The Kindly Ones

Thomas was a good friend, I was really glad to see him again. We had been friends for several years; in Berlin, we often had dinner together; sometimes he took me with him to nightclubs, or to famous concert halls. He was a bon vivant who knew his way around. And it was mostly thanks to him that I had found myself in Russia; at least the suggestion had come from him. But actually the story goes back a little further than that. In the spring of 1939, I had just received my doctorate in law and joined the SD, and there was a lot of talk of war. After Bohemia and Moravia, the Führer was turning his attention to Danzig; the whole problem was to anticipate the reaction of France and Great Britain. Most people thought that they wouldn’t risk war for Danzig any more than they would for Prague; but they had guaranteed the western border of Poland, and were rearming as quickly as possible. I had a long discussion about it with Dr. Best, my superior and also somewhat my mentor at the SD. In theory, he said, we shouldn’t be afraid of war; war was the logical outcome of our Weltanschauung. Quoting from Hegel and Jünger, he argued that the State could reach its ideal point of unity only in and through war: “If the individual is the negation of the State, then war is the negation of that negation. War is the moment of absolute socialization of the collective existence of the people, the Volk.” But in high places they had more prosaic concerns. Ribbentrop’s ministry, the Abwehr, our own foreign affairs department, each evaluated the situation in his own way. One day, I was called in to see the Chief, Reinhard Heydrich. This was my first time and I felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety as I entered his office. Rigidly concentrated, he was working on a pile of reports, and I stood at attention for several minutes before he made a sign for me to sit down. I had time to observe him up close. I had of course seen him many times, during staff conferences or in the hallways of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais; but whereas at a distance he presented the very embodiment of the Nordic Übermensch, up close he gave a curious impression, somewhat blurred. I finally decided that it must be a question of proportion: beneath an abnormally high, domed forehead, his mouth was too wide, his lips too thick for his narrow face; his hands seemed too long, like nervous algae attached to his arms. When he raised his little eyes, set too close together, toward me, they didn’t stay in place; and when he finally spoke to me, his voice seemed much too high for a man with such a powerful body. He gave me a disturbing feeling of femininity, which only made him more sinister. His sentences fell rapidly, short, tense; he almost never finished them; but the meaning always remained crisp and clear. “I have a mission for you, Doktor Aue.” The Reichsführer was dissatisfied with the reports he was receiving about the intentions of the Western powers. He wanted another evaluation, independent from that of the foreign department. Everyone knew that in those countries there was a strong pacifist trend, especially within nationalist or pro-fascist circles; but what was still hard to judge was their influence on the governments. “You know Paris well, I think. According to your file you were connected to circles close to the Action Française. Those people have acquired a certain amount of importance since then.” I tried to get in a word but Heydrich interrupted me: “That doesn’t matter.” He wanted me to go to Paris and strike up again with my old acquaintances, to study the actual political weight of the pacifist circles. I was to use the end-of-term vacation as a pretext. Naturally, I was to repeat National Socialist Germany’s pacifist intentions toward France to anyone who cared to listen. “Dr. Hauser will go with you. But you’ll submit separate reports. Standartenführer Taubert will provide you with the necessary currency and documents. Is everything clear?” In fact, I felt completely lost, but he had caught me by surprise. “Zu Befehl, Gruppenführer,” was all I could say. “Fine. Be back by the end of July. Dismissed.”