The Reichsführer, surrounded by a silent horde of officers and flanked by Rudolf Brandt, made his appearance around three o’clock in the afternoon, soon after we returned to the Schloss. Brandt noticed me and motioned to me with his head; he was already wearing his new stripes, but didn’t give me time to congratulate him when I came over: “After the Reichsführer’s speech, we’re leaving for Cracow. You will come with us.”—“Fine, Standartenführer.” Himmler had sat down in the first row, next to Bormann. First we were fed a speech by Dönitz, who justified the temporary cessation of submarine warfare, while hoping it would soon resume; by Milch, who hoped the Luftwaffe’s new tactics would soon put an end to the terrorist raids on our cities; and by Schepmann, the new Chief of Staff of the SA, who hoped for nothing that I could remember. Around five thirty, the Reichsführer mounted the podium. Blood-red flags and the black helmets of the honor guard framed his small silhouette on the high platform; the tall microphone stands almost hid his face; the light from the hall played on his glasses. The amplification gave his voice a metallic tone. Of the reactions of the audience, I have already spoken; I was sorry, finding myself in the rear of the hall, to have to contemplate the backs of people’s necks rather than their faces. Despite my alarm and surprise, I might add that some of his words touched me personally, especially those that had to do with the effect of this decision on those in charge of carrying it out, of the danger they ran in their minds of becoming cruel and heartless and no longer respecting human life, or of going soft and succumbing to weakness and nervous depression— yes, I knew this appallingly narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis well, these words could have been addressed to me, and to a certain extent, in all modesty, they were, to me and to those who like me were afflicted with this horrific responsibility, by our Reichsführer who understood well what we were enduring. Not that he let himself give in to the slightest sentimentality; as he said so brutally, toward the end of the speech: Many will weep, but that doesn’t matter; there is a lot of weeping already, words, to my ear, almost Shakespearean in breath, but maybe that was in the other speech, the one I read later on, I’m not sure, it matters little. After the speech—it must have been seven o’clock—Reichsleiter Bormann invited us to a buffet in a neighboring room. The dignitaries, especially the older Gauleiters, stormed the bar; since I had to travel with the Reichsführer, I abstained from drinking. I saw him in a corner, standing in front of Mandelbrod, with Bormann, Goebbels, and Leland; his back was turned to the room and he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the effect his words had produced. The Gauleiters downed drink after drink and talked in low voices; from time to time one of them barked out a platitude; his colleagues solemnly nodded and drank some more. I must confess that I, for my part, was, despite the effect of the speech, more preoccupied by the little scene of that afternoon: I felt clearly that Mandelbrod was seeking to position me, but how and in relation to whom, I didn’t yet see; I knew too little about his relations with the Reichsführer, or with Speer, for that matter, to come to any conclusion, and that worried me, I felt that these issues went beyond me. I wondered if Hilde or Hedwig could have enlightened me; at the same time I knew very well that, even in bed, they would have told me nothing that Mandelbrod didn’t want me to know. And Speer? For a long time I thought I remembered, but without thinking about it, that he too was talking with the Reichsführer during this reception. Then one day, some time ago, in a book, I learned that for years Speer has energetically denied having been there, that he claims he left at lunchtime with Rohland, and that he wasn’t present at the Reichsführer’s speech. All I can say about it is that it’s possible: for my part, after the words we exchanged at the noon reception, I didn’t pay any special attention to him, I was more concentrated on Dr. Mandelbrod and the Reichsführer, and also, there were really a lot of people; nonetheless, I thought I had seen him that evening, and he himself has described the frantic drinking bout of the Gauleiters, at the end of which, according to his own book, many of them had to be carried to the special train; at that moment, I had already left with the Reichsführer, so I didn’t see that myself, but he describes it as if he had been there, so it’s hard to say, and in any case it’s a rather pointless quibble: whether or not he heard the Reichsführer’s words that day, Reichsminister Speer knew, like everyone else; at the very least, by that point, he knew enough to know that it was better not to know any more, to quote a historian, and I can affirm that a little later on, when I knew him better, he knew everything, including about the women and children who, after all, couldn’t have been warehoused without his knowing it, even if he never