Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

The next morning, I took a military shuttle and went up to Simferopol. Ohlendorf welcomed me with his usual politeness, which perhaps lacked warmth, but was suave and pleasant. “I forgot to ask you yesterday how Frau Ohlendorf is doing?”—“Käthe? Fine, thanks. Of course she misses me, but Krieg ist Krieg .” An orderly served us some excellent coffee and Ohlendorf launched into a quick presentation. “You’ll find that the work will be very interesting to you. You won’t have to worry about executive measures, I leave all that to the Kommandos; in any case, the Crimea is already nearly judenrein , and we’ve almost finished with the Gypsies too.”—“All the Gypsies?” I interrupted, surprised. “In the Ukraine, we’re not so systematic.”—“For me,” he replied, “they’re just as dangerous as the Jews, if not more so. In every war, the Gypsies act as spies, or as agents to communicate through the lines. Just read the narratives by Ricarda Huch or Schiller on the Thirty Years’ War.” He paused. “At first, you’ll mostly have to deal with research. We’re going to advance into the Caucasus in the spring—that’s a secret that I recommend you keep to yourself—and since it’s still a mostly unknown region, I’d like to gather some information for the Gruppenstab and the Kommandos, especially about the different ethnic minorities and their relationships among themselves and with the Soviet government. In principle, the same system of occupation will be applied as in the Ukraine; we’ll form a new Reichskommissariat, but of course the SP and the SD have to put their two cents in, and the better backed up those two cents are, the more chances they’ll have of being listened to. Your immediate superior will be Sturmbannführer Dr. Seibert, who is also the Group’s Chief of Staff. Come with me, I’ll introduce you to him, and to Hauptsturmführer Ulrich, who will take care of your transfer.”

I knew Seibert vaguely; in Berlin, he headed the SD Department D (Economics). He was a serious man, sincere, cordial, an excellent economist from the University of Göttingen, who seemed as out of place here as Ohlendorf. The premature loss of his hair had accelerated since his departure; but neither his broad bare forehead nor his preoccupied air nor the old dueling scar that gashed his chin managed to make him lose a kind of adolescent, perpetually dreamy look. He welcomed me kindly, introduced me to his other colleagues, and then, when Ohlendorf had left us, took me to the office of Ulrich, who seemed to me a fussy little bureaucrat. “The Oberführer has a somewhat loose vision of transfer procedures,” he informed me sourly. “Normally, you have to send a request to Berlin, then wait for the reply. You can’t just pick people off the street like that.”—“The Oberführer didn’t find me in the street, he found me in a Kasino,” I pointed out. He took off his glasses and looked at me, squinting: “Tell me, Hauptsturmführer, are you trying to be funny?”—“Not at all. If you really think it isn’t possible, I’ll tell the Oberführer and return to my Kommando.”—“No, no, no,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It’s complicated, that’s all. It will make more paperwork for me. However that may be, the Oberführer has already sent a letter about you to Brigadeführer Thomas. When he receives a reply, if it’s positive, I’ll refer to Berlin. It will take time. Go back to Yalta, then, and then come see me at the end of your leave.”

Dr. Thomas quickly gave his assent. While we waited for Berlin to endorse the transfer, I was “temporarily detached” from Sonderkommando 4a to the Einsatzgruppe D. I didn’t even have to return to Kharkov; Strehlke forwarded to me the few things I had left there. I was quartered in Simferopol in a pleasant pre-Revolutionary middle-class house, emptied of its occupants, on Chekhov Street, a few hundred meters from the Gruppenstab. I dove with pleasure into my Caucasian studies, beginning with a series of books, historical works, traveler’s accounts, anthropological treatises, most of them unfortunately dating back to before the Revolution. This is not the place to expand on the peculiarities of that fascinating region: the interested reader should refer to the libraries or, if he likes, to the archives of the Federal Republic, where he might find, with persistence and a little luck, my original reports, signed by Ohlendorf or Seibert, but identifiable thanks to the dictation sign M.A. We knew very little about present conditions in the Soviet Caucasus. A few Western travelers had still been able to go there in the twenties; since then, even the information provided by the Auswärtiges Amt , our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was pretty scant. To find facts, you had to dig deep. The Gruppenstab had a few copies of a German scientific journal called Caucasica : most of the articles dealt with linguistics, in an extremely technical way, but you could also glean quite a few things from them; Amt VII, in Berlin, had ordered the complete collection. There was also copious Soviet scientific literature, but it had never been translated and was only