The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

We have to accept our duty in the same way that Abraham accepts the unimaginable sacrifice of his son Isaac demanded by God. You’ve read Kierkegaard? He calls Abraham the knight of faith, who must sacrifice not only his son, but also and especially his ethical principles. For us it’s the same, isn’t that so? We have to accomplish Abraham’s sacrifice.”

This Turek was one of the few visceral, obscene anti-Semites, in the Streicher mode, whom I had met in the Einsatzgruppen; at the SP and the SD, traditionally, we cultivated an intellectual kind of anti-Semitism, and these kinds of emotional remarks were poorly viewed. But Turek was afflicted with a remarkably Jewish physique: he had dark curly hair, a prominent nose, sensual lips; behind his back, some people cruelly called him “Jew Süss,” while others insinuated that he had Gypsy blood. He must have suffered from this since childhood; and at the slightest provocation he boasted about his Aryan ancestry: “I know it’s hard to see,” he would begin before explaining that for his recent wedding he had had to carry out exhaustive research and had been able to go back to the seventeenth century; he would go so far as to produce his RuSHA certificate attesting that he was of pure race and fit to procreate German children. I understood all that, and might have pitied him; but his outrageousness and obscenities surpassed all bounds: at the executions, I had heard, he taunted the condemned men for their circumsized penises, and forced women to strip naked so he could tell them that their Jewish vaginas would never produce any more children.

A man of a certain age, in distinguished clothes with glasses and a little moustache, approached me. He was holding a very young boy in his arms. He took off his hat and addressed me in perfect German: “Herr Offizier, can I have a few words with you?”—“You speak German very well,” I replied.—“I studied in Germany,” he said with a slightly stiff dignity. “It was once a great country.” He must have been one of the professors from Leningrad. “What do you wish to say to me?” I asked curtly. The little boy, who was holding the man by the neck, was gazing at me with large blue eyes. He was about two. “I know what you are doing here,” the man said coolly. “It is an abomination. I simply want to wish that you’ll survive this war and wake up for twenty years, every night, screaming. I hope you’ll be incapable of looking at your children without seeing ours, the ones you murdered.” He turned his back on me and went away before I could reply. The boy kept staring at me over his shoulder.

I veered off toward the little pavilion called the Aeolian Harp, from which one has a broad view of the plain to the south, scattered with otherworldly mounds, one volcano and then another and then another, extinct, peaceful.

“Speaking of mortality,” he asked me pleasantly, “are you still murdering poor defenseless people?” I handed him his glass coolly. “Coming from you, Doktor, I won’t take that the wrong way. But in any case, I’m nothing but a liaison officer, which suits me fine. I observe and do nothing, that’s my favorite position.”

“What I can tell you,” I said, standing in front of him, “is that some of my dear colleagues here are absolute bastards.”—“I don’t doubt it for an instant. It’s a common defect in people who practice without observing.

I thought again about Lermontov dying on the grass a few steps away, his chest shattered, for an empty remark about Martynov’s clothes. Unlike his hero Pechorin, Lermontov had fired into the air; his adversary, not. What could Martynov have been thinking as he looked at his enemy’s corpse? He himself had wanted to be a poet, and he had certainly read A Hero of Our Time; so he could savor the bitter echoes and slow ripples of the growing legend, he knew too that his name would remain only as that of Lermontov’s murderer, another d’Anthès encumbering Russian letters. But he must have had other ambitions when he started out in life; he too must have wanted to create, and create good things. Perhaps he was simply jealous of Lermontov’s talent? Or perhaps he chose to be remembered for the harm he had done, rather than not at all?

Patches of light fell in places between the trees and in these islands of sun, little black-and-white butterflies were dancing around faded flowers.

this peculiarity German has in contrast to other European languages: the way it can sort of self-generate its vocabulary. It’s a fact that any eight-year-old German child knows all the roots of our language and can take apart and understand any word, even the most abstruse compound, which is not the case for a French child, for instance, who will take a very long time to learn the ‘difficult’ words derived from Greek or Latin.

This was the first time I really saw the Caucasus. Sovereign, the mountain chain unfurled like an immense sloping wall, to the very edge of the horizon; you felt as though if you squinted you could see the last mountains plunging into the Black Sea far to the right, and to the left into the Caspian. The hills were blue, crowned with pale-yellow, whitish ridges; the white Elbruz, an overturned bowl of milk, sat atop the peaks; a little farther away, the Kazbek loomed over Ossetia. It was as beautiful as a phrase of Bach.

