In my relations, as I may have said, I always took care to avoid intellectuals or men of my social class: they always wanted to talk, and had an annoying tendency to fall in love. With Mihaï, I made an exception, but there weren’t too many risks; he was a cynic, frivolous and amoral. He had a little house west of Charlottenburg; I let him invite me over there the first night, after dinner, under the pretext of having a last drink, and I spent the night there. Beneath his eccentric mannerisms, he had the hard, taut body of an athlete, no doubt inherited from his peasant origins, brown, curly, luxuriant body hair, a rough, male odor. It greatly amused him to have seduced an SS officer: “The Wehrmacht or the Auswärtiges Amt, they’re too easy.” I saw him again from time to time. Sometimes I went to see him after dining with Helene; I used him brutally, as if to wash her silent desires out of my head, or my own ambiguity.

In October, just after my birthday, I was sent back to Hungary. Horthy had been overthrown by a coup organized by von dem Bach-Zelewski and Skorzeny; now Szálasi’s Arrow Cross Party was in power. Kammler was clamoring for labor for his underground factories and his V-2s, the first models of which had just been launched in September. Soviet troops were already penetrating Hungary, from the south, as well as the Reich’s own territory, in eastern Prussia. In Budapest, the SEk had been dissolved in September, but Wisliceny was still there and Eichmann quickly made another appearance. Once more, it was a disaster. The Hungarians agreed to give us fifty thousand Jews from Budapest (in November, Szálasi was already insisting on the fact that they were only “on loan”), but they had to be conveyed to Vienna, for Kammler and for the construction of an Ostwall, and there was no more transport available: Eichmann, probably with Veesenmayer’s agreement, decided to send them there on foot. The story is well known: many died on the road, and the officer in charge of reception, Obersturmbannführer Höse, refused most of the ones who arrived, for once again he could not employ women for excavation work. I could do absolutely nothing, no one listened to my suggestions, not Eichmann, not Winkelmann, not Veesenmayer, not the Hungarians. When Obergruppenführer Jüttner, the head of the SS-FHA, arrived in Budapest with Becher, I tried to intercede with him; Jüttner had passed the marchers, who were falling like flies in the mud, the rain, and the snow; this spectacle had scandalized him and he did in fact go and protest to Winkelmann; but Winkelmann sent him to Eichmann, over whom he had no control, and Eichmann bluntly refused to see Jüttner—he sent one of his subordinates, who haughtily brushed aside the complaints. Eichmann, obviously, was so full of himself that he no longer listened to anyone, except maybe Müller and Kaltenbrunner, and Kaltenbrunner no longer seemed to listen even to the Reichsführer anymore. I spoke about it with Becher, who was to see Himmler; I asked him to intervene, and he promised to do what he could. As for Szálasi, he soon took fright: the Russians were advancing; in mid-November he put an end to the marches, they hadn’t even sent thirty thousand, one more senseless waste, on top of the others. No one seemed to know what he was doing anymore, or rather everyone did just as he pleased, alone and separately; it was becoming impossible to work in such conditions. I made one final attempt to approach Speer, who had taken over complete control of the Arbeitseinsatz in October, including the use of the WVHA inmates; he finally agreed to see me, but he rushed through the interview, in which he hadn’t the slightest interest. It’s true that I didn’t have anything concrete to offer him. As for the Reichsführer, I no longer understood his position at all. At the end of October, he gave Auschwitz the order to stop gassing the Jews, and at the end of November, declaring the Jewish question resolved, he ordered the destruction of the camp’s extermination installations; at the same time, at the RSHA and at the Persönlicher Stab, they were actively discussing the creation of a new extermination camp in Alteist-Hartel, near Mauthausen. It was also said that the Reichsführer was conducting negotiations with the Jews, in Switzerland and Sweden; Becher seemed to know all about it, but eluded my questions when I asked him for clarification. I also learned that he finally got the Reichsführer to agree to summon Eichmann (that was later on, in December); but I didn’t find out what was said on that occasion until seventeen years later, during the good Obersturmbannführer’s trial in Jerusalem: Becher, having become a businessman and a millionaire in Bremen, stated in his deposition that the meeting had taken place in the Reichsführer’s special train, in the Black Forest, near Triberg, and that the Reichsführer had spoken to Eichmann with both kindness and anger. One sentence in particular, that the Reichsführer, according to Becher, supposedly threw at his stubborn subordinate has often been quoted since in books: “Though you have been exterminating Jews up to now, from now on, if I give you the order, as I do now, you will be a nursemaid to the Jews. I should remind you that in 1933 it was I who set up the RSHA, and not Gruppenführer Müller or you. If you cannot obey me, tell me so!” This could be true. But Becher’s testimony should certainly be treated with caution; he takes credit himself, for example, thanks to his influence over Himmler, for the cessation of the forced marches from Budapest—whereas the order actually came from the panicking Hungarians—and also, an even more outrageous claim, the initiative for the order to interrupt the Endlösung: yet if anyone could have slipped that idea to the Reichsführer, it was certainly not that clever wheeler-dealer (Schellenberg, maybe).