partly available; I asked a Dolmetscher who wasn’t a complete idiot to read the works available and provide me with extracts and synopses. In terms of intelligence, we had abundant information about the oil industry, the infrastructure, communications, and manufacturing; on the subject of ethnic or political relationships, on the other hand, our files were almost empty. A certain Sturmbannführer Kurreck, from Amt VI, had joined the Group to start up a Sonderkommando Zeppelin, a project of Schellenberg’s: he was recruiting “anti-Bolshevist activists” from the Stalags and the Oflags, often from ethnic minorities, to send them behind the Russian lines for espionage or sabotage. But the program was just getting started and hadn’t yielded anything yet. Ohlendorf sent me to consult the Abwehr. His relations with the AOK, very tense at the beginning of the campaign, had gotten noticeably better ever since the arrival of von Manstein as the replacement for General von Schobert, killed in September in a plane accident. Yet he still couldn’t manage to get along with the Chief of Staff, Oberst Wöhler, who tended to want to treat the Kommandos as units of the Secret Military Police, and refused to call Ohlendorf by his rank, a serious insult. But working relations with the Ic/AO, Major Eisler, were good, and with the CI officer, Major Riesen, excellent, especially since the Einsatzgruppe began actively participating in the anti-partisan struggle. So I went to see Eisler who directed me to one of his specialists, Leutnant Dr. Voss. Voss, an affable man about my age, wasn’t a genuine officer but rather a university researcher seconded to the Abwehr for the duration of the campaign. He came from the University of Berlin, like me; he was neither an anthropologist nor an ethnologist, but a linguist, a profession that, as I would soon find out, could quickly go beyond the narrow problems of phonetics, morphology, or syntax to generate its own Weltanschauung . Voss received me in a little office where he was reading, his feet on a table covered with piled-up books and scattered sheets of paper. When he saw me knock on his open door, without even saluting me (I was his hierarchical superior and he should at least have stood up), he asked me: “Do you want some tea? I have real tea.” Without waiting for a reply he called out: “Hans! Hans!” Then he grumbled: “Oh, where has he gone?” put down his book, got up, went past me and disappeared into the hallway. He reappeared an instant later: “It’s fine. The water’s heating.” Then he said: “But don’t stay standing there! Come in.” Voss had a delicate, narrow face and animated eyes; with his rebellious blond hair, shaved on the sides, he looked like a teenager just out of high school. But his uniform was well tailored, and he wore it with elegance and assurance. “Hello! What brings you here?” I explained the object of my studies. “So the SD is interested in the Caucasus. Why? Are we planning on invading the Caucasus?” At my crestfallen demeanor, he burst out laughing. “Don’t make such a face! Of course I know. In fact, I’m here only for that. I’m a specialist in Indo-Germanic and Indo-Iranian languages, with a subspecialization in Caucasian languages. So everything of interest to me is over there; here I’m just treading water. I learned Tatar, but it’s not of great interest. Fortunately, I found some good scientific works in the library. As our advance progresses I have to gather a complete scientific collection and send it to Berlin.” He burst out laughing. “If we’d remained at peace with Stalin, we could have just ordered them. It would have been pretty expensive, but certainly less than an invasion.” An orderly brought some hot water and Voss took some tea out of a drawer. “Sugar? I can’t offer you any milk, unfortunately.”—“No, thanks.” He prepared two cups, handed me one, and fell back into his chair, one leg raised against his chest. The pile of books partly masked his face and I shifted. “What should I tell you, then?”—“Everything.”—“Everything! You have some time, then.” I smiled: “Yes. I have time.”—“Excellent. So let’s begin with the languages, since I’m a linguist. You should know that the Arabs, in the tenth century, called the Caucasus the Mountain of Languages . It’s just that. A unique phenomenon. No one really agrees on the exact number, since they’re still arguing about certain dialects, especially in Dagestan, but it’s around fifty. If you reason in terms of groups or families of languages, first you have the Indo-Iranian languages: Armenian, of course, a magnificent language; Ossetian, which particularly interests me, and Tat. Of course I’m not counting Russian. Then there are the Turkic languages, which are distributed around the perimeter of the mountains: Karachai, Balkar, Nogai, and Kumyk Turkish to the north, then Azeri and the Meskhetian dialect in the south. Azeri is the language that most resembles the one they speak in Turkey, but it has kept all the old Persian words that Kemal Atatürk purified out of so-called modern Turkish. All these peoples, of course, are leftovers from the Turco-Mongolian hordes that invaded the region in the thirteenth century, or else the remnants of subsequent migrations. And the Nogai Khans reigned for a very long time over the Crimea. You saw their palace in Bakhchisaray?”