The Kindly Ones

When it comes to suffering, though, I ought to know a thing or two. Every European of my generation could say the same, but I can claim without any false modesty that I have seen more than most. And also people forget so quickly, I see it every day. Even those who were actually there hardly ever use anything but ready-made thoughts and phrases to talk about it. Just look at the pathetic prose of the German writers who describe the Eastern Front: putrid sentimentalism, a dead, hideous language. The prose of Herr Paul Carell, for instance, a successful author these past few years. It just so happens that I once knew this Herr Carell, in Hungary, back when he was still called Paul Karl Schmidt and, on behalf of Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry, wrote what he really thought, in vigorous, effective prose: The Jewish question is no question of humanity, and it is no question of religion; it is solely a question of political hygiene. Now the honorable Herr Carell-Schmidt has brought off the considerable feat of publishing four insipid volumes about the war against the Soviet Union without once mentioning the word Jew. I know this, I’ve read them: it was tedious work, but I’m stubborn. Our French authors, the Mabires and others like him, are no better. As for the Communists, they’re the same, only from the opposite point of view. So where have they all gone, the ones who used to sing, Boys, sharpen your knives on the sidewalk curbs? They keep quiet, or else they’re dead. We babble, we simper, we flounder through an insipid morass made of words such as glory, honor, heroism—it’s tiresome, no one says anything anymore. Perhaps I’m a bit unfair, but I dare to hope that you understand me. The television bombards us with numbers, impressive numbers, in the seven- or even eight-figure range; but who among you has ever seriously stopped to think about these numbers? Who among you has ever even tried to count all the people he knows or has known in his life, and to compare that laughable number with the numbers he hears on television, those famous six million, or twenty million? Let’s do some math. Math is useful; it gives one perspective, refreshes the soul. It can be a very instructive exercise. Be a little patient, then, and pay attention. I will consider only the two theaters of operations where I played a role, however minute: the war against the Soviet Union, and the extermination program officially referred to in our documents as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” die Endlösung der Judenfrage, to cite that fine euphemism. On the Western fronts, in any case, the losses were relatively minor, a few hundred thousand here or there at most. My starting figures will be somewhat arbitrary: I have no choice, since no one agrees on them. For the total Soviet losses, I’ll stick to the traditional number, the twenty million cited by Khrushchev in 1956, while noting that Reitlinger, a respected British author, finds only some twelve million, whereas Erickson, a Scottish scholar who’s just as reputable if not more so, comes to a minimum figure of twenty-six million; thus the official Soviet number neatly splits the difference, give or take a million. As for the German losses—in the East alone, that is—one can take as a starting point the even more official and Germanically precise number of 6,172,373 casualties between June 22, 1941, and March 31, 1945, a figure compiled in an internal report of the OKH (the Army High Command) that surfaced after the war, but one that includes both the dead (more than a million), the wounded (almost four million), and the missing (i.e., dead plus prisoners plus dead prisoners, some 1,288,000 men). So let us say for the sake of simplicity two million dead, since the wounded don’t concern us here, including, thrown in for good measure, the additional fifty thousand or so men killed between April 1 and May 8, 1945, mainly in Berlin, to which we still have to add the roughly one million civilians believed to have died during the invasion of eastern Germany and the subsequent population movements, giving us, let’s say, a grand total of three million German dead. As for the Jews, you have a choice: the traditional number, even though few people know where it comes from, is six million (it was Höttl who said at Nuremberg that Eichmann had told him this; but Wisliceny asserted that Eichmann had said five million to his colleagues; and Eichmann himself, when the Jews finally got to ask him the question in person, said somewhere between five and six million, but probably closer to five). Dr. Korherr, who compiled statistics for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, totaled up close to two million as of December 31, 1942, but acknowledged, when I discussed the matter with him in 1943, that his baseline figures were unreliable. Finally, the highly respected professor Raul Hilberg, a specialist in the matter and one who can hardly be suspected of holding a partisan stance, at least not in favor of the Germans, reaches, after a dense, nineteen-page demonstration, a final count of 5,100,000, which more or less corresponds to the opinion of the late Obersturmbannführer Eichmann. So let’s settle for Professor Hilberg’s figure, which gives us, to summarize: