The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

I examined the coffered, multicolored ceiling made of precious wood, with a polychrome head in relief set into each square—bearded soldiers, hat-wearing burghers, feathered courtiers, coquettish ladies—all contemplating vertically, impassive, the strange invaders below them.

Schellenberg had the habit of calling people he didn’t like whores, and this term suited him well—and when I think about it, it’s true that the insults people prefer, the ones that come most spontaneously to their lips, often in the end reveal their own hidden faults, since they naturally hate what they most resemble.

This idea stayed with me all evening, and when I was back home, late at night, a little drunk perhaps, I took down from a shelf an anthology of the Führer’s speeches that belonged to Frau Gutknecht and began leafing through it, looking for the most virulent passages, especially on the Jews, and as I read them I wondered if, when he said, The Jews lack ability and creativity in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating, or else The Jew’s entire building will collapse if he’s refused a following, or They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They only got anywhere through the simplemindedness of those around them, or We can live without the Jew. But he cannot live without us, the Führer, without knowing it, was really describing himself. Yet this man never spoke in his own name, so the accidents of his personality counted for little: his role was almost that of a lens, he captured and concentrated the will of the Volk to bring it into focus always at the right point. Thus, even if in those passages he was speaking about himself, wasn’t he speaking about us all?

Sensing my gaze, she had looked at me: under high-arched, thin eyebrows, she had dark, almost black eyes, asymmetrical and Assyrian (but perhaps this last likeness only came to my mind through assonance).

He set out into the undergrowth. It was quite dense; we had to go around the bushes, it was impossible to walk straight; drops of water streamed from the leaves and splattered onto our hats and hands; on the ground, the dead, wet leaves gave off a strong odor of earth and humus—beautiful, rich, and invigorating, but it brought unhappy memories to my mind. A sudden burst of bitterness invaded me: so this is what they’ve turned me into, I said to myself, a man who can’t see a forest without thinking about a mass grave.

“It’s surprising that you don’t like hunting,” Speer commented. Absorbed in my thoughts, I answered without thinking: “I don’t like killing, Herr Reichsminister.” He gave me a curious look, and I explained: “It’s sometimes necessary to kill out of duty, Herr Reichsminister. Killing for pleasure is a choice.” He smiled: “As for me, thank God, I’ve done nothing but kill for pleasure. I’ve never been to war.”

“Rhodes said once: The colonizer can do no wrong; whatever he does becomes right. It is his duty to do what he wants. It is this principle, strictly applied, that won Europe its colonies, its domination over inferior peoples. It’s only when the corrupt democracies wanted to mix in, to give themselves a good conscience, hypocritical principles of morality, that the decline began. You’ll see: whatever the outcome of this war, France and Great Britain will lose their colonies. Their grip has slackened, they won’t be able to close their fists anymore. It’s Germany now that has picked up the torch.

Around seven o’clock, conversations trailed off, people began to eye the clock over the bar: ten minutes later the sirens started up, then the flak, violent and close. The manager had come to assure us that the bar also served as a shelter; all the hotel clients came downstairs, and soon there was no more room. The ambiance became cheerful and animated: as the first bombs got closer, the Georgian went back to the piano and dove into a jazz tune; women in evening gowns got up to dance, the walls and chandeliers trembled, glasses fell from the bar and shattered, you could scarcely hear the music beneath the explosions, the air pressure became unbearable, I drank, several women, hysterical, laughed, another tried to kiss me, then burst out sobbing. When it was over, the manager handed out a round on the house.

