Europe Central (85 page)

Helmut Franz was partly correct about him; Kurt Gerstein had always been a volunteer. The first time he joined the Party, it was out of true German ardor; Berthe was still alive. Then he’d volunteered to be a spy for God.

Helmut Franz was also, perhaps, jealous. For one thing, he would never look as wholesome as Kurt Gerstein.

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Down the dark way! Berthe lay under the earthen mound into which a path led, underneath the tall, tapering brick chimney. Hadn’t he won the right to love her as he did her sister? Let gape the gates! The Commandant’s watchdogs howled; the
formed up in a double line with rifles raised; they were an honor guard; MY HONOR IS MY LOYALTY. What would happen next?
Geheim.

He could no longer imagine what would have happened next. He was finished; he’d done everything; it was over.

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Yes, it was over. Soon the hunters would have to hide whatever they could. Like Kurt Gerstein, they must take the knife-edge path. For Operation Reinhard was approaching its close! In the official records, Captain Wirth was murdered by Jewish-Bolshevik partisans in the autumn of ’44, while Brigade Chief Globocnik, in despair at the way that the armed forces kept betraying our Führer, shot himself in the head with his Walther pistol (Geco, 7.65 millimeter). Their bodies were never found. The Jewish gold was already entering Switzerland, in accounts classified
. Division 1005 (corpse obliteration) had almost wound up its work throughout the Eastern territories we still controlled; they’d slipped up at Majdanek, unfortunately; they’d left traces in Lemberg, which was already Lvov again; but at Auschwitz the gas chambers and crematoria stood ready to be blown up when the time came, so that nothing could be proved against us. Naturally, Division 1005 kept requisitioning large quantities of methanol. Gerstein did the little he could, which was nothing, to impede the work. He’d tried to tittletattle again to Baron von Otter. For the convenience of some postwar prosecutor whose existence he no longer imagined, he recorded the locations of the pits and the approximate volume of the matter within, the tight-packed mass I should say, whose shape partook of the same irregularity as the fireball which blossoms from an airplane after a direct hit; this thing, which Division 1005 had to pickaxe apart into its component members before they could burn it, infested Gerstein’s nightmares to the point of literal stench; he woke up choking, with the reek of Belzec in his mouth. Needless to say, the instant that the war ended, he’d draw up all his affidavits and get free.

As for the hunters, they didn’t give a hang about Division 1005. Demobilizing against (I mean in advance of) orders, they planned to buy tiny white houses on various meadow-cliffs. Their pasts remained, it’s true, like rocks bony under the lushness, but, saying to themselves, just as they’d always done,
we need to face facts,
they’d remove a few photographs from their wartime albums; they’d plan new careers in the surprising stillness of the Swiss Alps, the moist warm summer silence. Just as Swiss mountains open out into wide steep valleys of green and grey across which time passes disguised as clouds, so “the postwar era,” which our Führer would have called
the interval between two wars,
would expand before them, bordered not by prison walls but avalanche fences and terraced vineyards. In the guest room, or maybe in the closet, but most likely in a safe deposit box they’d keep that shirt of golden armor from Transylvania. Every Christmas and every Easter would be often enough to break out that wine cup comprised of an immense snail shell (or was it a chambered nautilus?), whose base was a golden woman, naked save for a loincloth, standing on a gasping golden fish; somehow she reminded them of Poland’s blonde fields. But all that was half a year away. Until the last minute they kept shooting intellectuals, Jews and more Jews, Communists, Polish and Russian soldiers, hospital patients and lunatics. (Naturally, they did it out of sight of the generals, according to a procedure stamped
.)

As for Gerstein, he continued to hold his dangerously illegal gatherings, seeking always to warn about and learn about the Third Reich’s latest crimes: the mass hangings at Plötzensee, the reprisals in Slovakia, Dr. Brachtl’s liver puncture experiments, Jewish hands in the air, Jewish eyes looking desperately away,
-men and Order Police looting the silent houses, army trucks shuttling convenient batches of Jews to the antitank ditches in the forest. At the office he kept doing his accounts. “Clever Hans” Günther, for instance, seemed to have murdered about two hundred thousand people. Gerstein tried and failed to compute subtotals from Bohemia and Moravia. His mind rode on through the dark forest. Afterwards he lay weak in bed, awaiting his final arrest.

In 8.44 we find him writing to his father:
You are wrong about one thing. I never participated in any of this. Whenever I received orders, I not only didn’t follow them, but made sure they were disobeyed. For my part, I leave all this with clean hands and a clear conscience.
At terrible risk, he had misdirected a few more shipments of Zyklon B. He also modified the formula to make the deaths less excruciating. Why not call him as heroic as
-Obersturmführer Michael Wittmann, who won the Knight’s Cross for destroying sixty-six Soviet tanks singlehanded?

On 25.5.45 he turned himself in to the Americans, presenting them with detailed and incriminating documents against Wirth, Pfannenstiel, Günther, Eichmann, Brack, Höss, and all the rest, each paper adorned by the swastika-clutching eagle within its circle. He told his wife: People will hear about me, you can be sure of that! You will be astounded to learn all the things I have done . . .

She and the children were living on stale breadcrusts by then, “Stalin tarts” we’d already learned to call them. When summer came, they might be able to pick a few gooseberries.—Your father says we’ll be astounded, she said to Christian with a weary laugh.

But the Americans sent Kurt Gerstein home. So he went to pledge himself to the French.

They imprisoned him in Paris with other
-officers. On 10.7.45 they commenced proceedings against him for the crime of genocide.

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When Parzival was dishonored for not questioning the evil which infested the Grail Castle, he set out to cleanse his name. In due course he met his piebald brother, redeemed himself, converted his brother and became King. Unfortunately, Kurt Gerstein could not follow any of these measures once he’d been dishonored, because on 25.7.45, the turnkey looked into his cell and found his corpse hanging there.

In 1949 the Denazification Council of Tübingen refused to rehabilitate his memory, calling him a “petty Nazi.” He was no comrade to us.

A court in 1955 noted regretfully:
It may be that the mere fact of making such efforts, associated with a constant risk of death, had been sufficient to persuade him that his conscience and his hands were unsullied. But this conviction does not indicate whether those efforts always achieved the desired success.

On 20.1.65 he was in fact rehabilitated. By that time, anti-Semites around the world were already denying that anything untoward had happened. After all, as Göring laughed during his own trial for war crimes at Nuremberg:
Anybody can make an atrocity film if they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor shoving them back in again
. . . ‣

THE SECOND FRONT