He knew what he was talking about. In Cherniakov, the SP had arrested the president of the regional Troïka of the NKVD, along with one of his colleagues, and had sent them to Zhitomir. Interrogated by Vogt and his colleagues, this judge, Wolf Kieper, admitted he had had more than 1,350 people executed. He was a Jew in his early sixties, a Communist since 1905 and a People’s Judge since 1918; the other one, Moishe Kogan, was younger, but he was also a member of the Cheka and a Jew. Blobel had discussed the case with Rasch and Oberst Heim and they had agreed on a public execution. Kieper and Kogan were tried before a military court and condemned to death. On August 7, early in the morning, officers from the Sonderkommando, supported by Orpos and our Askaris, conducted arrests of Jews and gathered them together in the market square. The Sixth Army had made available a propaganda company car with a loudspeaker that wound through the streets of the city and announced the execution in German and Ukrainian. I arrived at the square toward late morning, accompanied by Thomas. More than four hundred Jews had been assembled and forced to sit down, their hands clasped at the back of their necks, next to the tall gallows put up the day before by the Sonderkommando drivers. Beyond the Waffen-SS cordon, hundreds of onlookers were flooding in, soldiers especially but also men from the Organisation Todt and from the NSKK, as well as many Ukrainian civilians. These spectators filled the square on all sides; it was difficult to clear a path through them; about thirty soldiers were even perched on the metal roof of a neighboring building. The men were laughing and joking; a lot of them were photographing the scene. Blobel was standing at the foot of the gallows along with Häfner, who had just returned from Belaya Tserkov. In front of the rows of Jews, von Radetzky was haranguing the crowd in Ukrainian: “Does someone have an account to settle with one of these Jews?” he asked. A man emerged from the crowd and kicked one of the seated men, then returned; others threw fruit and rotten tomatoes at them. I watched the Jews: their faces were gray, they looked anguished, wondering what was going to happen next. There were a lot of old men among them, but some quite young ones too. I noticed that in the cordon of guards were several Landsers from the Wehrmacht. “What are they doing here?” I asked Häfner.—“They’re volunteers. They asked to help.” I made a face. A number of officers could be seen, but I didn’t recognize anyone from the AOK. I headed toward the cordon and questioned one of the soldiers: “What are you doing here? Who asked you to stand guard?” He looked embarrassed. “Where is your superior?”—“I don’t know, Herr Offizier,” he finally replied, scratching his forehead under his cap.—“What are you doing here?” I repeated.—“I went to the ghetto this morning, with my comrades, Herr Offizier. And then we offered to help out, your colleagues said yes. I had ordered a pair of leather boots from a Jew and I wanted to try to find him before…before…” He didn’t even dare say the word.—“Before they shoot him, is that it?” I said sharply.—“Yes, Herr Offizier.”—“And did you find him?”—“He’s over there. But I haven’t been able to speak to him.” I returned to where Blobel was. “Standartenführer, the men from the Wehrmacht should be dismissed. It’s not normal for them to participate in the Aktion without orders.”—“Leave it, leave it alone, Obersturmführer. It’s wonderful they’re showing enthusiasm. They’re good National Socialists, they want to do their part too.” I shrugged and rejoined Thomas. He gestured to the crowd with his chin: “We should have sold tickets, we’d be rich.” He snickered. “At the AOK, they call this Executionstourismus.” The truck had arrived and was maneuvering under the gallows. Two Waffen-SS had Kieper and Kogan come out. They were in peasant shirts and had their hands tied behind their backs. Kieper’s beard had turned white since his arrest. Our drivers placed a plank atop the truck’s side, climbed up on it, and started attaching the ropes. I noticed Höfler standing apart, smoking glumly; Bauer, Blobel’s personal driver, was testing the knots. Then Zorn also climbed up and the Waffen-SS hoisted up the two condemned men. They were placed standing below the gallows, and Zorn made a speech; he spoke in Ukrainian, he must have been explaining the sentence. The spectators were yelling and hissing, and he had difficulty making himself heard; several times he made gestures to silence them, but no one was paying any attention. Soldiers were taking pictures, pointing at the condemned men, and laughing. Then Zorn and one of the Waffen-SS placed the nooses around their necks. The two condemned men remained silent, withdrawn into themselves. Zorn and the others came down from the board and Bauer started up the truck. “Slower, slower,” shouted the Landsers, who were taking photographs. The truck moved forward, the two men tried to keep their balance, then they fell over, one after the other, and swung back and forth several times. Kieper’s pants had fallen around his ankles; below his shirt, he was naked; horrified, I saw his engorged penis, still ejaculating. “Nix Kultura!” a Landser bellowed, and others took up the cry. On the posts of the gallows, Zorn was nailing signs explaining the condemnation; they stated that Kieper’s 1,350 victims were all Volksdeutschen and Ukrainians.

