The Kindly Ones

About the hour-and-a-half-long speech the Reichsführer gave on the night of October 6 to the assembled Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, I don’t have much to say. This speech is less well known than the one, almost twice as long, he read on October 4 to his Obergruppenführers and HSSPFs; but aside from a few differences due to the nature of the respective audiences, and the less informal, less sardonic, less colloquial tone of the second speech, the Reichsführer said essentially the same thing. Thanks to the chance survival of archives, and the victors’ justice, these speeches have become famous far beyond the closed circles for which they were intended; you won’t find a book on the SS, the Reichsführer, or the destruction of the Jews in which they aren’t cited; if their content interests you, you can easily consult them, in several languages; the October 4 speech was entered as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, under document number 1919-PS (it was obviously in this form that I was finally able to study it in detail, after the war, although I learned its general import in Posen itself); moreover, it was recorded, either on a wax disk or on a red oxide magnetic tape—the historians aren’t in agreement, and on this point I cannot enlighten them, not having been present at that speech, but whatever the case the recording has survived and, if you feel so inclined, you can listen to it, and thus hear for yourself the Reichsführer’s monotone, pedantic, didactic, precise voice, a little more urgent when he waxes ironic; there are even, though rarely, moments of anger, especially obvious, in hindsight, when he comes to subjects over which he must have felt he had little control—the widespread corruption, for instance, which he also spoke about on the sixth to the regime’s dignitaries, but on which he insisted especially, as I heard at the time from Brandt, during his speech to the Gruppenführers given on the fourth. If these speeches have entered history, it’s not of course because of all that, but because in this speech the Reichsführer, with a frankness he has never to my knowledge equaled either before or since, with frankness thus and in a manner that could even be called crude, outlined the program of the destruction of the Jews. Even I, when I heard it on October 6, didn’t at first believe my ears, the hall was full, the sumptuous Golden Hall in the castle at Posen, I was in the very back, behind about fifty Gauleiters and leaders of the Party, not to mention a few industrialists, two service chiefs, and three (or maybe two) ministers of the Reich; and I found it, considering the secrecy rules we were bound to, truly shocking, almost indecent, and at the beginning, it made me very ill at ease, and I was certainly not the only one, I could see Gauleiters sigh and mop their foreheads or necks, it wasn’t that they were learning something new, no, everyone, in that great hall with its subdued lighting must have been in the know, even though some of them, until then, probably hadn’t had to think the thing through to the end, to discern its full extent, to think, for instance, about the women and children, and that’s probably why the Reichsführer insisted on this point, far more, moreover, to the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters than to his Gruppenführers, who couldn’t in any case have had any illusions, which is probably why he insisted that, yes, we were indeed killing the women and the children too, so as not to let any ambiguity linger, and that’s precisely what was so uncomfortable, that total absence, for once, of ambiguity, and it was as if he were violating an unwritten rule, even stronger than his own rules he decreed for his subordinates, his Sprachregelungen already absolutely strict, the rule of tact perhaps, that tact he spoke of in his first speech, evoking it in the context of the execution of Röhm and his SA comrades, a kind of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, he said, a consequence of this tact due to which we have never spoken about it among ourselves, but perhaps it was also a matter of something other than the question of that tact and of those rules, and that’s when I began to understand, I think, the profound reason for these declarations, and also why the dignitaries sighed and sweated so much, for they too, like me, were beginning to understand, to understand that it wasn’t by chance that the Reichsführer, in the beginning of the fifth year of the war, was thus openly referring to the destruction of the Jews before them, without euphemisms, without winks, with simple and brutal words like

kill—exterminate, he said, meaning kill or order to have killed— that, for once, the Reichsführer spoke to them quite openly about this question…to tell you how it was