My legal case continued its course; Judge von Rabingen regularly summoned me to clear up one point or another. From time to time I saw Mihaï; as for Helene, she seemed to be growing increasingly transparent, not from fear, but from pent-up emotion. When, back from Hungary, I told her about the atrocities of Nyíregyháza (the Third Armored Corps had retaken the city from the Russians at the end of October, and had found women of all ages raped, parents nailed alive to doors in front of their mutilated children; and these had been Hungarians, not Germans), she looked at me for a long time, then said gently: “And in Russia, was it very different?” I didn’t say anything. I looked at the extraordinarily thin wrists her sleeves revealed; I could easily have looped my thumb and index finger around them. “I know their revenge will be terrible,” she said then. “But we’ll have deserved it.” In the beginning of November, my apartment, miraculously preserved till then, disappeared in a bombing: a bomb came through the roof and took the top two floors with it; poor Herr Zempke succumbed to a heart attack as he left the half-collapsed cellar. Fortunately, I had gotten into the habit of keeping some of my clothes and my underwear at the office. Mihaï suggested I move to his apartment; I preferred to go to Wannsee, to Thomas’s place, where he had moved after his Dahlem house burned down in May. He led a wild life there, there were always a few fire-brands from the Amt VI around, one or two of Thomas’s colleagues, Schellenberg, and of course girls. Schellenberg often talked in private with Thomas but obviously mistrusted me. One day I came home a little early and heard an animated discussion in the living room, loud voices, Schellenberg’s mocking, insistent intonation: “If that Bernadotte agrees…” He interrupted himself as soon as he saw me on the doorstep and greeted me in a pleasant tone: “Aue, nice to see you.” But he didn’t continue his conversation with Thomas. When I wearied of my friend’s parties, I sometimes let myself be taken around by Mihaï. He often attended the daily farewell parties of Dr. Kosak, the Croatian ambassador, which took place either at the legation or in his villa in Dahlem; the upper crust of the diplomatic corps and the Auswärtiges Amt went there to stuff themselves, get drunk, and meet the prettiest UFA starlets, Maria Milde, Ilse Werner, Marikka Rökk. Around midnight, a choir sang traditional Dalmatian songs; after the usual Mosquito raid, the artillerymen from the Croatian flak battery stationed next door came to drink and play jazz till dawn; among them was an officer who had escaped from Stalingrad, but I took care not to tell him I had been there too, he would never have left me alone. These bacchanales sometimes degenerated into orgies, couples intertwined in the alcoves of the legation and frustrated idiots went out to empty their pistols in the garden: one night, drunk, I made love with Mihaï in the bedroom of the ambassador, who was snoring downstairs on a sofa; then, overexcited, Mihaï came back up with a little actress and took her in front of me as I finished a bottle of slivovitz and meditated on the servitudes of the flesh. This vain, frenetic gaiety couldn’t last. At the end of December, as the Russians were attacking Budapest and our last offensive was getting bogged down in the Ardennes, the Reichsführer sent me to inspect the evacuation of Auschwitz.