The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

Döll killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities? And how many philanthropists, throughout the world, made famous by their extravagant generosity are, on the contrary, monsters of egotism and harshness, greedy for public glory, full of vanity, tyranni...

And in order for men to be able to live together, avoiding the Hobbesian state of “all against all,” and, on the contrary, to be able, thanks to mutual aid and the increased productivity that stems from it, to satisfy a greater portion of their desires, you need a regulatory authority, which prescribes limits to these desires and arbitrates conflicts: this mechanism is the Law. But it is also necessary for men, egotistical and weak, to accept the constraint of the Law, and so this Law must refer to an authority outside of man, must be founded on a power that man feels is superior to himself. As I had suggested to Eichmann during our dinner, this supreme and imaginary reference point was for a long time the idea of God; from that invisible, omnipotent God, it shifted to the physical presence of the king, sovereign by divine right; and...

Biblical Law says, Thou shalt not kill, and doesn’t brook any exception; but every Jew or Christian accepts that in wartime that law is suspended, that it is just to kill the enemy of one’s people, that there is no sin in that; once the war is over and the weapons stored away, the old law resumes its peaceful course, as if the interruption had never taken place. So for a German, to be a good German means to obey the laws and thus the Führer: there can be no other morality, since there would be nothing to support it.

When a soldier is sent to the front, he doesn’t protest; not only is he risking his life, but he is forced to kill, even if he doesn’t want to kill; his free will abdicates; if he remains at his post, he’s a virtuous man, if he runs away, he’s a deserter, a traitor. The man posted to a concentration camp, like the man assigned to an Einsatzkommando or a police battalion, most of the time doesn’t reason any differently: he knows that his free will has nothing to do with it, and that chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man.

for the Greeks, chance played a part in the doings of men (chance, it should be said, often disguised as an intervention of the gods), but they did not consider that this chance diminished one’s responsibility in any way. Crime has to do with the deed, not the will. When Oedipus kills his father, he doesn’t know he is committing parricide; killing a stranger who has insulted you on the open road, for Greek conscience and law, is a legitimate action, there’s no sin in it; but that man was Laius, and ignorance doesn’t alter the crime in the least: and Oedipus himself recognizes this, and when he finally learns the truth, he chooses his own punishment, and inflicts it on himself.

The link between will and crime is a Christian notion, which persists in modern law; the penal code, for example, regards involuntary or negligent homicide as a crime, but a lesser one than premeditated homicide; the same is true for the legal concept of diminished responsibility in case of insanity; and the nineteenth century ended by linking the notion of crime to that of the abnormal.

How, for an ordinary man, can something be righteous one day and a crime the next? Men need to be guided, it’s not their fault. These are complex questions and there are no simple answers. Who knows where the Law is? Everyone must look for it, but it’s difficult, and it’s normal to bow to the common consensus. Everybody can’t be a legislator.

the anus, surrounded by a pink halo, gaped open like a sea anemone between two white globes.

Koch was transferred here, to command the KL, and I followed him. I discovered a network of corruption that covered all the camps. Finally, last summer, Koch was suspended. But he had also had most of the witnesses assassinated, including a Hauptscharführer in Buchenwald, one of his accomplices. Here, he had all the Jewish witnesses killed; we opened an investigation into that too, but then all the Jews in the KL were executed; when we tried to react, they pleaded superior orders to us.”—“But such orders exist, you must know that.”—“I learned it then. And it’s clear that in that case we have no jurisdiction. But, still, there is a distinction: if a member of the SS has a Jew killed in the context of superior orders, that’s one thing; but if he has a Jew killed to cover his embezzlements, or for his own perverted pleasure, as also happens, that’s another thing, that’s a crime. Even if the Jew is to die anyway.”

Sometimes, of course, there’s no ambiguity: for instance, I’m also investigating Koch’s wife, a sexual deviant who had tattooed prisoners killed in order to remove their skin; she used the tanned skins for lampshades or other things like that.

