The Kindly Ones

I spent the following days sleeping. I still had a fever, around thirty-eight, sometimes thirty-nine; but I drank orange juice and meat broth, I ate bread, a little chicken. At night, there were frequent alerts and I ignored them (there may have been alerts during my three nights of delirium, but I don’t know). These were little raids, a handful of Mosquitos that dropped a few bombs haphazardly, mostly on the administrative center. But one night Frau Zempke and her husband forced me to go down to the basement, after putting me into my bathrobe; the effort exhausted me so much that I had to be carried back up. A few days after Helene’s departure, Frau Zempke burst in in the early evening, red, in curlers and a dressing gown: “Herr Obersturmbannführer! Herr Obersturmbannführer!” She had woken me up and I was annoyed: “What is it, Frau Zempke?”—“They tried to kill the Führer!” She clumsily explained to me what she had heard on the radio: there had been an assassination attempt, at the Führer’s HQ, in eastern Prussia, he was unhurt, had received Mussolini in the afternoon and had already returned to work. “And so?” I asked.—“Well, it’s horrible!”—“Indeed,” I retorted dryly. “But the Führer is alive, you say, that’s the main thing. Thank you.” I went back to bed; she waited a bit, a little at a loss, then beat a retreat. I must confess that I didn’t even think about this piece of news: I no longer thought about anything. A few days later, Thomas came to see me. “You look like you’re getting better.”—“A little,” I replied. I had finally shaved, I must have vaguely resumed a human appearance; but I had trouble formulating coherent thoughts, they broke up with the effort, only scraps remained, without any link between them, Helene, the Führer, my work, Mandelbrod, Clemens and Weser, an inextricable jumble. “You heard the news,” said Thomas, who had sat down by the window and was smoking. “Yes. How is the Führer doing?”—“The Führer is doing fine. But it was more than a failed assassination. The Wehrmacht, or at least part of it, wanted to pull a coup d’état.” I grunted in surprise, and Thomas gave me the details of the affair. “In the beginning we thought it was limited to an officers’ plot. Actually it branched out in every direction: there were cliques in the Abwehr, at the Auswärtiges Amt

, among the old aristocrats. Even Nebe, apparently, was in on it. He disappeared yesterday after trying to cover himself by arresting some conspirators. Like Fromm. In short, it’s a bloody mess. The Reichsführer was appointed head of the Ersatzheer

, in place of Fromm. It’s clear that now the SS is going to have a crucial role to play.” His voice was tense, but sure and determined. “What happened at the Auswärtiges Amt

?” I asked.—“You’re thinking of your girlfriend? We’ve already arrested quite a few people, including some of her superiors; we should be arresting von Trott zu Solz any day now. But I don’t think you have to worry about her.”—“I wasn’t worrying. I was asking, that’s all. Are you looking into all that?” Thomas nodded yes. “Kaltenbrunner has created a special commission to investigate the ramifications of the affair. Huppenkothen is in charge, I’ll be his deputy. Panzinger is probably going to replace Nebe at the Kripo. We’d already begun reorganizing everything at the Staatspolizei

anyway; this will just speed things up.”—“And what were your conspirators aiming for?”—“They’re not my conspirators,” he hissed. “And it varies. Most of them apparently thought that without the Führer and the Reichsführer, the West would accept a separate peace. They wanted to dismantle the SS. They didn’t seem to realize that it was just another Dolchstoss, a stab in the back like in ’eighteen. As if Germany would have followed them, the traitors. I have the impression that a lot of them were a little in the clouds: some of them even thought they’d be allowed to keep Alsace and Lorraine, once they’d dropped their pants. And the Incorporated Territories, of course. You know, dreamers. But we’ll see all that—they were so stupid, the civilians especially, that they put almost everything down in writing. We found masses of projects, lists of ministers for their new government. They had even put your friend Speer on one of the lists: I can tell you he’s feeling the heat a little right now.”—“And who was supposed to take the lead?”—“Beck. But he’s dead. He killed himself. Fromm also had quite a few guys shot right away, to try to cover himself.” He explained the details of the attempt and the failed putsch to me. “It could have gone either way. We’ve never had such a close shave before. You have to get better: there’s going to be work to do.”