As I left Himmler’s office, I have to confess, I felt as if I were floating in my boots. Finally I was being given a responsibility, an authentic responsibility! So they had recognized my true worth. And it was a positive job, a way to contribute to the war effort and to the victory of Germany by other means than murder and destruction. Even before talking with Rudolf Brandt, I gave in to glorious, ridiculous fantasies, like a teenager: convinced by my flawless argumentation, the departments fell in behind me; the inept and the criminal were overthrown, sent back to their lairs; in a few months, considerable progress had been made, inmates recovered their strength, their health; many of them, their hearts swept away by the force of unchained National Socialism, began working joyously to help Germany in its struggle; production soared from month to month; I got a more important position, real influence, allowing me to improve things in accord with the principles of the true Weltanschauung, and the Reichsführer himself listened to my advice, the advice of one of the best National Socialists there was. Ridiculous, puerile, I am well aware, but intoxicating. Of course, things wouldn’t turn out quite like that. But in the beginning I was truly bursting with enthusiasm. Even Thomas seemed impressed: “You see what happens, when you follow my advice instead of doing whatever you please,” he said to me with his sardonic smile. But when I thought about it, I hadn’t acted very differently than during our shared mission in 1939: once again, I had written the strict truth, without thinking too much about the consequences; but it just happened that I had more luck, and that the truth, this time, corresponded to what they wanted to hear.

I threw myself into the job with dedication. Since there wasn’t enough room in the SS-Haus, Brandt had a suite of offices assigned to me in the Minister of the Interior’s Zentralabteilung, on the Königsplatz in a bend of the Spree, on the top floor; from my windows, the Reichstag remained hidden, but I could see to one side, behind the Kroll Opera, the entire green, serene expanse of the Tiergarten, and to the other, beyond the river and the Moltke Bridge, the Lehrter customs rail station, with its vast network of sidings, constantly alive with a slow, juddering, soothing traffic, a perpetual childlike pleasure. Even better, the Reichsführer never came here: I could finally smoke in peace in my office. Fräulein Praxa, whom after all I didn’t really mind, and who knew at least how to answer the telephone and take messages, moved with me; I also managed to keep Piontek. Brandt also assigned me a Hauptscharführer, Walser, to take care of the filing, and two stenographers, and he authorized me to take on an administrative assistant with the rank of Untersturmführer; I had Thomas recommend one for me, a young man named Asbach, who had just entered the Staatspolizei after studying law and passing a training course at the Junkerschule in Bad Tölz.

The British planes had come back several nights running, but each time there were fewer: the Wilde Sau, which allowed our fighter planes to shoot down enemy aircraft from above while themselves remaining above the level of the flak, did a lot of damage, and the Luftwaffe had also begun to use flares to light up their targets as if in broad daylight; after September 3, the raids stopped completely: our new tactics had discouraged them. I went to see Pohl at his headquarters in Lichterfelde to discuss the composition of my research group. Pohl seemed very happy that this problem was finally being looked into in a systematic way; he told me frankly he was sick of sending his Kommandanten orders that weren’t followed through. We agreed that the Amtsgruppe D would appoint three representatives, one for each department; Pohl also suggested an administrator from the main office of the DWB, the German Economic Enterprises, to advise us about the economic aspects and constraints of companies using inmate labor; finally, he seconded to me his Nutrition Inspector, Professor Weinrowski, a man with moist eyes and hair already white, with a deep cleft in his chin, in which nested rough stubble that had escaped the razor. For almost a year already, Weinrowski had been trying to improve the nourishment of the Häftlinge, without any success; but he had a good experience with the obstacles, and Pohl wanted him to participate in our work. After an exchange of correspondence with the departments concerned, I summoned a preliminary meeting to take stock of the situation. At my request, Professor Weinrowski, along with his assistant, Hauptsturmführer Dr. Isenbeck, had prepared a brief memo for us that was distributed to all the participants; he also gave us an oral presentation. It was a beautiful September day, the end of the Indian summer; the sun shone on the trees of the Tiergarten and cast great patches of light into our conference room, illuminating the professor’s hair like a halo. The nutritional situation of the Häftlinge, Weinrowski explained to us in his jerky, didactic voice, was quite confused. Central regulations set norms and budgets, but the camps got their supplies locally, of course, which gave rise to sometimes considerable variation. As a typical ration, he gave the example of KL Auschwitz, where a Häftling assigned to heavy labor was supposed to receive, per day, 350 grams of bread, half a liter of ersatz, and a liter of potato or turnip soup, with the addition, four times a week, of 20 grams of meat in the soup. The inmates assigned to light work or to the infirmary obviously received less; there were also all kinds of special rations, such as those for children in the family camp or for inmates selected for medical experiments. To summarize the situation, roughly: an inmate assigned to heavy labor officially received about 2,150 calories per day and, for light work, 1,700. Now, without even knowing if these norms were applied, they could already be seen to be insufficient: a man at rest