, no, that certainly wasn’t by chance, and if he allowed himself to do it, then the Führer knew about it, and worse, the Führer had wanted it, hence their anguish, the Reichsführer was speaking necessarily here in the name of the Führer, and he was saying this, these words that you weren’t supposed to say, and he was recording them, on a disk or a tape, it doesn’t matter, and he was carefully taking note of those present and those absent—among the SS leaders, the only ones who didn’t attend the October 4 speech were Kaltenbrunner, who was sick with phlebitis, Daluege, who had a serious heart disease and was on leave for a year or two, Wolff, just recently appointed HSSPF for Italy and plenipotentiary to Mussolini, and Globocnik, who had just, although I didn’t know it yet and heard about it only after Posen, suddenly been transferred from his little Lublin kingdom to his native town of Trieste, as SSPF for Istria and Dalmatia, under Wolff’s orders in fact, accompanied—but this I wouldn’t know till even later on—by almost the entire personnel of Einsatz Reinhard, T-4 included, everything was being shut down, Auschwitz would henceforth be enough, and the beautiful Adriatic coast would make a fine dumping ground for all these people we had no further use for, even Blobel would come join them a little later on, let them go get killed by Tito’s partisans, that would spare us some housekeeping; and as to the Party dignitaries, note was also taken of the missing heads, but I never saw the list—all that, then, the Reichsführer was doing deliberately, on instructions, and for that there could only have been one reason, hence the perceptible emotion of the listeners, who grasped this reason very well: it was so that none of them could, later on, say that he didn’t know, couldn’t try to make people think, in case of defeat, that he was innocent of the worst, couldn’t think he might someday be able to get off scot-free; it was in order to drag them in, and they understood it very well, hence their distress. The Moscow Conference, at the end of which the Allies swore to pursue the “war criminals” to the furthest corners of the earth, hadn’t yet taken place, that would come a few weeks later, before the end of that month of October 1943, but already, especially since summer, the BBC was conducting an intensive propaganda campaign on this theme, naming names, and with a certain precision, for it sometimes quoted officers and even noncoms from specific KLs, it was very well informed, and the Staatspolizei certainly wondered how, and this, it is entirely correct to note, provoked a certain nervousness among the interested parties, all the more so since the news from the front wasn’t good, to hold on to Italy we had had to strip the Eastern Front, and there wasn’t much chance we could remain on the Donets, we had already lost Briansk, Smolensk, Poltava, and Kremenchug, the Crimea was threatened, in short, anyone could see that things were going badly, and certainly there must have been many who were asking themselves questions about the future, the future of Germany in general of course but their own in particular too, hence a certain effectiveness of this English propaganda, which demoralized not only some who were named, but also others not yet named, by encouraging them to think that the end of the Reich might not automatically mean their own end, and thus rendering the specter of defeat a tiny bit less inconceivable, hence, one can well understand this, when it came to the cadres of the Party, the SS, and the Wehrmacht, the necessity to make them understand that a potential defeat would concern them too, personally, so as to remotivate them a little, that the so-called crimes of some would in the eyes of the Allies be the crimes of all, in the upper echelons at least, that all the boats, or bridges, if you like, were burning, that no return to the past was possible, and that the only salvation was victory. And indeed victory would have settled everything, for if we had won, imagine it for an instant, if Germany had crushed the Reds and destroyed the Soviet Union, there would have been no more question of crimes, or rather, yes, but of Bolshevik crimes, duly documented thanks to the archives seized (the archives of the NKVD in Smolensk, evacuated to Germany and recovered at the end of the war by the Americans, played precisely this role, when the time finally came when they had to explain almost overnight to the good democratic voters why the evil monsters of the day before now had to serve as a bulwark against the heroic allies of the day before, now revealed as even worse monsters), we might even perhaps have conducted full-blown trials, why not, have prosecuted the Bolshevik leaders, imagine that, doing things seriously as the Anglo-Americans later sought to (Stalin, we know, couldn’t have cared less about these trials, he took them for what they were, a hypocrisy, and pointless to boot), and then everyone, with the British and the Americans leading the way, would have made do with us, the diplomats would have adjusted to the new realities, and despite the inevitable squalling of the New York Jews, the European Jews, whom in any case no one would have missed, would have been written off as a loss, like all the other dead, the Gypsies, the Poles, what do I know, the grass grows thick on the graves of the defeated, and no one holds the victor to account, I’m not saying this to try to justify us, no, it’s the simple, frightening truth, look at Roosevelt, that good man, with his dear