Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

It was also during those first days of March 1943 that Dr. Mandelbrod invited me over for tea.

I had known Mandelbrod and his partner, Herr Leland, for some time. Many years before, after the Great War—and maybe even before it, but I have no way of checking—my father had worked for them (apparently my uncle had also served as an agent for them on occasion). Their relations, from what I had gleaned little by little, went beyond a simple employer-employee relationship: after my father’s disappearance, Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland had helped my mother in her searches, and may also have supported her financially, but that’s not so certain. And they had continued to play a role in my life; in 1934, when I was preparing to break with my mother, to come to Germany, I got in touch with Mandelbrod, who had long been a respected figure within the Movement; he supported me and offered me his help; it was he too who encouraged me to pursue my studies—for the sake of Germany now, though, and not for France—and who organized my enrollment in Kiel as well as my enlisting in the SS. Despite his Jewish-sounding name, he was, like Minister Rosenberg, a pure German of old Prussian stock, with perhaps a drop of Slavic blood; as for Herr Leland, he was of British origin, but his Germanophile convictions had impelled him to turn his back on his native country long before my birth. They were industrialists, but their exact position would be hard to define. They sat on numerous boards, especially that of IG Farben, and held shares in other companies, without their names being linked to any one in particular; they were said to be very influential in the chemical sector (they were both members of the Reichsgruppe for the chemical industry) and also in the metals sector. Moreover, they had been close to the Party ever since the Kampfzeit , and had contributed to financing it when it was starting up; according to Thomas, with whom I had discussed them once before the war, they held positions in the Führer’s chancellery, but were not entirely subordinate to Philipp Bouhler; and they had access to the highest spheres of the Party chancellery. Finally, the Reichsführer-SS had made them honorary SS-Gruppenführers, and members of the Freundeskreis Himmler ; but Thomas, mysteriously, stated that this gave the SS no influence over them, and that any influence there might be worked the other way. He had been very impressed when I told him about my relationship with them, and obviously even envied me a little for having such protectors. Their interest in my career, however, had varied over time: when I had been in effect sidelined, after my 1939 report, I had tried to see them; but that was a busy period, it had taken me several months to get a reply, and it wasn’t until the invasion of France that they invited me to dinner: Herr Leland, as was his custom, remained for the most part taciturn, and Dr. Mandelbrod was mainly concerned with the political situation; my work hadn’t been mentioned, and I hadn’t dared broach the subject myself. I hadn’t seen them again since then. So Mandelbrod’s invitation caught me off guard: What could he want from me? For the occasion, I put on my new uniform and all my decorations. Their private offices occupied the top two floors of a handsome building on Unter den Linden, next to the Academy of Sciences and the headquarters of the Reichsvereinigung Kohle , the Coal Board, where they also played a role. There was no plaque on the entrance. In the lobby, my papers were checked by a young woman with long light brown hair pulled back, who wore charcoal-gray clothes without any insignia, but cut like a uniform, with men’s pants and boots instead of a skirt. Satisfied, she escorted me to a private elevator, which she started up with a key hanging around her neck on a long chain, and accompanied me to the top floor, without a word. I had never come here: in the 1930s, they had another address, and in any case I usually met them in a restaurant or in one of the big hotels. The elevator opened onto a wide reception room furnished in wood and dark leather inset with polished brass and frosted glass decorative elements, elegant and discreet. The woman who escorted me left me there; another woman, in identical costume, took my coat and hung it in a wardrobe. Then she asked me to hand her my service revolver, and holding it with a surprising naturalness in her beautiful carefully manicured fingers, she put it away in a drawer, which she locked shut. I wasn’t made to wait any longer; she led me in through a padded double door. Dr. Mandelbrod was waiting for me at the rear of an immense room, behind a large reddish mahogany desk, his back to a long bay window, also of frosted glass, that let a pale, milky light filter through. He looked even fatter than at our last meeting. Several cats were strolling about the carpets or sleeping on the leather furniture and on his desk. He pointed with his pudgy fingers to a sofa on the left, in front of a low table: “Hello, hello. Have a seat, I’ll be right there.” I had never been able to understand how such a beautiful and melodious voice could emanate from so many layers of fat; it still surprised me. With my cap under my arm, I crossed the room and took a seat, displacing a sleek tabby cat with white paws, who didn’t seem