Blobel put an end to the Aktion a few days after the New Year. They had kept several thousand Jews in the KhTZ for forced labor in the city; they would be shot later on. We had just learned that Blobel was going to be replaced. He had known it for weeks, but hadn’t said anything. It was high time in any case for him to leave. Ever since he had arrived in Kharkov, he had become a nervous wreck, in just as bad a state, almost, as in Lutsk: one moment he’d gather us together and wax enthusiastic about the recent cumulative totals of the Sonderkommando, and the next he’d shout himself hoarse with incoherent rage over some trifle, a remark taken the wrong way. One day, in the beginning of January, I went into his office to bring him a report from Woytinek. Without returning my salute, he threw a sheet of paper at me: “Look at this piece of shit.” He was drunk, white with anger. I took the paper: it was an order from General von Manstein, the commander of the Eleventh Army, in the Crimea. “Your boss Ohlendorf sent me that. Read it, read it. You see, there, on the bottom? It is dishonorable for officers to be present at the executions of Jews. Dishonorable! Those assholes. As if what they were doing was so honorable…as if they were treating their POWs with honor!…I was in the Great War. During the Great War we took care of our prisoners, we fed them, we didn’t let them die of starvation like animals.” A bottle of schnapps stood on the table; he poured himself a glassful, which he swallowed in one gulp. I was still standing facing his desk, not saying anything. “As if we all didn’t take our orders from the same source…. The bastards. They want to keep their hands clean, those little Wehrmacht shits. They want to leave the dirty work to us.” He raised his head, his face flushing bright red. “The dogs. They want to be able to say, afterward: ‘Oh no, the atrocities, that wasn’t us. That was them, those guys, those SS killers. We had nothing to do with all that. We fought like soldiers, with honor.’ But who the hell captured all these cities we’re cleansing? Whose ass are we protecting when we eliminate partisans and Jews and all the scum? You think they’re complaining? They’re begging us to do it!” He was shouting so much that he was spluttering. “That prick Manstein, that hypocrite, that half-yid who teaches his dog to raise its paw when it hears ‘Heil Hitler,’ and who hangs a sign behind his desk—Ohlendorf told me—that says What would the Führer say about this? Well, then, that’s just it, what would he say, our Führer? What would he say, when AOK Eleven asks its Einsatzgruppe to liquidate all the Jews of Simferopol before Christmas, so the officers can have a judenfrei holiday? And then they spew this garbage about the honor of the Wehrmacht? The swine. Who signed the Kommissarbefehl? Who signed the Jurisdiction order? Who? The Reichsführer maybe?” He paused to catch his breath and down another glassful; he swallowed the wrong way, choked, coughed. “And if things go sour, they’ll put all the blame on us. All of it. They’ll come out all clean, all elegant, waving about this kind of toilet paper”—he had torn the sheet from my hands and was shaking it in the air—“and saying: ‘No, we’re not the ones who killed the Jews, the Commissars, the Gypsies, we can prove it, see, we never agreed, it’s all the fault of the Führer and the SS…’” His voice turned into a whine. “Hell, even if we win they’ll screw us. Because, listen to me, Aue, listen to me carefully”—he was almost whispering, now, his voice was hoarse—“someday all of this will come out. All of it. Too many people know, too many witnesses. And when it does come out, whether we’ve won or lost the war, there’ll be hell to pay. Scapegoats needed. Heads will have to roll. And it will be our heads they’ll serve up to the crowd while all the Prusso-yids like von Manstein, all the von Rundstedts and von Brauchitsches and von Kluges, will return to their comfortable von estates and write their von memoirs, patting each other on the back for having been such decent and honorable von soldiers. And we’ll end up in the trash. They’ll pull another thirtieth of June on us, except this time the suckers will be the SS. The bastards.” He was spluttering all over his papers. “The bastards, the bastards. Our heads on a platter, and them with their little white hands all clean and elegant, well manicured, not one drop of blood. As if not a single one of them had ever signed an execution order. As if not a single one of them had ever stretched out his arm shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ when people talked to them about killing Jews.” He leaped out of his chair and stood at attention, thrusting out his chest, his arm raised almost upright, and roared: “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!” He sat back down hard and began muttering. “The bastards. The honorable little bastards. If only we could shoot them too. Not Reichenau, he’s a muzhik, but the others, all the others.” He was growing more and more incoherent. Finally he fell silent. I took advantage of that quickly to hand him Woytinek’s report and excuse myself. He started shouting again as soon as I got through the door but I didn’t stop.

Finally his replacement arrived. Blobel didn’t drag things out: he gave us a brief farewell speech and took the first train to Kiev. No one, I think, missed him, especially since our new commander, Standartenführer Dr. Erwin Weinmann, stood in positive contrast to his predecessor. He was a young man, just a few years older than I, restrained, with a worried, almost sad face, and genuine National Socialist convictions. Like Dr. Thomas, he was a medical doctor by profession, but he had been working for several years in the Staatspolizei. He immediately made a good impression. “I spent several days in Kiev with Brigadeführer Thomas,” he informed us right away, “and he explained to me the immense difficulties the officers and men of this Kommando have had to face. You should know that it hasn’t been in vain, and that Germany is proud of you. I’m going to spend the next few days familiarizing myself with the Kommando’s work; to that end, I would like to have a frank, free discussion with each of you, individually.”

