I climbed back out and they gave me some tea; the warmth of the liquid comforted me a little. The moon, three-quarters full, had risen and hung in the gray sky, pale and scarcely visible. A little hut had been put up for the officers. I went in and sat down on a bench in the back, to smoke and drink my tea. There were three other men in this hut but no one talked. Down below, the salvos continued to crackle: tireless, methodical, the giant system we had set in motion went on destroying people. It seemed it would never stop. Ever since the beginnings of human history, war has always been regarded as the ultimate evil. But we had invented something compared to which war had come to seem clean and pure, something from which many were already trying to escape by taking refuge in the elementary certainties of war and the front. Even the insane butcheries of the Great War, which our fathers or some of our older officers had lived through, seemed almost clean and righteous compared to what we had brought into the world. I found this extraordinary. It seemed to me that there was something crucial in this, and that if I could understand it then I’d understand everything and could finally rest. But I couldn’t think, my thoughts clashed with each other, reverberating in my head like the roar of Metro cars rushing through stations one after another, going in different directions on different levels. In any case no one cared about what I might think. Our system, our State couldn’t care less about the thoughts of its servants. It was all the same to the State whether you killed Jews because you hated them or because you wanted to advance your career or even, in some cases, because you took pleasure in it. It did not mind, either, if you did not hate the Jews and the Gypsies and the Russians you were killing, and if you took absolutely no pleasure in eliminating them, no pleasure at all. It did not even mind, in the end, if you refused to kill, no disciplinary action would be taken, since it was well aware that the pool of available killers was bottomless, it could fish new men out at will, and you could just as easily be put to some other use more in keeping with your talents. Schulz, for example, the Kommandant of Ek 5 who had asked to be replaced after receiving the Vernichtungsbefehl, had finally been relieved, and it was said that he had landed a cushy job in Berlin, at the Staatspolizei. I too could have asked to leave, I would probably even have gotten a positive recommendation from Blobel or Dr. Rasch. So why then didn’t I? Probably because I hadn’t yet understood what I wanted to understand. Would I ever understand it? Nothing was less certain. A sentence of Chesterton’s ran through my head: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous. Is that what war was, then, a perverted fairyland, the playground of a demented child who breaks his toys and shouts with laughter, gleefully tossing the dishes out the window?

A little before six o’clock, the sun set and Blobel ordered a break for the night: the shooters couldn’t see anymore in any case. He held a quick meeting, standing behind the ravine among his officers, to discuss the problems. Thousands of Jews were still waiting in the square and on Melnikova Street; according to calculations, almost twenty thousand had already been shot. Several officers complained about the condemned being sent over the edge of the ravine: when they saw the scene at their feet, they panicked and became difficult to control. After some discussion, Blobel decided to have engineers from the Ortskommandantur dig entrances into the small ravines that led to the main one, and to have the Jews come in that way; then they wouldn’t see the bodies until the last minute. He also ordered the dead to be covered over with quicklime. We returned to our quarters. On the square in front of Lukyanovskoe, hundreds of families were waiting, sitting on their suitcases or on the ground. Some had made fires and were preparing their food. In the street it was the same thing: the line stretched back to the city, guarded by a thin cordon. The next morning, at dawn, it began again. But I don’t think it is necessary to continue the description.