I wasn’t in charge of the case anymore. I had problems with another man, not a camp officer but a Waffen-SS officer, a certain Dirlewanger. A raving lunatic, at the head of a unit of reprieved criminals and poachers. In 1941, I received information that he was conducting so-called scientific experiments, here in the GG, with his friends: he was killing girls with strychnine and watching them die while he smoked cigarettes. But when I wanted to prosecute him, he and his unit were transferred to Byelorussia. I can tell you that he benefits from protection at a very high level of the SS. Finally I was demoted, relieved of my functions, reduced to the rank of SS-Sturmmann, and sent to a field battalion, then to the SS-‘Wiking,’ in Russia.

Before I came, I received a report from the KdS on a Jewish wedding in a work camp. There were more than a thousand guests.”—“I don’t understand.”—“A Jew, an important kapo, got married in this Judenlager. There were astronomical quantities of food and alcohol. SS guards took part. Clearly, there must have been criminal infractions there.”—“Where did that take place?”—“I don’t know. When I arrived in Lublin, I asked Müller; he was very vague. He sent me to the camp of the DAW, but there they didn’t know anything. Then they advised me to go see Wirth, a Kriminalkommissar, you know who he is? And Wirth told me it was true, and that it was his method for the extermination of the Jews: he gave privileges to some, who helped him kill the others; then he killed them too.

Es geht alles vorüber Es geht alles vorbei Zwei Jahre in Russland Und nix ponimai.

Thus, in Buchenwald, he had gathered his first serious evidence of the murders committed by Koch when he had noticed that the same inmate was registered at the same time in two different places: at a given date, the prison register of the Politische Abteilung bore, next to the name of the inmate, the comment “Released, noon,” while the register of the Revier indicated: “Patient deceased at 9:15.” The inmate had in fact been killed at the Gestapo prison, but his killers had tried to make it look as if he had died of illness.

Just like here, with the Einsatz, they have immense warehouses to sort and package all the confiscated goods. I suspect that must give rise to colossal misappropriations and thefts. We were alerted by a package sent from the KL by military post: because of its unusual weight, it was opened; inside, they found three chunks of dental gold, big as fists, sent by a camp nurse to his wife. I calculated that such a quantity of gold represents more than a hundred thousand dead.”

In all of the GG, 130,000 Jews remained, mostly in Lublin, Radom, and Galicia, with Warsaw and Cracow being entirely judenrein, apart from a handful of clandestines. That was still a lot. But the problems would be solved with determination.

From Lublin, the quickest way was to drive through Kielce and then the industrial region of Kattowitz, a flat, gloomy landscape dotted with pine or birch copses, and disfigured by the tall chimneys of factories and blast furnaces that, standing out against the sky, vomited bitter, sinister smoke.

I walked slowly between the rows. Most of the people were talking, in low voices, in French; others, no doubt naturalized Jews or foreigners, in various languages: I listened to the sentences I understood, the questions, the comments; these people had no idea where they were or what was awaiting them. The Kommando Häftlinge, obeying orders, reassured them: “Don’t worry, you’ll see each other afterward, they’ll return your suitcases, tea and soup are waiting for you after the shower.”

The car ran alongside the whitewashed poles and watchtowers; the barracks streamed past, and their perfect alignment made long brown perspectives unfurl, fleeting diagonals that opened up and then intersected with the next one.

“It’s like in Treblinka or Sobibor,” Höss commented. “Until the last minute, we make them think they’re going to be deloused. Most of the time, it happens very calmly.” He began explaining the arrangements: “Over there, we have two other crematoriums, but much bigger: the gas chambers are underground and can accommodate up to two thousand people. Here the chambers are smaller and there are two per Krema: it’s much more practical for small convoys.”—“What is the maximum capacity?”—“In terms of gassing, practically unlimited; the major constraint is the capacity of the ovens. They were conceived especially for us by the Topf firm. These officially have a capacity of seven hundred and sixty-eight bodies per installation per twenty-four-hour period. But you can cram in up to a thousand or even fifteen hundred, if you have to.”

We had already moved on to the Kanada, where the confiscated goods were sorted and warehoused before being distributed, when the chimneys of the crematorium that we had just left began to smoke, spreading that same sweetish, hideous smell I had experienced in Belzec. Höss, noticing my discomfort, commented: “I’ve been used to this smell ever since I was a boy. It’s the smell of cheap church candles. My father was very religious and took me to church often. He wanted me to be a priest. Since there wasn’t enough money for wax, they made the candles from animal tallow, and they gave off the same smell. It’s due to a chemical compound, but I’ve forgotten the name; it was Wirths, our head doctor, who explained it to me.”

