War and Remembrance (123 page)

Later, when both men are on the bone-disposal detail, raking warm fragments or whole collarbones, thighs, and skulls out of the smoking ash heap and feeding them into the bone-crushing mill, Mutterperl pokes Jastrow with an elbow.

“
Ut iz er.
“

At the pit, the SS man is urinating again, picking a spot where the bodies still lie.

Mutterperl repeats,
“Him,
I want to kill.”

The sun has gone down. It is almost dark, and bitter cold. The last fire of the day is flickering low all along the frame, lighting up the faces and arms of the Jews who are raking the fallen ashes for bones. The trucks have arrived. This grave is too far out from town to march the kommando there and back; not that one has to coddle Jews, but time is important. Blobel has even taken criticism for “taxiing” Jews with precious gasoline, as one critical SS inspector put it; but he has a tough hide and he runs his show as he pleases. Only he knows the true magnitude and urgency of the job. He knows more about it than the great Himmler, who assigned it to him, because he is the man on the spot, and he has all the maps and reports of the execution squads.

So the Jews will ride back to the cow barns at an abandoned dairy in Minsk. There are of course no cattle or horses in occupied Russia. The Germans have long since taken them off. Blobel’s far-roaming Kommando 1005 has no trouble quartering its Jews in one animal stall or another, and its SS contingent merely turns out of their homes as many Russians as may be necessary. Food for the field kitchens is a chronic problem, because the Wehrmacht is so stingy about it, but Blobel’s officers are now old hands at smelling out and requisitioning victuals from the local people. Even in this
scrubby and devastated part of the Soviet Union there is food. People must eat. One has to know how to lay hands on their stores, that is all.

By the last light of the fire, Untersturmführer Greiser is himself locking up the valuables collected from the corpses, in heavy canvas bags used for transporting secret SS correspondence.

More of this disagreeable work tomorrow; a pretty deep grave, after all, two layers of bodies left. Half a day’s work to clean them up, shovel in the ashes, level off the pit with dirt and scatter grass seed. By next spring it will be hard to find the place. In two years brush will cover it; in five years the woods will obliterate it with new growth, and that will be that.

Standartenführer Blobel’s car drives up. In the dim firelight, the chauffeur gets out and salutes. Untersturmführer Greiser is to report to the Standartenführer at once, and the car has come for him. Greiser is surprised and concerned. The Standartenführer seems to like him, but any summons from a superior can be bad news. Probably the boss wants a report on the economic processing. Greiser puts his master sergeant in charge of the sacks, keeping the keys himself. The car drives off with him toward Minsk.

How Greiser would love a bath before he makes his report! It’s no use keeping clear of the pit, the bodies, the smoke; the smell infects the air all around a work area. It haunts the nerves of your nose. You’re still smelling it even after a bath, when you sit down to try to enjoy your dinner. Rough duty!

Untersturmführer Greiser reported to Kommando 1005 with a high rating for loyalty and intelligence. His father is an old National Socialist, a top official in the post office. Greiser was brought up in the Hitler movement. The special treatment of Jews was a hard concept to swallow when he first heard of it in a secret SS training program. But now he understands it. Still, he has had trouble with the Kommando 1005 mission. Why conceal and obliterate the graves? On the contrary, once the New Order triumphs these places should all have monumental markers to show where the enemies of mankind perished, at the hands of the German people, Western civilization’s rescuers. He once ventured to say this to the Standartenführer. Blobel explained that once the new day dawns for mankind, all these evildoers and the world wars they caused must simply be forgotten, so that innocent children can grow up in a happy Jew-free world, without even a memory of the bad past.

But, Greiser objected, what will the world think happened to Europe’s eleven million Jews, that they just vanished into thin air? Blobel, with an indulgent smile, advised the young man to read
Mein Kampf
again, on the stupidity and short memory of the masses.

Standartenführer Blobel, well along in his evening boozing, is poring over his SS maps of the Ukraine while he waits for Greiser to arrive. He finds the loyal naïveté of the young officer very engaging. Blobel could not tell him the truth about the 1005 operation, which he himself has surmised
but has never breathed to a soul; and which is, that Heinrich Himmler now thinks Germany may lose the war, and is taking steps to preserve Germany’s reputation. Blobel thinks the Reichsführer is very wise. One can hope the Fiihrer will still pull it off, in spite of all the odds, and in spite of the hard Stalingrad blow. But now is the time to prepare for an unfavorable result of the war.

Whatever happens, doing away with the Jews will remain Germany’s historic achievement. For two thousand years the European nations tried converting them, or isolating them, or driving them out. Yet when the Fiihrer took power there they were still. Only the leader of Kommando 1005 can appreciate the true grandeur of Adolf Hitler to the fullest. As Himmler said, “We will never talk about this to the world.” Even the mute evidence of the corpses must not exist. For otherwise the decadent democracies will pretend holy horror at Germany’s special measures against the Jews, should they find out, though they have no use for the Jews themselves; and the Bolsheviks of course will make crude distorted propaganda of anything that can be turned to the Reich’s discredit.

In short, Kommando 1005 has become the custodian of the great and sacred Reich secret; indeed, of Germany’s national honor. He, Paul Blobel, is in the last analysis as great a guardian of that honor as the most famous general in the war; but the difficult work he must do will never get the praise it merits. He is a German hero who must go unsung. Drunk or sober, this is what Paul Blobel truly thinks. He is, in his own mind, no common concentration camp plug-ugly; nothing like it. He is a cultivated professional man, in peacetime an independent architect, a loyal German who understands German world-philosophy and is serving heart and soul in a very demanding war job. One honestly needs nerves of iron.

