I was open to some of Voss’s arguments: if the Bergjuden did in fact think of themselves as authentic Caucasian mountain people, and were regarded as such by their neighbors, their attitude toward us, in general, might indeed remain loyal, whatever the origin of their blood. Cultural and social factors could also count; one had to consider, for example, the relations this people had with the Bolshevik authorities. The words of the old Tat, in Pyatigorsk, had suggested to me that the Bergjuden were not particularly fond of the Jews of Russia, and perhaps the same was true for the whole Stalinist system. The attitude of the other tribes toward them was also important, you couldn’t depend on the word of Shadov alone: here too, perhaps, the Jews were living as parasites. Going back to Pyatigorsk, I thought about Voss’s other arguments. To deny racial anthropology as a whole in that way seemed to me to be overdoing it; of course the methods could be refined, and I didn’t doubt that people of little talent were able to profit from their Party connections to construct an undeserved career for themselves: Germany was swarming with parasites like that (and fighting that was also one of the tasks of the SD, in the minds of some people at least). But Voss, despite all his talent, had the definitive opinions of youth. Things were certainly more complex than he thought. I didn’t have the knowledge to criticize him, but it seemed to me that if you believed in a certain idea of Germany and the German Volk, the rest had to follow naturally. Some things could be demonstrated, but others simply had to be understood; it was also no doubt a question of faith.

In Pyatigorsk, the first reply from Berlin was waiting for me, sent by telex. Amt VII had sought the opinion of a certain Professor Kittel, who wrote: Difficult question, to be studied locally. That was not very encouraging. Department VII B 1, on the other hand, had prepared documentation that would arrive soon by air mail. The specialist from the Wehrmacht, von Gilsa told me, was on his way, and Rosenberg’s expert would follow him soon after. Waiting for ours to arrive, I settled the problem of my winter clothing. Reuter kindly placed one of the Jewish artisans from the Wehrmacht at my service, an old man with a long beard, quite thin; he came to take my measurements, and I ordered a long gray coat from him with an Astrakhan collar, lined with shearling, which the Russians call a shuba, and a pair of fleece-lined boots; as for the shapka (the one from the year before had disappeared a long time ago), I went myself and found one at the market, the Verkhnyi rynok, in silver fox. A number of officers from the Waffen-SS had adopted the custom of having a death’s head insignia sewn onto their non-regulation shapkas; I thought that a bit affected; but on the other hand, I removed the epaulettes and an SD insignia from one of my jackets and had them sewn onto the coat.

My bouts of nausea and vomiting caught me at irregular intervals; and harrowing dreams began to deepen my unease. Often they remained black and opaque; morning erased all images and left only the weight of them. But sometimes too this darkness was ripped apart all of a sudden, revealing visions blinding in their clarity and horror. Two or three nights after I returned from Nalchik, I ill-advisedly opened one of these doors: Voss, in a dark, empty room, was on all fours, his rear end bare, and liquid shit was streaming from his anus. Worried, I seized some paper, some pages from Izvestia, and tried to sponge up this brown liquid, which was becoming increasingly darker and thicker. I tried to keep my hands clean, but it was impossible, the almost black pitch covered the pages and my fingers, then my whole hand. Sick with disgust, I ran to wash my hands in a bathtub nearby; but during this time it was still streaming. Waking up, I tried to understand these frightful images; but I must not have been completely awake, since my thoughts, which seemed to me at the time perfectly lucid, remained as cloudy as the meaning of the image itself: it seemed to me in fact from certain signs that these people represented others, that the man on all fours must have been me, and the one who was wiping him, my father. And what could the articles from Izvestia have been about? Could there have been a piece there that might have settled the Tat question once and for all? The mail from VII B 1, sent by a certain Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Füsslein, did nothing to resolve my pessimism; the zealous Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat, in fact, had simply contented himself with culling excerpts from The Jewish Encyclopedia. There were some very erudite things there, but their contradictory opinions, alas, led to no conclusion. Thus I learned that the Jews of the Caucasus were mentioned for the first time by Benjamin of Tudela, who had traveled to these lands around 1170, and Pethahiah of Ratisbon, who asserted that they were of Persian origin and had come to the Caucasus around the twelfth century. Willem van Ruysbroeck, in 1254, had found a large Jewish population east of the massif, in the region of Astrakhan. But a Georgian text of 314 mentioned Hebrew-speaking Jews who had adopted the old Iranian language (“Parsee” or “Tat”) after the occupation of the Transcaucasus by the Persians, mixing it with Hebrew and local languages. The Jews of Georgia, however, called, according to Koch, Huria (perhaps derived from Iberia), speak not Tat but a Kartvelian dialect. As for Daghestan, according to the Derbent-Nameh, the Arabs had already found Jews there during their conquest, in the eighth century. Contemporary researchers only complicated the affair. There was reason to despair; I resolved to send all of it to Bierkamp and Leetsch without commentary, insisting that a specialist be summoned as soon as possible.