He was particularly up in arms about the use of criminals in positions of responsibility in the camp: “I’ve talked about it dozens of times with Obersturmbannführer Höss. Those ‘greens’ are brutes, sometimes psychopaths, they’re corrupt, they reign with terror over the other inmates, and all with the connivance of the SS. It’s inadmissible, not to speak of the fact that the results are lamentable.”—“What would you prefer? Political prisoners, Communists?”—“Of course!” He began to count on his fingers: “One: they are by definition men who have a social conscience. Even if they can be corrupted, they’ll never commit the same atrocities as the common-law prisoners. Do you realize that in the women’s camp the Blockältesten are prostitutes, degenerates! And most of the male block elders keep what they call here a Pipel, a young boy who serves as their sex slave. That’s what we have to rely on here!

However often the factory returned to the camp the inmates unable to work and demanded replacements, as the contract allowed, the new ones would arrive in a scarcely better state. “What happens to the ones you send back?” I asked in a neutral tone. Schenke looked at me with surprise: “I have no idea. That’s not my business. I guess they fix them up in the hospital. Don’t you know?” I pensively contemplated this young, motivated engineer: Was it really possible that he didn’t know? The chimneys in Birkenau were smoking daily eight kilometers away, and I knew as well as anyone else how gossip spread. But after all, if he didn’t want to know, it was possible for him not to know. The rules of secrecy and concealment could serve that purpose too.

However, judging from the treatment of the inmates employed, it didn’t seem that their ultimate fate was a major preoccupation for Schenke or his colleagues. In the midst of the immense, muddy construction site that was to become the factory, columns of scrawny Häftlinge in rags carried at a run, under the shouts and cudgel blows of the kapos, beams or bags of cement far too heavy for them. If a worker, in his big wooden clogs, stumbled and let his load fall, or collapsed himself, the blows redoubled, and blood, fresh and red, gushed onto the oily mud. Some never got up again.

There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.

In this dream I was traveling, at different altitudes, but always as if in the air, I was more like a pure gaze or even a camera than a living being,

Learning that almost everywhere the work progressed less quickly than the engineers had foreseen didn’t surprise me: usually they blamed the bad quality of the goods supplied by the camp. A young engineer from the Hermann-Göring Werke had tried, he told me with a resigned air, to obtain an extra ration for the inmates in Jawizowitz, but management had refused the additional expenditure. As for hitting them less, even this man with progressive ideas sadly acknowledged that it was difficult: if you hit them, the inmates advanced slowly, but if you didn’t hit them, they didn’t advance at all.

Wirths agreed with me in saying that even men who, in the beginning, hit only out of obligation ended up developing a taste for it. “Far from correcting hardened criminals,” he passionately affirmed, “we confirm them in their perversity by giving them full rights over the other prisoners. And we’re even creating new ones among our SS. These camps, with the present methods, are a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations; after the war, when these men go back to civilian life, we’ll find ourselves with a considerable problem on our hands.”

As for the sadistic tendencies, they are very frequent, especially with the guards, and they’re often connected to sexual troubles.”—“Do you have concrete examples?”—“They rarely come to consult me. But it happens. A month ago, I saw a guard who’s been here for a year. A man from Breslau, thirty-seven years old, married, three children. He confessed to me that he had beaten inmates until he ejaculated, without even touching himself. He no longer had any normal sexual relations; when he had leave, he didn’t go back home, he was so ashamed. But before he came to Auschwitz, he told me, he was perfectly normal.”—“And what did you do for him?”—“In the conditions we have here, there’s not much I can do. He would need extensive psychiatric treatment. I’m trying to have him transferred outside the camp system, but it’s hard: I can’t tell the whole story, or he’d be arrested. But he’s a sick man, he needs to be taken care of.”