I looked at the mountains again. The subtle and infinite variations of blue tinting the slopes looked as if they could be read like a long line of music, with the summits marking time.

What counts now is to make a decision about the Bergjuden of Nalchik, of whom there are…” He turned to Bräutigam, who said, “Between six and seven thousand.”—“Exactly,” Köstring continued. “A decision, then, that is fair, scientifically based, and finally that takes into account both the security of our rear area”—he inclined his head to Bierkamp—“and our desire to follow a policy of maximum collaboration with the local populations. The opinion of our scientific commission will thus be very important.” Von Bittenfeld leafed through a bundle of papers: “We already have on-site Leutnant Dr. Voss, who despite his youth is a reputed authority in scientific circles in Germany. We are also having an anthropologist or an ethnologist come.”—“For my part,” Bräutigam interrupted, “I have already contacted my ministry. They are sending a specialist from Frankfurt, from the Institute for Jewish Questions. They will also try to have someone from Dr. Walter Frank’s institute in Munich.”—“I have already sought the opinion of the scientific department of the RSHA,” Bierkamp said. “I think I will also ask for an expert. In the meantime, I have entrusted our investigations to Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue present, who is our specialist in matters concerning the Caucasian peoples.”

“And what do you think about the problem?” I asked.—“What do I think? The way they’ve put it, it’s absurd. The only thing you can say about these people is that they speak an Iranian language, practice the Mosaic religion, and live according to the customs of the Caucasian mountain people. That’s it.”—“Yes, but they do have an origin.” He shrugged his shoulders: “Everyone has an origin, most of the time a dreamed one. We talked about that. For the Tats, it’s lost in time and legend. Even if they really were Jews who came from Babylonia—let’s even say one of the lost tribes—in the meantime they must have mingled with the peoples from here so much that it wouldn’t mean anything anymore. In Azerbaidjan, there are Muslim Tats. Are they Jews who accepted Islam? Or did these hypothetical Jews from elsewhere trade women with an Iranian, pagan tribe whose descendants converted later on to one or the other religion of the Book? It’s impossible to say.”—“But,” I insisted, “there must be scientific clues that would allow us to decide?”

What I don’t understand is what connection any of this has with the security of our troops. Aren’t we capable of judging their attitude toward us objectively, based on fact?”—“It’s quite simply a racial problem,” I replied. “We know that racially inferior groups exist, including the Jews, who present marked characteristics that in turn predispose them to Bolshevik corruption, theft, murder, and all kinds of other harmful manifestations. Obviously, that is not the case for all members of the group. But in wartime, in a context of occupation, and with our limited resources, it is impossible for us to carry out individual investigations. So we are forced to consider the risk-bearing groups as a whole, and to react globally. That creates great injustices, but that’s because of the exceptional situation.” Voss gazed at his coffee with a bitter, sad look. “Doktor Aue. I have always thought of you as an intelligent, sensible man. Even if everything you’re telling me is true, explain to me, if you please, what you mean by ‘race.’ Because for me, that’s a concept that is scientifically indefinable and hence without any theoretical value.”

“But race exists, that’s a fact, our best researchers are studying it and writing about it. You know that very well. Our racial anthropologists are the best in the world.” Voss suddenly exploded: “They are clowns. They have no competition in serious countries because their discipline doesn’t exist and isn’t taught there. If it weren’t for politics, none of them would have a job or be published!”

Racial anthropology, by comparison, has no theory. It postulates races, without being able to define them, then posits hierarchies, without the slightest criteria. All the attempts to define races biologically have failed. Cranial anthropometry was a total flop: after decades of measurements and compilations of tables, based on the most farfetched indices or angles, we still can’t tell a Jewish skull from a German skull with any degree of certainty. As for Mendelian genetics, it gives good results for simple organisms, but aside from the Habsburg chin, we’re still far from being able to apply it to man. All this is so much the case that in order to write our famous racial laws, we were forced to use the grandparents’ religion as a basis! It was postulated that the Jews of the last century were racially pure, but that’s absolutely arbitrary.

As for what constitutes a racially pure German, no one knows, whatever your Reichsführer-SS may say. So racial anthropology, incapable of defining anything, was simply built on the so much more demonstrable categories of linguistics. Schlegel, who was fascinated by the work of Humboldt and Bopp, deduced from the existence of a supposedly original Indo-Iranian language the idea of an equally original people, whom he baptized Aryan, taking the term from Herodotus. The same for the Jews: once the linguists had demonstrated the existence of a so-called Semitic group of languages, the racialists jumped on the idea, which they apply in a completely illogical way, since Germany wants to cultivate the Arabs and the Führer officially welcomes the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem!

