Holocaust (31 page)

The other story is that it was Nebe’s idea. Trying to curry favor with the boss.

In any case, neither Heydrich nor I liked the notion. We discussed it
sotto voce
, as we walked across a frozen field outside the Russian city of Minsk. Since this was just a “demonstration,” Nebe’s men had rounded up about a hundred Jews, all male except for two.

“Nebe is an idiot,” Heydrich whispered to me. “I know our esteemed Reichsführer better than he does. He’s full of theories, and he’s good at measuring Jewish skulls, but he doesn’t like to get close to blood.”

“Neither do I, sir,” I said.

“But you have gotten used to it,” the chief said.

I did not answer. But I suppose I have. In view of the great goal, the wartime necessity of isolating and diminishing Jewish influence, we must have the courage to face up to onerous tasks.

The hundred or so Jews were assembled alongside a deep ditch. They were naked. Nebe explained to Himmler that his men had already shot 45,000 Jews in the Minsk area.

Colonel Paul Blobel, who was walking with me, muttered, “Piker. We got rid of thirty-three thousand in two days at Babi Yar.”

The party halted perhaps twenty yards from where the Jews were standing, and a curious thing happened. Himmler’s eyes came to rest on a young Jew, quite tall, well formed, with blue eyes and blond hair.

To our amazement, the Reichsführer walked up to the youth and asked if he were a Jew, refusing to believe that such a Nordic-looking fellow could be one.

“Yes,” the man said. “I am a Jew.”

“Are both of your parents Jews?”

Heydrich and I exchanged looks—critical, dismayed.

“Yes.”

“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”

“No.”

“Then I cannot help you.”

Heydrich whispered to me, “At least he did not deny his heritage. That took a bit of courage.”

I wondered if subconsciously Heydrich was thinking about the rumors of his own Jewish blood.

“Whenever you are ready, Reichsführer,” Nebe said.

“Yes … yes …”

The soldiers opened up with their machine pistols and the Jews fell in heaps into the ditch. We observed Himmler. He was trembling, sweating, wringing his hands. Incredible. This man who passes out orders daily on the mass murder of millions could not bear to see a hundred shot!

Through some strange coincidence, the two women in the group were not dead. They were merely wounded, and their naked arms kept reaching up, imploring.

“Kill them!” screamed Himmler. “Don’t torture them like that! Sergeant, kill them! Kill them!”

At once the women were dispatched with pistol shots in the neck.

Himmler stumbled about as if he were going to faint.

“First time … you realize …” He was choking.

“Miserable fucking chicken farmer,” Blobel said to me. “We kill Yids by the hundreds of thousands, and he gets sick when he sees a handful go to their Jewish God.”

Nebe then made things worse by telling the Reichsführer that this was a mere hundred, and that the good German soldiers who had to shoot thousands daily were being affected by it. Of course, they obeyed and they understood their duty to the Reich and to Hitler, but some of these men would be “finished” for life. (I disagree, but I said nothing; it is amazing how much cognac and cigarettes and loot from dead Jews can keep our enlisted men going—that and the assurance that as long as they are shooting Jews, they will not be shot at by the Red Army.)

Himmler, moved to his very soul, then made a brief speech to the assembled officers.

“I have never been prouder of German soldiers,” said the Reichsführer. There was a heavy smell of
gunpowder in the air. A work party of Jews was shoveling dirt over the dead.

“The men are appreciative, Reichsführer,” Heydrich said.

Himmler’s eyes were glazed, lost behind his prissy pince-nez. “Your consciences can be clear. I take full responsibility before God and the Führer for all your acts. We must take a lesson from nature. There is combat everywhere. Primitive man understood that a bedbug was bad, a horse good. You may argue that bedbugs, rats and Jews have a right to live, and I might agree. But a man has a right to defend himself against vermin.”

His voice, that schoolmasterish, low voice, dwindled. In the privacy of this diary, I am forced to note that he is, with his pinched face, sparse hair, paunch, and sissified voice, hardly the ideal of the Aryan hero. How much more of an ideal is Reinhard Heydrich! No wonder they detest and distrust each other.

Himmler’s eyes took us all in. “Heydrich, Nebe, Blobel … all my good officers. This shooting is not the answer. We must look for more efficient ways of getting this business done.”

Later, Himmler was taken on a tour of an insane asylum. He told Nebe to finish off the inmates, but in an efficient, clean manner, something more “humane” than shooting. Nebe suggested dynamite.

