Steve Tem - Ubo

The young man looked alarmed. “Oh no, Herr Reichsführer. Everyone was checked beforehand.”

“Make sure,” he whispered. “Shoot them if necessary.”

Peering around them, Heinrich saw something on one of the counters that made him gasp: a bloody rabbit carcass, waiting patiently to be fully butchered. He shuddered, his belly twisting in knots. Vaguely, he heard one of his men explaining how they could not close the door to the kitchen, but they had found a mattress in one of the rooms. They would stuff it in front of the door.

He scurried back toward the podium, trying to leave the image of the butchered animal behind him. He had no tolerance for such things—for him a meal was ruined if he was reminded that animals had been slaughtered.

He could never understand how a hunter received pleasure from shooting an innocent creature. Every animal had a right to live. The Buddhist monks had the right idea. They carried a bell with them to keep the woodland animals away so that no harm might come to them.

He was rattled, but he went on to discuss the evacuation of Kharkov, still hearing things out in the crowd and glimpsingmovement. Why couldn’t the child at least lie still until Heinrich was finished?

“An element basic to an overall evaluation is the question of Russian population figures. That is the great riddle… 400 times 10,000 men, or 400 new divisions. I calculate this in approximately the following manner: the Russians have already drafted all men born in 1926, and some of the men born in 1927…”

The man clearly loved his dates and figures, his theories of population. But those thoughts were not music—they were like sharp rocks rolling around inside Daniel’s head. “… amount to 1.5 and 1.8 men respectively, while our men born in the same years amount to only 500,000 to 600,000 respectively, that is, that is… the subhumans …”

They took a break. It was very warm in the room, “Could someone open the windows?”

He took a few steps away. He could smell the boy—that’s what he had smelled earlier. That Jew flesh, that dead Jew flesh. He would never be able to get the smell completely scrubbed off. He should stop the speech. He should send his men out into the audience to find the dead Jew boy and drag him outside. It was the only way to be sure. But what if the boy had friends, collaborators? It was a sad thing, but Heinrich could trust no one.

He calmed himself. He began again. “America is waging a war on two fronts, even more than England: the Pacific…”

What was that? He turned his head. “What’s going on?” he asked. “America is waging…” He stopped and repeated himself again.

He fell back into his notes, his speech. He tried to keep his eyes down. But he kept looking up, and finding the boy’s eyes burning like twin stars in the shadows, hiding behind the men, his men.

“The Slav is never able to build anything himself. In the long run, he’s not capable of it… with the exception, therefore, of an Attila, a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane, a Lenin, a Stalin—the mixed race of the Slavs is based on a sub-race with a few drops of blood of our blood, blood of a leading race…”

He was disturbed to see more of the striped pajamas in the gaps between his brave Aryan men. Had the boy brought his friends? There on a pale hand, draped across the shoulder of one of his finest, a gleaming drop of blood. Heinrich was disgusted.

“It’s just as true that he is an uninhibited beast, who can torture and torment other people in ways the Devil would never permit himself to think of. It’s just as true that the Russian, high or low, is inclined to the most perverse of things, even devouring his comrades or keeping his neighbor’s liver in his lunch bag.”

Skinny arms were coming out between the seats. A paleness beyond pale. And yet his men did nothing. They simply sat there.

“It is basically wrong for us to infuse all our inoffensive soul and spirit, our good nature, and our idealism into foreign peoples.”

He could not tell even whether they were male or female. In death all Jews became the same. He was appalled when one pale sexless head placed its lips on the mouth of one of his finest…

“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest.”

At least he had attempted to be efficient.

“Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood.”

The problem was that ordinary men had no appreciation for the larger demands of history.

He read off statistic after statistic. The numbers were spell-binding, possessed of magic. He could tell that his men were uncomfortable. There was nothing more important to him than his men, his brave SS men. They all had some very difficult work to do.

“ Ich will auch ein ganz schweres Kapitel will ich hier vor Ihnen in aller Offenheit nennen . I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it… It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.”

Ausrottung ? Was that the word he wanted to use? Look at them—the way they all sat up, their attention renewed. Yes. Ausrottung .

“I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about—‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one party member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our program—elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew… Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

Heinrich hoped they understood the gift he was attempting to give them. A way for them to look at what he’d asked them to do, this unpleasant yet necessary task, but without guilt or blame. These were good men, SS men of fine character. Hadn’t he always been concerned about their emotional health?

Two years before while visiting Minsk he’d asked to see a shooting operation. Originally it had seemed the simplest way to handle their Jewish problem. Just shoot them. Commander Nebe arranged the execution of 98 men and two women by an einsatzgruppe unit for his benefit.

Before the execution he’d walked up to one of them. He’d asked him point blank, “Are you a Jew?”

The man had stared at him as if trying to think of a good reply. Finally he’d said “yes.”

“Are both your parents Jews?”

Again he’d replied, “yes.”

“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

The Jews had to jump into an open grave like an upside down triangle and lie face down along the apex. One or two rows of Jews would be shot, and then the next group would have to lie down on top of the dead ones in order to be shot by the soldiers standing along the grave’s edge.

He’d made the mistake of stepping right up to the edge and peering in.