I plunged into my work as into an invigorating bath in one of Piatigorsk’s sulfurous springs. For days on end, sitting on the little sofa in my office, I devoured reports, correspondence, orders, and organizational tables, smoking a discreet cigarette from time to time at my window. Fräulein Praxa, a somewhat scatterbrained Sudeten-lander who would obviously have preferred spending her days chattering on the telephone, had to keep going up and down to the archives, and complained that her ankles were swelling. “Thank you,” I said without looking at her when she came into my room with a new bundle. “Put it down there and take these; I’m done with them, you can take them back.” She sighed and left, trying to make as much noise as possible. Frau Gutknecht quickly revealed herself to be an execrable cook, knowing three dishes at most, all with cabbage, which she often spoiled; so at night I got into the habit of dismissing Fräulein Praxa and going down to the mess for a bite, and then to keep working in my office till late at night, returning home only to sleep. So as not to keep Piontek waiting, I took the U-Bahn; at those late hours the C line was almost empty, and I liked observing the rare passengers, their faces worn out, exhausted; it took me out of my work a little. Many times I found myself in a car with the same man, a civil servant who like me must have been working late; he never noticed me, since he was always immersed in a book. This man, otherwise so unremarkable, read in a remarkable way: while his eyes ran over the lines, his lips moved as if he were saying the words, but without any sound that I could hear, not even a whisper; and I felt then something like Augustine’s surprise when he saw for the first time Ambrose of Milan reading silently, with his eyes only—a thing the provincial Augustine didn’t know was possible, since he could only read out loud, listening to himself.

In the course of my own reading, I came upon the report turned in to the Reichsführer at the end of March by Dr. Korherr, the glum statistician who had questioned our figures: his, I have to admit, horrified me. At the end of a statistical argument difficult to follow for a non-specialist, he concluded that by December 31, 1942, 1,873,549 Jews, not including Russia and Serbia, had died, been “transported to the East,” or had been “sluiced through the camps” (durchgeschleust, a curious term imposed, I imagine, by the Reichsführer’s Sprachregelungen). In all, he estimated in conclusion, German influence, since the Seizure of Power, had reduced the Jewish population of Europe by four million—a number including, if I understood correctly, prewar emigration. Even after what I had seen in Russia, this was impressive: we had long since moved beyond the primitive methods of the Einsatzgruppen. Through a whole series of orders and instructions, I was also able to form an idea of the difficult adaptation of the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps to the requirements of total war. Whereas the very formation of the WVHA and its absorption of the IKL, which were supposed to signal and implement a passage to maximal war production, dated back to March 1942, serious measures to reduce the mortality of the inmates and improve their output had not been promulgated until October; in December still, Glücks, the head of the IKL, was ordering doctors in the Konzentrationslager to improve sanitary conditions, lower mortality, and increase productivity, but once again without specifying any concrete measures. According to the statistics of the D II that I consulted, mortality, expressed in monthly percentages, had gone down considerably: the overall rate for all of the KLs had gone from losses of 10 percent in December to 2.8 percent in April. But this reduction was entirely relative, since the population of the camps continued to increase; the net losses hadn’t changed. A semiannual report of the D II indicated that from July to December 1942, 57,503 inmates out of 96,770, or 60 percent of the total, had died; since January, the losses continued to hover at around 6,000 or 7,000 a month. None of the measures taken seemed able to reduce them. What’s more, certain camps appeared clearly worse than others; the mortality rate in March at Auschwitz, a KL in Upper Silesia that I was hearing about for the first time, had been 15.4 percent. I began to see what the Reichsführer was driving at.

Nevertheless I felt rather unsure of myself. Was that because of recent events, or simply my innate lack of bureaucratic instinct? Whatever the case, after I had managed to gather an overall idea of the problem from the documents, I decided, before going up to Oranienburg where the IKL people had their headquarters, to consult Thomas. I liked Thomas, but I would never have spoken to him about my personal problems; for my professional doubts, though, he was the best confidant I knew. He had once demonstrated to me in luminous terms the principle of how the system functioned (this must have been in 1939, or maybe even the end of 1938, during the internal conflicts that had shaken the movement after the Kristallnacht): “It’s normal that orders are always vague; it’s even deliberate, and it stems from the very logic of the Führerprinzip. It’s up to the recipient to recognize the intentions of the one who gives the command, and to act accordingly. The ones who insist on having clear orders or who want legislative measures haven’t understood that it’s the will of the leader, and not his orders, that counts, and that it’s up to the receiver of the orders to know how to decipher and even anticipate that will. Whoever knows how to act this way is an excellent National Socialist, and he’ll never be reproached for his excess of zeal, even if he makes mistakes; the others are the ones who, as the Führer says, are afraid of jumping over their own shadows.” I had understood that; but I also understood that I lacked the skill to go beyond the surfaces of things, to guess at the hidden stakes; and Thomas had precisely this talent to the highest degree, and that’s why he was driving in a sports convertible while I was going home on the U-Bahn. I found him at the Neva Grill, one of the good restaurants he liked to frequent. He talked to me with cynical amusement about the population’s morale, as it was revealed in Ohlendorf’s confidential reports, copies of which he received: “It’s remarkable how well informed people are of the so-called secrets—the euthanasia program, the destruction of the Jews, the camps in Poland, the