Blobel had come to Kharkov with the Saurer truck, and he was counting on using it for the action being planned. He had finally been able to try it out in Poltava. Häfner, who had been present—the Teilkommandos had gathered in Poltava before marching together to Kharkov—related the scene to me one night at the Kasino: “Actually it’s not an improvement at all. The Standartenführer loaded some women and children in it, then started the engine. When the Jews understood what was happening, they started beating on the sides, shouting ‘Dear Germans! Dear Germans! Let us get out!’ I stayed in the car with the Standartenführer, who was drinking schnapps. Afterward, during the unloading, I can tell you he was not pleased. The bodies were covered with shit and vomit, the men were disgusted. Findeisen, who was driving the truck, also inhaled some gas and was vomiting everywhere. Horrible. If that’s all they could come up with to simplify our lives, they can try again. Only some damn bureaucrat could have thought that one up.”—“But the Standartenführer still wants to use it?”—“Oh yes! But believe me, it will be without me.”

Finally the negotiations with the AOK came to a conclusion. Blobel, supported by the Ic Niemeyer, had asserted that the elimination of the Jewish population, as well as of other undesirables and political suspects, and even of non-residents, would contribute to easing the problem of the food supplies, which was growing increasingly urgent. The Wehrmacht, in cooperation with the city’s housing office, agreed to place a site at the Sonderkommando’s disposal for the evacuation: the KhTZ, a tractor factory, with barracks for the workers. It lay outside of the city, twelve kilometers from the center, beyond the river on the old road to Moscow. On December 14, an order was posted giving all Jews in the city two days to relocate there. As in Kiev, the Jews went there on their own, without escort; and at first they actually were housed in the barracks. On the day of the evacuation, it was snowing and very cold; the children were crying. I took a car to go to the KhTZ. The site hadn’t been sealed off and a huge number of people were coming and going. Since in these barracks there was no water or food or heat, the people left to find whatever they needed, and no one did anything to prevent them; informers simply pointed out those spreading negative rumors and upsetting the others; they were discreetly arrested and liquidated in the basements of the Sonderkommando’s offices. In the camp, utter chaos reigned; the barracks were going to ruin, children ran around screaming, old people were already dying, and since their families couldn’t bury them, they laid them out outside, where they remained, frozen by the frost. Finally the camp was closed and German guards were posted. But people kept flowing in, Jews who wanted to join their families, or else Russian or Ukrainian spouses, who were bringing food to their husbands, wives or children; we still let them come and go, since Blobel wanted to avoid panic and reduce the camp little by little, discreetly. The Wehrmacht had objected that a vast single action, as in Kiev, would create too much of a stir, and Blobel had accepted this argument. On Christmas Eve, the Ortskommandantur invited the officers from the Sonderkommando to a reception in the large conference hall of the Ukraine Communist Party, redecorated for the occasion; in front of a richly appointed buffet, we drank glass after glass of schnapps and brandies with the Wehrmacht officers, who raised their glasses to the Führer, to the Endsieg, and to our great common task. Blobel and the City Kommandant, General Reiner, traded gifts; then the officers who had a good voice sang some choruses. Beginning the next day—the Wehrmacht had insisted on delaying the date till after Christmas, to avoid spoiling the festivities—the Jews were invited to volunteer to go work in Poltava, in Lubny, in Romny. It was freezing cold, snow covered everything; the Jews, chilled to the bone, hurried to the selection point in the hope of leaving the camp as soon as possible. They were loaded onto trucks driven by Ukrainian drivers; their belongings were piled separately into other vehicles. Then they were brought in convoys to Rogan, a remote suburb of the city, and shot in balki, ravines chosen by our surveyors. Their belongings were brought to warehouses to be sorted and then distributed to Volksdeutschen by the NSV and the VoMi. In this way, the camp was emptied in small groups, a little each day. Just before the New Year, I went to attend an execution. The shooters were all young volunteers from the 314th Police Battalion; they weren’t used to it yet, their shots missed and there were a lot of wounded. The officers bawled them out and had alcohol served to them, which didn’t improve their performance. Fresh blood splattered the snow, flowed to the bottom of the ravine, spread in pools on the ground hardened by cold; it didn’t freeze, but stagnated, viscous. All around, the gray, dead stems of sunflowers dotted the white fields. All sounds, even the shouts and the gunfire, were muted; underfoot, the snow crunched. I was vomiting often now and felt I was getting a little sick; I had a fever, not enough to keep me in bed, but rather long shivers and a sensation of fragility, as if my skin were turning to crystal. At the balka, between the volleys, bitter upsurges of this fever ran through my body. Everything was white, terrifyingly white, except the blood staining everything, the snow, the men, my coat. In the sky, great formations of wild ducks calmly flew south.