“And how do you think this sadism develops?” I asked. “I mean with normal men, without any predisposition that would be revealed under these conditions?” Wirths looked out the window, pensive. He took a long while to reply: “That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s difficult to answer. An easy solution would be to blame our propaganda, the way for instance it’s taught here to the troops by Oberscharführer Knittel, who heads the Kulturabteilung: the Häftling is subhuman, he’s not even human, so it’s entirely legitimate to hit him. But that’s not the whole of it—after all, animals aren’t human, either, but none of our guards would treat an animal the way they treat the Häftlinge.

Propaganda does play a role, but in a more complex way. I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the...

He noticed the anthill and said: “I’ll destroy that, Herr Offizier.”—“Absolutely not! Don’t touch it.”—“Oh yes, Stani,” Klaus gushed, “leave them alone. They haven’t done anything to you.” Klaus turned to me: “Where are they going?”—“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” The ants were following the garden wall, then hurrying along the curb, passing behind the cars and motorcycles parked opposite the Kommandantur; then they continued straight ahead, a long wavering line, beyond the camp’s administration building. We followed them step-by-step, admiring their indefatigable determination. When we neared the Politische Abteilung, Klaus looked at me nervously: “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer, but my father doesn’t want me to come this way.”—“Wait for me, then. I’ll tell you.” Behind the barracks of the political department stood the squat mass of the crematorium, a former ammunition bunker covered with earth and vaguely resembling, apart from the chimney, a flattened kurgan. The ants continued toward its somber mass; they climbed up the sloping side, weaving their way through the grass; then they turned and went down a cement section of wall, where the entrance to the bunker formed a recess between the dirt slopes. I kept following them and saw that they went through the half-open door and into the crematorium. I looked around: aside from a guard who was staring at me curiously and a column of inmates pushing wheelbarrows a little farther away, near the extension of the camp, there wa...

The rooms were nicely furnished, with rugs, leather sofas and armchairs, furniture in rich, well-tooled wood, vases with fresh flowers on lace doilies. The lamps gave off a yellow, discreet, almost subdued light. Signed enlargements of photographs of the Reichsführer visiting the camp with Höss or holding his children on his knees decorated the walls. The brandies and wines were of good quality; Höss also offered his guests fine Yugoslavian cigarettes, Ibars. I contemplated with curiosity this rigid, conscientious man, who dressed his children in the clothes of Jewish children killed under his direction. Did Höss think of that as he looked at them? Probably the idea didn’t even enter his mind.

His wife held his elbow and emitted curt, sharp bursts of laughter. I looked at her and thought about her cunt, under her dress, nesting in the lace panties of a pretty young Jewish girl gassed by her husband. The Jewess had long ago been burned along with her own cunt and had gone up in smoke to join the clouds; her expensive panties, which she might have put on especially for her deportation, now adorned and protected the cunt of Hedwig Höss. Did Höss think about that Jewess, when he took off her panties to honor his wife? But maybe he wasn’t much interested anymore in Frau Höss’s cunt, however delicately it was covered: work in the camps, when it didn’t make men insane, often made them impotent. Maybe he kept his own Jewess somewhere in the camp, clean, well fed, a lucky one, the Kommandant’s whore? No, not him: if Höss took a mistress from among the inmates, it would be a German, not a Jew.

I thought about what I had seen in Poland, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, my thinking skimmed over the images and came to rest on the words. The words preoccupied me. I had been wondering how much the differences between German and Russian reactions to mass killings (differences that caused us finally to change our method to make the thing somehow easier, while the Russians seemed, even after a quarter century, to remain unmoved by it) had to do with differences of vocabulary. The word Tod, after all, has the stiffness of a clean, already cold, almost abstract corpse, the finality in any case of the after-death, whereas smiert’, the Russian word, is as heavy and greasy as the thing itself. What about French, in that case? That language, for me, remained dependent on the feminization of death by Latin: What a difference finally between la Mort and all the almost warm, tender images it gives rise to, and the terrible Thanatos of the Greeks! The Germans had at least preserved the masculine (smiert’, it should be said in passing, is also feminine).

