Europe Central (84 page)

Rage’s beak drilled at the back of his skull. Rage’s claws grubbed in his guts, piercing and digging.

32

“Clever Hans” Günther called for his advice as to whether it would be practical to liquidate the remaining Jews of Theresienstadt all at once if we herded them into open ditches and then sprinkled them with Zyklon B. The always clean and pleasing look of Kurt Gerstein’s face came into play when the blond man lied and said that it was utterly impossible. That was the last time he succeeded in saving anybody. As it turned out, those Jews got murdered anyway, by shooting.

In his flat he frequently committed the capital crime of listening to BBC broadcasts; moreover, he increased the volume until the neighbors could hear it through the walls. He lay in bed thinking what his father always called his evil thoughts; he scribbled additions to his indictments: During the French campaign they’d murdered British prisoners-of-war in the village of Le Paradis. He even tuned in to Radio Moscow. Field-Marshal Paulus was speaking on the Freedom Broadcasting Station, offering to fight for a “democratic order” in Germany. When his increasingly rare visitors taxed him with giving in to suicidal impulses, the blond man stubbornly insisted that he was doing this only so that the neighbors could have access to these broadcasts without any risk to themselves. He defended this absurd position so loudly that guests sometimes feared for his reason. Then, in a sudden fury, he began to describe to them the way Jew-brains explode high into the air when we shoot at close range. He couldn’t stop seeing that, he said.

Herr Gerstein, forgive me for asking this, but have you ever personally taken part in the actions against the Jews?

I have clean hands, he replied through clenched teeth.

33

His father came for a visit, and Kurt Gerstein, summoning up all his courage, began with a dry mouth to hint at some of the things which were occurring in the East. (Anyone who talks will be shot immediately, “Clever Hans” had said.)

Hard times demand hard methods, said his father with a shrug.

But what would Christ say about those methods?

I still believe in Hitler, his father replied. But there’s something I want to ask you.

Yes, father?

Why don’t you carry a riding-crop?

Excuse me?

Well, I often see
-men with riding crops. I think that it looks quite stylish. Would you like me to buy you one?

That’s very generous, father, but riding-crops are reserved for members of the permanent staff, at Belzec, for instance—

Well, why don’t you get yourself appointed to some permanent staff? Seriously, my boy, I’m worried about you. You seem as though you’ve lost your way.

34

You seem as though you’ve lost your way, his father had said, but Berthe whispered her pride and gratitude that he’d been faithful to her. . . .

Ha, ha! You should have seen the way we killed the—

Better not tell your wife!

Trudchen? She’s such a little prude-chen she’d never—

Now it’s your turn, Gerstein! Are you one of us or not? Tell us a story.

What kind of story?

Don’t play coy! Come on, now! Are you going to participate in our fellowship?

Very well, said racial comrade Kurt Gerstein with a carefree laugh. (Oh, his candid eyes and firm lips!)—Now, this anecdote goes back to the summer of ’40, when I first heard about the T-4 operation. In retrospect, I think it was providential that my sister-in-law Berthe—

They were staring at him.

Was gassed, or more probably shot in the back of the head with a small-caliber revolver. She was deranged, you see. Incurable. And that was when I realized that hard times demand hard measures. And so I joined the

We know you’re an idealist, Gerstein. We were merely hoping that for once you could—

To hell with it, Franz. He’s never going to come down to our level.

You know what, Gerstein? Sometimes I find your patently Christian attitude offensive. In our line of work, there’s nothing wrong with a laugh now and then. In fact, it’s good for us.

The truth is—

We all have to get our hands dirty from time to time. We don’t get to sit at a great big office like you. We’re nobodies. We didn’t have bigshot fathers like you, so we have to eat our lunches there in the crematorium, day after day, with dead Jews stinking and burning and ashes falling on our sandwiches. What do you think about that?

Tell us the truth, Pastor Gerstein—

Rabbi Gerstein, you mean!

When was the last time you personally sent a Jew to the Promised Land?

To get right down to it, Gerstein, what’s your stance on the Jewish question?

Franz,
I’m a specialist in cyanide disinfectants.
Don’t you understand what that means?

Then they had to laugh. Blond Kurt Gerstein was one of them after all, in spite of his perpetually inappropriate half-smile—

Late in ’43, I can’t tell you exactly when, an old friend paid a visit to his office. Gerstein was sitting at his big desk, doing his accounts—Auschwitz’s current tally, he calculated, was two million victims—when he saw the big Mercedes with the swastika pennant. He thought it was the Gestapo, but it was only Dr. Pfannenstiel. He wanted Gerstein to go to Poland with him, for the pleasure of his company, of course, and also to inspect some new technical developments relating to Operation Reinhard.

If you can get me a sleeping car! laughed Kurt Gerstein, knowing that he couldn’t.

That’s hardly a Gothic demand, my young friend—

But if there’s anything you need—

Well, after all, since you’re the man who invented the gas chamber—

Excuse me?

No false modesty, please! It was you who brought the Zyklon B to Belzec. Then you wrote up your report.

