The Kindly Ones

I slept little and returned early to the Bendlerstrasse. The sky had cleared and there were Sturmoviks everywhere. The next day it was even nicer out, the gardens, in the ruins, were flowering. I didn’t see Thomas, he had gotten caught up in some business between Wolff and Kaltenbrunner, I don’t know too much about it, Wolff had come up from Italy to discuss the possibility of a surrender, Kaltenbrunner had gotten angry and wanted to arrest him or have him hanged, as usual it ended up in front of the Führer, who let Wolff go. When I finally saw Thomas again, the day the Seelow Heights fell, he was furious, raging against Kaltenbrunner, his stupidity, his narrow-mindedness. I myself didn’t understand at all what Kaltenbrunner was playing at, what use it could be to him to turn against the Reichsführer, to intrigue with Bormann, to maneuver to become the Führer’s new favorite. Kaltenbrunner wasn’t an idiot, he must have known, better than anyone, that the game was coming to an end; but instead of positioning himself for what would come after, he was wasting his energy in pointless, futile quarrels, affecting a hard-line attitude that he would never, as was obvious to anyone who knew him, have the courage to bring to its logical conclusion. Yet Kaltenbrunner was far from being the only one to lose all sense of moderation. Everywhere, in Berlin, Sperrkommandos were appearing, blocking units made up of men from the SD, the police, various Party organizations, Feldgendarmen, who administered an extremely summary justice to those who, more reasonable than they, just wanted to live, and sometimes even to some who had nothing to do with anything, but who just had the misfortune to be there. The little fanatics of the Leibstandarte hauled wounded soldiers out of basements to execute them. Everywhere, exhausted veterans from the Wehrmacht, recently called-up civilians, sixteen-year-old kids, their faces purplish-blue, decorated lampposts, trees, bridges, S-Bahn elevated tracks, anyplace from which a man can be hanged, and always with the invariable sign around their necks: I AM HERE BECAUSE I ABANDONED MY POST WITHOUT ORDERS. Berliners had a resigned attitude: “Instead of getting hanged, I’d rather believe in victory.” I myself had problems with these maniacs; since I moved around a lot, they were constantly checking my papers, I thought of asking for an armed escort to defend myself. At the same time, I almost pitied these men, drunk with fury and bitterness, devoured by an impotent hatred that, as it could no longer be directed at the enemy, they turned against their own, like rabid wolves devouring one another. At the Kurfürstenstrasse, a young Obersturmführer from the Staatspolizei, Gersbach, hadn’t shown up one morning; he didn’t have any work to do, true, but it had been noticed; some policemen finally found him at his home, dead drunk; Müller waited for him to sober up, then had him shot with a bullet in the neck in front of the officers gathered in the building’s courtyard. Afterward, his corpse was thrown out onto the asphalt, while a young SS recruit, almost hysterical, emptied the magazine of his submachine gun into the poor man’s body.