The Kindly Ones

About the officers around Eichmann, there’s not much to say. They were, for the most part, peaceable men, good citizens doing their duty, proud and happy bearers of the SS uniform, but timorous, with little initiative, always going “Yes…but,” and admiring their leader as a great genius. The only one who stood out a little was Wisliceny, a Prussian my age, who spoke very good English and had an excellent grasp of history, and with whom I liked to spend my evenings discussing the Thirty Years’ War, the turning point of 1848, or else the moral bankruptcy of the Wilhelmine era. His views weren’t always original, but they were solidly documented and he could work them into a coherent narrative, which is the foremost quality of the historical imagination. He had once been Eichmann’s superior, in 1936 I think, in any case during the time of the SD-Hauptamt, when the Department of Jewish Affairs was still called Abteilung II 112; but his laziness and indolence had quickly led to his being surpassed by his disciple, which he didn’t hold against him, they had remained good friends, Wisliceny was a close family friend, they even publicly called each other by their first names (later on they had a falling-out, for reasons I am unaware of). Wisliceny, a witness at Nuremberg, painted a negative portrait of his old comrade that for a long time helped to distort the image that historians and writers had of Eichmann, some even going so far as to argue in good faith that the poor Obersturmbannführer gave orders to Adolf Hitler. You can’t blame Wisliceny: he was trying to save his neck, and Eichmann had disappeared, at the time it was customary to incriminate the absent, though it didn’t get poor Wisliceny very far; he ended up at the end of a rope in Pressburg, the Bratislava of the Slovaks (and it must have been solid, that rope, to support his corpulence). Another reason that made me appreciate Wisliceny was that he kept a level head, unlike some others, especially the Berlin bureaucrats, who, having been sent to the field for the first time in their lives and seeing themselves suddenly so powerful compared to these Jewish dignitaries, educated men sometimes twice their age, lost all sense of moderation. Some of them insulted the Jews in the coarsest and most unseemly way; others succumbed to the temptation of abusing their position; all of them demonstrated an arrogance that was unbearable and, in my opinion, utterly inappropriate. I remember Hunsche, for example, a Regierungsrat, that is, a career civil servant, a jurist with an accountant’s mentality, the little gray man you never notice behind the desk of a bank where he patiently shuffles paper as he waits till he can draw his pension and go out in a cardigan knitted by his wife and grow Dutch tulips, or else paint Napoleonic lead soldiers, which he will arrange lovingly, in perfect rows, nostalgic for the lost order of his youth, in front of a plaster model of the Brandenburg Gate, what do I know of the dreams that haunt this sort of man? And there, in Budapest, ridiculous in a uniform with an extra-baggy pair of riding breeches, he smoked expensive cigarettes, received Jewish leaders with his dirty boots resting on a velvet armchair, and shamelessly indulged his slightest whims. In the very first few days after our arrival, he had asked the Jews to provide him with a piano, saying negligently to them, “I’ve always dreamed of having a piano”; the Jews, terrified, brought him eight; and Hunsche, right in front of me, planted in his tall boots, reprimanded them in a voice that was trying to sound ironic: “But meine Herren! I don’t want to open a store, I just want to play the piano.” A piano! Germany is groaning under the bombs, our soldiers at the front are fighting with frozen limbs and missing fingers, but Hauptsturmführer Regierungsrat Dr. Hunsche, who has never left his Berlin office, needs a piano, no doubt to calm his frayed nerves. When I watched him prepare orders for the men in the transit camps—the evacuations had begun—I wondered if, as he appended his signature, he didn’t get hard under the table. He was, I’m the first to acknowledge it, a truly poor specimen of the Herrenvolk

: and if you are to judge Germany from this kind of man, alas only too common, then, yes, I can’t deny it, we have deserved our fate, the judgment of history, our

dikè

.