ALLEMANDES I AND II

At the border they had set up a pontoon bridge. Just next to it, rising above the gray water of the Bug, the warped girders of the metal bridge the Soviets had dynamited lay in tangles. Our sappers had erected the new one in one night, we’d heard, and impassive Feldgendarmen, their crescent-shaped neck-plates reflecting the sun’s glare, controlled the traffic with self-assurance, as if they were still back home. The Wehrmacht had priority; we were told to wait. I contemplated the big lazy river, the quiet little woods on the other side, the throng on the bridge. Then it was our turn to cross and right on the other side there stretched out, like a boulevard, the wrecks of Russian equipment, trucks burned out and crumpled, tanks ripped open like tin cans, artillery carriages twisted like straw, overturned, swept aside, tangled up in an interminable burned strip made up of irregular heaps running alongside the road. Beyond, the woods gleamed in the splendid summer sun. The dirt road had been cleared but you could see traces of explosions along it, big oil slicks, scattered debris. Then came the first houses of Sokal. In the center of town, a few fires were still gently crackling; dust-covered corpses, most of them in civilian clothing, blocked part of the street, intermingled with ruins and rubble; and facing us, in the shade of a park, white crosses topped with curious little roofs formed a tidy line beneath the trees. Two German soldiers were painting names on them. We waited there while Blobel, accompanied by Strehlke, our supply officer, went to HQ. A sweetish smell, vaguely nauseating, intermingled with the acridity of the smoke. Soon Blobel returned: “It’s fine. Strehlke is taking care of the quarters. Follow me.”

The AOK* had set us up in a school. “I’m sorry,” a little quartermaster in creased field gray said. “We’re still getting organized. But they’ll send you some rations.” Our second in command, von Radetzky, an elegant Balt, waved a gloved hand and smiled: “That’s no problem. We’re not going to stay.” There weren’t any beds, but we had brought blankets; the men sat down on the little school chairs. There must have been about seventy of us. At night, we got soup with cabbage and potato, almost cold, some raw onions, and chunks of a black, gummy bread, which dried out as soon as it was sliced. I was hungry, I dipped it in the soup and ate it and bit into onions whole. Von Radetzky set the watch. The night passed peacefully.

The next morning, Standartenführer Blobel, our commander, gathered his Leiters together to go to HQ. The Leiter III, my immediate superior, wanted to type up a report, so he sent me in his place. The headquarters of the Sixth Army, the AOK 6, to which we were attached, had occupied a large Austro-Hungarian building, its façade gaily painted orange, enhanced with columns and stucco decorations, and riddled with shrapnel. An Oberst, who seemed to know Blobel well, received us: “The Generalfeldmarschall is working outdoors. Follow me.” He led us toward a vast park that stretched down from the building to a bend in the Bug, down below. Near a solitary tree, a man in swimming trunks was walking with long strides, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of officers, their uniforms drenched in sweat. He turned toward us: “Ah, Blobel! Hello, gentlemen.” We saluted him: he was Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, the commander in chief of the army. His hairy chest, thrust forward, radiated vigor; embedded in the fat that, despite his athletic build, drowned out the Prussian fineness of his traits, his famous monocle gleamed in the sun, incongruous, almost ridiculous. Without stopping his precise and meticulous instructions he continued his jerky movements to and fro; we had to follow him, which was a little disconcerting; I bumped into a Major and didn’t grasp much. Then he stood still to dismiss us. “Oh yes! One other thing. For the Jews, five guns are too much, you don’t have enough men. Two guns per condemned man will be enough. As for the Bolsheviks, we’ll see how many there are. If they’re women you can use a full squad.” Blobel saluted: “Zu Befehl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.” Von Reichenau clicked his bare heels and raised his arm: “Heil Hitler!”—“Heil Hitler,” we all replied in chorus before beating a retreat.

Sturmbannführer Dr. Kehrig, my superior, greeted my report sullenly. “Is that all?”—“I didn’t hear everything, Sturmbannführer.” He made a face and fiddled distractedly with his papers. “I don’t understand. Who should we take our orders from, in the end? From Reichenau or Jeckeln? And where is Brigadeführer Rasch?”—“I don’t know, Sturmbannführer.”—“You don’t know much, Obersturmführer. Dismissed.”

Blobel called all the officers together the next day. Early in the morning, about twenty men had gone with Callsen. “I sent him to Lutsk with a Vorkommando. The whole Kommando will follow in a day or two. That’s where we’ll set up our headquarters, for now. The AOK will also be transferred to Lutsk. Our divisions are advancing quickly, we have to get to work. I’m waiting for Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, who will give us orders.” Jeckeln, an old Party hand, was the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer for southern Russia; all SS formations in the zone, including our own, were subordinated to him in one way or another. But the question of the chain of command continued to worry Kehrig: “So, are we under the authority of the Obergruppenführer?”—“Administratively, we’re subordinated to the Sixth Army. But tactically we receive our orders from the RSHA, via the Gruppenstab, and from the HSSPF. Is that clear?” Kehrig nodded and sighed: “Not entirely, but I’m guessing the details will become clearer as we go along.” Blobel flushed crimson: “But they explained everything to you in Pretzsch, good God!” Kehrig kept his calm. “In Pretzsch, Standartenführer, they explained absolutely nothing to us. They fed us some speeches and made us exercise. That’s it. I would remind you that the representatives of the SD were not invited to the meeting with Gruppenführer Heydrich, last week. I’m sure there were good reasons for that, but the fact is that I have no idea what I should do, aside from write reports on the morale and behavior of the Wehrmacht.” He turned to Vogt, the Leiter IV: “You were there, at that meeting. Well, when they explain our tasks to us, we’ll carry them out.” Vogt tapped on the table with a pen, ill at ease. Blobel chewed the inside of his cheeks and stared furiously at a point on the wall. “All right,” he finally barked. “In any case, the Obergruppenführer is arriving tonight. We’ll see about that tomorrow.”

