I returned to Voroshilovsk as our forces were taking Mozdok, an important Russian military center; the front now followed the Terek and Baksan rivers, and the 111th Infantry Division was getting ready to cross the Terek toward Groznyi. Our Kommandos were getting active: in Krasnodar, Sk 10a had liquidated the three hundred patients of the regional psychiatric hospital as well as those of a psychiatric clinic for children; in the KMV, Dr. Müller was preparing a large-scale Aktion, and had already formed Jewish Councils in every city; the Jews of Kislovodsk, headed by a dentist, had shown themselves to be so eager that they had come to hand over their carpets, jewelry, and warm clothes before they had even received the order. The HSSPF, Korsemann, had just arrived in Voroshilovsk with his staff and invited us, the night of my return, to his introductory speech. I had already heard about Korsemann, in the Ukraine: he had been a member of the Freikorps and the SA, had worked mostly with the Hauptamt Orpo and hadn’t joined the SS until late, just before the war. Heydrich, they said, didn’t want him and called him an SA agitator; but he was supported by Daluege and von dem Bach-Zelewski, and the Reichsführer had decided to make him an HSSPF, raising him up step-by-step. In the Ukraine, he was already serving as HSSPF z.b.V., that is, “for special tasks,” but he had remained largely in the shadow of Prützmann, who had succeeded Jeckeln as HSSPF Russland-Süd in November 1941. So Korsemann still hadn’t proven himself; the offensive in the Caucasus offered him the chance to demonstrate his capabilities. That seemed to have stimulated an enthusiasm in him that bubbled over in his speech. The SS, he hammered out, had to carry out not only negative tasks, of security and repression, but also positive tasks, to which the Einsatzgruppe could and should contribute: positive propaganda for the natives; fighting infectious diseases; renovating sanatoriums for the Waffen-SS wounded; and economic production, especially in the oil industry, but also in other mining assets still to be allocated, which the SS could assume control of for its businesses. He also urgently stressed the subject of relations with the Wehrmacht: “You’re all certainly aware of the problems related to this that severely affected the work of the Einsatzgruppe at the beginning of the campaign. From now on, to avoid any incident, relations of the SS with the OKHG and the AOK will be centralized by my office. Beyond the usual liaisons and working relations, no SS officer under my command is authorized to negotiate questions of importance directly with the Wehrmacht. In case of any inopportune initiative in this domain, I will be ruthless, believe me.” But despite this unusual stiffness, which seemed to stem from the lack of confidence of a newcomer still ill at ease in his functions, Korsemann spoke eloquently, and showed great personal charm; the general impression was mostly positive. Later that night, during a small informal meeting of subaltern officers, Remmer offered an explanation for Korsemann’s pettifogging attitude: what worried him was still having almost no actual authority. According to the principle of double subordination, the Einsatzgruppe reported directly to the RSHA, and therefore Bierkamp could countermand any order from Korsemann that didn’t suit him: the same was true for the SS economists from the WVHA, and of course for the Waffen-SS, which in any case was subordinated to the Wehrmacht. Ordinarily, to establish his authority and dispose of his own troops, an HSSPF had a few Orpo battalions; but Korsemann hadn’t yet received such forces, and so in fact remained an HSSPF “without special tasks”: he could make suggestions, but if Bierkamp didn’t like them, he wasn’t obliged to follow them.

At the KMV, Dr. Müller was launching his action and Prill asked me to go inspect it. I began to find this curious: I didn’t have anything against inspections, but Prill seemed to be doing everything to keep me away from Voroshilovsk. We were expecting the imminent arrival of Seibert’s replacement, Dr. Leetsch; perhaps Prill, whose rank was the same as mine, was worried that, playing on my relations with Ohlendorf, I could scheme with Leetsch to be named adjunct instead of him. If that was the case, it was idiotic: I had no ambition in that regard, and Prill had nothing to fear from me. But maybe I was imagining things for no reason? It was hard to say. I had never mastered the baroque rituals of precedence in the SS, and it was easy to err in either direction; instinct and Thomas’s advice here would have been precious to me. But Thomas was far away, and I didn’t have any close friend in the Group. To tell the truth, they weren’t the kind of people with whom I could easily strike up a bond. They had been picked out of the most obscure offices of the RSHA, and most of them were very ambitious and saw the work of the Einsatzgruppe only as a springboard; almost all of them, as soon as they arrived, seemed to regard the work of extermination as self-evident, and they didn’t even ask themselves the questions that had so worried the men in the first year. In the midst of these men, I was seen as a somewhat complicated intellectual, and I remained isolated. That didn’t bother me: I have always been able to do without the friendship of coarse loudmouths. But I had to stay on my guard.

