On Sundays, when I didn’t have too much work, I’d take an Opel and we’d go to the beach, to Eupatoria. Often I’d drive myself. The heat was increasing by the day, we were in the heart of springtime, and I had to watch out for the clusters of naked boys who, lying on their stomachs on the burning asphalt of the road, scattered like sparrows before each vehicle, in a lively jumble of thin little tanned bodies. Eupatoria had a fine mosque, the largest one in the Crimea, designed in the sixteenth century by the famous Ottoman architect Sinan, and some curious ruins; but we couldn’t find any Portwein there, or even really any tea; and the lake water was stagnant and muddy. So we would leave the city for the beaches, where we sometimes met groups of soldiers coming up from Sebastopol to rest from the fighting. Most of the time naked, almost always completely white, apart from their faces, necks, and forearms, they played around like children, rushing into the water, then sprawling on the sand still wet, breathing in its warmth like a prayer, to chase away the winter cold. Often the beaches were empty. I liked the old-fashioned look of these Soviet beaches: brightly colored parasols missing their canvas, benches stained with bird droppings, changing booths made of rusty metal with their paint flaking off, revealing your feet and head to the kids lazing by the fences. We had our favorite place, a beach south of the city. The day we discovered it, half a dozen cows, scattered around a brightly colored trawler lying on the sand, were grazing on the new grass of the steppe invading the dunes, indifferent to the blond child on a rickety bicycle weaving between them. Across the narrow bay, a sad little Russian tune drifted from a blue shack perched on a shaky dock, in front of which rocked, tied up with old ropes, three poor fishing boats. The place was bathed in calm forsakenness. We had brought some fresh bread and some red apples from the previous year that we snacked on while we drank some vodka; the water was cold, invigorating. To our right stood two old ramshackle refreshment stalls, padlocked, and a lifeguard’s tower on the verge of collapse. The hours passed without our saying much. Voss read; I slowly finished the vodka and plunged back into the water; one of the cows, for no reason, galloped off down the beach. When we left, passing by a little fishing village to get our car, which was parked farther up, I saw a flock of geese slipping one after another beneath a wooden gate; the last one, with a little green apple wedged in her beak, was running to catch up with her sisters.

I often saw Ohlendorf too. At work, I mostly dealt with Seibert; but in the late afternoon, if Ohlendorf wasn’t too busy, I would go to his office for a cup of coffee. He drank it constantly; gossips said it was his sole nourishment. He seemed always busy with a multitude of tasks that sometimes had little to do with the Group. Seibert, in fact, managed the daily work; he was the one who supervised the other officers from the Gruppenstab, and who led the regular meetings with the Chief of Staff or the Ic of the Eleventh Army. To submit an official question to Ohlendorf, you had to go through his adjutant, Obersturmführer Heinz Schubert, a descendent of the great composer and a conscientious man, although a little slow. So when Ohlendorf received me, a little like a professor meeting with a student outside of class, I never spoke to him about work; instead we discussed theoretical or ideological questions. One day I brought up the Jewish question. “The Jews!” he exclaimed. “Damn them! They’re worse than the Hegelians!” He smiled one of his rare smiles before going on, in his precise, musical, slightly shrill voice. “You could say that Schopenhauer saw all the more correctly that Marxism, at bottom, is a Jewish perversion of Hegel. Isn’t that so?”—“I wanted especially to ask your opinion about our work,” I hazarded.—“You want to talk about the destruction of the Jewish people, I suppose?”—“Yes. I should confess to you that it poses some problems for me.”—“It poses problems for everyone,” he replied categorically. “To me too it poses problems.”—“What is your opinion, then?”—“My opinion?” He stretched, and joined his fingertips in front of his lips; his eyes, usually piercing, had gone almost empty. I wasn’t used to seeing him in uniform; Ohlendorf, for me, remained a civilian, and I had trouble imagining him other than in his discreet, perfectly cut suits. “It’s a mistake,” he finally said. “But a necessary mistake.