The Kindly Ones

Around noon, a speech of the Führer’s was broadcast on the occasion of the twelfth (and, as it turned out, last) anniversary of the Seizure of Power. I listened without paying it much heed in the mess hall in Oranienburg, I don’t even remember what he said, he must still have been talking about the Asiatic flood of Bolshevism

or something of the sort; what struck me above all was the reaction of the SS officers present: only some of them stood up to raise their arms when the national anthem was played at the end, a nonchalance that, a few months before, would have been deemed inadmissible, unpardonable. The same day, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the

Wilhelm-Gustloff

off the coast of Danzig, the jewel of Ley’s “Kraft durch Freude” fleet, which was transporting more than ten thousand evacuees, half of them children. There were almost no survivors. In the time it took me to return to Berlin the next day, the Russians had reached the Oder and had crossed it almost casually to occupy a wide bridgehead between Küstrin and Frankfurt. I was vomiting up almost every meal, I was afraid the fever might return.

At the beginning of February, the Americans reappeared in full daylight above Berlin. Despite the prohibitions, the city was full of sour, aggressive refugees, who settled into the ruins and looted warehouses and stores without any interference from the police. I was passing by the Staatspolizei, it must have been around 11:00 a.m.; with the few officers who were still working there, I was directed to the antiaircraft shelter built in the garden, at the edge of the devastated park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, itself an empty, roofless shell. This shelter, which wasn’t even underground, was basically a long cement hallway; it didn’t seem very reassuring to me, but I didn’t have a choice. Along with the officers from the Gestapo, they brought in some prisoners, scruffy men with chains on their feet, who must have been pulled out of the neighboring cells: I recognized some of them, July conspirators, whose photograph I had seen in the papers or on the news. The raid was incredibly violent; the squat bunker, whose walls were more than a meter thick, swayed from side to side like a linden tree in the wind. I felt as if I were in the heart of a hurricane, a storm not of the elements but of pure, wild noise, all the noise in the world unleashed. The pressure from the explosions pressed painfully on my eardrums, I couldn’t hear anything anymore; it hurt so much I was afraid they’d burst. I wanted to be swept away, crushed, I couldn’t bear it anymore. The prisoners, who had been forbidden to sit down, were lying on the ground, most of them rolled up in a ball. Then I was lifted from my seat as if by a giant hand and hurled in the air. When I opened my eyes, several faces were floating above me. They seemed to be shouting, I didn’t understand what they wanted. I shook my head but felt hands holding it firmly and forcing me to keep still. After the alert, they took me out. Thomas was supporting me. The sky, at high noon, was black with smoke; flames were licking the windows of the Staatspolizei building; in the park, trees were burning like torches, an entire section of the rear façade of the palace had collapsed. Thomas had me sit down on the remains of a pulverized bench. I touched my face: blood was flowing down my cheek. My ears were ringing, but I could distinguish sounds. Thomas turned to me: “Can you hear me?” I signaled that I could; despite the horrible pain in my ears, I understood what he was saying. “Don’t move. You took a bad crack.” A little later they loaded me into an Opel. On the Askanischer Platz, cars and twisted trucks were burning, the Anhalter Bahnhof seemed to have crumpled in on itself and was disgorging a black, acrid smoke, the Europa Haus and the buildings around it were also burning. Soldiers and auxiliaries, their faces black with soot, were vainly fighting the fires. I was driven to the Kurfürstenstrasse, to Eichmann’s offices, which were still standing. There I was laid down on a table, among other wounded. A Hauptsturmführer arrived, the doctor whom I knew but whose name I had again forgotten: “You again,” he said amiably. Thomas told him that my head had hit the wall of the bunker and that I had lost consciousness for about twenty minutes. The doctor had me stick out my tongue and then aimed a dazzling light into my eyes. “You have a concussion,” he said. He turned to Thomas: “Have him get an X-ray of his skull. If there’s no fracture, three weeks’ rest.” He scribbled a note on a piece of paper, gave it to Thomas, and disappeared. Thomas said to me: “I’m going to find you a hospital for the X-ray. If they don’t keep you there, come back to my place to rest. I’ll take care of Grothmann.” I laughed: “What if there is no more ‘your place’?” He shrugged: “Then come back here.”