The Kindly Ones

Not long after my supper with Ohlendorf, I had received an invitation from Dr. Mandelbrod to come spend the weekend at a country estate belonging to one of the directors of IG Farben, in the north of Brandenburg. The letter made it clear that there would be a hunting party and an informal dinner. Massacring fowl didn’t tempt me much, but I didn’t have to shoot, I could just walk in the woods. The weather was rainy: Berlin was sinking into fall, the beautiful October days had come to an end, the trees were all stripped bare now; sometimes, though, the sky cleared and you could go out and enjoy the already cool air. On November 18, at dinnertime, the sirens wailed and the flak began to thunder, for the first time since the end of August. I was at a restaurant with some friends, including Thomas—we had just left our fencing session. We had to go down into the basement without even eating; the alert lasted for two hours, but they had wine served to us, and the time passed in pleasantries. The raid caused serious damage to the center of town; the English had sent more than four hundred aircraft: they had decided to brave our new tactics. That took place on the Thursday evening; on the Saturday morning, I had Piontek drive me toward Prenzlau, to the village mentioned by Mandelbrod. The house was a few kilometers outside of town, at the end of a long lane bordered with ancient oaks, many of which were missing, however, decimated by disease or storms; it was an old manor house, bought by the director, next to a forest dominated by pine trees mixed in with beech and maple trees, and surrounded by a handsome, open park, and then, farther away, big, empty, muddy fields. It had drizzled during the journey, but the sky, whipped by a bracing little north wind, had cleared up. On the gravel in front of the steps, several sedans had parked side by side, and a uniformed chauffeur was washing the mud from the bumpers. I was welcomed on the steps by Herr Leland; that day he looked very soldierly, despite his brown woollen knit cardigan: the owner was away, he explained, but he had lent them the house; Mandelbrod wouldn’t arrive till evening, after the hunting party. On his advice, I sent Piontek back to Berlin: the guests would return together, there would certainly be room for me in one of the cars. A black-uniformed servant girl wearing a lace apron showed me my room. A fire was roaring in the chimney; outside it had begun to rain again gently. As the invitation had suggested, I wasn’t wearing my uniform but a country outfit, woollen trousers with boots and a collarless Austrian jacket with bone buttons, made to be water-resistant; for the evening, I had brought a suit that I unfolded, brushed, and hung in the closet before going downstairs. In the living room, several guests were drinking tea or talking with Leland; Speer, sitting in front of a casement window, recognized me right away and got up with a friendly smile to come shake my hand. “Sturmbannführer, what a pleasure to see you again. Herr Leland told me you’d be coming. Come, I’ll introduce you to my wife.” Margret Speer was sitting near the fireplace with another woman, a certain Frau von Wrede, the wife of a general who was going to join us; standing in front of them, I clicked my heels and gave a German salute that Frau von Wrede returned; Frau Speer just held out an elegant little gloved hand to me: “Pleased to meet you, Sturmbannführer. I’ve heard about you: my husband tells me you’ve been a great help to him, in the SS.”—“I do what I can, meine Dame.” She was a thin, blond woman of a decidedly Nordic beauty, with a strong, square jaw and very light blue eyes under blond eyebrows; but she seemed tired and that gave her skin a slightly sallow cast. I was served tea, and chatted a little with her while her husband joined Leland. “Your children didn’t come?” I asked politely.—“Oh! If I had brought them, it wouldn’t have been a vacation. They stayed in Berlin. It’s already so hard for me to tear Albert away from his ministry, once he accepts, I don’t want him to be disturbed. He so needs rest.” The conversation turned to Stalingrad, for Frau Speer knew I had been there; Frau von Wrede had lost a cousin there, a Generalmajor who was commanding a division and was probably in the hands of the Russians: “It must have been terrible!” Yes, I confirmed, it had been terrible, but I didn’t add, out of courtesy, that it had surely been less so for a divisional general than for an ordinary trooper like Speer’s brother, who, if by some miracle he was still alive, would not be benefiting from the preferential treatment that the Bolsheviks, hardly egalitarian for once, gave superior officers, according to our information. “Albert was very affected by the loss of his brother,” Margret Speer said dreamily. “He doesn’t show it, but I know. He gave his name to our last-born child.”