“Do you know why we hate the Jews? I’ll tell you. We hate the Jews because they’re a thrifty, prudent people, greedy not just for money and security but also for their traditions, their knowledge, and their books, incapable of giving and spending, a people that doesn’t know war. A people that just knows how to accumulate, never to waste. In Kiev you said the murder of the Jews was a waste. Well, precisely, by wasting their lives the way you throw rice at a wedding, we’ve taught them expense, we’ve taught them war. And the proof that it’s working, that the Jews are beginning to learn the lesson, is Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bialystok, it’s the Jews who are becoming warriors again, who are becoming cruel, who also are becoming killers. I find that very beautiful. We’ve made them into an enemy worthy of us. The Pour la Semite”—he struck his chest at the heart, where the Jews sew the star—“is picking up value again. And if the Germans don’t pull themselves together like the Jews, instead of moaning, they’ll just get what they deserve. Vae victis.”

She too, when she looked at me, must have had similar thoughts, or rather women’s thoughts, different from men’s, in their tonality and color probably more than in their content, difficult to imagine for a man, even me. I pictured them this way: Is it possible I will enter this man’s bed someday, give myself to him? To give oneself, a strange phrase in our language; but the man who doesn’t grasp its full extent should try in turn to let himself be penetrated, it will open his eyes.

I’m not satisfied with stagnating in back offices. I’m a real National Socialist, I am. And Bormann too, in his own way. Your Speer, I’m not so sure. He has talent, but I don’t think he’s very devoted to the regime he’s serving.” I smiled again, thinking about Schellenberg. Thomas went on: “The more difficult things become, the more we’ll be able to count only on the real National Socialists. The rats are all going to start to jump ship. You’ll see.”

In fact, deep in the hold of the Reich, the rats were getting agitated, squealing, swarming, bristling with a formidable anxiety. Ever since Italy’s defection, tensions with our other allies let networks of fine cracks appear on the surface of our relations. Each, in his own way, was beginning to look for a way out, and that way was not German.

Before reaching my present position, I had, naïvely no doubt, thought that major decisions were made on the basis of ideological correctness and rationality. I now saw that, even if that remained partially true, many other factors were involved, conflicts of bureaucratic precedence, special interests, or the personal ambition of some.

It had always seemed to me that these lines of Coventry Patmore would be borne out: The truth is great, and shall prevail, / When none cares whether it prevail or not; and that National Socialism could be nothing but the common search for this truth, in good faith.

I have changed. When I was young, I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what it should be and what it actually was, and about my own place in that world; and with all the madness and the arrogance of that youth, I had thought it would always be so; that the attitude induced by my analysis would never change; but I had forgotten, or rather I did not yet know, the force of time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological confusion, my inability to take a clear position on the questions I was dealing with, and to hold to it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground away from under my feet. Such a fatigue has no end, only death can put an end to it, it still lasts today, and for me it will always last.

The day before, the Americans had launched their first daytime raid on Berlin; it was a very small raid, there were just thirty or so bombers, and Goebbels’s press had crowed about the minimal damage, but these bombers, for the first time, came accompanied by long-range fighter planes, a new weapon that was terrifying in its implications, since our own fighter planes had been driven back with losses, and you had to be a fool not to understand that this raid was just a test, a successful test, and that from then on there would be no more respite, neither by day nor on nights with a full moon, and that the front was everywhere now, all the time. The failure of our Luftwaffe, incapable of mounting an effective counterattack, was complete.

He quickly passed over the failure of ghettoization and criticized the inefficiency and confusion of the mobile operations: “Whatever the successes racked up, they remain sporadic, they allow too many Jews to escape, to reach the woods to swell the ranks of the partisans, and they sap the morale of our men.”

As for the Judenräte, they permit a considerable savings in personnel, and they harness the Jews themselves to the task of their destruction. Of course, these Jews have their own aims, their own dreams. But the dreams of Jews serve us too. They dream of grandiose corruptions, they offer us their money, their property. We take this money and this property and we pursue our own task. They dream of the economic needs of the Wehrmacht, of the protection provided by work certificates, and we, we use these dreams to feed our armaments factories, so that we are offered the labor we need to build our underground complexes, and also to get the weak and the old, the useless mouths, handed over to us. But understand this too: the elimination of the first one hundred thousand Jews is much easier than getting rid of the last five thousand. Look at what happened in Warsaw, or during the other rebellions that Standartenführer Hauser told us about. When the Reichsführer sent me the report on the fighting in Warsaw, he noted that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Jews in a ghetto could fight like that.