to hold it against me, but gently slipped under the table to settle down elsewhere. I examined the room: all the walls were padded with leather, and aside from the stylish ornaments such as those in the antechamber, there were no decorations, no paintings or photographs, not even a portrait of the Führer. The surface of the low table, on the other hand, was made of superb marquetry, a complex labyrinth in precious wood, protected by a thick glass plate. Only the cat hair clinging to furniture and rugs disfigured this discreet, hushed décor. A vaguely unpleasant smell pervaded the room. One of the cats rubbed against my boots, purring, its tail up; I tried to get rid of it with the tip of my foot, but it didn’t pay any attention. Mandelbrod, in the meantime, must have pressed a hidden button: an almost invisible door opened in the wall to the right of his desk and another woman came in, dressed like the first two, but with completely blond hair. She walked behind Mandelbrod, pulled him back, swiveled him around, and pushed him alongside his desk toward me. I got up. Mandelbrod had in fact gotten fatter; whereas before he got around in an ordinary wheelchair, he was now settled in a vast round armchair mounted on a little platform, like an enormous Oriental idol, placid, bovine, colossal. The woman pushed this massive apparatus without any visible effort, probably by starting up and controlling an electrical system. She set him in front of the low table; I walked round to shake his hand and he scarcely brushed me with the tips of his fingers while the woman left through the door by which she had come in. “Please, do sit down,” he murmured in his beautiful voice. He was dressed in a thick brown wool suit; his tie disappeared beneath a breastplate of flesh hanging from his neck. A rude noise came from beneath him and a horrible smell reached me; I made an effort to remain impassive. At the same time a cat jumped onto his knees and he sneezed, then began caressing it, then sneezed again: each sneeze came like a little explosion that made the cat jump. “I am allergic to these poor creatures,” he sniffled, “but I love them too much.” The woman reappeared with a tray: she came up to us with a measured, assured step, placed a tea service on the low table, attached a tray to Mandelbrod’s armrest, poured us two cups, and again disappeared—all as discreetly and silently as the cats. “There’s milk and sugar,” said Mandelbrod. “Help yourself. I don’t take any.” He examined me for a few minutes: an impish gleam glinted in his little eyes almost drowned beneath folds of fat. “You have changed,” he declared. “The East did you good. You have matured. Your father would have been proud.” These words touched me to the quick: “You think?”—“Certainly. You’ve done some remarkable work: the Reichsführer himself took note of your reports. He showed us the album you prepared in Kiev: your chief wanted to take all the credit for himself, but we knew the idea came from you. In any case that was a trifle. But the reports you wrote, especially these past few months, were excellent. In my opinion, you have a brilliant future before you.” He fell silent and contemplated me: “How is your wound?” he asked finally.—“Fine, Herr Doktor. It’s healed, I just have to rest a little more.”—“And then?”—“I’ll resume my service, of course.”—“And what do you plan on doing?”—“I’m not sure, actually. It will depend on what they offer me.”—“It’s really up to you to receive the offer you like. If you choose wisely, doors will open, I assure you.”—“What are you thinking of, Herr Doktor?” Slowly, he raised his teacup, blew on it, and drank noisily. I also drank a little. “In Russia, I believe you concerned yourself mostly with the Jewish question, isn’t that right?”—“Yes, Herr Doktor,” I said, slightly annoyed. “But not just that.” Mandelbrod was already going on in his measured, melodious voice: “From the position you were in, you no doubt could not appreciate the full extent either of the problem or of the solution being applied to it. You have probably heard rumors: they are true. Since the end of 1941, this solution has been extended to all the countries in Europe, insofar as possible. The program has been operational since the spring of last year. We have already recorded considerable successes, but it is far from over. There is room there for energetic, devoted men like you.” I felt myself blush: “Thank you for your trust, Herr Doktor. But I should tell you: I found that aspect of my work extremely difficult, beyond my strength. I’d rather concentrate now on something that corresponds better to my talents and knowledge, like constitutional law or even legal relations with the other European countries. The construction of the new Europe is a field that attracts me very much.” During my little speech, Mandelbrod had finished his tea; the blond Amazon had reappeared and crossed the room, poured him another cup, and left again. Mandelbrod drank some more. “I understand your hesitations,” he said finally. “Why take on difficult tasks if there are others to do them? That’s the spirit of the time. During the other war, it was different. The more difficult or dangerous a task was, the more men strove to carry it out. Your father, for example, thought that difficulty in itself was reason enough to do a thing, and to do it to perfection. Your grandfather was a man of the same mold. These