That afternoon, I ran into Colonel Nebe and Colonel Blobel again at the Einsatzgruppe headquarters in Minsk. Heydrich had been upset over the day’s events, and I made known his—and my—annoyance with Nebe, accusing him of botching the entire affair. I failed to use his title when I addressed him, and it bothered him.

“I am Colonel Nebe to you, Major Dorf.”

“You’re lucky you are not a sergeant after that mess today. Why didn’t you talk the Reichsführer out of his lunatic notion to observe a shooting? And couldn’t you find gunners who could get rid of them all in one volley?”

He and Blobel were taken aback by my assault.

“Damn you, Dorf, don’t go barking at me,” Nebe said.

“Your operation was a disgrace,” I said.

Blobel, boots on Nebe’s desk, whiskey glass in hand, glowered at me. “Shut up, Dorf. Some of us are sick of your goddamn interference.”

“Are you? Well, for your information, Blobel, Heydrich is not happy with the results of Babi Yar. We are told that so many bodies are buried there that the gases are erupting the earth. We want those bodies dug up and burned. Burned so that no trace is left.”

“What? All those bodies? Who the hell are you—”

I cut him short. These men, deep in their hearts, are cowards.

“Get your fat ass back to the Ukraine, Blobel, and do as you are told.”

Nebe nervously paced the floor. Outside the window I could see his men, aided by Lithuanian “volunteers,” parading more Jews to the countryside. “Major Dorf, you have no right to talk to us in this insulting manner.”

“Sure he does,” Blobel said. “He’s Heydrich’s pet, his favorite shyster. You and that half-Jew think you can—”

“That is a lie. Anyone who spreads such lies will have to answer for them.”

“Go to hell,” Blobel said. He shook the dregs from his bottle. “I need a drink.”

They got up. I was not invited. But Nebe was still trying to placate me. A weak man. “Listen, Major. I think I have some good ideas on what Himmler has in mind. I mentioned dynamiting large numbers of undesirables to him. But there are other ways. Injections. Gas. It’s been tried in a few places, you know.”

“To hell with him, Nebe,” Blobel said. As they walked out, I could hear Blobel, in a voice intentionally loud, saying to his fellow officer, “We’ve got to do something about that scheming little bastard.”

Berlin
May 1942

Exhausted from this past tour of the occupied territories, I’m back in Berlin. At last a chance to hold Marta in my arms, kiss her beloved fair face, stroke her hair, join our bodies in that sweetest of unions.

I can’t wait to see the children. Peter is in training with his Jungvolk unit, the preparatory organization for the Hitler Jugend. He says he wants to join the SS when he is old enough, a combat unit, such as a Panzer division. I told him the war will long have ended by then, with Germany victorious. Little Laura is getting top grades in school. Her teachers adore her—so pretty, so vivacious, so obedient.

My work is mounting, my areas of responsibility broadening each day. Heydrich says I am a glutton for work. I get more done in a day than any of his other aides do in a week. Major “Heart-of-the-Matter,” he calls me.

We discussed alternative methods this morning, May 21, in his office.

Two months ago, the new camp at Belzec began using carbon monoxide gas, but the results are not too good. Heydrich wants a full report. And at Chelmno, near Lodz, an ingenious method is being tried—huge mobile vans, in which the exhaust is passed into the sealed body of the truck. There is some question about the efficiency of this method also.

We enjoyed a good laugh about Blobel. I must have scared the pants off him. He went back to Babi Yar and dug up a great many bodies, burning them to nothingness on giant pyres of railroad ties soaked with gasoline. Amazing, what with wartime shortages, and the army demanding every drop of motor fuel, that Blobel was able to get the stuff. But the army jumps when we give orders. And I may have underestimated Blobel. His method of disposing of corpses is remarkable,
so that, as Himmler has decreed, “even the ashes disappear.”

As I was about to leave, Heydrich called me back and handed me a single sheet of paper. “What do you make of this, Dorf?”

I read it, and as I did, it was an effort to keep my composure.

“Aloud,” Heydrich said.

“‘Major Erik Dorf of your staff was in the early thirties a member of a Communist youth group at the University of Berlin. His father was a Communist Party member who took his own life in a scandal involving money. Dorf’s mother’s family may contain a Jew in the background. All these matters are worth an investigation.’”

“Well?”

“It’s not signed,” I said.