I reached Pyatigorsk early in the morning. It was the beginning of September and the blue-gray of the sky was still hazy and heavy with summer dust. The road from Voroshilovsk crosses the railroad just before Mineralnye Vody, then, running alongside it, snakes between the five volcanic peaks that give Pyatigorsk its name. You enter the city from the north, skirting round the great hump of the Mashuk; the road rises at this point, and the town appeared suddenly at my feet, with beyond it the undulating sweep of the foothills, dotted with volcanoes, their collapsed domes scattered about. The Einsatzkommando was occupying one of the turn-of-the-century sanatoriums sprawled at the foot of Mount Mashuk, in the eastern part of town; von Kleist’s AOK had requisitioned the immense Lermontov Sanatorium, but the SS had been able to obtain the Voenaya Sanatoria, which would serve as a lazaretto for the Waffen-SS. The Leibstandarte was fighting in the area, and I thought with a vague twinge about Partenau; but it isn’t good to try to revive old affairs, and I knew I wouldn’t make any effort to see him again. Pyatigorsk was still mostly intact; after a brief skirmish with a factory’s self-defense militia, the town had been captured without combat; the streets were swarming like those of an American mining town during the Gold Rush. Wagons and even camels got in the way of military vehicles pretty much everywhere to create traffic jams that the Feldgendarmen broke up with a liberal sprinkling of insults and blows. Opposite the large Tsvetnik Garden, in front of the Bristol Hotel, neatly parked cars and motorcycles marked the emplacement of the Feldkommandantur; the offices of the Einsatzkommando were lower down, on Kirov Boulevard, in a two-story former institute. The trees on the boulevard hid its pretty façade; and I examined the ceramic floral motifs, set under stucco moldings representing, seated above two pigeons, a cherub with a basket of flowers on his head; at the top, you could make out a parrot perched on a ring, and the head of a sad little girl with pinched nostrils. On the right an archway led to an inner courtyard. My driver parked there next to the Saurer truck while I showed the guards my papers. Dr. Müller was busy, and I was received by Obersturmführer Dr. Bolte, an officer from the Staatspolizei. The staff occupied large rooms with high ceilings, well lit by tall wooden casement windows; Dr. Bolte had his office in a pretty little circular room, at the very top of one of the two towers set at the corners of the building. He curtly explained the procedures of the action: each day, according to a timetable drawn up on the basis of the figures provided by the Jewish Councils, a part or all of the Jews of one of the towns of the KMV were evacuated by train; the posters inviting them to come “resettle in the Ukraine” had been printed by the Wehrmacht, which also provided the train and the escort troops; they were sent to Mineralnye Vody, where they were held in a glass factory before they were taken a little farther off, to a Soviet antitank ditch. The figures had turned out larger than expected: we had found a lot of Jews evacuated from the Ukraine or from Byelorussia, as well as the teaching staff and students from the University of Leningrad, sent to the KMV the previous year for their safety, many of whom were either Jews or Party members, or were regarded as dangerous because they were intellectuals. The Einsatzkommando was taking advantage of the occasion to liquidate arrested Communists, Komsomols, Gypsies, common law criminals found in jail, and the staff and patients of several sanatoriums. “You understand,” Bolte explained, “the infrastructure here is ideal for our administration. Envoys of the Reichskommissar, for example, asked us to free up the sanatorium of the People’s Commissariat for the oil industry, in Kislovodsk.” The Aktion was already well under way: on the first day they had finished with the Jews of Minvody, then of Yessentuki and Zheleznovodsk; the next day, they would start with the Jews of Pyatigorsk, then the action would end with the Jews of Kislovodsk. In each case, the evacuation order was posted two days before the operation. “Since they can’t travel from one town to the other, they don’t suspect anything.” He invited me to come with him to inspect the action under way; I replied that I would rather visit the other towns of the KMV first. “Then I won’t be able to go with you: Sturmbannführer Müller is waiting for me.” “That’s all right. You can just lend me a man who knows the offices of your Teilkommandos.”