The Kindly Ones

The next day, Thursday, I continued collecting statistics for Brandt. Walser still hadn’t reappeared but I wasn’t too worried. To make up for the lack of telephone lines, we now had a squad of Hitlerjugend on loan from Goebbels. We sent them all over, on bikes or on foot, to send or get messages and mail. In town, the hard work of the municipal services was already yielding results: in some neighborhoods, water had come back, electricity too, sections of the trolley lines were put back in service, along with the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, where it was possible. We also knew that Goebbels was contemplating a partial evacuation of the city. Everywhere, on the ruins, chalk messages were proliferating, people trying to find their parents, their friends, their neighbors. Around noon, I requisitioned a small van from the police and went to help Asbach bury his mother-in-law in the Plötzensee cemetery, alongside her husband who had died of cancer four years earlier. Asbach seemed a little better: his wife was recovering her senses, she had recognized him; but he hadn’t told her anything yet, either about her mother or about the baby. Fräulein Praxa accompanied us and even managed to find flowers; Asbach was visibly touched. Aside from us there were only three of his friends, including a couple, and a minister. The coffin was made of coarse, badly planed boards; Asbach kept saying that as soon as possible he would ask for a permit to exhume the body to give his mother-in-law a proper funeral: they had never gotten along well, he added, she hadn’t hidden her scorn for his SS uniform, but still, she was his wife’s mother, and Asbach loved his wife. I didn’t envy his situation: to be alone in the world is sometimes a great advantage, especially in wartime. I dropped him off at the military hospital where his wife was, and went back to the SS-Haus. That night, there was no raid; an alert went off in the early evening, provoking an outburst of panic, but they were just reconnaissance planes, come to photograph the damage. After the alert, which I spent in the Staatspolizei bunker, Thomas took me to a little restaurant that had already reopened its doors. He was in a cheerful mood: Schellenberg had arranged to have a small house in Dahlem lent to him, in a fashionable neighborhood near the Grunewald, and he was going to buy a small Mercedes convertible from a widow who needed money; her husband, a Hauptsturmführer, had been killed during the first raid. “Fortunately, my bank is intact. That’s what counts.” I made a face: “Still, there are other things that count.”—“Like what, for example?”—“Our sacrifices. The suffering of the people, here, around us, on the front.” In Russia things were going very badly: after losing Kiev, we had managed to retake Zhitomir, only to lose Cherkassy the day I was hunting grouse with Speer; in Rovno, the Ukrainian insurgents of the UPA, as anti-German as they were anti-Bolshevik, were picking off isolated German soldiers like rabbits. “I’ve always said, Max,” Thomas said, “you take things too seriously.”—“It’s a question of Weltanschauung

,” I said, raising my glass. Thomas gave a brief, mocking laugh. “Weltanschauung here, Weltanschauung there, as Schnitzler said. Everyone has a Weltanschauung

these days, the lowliest baker or plumber has his Weltanschauung, my mechanic overcharges me thirty percent for repairs, but he too has his Weltanschauung

. I have one too…” He fell silent and drank; I drank too. It was a Bulgarian wine, a little rough, but given the circumstances there was nothing to complain about. “I’m going to tell you what counts,” Thomas said urgently. “Serve your country, die if you have to, but take advantage of life as much as possible in the meantime. Your posthumous Ritterkreuz might console your old mother, but it’ll be cold comfort for you.”—“My mother is dead,” I said softly.—“I know. I’m sorry.” One night, after many drinks, I had told him about my mother’s death, without going into too much detail; since then we hadn’t talked about it again. Thomas drank some more, then burst out: “Do you know why we hate the Jews? I’ll tell you. We hate the Jews because they’re a thrifty, prudent people, greedy not just for money and security but also for their traditions, their knowledge, and their books, incapable of giving and spending, a people that doesn’t know war. A people that just knows how to accumulate, never to waste. In Kiev you said the murder of the Jews was a waste. Well, precisely, by wasting their lives the way you throw rice at a wedding, we’ve taught them expense, we’ve taught them war. And the proof that it’s working, that the Jews are beginning to learn the lesson, is Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bialystok, it’s the Jews who are becoming warriors again, who are becoming cruel, who also are becoming killers. I find that very beautiful. We’ve made them into an enemy worthy of us. The Pour la Semite

”—he struck his chest at the heart, where the Jews sew the star—“is picking up value again. And if the Germans don’t pull themselves together like the Jews, instead of moaning, they’ll just get what they deserve. Vae victis.” He emptied his glass in one swallow, his gaze distant. I realized he was drunk. “I’m going home,” he said. I offered to drive him back, but he refused: he had taken a car from the garage. In the still-half-cleared street, he absentmindedly shook my hand, slammed the door, and shot off. I went back to sleep at the Staatspolizei; it was heated, and the showers, at least, had been fixed.