It was the end of November; on the vast circular square, rebaptized Adolf-Hitler-Platz, a gray snow, pale as motes of light, was falling softly from the noon sky. A woman was hanging by a long rope from Lenin’s outstretched hand; some children playing beneath raised their heads to look up her skirt. The hanged were increasingly numerous; the Ortskommandant had ordered that they remain strung up, to set an example. Russian passersby walked quickly in front of them, their heads lowered; German soldiers and children examined them curiously, and the soldiers often photographed them. For several days now I had stopped vomiting, I was beginning to hope I was getting better; but it was only a respite; and when it took me again, I vomited up my sausage, cabbage, and beer, an hour after the meal, in the street, half hidden in an alleyway. A little farther on, at the corner of the Trade Unions Park, they had raised a gallows, and that day they were leading two very young men and a woman there, their hands tied behind their backs, surrounded by a crowd made up mainly of German soldiers and officers. The woman had a large sign around her neck explaining that she was being punished in retaliation for a murder attempt on an officer. Then they hanged them. One of the young men looked dumbfounded, astonished at finding himself there; the other was simply sad; the woman grimaced terribly when they snatched the support out from under her feet, but that was all. God alone knows if they had in fact been involved in the attack; we were hanging almost anyone, Jews but also Russian soldiers, people without identity papers, peasants loitering in search of food. The idea was not to punish the guilty but to prevent new attacks by spreading terror. In Kharkov itself, it seemed to work; there had been no more explosions since the hangings. But outside the city the situation was getting worse. Oberst von Hornbogen, the Ic from the Ortskommandantur whom I often visited, had a large map on his wall of the area around Kharkov dotted with red push-pins, each representing a partisan attack or a bombing. “It’s becoming a real problem,” he explained to me. “We can only leave the city in force; isolated men get shot like rabbits. We raze all the villages where we find partisans, but that’s not helping much. Food supplies are getting difficult, even for the troops; as for feeding the population this winter, it doesn’t even bear thinking about.” The city had about six hundred thousand inhabitants; there were no public food supplies, and already the elderly were dying of hunger. “Could you tell me about your discipline problems, if you don’t mind,” I asked the Oberst, with whom I had already developed fairly good relations.—“It’s true, we’re having difficulties. Especially cases of looting. Some soldiers emptied the apartment of the Russian mayor while he was visiting us. A lot of soldiers are taking coats or fur hats from the populace. There are also some cases of rape. A Russian woman was locked up in a basement and raped by six soldiers, one after the other.”—“What do you attribute that to?”—“A question of morale, I guess. The troops are exhausted, dirty, covered with vermin, they’re not even being provided with clean underwear, and also winter is coming, they sense it’s going to get worse.” He leaned forward with a faint smile: “Between you and me, I can tell you that they’ve even painted some inscriptions on the AOK buildings, in Poltava. Things like We want to go back to Germany or We’re dirty and we have lice and we want to go home. The Generalfeldmarschall was mad with rage, he took it as a personal insult. Of course, he realizes there are tensions and privations, but he thinks the officers could do more for the political education of the men. But ultimately, the most worrisome thing is still the problem of the food supplies.”

Outside, a thin layer of snow was covering the square, dusting the shoulders and the hair of the hanged. Next to me, a young Russian was rushing into the Ortskommandantur, keeping the heavy swinging door from banging back by catching it, with practiced delicacy, with his foot. My nose was running; a drop of water fell from my nose and crossed my lips with a cold streak. Von Hornbogen had made me feel extremely pessimistic. But life went on. Businesses, run by Volksdeutschen, were opening, along with Armenian restaurants, and even two nightclubs. The Wehrmacht had reopened the Shevshchenko Ukrainian Dramatic Theater, after repainting its elegant nineteenth-century façade, with its white columns and moldings mutilated by shrapnel, ochre yellow and a heavy burgundy. They had turned it into a cabaret called the Panzersprenggranate, the “Antitank Grenade,” and a garish sign proclaimed its name above the ornate doors. I took Hanika there one night, to a satirical revue. It was pretty awful, but the men, delighted, laughed and applauded furiously; some numbers were nearly funny. In one parodic scene, a choir of rabbis wearing striped prayer shawls sang, more or less on key, an aria from the St. John Passion:

Wir haben ein Gesetz

und nach dem Gesetz

soll er sterben.

Bach, I said to myself, a pious man, would not have appreciated such facetiousness. But I had to admit it was comical. Hanika’s face glowed, he applauded every number; he seemed happy. That evening, I felt at ease, I hadn’t vomited, and I appreciated the theater’s warmth and the pleasant ambiance. At intermission, I went to the refreshment stand and offered Hanika a glass of ice-cold vodka; he turned red, he wasn’t used to it. Adjusting my uniform in front of a mirror, I noticed a stain. “Hanika,” I asked, “what is that?”—“What, Hauptsturmführer?”—“The stain, there.” He looked: “I don’t see anything, Hauptsturmführer.”—“Yes, yes,” I insisted, “there’s a stain, there, it’s a little dark. Rub better when you do the wash.”—“Yes, Hauptsturmführer.” This stain troubled me; I tried to forget it by having another drink, then returned to the hall for the second part of the program. Afterward, accompanied by Hanika, I walked up the former Liebknecht Street, now rebaptized Horst-Wesselstrasse or something like that. Farther up, near the park, some old women, supervised by soldiers, were unstringing a hanged man. At least, I thought when I saw this, these Russians we’re hanging have mothers to wipe the sweat and dirt from their faces, close their eyes, cross their stiff arms, and tenderly bury them. I thought of all the Jews with their eyes still open under the earth in the ravine in Kiev: we had deprived them not only of life but also of that tenderness, for we had killed their mothers and wives and sisters with them, and hadn’t left anyone to mourn them. Their fate was the bitterness of a mass grave, their only funeral feast the rich earth of the Ukraine filling their mouths, their only Kaddish the whistling of the wind over the steppe. And the same fate awaited their brethren in Kharkov. Blobel had finally arrived with the Hauptkommando, and discovered with fury that no measures had yet been taken, except the order to wear the yellow star. “But what the hell is the Wehrmacht doing?! Do they want to spend the winter with thirty thousand saboteurs and terrorists in their midst?” He had brought Dr. Kehrig’s replacement, fresh from Germany; thus I found myself relegated to my old subordinate tasks, which, given my state of fatigue, didn’t bother me much. Sturmbannführer Dr. Woytinek was a dry, glum little man, who nourished a keen resentment for having missed the beginning of the campaign and who hoped that the opportunity to make up for it would soon present itself. The opportunity indeed soon would present itself; but not right away. As soon as they arrived, Blobel and Vogt had begun negotiations with the representatives from the AOK about another Grosse Aktion. But in the meantime, von Rundstedt had been dismissed because of the retreat from Rostov, and the Führer had appointed von Reichenau to replace him as head of Army Group South. No replacement had yet been named to take command of the Sixth Army; for now, the AOK was headed by Oberst Heim, the Chief of Staff; and he, in terms of cooperation with the SP and the SD, turned out to be less complacent than his former boss. He never uttered any outright objection, but every day he raised new practical difficulties in his correspondence, and the discussions dragged on. Blobel was fuming, and taking out his anger on the officers in his Kommando. Dr. Woytinek was getting acquainted with the files and harassed me with questions throughout the day. When Dr. Sperath saw me, he remarked: “You don’t look very well.”—“It’s nothing. I’m just a little tired.”—“You should get some rest.” I laughed: “Yes, after the war.” But I was also distracted by the traces of mud on my pants that Hanika, who seemed to be growing a little negligent, hadn’t cleaned well.