friend Uncle Joe, how many millions had Stalin already killed, in 1941, or even before 1939, many more than we did, that’s certain, and even if you drew up a full balance sheet he might well remain ahead of us, between collectivization, de-kulakization, the great purges and the deportations of peoples in 1943 and 1944, and all that, everyone knew it at the time, everyone knew more or less what was happening in Russia during the 1930s, Roosevelt knew it too, that friend of mankind, but that never prevented him from praising Stalin’s loyalty and humanity, despite the repeated warnings of Churchill, who was a little less naïve from a certain point of view, a little less realistic, from another, and so if we Germans had in fact won this war, it would certainly have been the same, little by little, the stubborn ones who kept calling us the enemies of mankind would have fallen silent one by one, for lack of an audience, and the diplomats would have smoothed things out, since after all,

Krieg ist Krieg und Schnaps ist Schnaps, isn’t that right, and that’s the way of the world. And maybe even in the end our efforts would have been applauded, as the Führer often predicted, or maybe not, in any case many would have applauded, who in the meantime have fallen silent, for we lost, harsh reality. And even if a certain tension had persisted on this subject, for ten or fifteen years, it would have dissipated sooner or later, when for example our diplomats would have firmly condemned, while still reserving the possibility of showing a certain degree of comprehension, the harsh measures, liable to impinge on human rights, that someday or other Great Britain or France would have had to apply in order to restore order in their restive colonies, or, in the case of the United States, to ensure the stability of world commerce and fight the communist hotbeds of revolt, as they indeed ended up doing, with the results we all remember. For it would be a mistake, a serious one, in my opinion, to think that the moral sense of the Western powers differs so fundamentally from our own: after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn’t become one by chance, and doesn’t remain one by chance, either. The people of Monaco, or the inhabitants of Luxembourg, can afford the luxury of a certain political uprightness; it’s a little different for the English. Wasn’t it a British administrator, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, who in 1922 advocated administrative massacres to ensure the security of the colonies, and bitterly regretted that the political situation in the Home Islands rendered these salutary measures impossible? Or, if like some people, you want to charge all our sins to the account of anti-Semitism alone—a gross mistake, in my opinion, but a seductive one for many—wouldn’t you have to acknowledge that France, on the eve of the Great War, went much further in this domain than us (not to mention the Russia of the pogroms!)? I hope, by the way, that you won’t be too surprised that I thus discount anti-Semitism as a fundamental cause of the massacre of the Jews: that would be forgetting that our extermination policies went much further. By the time of our defeat—and far from wanting to rewrite History, I would be the first to acknowledge it—we had already, aside from the Jews, completed the destruction of all the German incurable physically and mentally handicapped, of most of the Gypsies, and of millions of Russians and Poles. And the projects, as you know, were even more ambitious: for the Russians, the necessary natural diminution

, according to the experts of the Four-Year Plan and the RSHA, was to reach thirty million, or even forty-six to fifty-one million, according to the dissident opinion of a somewhat zealous Dezernent in the Ostministerium. If the war had lasted a few more years, we would certainly have begun a massive reduction of the Poles. The idea had already been in the air for some time: viz the voluminous correspondence between Gauleiter Greiser in Warthegau and the Reichsführer, where Greiser asks, in May 1942, for permission to use the Kulmhof gassing installations to destroy thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles, who constituted, he said, a grave health menace for his Gau; after seven months, the Reichsführer finally let him understand that his proposition was interesting, but premature. You must think I’m explaining all this to you rather coldly: that’s simply in order to demonstrate to you that the destruction by our deeds of the people of Moses did not stem solely from an irrational hatred of the Jews—I think I’ve already shown how poorly the emotional type of anti-Semite was regarded by the SD and the SS in general—but above all from a firm, well-reasoned acceptance of the recourse to violence to resolve the most varied social problems, in which, moreover, we differed from the Bolsheviks only by our respective evaluations of the categories of problems to be resolved: their approach being based on a horizontal reading of social identity (class), ours on a vertical one (race), but both equally deterministic (as I think I’ve already stressed) and reaching similar conclusions in