Bär assigned me an office in the Kommandantur in Birkenau, and I had Obersturmführer Elias and one of my new subordinates, Untersturmführer Darius, come from Oranienburg. I took my quarters at the Haus der Waffen-SS; they gave me the same room as during my first visit, a year and a half before. The weather was horrible—cold, damp, fickle. The whole region lay beneath snow, a thick layer of it, often dusted with the soot from the mines and factory chimneys, a dirty gray lace. In the camp it was almost black, packed down by the footsteps of thousands of inmates, and mixed with mud frozen by frost. Violent snow squalls came down without warning from the Beskids and for twenty minutes or so smothered the camp under a white, swirling veil, before disappearing with the same swiftness, leaving everything immaculate for a few moments. In Birkenau only one chimney was still smoking, in fits and starts, the Krema IV, which was being kept active to dispose of the inmates who died in the camp; Krema III was in ruins since the October uprising, and the other two, following Himmler’s instructions, were partially dismantled. The new construction zone had been abandoned and most of the barracks removed, and the vast, empty terrain left to the snow; the problems of overpopulation had been solved by the preliminary evacuations. When the clouds lifted on rare occasions, the blue-tinted line of the Beskids appeared behind the geometric rows of the barracks: and the camp, beneath the snow, seemed as if peaceful and tranquil. I went almost every day to inspect the different satellite camps, Günthergrube, Fürstergrube, Tschechowitz, Neu Dachs, the little camps of Gleiwitz, to check the state of the preparations. The long, flat roads were almost deserted, scarcely disturbed by Wehrmacht trucks; I would come home at night under a dark sky, a heavy, gray mass; beyond it, snow fell sometimes like a sheet on the distant villages, and beyond that a delicate sky, blue and pale yellow, with just a few clouds of muted purple, rimmed by the light of the setting sun, colored the snow and the ice of the marshes that soak the Polish earth. The night of December 31, the Haus organized a quiet celebration for the officers passing through and some camp officers: people sang melancholy carols, the men drank slowly and spoke in low voices; everyone understood it was the last New Year’s Eve of the war, and that it wasn’t very likely the Reich would survive till the next one. I found Dr. Wirths there, profoundly depressed, he had sent his family back to Germany; and I met Untersturmführer Schurz, the new head of the Politische Abteilung, who treated me with much more deference than his Kommandant. I talked for a long time with Kraus; he had served several years in Russia, until he was seriously wounded in Kursk, where he had just barely managed to drag himself out of his burning tank; after his convalescence, he had been assigned to the Southeast SS District, in Breslau, and he had ended up on Schmauser’s staff. This officer, who bore the same first names, Franz Xaver, as another Kraus, a well-known Catholic theologian from the previous century, gave me the impression of being a serious man, open to others’ opinions, but fanatically determined to see his mission through; although he said he understood my aims, he maintained that no inmate should, naturally, fall alive into the hands of the Russians, and thought that these two constraints were not incompatible. He was probably right in principle, but for my part I was worried—rightly so, as we will see—that overly severe orders would rouse the brutality of the camp guards, made up in this sixth year of the war from the dregs of the SS, men too old or too sick to serve at the front, Volksdeutschen who barely spoke German, veterans suffering from psychiatric disorders but deemed fit for service, alcoholics, drug addicts, degenerates clever enough to have avoided the punitive battalion or the firing squad. Many officers were hardly any better than their men: with the enormous expansion, this last year, of the system of KLs, the WVHA had been forced to recruit just about anyone, to promote notoriously incompetent subalterns, to reappoint officers who had been cashiered for serious offenses, or to appoint people no one else wanted. Hauptsturmführer Drescher, an officer I also met that night, confirmed me in my pessimistic outlook. Drescher directed the branch of the Morgen commission still operating in the camp, and had seen me once with his superior in Lublin; that night, in an alcove set a little back from the restaurant dining room, he opened up to me quite frankly about the investigations under way. The case against Höss, which was nearly wrapped up in October, had suddenly collapsed in November, despite the testimony of a female inmate, an Austrian prostitute Höss had seduced and then tried to kill by locking her up in a disciplinary cell of the PA. After his transfer to Oranienburg at the end of 1943, Höss had left his family in the Kommandant’s house, forcing his successive replacements to take quarters elsewhere; he had only finally moved them the previous month, probably because of the Russian threat, and it was common knowledge, in the camp, that Frau Höss had required four whole trucks to carry their belongings. Drescher was appalled, but Morgen had come up against Höss’s protectors. The investigations were continuing, but concerned only small fry. Wirths had joined us, and Drescher went on talking without being bothered by the doctor’s presence; obviously, he wasn’t telling him anything new. Wirths was worried about the evacuation: despite Boesenberg’s plan, no measures had been taken in the Stammlager or in Birkenau to prepare rations or warm clothing for the journey. I too was worried.

Yet the Russians still weren’t moving. In the West, our forces were still struggling to break through (the Americans were clinging to Bastogne), and we also had gone over to the offensive in Budapest, which gave us a little hope again. But the famous V-2 rockets had turned out, if you knew how to read between the lines, to be ineffective, our secondary offensive in Northern Alsace had immediately been contained, and it was obvious that it was just a question of time now. At the beginning of January, I gave Piontek a day off so he could evacuate his family from Tarnowitz, at least as far as Breslau; I didn’t want him worrying himself sick about them when the time came. Snow fell steadily, and when the sky did clear, the heavy, dirty smoke from the foundries dominated the Silesian landscape, bearing witness to a production of tanks, cannons, and munitions that would continue till the last minute. A dozen days went by like this in anxious tranquility, punctuated by bureaucratic quarrels. I finally managed to persuade Bär to prepare special rations, to be distributed to the inmates at the time of departure; as for warm clothing, he told me they would take them from the Kanada, whose warehouses, for lack of transport, were still full. A good piece of news briefly came to lighten this tension. One night, at the Haus, Drescher presented himself at my table with two glasses of Cognac, smiling into his goatee: “Congratulations, Obersturmbannführer,” he declared, handing me a glass and raising the other.—“That’s fine with me, but why?”—“I spoke to Sturmbannführer Morgen today. He asked me to tell you that your affair is closed.” That Drescher knew about it scarcely bothered me, I was so relieved by the news. Drescher went on: “In the absence of any material evidence, Judge von Rabingen decided to dismiss the case against you. Von Rabingen told the Sturmbannführer that he’d never seen such a shoddy case with so little to back it up, and that the Kripo had done an abominable job. He was close to thinking it all stemmed from some plot against you.” I breathed in: “That’s what I always said. Fortunately, the Reichsführer kept his confidence in me. If what you say is true, then my honor is cleared.”—“That’s right,” said Drescher, nodding. “Sturmbannführer Morgen even told me that Judge von Rabingen was thinking of taking disciplinary measures against the inspectors who were working against you.”—“I’d be delighted.” The news was confirmed to me three days later by a letter from Brandt, which included a copy of a letter to the Reichsführer in which von Rabingen stated he was fully convinced of my innocence. Neither of the two letters mentioned Clemens or Weser, but that was enough for me.