The Kindly Ones

Weser wasn’t wrong. I returned to Berlin in the second week of July to report on my activities and await new instructions. I found the Reichsführer’s and the RSHA’s offices hard hit by the March and April bombings. The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais had been completely destroyed by high-explosive bombs; the SS-Haus was still standing, but only partly, and my office had had to move again, to another annex of the Ministry of the Interior. An entire wing of the Staatspolizei

headquarters had burned down, giant cracks zigzagged through the walls, boards blocked up the gaping windows; most of the departments and sections had moved to the suburbs or even distant villages. Häftlinge were still working to repaint the hallways and stairways and clear away the rubble of the destroyed offices; several of them had been killed during a raid in the beginning of May. In town, for the people who stayed, life was hard. There was almost no running water, soldiers delivered two buckets a day to destitute families, no electricity, no gas. The functionaries who still laboriously came to work wrapped scarves around their faces to protect themselves from the perpetual smoke of the fires. Obeying Goebbels’s patriotic propaganda, women no longer wore hats, nor elegant clothing; those who ventured out into the streets wearing makeup were scolded. The big raids with several hundred aircraft had stopped sometime ago; but the little Mosquito attacks continued, unpredictable, exhausting. We had finally launched our first rockets against London, not Speer’s and Kammler’s, but little ones from the Luftwaffe that Goebbels had baptized V-1, for Vergeltungswaffen, “retribution weapons”; they had little effect on English morale, even less on that of our own civilians, much too downcast by the bombings in central Germany and the disastrous news from the front, the successful landings in Normandy, the surrender of Cherbourg, the loss of Monte Cassino, and the debacle at Sebastopol at the end of May. The Wehrmacht was still keeping quiet about the terrible Soviet breakthrough in Byelorussia, few people knew about it, even though rumors were already flying, still short of the truth, but I knew everything, especially that in three weeks the Russians had reached the sea, that the Army Group North was cut off on the Baltic, and that the Army Group Center no longer existed at all. In this glum atmosphere, Grothmann, Brandt’s deputy, gave me a cold, almost scornful welcome, he seemed to want to blame me personally for the poor results of the Hungarian Einsatz, and I let him talk, I was too demoralized to protest. Brandt himself was in Rastenburg with the Reichsführer. My colleagues seemed in utter confusion, no one really knew where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to be doing. Speer, after his illness, had never tried to contact me again, but I still received copies of his furious letters to the Reichsführer: since the beginning of the year, the Gestapo had arrested more than three hundred thousand people for various offences, including two hundred thousand foreign workers, who had gone to increase the workforce in the camps; Speer was accusing Himmler of poaching his labor and was threatening to go to the Führer. Our other interlocutors were piling up complaints and criticisms, especially the Jägerstab, which believed itself deliberately wronged. Our own letters or requests received only indifferent replies. But that was all the same to me, I read through this correspondence without understanding half of it. Among the pile of mail awaiting me, I found a letter from Judge Baumann: I hastily tore open the envelope, took out a brief note and a photograph. It was a reproduction of an old picture, grainy, slightly blurry, with strongly contrasting tones; one could make out men on horseback in the snow, with disparate uniforms, metal helmets, navy caps, astrakhan hats; Baumann had drawn a cross in ink over one of these men, who was wearing a long coat with an officer’s stripes; his oval, minuscule face was completely indistinct, unrecognizable. On the back, Baumann had written COURLAND, NEAR WOLMAR, 1919. His polite note told me nothing more.