spoke about it, that’s true, and even if he wasn’t up to date on all the technical details, which didn’t concern his specific field of responsibility, after all. I won’t deny that he would no doubt have preferred not to know; Gauleiter von Schirach, whom I saw that night sprawled on a chair, his tie undone and his collar open, drinking one Cognac after another, would certainly have preferred not to know, either, and many others along with him, either because the courage of their convictions failed them or because they were already afraid of the Allied reprisals, but it should be added that those men, the Gauleiters, did little for the war effort, and even hampered it in some cases, whereas Speer, as all the specialists now affirm, gave at least two extra years to National Socialist Germany, more than anyone he contributed to prolonging the business, and he would have prolonged it even more if he could have, and certainly he wanted victory, he struggled vehemently for victory, the victory of this National Socialist Germany that was destroying the Jews, women and children included, and the Gypsies too and many others besides, and that’s why I permit myself, despite the immense respect I have for his accomplishments as Minister, to find his oh so very public postwar regrets somewhat indecent, regrets that saved his skin, indeed, whereas he deserved life neither more nor less than the others, Sauckel, for instance, or Jodl, and which then forced him, in order to maintain the pose, into ever more intricately baroque contortions, whereas it would have been so simple, especially after he had served his sentence, to come out and say: Yes, I knew, and so what? As my comrade Eichmann stated so well, in Jerusalem, with all the direct simplicity of simple men: “Regrets, that’s for children.”

I left the reception around eight o’clock, on Brandt’s orders, without managing to say a proper goodbye to Dr. Mandelbrod, deep in discussion. With several other officers, I was driven to the Posen Hotel so I could pick up my things, then to the train station, where the Reichsführer’s special train was waiting for us. Once again, I had a private cabin, but of much more modest dimensions than in Dr. Mandelbrod’s car, with a tiny couchette. This train, called Heinrich, was extraordinarily well designed: in front, along with the Reichsführer’s personal armored cars, were cars made into offices and into a mobile communications center, all of them protected by flatcars equipped with antiaircraft weaponry; the entire Reichsführung-SS, if necessary, could keep working on the move. I didn’t see the Reichsführer get in; a little while after we arrived, the train started off; this time there was a window in my cabin, so I could put out the light and, sitting in the dark, contemplate the night, a beautiful, clear fall night, lit by stars and a crescent moon that shed a fine metallic gleam over Poland’s poor landscape. From Posen to Cracow it’s about four hundred kilometers; with the many stops required by alerts or blockages, we arrived long after dawn; awake already and sitting on my couchette, I watched the gray plains and potato fields slowly turn pink. At the Cracow train station, an honor guard was waiting for us, led by the Generalgouverneur, with a red carpet and a brass band; from a distance I saw Frank, surrounded by young Polish women in national dress carrying baskets of hothouse flowers, give the Reichsführer a German salute that almost made the seams of his uniform burst, then exchange a few animated words with him before they were swallowed up by an enormous sedan. We were given rooms in a hotel at the foot of the Wawel; I bathed, shaved carefully, and sent one of my uniforms to the cleaners. Then, strolling through the sunny, beautiful old streets of Cracow, I headed toward the HSSPF’s offices, where I sent a telex to Berlin to ask for news of my project’s progress. At midday, I attended the official lunch as a member of the Reichsführer’s delegation; I was seated at a table with several SS and Wehrmacht officers, as well as minor civil servants of the Generalgouvernement; at the main table, Bierkamp sat next to the Reichsführer and the Generalgouverneur, but I had no opportunity to go over and greet him. The conversation centered on Lublin, with Frank’s men confirming the rumor, in the GG, that Globocnik had been fired because of the epic scale of his embezzlements: according to one version, the Reichsführer even wanted to have him arrested and tried, as an example, but Globocnik had prudently accumulated a large number of compromising documents, and had used them to negotiate an almost golden retreat for himself to his native coast. After the banquet there were speeches, but I didn’t wait and went back to town to make my report to Brandt, who had established himself at the HSSPF’s. There wasn’t much to say: aside from the D III, which had immediately said yes, we were still waiting for the opinions of the other departments as well as the RSHA. Brandt told me to speed things up as soon as I returned: the Reichsführer wanted the project to be ready by midmonth.