The Kindly Ones

One evening, I was invited to Gruppenführer Müller’s place. The invitation was passed on to me, after an air-raid alert, by Eichmann, in whose offices an important planning meeting was taking place that day. “Every Thursday,” he came over to tell me, “the Amtschef likes to gather some of his specialists together at his place, to talk things over. He would be delighted if you could come.” I would have to cancel my fencing session, but I agreed: I scarcely knew Müller, and it would be interesting to see him close up. Müller lived in an SS apartment a little ways out of town, spared by the bombs. A rather self-effacing woman with a bun and eyes set close together opened the door to me; I thought she might be a maid, but she was in fact Frau Müller. She was the only woman present. Müller himself was in civilian clothes; and instead of returning my salute, he shook my hand with his massive grip, with thick, square-tipped fingers; apart from this demonstration of familiarity, though, the ambiance was much less gemütlich than at Eichmann’s. Eichmann had also donned civilian clothes, but most of the officers were in uniform, like me. Müller, a rather short-legged, thickset man with the square skull of a farmer, yet nicely, almost elegantly dressed, wore a knitted cardigan over a silk open-collared shirt. He poured me some Cognac and introduced me to the other guests, almost of them Gruppenleiter or Referenten from Amt IV: I remember two men from IV D, who were in charge of Gestapo services in occupied countries, and a certain Regierungsrat Berndorff, who headed the

Schutzhaftreferat. There was also an officer from the Kripo, and Litzenberg, a colleague of Thomas’s. Thomas himself, casually sporting his new Standartenführer stripes, arrived a little late and was cordially welcomed by Müller. The conversation dealt mostly with the Hungarian problem: the RSHA had already identified Magyars ready to cooperate with Germany; the main question was to find out how the Führer would bring about Kállay’s fall. When Müller wasn’t taking part in the conversation, he surveyed his guests with his restless, mobile, penetrating little eyes. Then he spoke in curt, simple sentences, drawled in a coarse Bavarian accent with a show of cordiality that did little to mask his innate coldness. From time to time, though, he let down his guard. With Thomas and Dr. Frey, a former member of the SD who, like Thomas, had gone on to the Staatspolizei

, I had started discussing the intellectual origins of National Socialism. Frey remarked that he thought the name itself was ill-chosen, since the term national for him referred to the tradition of 1789, which National Socialism rejected. “What would you suggest in its place?” I asked him.—“In my opinion, it should have been

Völkisch Socialism. That’s much more precise.” The man from the Kripo had joined us: “If you follow Möller van der Bruck,” he declared, “it could be Imperial Socialism.”—“Yes, actually that’s closer to Strasser’s deviation, isn’t it?” Frey retorted stiffly. That’s when I noticed Müller: he was standing behind us, a glass clutched in his big paw, and listening to us, blinking rapidly. “We should really push all the intellectuals into a coal mine and blow it up…” he blurted out in a grating, harsh voice.—“The Gruppenführer is absolutely right,” Thomas said. “Meine Herren, you’re even worse than Jews. Follow his example: action, not words.” His eyes were sparkling with laughter. Müller nodded; Frey seemed confused: “It’s clear that with us the sense of initiative has always taken precedence over theoretical elaboration…” the man from the Kripo mumbled. I moved off and went to the buffet to fill my plate with salad and sausages. Müller followed me. “And how is Reichsminister Speer doing?” he asked me.—“Actually, Gruppenführer, I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch with him since his illness began. I hear he’s doing better.”—“Apparently he’ll get out soon.”—“That’s likely. It would be a good thing. If we manage to get workers from Hungary, it will very quickly open new possibilities for our armaments industries.”—“Maybe,” Müller grunted. “But it will mostly be Jews, and Jews are forbidden in Altreich territory.” I swallowed a little sausage and said: “Then that rule will have to change. We are now at our maximum capacity. Without those Jews, we can’t go any further.” Eichmann had drawn closer and listened to my last words as he drank his Cognac. He interrupted without even giving Müller time to respond: “Do you truly believe that between victory and defeat, the balance depends on the work of a few thousand Jews? And if that were the case, would you want Germany’s victory to be due to Jews?” Eichmann had drunk a lot, his face was red and his eyes moist; he was proud of uttering such words in front of his superior. I listened to him as I picked sausage slices off the plate I was holding. I remained calm, but his nonsense irritated me. “You know, Obersturmbannführer,” I replied evenly, “in 1941, we had the most modern army in the world. Now we’ve gone almost half a century back. All our transports, at the front, are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they’re also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they’re producing a cargo ship a day. That’s many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we’re in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren’t suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren’t made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.” Eichmann puffed himself out: “You’re in a defeatist mood tonight!” Müller observed us in silence, unsmiling; his mobile eyes flew from one of us to the other. “I’m not a defeatist,” I retorted. “I’m a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.” But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: “You reason like a capitalist, a materialist…This war isn’t a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we’d never have attacked Russia.” I wasn’t following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn’t stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. “We’re not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. We’re waging war to purify Germany, to create a Germany in which you’d want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?” I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn’t any point in talking with him. Müller put his hand on his shoulder: “Eichmann, my friend, you’re right.” He turned to me: “That’s why our dear Eichmann is so gifted for his work: he sees only what is essential. That’s what makes him such a good specialist. And that’s why I’m sending him to Hungary: for Jewish affairs, he’s our Meister

.” Eichmann, presented with these compliments, blushed with pleasure; for my part, I found him rather narrow-minded, at that moment. But that didn’t prevent Müller from being right: he truly was quite effective, and in the end, it’s often the narrow-minded ones who are the most effective. Müller went on: “The only thing, Eichmann, is that you shouldn’t think just about the Jews. The Jews are among our great enemies, that’s true. But the Jewish question is already almost settled in Europe. After Hungary there won’t be many left. We have to think of the future. And we have a lot of enemies.” He spoke softly, his monotonous voice, cradled by his rustic accent, seemed to flow through his thin, nervous lips. “You have to think about what we’re going to do with the Poles. Eliminating the Jews but leaving the Poles makes no sense. And here too, in Germany. We’ve already begun, but we have to follow it through to the end. We also need an Endlösung der Sozialfrage, a “Final Solution to the Social Question.” There are still far too many criminals, asocials, vagabonds, Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals. We have to think about people with tuberculosis, who contaminate healthy people. About the heart patients, who pass on defective blood and cost a fortune in medical care: them at least we can sterilize. We have to take care of all of them, category by category. All our good Germans oppose it, they always have good reasons. That’s why Stalin is so strong: he knows how to make himself obeyed, and he knows how to go all the way.” He looked at me: “I know the Bolsheviks very well. Since the executions of hostages in Munich, during the Revolution. After that, I fought them for fourteen years, until the Seizure of Power, and I’m still fighting them. But you know, I respect them. They are people who have an innate sense of organization, of discipline, and who don’t shrink back from anything. We could learn lessons from them. Don’t you think so?” Müller didn’t wait for the reply to his question. He took Eichmann by the arm and led him to a low table, where he set up a chess game. I watched them play from afar while I finished my plate. Eichmann played well, but he couldn’t hold his own against Müller: Müller, I said to myself, plays as he works, methodically, with stubbornness and a cold, thought-out brutality. They played several games, I had time to observe them. Eichmann tried cunning, calculated combinations, but Müller never let himself be trapped, and his defenses always remained just as strong as his attacks, systematically planned, irresistible. And Müller always won.