He knew that the strongest Jews, the toughest, the cleverest, the wiliest, would escape all selections and would be the hardest to destroy. And it is precisely those who form the vital reservoir from which Jewry could spring back, the germ cell for Jewish regeneration, as the late Obergruppenführer said.

I remarked favorably on Eichmann’s speech. But Six, who never abandoned his glum, depressed air, thought much more negatively of it: “Intellectually uninteresting. He’s a relatively simple man, not particularly gifted. Of course, he is snappish, and he’s good at what he does, within the limits of his specialization.”—“Precisely,” I said, “he’s a good officer, motivated and talented in his way. In my opinion, he could go far.”—“That would surprise me,” Thomas dryly interrupted. “He’s too stubborn. He’s a bulldog, a gifted executor. But he has no imagination. He is incapable of reacting to events outside his field, of evolving. He built his career on Jews, on the destruction of Jews, and for that he’s very efficient. But once we’ve done with the Jews—or else if the wind shifts, if the time comes no longer to destroy Jews—then he’ll be unable to adapt, he’ll be lost.”

it was a mess, genuine havoc, due to which in the end most of the deported Jews died, right away I mean, gassed even before they could be put to work, for very few of those who reached Auschwitz were fit, considerable losses, 70 percent perhaps, no one is really sure, and because of which people after the war believed, and this is understandable, that it was the true aim of the operation, to kill all those Jews, those women, those old people, those chubby healthy children, and thus people couldn’t understand why the Germans, when they were losing the war (though the specter of defeat may not have been so clear, at the time, from the German standpoint at least), still persisted in massacring Jews, in mobilizing considerable resources, men and trains, especially, to exterminate women and children, and thus since people couldn’t understand, they attributed it to the anti-Semitic madness of the Germans, to a delirium of murder that was very remote from the thinking of most of the participants, for in fact, for me as well as for so many other functionaries and specialists, the stakes were essential, crucial, to find labor for our factories, a few hundred thousand workers who might have let us reverse the course of things,

in short, few of us deliberately wanted what happened, and yet, you’ll say, it happened, it’s true, and it’s also true that we sent all those Jews to Auschwitz, not just the ones who could work, but all of them, knowing perfectly well that the old people and the children would be gassed, and so we return to the initial question, why this obstinacy to empty Hungary of its Jews, given the conditions of war and all that, and there, of course, I can only put forward hypotheses, for it wasn’t my personal objective, or rather, I’m not being precise here, I know why we wanted to deport (at the time we said evacuate) all the Jews from Hungary and kill those unfit for work immediately, that was because our authorities, the Führer, the Reichsführer, had decided to kill all the Jews in Europe, that is clear, we knew that, just as we knew that even those who would be put to work would die sooner or later, and the why of all that is a question I’ve talked a lot about and to which I still don’t have an answer, people, in those days, believed all sorts of things about the Jews, the bacillus theory like the Reichsführer and Heydrich, cited at the Krummhübel conference by Eichmann, but for whom in my opinion it must have been a purely theoretical construct, the argument of Jewish uprisings, espionage or fifth column for our enemies who were getting closer, an argument that obsessed a large part of the RSHA and even preoccupied my friend Thomas, the fear too of Jewish omnipotence, in which ...