Correct, said Gerstein. However, what I actually said—

I have it on reliable authority from Clever Hans himself, who adores you, that without you the entire operation would have—

Tell me something, Herr Doktor, and without any Jewish subtleties, please: In your medical opinion, when those dead Jews at Belzec lay staring at us all in a heap, what was the
expression
on their faces?

Dr. Pfannenstiel looked at him severely and said: I noticed nothing special about the corpses, except that some of them showed a bluish puffiness about the face. This is not surprising, since they died of asphyxiation.

Gerstein said: I take it you haven’t yet been invited to Auschwitz, Herr Doktor, because they’re employing Zyklon B over there, which makes them pink!

You don’t say! But that’s the merest curiosity, Gerstein. The relevant question is this: Can science devise a way to render this process of exterminating human beings devoid of cruelty?

35

It’s for your wife, said Captain Wirth, smiling. You’re so impossible about accepting gifts, I finally said to myself, I said, hit the armored man in his wife-spot!

Thank you, said Gertstein, stroking the soft supple leather of the handbag a little absently.

Human skin, said Captain Wirth. Don’t worry; it’s not Jewish. A good Russian peasant-boy; I picked him out myself.

36

When he was still a schoolboy, before he’d even passed his
Abitur
exam, in fact, his friend Helmut Franz had shown him a reproduction of Käthe Kollwitz’s famous chalk drawing entitled “The Volunteers,” which depicts young, young men with gaping, hypnotized faces marching off all in row, with a skeleton leading them. Well, but after all, that image, made in 1920, in no way corresponded to the realities of our current world-historical situation, which can be easily represented by the empty acorn-caps and squashed chestnuts one sees in the gravel alongside the Landwehrkanal.—Neither he nor Helmut Franz had liked “The Volunteers.” They’d found it anti-German.

Helmut Franz had elaborated: Yes, I grant that a skeleton led us last time, but there will never be another World War!

Naturally not, said Gerstein. Anyhow, it’s up to all of us to will the best for Germany, not the worst.

For a long time he had continued to believe this, and in a sense he continued to believe it. He wanted to be Hagen, standing up for Germany in the world. When the sleepwalker became Chancellor in 1933, he granted that the man had faults, but Helmut Franz reminded him that if each of them, and every German, simply and unceasingly willed his goodness, then the sleepwalker would become good. This meant volunteering in the highest sense, intuiting and working toward what our Führer would want, setting aside any flaws in the leadership.

And so, when he told his friend of the crimes he had seen in the huge industrial green of Birkenau with its many strands of barbed wire bent over curving concrete light-poles, Helmut Franz, who’d been shocked to learn the secret of Belzec, now warned him: It’s better not to investigate evil things too deeply, Kurt, not only for your safety and ours but also because evil deserves to be respected! Would you strip a leper of his clothes and expose him? Would you call attention to the ugliness of someone who owns the power to do you harm?

I reject that! Gerstein replied. Parzifal’s sin was
not
asking,
not
inquiring into evil’s source. That’s why he became accursed and lost the Grail.

You’re too much the mystic. Nowadays, the only hope for us Germans is to forge our own Grail. If it’s not perfect, may our loyalty make it so!

Loyalty? When Dr. Mengele stands whistling a tune as he points with his thumb, left or right! And then they—

Where’s your own evil in this, Kurt?

What do you mean? I bear no responsibility.

All your life, you’ve been the martyr. You’ve suffered the strictness of your father, but bearing it never brought you any peace. You stood up to evil and got your teeth knocked out. You warned us all of evil and went to a concentration camp. When all of us helped you get rehabilitated—and you know, Kurt, it wasn’t just your father; it really
was
all of us—you promptly did everything you could to get sent to Belzec, and now you have nightmares! I can’t help wondering whether you’re bringing your own fate upon yourself.

Are you claiming that I want to suffer? That’s—

No. You’re not a masochist in the clinical sense. These terrible things keep happening to you because you insist that you’re not evil like everyone else.

What specifically is my sin?

Pride, Kurt, or willed blindness. You think that you’re better than we are. So you attempt the impossible. Of course you’ll get punished.

Perhaps that’s so. But in that case, your sin is relying on impossibility as a shield against any kind of commitment.

In other words, Kurt, you accuse me of standing still while you rise up and volunteer. But who’s your leader?

I follow our Lord Jesus Christ, he replied through clenched teeth.

You think you are. But what if you’re in that Kollwitz drawing, following the skeleton?

They parted coldly. The subway was crowded with invalids and old women. He remembered how back in ’32 it would have been packed with Storm Troopers who sang rude songs and threatened everybody in their goodnatured way; then the Führer had liquidated Röhm, and after that one saw mainly
steady and professionally cool; now the folders for Case White and Operation Barbarossa had sprung open, and men got swallowed up in the war. He missed the Storm Troopers. In those days he’d still believed in victory. Thrilled by the phrase
radical measures,
he’d almost joined the Steel Helmets.