Very early, it seems to me, I greedily sought the love of everyone I met. This instinct, with adults at least, was generally repaid in kind, since I was both handsome and very intelligent as a boy. But at school, I found myself confronted with cruel, aggressive children, many of whom had lost their fathers in the war, or were beaten and neglected by fathers who had returned from the trenches brutalized and half mad. They avenged themselves, at school, for this lack of love at home by turning viciously against other children who were frailer and more sensitive. They hit me, and I had few friends; in sports, when teams were being formed, no one ever picked me. Then, instead of begging for their affection, I sought their attention. I also tried to impress the teachers, who were fairer than the boys my age; since I was intelligent, this was easy: but then the others called me a teacher’s pet and beat me up even more. Of course, I never mentioned any of this to my father.

After the defeat, when we had settled in Kiel, he had had to leave again—we didn’t really know where or why; from time to time he returned to see us, then he would disappear again; he didn’t settle down with us for good till the end of 1919. In 1921, he fell seriously ill and had to stop working. His convalescence dragged on, and the atmosphere at home grew tense and gloomy. Around the beginning of the summer, still gray and cold as I remember it, his brother came to visit us. This younger brother, cheerful and funny, told wonderful stories about the war and about his travels that made me roar in admiration. My sister didn’t like him so much. A few days later, my father left with him on a trip, to visit our grandfather, whom I had seen only once or twice and whom I scarcely remembered (my mother’s parents, I think, were already dead). Even today I remember this departure: my mother, my sister, and I were lined up in front of the gate to the house, my father was loading his suitcase into the trunk of the car that would take him to the train station: “Goodbye, little ones,” he said with a smile, “don’t worry, I’ll come back soon.” I never saw him again. My twin sister and I were almost eight then. I learned much later that after some time my mother had gotten a letter from my uncle: after the visit to their father, it said, they had had a falling-out, and my father, apparently, had left in a train for Turkey and the Middle East; my uncle didn’t know anything else about his disappearance; his employers, contacted by my mother, didn’t know anything either. I never saw this letter from my uncle; it was my mother who explained it to me one day, and I could never confirm what she said, or locate this brother who nevertheless did exist. I did not tell all of this to Partenau: but I am telling it to you.

I spent a lot of time with Partenau now. Sexually, he left me with an uncertain impression. His rigor and his National Socialist and SS enthusiasm could turn out to be an obstacle; but deep down, I felt, his desire must not have been more oriented than anyone else’s. In high school I had quickly learned that there was no homosexuality, as such; the boys made do with what there was, and in the army, as in prisons, it was certainly the same. Of course, since 1937, the date of my brief arrest for the Tiergarten affair, the official attitude had grown considerably harsher. The SS seemed particularly targeted. The previous autumn, when I arrived in Kharkov, the Führer had signed a decree, “On the Maintenance of Purity Within the SS and the Police,” condemning to death any SS man or police employee who engaged in indecent behavior with another man or even permitted himself to be abused. This decree, out of fear it might give rise to misinterpretation, had not been published, but in the SD we had been informed of it. For my part, I thought it was mostly rhetorical posturing; in actual fact, if you stayed discreet, there were rarely any problems. It all depended on not compromising yourself with a personal enemy; but I didn’t have any personal enemies. Partenau, however, must have been influenced by the hysterical rhetoric of the Schwarzes Korps and other SS publications. But my intuition told me that if one could provide him with the necessary ideological framework, the rest would come on its own.

It wasn’t necessary to be subtle: it was just a question of being methodical. In the afternoons, occasionally, if there was some free time, we would go out and walk about town, strolling through the little streets or along the quays lined with palm trees; then we would go sit in a café and drink a glass of Crimean muscatel, a little sweet to my taste, but pleasant. On the esplanade, we met mostly Germans, sometimes accompanied by girls; as for the men of the region, aside from a few Tatars or Ukrainians wearing the white armband of the Hiwis, we didn’t see any; in January, in fact, the Wehrmacht had evacuated the entire male population, first to transit camps, then to the Nikolayev Generalkommissariat: a radical solution indeed to the problem of partisans, but it must be acknowledged that with all those wounded or convalescent soldiers, they couldn’t take any risks. Before springtime, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, aside from the theater, or some movies arranged by the Wehrmacht. Even bacilli fall asleep in Yalta, wrote Chekhov, but this slow boredom suited me. Sometimes several other young officers joined us, and we would go sit on a café terrace overlooking the sea. If we found one—provisions from the requisitioned supplies were ruled by mysterious laws—we’d order a bottle of wine; along with the muscatel, there was a red Portwein, just as sweet but suited to the climate. Talk centered on the local women sadly deprived of husbands, and Partenau didn’t seem indifferent to this. In the midst of bursts of laughter, one of the bolder officers would accost some young women and, talking gibberish, invite them to join us; sometimes they blushed and went on their way, and sometimes they came and sat down; Partenau, then, cheerfully joined in on a conversation made up mainly of gestures, onomatopoeia, and isolated words. This had to be cut short. “Meine Herren, I don’t want to be a spoilsport,” I began on one of these occasions. “But I should warn you of the risks you’re running.” I rapped sharply a few times on the table. “In the SD, we receive and synthesize all the reports on incidents in the rear zones of the Wehrmacht. That gives us an overview of problems that you can’t have. I should tell you that having relations with Soviet, Ukrainian, or Russian women is not only unworthy of a German soldier, but dangerous. I’m not exaggerating. Many of these females are Jews, whose Jewish origins can’t be seen; that by itself is already risking Rassenschande, racial soiling. But there’s something else. Not only the Jewesses but also Slav females are in league with the partisans; we know that they make unscrupulous use of their physical advantages, and our soldiers’ trust, for espionage. You might think you can hold your tongue, but I can tell you that there’s no such thing as a harmless detail, and the work of an intelligence service consists of creating giant mosaics from minuscule elements that are insignificant if taken individually but, when connected to thousands of others, make sense. The Bolsheviks don’t go about it any differently.” My pronouncements seemed to be putting my comrades ill at ease. I continued. “In Kharkov, in Kiev, we had many cases of men and officers who slipped off to a rendezvous and were found horribly mutilated. And then of course there are the diseases. Our health services believe, based on Soviet statistics, that ninety percent of Russian females are afflicted with gonorrhea, and fifty percent with syphilis. Many of our soldiers are already infected; and these men, when they go home on leave, contaminate their wives or their girlfriends; the medical services of the Reich are horrified, and are talking of an epidemic. Such a profanation of the race, if it isn’t violently combated, can lead in the end only to a form of Entdeutschung, a de-Germanizing of our race and our blood.”