“They never are. What about it, Erik?”

“Lies. As we say in court, in its parts, and in the whole. My father was briefly a Socialist. Nothing serious. He and his brother. They got over it. Oh, excuse me. One part is true. He did take his life, but there was no scandal. He was wiped out in the depression. My mother’s family is free of taint.”

“You’re certain?”

“The usual check was made on me in 1935. My God, General, why after seven years of faithful service a thing like this has to surface …”

“Oh, I agree. Unfortunately, Himmler got one of these also. I’m afraid he wants another report on you. Family records and so on.”

“Didn’t you reassure him about me?”

“You know how it is in the service. Himmler and I have had our rivalries. I’m afraid you got caught in the middle.”

“Do you have any idea who sent out this poison?”

“It could be any of a dozen. A way of striking at me.”

I was stunned. “But you’re second in command. Everyone knows you run the SS and the SD, and the Jewish Resettlement program.”

“That’s why they’re wary of me. You see, Erik, I know a great deal about all of them—top to bottom. I know what a collection of thugs and scum many of them are. Useful to us, but not really to the taste of men like us. We’re intellectuals, Erik—armed intellectuals, if you will. But most of them—a bloody rogues’ gallery.”

There were photographs on the wall of some of our leaders, and Heydrich ticked them off as he walked by them. “Goering, drug addict and bribe taker. You should see him in his Roman toga, perfumed, toenails painted, rouge on his cheeks. Rosenberg—a Jewish mistress. Goebbels—scandals on top of scandals. Himmler? Something fishy on his wife’s side. And then we come to dignitaries like Streicher and Kaltenbrunner who aren’t much better than common criminals. That’s why the Führer needs a few brains around him, Erik. People like us.”

“I trust I’ll never become a member of your rogues’ gallery,” I said.

He returned to his desk, smiled, dropped the paper with the false charges. “Why should you?” And as I trembled inwardly, he added, “Assuming this letter is—as you claim—a pack of lies.”

I am disturbed. As much by the campaign of slander that has been launched against me as by Heydrich’s revelations about our leaders.

How much of it is true? And how much intended to frighten me, to show me how wide-ranging his powers are? I cannot resolve the matter in my mind. I tell myself that all men of greatness have failings. For example, in SS circles, it is firmly believed that Roosevelt is a syphilitic. Hence his confinement to a wheelchair. The world knows Churchill is a drunkard.

But it is strange to me that Heydrich would talk so freely, with such mockery, of our chiefs. They hold the power of life and death over millions.

Is there a vague, faint possibility that there is something out of kilter in some of our leaders, and the kind of wars they wage, the government they have
created? But, look how we have won support from every level of German life—church, business, corporations, labor unions, educators! The German people, the heirs of Goethe and Beethoven, would not countenance criminals as their prophets and kings. Heydrich exaggerated, perhaps to scare me a little. Or was the secret part-Jew in him at work?

Chelmno,
Poland June 1942

Today, June 17, I rode with Colonel Artur Nebe behind one of those experimental vans. It was quite an experience. Indeed, so profound was it that I forgot my unease over the campaign of slander against me.

Nebe and I rode in a chauffeured staff car, along a secondary dirt road. Some distance ahead of us, a huge van labored to make the grade. It was a drab-green vehicle, totally enclosed, windowless, bearing the sign
GHETTO AUTOBUS
.

“He’s laboring,” Nebe said. “Close to forty inside. Too many.”

“How long does the process take?”

“Oh, it varies. Ten, twelve minutes. Longer when the truck is so heavily loaded. The gas pressure can be irregular, and sometimes it can take a long time to finish them off.”

“And this is your more efficient method?”

“We’re trying, Dorf, we’re trying.”

I don’t care for it. It seems a makeshift way of disposing of our problem. Vans and trucks all over Poland and Russia, grunting and groaning their way around the countryside? Instead of letting the carbon monoxide escape into the atmosphere, it can be circulated inside an enclosed space and used to “resettle” Jews. There are permanent installations using carbon monoxide from diesel engines at several camps, but they are also in the more or less experimental stage. Almost all the Jews of Lublin, for example, were
given this special treatment with engine-exhaust gases at the Belzec camp. Other such centers are now ready to begin to operate—Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor. But as yet we have found no perfect method, one that combines speed, efficiency, disposal and, if I may be candid, a certain humane element, so as to end suffering quickly.