The Kindly Ones

By October 1, it was all over. Blobel had the sides of the ravine dynamited to cover the bodies over; we were expecting a visit from the Reichsführer, and he wanted everything cleaned up. At the same time the executions continued: Jews, still, but also Communists, officers of the Red Army, sailors from the Dnieper fleet, looters, saboteurs, officials, Banderists, Gypsies, Tatars. And then Einsatzkommando 5, headed now, instead of by Schulz, by one Sturmbannführer Meier, was arriving in Kiev to take over the executions and the administrative tasks; our own Sonderkommando would continue to advance in the wake of the Sixth Army, toward Poltava and Kharkov; so in the days following the Great Action, I was very busy, since I had to hand over all my networks and contacts to my successor, the Leiter III of Ek 5. We also had to attend to the results of the action: we had collected 137 truckloads of clothing, destined for the needy Volksdeutschen of the Ukraine; the blankets would go to the Waffen-SS for a military hospital. And then there were all the reports: Blobel had reminded me of Müller’s order, and had put me in charge of preparing a visual presentation of the action. Himmler finally arrived, accompanied by Jeckeln, and that same day was pleased to address us. After explaining the necessity of wiping out the Jewish population, in order to eradicate Bolshevism at the root, he gravely noted that he was aware of the difficulty of the task; then, almost without transition, he revealed to us his concept of the future of the German East. The Russians, at the end of the war, pushed back beyond the Urals, could form a rump Slavland; of course, they would regularly try to return; to prevent them from doing so, Germany would set up a line of garrison towns and small forts in the mountains, entrusted to the Waffen-SS. All young Germans would be drafted for two years in the SS and would be sent there; of course there would be losses, but these small, permanent, low-intensity conflicts would allow the German nation not to wallow in the weakness of conquerors, but to preserve all the vigor of the warrior, vigilant and strong. Protected by this line, Russian and Ukrainian land would be open for German colonization, to be developed by our veterans: each one, a soldier-peasant like his sons, would manage a great, rich property; the labor in the fields would be provided by Slav helots, and the German would limit himself to administering. These farms would be placed in a constellation around little garrison and market towns; as for the frightful Russian industrial cities, they would eventually be razed; Kiev, a very ancient German city originally called Kiroffo, might however be spared. All these cities would be linked to the Reich by a network of highways and double-decker express trains, with individual sleeper cabins, for which special wide-gauge railways would be built; these vast projects would be carried out by the remaining Jews and war prisoners. Finally the Crimea, once the land of the Goth, as well as the German regions of the Volga and the oil center of Baku, would be annexed to the Reich, to become a vacation and leisure territory, directly connected to Germany, via Brest-Litovsk, by an express; the Führer, after finishing his great works, would come there to retire. This speech made a strong impression: clearly, even if to me the vision outlined evoked the fantastic utopias of a Jules Verne or an Edgar Rice Burroughs, there really was, elaborated in rarified spheres far above our own, a plan, a final objective.