The snow stopped for a few days, then started up again. In the mess, the officers spoke in low, worried voices: Rommel had been beaten by the English at El-Alamein, then, a few days later, the English and Americans had landed in North Africa; our forces had just occupied the Free Zone in France, in retaliation; but that had pushed the Vichy troops in Africa to go over to the Allies. “If only things were going better here,” was von Gilsa’s comment. But before Ordzhonikidze our divisions had gone on the defensive; the line ran from south of Chegem and Nalchik to Chikola and Gizel, then followed the Terek to the north of Malgobek; and soon, a Soviet counterattack recaptured Gizel. Then came the real blow. I didn’t learn about it right away, since the officers from the Abwehr blocked my access to the map room and refused to give me any details. “I’m sorry,” Reuter said. “Your Kommandant will have to discuss it with the OKHG.” At the end of the day I managed to learn that the Soviets had launched a counteroffensive on the Stalingrad front; but I couldn’t find out where or how large it was: the officers from the AOK, their faces somber and tense, obstinately refused to talk to me. Leetsch, on the telephone, told me that the OKHG was reacting in the same way; the Gruppenstab didn’t know any more than I did, and asked me to pass on any new information immediately. This attitude persisted the next day, and I got angry with Reuter, who retorted curtly that the AOK had no obligation to inform the SS about operations under way outside of its own area of responsibility. But already the rumors were spreading, the officers could no longer control the Latrinenparolen; I fell back on the drivers, dispatch riders, and noncoms and, in a few hours, by cross-checking the various tidbits, managed to form some idea of the extent of the danger. I called back Leetsch, who seemed to have the same information; but as to what the Wehrmacht’s reaction would be, no one could say. The two Romanian fronts, west of Stalingrad on the Don and to the south in the Kalmuk Steppe, were collapsing, and the Reds were evidently aiming to take the Sixth Army from the rear. Where had they found the necessary troops? I couldn’t manage to find out where they were, the situation was evolving too quickly even for the cooks to follow, but it seemed urgent that the Sixth Army begin a retreat to keep from being surrounded; yet the Sixth Army wasn’t moving. On November 21, Generaloberst von Kleist was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and named Commander in Chief of Army Group A: the Führer must have been feeling overwhelmed. Generaloberst von Mackensen took Kleist’s place at the head of the First Panzer Army. Von Gilsa passed me this news officially; he seemed desperate, and hinted to me that the situation was becoming catastrophic. The next day, a Sunday, the two Soviet pincer movements met up at Kalach-on-the-Don, and the Sixth Army as well as part of the Fourth Panzer Army were surrounded. Rumors spoke of a debacle, of massive losses, of chaos; but every seemingly precise piece of information contradicted the previous one. By the end of the day, finally, Reuter took me to von Gilsa, who gave me a quick summary on the maps. “The decision not to try to evacuate the Sixth Army was made by the Führer himself,” he told me. The surrounded divisions now formed a giant Kessel, a “cauldron” as they said, cut off from our lines, but stretching from Stalingrad through the steppe almost to the Don. The situation was worrisome, but the rumors were exaggerating things terribly; the German forces had lost few men or materiel and kept their cohesion; what’s more, the experience of Demiansk, the previous year, showed that a Kessel, if supplied by air, could hold out indefinitely. “A breakthrough operation will soon be launched,” he concluded. A meeting called the next day by Bierkamp confirmed this optimistic interpretation: Reichsmarschall Göring, Korsemann announced, had given his word to the Führer that the Luftwaffe was able to supply the Sixth Army; General Paulus had joined his staff in Gumrak to direct operations from within the Kessel; and Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein was being recalled from Vitebsk to form a new Army Group Don, tasked with relieving the surrounded forces. This last piece of news especially created a great sense of relief: ever since the taking of Sebastopol, von Manstein was regarded as the best strategist in the Wehrmacht; if anyone could resolve the situation, it was he.