Weinmann brought us some important news. Von Reichenau had finally been replaced at the head of AOK 6, in the beginning of the year, by a newcomer to the theater of operations, General der Panzertruppe Friedrich Paulus, one of his former chiefs of staff who, since 1940, had been in charge of planning at OKW, and whom he had recommended. But Paulus had already lost his protector. On the eve of Weinmann’s arrival in Kharkov, after his morning run in twenty below, von Reichenau had collapsed, struck down by a heart attack according to some, a stroke according to others; Weinmann had learned about it on the train from an officer from the AOK. As Reichenau was still alive, the Führer had ordered him flown back to Germany; but his plane crashed near Lemberg, and they found him still strapped into his seat, his Feldmarschall baton in his hand, a sad end for a German hero. After some hesitation, Generalfeldmarschall von Bock was appointed in his place; on the very day of his nomination, the Soviets, trying to capitalize on their successes around Moscow, launched an offensive starting in Izyum, south of Kharkov, toward Poltava. It was now thirty degrees below zero; almost no vehicles were circulating, resupply had to be carried out in panje carts, and the Rollbahn was losing more men than the divisions at the front. The Russians had rolled out a formidable new tank, the T-34, invulnerable to the cold and terrifying for the Landsers; fortunately, it couldn’t hold up to our .88s. Paulus transferred AOK 6 from Poltava to Kharkov, which brought some excitement to our city. The Reds were definitely aiming to surround Kharkov, but their northern pincer never budged; the southern branch pushed through our lines and was contained with difficulty near the end of the month, in front of Krasnograd and Paulograd, which left an enormous salient seventy kilometers long wedged into our front line, a dangerous bridgehead this side of the Donets. The partisans, at the rear of our lines, were intensifying their operations; even Kharkov was becoming unsafe: the attacks, despite fierce repression, were multiplying; no doubt the open famine now rampant in the city contributed to it. The Sonderkommando wasn’t spared. One day toward the beginning of February, I had a meeting in an office of the Wehrmacht on the Tereleva Maidan in the center of town. Hanika accompanied me to try to find something to improve our rations, and I left him to his shopping. The discussion was short; I left quickly. At the top of the steps, I paused to breathe in the cold, sharp air, then lit a cigarette. I contemplated the square as I inhaled the first few drags. The sky was luminous, that pure blue of Russian winters that you don’t see anywhere else. On the side, three old Kolkhozniks, sitting on crates, were waiting to sell some meager shriveled vegetables; on the square, at the foot of the Bolshevik monument to the liberation of Kharkov (the 1919 one), half a dozen children, despite the cold, were playing with a tattered rag ball. A few of our Orpos were shuffling about a little farther down. Hanika was standing at the corner, near the Opel, whose driver was letting the engine run. Hanika looked pale, withdrawn; my recent outbursts had shaken him; he was getting on my nerves too. Another child emerged suddenly from a little side street and ran toward the square. He was holding something in his hand. When he reached Hanika he exploded. The detonation blew out the windows of the Opel; I could distinctly hear the glass tinkling on the pavement. The Orpos, panicked, started firing volleys at the children playing. The old women screamed, the ball of rags came apart in the blood. I ran toward Hanika: he was kneeling in the snow and clutching his stomach. The skin of his face, speckled with acne, was terrifyingly pale; before I could reach him his head fell back and his eyes, I saw this, his blue eyes faded into the blue of the sky. The sky erased his eyes. Then he fell on his side. The boy was dead, his arm torn off; on the square, the policemen, shocked, approached the old women who, howling, craddled the limp bodies of the children in their arms. Weinmann seemed more concerned by the blunder of our Orpos than by Hanika’s death: “It’s unacceptable. We’re trying to improve our relations with the local population and we kill their children. They should be court-martialed.” I was skeptical: “That’s going to be difficult, Standartenführer. Their reaction was unfortunate, but understandable. What’s more, we’ve been making them shoot children for months; it would be hard to punish them for the same thing.”—“It’s not the same thing! The children we execute are condemned! These were innocent children.”—“If you will allow me, Standartenführer, the basis on which the condemnations are decided makes such a distinction somewhat arbitrary.” He opened his eyes wide and his nostrils quivered with rage; then he changed his mind and calmed down all of a sudden. “Let’s move on to another matter, Hauptsturmführer. I’ve been wanting to talk with you anyway for several days now. I think you’re very tired. Dr. Sperath thinks you’re on the verge of nervous exhaustion.”—“Excuse me, Standartenführer, but allow me to reject that opinion. I feel fine.” He offered me a cigarette and lit one himself. “Hauptsturmführer, I’m a doctor by training. I too can recognize certain symptoms. You are, as the expression goes, completely fried. You’re not the only one, either: almost all the officers of the Kommando are at the end of their tether. In any case, because of the winter we’re already experiencing a strong decrease in activity and can permit ourselves to function for one or two months with reduced staff. A certain number of officers will be either relieved or sent on a prolonged medical leave. The ones with families will go back to Germany. The others, like you, will go to the Crimea, to one of the sanatoriums of the Wehrmacht. I hear it’s very nice there. You might even be able to go swimming, in a few weeks’ time.” A little smile passed over his narrow face and he held out an envelope to me. “Here are your travel authorizations and your certificates. Everything is in order. You have two months; after that we’ll see. Have a good rest.”