Blood transmits a propensity for heart diseases; if it also transmits a propensity for treason, no one has ever been able to prove it.

As for people like Hans Günther or that Georges Montandon, in France, who’s also made a name for himself, I say they’re full of shit. And if it’s criteria like theirs that you use to decide whether people live or die, you’d do better to go shooting at random into a crowd, the result would be the same.”

“The question of language has no importance. The question of customs is a little more important, but not much. If they are Jewish, they’ll have remained so despite all their attempts at assimilation, just like the Jews in Germany who spoke German and dressed like Western bourgeoisie, but remained Jews under their starched shirtfronts and didn’t fool anyone. Open the pinstripe pants of a Jewish industrialist,” she went on crudely, “and you’ll find a circumcised penis. Here, it will be the same thing. I don’t see why they’re racking their brains about it.” I ignored her coarse language, which gave me reason to suspect, in this seemingly icy doctor, the troubled and agitated eddies of murky waters, but I did allow myself to point out to her that given Muslim practices, that particular sign, at least, would lead to little here. She regarded me with even more scorn: “I was speaking metaphorically, Hauptsturmführer. What do you take me for? What I mean is that Fremdkörper remain such whatever the context.

“What a circus!” she exclaimed in the car.—“That’s nothing compared to what they did for the commission from the Wehrmacht,” Reinholz commented.—“And those gifts!” she went on. “What are they thinking? That they can buy off SS officers? That’s really a Jewish tactic.” I didn’t say anything: Weseloh annoyed me, she seemed to have started out with her mind already made up; I didn’t think that was the right way to go about it. At the Sonderkommando offices, she explained that the old man with whom she had talked knew the Koran, the prayers, and Muslim customs well, but according to her, that didn’t prove anything.

The sounds continued uninterruptedly, a description beyond language of his agony. It chilled me, I had trouble breathing, as in a dream where someone is talking and you don’t understand. But here there was nothing to understand. I pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen onto his eyelid. He opened his eyes and stared at me, but these eyes were empty of all recognition. He had reached that private, closed space from which you never return to the surface, but from which he hadn’t sunk deeper yet. Like an animal, his body was struggling with what was happening to him, and these sounds—that’s what they were, too, animal sounds. From time to time the sounds broke off so he could pant, sucking air through his teeth with an almost liquid noise.

I watched Voss: the strange, terrifying sounds, forming almost by themselves, kept coming out of his mouth, which was working convulsively. An ancient voice, come from the beginning of time; but if it was a language, it wasn’t saying anything, and expressed only its own disappearance.

This matter of the Bergjuden risked putting me in a bad position: I had no bias, I just wanted to respect a certain intellectual honesty, and I had trouble understanding Bierkamp’s insistence on wanting to liquidate them at all costs; was he sincerely convinced of their Jewish racial origins? For me, that didn’t emerge clearly from the documentation; as to their appearance and behavior, they didn’t at all resemble the Jews we knew; seeing them at home, they seemed in every point like the Kabards, the Balkars, or the Karachai. They too offered us sumptuous gifts, it was a tradition, you didn’t have to see that as corruption. But I had to watch out: indecisiveness could be interpreted as weakness,

I hadn’t understood the rules of the game, I had looked for the truth when what was wanted was not the truth but political advantage.

Night was falling. A thick frost covered everything: the twisted branches of the trees, the wires and poles of the fences, the dense grass, the earth in the almost bare fields. It was like a world of horrible white shapes, harrowing, ghostlike, a crystalline universe from which life seemed banished. I looked at the mountains: the vast blue wall barred the horizon, guardian of another world, a hidden one. The sun, over toward Abkhazia probably, was setting behind the ridges, but its light still touched the summits, casting on the snow sumptuous and soft pink, yellow, orange, fuchsia glints, which ran delicately from one peak to the other. It was a cruel beauty, enough to take your breath away, almost human but at the same time very remote from any human concerns. Little by little, behind, the sea was swallowing up the sun, and the colors were extinguished one by one, leaving the snow blue, then a gray-white that gleamed calmly in the night. The frost-encrusted trees appeared in the beams of our headlights like creatures in full movement. It was almost as if I had gone over to the other side, to that country that children know well, from which no one returns.

Stalin, that cunning Ossete, had used the tactics of his Scythian ancestors on us: the endless retreat, always farther into the interior, the little game, as Herodotus called it, the infernal pursuit; playing, using the emptiness.

