The day after the dinner with Oberländer, as soon as I woke up, I went to see Hennicke, the Group’s Chief of Staff. “Ah, Obersturmführer Aue. The dispatches for Lutsk are almost ready. Go see the Brigadeführer. He’s at the Brygidki Prison. Untersturmführer Beck will take you there.” This Beck was still very young; he was handsome, but seemed to be brooding about something, harboring a secret anger. After saluting me he hardly said a word. In the streets, the people seemed even more agitated than the day before; armed groups of nationalists were patrolling, and traffic was difficult. There were also many more German soldiers evident. “I have to stop by the train station to pick up a package,” Beck said. “Is that all right with you?” His driver already knew the way well; to avoid the crowd, he cut off onto a side street, which, farther on, wound along the side of a little hill lined with middle-class houses, quiet and comfortable. “It’s a beautiful city,” I remarked.—“That’s normal. It is a German city, basically,” Beck responded. I was silent. At the station, he left me in the car and disappeared into the crowd. Streetcars were discharging their passengers, taking on others, setting off again. In a little park over to the left, indifferent to the commotion, several families of Gypsies were lounging about under the trees, dirty, weather-beaten, dressed in colorful rags. Others were standing near the train station, but they weren’t begging; the children weren’t even playing. Beck returned with a little package. He followed my gaze and noticed the Gypsies. “Instead of wasting our time with the Jews, we’d do better taking care of those people,” he spat out viciously. “They’re much more dangerous. They work for the Reds, did you know that? But we’ll deal with them.” In the long street that led up from the station, he spoke again: “The synagogue is here, right next door. I’d like to see it. After that we’ll go to the prison.” The synagogue was set back in a little side street, on the left side of the avenue leading to the center of town. Two German soldiers were standing guard in front of the gate. The dilapidated façade wasn’t much to look at; only a Star of David on the pediment revealed the nature of the place; there wasn’t a Jew in sight. I followed Beck through the little door. The main room rose up two floors, surrounded by an elevated gallery, for the women no doubt; vivid paintings in bright colors decorated the walls, in a naïve but vigorous style, representing a great Lion of Judah surrounded by Jewish stars, parrots, and swallows, and riddled in places with bullet holes. In place of benches there were little chairs with school desks attached. Beck contemplated the paintings for a long while, then went out. The street in front of the prison was swarming with people, a monstrous, cacophonic crush. The people were shouting themselves hoarse; women, hysterical, were tearing their clothes and rolling on the ground; Jews, on their knees, guarded by Feldgendarmen, were scrubbing the sidewalk; now and then a passerby kicked one, a rubicund Feldwebel barked, “Juden, kaputt!” Ukrainians frantically applauded. At the gate to the prison, I had to make way for a column of Jews, in shirtsleeves or stripped to the waist, most of them bleeding, who, flanked by German soldiers, were carrying putrified corpses and loading them onto wagons. Old women in black threw themselves on the bodies, ululating, then rushed at the Jews, scratching at them until a soldier tried to push them away. I had lost sight of Beck; I went into the prison courtyard, and there it was the same spectacle again, terrified Jews sorting through corpses, others scrubbing the pavement while soldiers hooted; from time to time one of them lunged forward, striking at the Jews with his bare hands or his rifle butt, the Jews screamed, collapsed, struggled to rise up and get back to work, other soldiers were photographing the scene, still others, laughing, shouted insults or encouragements, sometimes too a Jew didn’t get up, and then several men would go at him with their boots, until one or two Jews would come to drag the body by the feet over to the side, while others had to scrub the pavement again. Finally I found an SS man: “Do you know where Brigadeführer Rasch is?”—“I think he’s in the prison offices, over there, I just saw him go up.” In the long hallway, soldiers were coming and going, it was calmer, but the green walls, shiny and filthy, were splattered with bloodstains, more or less fresh, and speckled with scraps of brain mixed with hair and bone fragments; there were also long trails where they had dragged the corpses, my boots stuck to the floor at each step. At the other end, Rasch was coming down the stairs in the company of a tall Oberführer with a chubby face and several other officers from the Group. I saluted them. “Oh, it’s you. Good. I received a report from Radetzky; ask him to come here as soon as he can. And you’ll report in person to Obergruppenführer Jeckeln about the Aktion here. Insist on the fact that it’s the nationalists and the people who took the initiative. In Lemberg the NKVD and the Jews assassinated three thousand people. So the people are taking their revenge, that’s normal. We asked the AOK to leave them a few days.”