By October 1, it was all over. Blobel had the sides of the ravine dynamited to cover the bodies over; we were expecting a visit from the Reichsführer, and he wanted everything cleaned up. At the same time the executions continued: Jews, still, but also Communists, officers of the Red Army, sailors from the Dnieper fleet, looters, saboteurs, officials, Banderists, Gypsies, Tatars. And then Einsatzkommando 5, headed now, instead of by Schulz, by one Sturmbannführer Meier, was arriving in Kiev to take over the executions and the administrative tasks; our own Sonderkommando would continue to advance in the wake of the Sixth Army, toward Poltava and Kharkov; so in the days following the Great Action, I was very busy, since I had to hand over all my networks and contacts to my successor, the Leiter III of Ek 5. We also had to attend to the results of the action: we had collected 137 truckloads of clothing, destined for the needy Volksdeutschen of the Ukraine; the blankets would go to the Waffen-SS for a military hospital. And then there were all the reports: Blobel had reminded me of Müller’s order, and had put me in charge of preparing a visual presentation of the action. Himmler finally arrived, accompanied by Jeckeln, and that same day was pleased to address us. After explaining the necessity of wiping out the Jewish population, in order to eradicate Bolshevism at the root, he gravely noted that he was aware of the difficulty of the task; then, almost without transition, he revealed to us his concept of the future of the German East. The Russians, at the end of the war, pushed back beyond the Urals, could form a rump Slavland; of course, they would regularly try to return; to prevent them from doing so, Germany would set up a line of garrison towns and small forts in the mountains, entrusted to the Waffen-SS. All young Germans would be drafted for two years in the SS and would be sent there; of course there would be losses, but these small, permanent, low-intensity conflicts would allow the German nation not to wallow in the weakness of conquerors, but to preserve all the vigor of the warrior, vigilant and strong. Protected by this line, Russian and Ukrainian land would be open for German colonization, to be developed by our veterans: each one, a soldier-peasant like his sons, would manage a great, rich property; the labor in the fields would be provided by Slav helots, and the German would limit himself to administering. These farms would be placed in a constellation around little garrison and market towns; as for the frightful Russian industrial cities, they would eventually be razed; Kiev, a very ancient German city originally called Kiroffo, might however be spared. All these cities would be linked to the Reich by a network of highways and double-decker express trains, with individual sleeper cabins, for which special wide-gauge railways would be built; these vast projects would be carried out by the remaining Jews and war prisoners. Finally the Crimea, once the land of the Goth, as well as the German regions of the Volga and the oil center of Baku, would be annexed to the Reich, to become a vacation and leisure territory, directly connected to Germany, via Brest-Litovsk, by an express; the Führer, after finishing his great works, would come there to retire. This speech made a strong impression: clearly, even if to me the vision outlined evoked the fantastic utopias of a Jules Verne or an Edgar Rice Burroughs, there really was, elaborated in rarified spheres far above our own, a plan, a final objective.

The Reichsfürer also took advantage of the occasion to introduce to us the SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei Dr. Thomas, who had come with him to replace Dr. Rasch as the head of the Einsatzgruppe. Rasch, in fact, had left Kiev on the second day of the action, without even saying goodbye: Thomas, as always, had anticipated events correctly. Rumors were flying: people speculated about his conflict with Koch; some said he had collapsed during the action. Dr. Thomas, who had the Iron Cross and spoke French, English, Greek, and Latin, was cast in a different mold: a doctor specializing in psychiatry, he had left his practice for the SD in 1934, out of idealism and National Socialist convictions. I quickly had occasion to get to know him better, since as soon as he arrived he began visiting all the offices of the Group and the Kommandos and talking individually with the officers. He seemed especially concerned with the psychological troubles of the men and officers: as he explained to us, in the presence of the Leiter from Ek 5 who was taking over my caseload, and of several other SD officers, it was impossible for a sane man to be exposed to such situations for months on end without suffering aftereffects, sometimes very serious ones. In Latvia, in Einsatzgruppe A, an Untersturmführer had gone mad and killed several other officers before he himself was shot; this case profoundly worried Himmler and the hierarchy, and the Reichsführer had asked Dr. Thomas, on whom his old specialty conferred a particular sensitivity to the problem, to recommend some measures. The Brigadeführer quickly promulgated an unusual order: all those who could no longer force themselves to kill Jews, either out of a sense of conscience or out of weakness, should present themselves to the Gruppenstab to have other tasks assigned to them or even to be sent back to Germany. This order gave rise to lively discussions among the officers; some thought that recognizing your weakness officially in this way would leave damaging traces in your personal file, and would limit any chance for promotion; others, on the contrary, declared they were ready to take Dr. Thomas at his word, and asked to leave. Still others, like Lübbe, were transferred without having asked for anything, on the advice of doctors from the Kommandos. Things were slowing down a little. For my report I had decided, rather than just delivering a stack of photographs, to make a display album. That turned out to be quite a job. One of our Orpos, an amateur photographer, had taken several rolls of color film during the executions, and also had the chemicals to develop them; I had some equipment requisitioned