There, in the brightness of summer, I thought about that decision we had made, the extraordinary idea of killing all the Jews, whoever they might be, young or old, good or bad, of destroying Judaism in the person of its bearers, a decision that had received the name, now well known, of Endlösung: the “Final Solution.” But what a beautiful word! It had not always been a synonym for extermination, though: since the beginning, people had called for, when it came to the Jews, an Endlösung, or else a völlige Lösung (a complete solution) or also an allgemeine Lösung (a general solution), and according to the period, this meant exclusion from public life or exclusion from economic life or, finally, emigration. Then, little by little, the signification had slid toward the abyss, but without the signifier changing, and it seemed almost as if this final meaning had always lived in the heart of the word, and that the thing had been attracted, drawn in by it, by its weight, its fabulous gravity, into that black hole of the mind, toward the point of singularity: and then we had passed the event horizon, beyond which there is no return.

We still believe in ideas, in concepts, we believe that words designate ideas, but that’s not necessarily true, maybe there aren’t really any ideas, maybe there’s really nothing but words, and the weight peculiar to words. And maybe thus we had let ourselves be led along by a word and its inevitability. Within us, then, there would have been no ideas, no logic, no coherence? There would have been only words, in our oh so peculiar language, only that word, Endlösung, its streaming beauty? For, really, how could o...

This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that…,” “the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung, the “steppification” of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses. Man lebt in seiner Sprache, wrote Hanns Johst, one of our best National Socialist poets: “You live in your language.

KL Auschwitz, where a Häftling assigned to heavy labor was supposed to receive, per day, 350 grams of bread, half a liter of ersatz, and a liter of potato or turnip soup, with the addition, four times a week, of 20 grams of meat in the soup. The inmates assigned to light work or to the infirmary obviously received less; there were also all kinds of special rations, such as those for children in the family camp or for inmates selected for medical experiments. To summarize the situation, roughly: an inmate assigned to heavy labor officially received about 2,150 calories per day and, for light work, 1,700. Now, without even knowing if these norms were applied, they could already be seen to be insufficient: a man at rest needs, depending on his size and weight, and taking environment into account, a minimum of 2,100 calories per day to stay in good health, and a man who works, 3,000. So the inmates could only waste away, all the more so since the balance between fats, carbohydrates, and proteins was far from being respected: 6.4 percent of the ration, at most, consisted of proteins, whereas the requirement ought to be 10 percent, or even 15 percent.

“I will explain: the WVHA presently spends, let’s say, one point five reichsmarks per day for an inmate capable of carrying out ten percent of the daily work of a German worker. So we need ten inmates, or fifteen reichsmarks per day, to replace a German. But what if, by spending two reichsmarks per day for an inmate, we could give him back his strength, increase the period during which he’s fit for work, and thus train him correctly? In that case, it would be conceivable that an inmate could, after a few months, provide fifty percent of the work of his German counterpart: thus, we would need no more than two inmates, or four reichsmarks per day, to carry out the job of one German.

As we surely knew, the inmates generally arrived in the factories in a feeble condition, and often, exhausted after only a few weeks, they had to be sent back to the camp. Their training required a minimum of several weeks; there was a shortage of instructors, and they didn’t have the means to train new groups every month. What’s more, for the slightest job requiring even a minimum level of qualification, at least six months had to go by before output reached a satisfactory level: and few inmates lasted that long.

“What you are saying,” he said, as if thinking out loud, “is that the strongest inmates will always find a way to steal some of the rations of the weaker inmates, and so to survive. But in a way, isn’t it in our own interest for the weakest inmates not to get their complete ration? Once they’ve passed a certain level of weakness, automatically so to speak, their rations get stolen, so they eat even less and die faster, and so we save on their food. As to what is stolen from them, that strengthens the inmates who are already stronger, so that they work better. It’s simply the natural mechanism of survival of the fittest; in the same way, a sick animal succumbs quickly to predators.”

The apartment was dark, with the musty, stale smell of old people’s apartments. I had always wondered where this smell came from. Would I smell that way too, if I ever lived long enough? Strange idea. Today, in any case, I don’t think I smell; but one can never smell one’s own odor, they say.

“In principle, dear Doktor, there are no inmates who don’t work. There are only sick inmates: but if they are fed even less than they are now, they would have no chance to recover and become fit for work again. In that case, might as well not feed them at all; but then the death rate would increase again.”—“Yes, but what I mean is that you must keep the women and the children somewhere? So they must be fed too?” I stared at him without replying. Weinrowski too remained silent. Finally I said: “No, Doktor. We don’t keep the women, the elderly, or the children.” Hohenegg opened his eyes wide and looked at me without replying, as if he wanted me to confirm that I had indeed said what I had said. I nodded.

