The Kindly Ones

The mood within the Kommando was becoming execrable; the officers were nervous, they shouted at the slightest provocation. Callsen and the others went back to their Teilkommandos; everyone kept his opinions to himself, but you could see that the new tasks weighed on them. Kehrig left quickly, almost without saying goodbye. Lübbe was often sick. From the field, the Teilkommandoführers sent very negative reports on the morale of their troops: there were nervous depressions, the men often cried; according to Sperath, many were suffering from sexual impotence. There was a series of incidents with the Wehrmacht: Near Korosten, a Hauptscharführer forced some Jewish women to undress and made them run naked in front of a machine gun; he took photos, and these photos were intercepted by the AOK. In Belaya Tserkov, Häfner had a confrontation with an officer from division headquarters, who had intervened to block the execution of some Jewish orphans; Blobel had to go down there himself and the affair went all the way up to von Reichenau, who confirmed the execution and reprimanded the officer; but it created quite a few ripples, and furthermore Häfner refused to inflict that on his men, and left the dirty work to his Askaris. Other officers did the same; but as the difficulties with the OUN-B persisted, this practice in turn engendered new problems: the Ukrainians, disgusted, were deserting or even committing treason. Others, however, carried out the executions without grumbling, but they shamelessly stole from the Jews and raped the women before killing them; sometimes we had to shoot our own soldiers. Kehrig’s replacement hadn’t arrived, and I was overwhelmed with work. At the end of the month, Blobel sent me to Korosten. The “Republic of Polesia,” northeast of the city, was off-limits to us per order of the Wehrmacht, but there was still a lot of work in the region. The officer in charge was Kurt Hans. I didn’t like Hans much—he was a foul man, moody; and he didn’t like me, either. Still, we had to work together. The methods had changed, they had been rationalized, systematized according to the new demands. But these changes still didn’t make the soldiers’ work any easier. Now the condemned had to undress before execution, since their clothing was collected for the Winter Aid and the repatriates. In Zhitomir, Blobel had explained to us the new practice of Sardinenpackung developed by Jeckeln, the “sardine-packing” method that Callsen already knew. With the considerable increase in volume, in Galicia, as early as July, Jeckeln had decided that the graves were filling up too quickly; the bodies were falling any which way and got all tangled up, a lot of space was wasted, and so we were wasting too much time digging; so now the condemned, undressed, had to lie on their stomachs in the bottom of the trench, and a few shooters administered a shot in the neck at point-blank range. “I have always been against the Genickschuss,” Blobel reminded us, “but now we no longer have a choice.” After each row, an officer had to perform an inspection and make sure all the condemned were indeed dead; then they were covered with a thin layer of dirt and the next group came to lie down on top of them, head to foot; when five or six layers had accumulated this way, the trench was filled in. The Teilkommandoführer thought the men would find this too difficult, but Blobel didn’t want to hear any objections: “In my Kommando, we will do what the Obergruppenführer says.” Kurt Hans, in any case, wasn’t too bothered; he seemed indifferent to everything. I attended several executions with him. I could now distinguish three different temperaments among my colleagues. First, there were those who, even if they tried to hide it, killed with sensual pleasure; I have already talked about them, they were criminals who revealed their true nature thanks to the war. Then there were those who were disgusted by it and who killed out of duty, overcoming their repugnance, out of a love of order. Finally, there were those who regarded the Jews as animals and killed them the way a butcher slaughters a cow—a joyful or a difficult task, according to their humor or disposition. Kurt Hans clearly belonged to this last category: for him, the only thing that counted was the precision of the gesture, the efficiency, the output. Every night, he meticulously went over his totals. And what about me? I couldn’t identify with any of these three types, but that was of little help, and if I had been pushed a little, I would have had trouble articulating an honest answer. I was still looking for one. Passion for the absolute was a part of it, as was, I realized one day with terror, curiosity: here, as in so many other things in my life, I was curious, I was trying to see what effect all this would have on me. I was always observing myself: it was as if a film camera were fixed just above me, and I was at once this camera, the man it was filming, and the man who was then studying the film. Sometimes that astonished me, and often, at night, I couldn’t sleep; I stared at the ceiling; the lens didn’t leave me in peace. But the answer to my question kept slipping through my fingers.