for him from a small photographer’s studio so he could prepare prints of his best pictures for me. I also collected some black-and-white photographs and had all our reports dealing with the action copied on good paper, provided by the supply officer of the Twenty-ninth Corps. A clerk from the Stab wrote out captions and a title page in his fine official script, with The Great Action of Kiev as a title, and in smaller letters, Reports and Documents, with the dates. Among the specialized Arbeitsjuden kept in the new Syrets Lager, I unearthed an old leatherworker who had restored books for some Party offices and even made fancy albums for a conference; von Radomski, the camp commander, lent him to me for a few days, and with some black leather found among the confiscated goods, he bound the reports and the pages of photographs for me, in a cover embossed with the insignia “Sk 4a.” Then I presented the book to Blobel. He was delighted; he leafed through it, went into raptures over the binding and the calligraphy: “Oh, I’d so like to have one too, as a souvenir.” He congratulated me and assured me it would be given to the Reichsfürer, and even shown to the Führer himself; the whole Kommando could take great pride from it. I don’t think he thought of this album as I did: for him, it was a trophy; for me, it was a bitter remembrance, a solemn reminder. I discussed it that night with a new acquaintance, an engineer from the Wehrmacht named Osnabrugge. I had met him in the officers’ Kasino, when he had offered me a drink; he had turned out to be an interesting man, and I liked talking with him. I spoke to him about the album and he had this curious thought: “Every man must do his work with love.” Osnabrugge was a graduate of a polytechnic university in the Rhineland, specializing in bridge construction; his vocation fascinated him, and he spoke eloquently about it: “You understand, I was trained with a sense of cultural mission. A bridge is a literal and material contribution to the community; it creates new roads, new links. And also, it’s a beautiful thing. Not just to look at: if only you could understand the poetry of the calculations, the tensions and forces, the arches and cables, how it’s all balanced by the play of mathematics!” He himself, however, had never built a bridge: he had drawn up some plans, but none had been realized. Then the Wehrmacht had sent him here to assess the bridge destructions carried out by the Soviets. “It’s fascinating, really. Just as no bridge is ever built in the same way, no bridge blows up in the same way. There are always surprises, it’s very instructive. But still, it pains me to see it. They’re such fine works. If you like, I can show you.” I accepted with pleasure; I had some free time now. He made an appointment with me at the foot of the largest of the destroyed bridges over the Dnieper, and I found him there one morning. “It’s really impressive,” he commented, examining the debris, hands on hips, motionless. This immense metal bridge with arches, built just under the cliffs of Pechersk, rested on five massive stone pillars; three whole spans were in the water, cut clean off by the explosives; across the river, two sections were still standing. The corps of engineers was building a floating bridge right next to it, with girders and wooden beams thrown across large inflatable boats; they had already reached almost halfway across. In the meantime, traffic was carried by means of barges, and a crowd was waiting on the bank, soldiers and civilians. Osnabrugge had a motor boat. We went round the pontoon bridge being built and he slowly drew alongside the twisted girders of the collapsed bridge. “You see,” he showed me, pointing at the pillars, “there they even brought down the supporting arch, but over there they didn’t. Actually it wasn’t necessary, all they had to do was blow the load-bearing elements and all the rest would have come straight down. They overdid it.”—“What about the pillars?”—“They’re all good, except maybe the one in the middle. We’re still checking it. Anyway we’ll definitely rebuild it, but not right away.” I looked around while Osnabrugge pointed out more details. At the top of the wooded cliffs, transformed by autumn into an orange-and-yellow blaze, with touches of bright red scattered about, the golden cupolas of the lavra were glittering in the sunlight. The city lay hidden behind it, and we couldn’t see any houses on that side. Farther downstream, two other demolished bridges barred the river. The river flowed lazily between the half-sunken girders; in front of us, a barge loaded with peasant women in colorful scarves and sleepy soldiers calmly advanced. Contemplating the long seaweed undulating beneath the surface, I suddenly had a kind of dual vision: I could clearly see the seaweed and at the same time I thought I saw the bodies of Napoleonic hussars, in apple-green, bottle-green, or yellow uniforms, with cockades and ostrich feathers waving, drifting with the current. This was very intense, and I must have spoken the emperor’s name, since Osnabrugge suddenly said: “Napoleon? I actually came across a book about Eblé before I left—you know, his chief engineer? An admirable man. Almost the only one, aside from Ney, who got his feet wet, literally, and the only one of Napoleon’s superior officers who died, too. In Königsberg, at the end of the year, as a consequence of his bridge work over the Berezina.”—“Yes, the Berezina, that’s famous.”—“We crossed it in less than a week. Did you know that Eblé had two bridges built over it? One for the men and one for the wagons, and the officers’ carioles of course.” We were heading back toward the shore. “You should read Herodotus,” I said to him. “He has some fine stories about bridges too.”—“Oh, I know, I know that.” He pointed to the engineer’s floating pontoon: “The Persians were already building on boats, like that.” He made a face. “Better, probably.” He left me on the shore and I shook his hand warmly. “Thanks for the expedition. It’s done me a lot of good. See you soon!”—“Oh, I don’t know. I have to leave tomorrow for Dniepropetrovsk. I have to examine twenty-three bridges in all, can you imagine! But I’m sure we’ll meet again one of these days.”