For it would be a mistake, a serious one, in my opinion, to think that the moral sense of the Western powers differs so fundamentally from our own: after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn’t become one by chance, and doesn’t remain one by chance, either. The people of Monaco, or the inhabitants of Luxembourg, can afford the luxury of a certain political uprightness; it’s a little different for the English. Wasn’t it a British administrator, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, who in 1922 advocated administrative massacres to ensure the security of the colonies, and bitterly regretted that the political situation in the Home Islands rendered these salutary measures impossible?

Or, if like some people, you want to charge all our sins to the account of anti-Semitism alone—a gross mistake, in my opinion, but a seductive one for many—wouldn’t you have to acknowledge that France, on the eve of the Great War, went much further in this domain than us (not to mention the Russia of the pogroms!)? I hope, by the way, that you won’t be too surprised that I thus discount anti-Semitism as a fundamental cause of the massacre of the Jews: that would be forgetting that our extermination policies went much further. By the time of our defeat—and far from wanting to rewrite History, I would be the first to acknowledge it—we had already, aside from the Jews, completed the destruction of all the German incurable physically and mentally handicapped, of most of the Gypsies, and of millions of Russians and Poles.

You must think I’m explaining all this to you rather coldly: that’s simply in order to demonstrate to you that the destruction by our deeds of the people of Moses did not stem solely from an irrational hatred of the Jews—I think I’ve already shown how poorly the emotional type of anti-Semite was regarded by the SD and the SS in general—but above all from a firm, well-reasoned acceptance of the recourse to violence to resolve the most varied social problems, in which, moreover, we differed from the Bolsheviks only by our respective evaluations of the categories of problems to be resolved: their approach being based on a horizontal reading of social identity (class), ours on a vertical one (race), but both equally deterministic (as I think I’ve already stressed) and reaching similar conclusions in terms of the remedy to be employed.

What could be more logical, then, than to say: Well, then, if that’s the way it is, if it’s just to sacrifice the best of the nation, to send to their deaths the most patriotic, the most intelligent, the most devoted men, those most loyal to our race, and all in the name of the salvation of the nation—and if that was all for naught—and if their sacrifice is spat upon—then, what right to life should the worst elements have, the criminals, the insane, the retarded, the asocials, the Jews, not to mention our external enemies?

New solutions were necessary, and they were found, as man always finds the solutions he needs, as the so-called democratic countries too would have found them, if they had needed them. But then why, you might ask today, the Jews? What do the Jews have in common with your lunatics, your criminals, your contagious? Yet it’s not hard to see that, historically, the Jews constituted themselves as a “problem,” by wanting to remain apart at all costs. Didn’t the first writings against the Jews, those of the Greeks of Alexandria, long before Christ and theological anti-Semitism, accuse them of being an asocial people, of violating the laws of hospitality, the main foundation and political principle of the ancient world, in the name of their food prohibitions, which prevented them from eating at other people’s houses or from receiving them as guests, from being hosts? Then, of course, there was the religious question. I am not seeking here, as some might think, to make the Jews responsible for their catastrophe; I’m simply trying to say that a certain aspect of European history, unfortunate according to some, inevitable according to others, has made it so that even in our days, in times of crisis, it is natural to turn against the Jews, and that if you become involved in a reshaping of society through violence, sooner or later the Jews will end up on the receiving end—sooner, in our case, later, in the Soviets’—and that this is not entirely by chance.

had myself driven to the Schloss Posen, admiring on the way the blue belfry and the arcaded loggia of the city hall, then the many-colored façades of the narrow houses of burghers crowded onto the Old Square, reflections of many centuries of subtly fanciful architecture, until this fugitive morning pleasure collided with the castle itself, a vast pile of blocks abutting a large empty square, crude and bristling with pointed roofs and a tall buttressed tower propped against it, massive, proud, severe, dreary, in front of which the penant-bearing Mercedes of the dignitaries were lining up one by one.