even if, objectively, there was no doubt about the final aim, it wasn’t with this aim in mind that most of the participants were working, it wasn’t that which motivated them and drove them to work so energetically and single-mindedly, it was a whole gamut of motivations, and even Eichmann, I’m convinced, he had a very harsh attitude but at bottom it was the same to him whether or not the Jews were killed, the only thing that counted, for him, was to show what he could do, to prove his worth, and also to use the abilities he had developed, for the rest of it, he didn’t give a fuck, either about industry or about the gas chambers for that matter, the only thing he did give a fuck about was that no one fucked with him,

the specialists in the Ministry of Food saw the evacuation of the Jews by the RSHA as a measure that would allow Hungary to free up a surplus of wheat for Germany, corresponding to our needs, and as for the fate of the evacuated Jews, who in principle would have to be fed elsewhere if they weren’t killed, that didn’t concern this young and all in all pleasant expert, a little obsessed with his figures though, for there were other departments in the Ministry of Food to take care of that, feeding the inmates and other foreign workers in Germany, that wasn’t his business, and for him the evacuation of the Jews was the solution to his problem, even if it became someone else’s problem in turn. And he wasn’t the only one, this man, everyone was like him, I too was like him, and you too, in his place, you would have been like him.

His views weren’t always original, but they were solidly documented and he could work them into a coherent narrative, which is the foremost quality of the historical imagination.

I remember Hunsche, for example, a Regierungsrat, that is, a career civil servant, a jurist with an accountant’s mentality, the little gray man you never notice behind the desk of a bank where he patiently shuffles paper as he waits till he can draw his pension and go out in a cardigan knitted by his wife and grow Dutch tulips, or else paint Napoleonic lead soldiers, which he will arrange lovingly, in perfect rows, nostalgic for the lost order of his youth, in front of a plaster model of the Brandenburg Gate, what do I know of the dreams that haunt this sort of man? And there, in Budapest, ridiculous in a uniform with an extra-baggy pair of riding breeches, he smoked expensive cigarettes, received Jewish leaders with his dirty boots resting on a velvet armchair, and shamelessly indulged his slightest whims.

When I watched him prepare orders for the men in the transit camps—the evacuations had begun—I wondered if, as he appended his signature, he didn’t get hard under the table.

I went to Auschwitz. I arrived at night, by the Vienna-Cracow train; well before the station, to the left of the train, you could see a line of points of white light, the barbed-wire spotlights perched on whitewashed poles, and behind that line, more darkness, an abyss giving off that abominable stench of burned flesh, which wafted through the car. The passengers, mainly soldiers or functionaries returning to their posts, crowded around the windows, often with their wives. Comments flew: “It’s burning nicely,” a civilian said to his wife.

The entire rear of the camp was dominated by fire and smoke, even beyond the quiet expanse of the Birkenwald. At night, endless columns of women, children, and old people kept coming up from the ramp along a long barbed-wire corridor, toward Kremas III and IV, where they would wait their turn patiently under the birch trees, and the beautiful light of the setting sun skimmed the treetops of the Birkenwald, stretched to infinity the shadows of the rows of barracks, made the dark gray of the smoke gleam with the opalescent yellow of Dutch paintings, cast gentle reflections on the puddles and pools of water, tinted the bricks of the Kommandantur a bright, cheerful orange, and suddenly I had had enough and I ditched Höss there and went back to the Haus, where I spent the night writing a virulent report on the deficiencies of the camp.

My mouth was dry, I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the pasty coating surrounding it, but I couldn’t even dream of standing up to get some water. I wandered this way for a long time through the dense woods of fever, my body haunted by old obsessions: with the shivers and cramps, a kind of erotic furor traversed my paralyzed body, my anus tingled, I had a painful hard-on, but I couldn’t make the slightest gesture to relieve myself, it was as if I were jerking off with my hand full of ground glass,

