Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Baron von Otter sent a report to his government, but this report must have been stamped, for it remained unpublished until three months after the war’s end.

  8

  As for Gerstein, he opened the New Testament and read: Leave the dead to bury the dead. Then horror came upon him like a sickness.

  9

  It’s natural to believe, or want to believe, since inertia is self-preservation, that once we have opened the vault, the dark grey file, and read some stupefying secret, we’ve learned the secret, in which all others, if in fact there are any others, must be contained; hence we need not go to the dangerous trouble of digging anything else up. The allurements of ease, which kept most Germans from doing what Gerstein tried to do, encourage us to say: In any event, I’ve done my duty now. The rest is up to others.

  Ever since he was a child, he’d been afflicted by what his father called evil thoughts, meaning an introspection of the melancholy, isolating sort. If only he had not had those thoughts! Then he would not have been obliged to cause himself and others so much pain . . .

  The working capacity of Belzec was fifteen thousand murders per day. That meant (he made the calculation on a sheet of stationery of the Deutsche Gesandtschaft Budapest, with the Nazi eagle on it; then he tore the page into pieces and burned it) four hundred and fifty thousand Jews gassed every month, or five and a half million Jews per year, under ideal conditions of course. This was shocking enough that on that first time at Belzec when the bright light came on in the chamber, he thought that he knew the worst. But the next day, after parting from Captain Günther at Lemberg with a loud Heil Hitler! (Captain Günther was required on secret business, in a place called Chelmno), the blond man found himself riding in a French-made lorry beside his intimate friend Dr. Pfannenstiel, Captain Wirth at the wheel, to a second extermination camp, called Treblinka, whose eight gas chambers could kill twenty-five thousand Jews per day; and in due course Gerstein’s various liaison and inspection duties would bring him to the virgin facility of Maidanek, whose greenish barracks could devour only two thousand Jews per day, but the place produced luscious cabbages which were manured with the snow-white ashes of Jews; and Captain Günther had mentioned Chelmno, while Captain Wirth with a wink admitted to him knowledge of Sobibor (capacity: twenty thousand per day), where German engineers had invented a special mill for grinding Jews’ bones to powder. As the Scripture says, my house has many mansions.

  The joke at Sobibor (Gerstein was really going to split his sides at this one, Captain Wirth promised) was that our very first gassing there—forty-odd screaming naked Jewesses; you should have seen how they . . .—was accomplished by means of a two-hundred-horsepower petrol engine of Russian manufacture! If only those Bolshevist kikes could see how we used their technology!—Dr. Pfannenstiel was the one who laughed; Dr. Pfannenstiel was the one who remarked that Captain Wirth’s point, namely, the ironic justice of our appropriation of captured matériel, would make for an excellent column in Signal magazine. Too bad that it was!

  Gerstein, mechanically smiling, a smile which hid the missing three teeth, had just worked out the total for these facilities: more than twenty-two million Jews per year, excluding Chelmno and ignoring human or mechanical failures—how many Jews were there in Europe? Did he dare ask Dr. Pfannenstiel? How many Jews remained above the ground in Europe? How many were there in the entire world? What if his estimates were faulty? Suppose that in fact no more than, for example, two million Jews per year were put to death? And how many other camps might there be? Two million, five million or twenty-two million—he was a mining engineer. He could comprehend large figures.

  At Treblinka theheld a banquet for them, and after a Sieg Heil! for our Führer and a hearty if not entirely tuneful singing of “Deutschland über Alles,” Dr. Pfannenstiel, flushed with Polish wine, rose to give an impromptu speech which concluded: When one sees the bodies of these Jews, one understands the greatness of the work you’re doing!—Gerstein laughed in a great shout, raising his goblet for the toast. Dr. Pfannenstiel sat down. It was late afternoon. From outside came women’s screams in a quick-ceasing chorus; was that an action, a general action, or a total action? Dr. Pfannenstiel refilled Gerstein’s glass with a little bow. Gerstein thanked him.—I like you, you blue-eyed Goth! chuckled his colleague; so wide a chuckle it was that Gerstein could see down his throat.—Then Captain Wirth beckoned.

  Gerstein, you’ve seen for yourself that we run a good operation here, he began, embarrassed, and Gerstein, smiling disarmingly, nodding at him like a schoolboy, thought: This monster wants a favor!

  You won’t mention the engine problem to Berlin, will you?

  Of course not, Herr Captain! That sort of thing can happen anywhere—

  You’re a very understanding young man, and I won’t forget that. Now I want to ask you something else. What do you intend to do with the prussic acid?