Greiser learns, on arriving at the house in Minsk which the Standartenführer is occupying, that Blobel is not interested in a report on the economic process. There is big news. Kommando 1005 is going to the Ukraine! The Standartenführer has been nagging Berlin for a month to issue these orders. He is in a jovial mood, and presses a large glass of schnapps on the young officer, who is glad enough to get it. Down in the Ukraine things will hum, because that is his own territory, Blobel says. He was a leading officer of
Einsatzgruppe
C, and he insisted from the start on keeping decent maps and accurate body-count reports. As a result the Ukraine sweep can be done with system. All this groping around for grave sites wastes precious time, and the ground in the north is still frozen, and the whole thing is stupid. While they are cleaning out the Ukraine, he will send an officer detail back to Berlin to make a thorough review of all the confused records, maps, and reports of
Einsatzgruppen
A and B. That detail will then return and search out and mark every northern grave site
in advance.

Hope stirs in Greiser that he is being detailed back to Berlin, but that is
not it. Blobel has another mission for him. The graves in the Ukraine are enormous, much bigger than any Greiser has seen. One frame will not do down there, they will have to work with three for best results. Greiser is to proceed at once to Kiev with a detachment of a hundred Jews from the section, a suitable number of SS guards, and report to the office of the Reich commissar for the Ukraine. Blobel will issue to him the necessary top-priority authorizations for steel rails and the use of a foundry. The Jew work leader “Sammy” is a construction man, and Greiser will have no trouble manufacturing the frames in a week or so. Blobel wants them finished and ready for use when Section 1005 arrives in Kiev. Meanwhile, it will clean out one more small grave to the west of Minsk, which was found today.

Greiser diffidently asks about the economic processing of the new grave. Very little to do, says Blobel; the bodies in that grave are naked.

But Standartenfiihrer Blobel’s plan for the move to the Ukraine is delayed at the outset by a grave accident at the Minsk railroad station.

At about nine o’clock in the morning, when the train has already failed to show up for two hours, and the Jews in striped suits are drooping sleepily on their feet in two long lines that stretch the length of the platform, and the SS guards are grouped in desultory talk to kill time, a burly figure bursts from the Jews, grabs a machine gun from one of the guards, and begins shooting! It is never known whose gun he snatched, because several guards fall and their guns go clattering over the platform. But no other Jews have time to snatch up the fallen guns and make real trouble. From both ends of the platform SS men come running, pumping bullets into Sammy Mutterperl. He topples, still holding the machine gun, blood flowing over his striped suit. The surviving guards surround him in rage and riddle his body with bullets; possibly a hundred slugs enter his already lifeless body. They boot and stamp and kick the corpse all around the platform, kicking and kicking at his face until it is a mere pulp of blood and broken bone, as a hundred Jews look on in dumb paralyzed fear. Yet they do not quite kick off the wrecked face the contours of a grin.

Four SS men are sprawled dead on the platform; one crawls around wounded, trailing blood, crying like a woman. It is the Pisser; and after a few moments he lies still across the track, dead as any corpse he ever pissed on, his blood spurting on the steel rails and the wooden ties.

In his report Greiser fixes the blame on the SS noncom in charge of the armed guards, who drifted together instead of holding spaced positions along the double line of Jews as regulations require. The Jew work leader “Sammy” was a privileged character who got special food rations. The incident demonstrates again that the subhuman Jews are totally unpredictable.
Therefore the harshest and most vigilant severity, as with wild animals, is the only safe method of handling them.

The detachment marches back from the station carrying the bodies. The dead SS men are left in Minsk; to receive honored burial in a German military cemetery. Mutterperl’s blood-soaked and bullet-riddled remains go on the truck with the Jews to the grave site, to be burned on the frame with the day’s corpses. Berel Jastrow sees the body, hears the whispered story down in the pit, and makes the blessing on evil news,
Blessed be the true judge.
He places himself at the frame when the pyre has burned down, and himself rakes out what he believes are Mutterperl’s bone fragments. As he shoves them into the crusher, he murmurs the old burial service:

“Lord, full of mercy, dweller on high, grant true rest, under the wings of the Presence among the holy and pure ones, to the soul of Samuel, son of Nahum Mendel, who has gone to his eternity…. Blessed is the Lord who created you justly, fed and sustained you justly, gave you death justly, and in thefuturewiüI resurrect’you justly
.

So the faith teaches. But what resurrection can there be for these burned atomized remains? Well, the Talmud takes up the question of bodies destroyed by fire. It teaches that in each Jew there is one small bone that no fire can consume, that nothing can shatter; and that out of this minute indestructible bone, the resurrected body will grow and rise.

“Go in peace, Sammy,” Berel says when it is finished.

Now it is up to him to get to Prague.

A
MERICAN
torpedoes were still failing when the
Moray
set forth on its first war patrol. The two problems that haunted SubPac were dud torpedoes and dud captains. The service was secretive about both alarming deficiencies, but the submariners themselves all knew about the unreliable magnetic exploders of the Mark Fourteen torpedo, and about the captains who either had to be beached for overcaution or, on the Branch Hoban pattern, fell apart under attack. Aces like Captain Aster who combined cold courage with skill and luck in battle were few. Such men of picturesque sobriquets — Mush Morton, Fearless Freddie Warder, Lady Aster, Red Coe — were setting the pace in SubPac, inspiring the rest of the skippers despite the damnable torpedo failures. Within broad limits, they could get away with murder.

A large sign over Admiral Halsey’s advance headquarters in the Solomons read:

KILL JAPS

KILL JAPS

KILL MORE JAPS

A photograph of this sign hung on the bulkhead of Captain Aster’s cabin in the
Moray.