—“Zu Befehl, Brigadeführer.” I followed them out. Rasch and the Oberführer were having an animated discussion. In the courtyard, distinct from the stink of the corpses, rose the heavy, nauseating smell of fresh blood. Going out, I passed two Jews who were coming back in from the street under escort; one of them, a very young man, was sobbing violently, but in silence. I found Beck again next to the car and we returned to the Gruppenstab. I ordered Höfler to get the Opel ready and find Popp, then went to get the dispatches and the mail from the Leiter III. I also asked where Thomas was, since I wanted to say goodbye to him before leaving: “You’ll find him down by the boulevard,” I was told. “Go look in the Metropole Café, on Sykstuska.” In the courtyard, Popp and Höfler were ready. “Shall we go, Herr Obersturmführer?”—“Yes, but we’ll make a stop on the way. Go by the boulevard.” I found the Metropole easily. Inside, clusters of men were noisily talking; some, already drunk, were bellowing; near the bar, officers from the Rollbahn were drinking beer and commenting on the situation. I found Thomas in the back next to a blond young man in civilian clothes with a bloated, sullen face. They were drinking coffee. “Hi, Max! This is Oleg. A very well informed, intelligent man.” Oleg got up and shook my hand eagerly; he actually looked like a complete idiot. “Listen, I’m leaving now.” Thomas replied in French: “That’s very good. In any case we’ll see each other soon: according to the plan, your Kommandostab will be stationed in Zhitomir, with us.”—“Excellent.” He continued in German: “Good luck! Keep up your spirits.” I nodded to Oleg and went out. Our troops were still a long way away from Zhitomir, but Thomas seemed confident, he must have had good information. On the road, I lost myself with pleasure in the softness of the Galician countryside; we advanced slowly, in the dust of columns of trucks and equipment heading toward the front; from time to time the sun pierced through the long rows of white clouds that scrolled across the sky, a vast roof of shadows, cheerful and calm.

I arrived in Lutsk in the afternoon. Blobel, according to von Radetzky, wouldn’t be returning right away; Häfner told us confidentially that in the end they had left him in an insane asylum run by the Wehrmacht. The reprisal Aktion had been carried out successfully, but no one seemed too eager to talk about it: “You can count yourself lucky not to have been there,” Zorn whispered to me. On July 6, the Sonderkommando, still sticking to the advance of the Sixth Army, moved to Rovno, then quickly on to Tsviahel or Swjagel, which the Soviets call Novograd-Volynskiy. At each stage, Teilkommandos were detached to identify, arrest, and execute potential opponents. Most of them, it should be said, were Jews. But we also shot Commissars or cadres of the Bolshevik Party, when we found them, thieves, looters, farmers who were hiding their grain, Gypsies too, Beck would have been happy. Von Radetzky had explained to us that we had to reason in terms of objective threat: since unmasking each and every guilty individual was impossible, we had to identify the sociopolitical categories most liable to cause us harm, and act accordingly. In Lemberg, the new Ortskommandant, General Rentz, had little by little succeeded in reestablishing order and quieting things down; nonetheless, Einsatzkommando 6, and then Einsatzkommando 5, which had come to replace it, had continued executing hundreds of people outside the city. We were also beginning to have problems with the Ukrainians. On July 9, the brief independence experiment came to an abrupt end: the SP arrested Bandera and Stetsko and sent them under escort to Cracow, and their men were disarmed. But elsewhere, the OUN-B started a revolt; in Drohobycz, they opened fire on our troops, and several Germans were killed. From that time on we began to treat Bandera’s supporters too as an objective threat; the Melnykists, delighted, helped us identify them, and took control of the local administrations. On July 11, the Gruppenstab to which we were subordinated traded designations with the one attached to Army Group Center: from then on, our Einsatzgruppe was called “C”; the same day, our three Opel Admirals entered Zhitomir behind the tanks of the Sixth Army. A few days later, I was sent to reinforce this Vorkommando, while we waited for the rest of headquarters to catch up with us.