Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

I spent several weeks in Lublin and also visited the region around it. I went to Himmlerstadt, formerly Zamosc, an excentric Renaissance gem built ex nihilo at the end of the sixteenth century by a rather megalomaniac Polish chancellor. The city had flourished thanks to its advantageous position on the commercial routes between Lublin and Lemberg and between Cracow and Kiev. It was now the heart of the most ambitious project of the RKF, the SS organization in charge, since 1939, of ensuring the repatriation of the Volksdeutschen from the USSR and the Banat, thus bringing about the Germanization of the East: the creation of a Germanic buffer region on the threshold of the Slavic regions, confronting eastern Galicia and Volhynia. I discussed the details of this with Globocnik’s delegate, a bureaucrat from the RKF who had his headquarters in the town hall, a tall baroque tower by the side of the square, its entrance on the upper story reached by a majestic, crescent-moon-shaped double staircase. From November to March, he explained to me, more than a hundred thousand people had been expelled—the able-bodied Poles sent to German factories via the Aktion Sauckel , the others to Auschwitz, and all the Jews to Belzec. The RKF aimed to replace them with Volksdeutschen ; but despite all the incentives and the natural wealth of the region, they were having trouble attracting enough settlers. When I asked him if our setbacks in the East discouraged them—this conversation took place in the beginning of July; the great battle of Kursk had just begun—this conscientious administrator looked at me with surprise and assured me that not even the Volksdeutschen were defeatist, and that, in any case, our brilliant offensive would soon reestablish the situation and bring Stalin to his knees. This optimistic man did, though, allow himself to talk about the local economy with some discouragement: despite the subsidies, the region was still far from self-sufficient, and depended entirely on money and food inputs from the RKF; most of the settlers, even the ones who had taken immediate possession of entire working farms, weren’t managing to feed their families; and as for the ones who wanted to set up enterprises, it would take them years to stay afloat. After this visit, I was driven by Piontek south of Himmlerstadt: it was a beautiful region, made of gentle hills with meadows and copses, dotted with fruit trees; it already looked more Galician than Polish, with rich fields spread out beneath a light blue, unvarying sky, broken only here and there by little puffs of white clouds. Out of curiosity, I went on to Belzec, one of the last towns before the district’s border. I stopped near the train station, where there was some bustle: cars and wagons moved up and down the main street, officers from various branches, as well as settlers in threadbare suits, were waiting for a train, farmers who looked more Romanian than German were selling apples on upturned crates by the side of the road. Beyond the track stood brick warehouses, a kind of small factory; and just behind, a few hundred meters farther on, thick black smoke rose up from a birch wood. I showed my papers to an SS noncom standing there and asked him where the camp was: he pointed to the wood. I got back into the car and traveled about three hundred meters on the main road alongside the railway toward Rawa Ruska and Lemberg; the camp stood on the other side of the tracks, surrounded by a forest of pine and birch. They had put tree branches in the barbed-wire fence, to hide the interior; but some of them had already been removed, and one could see through these gaps teams of prisoners, busy as ants, tearing down barracks and, in places, the fence itself; the smoke came from a hidden zone, a little higher up in the back of the camp; despite the lack of wind, a sweetish, nauseating smell made the air reek, and spread even into the car. After everything I had been told and shown, I had thought that the camps of the Einsatz were set up in uninhabited areas, difficult to access; but this one was right next to a little town swarming with German settlers and their families; the main railroad linking Galicia to the rest of the GG, on which civilians and soldiers traveled daily, passed right by the barbed wire, through the horrible smell and the smoke: and all these people, trading, traveling, scurrying in one direction or another, chatted, argued, wrote letters, spread rumors, told jokes.

But in any case, despite the interdictions, the promises of secrecy and Globocnik’s threats, the men of the Einsatz remained talkative. You just had to wear an SS uniform and frequent the bar in the Deutsches Haus, occasionally buying someone a drink, to be quickly informed of everything. The obvious discouragement caused by the military news, clearly decipherable through the optimism radiating from the communiqués, contributed to loosening people’s tongues. When they proclaimed that in Sicily our courageous Italian allies, backed by our forces, are holding firm , everyone understood that the enemy had not been driven back into the sea, and had finally opened a second front in Europe; as for Kursk, anxiety increased as the days passed, for the Wehrmacht, after its initial successes, remained obstinately, unusually silent: and when finally they began to mention the planned implementation of elastic tactics around Orel, even the most obtuse must have understood something was wrong. There were many who ruminated over these developments; and among the loudmouths who ranted every night, it was never hard to find a man drinking alone and in silence, and to engage him in conversation. That’s how one day I began talking with a man in an Untersturmführer’s uniform, leaning on the bar in front of a tankard of beer. Döll—that was his name—seemed flattered that a superior officer would treat him so familiarly; yet he must have been ten years older than me. He pointed to my “Order of the Frozen Meat” and asked me where I had spent that winter; when I answered Kharkov, he relaxed even further. “Me too, I was there, between Kharkov and Kursk. Special Operations.”—“You weren’t with the Einsatzgruppe, though?”—“No, it was something else. Actually, I’m not in the SS.” He was one of those famous functionaries from the Führer’s Chancellery. “Between us, we say T-four. That’s how it’s called.”—“And what were you doing around Kharkov?”—“You know, I was in Sonnenstein, one of the centers for the sick there…” I motioned with my head to show I knew what he meant, and he went on. “In the summer of ’forty-one, they closed it. And some of us, we were considered specialists, they wanted to keep us, so they sent us to Russia. There was a whole delegation of us, it was Oberdienstleiter Brack himself who led us, there were the doctors from the hospital, everything, and we carried out special actions. With gas trucks. We each had a special notice in our pay book, a red piece of paper signed by the OKW, that forbade us from being sent too close to the front: they were afraid we’d fall into the hands of the Russians.”—“I don’t really understand. The special measures, in that region, all the SP measures, those were the responsibility of my Kommando. You say that you had gas trucks, but how could you be carrying out the same tasks as us without our knowing it?” His face took on a belligerent, almost cynical look: “We weren’t carrying out the same tasks. The Jews or the Bolsheviks, over there, we didn’t touch them.”—“So?” He hesitated and drank some more, in long draughts, then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his fingers. “We took care of the wounded.”—“Russian wounded?”—“You don’t understand. Our own wounded. The ones who were too messed up to have a useful life were sent to us.” I understood and he smiled when he saw: he had produced his effect. I turned to the bar and ordered another round. “You’re talking about German wounded,” I finally said, softly. “As I told you. A real shit pile. Guys like me and you, who had given everything for the Heimat , and bang! That’s how they were thanked. I can tell you, I was happy when they sent me here. It’s not very cheerful here, either, but at least it’s not that.” Our drinks arrived. He told me about his youth: he had gone to a technical school; he wanted to be a farmer, but with the crisis he had joined the police: “My children were hungry, it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table every day.” At the end of 1939, he had been assigned to Sonnenstein for the Euthanasia Einsatz. He didn’t know how he had been chosen. “On one hand, it wasn’t very pleasant. But on the other, it wasn’t the front, and the pay was good, my wife was happy. So I didn’t say anything.”—“And Sobibor?” He had already told me that’s where he worked now. He shrugged his shoulders: “Sobibor? It’s like everything, you get used to it.” He made a strange gesture, which made a strong impression on me: with the tip of his boot, he scraped the floor, as if he were crushing something. “Little men and little women, it’s all the same. It’s like stepping on a cockroach.”