I must not have been the only one asking questions. A mute but profound uncertainty was pervading the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Cooperation with the SS was still excellent, but the Great Action had provoked anxious stirrings. A new order of the day by von Reichenau was beginning to circulate, a raw, harsh text, a brutal disclaimer of Rasch’s conclusions. It described the men’s doubts as vague ideas about the Bolshevik system. The soldier in the territories of the East is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of warfare, he wrote, but also the bearer of a pitiless völkisch ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities inflicted on the German and ethnically related nations. Therefore, the soldier must have a full understanding of the necessity for harsh but just countermeasures against Jewish subhumanity. Human pity had to be banished: offering a traveling Slav, possibly a Bolshevik agent, something to eat was pure thoughtlessness, a mistaken humanitarian act. The cities would be destroyed, the partisans annihilated along with the uncommitted. These ideas, of course, didn’t all come from von Reichenau; the Reichsführer must have suggested a few passages to him, but the main point was that this order worked correctly toward the Führer, along his lines and toward his aims, to use the fine expression of an obscure employee of the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, and so it was hardly surprising that the Führer was delighted with it, that he caused it to be distributed as an example to all the armies in the East. But I doubted if it was enough to set people’s minds at rest. National Socialism was a complete, total philosophy, a Weltanschauung, as we said; each person had to be able to find his place within it; there had to be room for all. But now, it was as if an opening had been forced into this whole, and all the destinies of National Socialism had been driven into it, on a one-way path of no return, which everyone had to follow until the end.

The fatality of things in Kiev only increased my unease. In the hallway of the palace of young virgins, I met an acquaintance from Berlin: “Sturmbannführer Eichmann! You’ve been promoted. Congratulations!”—“Ah! Dr. Aue. I’ve been looking for you. I have a package for you. It was given to me at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais.” I had known this officer back when he was setting up for Heydrich the Central Offices for Jewish Emigration; he would often come to my department to consult us on legal questions. He was an Obersturmführer then; now, he was sporting his four new diamonds on the neck of a black dress uniform that contrasted sharply with our campaign feldgrau. He strutted about like a little rooster; it was curious, he had left me with the impression of a hurried, plodding civil servant; I hardly recognized him now. “And what brings you here?” I asked him, inviting him into my office.—“Your package, and I have another one for one of your colleagues.”—“No, I mean to Kiev.” We had sat down and he leaned forward with a conspiratorial air: “I came to see the Reichsführer.” He was obviously beaming with pride and seemed eager to talk: “With my Amtschef. On special invitation.” He leaned over again: now he looked like a bird of prey, small and furtive. “I had to present a report. A statistical report. Prepared by my staff. You know that I head a whole Referat now?”—“No, I didn’t know. My congratulations.”—“The Four-B-four. Jewish affairs.” He had put his cap on my desk and was holding a black leather briefcase tightly on his knees; he pulled a case out of his tunic pocket, took out some large glasses, put them on, and opened the briefcase to extract a large envelope, quite thick, which he gave me. “Here it is. Of course, I won’t ask you what it is.”—“Oh, I can tell you. They’re scores.”—“You’re a musician? Me too, a little bit. I play the violin.”—“Actually not. It was for someone else, but he’s dead now.” He took off his glasses: “Ah. I’m very sorry. This war is really terrible. Actually,” he went on, “your friend Dr. Lulley also gave me a small bill, for the shipping costs.”—“No problem. I’ll send you some money this evening. Where are you staying?”—“With the Reichsführer’s staff.”—“Fine. Thank you very much for the favor. It was very kind of you.”—“Oh, it was nothing. We SS men have to help each other out. I’m just sorry it arrived too late.” I shrugged: “That’s how it is. Can I pour you a drink?”—“Oh, I shouldn’t. Work, you know. But…” He seemed sorry and I took the bait: “In the last war, they used to say Krieg ist Krieg…” He finished the sentence with me: “…und Schnaps ist Schnaps. Yes, I know. A very little one, then.” I opened my safe and took out two glasses and the bottle I kept for my guests. Eichmann got up to offer the toast, ceremoniously: “To the health of our Führer!” We clinked glasses. I saw he still wanted to talk. “So what was in your report, then?…If it isn’t a secret.”—“Well, it’s all very hush-hush, as the English say. But I can tell you. The Gruppenführer and myself were sent here by the Chief”—he meant Heydrich, now stationed in Prague as Assistant Reichsprotektor—“to discuss with the Reichsführer the plan for the evacuation of the Jews from the Reich.”—“Evacuation?”—“Exactly. To the East. By the end of the year.”—“All of them?”—“All of them.”—“And where will they be sent?”—“Most of them to the Ostland, probably. And down South too, for the construction of the Durchgangstrasse Four. It hasn’t yet been settled.”—“I see. And your report?”—“A statistical summary. I presented it in person to the Reichsführer. On the global situation regarding Jewish emigration.” He raised a finger. “Do you know how many there are?”—“Of what?”—“Of Jews. In Europe.” I shook my head: “No idea.”—“Eleven million! Eleven million, can you believe it? Of course, for the countries we don’t control yet, like England, the numbers are approximate. Since they don’t have any racial laws, we had to base our figures on religious criteria. But still that gives a rough estimate. Here in the Ukraine alone you have almost three million.” He took on a more pedantic tone: “Two million nine hundred ninety-four thousand six hundred and eighty-four, to be exact.”—“That is exact. But tell me, with one Einsatzgruppe we won’t be able to do much.”—“Precisely. Other methods are being studied.” He looked at his watch and got up. “You’ll have to excuse me now. I have to go back and find my Amtschef. Thank you for the drink.”—“Thank you for the package! I’ll send you the money for Lulley right away.” Together, we raised our arms and bellowed, “Heil Hitler!”

After Eichmann had left, I sat down and contemplated the package left on my desk. It contained the Rameau and Couperin scores that I had ordered for the little Jew in Zhitomir. That had been a mistake, a sentimental naïveté; still it filled me with a great melancholy. I now thought I could understand better the reactions of the men and officers during the executions. If they suffered, as I had suffered during the Great Action, it wasn’t just because of the smells and the sight of blood, but because of the terror and the moral suffering of the people they shot; in the same way, their victims often suffered more from the suffering and death, before their eyes, of those they loved, wives, parents, beloved children, than from their own deaths, which came to them in the end like a deliverance. In many cases, I said to myself, what I had taken for gratuitous sadism, the astonishing brutality with which some men treated the condemned before executing them, was nothing but a consequence of the monstrous pity they felt and which, incapable of expressing itself otherwise, turned into rage, but an impotent rage, without object, and which thus almost inevitably had to turn against those who had originally provoked it. If the terrible massacres of the East prove one thing, paradoxically, it is the awful, inalterable solidarity of humanity. As brutalized and habituated as they may have become, none of our men could kill a Jewish woman without thinking about his wife, his sister, or his mother, or kill a Jewish child without seeing his own children in front of him in the pit. Their reactions, their violence, their alcoholism, the nervous depressions, the suicides, my own sadness, all that demonstrated that the other exists, exists as an other, as a human, and that no will, no ideology, no amount of stupidity or alcohol can break this bond, tenuous but indestructible. This is a fact, not an opinion.