This inconclusive meeting probably took place on June 27, since the next day we were summoned to a speech by Obergruppenführer Jeckeln and my books affirm that this speech took place on the twenty-eighth. Jeckeln and Blobel had probably told themselves that the men of the Sonderkommando were in need of a little direction and motivation; late in the morning, the whole Kommando came to line up in the school courtyard to listen to the HSSPF. Jeckeln didn’t mince his words. Our job, he explained to us, was to identify and eliminate any element behind our lines that might threaten the security of our troops. Any Bolshevik, any People’s Commissar, any Jew and any Gypsy could at any instant dynamite our quarters, assassinate our men, derail our trains, or transmit vital information to the enemy. Our duty wasn’t to wait till he acted and then punish him, but to prevent him from acting. Nor was it a question, given the swiftness of our advance, of creating and filling camps: any suspect would be sent to the firing squad. For the lawyers among us, he reminded us that the USSR had refused to sign the Hague conventions, and that, therefore, the international law that regulated our actions in the West did not apply here. Certainly there would be mistakes; certainly there would be innocent victims; but that, alas, was war; when you bomb a city, civilians die too. At times it might be hard for us, our sensitivity and delicacy as men and Germans might sometimes suffer from it, he knew; we should triumph over ourselves; and he could only remind us of a phrase of the Führer’s, which he had heard from his own mouth: The leaders must themselves make the sacrifice of overcoming their doubts. Thank you and Heil Hitler. That at least had the merit of frankness. In Pretzsch, Müller’s and Streckenbach’s speeches abounded with fine phrases about the need to be pitiless and merciless, but aside from confirming that we were in fact going to Russia, they had confined themselves to generalities. Heydrich, in Düben, during the departure parade, might have been more explicit; but he had scarcely begun to speak when a violent rainstorm broke: he had canceled his speech and gone off to Berlin. So our confusion wasn’t surprising, all the more so since few of us had the slightest operational experience; I myself, ever since I had been recruited into the SD, did almost nothing but compile legal files, and I was far from being the exception. Kehrig took care of constitutional questions; even Vogt, the Leiter IV, came from the card files department. As for Standartenführer Blobel, they had taken him from the Düsseldorf Staatspolizei; he had probably never done anything but arrest asocials or homosexuals, along with maybe a Communist from time to time. In Pretzsch, they said he had been an architect: he had obviously not made a career of it. He was not what you would call a nice man; I found him aggressive, almost brutal with his colleagues. His round face, with his crushed chin and protuberant ears, seemed to be perched on the neck of his uniform like the naked head of a vulture, a resemblance even more accentuated by his beaklike nose. Every time I passed near him, he stank of alcohol; Häfner said that he was trying to get over a case of dysentery. I was happy I didn’t have to deal with him directly, and Dr. Kehrig, who was forced to, seemed to suffer from it. He himself seemed to feel out of place here. In Pretzsch, Thomas had explained to me that they had taken most of the officers from offices where they weren’t indispensable; they had been summarily attributed SS ranks (that’s how I found myself an SS-Obersturmführer, the equivalent of one of your lieutenants); Kehrig, an Oberregierungsrat, or government adviser, barely a month earlier, had benefited from his rank in the civil service to be promoted to Sturmbannführer; and he obviously had trouble getting used to his new epaulettes, as well as to his new functions. As for the noncoms and the troops, they came mostly from the lower middle class—shopkeepers, accountants, clerks, the kind of men who signed up in the SA during the Depression in the hope of finding work, and had never left it. Among them were a certain number of Volksdeutschen from the Baltic countries or from Ruthenia, gloomy, dull men, ill at ease in their uniforms, whose sole qualification was their knowledge of Russian; some could barely manage to make themselves understood in German. Von Radetzky, it’s true, stood out from the rest: he boasted of knowing the slang of the brothels of Moscow, where he was born, as well as that of Berlin, and always seemed to know what he was doing, even when he wasn’t doing anything. He also spoke some Ukrainian—he had apparently worked a little in import-export; like me, he came from the Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS. His posting to the southern sector filled him with despair; he had dreamed of being in the center, of entering Moscow as a conqueror and of striding across the Kremlin carpets. Vogt consoled him by telling him we’d have fun enough in Kiev, but von Radetzky made a face: “It’s true that the lavra is magnificent. But aside from that, it’s a hole.” The night of Jeckeln’s speech, we received the order to pack our things and prepare to march the next day: Callsen was ready to receive us.