The cold settled in and made itself at home, almost like a living organism stretching out over the earth and seeping in everywhere, in the most unexpected places. Sperath informed me that frostbite was decimating the Wehrmacht, and often led to amputations: the hobnailed soles of the regulation Kommisstiefel had turned out to be an effective conductor of cold. Every morning dead sentinels were found, their brains frozen by their helmets being placed directly on their heads, without a wool cap underneath. The tank drivers had to burn tires under their engines to be able to start them up. Some of the troops had finally received warm civilian clothing, collected in Germany by the Winterhilfe, but there was a little bit of everything there, and some soldiers strolled about in women’s fur coats, feather boas, or fancy muffs. The looting of civilians was getting worse: the soldiers took sheepskin coats and shapkas by force, then threw their owners almost naked out into the cold, where many died. In front of Moscow, reportedly, it was even worse; ever since the Soviet counteroffensive at the beginning of the month, our men, having moved to the defensive, were dying like flies in their positions without even seeing the enemy. Politically too the situation was becoming confused. In Kharkov, no one really understood why we had declared war on the Americans: “We already have enough to deal with as it is,” Häfner grumbled, seconded by Kurt Hans, “the Japanese can take care of them by themselves.” Others, more farsighted, saw danger for Germany in a Japanese victory. The purge of the army high command also gave rise to questions. In the SS, most people thought that the fact that the Führer had personally taken charge of OKH was a good thing: now, they said, those old reactionary Prussians won’t be able to subtly hinder him anymore; in the spring the Russians would be annihilated. The Wehrmacht officers, however, seemed more skeptical. Von Hornbogen, the Ic, spoke of rumors of an offensive to the south, with the oil fields of the Caucasus as objective. “I don’t understand anymore,” he confided to me after a drink or two at the Kasino. “Are our objectives political or economic?” Both, probably, I suggested; but for him the big question was that of our means. “The Americans are going to take a while to increase their production and accumulate enough material. That gives us time. But if we haven’t finished off the Reds by then, we’re screwed.” Despite everything, these words shocked me; never had I heard a pessimistic opinion expressed so crudely. I had already envisaged the possibility of a more limited victory than planned, a compromise peace, for example, where we’d leave Russia proper to Stalin but would keep the Ostland and the Ukraine, along with Crimea. But defeat? That seemed unthinkable to me. I would have liked to discuss it with Thomas, but he was far away, in Kiev, and I hadn’t heard from him since his promotion to Sturmbannführer, which he had announced to me in reply to my letter from Pereyaslav. In Kharkov, there weren’t many people to talk with. At night, Blobel drank and heaped abuse on the Jews, the Communists, even the Wehrmacht; the officers listened to him, played billiards, or withdrew to their rooms. I often did the same. At that time I was reading Stendhal’s diaries, where I found cryptic passages that surprisingly echoed my feeling: No to the Jews…The suffocation of these times is overwhelming me…Grief is making me a machine… As an aftereffect, surely, of a feeling of filth produced by the vomiting, I was also beginning to pay almost obsessive attention to my hygiene; several times, already, Woytinek had surprised me scrutinizing my uniform, searching for traces of mud or other substances, and had ordered me to stop gaping. Right after my first inspection of the Aktion I had given my soiled uniform to Hanika to wash; but every time he brought it back to me I found new stains; finally I took him aside, reproached him brutally for his laziness and incompetence, and then flung my jacket in his face. Sperath had come to ask me if I was sleeping well; when I told him I was, he seemed satisfied, and it was true, at night I fell asleep like a stone as soon as I lay down, but my sleep was full of heavy, troubled dreams, not nightmares exactly, but like long underwater currents stirring up the mud in the depths while the surface remains smooth and calm. I should note that I went back regularly to witness the executions; no one required it, but I went of my own free will. I didn’t shoot, but I studied the men who did, the officers especially, such as Häfner or Janssen, who had been there since the beginning and seemed now to have become perfectly hardened to their executioner’s work. I must have been like them. By inflicting this piteous spectacle on myself, I felt, I wasn’t trying to exhaust the scandal of it, the insurmountable feeling of a transgression, of a monstrous violation of the Good and the Beautiful, but rather this feeling of scandal came to wear out all by itself, one got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much; thus what I was trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being; instead of that, I now felt only a dull, anxious kind of excitation, always briefer, more acrid, mixed with the fever and my physical symptoms, and thus, slowly, without truly realizing it, I was sinking into mud while searching for light. A minor incident threw a harsh light on these widening fissures. In the big snow-covered park behind the statue of Shevchenko, a young partisan was being led to the gallows. A crowd of Germans was gathering: Landsers from the Wehrmacht and some Orpos, but also men from the Organisation Todt, Goldfasanen from the Ostministerium, a few Luftwaffe pilots. The partisan was a rather thin young woman, her face, touched with hysteria, framed by heavy black hair cut short, very coarsely, as if with pruning shears. An officer bound her hands, placed her under the gallows, and put the rope around her neck. Then the soldiers and officers present filed in front of her and kissed her one after the other on the mouth. She remained silent and kept her eyes open. Some kissed her tenderly, almost chastely, like schoolboys; others took her head in both hands and forced open her lips. When my turn came, she looked at me, a clear, luminous look, washed of everything, and I saw that she understood everything, knew everything, and faced with this pure knowledge I burst into flames. My clothes crackled, the skin of my belly melted, the fat sizzled, fire roared in my eye sockets and my mouth, and cleaned out the inside of my skull. The blaze was so intense she had to turn her head away. I burned to a cinder, my remains were transformed into a salt statue; soon it cooled down, pieces broke off, first a shoulder, then a hand, then half the head. Finally I finished collapsing at her feet and the wind swept away the pile of salt and scattered it. Already the next officer was advancing, and when they had all gone by, they hanged her. For days on end I reflected on this strange scene; but my reflection stood before me like a mirror, and never returned anything to me but my own image, reversed of course, but true. The body of this girl was also a mirror for me. The rope had broken or they had cut it, and she lay in the snow in the Trade Unions Park, her neck broken, her lips swollen, one bare breast gnawed by dogs. Her rough hair formed a Medusa crest around her head and she seemed fabulously beautiful to me, inhabiting death like an idol, Our-Lady-of-the-Snows. Whatever path I took to go from the hotel to our offices, I always found her lying in my way, a stubborn, single-minded question that threw me into a labyrinth of vain speculations and made me lose my footing. This lasted for weeks.