we are stronger than other living beings and we do as we please with their lives and their deaths, cows, chickens, ears of wheat are on earth to serve us, and it’s normal that among ourselves we act the same way, that each human group wants to exterminate those who challenge it over land, water, air, why, indeed, treat a Jew better than a cow or a Koch’s bacillus, if we could, and if the Jew could he’d do the same with us, or with others, to guarantee his own life, that’s the law of all things, the permanent war of all against all, and I know there’s nothing original about this thought, that it’s almost a commonplace of biological or social Darwinism, but that night in my fever its force of truth struck me as never before or since, stimulated by that dream where humanity succumbed to another organism whose life power was greater than our own, and I understood of course that this rule was true for everyone, that if others turned out to be stronger than we, they would do to us in turn what we had done to others, and that faced with these drives, the frail barriers that men erect to try to regulate common life, laws, justice, morality, ethics count for little, that the slightest fear or the slightest strong surge bursts them like straw fences, but that then too those who took the first step should not expect that the others, when their time comes, will respect justice or the laws, and I was afraid, for we were losing the war.

I felt like the victim of a shipwreck who, after a fierce, exhausting battle with the sea, finally lets himself roll onto the sand of a beach: maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. But that’s a bad comparison, for a shipwrecked person swims, fights to survive, and I hadn’t done anything, I had let myself be carried along and it was only death that hadn’t wanted me.

I contemplated with horror the long dark corridor, the tunnel leading from the depths of the past to the present moment. What had become of the infinite plains that opened up before us when, just out of childhood, we approached the future with energy and confidence? All that energy seemed to have served only to build ourselves a prison, a gallows, even.

In my relations, as I may have said, I always took care to avoid intellectuals or men of my social class: they always wanted to talk, and had an annoying tendency to fall in love. With Mihaï, I made an exception, but there weren’t too many risks; he was a cynic, frivolous and amoral. He had a little house west of Charlottenburg; I let him invite me over there the first night, after dinner, under the pretext of having a last drink, and I spent the night there. Beneath his eccentric mannerisms, he had the hard, taut body of an athlete, no doubt inherited from his peasant origins, brown, curly, luxuriant body hair, a rough, male odor. It greatly amused him to have seduced an SS officer: “The Wehrmacht or the Auswärtiges Amt, they’re too easy.” I saw him again from time to time. Sometimes I went to see him after dining with Helene; I used him brutally, as if to wash her silent desires out of my head, or my own ambiguity.

When, back from Hungary, I told her about the atrocities of Nyíregyháza (the Third Armored Corps had retaken the city from the Russians at the end of October, and had found women of all ages raped, parents nailed alive to doors in front of their mutilated children; and these had been Hungarians, not Germans), she looked at me for a long time, then said gently: “And in Russia, was it very different?” I didn’t say anything. I looked at the extraordinarily thin wrists her sleeves revealed; I could easily have looped my thumb and index finger around them. “I know their revenge will be terrible,” she said then. “But we’ll have deserved it.”

In the summer, the hurried, belated evacuation of KL Lublin had caused us a lot of concern: the Soviets had taken the installations intact, with the warehouses full, grist for the mill of their atrocity propaganda.

Furthermore—and this worried me even more after my experiences in October and November—Boesenberg’s plan anticipated an evacuation of the camps on foot, with the inmates having to walk between fifty-five and sixty-three kilometers before being put on trains in Gleiwitz and Loslau. This plan was logical: the war situation anticipated by the plan wouldn’t allow full use of the railroads close to the front; in any case the rolling stock was desperately scarce (in all of Germany, only some two hundred thousand cars were left, a loss of more than 70 percent of the railway equipment in two months).

I would come home at night under a dark sky, a heavy, gray mass; beyond it, snow fell sometimes like a sheet on the distant villages, and beyond that a delicate sky, blue and pale yellow, with just a few clouds of muted purple, rimmed by the light of the setting sun, colored the snow and the ice of the marshes that soak the Polish earth.

The night of December 31, the Haus organized a quiet celebration for the officers passing through and some camp officers: people sang melancholy carols, the men drank slowly and spoke in low voices; everyone understood it was the last New Year’s Eve of the war, and that it wasn’t very likely the Reich would survive till the next one.

although he said he understood my aims, he maintained that no inmate should, naturally, fall alive into the hands of the Russians, and thought that these two constraints were not incompatible. He was probably right in principle, but for my part I was worried—rightly so, as we will see—that overly severe orders would rouse the brutality of the camp guards, made up in this sixth year of the war from the dregs of the SS, men too old or too sick to serve at the front, Volksdeutschen who barely spoke German, veterans suffering from psychiatric disorders but deemed fit for service, alcoholics, drug addicts, degenerates clever enough to have avoided the punitive battalion or the firing squad.

