their fragility, this brittleness so close to a permanent loss of control, this perpetually threatening collapse, this vacuity embodied in such strong flesh. That is why, without a doubt, women so rarely kill. They suffer much more, but they will always have the last word.

All these dismal, bound men hanging made me think of sleeping chrysalises patiently waiting for metamorphosis.

I didn’t shoot, but I studied the men who did, the officers especially, such as Häfner or Janssen, who had been there since the beginning and seemed now to have become perfectly hardened to their executioner’s work. I must have been like them. By inflicting this piteous spectacle on myself, I felt, I wasn’t trying to exhaust the scandal of it, the insurmountable feeling of a transgression, of a monstrous violation of the Good and the Beautiful, but rather this feeling of scandal came to wear out all by itself, one got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much; thus what I was trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being; instead of that, I now felt only a dull, anxious kind of excitation, always briefer, more acrid, mixed with the fever and my physical symptoms, and thus, slowly, without truly realizing it, I was sinking into mud while searching for light.

“The advantage of forensic pathology,” he explained to me, “is that after you’ve opened up corpses of all ages and sexes, you have the impression that death loses its horror, is reduced to a physical phenomenon as ordinary and banal as the natural functions of the body. I can manage very calmly to imagine myself on a dissection table, under the hands of my successor, who would grimace slightly as he observed the state of my liver.”—“Ah, but that’s because you have the luck to get them when they’re already dead. It’s a very different thing when, as so often happens here, especially when you work in the SD, you’re present at the step beyond itself.”—“And are even contributing to it.”—“Exactly. Whatever his attitude or his ideology, the spectator can never fully grasp the experience of the deceased.”

The man dying will only experience something confused, more or less brief, more or less brutal, but something in any case that will always escape his awareness.

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.

How to describe these sensations to someone who has never experienced them? In the beginning, when it enters, it can be difficult, especially if it’s a little dry. But once inside, oh how nice it is, you can’t imagine. Your back arches and it’s like a blue, luminous stream of molten lead filling your pelvis and rising slowly up your spine to seize your head and erase it. This remarkable effect might be due to the contact of the penetrating organ with the prostate, the poor man’s clitoris, which, in the one penetrated, sits just against the rectum, whereas in the woman, if my notions of anatomy are correct, it’s separated from it by a part of the reproductive apparatus, which would explain why women, in general, seem to have so little taste for sodomy, or else just as an intellectual pleasure. For men, it’s different; and I’ve often told myself that the prostate and war are God’s two gifts to man to compensate him for not being a woman.

I didn’t understand much of this, but I marveled as I listened to him summarizing his material. And his tea was very good.

“Speaking a language isn’t the same thing as knowing how to read and write it; and having a precise knowledge of its phonology or its morphology is another thing entirely.

Now, if you consider that in everyday language you rarely use more than five hundred words and a pretty basic grammar, I can probably assimilate pretty much any language in ten or fifteen days. After that, each language has its own difficulties and problems that you have to work through if you want to master it. You could say, if you like, that language as a scientific subject is quite a different thing, in its approach, from language as a tool of communication.

A four-year-old Abkhaz kid will be capable of phenomenally complex articulations that I could never reproduce correctly, but I, on the other hand, can then break down and describe, for instance, a plain or labialized alveolo-palatal series, which will mean absolutely nothing to the boy, who has his whole language in his head but can never analyze it.”

The Soviet solution can be summarized in this way: a people, or a nationality as they say, equals a language plus a territory. It’s in order to obey this principle that they tried to provide the Jews, who had a language—Yiddish—but not a territory, with an autonomous region in the Far East, Birobidjan; but apparently the experiment failed, and the Jews didn’t want to live there.

A key point is the notion of literary language. To have its own republic, a people must necessarily have a literary, that is to say, written, language.

Now here’s a key for you: related peoples had to stop functioning as a network, horizontally, so that they would all refer vertically in parallel to each other, to the central government, which thus takes the position of the final arbiter of conflicts that it itself continually stirs up.

