The Kindly Ones

I had also begun reading again. But I would have been quite incapable of reading serious books, literature; I went over the same sentence ten times before realizing I hadn’t understood it. That’s how I found on my shelves the Martian adventures of E. R. Burroughs, which I had brought back from the attic of Moreau’s house and carefully put away without ever opening them. I read these three books at one go; but to my regret I found none of the emotion that had gripped me when I read them as a teenager, when, locked in the bathroom or buried in my bed, I forgot the external world for hours to lose myself voluptuously in the meanderings of this barbaric universe with its confused eroticism, peopled with warriors and princesses wearing nothing but weapons and jewelry, a whole weird jumble of monsters and machines. I made some surprising discoveries, though, in them, unsuspected by the dazzled boy I had been: certain passages in these science fiction novels, in fact, revealed this American prose writer as one of the unknown precursors of völkisch thinking. His ideas, in my idleness, led me to others; remembering Brandt’s advice, which I had till then been much too busy to follow, I sent for a typewriter and wrote a brief memo for the Reichsführer, quoting Burroughs as a model for

the profound social reforms that the SS should envisage after the war. Thus, to increase the birthrate after the war and force men to marry young, I took as an example the red Martians, who recruited their forced labor not just from criminals and prisoners of war, but also from confirmed bachelors who were too poor to pay the high celibacy tax which all red-Martian governments impose

; and I devoted an entire chapter to this celibacy tax that, if it were ever imposed, would put a heavy strain on my own finances. But I reserved even more radical suggestions for the SS elite, which should follow the example of the green Martians, those three-meter-tall monsters with four arms and fangs:

All property among the green Martians is owned in common by the community, except the personal weapons, ornaments, and sleeping silks and furs of the individuals…. The women and children of a man’s retinue may be likened to a military unit for which he is responsible in various ways, as in matters of instruction, discipline, sustenance, etc…. His women are in no sense wives…. Their mating is a matter of community interest solely, and is directed without reference to natural selection. The council of chieftains of each community control the matter as surely as the owner of a Kentucky racing stud directs the scientific breeding of his stock for the improvement of the whole. I drew inspiration from this to suggest progressive reforms of the Lebensborn

. I was actually digging my own grave, and part of me almost laughed as I wrote it, but it also seemed to me to stem logically from our Weltanschauung; what’s more I knew that it would please the Reichsführer; the passages from Burroughs reminded me obscurely of the prophetic utopia he had revealed to us in Kiev, in 1941. In fact, ten days after I sent my memorandum, I received a reply signed by his hand (his instructions, most of the time, were signed by Brandt or even Grothmann):

Very Dear Doktor Aue!