A dozen days went by like this in anxious tranquility, punctuated by bureaucratic quarrels.

Finally, after this brief respite, the Soviets launched the long-dreaded offensive from their bridgeheads over the Vistula. Our meager covering forces were swept aside. The Russians, during their pause, had accumulated incredible firepower; their T-34s rushed in columns across the Polish plains, smashing our divisions, imitating our 1941 tactics with brio; in many places, our troops were surprised by enemy tanks when they thought the lines were a hundred kilometers away.

For my part, I had done everything I thought possible: stored cans of gasoline, sandwiches, and rum in our two vehicles, and destroyed all the copies of my reports. On the night of the seventeenth, I was summoned by Bär along with all the other officers; he announced that according to Schmauser’s instructions, all fit inmates would be evacuated, by foot, starting the following morning: the roll call under way that night would be the last one.

“The warehouses are full,” he assured me. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to have blankets, boots, coats distributed.” But Bär, whom I found around 2:00 a.m. at the Kommandantur in Birkenau in the process of planning the order of departure for the columns, didn’t seem to be of that opinion. “The goods stored are the property of the Reich. I have no orders to distribute them to the inmates. They’ll be evacuated by truck or by train, when possible.” Outside, it must have been ten degrees below zero, the lanes were frozen over, slippery.

At the Stammlager and in Birkenau, the columns were pouring out of the camp. The Häftlinge, their feet wrapped in whatever they’d been able to find, were walking slowly, at a shuffling pace, surrounded by SS guards and led by well-fed, warmly dressed kapos. All those who had one had taken their blanket, which they generally wore draped over their heads, a little like Bedouins; but that was all. When I asked, I was told they had received a piece of sausage and bread for three days; no one had received any orders about clothes.

Everywhere, I noticed abuses: the guards had prisoners pushing carts loaded with their things, or else forced them to carry their suitcases. Here and there by the side of the road I noticed a corpse lying in the snow, the head frequently bloody;

The points I visited turned out to be insufficient in any case: a barn or a school, for two thousand inmates, sometimes; many of them slept outside, huddled next to each other. I asked that fires be lit, but there was no wood, the trees were too damp and no one had tools to cut them down; where boards or old crates could be found, they made little campfires, but these didn’t last till dawn. No soup had been planned, the inmates were supposed to survive on what had been distributed in the camp; farther on, they assured me, there would be rations. Most of the columns hadn’t gone five kilometers; many were still in the almost deserted camp zone; at this pace, the marches would last ten to twelve days.

The next morning, the columns kept on leaving the camps through the main gates, the guards were still manning the line of watchtowers, order reigned; but a few kilometers farther on, the columns began to grow longer and unravel as the weaker inmates slowed down. More and more corpses could be seen. It was snowing heavily, but it wasn’t too cold, for me in any case, I had seen much worse in Russia, but I was warmly dressed, I was traveling in a heated car, and the guards who had to walk had pullovers, good coats, and boots; as for the Häftlinge, they must have felt pierced through to the bone.

I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward.

They were loading another train when I arrived at the Gleiwitz station. To my great horror, I saw that all the cars were open, already full of snow and ice before the exhausted inmates were driven into them with rifle butts; inside, no water, no provisions, no sanitary bucket. I questioned the inmates: they came from Neu Dachs and hadn’t received anything since their departure from the camp; some hadn’t eaten in four days. Alarmed, I looked at these skeletal phantoms, wrapped in soaking, frozen blankets, standing up, squeezed against each other in the car full of snow.