days, despite all the Führer’s efforts, the Germans are sinking into laziness, indecision, compromise.” I felt the indirect insult like a slap; but something else in what he had said was more important to me: “Excuse me, Herr Doktor. I thought I understood you to say that you knew my grandfather?” Mandelbrod put down his cup: “Of course. He too worked with us, in our early years. An amazing man.” He stretched his swollen hand out to the desk. “Go look, there.” I obeyed. “You see that morocco portfolio? Bring it to me.” I went over and handed it to him. He put it on his knees, opened it, and took out a photograph, which he held out to me. “Look.” It was an old sepia photo, slightly yellowed: three figures side by side, in front of a background of tropical trees. The woman, in the middle, had a chubby little face, still marked by the plumpness of adolescence; the two men wore light summer suits: the one on the left, with narrow somewhat fluid features and a forehead streaked with a lock of hair, also wore a tie; the shirt of the man on the right was open, beneath an angular face, as if engraved in precious stone; even a pair of tinted glasses didn’t manage to hide the joyful, cruel intensity of his eyes. “Which one is my grandfather?” I asked, fascinated, full of anxiety too. Mandelbrod pointed to the man in the tie. I examined him again: unlike the other man, he had secretive, almost transparent eyes. “And the woman?” I asked again, guessing already.—“Your grandmother. Her name was Eva. A superb, magnificent woman.” I actually hadn’t really known either one: my grandmother had died long before my birth, and the rare visits of my grandfather, when I was very little, hadn’t left me any memories. He had died not long after my father’s disappearance. “And who is the other man?” Mandelbrod looked at me with a seraphic smile. “You can’t guess?” I looked at him: “It’s not possible!” I exclaimed. He didn’t stop smiling: “Why? You don’t think I’ve always looked like this, do you?” Confused, I stammered: “No, no, that’s not what I meant, Herr Doktor! But your age…In the photo, you look the same age as my grandfather.” Another cat, who was walking on the carpet, leaped nimbly onto the back of the armchair and climbed onto his shoulder, rubbing against his enormous head. Mandelbrod sneezed again. “In fact,” he said between two sneezes, “I was older than he. But I’ve aged well.” I was still greedily scrutinizing the photo: how many things it could teach me! Timidly, I asked: “Can I keep it, Herr Doktor?”—“No.” Disappointed, I gave it back; he put it away in the portfolio and sent me to replace it on his desk. I came back and sat down. “Your father was an authentic National Socialist,” Mandelbrod declared, “even before the Party existed. People then were living under the sway of wrong ideas: for them, nationalism meant a blind, narrow-minded patriotism, a parochial patriotism, coupled with an immense domestic injustice; socialism, for their adversaries, signified a false international equality of the classes, and a class struggle within each nation. In Germany, your father was among the first to understand that there had to be an equal role, with mutual respect, for all members of the nation, but only within the nation. In their own way, all great societies in history have been national and socialist. Look at Temujin, the excluded one: it was only when he could impose this idea, and unify the tribes on that basis, that the Mongols were able to conquer the world, in the name of this man from nowhere who became the Oceanic Emperor, Genghis Khan. I had the Reichsführer read a book about him, he was very impressed. With immense, fierce wisdom, the Mongols razed everything in their path, to rebuild it all afterward on healthy foundations. The entire infrastructure of the Russian Empire, all the foundations on which the Germans later built, under czars who were in fact also German—it was the Mongols who brought them: the roads, the money, the postal system, customs, the administration. It was only when the Mongols compromised their purity, by taking foreign women generation after generation, and often from among the Nestorians—the most Jewish of Christians—that their empire broke apart and collapsed. The Chinese present an opposite but equally instructive example: they never leave their Middle Kingdom, but absorb and irremediably sinicize any population that enters it, however powerful it may be; they drown the invader in a limitless ocean of Chinese blood. They are very strong. And we shouldn’t forget that when we’ve finished with the Russians, we’ll still have the Chinese to contend with. The Japanese will never resist them, even if they look as if they’re on top today. If not right away, we’ll have to confront them someday in any case, in a hundred, two hundred years. So we might as well keep them weak, prevent them if possible from understanding National Socialism and applying it to their own situation. Do you know, by the way, that the very term National Socialism was coined by a Jew, a precursor of Zionism, Moses Hess? Read his book someday, Rome and Jerusalem , you’ll see. It’s very instructive. And that’s not by chance: what’s more völkisch than Zionism? Like us, they realized that there can be no Volk or Blut without Boden , without land, and so the Jews must be brought back to the land, Eretz Israël , purified of any other race. Of