The Kindly Ones

The noose was tightening. The Adlon had closed its doors; my only diversion was drinking schnapps at the Kurfürstenstrasse, or at Wannsee with Thomas, who, laughing, filled me in on the most recent events. Müller now was looking for a mole: an enemy agent, apparently in the entourage of a high-ranking SS official. Schellenberg saw in this a conspiracy to destabilize Himmler, and so Thomas had to follow the developments of the affair. The situation was degenerating into vaudeville: Speer, who had lost the Führer’s confidence, had returned, dodging Sturmoviks to land his crate on the Ost-West-Achse, to beg for his grace; Göring had been stripped of all his offices and placed under arrest in Bavaria, for having somewhat hastily anticipated the death of his lord and master; the more sober people, von Ribbentrop and the military, were laying low or evacuating toward the Americans; the countless candidates for suicide were putting the finishing touches on their final scene. Our soldiers kept conscientiously getting themselves killed, a French battalion from the Charlemagne Division somehow found a way to enter Berlin on the twenty-fourth to reinforce the Nordland Division, and the administrative center of the Reich was now defended only by Finns, Estonians, Dutchmen, and young Parisian toughs. Elsewhere, people were keeping a cool head: a powerful army, it was said, was on the way to save Berlin and cast the Russians beyond the Oder, but at the Bendlerstrasse my interlocutors remained perfectly vague about the position and progression of the divisions, and the promised Wenck offensive was taking just as long to materialize as the one by Steiner’s Waffen-SS, a few days earlier. As for me, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much tempted by Götterdämmerung, and I would have prefered to be somewhere else, to reflect calmly on my situation. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of dying, believe me, I had few reasons to keep on living, after all, but the idea of being killed in this way, somewhat at the mercy of events, by a shell or a stray bullet, displeased me exceedingly, I would have liked to sit down and contemplate things rather than let myself be carried away by this black current. But such a choice was not offered me, I had to serve, like everyone else, and since it was necessary, I did it loyally, I collected and transmitted this useless information that seemed to serve only one purpose, to keep me in Berlin. As for our enemies, they remained supremely indifferent to all this commotion and kept advancing.