Then the soldiers in the cordon ordered the Jews to stand up and march. Blobel got into his car with Häfner and Zorn; von Radetzky invited me to come with him and also took Thomas. The crowd followed the Jews, there was an immense commotion. Everyone headed outside the city toward what people called the Pferdefriedhof, the horse cemetery: a trench had been dug there, with thick beams stacked up behind, to stop stray bullets. Obersturmführer Grafhorst, who commanded our company of Waffen-SS, was waiting with about twenty of his men. Blobel and Häfner inspected the trench, then we waited. I was thinking. I thought about my life, about what relationship there could be between this life that I had lived—an entirely ordinary life, the life of anyone, but also in some respects an extraordinary, an unusual life, although the unusual is also very ordinary—and what was happening here. There must have been a relationship, and it was a fact, there was one. True, I wasn’t taking part in the executions, I wasn’t commanding the firing squads; but that didn’t change much, since I often attended them, I helped prepare them and then I wrote the reports; what’s more, it was just by chance that I had been posted to the Stab rather than to the Teilkommandos. And if they had given me a Teilkommando, would I too have been able, like Nagel or Häfner, to organize the roundups, have the ditches dug, line up the condemned men, and shout “Fire!”? Yes, certainly. Ever since I was a child, I had been haunted by a passion for the absolute, for the overcoming of all limits; and now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of the Ukraine. I had always wanted my thinking to be radical; and now the State, the nation had also chosen the radical and the absolute; how, then, just at that moment, could I turn my back, say no, and at the end of the day prefer the comfort of bourgeois laws, the mediocre assurance of the social contract? That was obviously impossible. And if this radicalism was the radicalism of the abyss, and if the absolute turned out to be absolute evil, one still had to follow them to the end, with eyes wide open—of that at least I was utterly convinced. The crowd was arriving and filling the cemetery; I noticed some soldiers in bathing suits; there were also women, children. People were drinking beer and passing cigarettes around. I looked at a group of officers from headquarters: Oberst von Schuler was there, the IIa, along with several other officers. Grafhorst, our Kompanieführer, was positioning his men. Now we were using one rifle per Jew, a bullet in the chest at the level of the heart. Often that wasn’t enough to kill, and a man had to go down into the trench to finish them off; the screams resounded among the chatter and clamor of the crowd. Häfner, who was more or less officially commanding the action, was shouting himself hoarse. Between the salvos, men emerged from the crowd and asked the Waffen-SS to trade places with them; Grafhorst didn’t object to this, and his men handed their rifles over to the Landsers, who tried one or two shots before returning to join their comrades. Grafhorst’s Waffen-SS were quite young and, since the beginning of the execution, seemed disturbed. Häfner began bawling one of them out, who at each salvo handed his rifle over to a volunteer soldier and stood off to the side, white as a sheet. And then there were too many shots that missed and that was a problem. Häfner had the executions stopped and started to confer with Blobel and two officers from the Wehrmacht. I didn’t know them, but could see from the colors of their collar patches that one was a military judge and the other a doctor. Then Häfner went to talk things over with Grafhorst. I saw that Grafhorst was objecting to what Häfner was saying, but I couldn’t hear their words. Finally Grafhorst had a new batch of Jews brought over. They were positioned facing the trench, but the shooters from the Waffen-SS aimed at the head rather than the chest; the result was horrifying: the tops of their skulls flew into the air, the shooters got pieces of brain splashed in their faces. One of the volunteer shooters from the Wehrmacht was vomiting and his comrades were making fun of him. Grafhorst had flushed completely red and was cursing Häfner; then he turned toward Blobel and the debate started up again. Once again they changed methods: Blobel added some shooters and they shot two at a time into the neck, as in July; Häfner himself administered the deathblow when it was necessary.