gas, everything. You, in Russia, had never heard of the KLs in Lublin or Silesia, but the lowliest tramcar driver in Berlin or Düsseldorf knows they’re burning prisoners there. And despite Goebbels’s propaganda, people are still capable of forming opinions for themselves. The foreign radio broadcasts aren’t the only explanation, since a lot of people are still afraid of listening to them. No, all of Germany today is a vast tissue of rumors, a spider’s web that extends to all the territories under our control—the Russian front, the Balkans, France. Information circulates at an incredible speed. And the cleverest are able to match up these pieces of information so as sometimes to arrive at surprisingly precise conclusions. You know what we did, recently? We deliberately started a rumor in Berlin, a real false rumor, based on authentic but distorted information, to study how quickly and by what means it was transmitted. We picked it up in Munich, Vienna, Königsberg, and Hamburg in twenty-four hours, and in Linz, Breslau, Lübeck, and Jena in forty-eight. I’m tempted to try the same thing starting in the Ukraine, just to see. But the encouraging thing is that despite everything, people continue to support the Party and the authorities; they still have faith in our Führer and believe in the Endsieg. Which demonstrates what? That barely ten years after the Seizure of Power, the National Socialist spirit has become the truth of the daily life of the Volk. It has penetrated into the most obscure recesses. And so even if we lose the war, it will survive.”—“Let’s talk instead about how the war can be won, all right?” While eating, I told him about the instructions I had received and the general state of the situation as I understood it. He listened to me while drinking wine and cutting his steak, perfectly grilled, pink and juicy inside. He finished his meal and poured some more wine before he replied. “You’ve landed yourself a very interesting job, but I don’t envy you. I have the impression they’re sending you into a lion’s den, and even if you don’t make any blunders you’re going to be eaten alive. What do you know about the political situation? The internal one, I mean.” I too finished eating: “I don’t know much about the internal political situation.”—“Well you should. It has radically changed since the beginning of the war. Firstly, the Reichsmarschall is out, for good, in my opinion. What with the failure of the Luftwaffe against the bombings, his Homeric corruption, and his immoderate use of drugs, no one pays any attention to him anymore: he serves as an extra, they take him out of the closet when they need someone to talk in the Führer’s place. Our dear Dr. Goebbels, despite his valiant efforts after Stalingrad, is on the sidelines. The rising star today is Speer. When the Führer appointed him, no one gave him more than six months; since then, he’s tripled our weapons production, and the Führer grants him anything he asks for. What’s more, this little architect whom everyone used to make fun of has turned out a remarkable politician, and he’s now got several heavyweights on his side: Milch, who oversees the Aviation Ministry for Göring, and Fromm, the head of the Ersatzheer. What is Fromm’s interest? Fromm has to provide men for the Wehrmacht; so every German worker replaced by a foreign worker or an inmate is one more soldier for Fromm. Speer thinks only about how to increase production, and Milch does the same for the Luftwaffe. They all demand just one thing: men, men, men. And that’s where the Reichsführer has a problem. Of course, no one can criticize the Endlösung program in itself: it’s a direct order from the Führer, so the ministries can just quibble at the margins, playing on the diversion of some of the Jews for work. But after Thierack agreed to empty his prisons into the KLs, they have come to represent a considerable pool of manual labor. It’s nothing, of course, next to the foreign workers, but it’s still something. Now the Reichsführer is very jealous about his SS’s autonomy, and Speer is encroaching on it. When the Reichsführer demanded that the factories be built inside his camps, Speer went to see the Führer and, presto! The inmates left for the factories. You see the problem: the Reichsführer feels he’s in a weak position and has to give guarantees to Speer, to demonstrate that he’s showing goodwill. Of course, if he actually manages to inject more labor into industry, everyone’s happy. But that, in my opinion, is where the internal problem comes in: the SS, you see, is like the Reich in miniature, people tug it every which way. Take the example of the RSHA: Heydrich was a genius, a force of nature and an admirable National Socialist; but I’m convinced that the Reichsführer was secretly relieved by his death. Sending him to Prague was a brilliant move: Heydrich took it as a promotion, but he also saw that he was forced to let go a little of the RSHA, simply because he was no longer in Berlin. His tendancy toward autonomy was very strong, that’s why the Reichsführer didn’t want to replace him. And then each of the Amtschefs began to go his own way. So the Reichsführer appointed Kaltenbrunner to control them, hoping that Kaltenbrunner, who is a complete idiot, would himself remain controllable. But you’ll see, it’ll start all over again: the job requires it, more than the man. And it’s the same thing for all the other departments and divisions. The IKL is particularly rich in alte Kämpfer: there, even the Reichsführer has to tread softly.”—“If I understand correctly, the Reichsführer wants to promote reforms without upsetting the IKL too much?”—“Or else he doesn’t care about reforms, but wants to use them as an instrument to tighten the screws on the stubborn ones. And at the same time, he has to demonstrate to Speer that he’s cooperating with him, but without giving him the possibility of interfering with the SS or cutting back its privileges.”—“It certainly is delicate.”—“Ah! Brandt said it well: analysis and diplomacy.”—“He also said ‘initiative.’”—“Of course! If you find answers, even to problems that weren’t directly submitted to you but that play to the vital interests of the Reichsführer, your career is made. But if you start indulging in bureaucratic romanticism and try to change everything all at once, you’ll very quickly end up as a deputy Leiter in some shabby SD-Stelle in the hinterlands of Galicia. So beware: if you pull off the same kind of trick you did in France, I’ll regret having gotten you out of Stalingrad. Staying alive has to be earned.”