He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song.

The sun, in the distance, was setting on the horizon like a swollen red ball, but the red gave no color to anything; the snow remained white and blue.

I looked again at the snowy pile beside me and saw that it was made up of corpses, piled like logs to form long cords, their frozen faces the color of bronze gone slightly green, studded with dense beards, and with ice crystals at the corners of their mouths, in their nostrils, their eye sockets. There must have been hundreds of them.

“My dear Max, I’ve explained to you a hundred times that National Socialism is a jungle that functions according to strictly Darwinian principles. It’s the survival of the fittest or the cleverest. But you never want to recognize that.”

I realized keenly that for all the eighteen months I had been in Russia, this was the first time I was actually under fire; and an unpleasant sense of dread made my limbs heavy and numbed my thoughts. I have spoken before about fear: what I felt then I won’t call fear, or else not an honest, conscious fear, but rather an almost physical discomfort, like an itch that you can’t scratch, concentrated on the blind parts of the body—the nape of the neck, the back, the buttocks.

I looked at the buildings on the other side of the street. Many façades had collapsed, revealing the interior of the apartments, a series of dioramas of everyday life, powdered with snow and sometimes odd: on the third floor, a bicycle hanging on the wall; on the fourth, flowered wallpaper, an intact mirror, and a framed reproduction of Kramskoy’s haughty Unknown Woman; on the fifth, a green sofa with a corpse lying on it, its feminine hand dangling in the void.

The kid’s shouts were boring into my brain, a trowel burrowing in thick, sticky mud, full of worms and messy life. I wondered, would I too beg for my mother, when the time came? The idea of that woman filled me with hatred and disgust. It had been years since I last saw her, and I didn’t want to see her; the idea of invoking her name, her help, seemed inconceivable to me. Still, somehow I wondered if behind that mother there was not another one, the mother of the child I had been before something was irremediably broken. I too would probably writhe and cry out for that mother. And if not for her, it would be for her womb, the one from before the light, the diseased, sordid, sick light of day.

This odious letter threw me into a paroxysm of rage. I sent her a letter full of violent insults: My father, I wrote, was not dead, and the profound desire they both had of it would not be enough to kill him. If she wanted to sell herself to a despicable little French shopkeeper, that was entirely up to her; as for me, I would regard their marriage as illegitimate and bigamous. I hoped at least that they wouldn’t try to inflict on me a bastard whom I could only detest. My mother, wisely, did not answer this philippic.

There, using a belt for the leather bonds and with a broom or a bottle stuck in my anus, I writhed on the cold tiles while half a dozen of her massive, mute bodyguards took turns raping me in front of her. But brooms or bottles could hurt: I looked for something more suitable. Moreau loved thick German sausages; at night, I took one from the fridge, rolled it between my hands to warm it up, lubricated it with olive oil; afterward, I washed it carefully, dried it, and put it back where I had found it. The next day I watched Moreau and my mother slicing it up and eating it with great pleasure, and I refused my portion with a smile, offering a lack of appetite as my excuse, delighted at going hungry so I could watch them eat.

They must have been about twelve or thirteen, but they looked under ten, and while Zumpe, who was going to command the firing squad, was explaining the matter to me, they both stared at me with large eyes, as if I were going to save them. That made me enraged: What do you want from me? I wanted to shout at them. You’re going to die, so what?

Information about the supply problems, which affected morale, particularly interested me. Everyone knew, without speaking about it, that the Soviet prisoners in our Stalag, whom we had virtually stopped feeding for some time, had sunk into cannibalism. “It’s their true nature that’s being revealed,” Thomas had snapped at me when I tried to discuss it with him.

It was understood, though, that the German Landser, when in distress, would keep his dignity. So the shock caused by a report on a case of cannibalism in a German company posted at the western edge of the Kessel was all the keener in high places. The circumstances made the affair particularly atrocious. When famine made them resolve on this course, the soldiers in the company, still concerned with the Weltanschauung, had debated the following point: Should they eat a Russian or a German?

The ideological problem posed was about the legitimacy of eating a Slav, a Bolshevik Untermensch. Couldn’t that sort of meat corrupt their German stomachs? But eating a dead comrade would be dishonorable; even if they couldn’t bury them anymore, they still had respect for those who had fallen for the Vaterland. Finally they agreed to eat one of their Hiwis, an entirely reasonable compromise, given the terms of t...