needs, depending on his size and weight, and taking environment into account, a minimum of 2,100 calories per day to stay in good health, and a man who works, 3,000. So the inmates could only waste away, all the more so since the balance between fats, carbohydrates, and proteins was far from being respected: 6.4 percent of the ration, at most, consisted of proteins, whereas the requirement ought to be 10 percent, or even 15 percent. His presentation over, Weinrowski sat down with a satisfied air, and I read extracts from the series of orders from the Reichsführer to Pohl for the improvement of nutrition in the camps, which I had had my new assistant, Asbach, analyze. The first of these orders, which dated back to March 1942, remained somewhat vague: the Reichsführer simply asked Pohl, a few days after the incorporation of the IKL into the WVHA, to gradually develop a diet, like that of the Roman soldiers or Egyptian slaves, that would contain all the vitamins and would remain simple and inexpensive. The ensuing letters were a little more precise: more vitamins, large quantities of raw vegetables and onions, carrots, kohlrabi, turnips, and also garlic, a lot of garlic, especially in winter, to improve the state of health. “I know these orders,” Professor Weinrowski declared when I had finished. “But in my opinion that’s not the main point.” For a man working, the important thing is calories and proteins; vitamins and micronutrients remain secondary when all is said and done. Hauptsturmführer Dr. Alicke, who represented the D III, agreed with this point of view; the young Isenbeck, on the other hand, had his doubts: classical nutrition, he seemed to think, underestimates the importance of vitamins, and he put forward in favor of this opinion, as if it settled everything, an article taken from a 1938 British medical journal, a reference that seemed not to impress Weinrowski much. Then Hauptsturmführer Gorter, the representative of the Arbeitseinsatz, spoke in turn: As regards the overall statistics of registered inmates, the situation was continuing to show progressive improvement; from 2.8 percent in April, the average rate of mortality had fallen to 2.23 percent in July, then to 2.09 percent in August. Even in Auschwitz, it hovered around 3.6 percent, a remarkable drop since March. “At the moment, the system of KLs includes about one hundred and sixty thousand inmates: of this number, only thirty-five thousand are classified by the Arbeitseinsatz as unfit for work, and a hundred thousand, which is not inconsiderable, work outside, in factories or enterprises.” Thanks to the construction program undertaken by Amtsgruppe C, overcrowding, a source of epidemics, was diminishing; although clothing remained problematic, despite the use of goods taken from the Jews; the medical aspect had made great progress. In short, the situation seemed to be stabilizing. Obersturmführer Jedermann, from the administration, stated that he mostly agreed with this; but he reminded us too that control of costs remained a vital problem: the budgets allocated were restrictive. “That’s entirely true,” said Sturmbannführer Rizzi, the economic specialist chosen by Pohl, “but there are still a number of factors to take into account.” He was an officer about my age, with sparse hair and an upturned, almost Slavic nose; when he spoke, his thin, bloodless lips scarcely moved, yet his statements were lucid and precise. The productivity of an inmate could in general be expressed in terms of a percentage of the productivity of a German worker or a foreign worker; but those two categories entailed much greater expense than the Häftling, not to speak of the fact that their availability was growing more and more limited. Indeed, ever since the major corporations and the Armaments Ministry had complained about unfair competition, the SS could no longer provide inmates for its own enterprises at cost, but had to bill for them at the same price as for outside companies, four to six reichsmarks a day, while the cost for an inmate’s upkeep obviously remained less than that sum. Now, a slight increase of the actual cost of upkeep, carefully managed, could lead to a considerable increase in the ratio of productivity, from which everyone would gain. “I will explain: the WVHA presently spends, let’s say, one point five reichsmarks per day for an inmate capable of carrying out ten percent of the daily work of a German worker. So we need ten inmates, or fifteen reichsmarks per day, to replace a German. But what if, by spending two reichsmarks per day for an inmate, we could give him back his strength, increase the period during which he’s fit for work, and thus train him correctly? In that case, it would be conceivable that an inmate could, after a few months, provide fifty percent of the work of his German counterpart: thus, we would need no more than two inmates, or four reichsmarks per day, to carry out the job of one German. You follow me? Of course, these figures are approximate. A study would have to be carried out.”—“Could you take charge of that?” I asked with interest.—“Wait, wait,” Jedermann cut in. “If I have to provide for one hundred thousand inmates at two reichsmarks instead of one point five, that is an overcost of fifty thousand reichsmarks per day, every day. The fact that they’re producing more or less doesn’t change anything. My budget doesn’t change.”—“That’s true,” I replied. “But I see what Sturmbannführer Rizzi is getting at. If his idea is valid, the overall profits of the SS will increase, since the inmates will produce more without any increase in cost for the companies that employ them. It would be enough, if that can be demonstrated, to convince Obergruppenführer Pohl to transfer part of these increased profits to the maintenance budget of Amtsgruppe D.”—“Yes, that’s a good point,” agreed Gorter, Maurer’s man. “And if the inmates don’t get worn out so quickly, in the end, the labor pool will grow more quickly, in fact. Hence the importance of lowering the death rate, in the end.”