The next morning the Gruppenstab arrived, together with the bulk of our Kommando, headed by Kuno Callsen. Sappers had finally inspected our palace and taken away the crates of explosive bottles, and we had been able to go back to our premises in time to welcome them. A Vorkommando from the HSSPF arrived too and occupied the czar’s residence that we had just left; they brought with them two Orpo battalions, which gave us considerable reinforcements. The Wehrmacht began to dynamite the buildings in the center of town to control the fires. Four tons of explosives had been found in the Lenin Museum, ready to detonate, but the sappers had managed to defuse them and buried them in front of the entrance. The new City Kommandant, Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, was holding almost constant meetings, which representatives of the Group and the Kommando had to attend. Since Kehrig still hadn’t been replaced, I found myself the acting Leiter III of the Kommando, and Blobel often asked me to accompany him or delegated me in his place when he was too busy; the Gruppenstab also conferred hourly with the men from the HSSPF, and Jeckeln himself was expected that night or the next day. In the morning, the Wehrmacht was still thinking of civilian saboteurs and had asked us to help search them out and repress them; then, in the course of the day, the Abwehr found a demolition plan of the Red Army, listing almost sixty objectives prepared for destruction before their departure. Engineers were sent to inspect and seemed to confirm the information. More than forty of the objectives were still waiting to explode, some equipped with wireless detonators, controlled from a distance; the sappers were furiously demining, as fast as possible. The Wehrmacht wanted to take radical measures; at the Group too, measures were being discussed.

On Friday the Sicherheitspolizei began its activities. With the help of information I gathered, 1,600 Jews and Communists were arrested during the day. Vogt had set up seven commandos for the interrogations—in the Dulags, in the camp for the Jews, in the civilian camp, and in town—in order to sift through the masses of prisoners and pick out the dangerous elements. I reported this during one of Eberhard’s meetings; he nodded, but the army wanted more. The acts of sabotage continued: a young Jew had tried to cut one of the pipes set in the Dnieper by the sappers to feed their fire hoses; the Sonderkommando shot him, as well as a band of Gypsies caught rummaging around in an outlying neighborhood near an Orthodox church. On Blobel’s orders, one of our platoons liquidated the mentally ill in the Pavlov Hospital, for fear they might escape and add to the disorder. Jeckeln had arrived; in the afternoon, he presided over a large meeting at the Ortskommandantur, which was attended by General Eberhard and staff officers from the Sixth Army, officers from the Group, including Dr. Rasch, and officers from the Sonderkommando. Rasch looked out of sorts: tapping on the table with his pen, he didn’t speak, his somewhat vacant gaze straying distractedly over the faces surrounding him. Jeckeln, by contrast, was brimming with energy. He gave a short speech about the sabotage, the danger represented by the masses of Jews in the city, and the necessity to have recourse to the most rigorous possible measures of retaliation, but also of prevention. Sturmbannführer Hennicke, the Leiter III of the Einsatzgruppe, presented some statistics: according to his information, Kiev must at that time have been harboring some 150,000 Jews, permanent residents or refugees from western Ukraine. Jeckeln suggested, as a preliminary measure, shooting 50,000 of them; Eberhard warmly approved and pledged the logistic support of the Sixth Army. Jeckeln turned to us: “Gentlemen,” he declared, “I give you twenty-four hours to prepare a plan for me.” Blobel leaped up: “Obergruppenführer, it will be done!” Rasch spoke for the first time: “With Standartenführer Blobel, you can count on it.” His tone held a rather marked irony, but Blobel took it as a compliment: “Absolutely, absolutely.”—“We have to make a strong impression,” Eberhard concluded, calling the meeting to a close.

I was already working night and day, and snatching two hours of sleep when I could; but to tell the truth, I didn’t really contribute to the planning: the officers of the Teilkommandos, who weren’t yet entirely snowed under (they were shooting politruki unmasked by Vogt’s interrogators and a few suspects picked up more or less at random, but no more than that), took charge of it. The meetings with the Sixth Army and the HSSPF resumed the next day. The Sonderkommando proposed a site: west of the city, in the Syrets neighborhood, near the Jewish cemetery but still outside the inhabited zones, there were some wide ravines that would do well. “There’s also a freight depot there,” Blobel added. “That will let the Jews think we’re sending them away to settle somewhere else.” The Wehrmacht sent some surveyors to plot the land: based on their report, Jeckeln and Blobel decided on the ravine known as the Grandmother or the Old Lady, at the bottom of which ran a little stream. Blobel called together all his officers: “The Jews to be executed are antisocials, without any value, useless for Germany. We will also include asylum patients, Gypsies, and any other useless mouths to feed. But we’ll start with the Jews.” We studied the maps attentively; we had to position the cordons, arrange the routes, and plan the transports; reducing the number of trucks and the distances would save gasoline; it was also necessary to consider the munitions and food supplies for the troops; everything had to be calculated. For that we also had to decide on the method of execution: Blobel finally settled on a variation of the Sardinenpackung. For the shooters and the escorts of the condemned, Jeckeln insisted we use his two Orpo battalions, which visibly upset Blobel. There were also Grafhort’s Waffen-SS and Hauptmann Krumme’s Orpos. For the cordons, the Sixth Army placed several companies at our disposal, and they would supply the trucks. Häfner set up a depot for sorting the valuables, between the Lukyanovskoe and the Jewish cemeteries, a hundred and fifty meters from the ravine: Eberhard insisted the apartment keys be recovered and labeled, since the fires had thrown twenty-five thousand civilians out on the street, and the Wehrmacht wanted to rehouse them as soon as possible. The Sixth Army delivered one hundred thousand cartridges to us and printed up posters, in German, Russian, and Ukrainian, on cheap gray wrapping paper. Blobel, when he wasn’t immersed in his maps, somehow found time for other activities; that afternoon, with the help of the engineers, he had the Cathedral of the Dormition dynamited, a superb little eleventh-century Orthodox church in the middle of the lavra: “The Ukrainians have to pay a little too,” he explained to us later on with satisfaction. I discussed this in passing with Vogt, since I didn’t understand the sense of this action at all; according to him, it was definitely not an initiative of Blobel’s, but he had no idea who could have authorized or ordered it. “The Obergruppenführer, probably. It’s his style.” In any case it wasn’t Dr. Rasch, whom we saw hardly at all anymore. When I met Thomas in a hallway I asked him furtively: “What’s happening with the Brigadeführer? He doesn’t look right.”—“He’s been arguing with Jeckeln. And also with Koch.” Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, had been named Reichskommissar of the Ukraine a month before. “What about?” I asked.—“I’ll tell you later. Anyway he won’t be around much longer. One question, though: the Jews in the Dnieper, is that you guys?” The night before, all the Jews who had gone to synagogue for Shabbat had disappeared; their bodies had been found in the morning, floating in the river. “The army has filed a complaint,” he went on. “They say that actions like that disturb the civilian population. It’s not gemütlich.”—“And what we’re planning is gemütlich? I think the civilian population will soon have other things to worry about.”—“It’s not the same. On the contrary, they’ll be delighted to be rid of their Jews.” I shrugged: “No, it wasn’t us. As far as I know. We’re a little busy, right now, we have other things to see to. And also those are not really our methods.”