The Kindly Ones

What I’ve just written is true, but it is also true that I have loved a woman. Only one, but more than anything in the world. Yet she was precisely the one I was not allowed to have. It is quite conceivable that by dreaming of myself as a woman, by dreaming of myself in a woman’s body, I was still seeking her, I wanted to draw closer to her, I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be her. This is entirely plausible, even if it changes nothing. I have never loved a single one of the boys I slept with, I just used them and their bodies, that’s all. Whereas with her, her love would have fulfilled my life. Don’t laugh at me: that love is probably the only good thing I’ve ever done. All this, you’re probably thinking, must seem a little strange coming from an officer of the Schutzstaffel. But why couldn’t an SS-Obersturmbannführer have an inner life, desires, passions, just like any other man? There have been hundreds of thousands of us whom you still judge as criminals: among them, as among all human beings, there were ordinary men, of course, but also extraordinary men, artists, men of culture, neurotics, homosexuals, men in love with their mothers, who knows what else, and why not? None of them was more typical of anything than any other man in any other profession. There are businessmen who enjoy fine wine and cigars, businessmen obsessed with the bottom line, and also businessmen who hide obscene tattoos under their three-piece suits and go to work with a rubber plug up their anuses: all this seems obvious to us, so why wouldn’t it be the same for the SS or the Wehrmacht? Our military doctors would find women’s underwear when they cut open the uniforms of the wounded more frequently than you’d think. To state that I was not typical means nothing. I lived, I had a past, a difficult and burdensome past, but that happens, and I managed it in my own way. And then came the war, I served, and I found myself at the heart of terrible things, atrocities. I hadn’t changed, I was still the same man, my problems had not been resolved, even though the war created new problems for me, even though those horrors transformed me. There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers. And one thing leads to another: I started out within the bounds of my service and then, under the pressure of events, I finally overstepped those bounds; but everything is connected, closely, intimately connected: to argue that if there had been no war I would still have resorted to such extremities would be impossible. It might have happened, but maybe not, maybe I’d have found another solution. You can never know. Eckhart has written, An angel in Hell flies in his own little cloud of Paradise. I always took that to imply that a devil in Paradise flies also in his own little cloud of Hell. But I don’t think I’m a devil. There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don’t know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that’s what’s terrible. You can never say: I shall never kill, that’s impossible; the most you can say is: I hope I shall never kill. I too hoped so, I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men, equal to others, I too wanted to add my brick to our common house. But my hopes were dashed, and my sincerity was betrayed and placed at the services of an ultimately evil and corrupt work, and I crossed over to the dark shores, and all this evil entered my own life, and none of all this can be made whole, ever. These words are of no use either, they disappear like water in the sand, this wet sand that fills my mouth. I live, I do what can be done, it’s the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!

ALLEMANDES I AND II