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “I should explain. Have some coffee. It’s a mistake, because it’s the result of our inability to manage the problem in a more rational way. But it’s a necessary mistake because, in the present situation, the Jews present a phenomenal, urgent danger for us. If the Führer ended up imposing the most radical solution, it’s because he was forced into it by the indecision and incompetence of the men put in charge of the problem.”—“What do you mean by our inability to solve the problem?”—“I’m about to explain that. You must remember how, after the Seizure of Power, all the irresponsible idiots and psychopaths in the Party started bellowing for radical measures, and how all kinds of illegal or detrimental actions were launched, like Streicher’s imbecilic initiatives. The Führer, very wisely, reined in those unrestrained actions and undertook a legal resolution of the problem, which ended with the racial laws of 1935, on the whole satisfactory. But even after that, between the fussy bureaucrats who drowned out every advance beneath a flood of paper, and the overexcited fools who encouraged Einzelaktionen, often for their own personal interests, a solution to the Jewish problem as a whole was still far from being found. The pogroms of 1938, which did so much harm to Germany, were a logical consequence of this lack of coordination. It was only when the SD began to concentrate seriously on the problem that an alternative to all these ad hoc initiatives could emerge. After lengthy studies and discussions we were able to elaborate and propose a coherent overall policy: accelerated emigration. I think even today that this solution could have satisfied everyone, and that it was perfectly realizable, even after the Anschluss. The structures that were created to promote emigration, especially the use of ill-gotten Jewish funds to finance the emigration of poor Jews, turned out to be very effective. You might remember that little obsequious half-Austrian, who worked under Knochen, then under Behrends…?”—“You mean Sturmbannführer Eichmann? Indeed, I saw him again last year, in Kiev.”—“Yes, that’s right. Well, in Vienna, he put a remarkable organization into place. It worked very well.”—“Yes, but afterward there was Poland. And no country in the world was ready to accept three million Jews.”—“Exactly.” He had straightened up and crossed one leg over the other. “But even then we could have resolved the difficulties step by step. Ghettoization, of course, was a catastrophe; but Frank’s attitude contributed a lot to that, in my opinion. The real problem is that we wanted to do everything at the same time: repatriate the Volksdeutschen and resolve the Jewish problem as well as the Polish problem. So of course it was chaos.”—“Yes, but really, the repatriation of the Volksdeutschen was urgent: no one could know how long Stalin would continue to cooperate. He could have slammed the door shut any day. And we never did manage to save the Volga Germans.”—“We could have, I think. But they didn’t want to come. They made the mistake of trusting Stalin. They felt protected because of their status, isn’t that so? In any case, you’re right: we absolutely had to begin with the Volksdeutschen. But that concerned only the Incorporated Territories, not the Generalgouvernement. If everyone had agreed to cooperate, there would have been a way to move the Jews and the Poles out of the Warthegau and Danzig-Westpreussen and into the Generalgouvernement, to make room for the repatriated Volksdeutschen. But here we’re touching the limits of our National Socialist State as it now exists. It’s a fact that the organization of the National Socialist administration is not yet equal to meeting the political and social requirements of our mode of society. The Party is eaten away by too many corrupt elements, who defend their private interests. So each dispute turns immediately into an exaggerated conflict. In the case of the repatriation, the Gauleiters of the Incorporated Territories behaved with phenomenal arrogance, and the Generalgouvernement reacted similarly. Everyone accused everyone else of treating his territory as a dumping ground. And the SS, which had been put in charge of the problem, didn’t have enough power to impose a systematic regulation. At every stage, somebody would take an unauthorized initiative, or else challenge the Reichsführer’s decisions by making use of his private access to the Führer. Our State is so far an absolute, national, and socialist Führerstaat only in theory; in practice, and it’s only getting worse, it’s a form of pluralist anarchy. The Führer can try to arbitrate, but he can’t be everywhere, and our Gauleiters know very well how to interpret his orders, deform them, and then proclaim that they’re following his will when actually they’re doing whatever they want.”