course, those are ancient Jewish ideas. The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists, for almost three thousand five hundred years they’ve been so, ever since Moses gave them a Law to separate them forever from the other peoples. All our great ideas come from the Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it: the Land as promise and as accomplishment, the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of blood. That’s why the Greeks, degenerate, democrats, travelers, cosmopolitans, hated them so much, and that’s why they tried first to destroy them, then, through Paul, to corrupt their religion from within, by detaching it from the soil and from the blood, by making it catholic , that is, universal, by suppressing all the laws that served as a barrier to maintaining the purity of Jewish blood: food prohibitions, circumcision. And that’s also why the Jews, of all our enemies, are the worst, the most dangerous; the only ones who truly deserve being hated. They are our only real competitors, in fact. Our only serious rivals. The Russians are weak, a horde deprived of a center despite the attempts of that arrogant Georgian to impose a ‘National Communism’ on them. And the islanders, British or American, are rotten, corrupt, polluted. But the Jews! Who was it who, in the scientific era, discovered the truth of race by drawing on the age-old intuition of his people, humiliated but unconquered? Disraeli, a Jew. Gobineau learned everything from him. You don’t believe me? Go look.” He pointed to the shelves next to his desk: “There, go look.” I got up again and went over to the shelves: several books by Disraeli stood next to books by Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge, Drumont, Chamberlain, Herzl, and others. “Which one, Herr Doktor? There are many.”—“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. They all say the same thing. Take Coningsby . You read English, don’t you? Page two hundred and three. Begin with But Sidonia and his brethren …Read it out loud.” I found the passage and read: “But Sidonia and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race…. An unmixed race of a first-rate organisation are the aristocracy of Nature.” —“Very good! Page two-thirty-one, now. The fact is, you cannot destroy… He’s talking about the Jews, of course.”—“Yes. The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organisation. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature, which has baffled Egyptian and Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, and Christian Inquisitors. No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it. The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains. ”—“There you have it! Just think that this man, this Jew, was Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister! That he founded the British Empire! A man who, when still unknown, advanced such arguments in front of a Christian Parliament! Come back here. Serve me some more tea, please.” I went back to him and poured him another cup. “Out of love and respect for your father, Max, I have helped you, I have followed your career, I’ve supported you when I could. You owe it to yourself to make him proud, both for his race and for your own. There’s room on this earth for only one chosen people, called on to dominate the others: either it will be them, as the Jew Disraeli and the Jew Herzl wanted, or it will be us. And so we must kill them down to the last one, extirpate their stock. Because even if only ten remain, an intact quorum, or if only two remain, a man and a woman, in a hundred years we’ll have the same problem, and we’ll have to do everything over again.”—“May I ask you a question, Herr Doktor?”—“Ask away, my boy.”—“What is your role in all this, precisely?”—“Leland’s and mine, you mean? It’s a little hard to explain. We don’t have a bureaucratic position. We…we stand by the Führer’s side. You see, the Führer had the courage and the lucidity to make this historic, fatal decision; but, of course, the practical side of things doesn’t concern him. Between that decision and its realization, which has been entrusted to the Reichsführer-SS, there is, however, an immense space. Our task consists of reducing this space. In this sense, we don’t even answer to the Führer, but rather to that space.”—“I’m not sure I entirely understand. But what do you expect from me?”—“Nothing, except that you follow the path that you yourself have traced, to the end.”—“I’m not really sure what my path is, Herr Doktor. I have to think about it.”—“Oh, think! Think. And then call me. We’ll discuss it again.” Another cat was trying to climb up onto my lap, leaving white hairs on the black fabric before I could chase it away. Mandelbrod, without even batting an eyelid, still just as impassive, almost sleeping, emitted another huge fart. The odor made my throat seize up and I breathed in tiny breaths through my mouth. The main door opened and the young woman who manned the reception desk came in, seemingly oblivious to the smell. I got up: “Thank you, Herr Doktor. Please pass on my respects to Herr Leland. Soon, then.” But Mandelbrod seemed already almost asleep; only one of his enormous hands, which was slowly caressing a cat, showed the contrary. I waited for an instant, but he didn’t seem to want to say anything else, so I went out, followed by the girl, who closed the doors without a sound.