The intellectuals I had known, like Ohlendorf or Höhn, were continually developing their knowledge and their theories; when they spoke, it was either to present their ideas or to drive them forward. Voss’s knowledge, on the other hand, seemed to live inside him almost like an organism, and Voss enjoyed this knowledge as he would a mistress, sensually; he bathed in it, constantly discovered new aspects of it, already present in him but of which he had not yet been aware, and from it he took the pure pleasure of a child who has learned how to open and close a door or fill a pail with sand and empty it; and whoever listened to him shared this pleasure, since his talk was made up of capricious meanderings and perpetual surprises; you could laugh at it, but only with the laughter of pleasure of the father who watches his child open and close a door ten times in succession while laughing.

He took me one day to Bakhchisaray to visit the superb little palace of the Khans of Crimea, built in the sixteenth century by Italian, Persian, and Ottoman architects and by Russian and Ukrainian slaves; and the Chufut-Kale, the Fort of the Jews, a city of caves first dug into the chalk cliffs in the sixth century and occupied by various peoples, the last of whom, who had given the place its Persian name, were in fact Karaïtes, a dissident Jewish sect that, as I explained to Voss, had been exempted in 1937, based on a decision from the Ministry of the Interior, from the German racial laws, and had consequently, here in Crimea, also been spared by the special measures of the SP. “Apparently, the Karaïtes of Germany presented some czarist documents, including a ukase signed by Catherine the Great, that affirmed that they were not of Jewish origin but had converted to Judaism at a later period. The specialists in the ministry accepted the authenticity of these documents.”—“Yes, I heard talk of that,” Voss said with a little smile. “They were clever.”

The place was bathed in calm forsakenness.

“I wanted especially to ask your opinion about our work,” I hazarded.—“You want to talk about the destruction of the Jewish people, I suppose?”—“Yes. I should confess to you that it poses some problems for me.”—“It poses problems for everyone,” he replied categorically. “To me too it poses problems.”—“What is your opinion, then?”—“My opinion?” He stretched, and joined his fingertips in front of his lips; his eyes, usually piercing, had gone almost empty. I wasn’t used to seeing him in uniform; Ohlendorf, for me, remained a civilian, and I had trouble imagining him other than in his discreet, perfectly cut suits. “It’s a mistake,” he finally said. “But a necessary mistake.”

It’s a mistake, because it’s the result of our inability to manage the problem in a more rational way. But it’s a necessary mistake because, in the present situation, the Jews present a phenomenal, urgent danger for us. If the Führer ended up imposing the most radical solution, it’s because he was forced into it by the indecision and incompetence of the men put in charge of the problem.”

Our State is so far an absolute, national, and socialist Führerstaat only in theory; in practice, and it’s only getting worse, it’s a form of pluralist anarchy. The Führer can try to arbitrate, but he can’t be everywhere, and our Gauleiters know very well how to interpret his orders, deform them, and then proclaim that they’re following his will when actually they’re doing whatever they want.”

“The Vernichtungsbefehl is a terrible thing. Paradoxically, it’s almost like an order from the God of the Jews’ Bible, isn’t it? Now go and strike Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. You know that, it’s in the first Book of Samuel. When I received the order, that’s what I thought about. And as I told you, I believe that it’s a mistake, that we should have had the intelligence and ability to find a more…humane solution, let’s say, one more in agreement with our conscience as Germans and as National Socialists. In that sense, it’s a failure. But you also have to look at the realities of war. The war goes on, and every day that this enemy force remains behind our lines reinforces our adversary and weakens us. It’s a total war, all the forces of the nation are involved in it, and we can’t afford to neglect any means to victory, any. That’s what the Führer understood clearly: he cut the Gordian knot of doubts, hesitations, divergent interests. He did it, as he does everything, to save Germany, aware that if he can send hundreds of thousands of Germans to their deaths, he can and must also send to theirs the Jews and all our other enemies. The Jews are praying and striving for our defeat, and so long as we haven’t won we can’t nourish such an enemy in our midst. And for us, who have received the heavy burden of carrying out this task to the end, our duty toward our peop...