—“Unfortunately not. It’s in the frontline zone.”—“That’s true. I have a permit, though. The troglodyte complexes are extraordinary too.” He drank a little tea. “Where were we? Ah, yes. You then have by far the most interesting family, which is the Caucasian, or Ibero-Caucasian, family. I’ll stop you right away: Kartvelian, that is Georgian, has no connection to Basque. That was an idea of Humboldt’s, may his great soul rest in peace, and taken up since then, but wrongly. The term Ibero simply refers to the South Caucasian group. What’s more, we’re not even sure that these languages have any connection to each other. We think so—it’s the basic postulate of Soviet linguists—but it’s impossible to demonstrate genetically. At the very most we can outline subfamilies that form genetically related units. For the South Caucasian, that is, Kartvelian, Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz, it’s almost certain. Likewise for Northwest Caucasian: despite the”—he emitted a sort of strange hissing whistle—“of the Abkhaz dialects that are a little perplexing, it’s mainly a question, together with Abaza, Adyghe, and Kabardo-Cherkess, along with Ubykh, which is almost extinct and can still be found only among a few speakers in Anatolia, of a single language with strong dialectal variants. The same goes for Vainakh, which has several forms, of which the main ones are Chechen and Ingush. On the other hand, in Dagestan, it’s still very confusing. We’ve distinguished a few major groups like Avar and the Andi, the Dido or Tsez, the Lak, and the Lesghian languages, but some researchers think that the Vainakh languages are related to them, and others not; and within the subgroups there are major controversies, for instance on the relationship between Kubachi and Dargva; or else on the genetic affiliation of Khynalug, which some prefer to regard as a language-isolate, along with Archi.” I didn’t understand much of this, but I marveled as I listened to him summarizing his material. And his tea was very good. Finally I asked: “Excuse me, but do you know all these languages?” He burst out laughing: “You’ve got to be joking! Can’t you see how old I am? And also, without fieldwork, you can’t do anything. No, I have an adequate theoretical knowledge of Kartvelian, and I’ve studied elements of the other languages, especially of the Northwest Caucasian family.”—“And you know how many languages altogether?” He laughed again. “Speaking a language isn’t the same thing as knowing how to read and write it; and having a precise knowledge of its phonology or its morphology is another thing entirely. To go back to the Northwest Caucasian or Adyghe languages, I’ve done some work on the consonantic systems—but much less on the vowels—and I have a general idea of the grammar. But I’d be incapable of talking with a native speaker. Now, if you consider that in everyday language you rarely use more than five hundred words and a pretty basic grammar, I can probably assimilate pretty much any language in ten or fifteen days. After that, each language has its own difficulties and problems that you have to work through if you want to master it. You could say, if you like, that language as a scientific subject is quite a different thing, in its approach, from language as a tool of communication. A four-year-old Abkhaz kid will be capable of phenomenally complex articulations that I could never reproduce correctly, but I, on the other hand, can then break down and describe, for instance, a plain or labialized alveolo-palatal series, which will mean absolutely nothing to the boy, who has his whole language in his head but can never analyze it.” He thought for a minute. “For example, I once took a look at the consonantic system of a southern Chadian language, but it was just to compare it to that of Ubykh. Ubykh is a fascinating language. They were an Adyghe tribe, or Circassians, as they say in Europe, who were completely driven out of the Caucasus by the Russians, in 1864. The survivors settled in the Ottoman Empire, but mostly lost their language, which was replaced by Turkish or other Circassian dialects. The first partial description of it was made by a German, Adolf Dirr. He was a great pioneer in the description of Caucasian languages: he studied one a year, during his vacations. Unfortunately, during the Great War, he got stuck in Tiflis; he was finally able to escape, but only after losing most of his notes, including the ones on Ubykh that he had collected in 1913, in Turkey. He published what he had managed to keep in 1927, and it was still admirable. After that, a Frenchman, Dumézil, took it up and published a complete description of the language in 1931. Now, Ubykh has the peculiarity of having between eighty and eighty-three consonants, depending on how you count them. For several years people thought that was the world record. Then it was argued that some languages from southern Chad, like Margi, have more. But no conclusions have been reached yet.”