I exchanged a few words with a Heinkel 111 pilot who had gotten out of his plane to smoke; he was livid, and watched the scene with a bewildered look, murmuring: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible…. You know,” he finally said to me before he walked off, “every night, when I get back to Salsk alive, I cry like a child.” This simple sentence made my head swim; turning my back on the pilot and the desperate mob, I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people.

Finally they came to get me for the liaison, but not before an artillery shell had fallen on one of the tents of wounded near the runway, sending limbs and scraps of flesh flying over the whole unloading area. Since I was nearby, I had to help clear away the bloody debris, to look for survivors; as I caught myself studying the entrails spilled out of the belly of a young soldier on the reddened snow, to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them, I told myself that everything here was indeed taking on the look of an agonizing farce.

“Do you know what our tovarishchi are doing now on the front of the division? They’re playing a recording with a clock going tick, tock, tick, tock, very loud, then a sepulchral voice announcing in German: ‘Every seven seconds, a German dies in Russia!’ Then the tick, tock again. They put that on for hours. It’s quite striking.”

I’ve already conducted about thirty autopsies and the results are irrefutable: more than half present symptoms of acute malnutrition. To put it simply, almost no adipose tissue left under the skin or surrounding the internal organs; gelatinous fluid in the mesentery; congested liver; pale, anemic organs; red and yellow marrow replaced by a vitreous substance; cardiac muscle atrophied, but with an enlargement of the right ventricle and the right auricle. In ordinary language, their body, lacking anything to sustain its vital functions, devours itself to find the necessary calories; when there’s nothing left, everything stops, like a car that’s run out of gas.

This Kessel, in fact, is a giant laboratory. A genuine researcher’s paradise. I have as many bodies at my disposal as I could wish for, perfectly preserved, even if it’s sometimes a little hard to defrost them. I have to force my poor assistants to spend the night with them near the stove, turning them over regularly. The other day, in Baburkin, one of them fell asleep; the next morning, I found my subject frozen on one side and roasted on the other.

In the basements, packed together, they lived under carpets of rats that, having lost all fear, ran over the living as well as the dead and, at night, came and nibbled at the ears, noses, or toes of the exhausted sleepers.

and I have long understood that I had treated this poor man the way the bullies treated me, shamelessly, for the odious pleasure of demonstrating an illusory superiority. That is surely the immense advantage over the weak that those called strong possess: both are consumed with anxiety, fear, and doubt, but the weak know it and suffer because of it, while the strong do not perceive it and, to shore up the wall that protects them from the bottomless void, turn against the weak, whose all-too-visible fragility threatens their own fragile confidence. Thus the weak are a threat to the strong, and invite the violence and murder that pitilessly strike them down. And it’s only when blind and irresistible violence strikes the strongest in turn that the wall of their certainty cracks: only then do they glimpse what awaits them, and see that they are finished.

Politically, I can’t judge Stalin. Maybe it was a mistake. The Bolsheviks make mistakes too. But the important thing is that we have the strength to purge our own ranks regularly, to eliminate those who deviate, who let themselves be corrupted. It’s a strength that you lack: your Party is rotting from within.”

We both believe that man doesn’t freely choose his fate, but that it is imposed on him by nature or history. And we both draw the conclusion that objective enemies exist, that certain categories of human beings can and must legitimately be eliminated not for what they’ve done or even thought, but for what they are. In that, we differ only in the definition of the categories: for you, the Jews, Gypsies, the Poles, and, even I believe, the mentally ill; for us, the Kulaks, the bourgeois, the Party deviationists. At bottom, it’s the same thing; we both reject the homo economicus of the capitalists, the egotistical, individualistic man trapped in his illusion of freedom, in favor of a homo faber: Not a self-made man but a made man, you might say in English, or a man yet to be made, since communist man must still be constructed, educated, just like your perfect National Socialist. And this man-to-be-made justifies the pitiless liquidation of everything that is uneducable, and thus justifies the NKVD and the Gestapo, gardeners of the social body, who tear out the weeds and force the good plants to follow their stakes.”

if you believe our two systems are identical, why are you fighting against us?”—“I never said they were identical! And you’re much too intelligent to think so. I tried to show you that the ways our ideologies function are similar. The contents, of course, differ: class and race. For me, your National Socialism is a heresy of Marxism.”—“How, in your opinion, is Bolshevik ideology superior to National Socialism?”—“In that it wants the good of all humanity, whereas yours is selfish, it just wants the good of the Germans. Not being German, it’s impossible for me to adhere to it, even if I wanted to.”