terms of the remedy to be employed. And if you think carefully about it, you could deduce from this that this will, or at least this capacity, to accept the necessity of a much more radical approach to the problems afflicting all societies, can have been born only from our defeats during the Great War. Every country (except perhaps the United States) suffered; but victory, and the arrogance and moral smugness born of victory, probably allowed the English and the French and even the Italians more readily to forget their sufferings and their losses, and to settle down again, sometimes even to wallow in their self-satisfaction, and thus to grow frightened again more easily, from fear of seeing this oh so fragile compromise fall apart. As for us, we had nothing more to lose. We had fought just as honorably as our enemies; we had been treated like criminals, humiliated and dismembered, and our dead were scorned. The fate of the Russians, objectively, was scarcely any better. What could be more logical, then, than to say: Well, then, if that’s the way it is, if it’s just to sacrifice the best of the nation, to send to their deaths the most patriotic, the most intelligent, the most devoted men, those most loyal to our race, and all in the name of the salvation of the nation—and if that was all for naught—and if their sacrifice is spat upon—then, what right to life should the worst elements have, the criminals, the insane, the retarded, the asocials, the Jews, not to mention our external enemies? The Bolsheviks, I am convinced, reasoned in the same way. Since respecting the rules of so-called humanity was useless to us, why stubbornly persist in a respect for which no one was even grateful? Hence, inevitably, a much harsher, stiffer, more radical approach to our problems. In every society, in every age, social problems have been subject to arbitration between the needs of the group and the rights of the individual, and thus have given rise to a number of responses that are ultimately quite limited: roughly, death, charity, or exclusion (especially, historically, in the form of exile). The Greeks exposed their deformed children; the Arabs, acknowledging that they constituted, economically speaking, a burden that was too heavy for their families, but not wanting to kill them, put them in the care of the community, thanks to the zakat, that obligatory religious charity (a tax for good works); even in our days, in our countries, there exist specialized establishments for such cases, so that their misfortune need not spoil the view of those in good health. Now, if you adopt such an overall vision, you can see that in Europe at least, from the eighteenth century onward, all the distinct solutions to the various problems—public torture for criminals, exile for the contagiously ill (leprosariums), Christian charity for imbeciles—converged, under the influence of the Enlightenment, toward a single type of solution, applicable to all cases and infinitely variable: institutionalized imprisonment, financed by the State, a form of inner exile, if you like, sometimes with pedagogical pretensions, but above all with a practical finality: the criminals to prison, the sick to the hospital, the crazy to the asylum. And who cannot see that these humane solutions, too, resulted from compromise, were made possible by wealth, and remained, in the end, contingent? After the Great War many understood that they were no longer adapted, that they no longer sufficed to address the new amplitude of the problems, because of restricted economic means and also because of the hitherto unthinkable level of the stakes (the millions of dead of the war). New solutions were necessary, and they were found, as man always finds the solutions he needs, as the so-called democratic countries too would have found them, if they had needed them. But then why, you might ask today, the Jews? What do the Jews have in common with your lunatics, your criminals, your contagious? Yet it’s not hard to see that, historically, the Jews constituted themselves as a “problem,” by wanting to remain apart at all costs. Didn’t the first writings against the Jews, those of the Greeks of Alexandria, long before Christ and theological anti-Semitism, accuse them of being an asocial people, of violating the laws of hospitality, the main foundation and political principle of the ancient world, in the name of their food prohibitions, which prevented them from eating at other people’s houses or from receiving them as guests, from being hosts? Then, of course, there was the religious question. I am not seeking here, as some might think, to make the Jews responsible for their catastrophe; I’m simply trying to say that a certain aspect of European history, unfortunate according to some, inevitable according to others, has made it so that even in our days, in times of crisis, it is natural to turn against the Jews, and that if you become involved in a reshaping of society through violence, sooner or later the Jews will end up on the receiving end—sooner, in our case, later, in the Soviets’—and that this is not entirely by chance. Some Jews too, with the threat of anti-Semitism averted, succumb to hubris.