This mocking and at the same time formidable warning was painfully emphasized by a brief letter I got from my sister. As I suspected, she had left for Antibes just after our phone conversation:

Max, the police were talking about a psychopath or a thief or even a gangland killing. In fact they don’t know anything. They told me they were looking into Aristide’s business affairs. It was odious. They asked me all kinds of questions about the family: I told them about you, but I don’t know why, I took care not to tell them you were there. I don’t know what I was thinking of but I was afraid of making trouble for you. And what would be the use, anyway? I left immediately after the funeral. I wanted you to be there and at the same time I would have hated you to be there. It was sad and poor and awful. They were buried together at the town cemetery. Aside from me and a policeman who had come to see who would be at the funeral there were just a few old friends of Aristide’s and a priest. I left immediately afterward. I don’t know what else to write you. I’m terribly sad. Take care of yourself.

Of the twins, she didn’t breathe a word: after her violent reaction on the telephone, I found that surprising. What was even more surprising, for me, was my own lack of reaction: this frightened and mournful letter had the same effect on me as a yellow fall leaf, detached and dead before it had even touched the ground. A few minutes after reading it, I was thinking again about work problems. The questions that just a handful of weeks before had been eating away at me and keeping me awake at night now seemed to me like a row of closed, silent doors; the thought of my sister, a stove that had gone out and smelled of cold ashes, and the thought of my mother, a quiet, long-neglected gravestone. This strange apathy extended to all other aspects of my life: my landlady’s petty annoyances left me indifferent, sexual desire seemed like an abstract old memory, anxiety about the future a frivolous, vain luxury. That is somewhat the state in which I find myself today, and I feel fine this way. Only work occupied my thoughts. I meditated on Thomas’s advice: he seemed to me to be even righter than he knew. Toward the end of the month, with the Tiergarten flowering and the trees covering the still-gray city with their insolent greenery, I went to visit the offices of the Amtsgruppe D, the former IKL, in Oranienburg, near KL Sachsenhausen: long, white, clean buildings, perfectly straight lanes, flowerbeds meticulously mulched and weeded by well-fed inmates in clean uniforms, energetic, busy, motivated officers. I was courteously received by Brigadeführer Glücks. Glücks talked quickly and volubly, and this flow of confused words presented a marked contrast with the aura of efficiency that characterized his kingdom. He completely lacked an overall picture, and lingered at length and stubbornly over unimportant administrative details, quoting statistics—often wrong —to me at random, which I noted down out of politeness. To every somewhat specific question, he invariably replied: “Oh, you’d do better to see about that over at Liebehenschel’s,” all the while cordially pouring me French Cognac and offering me cookies. “Made by my wife. Despite the restrictions, she knows how to get by, she’s a wonder.” He clearly wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible, without, however, taking the risk of offending the Reichsführer, so as to return to his torpor and his cookies. I decided to cut things short; as soon as I paused, he called his adjutant and poured me a last Cognac: “To the health of our dear Reichsführer.” I took a sip, put down the glass, saluted him, and followed my guide. “You’ll see,” Glücks called to me as I was going out the door, “Liebehenschel can answer all your questions.” He was right, and his deputy, a small man with a sad, tired face who also ran the Central Office of Amtsgruppe D, gave me a concise, lucid, realistic summary of the situation and the state of progress of the reforms that had been undertaken. I already knew that most of the orders given out under Glücks’s signature were in fact prepared by Liebehenschel: that wasn’t very surprising. For Liebehenschel, a large share of the problems came from the Kommandanten: “They have no imagination, and they don’t know how to apply our orders. As soon as we get anything like a motivated Kommandant, the situation changes completely. But we sorely lack personnel, and there’s no prospect of replacing these cadres.”—“And the medical departments can’t make up for the deficiencies?”—“You’ll see Dr. Lolling after me, you’ll understand.” In fact, although the hour I spent with Standartenführer Dr. Lolling didn’t teach me much about the problems of the medical departments of the KLs, it at least allowed me, despite my irritation, to understand why these departments had no choice but to try to function autonomously. Elderly, his eyes watery, his mind confused and muddled, Lolling, whose department supervised all the sanitary structures of the camps, not only was an alcoholic but, according to widespread rumor, helped himself daily from his stock of morphine. I didn’t understand how such a man could remain in the SS, even less occupy a position of responsibility in it. No doubt he benefited from protection within the Party. Nevertheless I extracted a pile of highly useful reports from him: Lolling, for lack of anything better to do and to mask his own incompetence, spent his time ordering reports from his subordinates; they weren’t all men like him, there was some substantial material there.

That left Maurer, the creator and head of the Arbeitseinsatz, now department D II in the WVHA organizational table. Actually, I could have done without the other visits, even the one to Liebehenschel. Standartenführer Gerhard Maurer, a man still young, without any diplomas but endowed with a solid professional experience in accounting and management, had been pulled out of obscurity from an office in the old SS administration by Oswald Pohl and had quickly distinguished himself by his administrative abilities, his spirit of initiative, and his keen understanding of bureaucratic realities. When Pohl had taken the IKL under his wing, he had asked Maurer to set up the D II in order to centralize and rationalize the exploitation of camp labor. I was to see him again several times afterward and to correspond with him regularly, always with the same satisfaction. Maurer represented for me a certain ideal National Socialist who, though he must be a man with a Weltanschauung, still has to be a man who gets results. And concrete, measurable results formed Maurer’s very life. Although he himself hadn’t invented all the measures set in place by the Arbeitseinsatz, he had out of whole cloth created the impressive statistical data collection system that now covered all the WVHA camps. This system he patiently explained to me, itemizing the standardized, pre-printed forms that each camp had to fill out and send in, pointing out the most important figures and the right way to interpret them: considered thus, these numbers became fungible, more legible than a narrative report; capable of being compared and thus conveying an enormous amount of information, they allowed Maurer to follow precisely, without leaving his office, to what extent his orders were implemented, and with what success. These data allowed him to confirm Liebehenschel’s diagnosis for me. He gave me a severe speech on the reactionary attitude of the corps of Kommandanten, “trained in the Eicke method,” competent enough when it came to the old repressive, police functions, but in the main, limited and inept, unable to integrate modern management techniques adapted to new requirements: “These men aren’t bad, but they’re just not up to what’s being asked of them now.” Maurer himself had only one aim in mind: to extract the maximum amount of work from the KLs. He didn’t serve me any Cognac but when I took my leave he warmly shook my hand: “I’m delighted that the Reichsführer is finally looking more carefully into these problems. My office is at your service, Sturmbannführer, you can always count on me.”