The Kindly Ones

Ohlendorf, whom I saw toward the end of the month, when I finally began to go out again, seemed to think as I did. I found him—he who had already been so glum to begin with—even more despondent than Thomas. He confessed to me that the night before the execution of Jessen, to whom he had remained close in spite of everything, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. “I kept thinking about his wife and children. I’ll try to help them, I’m going to give them part of my salary.” He still thought, though, that Jessen deserved the death sentence. For years, he explained to me, our professor had broken his ties to National Socialism. They had continued to see each other, to talk, and Jessen had even tried to recruit his former student. Ohlendorf agreed with him on a number of points: “It’s obvious—the widespread corruption within the Party, the erosion of the rule of law, the pluralist anarchy that’s replaced the Führerstaat

, all that’s unacceptable. And the measures against the Jews, the

Endlösung

, were a mistake. But overthrowing the Führer and the NSDAP, that’s unthinkable. We have to purge the Party, bring up the veterans of the front, who have a realistic vision of things, the leaders of the Hitlerjugend, maybe the only idealists we have left. It’s those young people who will have to spur the Party on after the war. But we can’t dream of going backward, to the middle-class conservatism of the career soldiers and the Prussian aristocrats. This deed discredits them forever. What’s more, the people understand this.” It was true: all the SD reports showed that ordinary people and soldiers, despite their concerns, their fatigue, their anxieties, their demoralization, even their defeatism, were scandalized by the conspirators’ treason. The war effort and the campaign for austerity had received a jolt of energy; Goebbels, finally authorized to truly declare the “total war” he held so dear, went to great lengths to whip it up, without it really being necessary. The situation, though, was only getting worse: the Russians had retaken Galicia and gone beyond their 1939 border, Lublin was falling, and the wave had finally died down on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Bolshevik command was obviously just waiting for us to crush for them the Polish insurrection, launched at the beginning of the month. “We’re playing Stalin’s game there,” Ohlendorf commented. “It would be better to explain to the AK that the Bolsheviks represent a much greater danger than we do. If the Poles fought at our side, we could still hold the Russians back. But the Führer doesn’t want to hear about it. And the Balkans are going to fall like a house of cards.” In Bessarabia, in fact, the Sixth Army, reconstituted from scratch under Fretter-Pico, was getting itself cut into pieces a second time around: the gates to Romania gaped wide open. France was obviously lost; after having opened another front in Provence and taken Paris, the Anglo-Americans were getting ready to clear the rest of the country, while our bruised troops ebbed back to the Rhine. Ohlendorf was very pessimistic: “The new rockets are almost ready, according to Kammler. He’s convinced they will change the course of the war. But I don’t see how. A rocket carries fewer explosives than an American B-17, and can be used only once.” Unlike Schellenberg, about whom he refused to speak, he didn’t have any plans or concrete solutions: he could only talk about a “final National Socialist leap forward, a giant surge,” which to me resembled Goebbels’s rhetoric a little too much. I had the impression that he was secretly resigned to defeat. But I don’t think he had yet admitted that to himself.