  As you advise me, Herr Captain, returned Gerstein in the most ingratiating tone he could wring out. Actually, this wasn’t so bad. Anything was better than sitting next to Dr. Pfannenstiel.

  You’ll appreciate my motives in putting this to you: Heckenholt and all the others depend on me for their livelihood. As for Globocnik, well, between you and me, he’s been in trouble before, and he doesn’t want to get sidelined. None of us want to be sidelined here, Gerstein. Do you see what I mean? Now, here’s what I want you to do.

  By your order, Captain!

  I want you to tell those people in Berlin that we don’t need any modifications, at least not at Belzec (about Treblinka I don’t give a shit). Thanks to their interference, we’ve already been made to give up bottled gas, which worked perfectly well, believe me, back at the start of all this. They can complain all they like about supply problems. Well, in this life we all have supply problems. Bottled gas is what we used to carry out T-4, after the bleeding hearts decided that shooting wasn’t good enough for Germans. Well, they can all go to hell. Tell those assholes in Berlin that based on your technical expertise, diesel is more sensible than prussic acid—more rapid or more safe or whatever. Get those bureaucrats to leave us in peace. They’re not living in the real world. Do we have a deal?

  Gerstein, knowing that every hour Heckenholt’s engine broke down was an hour when Jews would escape murder at Belzec, also knowing that the lethality of his sky-blue prussic acid crystals was far superior to that of carbon monoxide, smiled at Captain Wirth with charming frankness and said: I’m afraid the prussic acid has deteriorated in transit. It’s quite unstable, actually. I fear that we have no alternative but to bury it—

  Good man! Gerstein, I’ll cut you in. Do you see that Ukrainian over there? I’ll make sure he has something for you.

  Herr Captain, that’s not necessary—

  But now Captain Wirth began to worry that Gerstein was holding out for more than a one-time payment in Jew-gold. All the prostitutes of Poland, so it seemed, had set up shop just beyond his railroad siding, not at all put out by the stinking black fog which overhung Belzec rain or shine; and his liaison officer Oberhauser, who enjoyed the occasional tryst with any Aryan-looking P-maiden, had reported to him that they kept raising their prices, doubtless because the treasures of Belzec were, at least from the standpoint of such sports, inexhaustible. (Captain Wirth had himself seen a blondish wench leading two of his Ukrainians into a sort of cave she’d made in the mound of Jew-clothes behind the locomotive shed. He’d had to punish her for that.) In his fear, Captain Wirth became grotesquely confiding, and soon, just for laughs, he was telling Gerstein all about Hadamar, my God, he’s talking about Hadamar, and later, when Captain Wirth kept telling him to take a few pounds of butter at least, not to mention a suitcase of “Wyborowca” vodka (in the end, Dr. Pfannenstiel was happy to relieve him of that), he kept staring as he smiled, like someone dazed by a glaring light, because Captain Wirth had told him how back in the glory days of Operation T-4—a very necessary endeavor, as he was sure that Gerstein knew, a challenging project, to get r
ight down to it, a rewarding time, a procedure which, in spite of being classified Geheim, had been exposed and interrupted by those Christian swine whose fat asses we were saving in this war—he used to personally shoot mental defectives in the back of the head with his service revolver, because it wasn’t until ’41 that a genius thought up the system of false shower-baths. Gerstein, sympathetically astonished, wondered why an officer of his rank and quality hadn’t been assigned more help in the performance of this duty, to which Captain Wirth laughingly replied that in such close quarters, and considering that the targets were merely peaceful mental patients, not hardened Jews, one shooter was better than two, because two in the head is too much; two will practically tear the head off; and that was when it occurred to Gerstein that Captain Wirth, who was pale, bespectacled, and pinchfaced except when he explicated Operations T-4 and Reinhard, that Captain Wirth, who wore an Iron Cross, a metal sunburst and a death’s head cap, had in all likelihood killed everybody at Hadamar himself—which is to say, he was the one who’d murdered Berthe.

  10

  To his friend Helmut Franz he once said in his typically didactic fashion: The times leave me no choice but to seek knife-edge paths and live dangerously.—That was in the golden summer of ’41, when we were rushing deeper and deeper into Russia, and, following closely behind our soldiers, the colleagues of Kurt Gerstein were marching Jews on a one-way trip out of town. Gerstein didn’t yet know anything apodictically; he hadn’t been invited to Belzec. But he was an-man; he was on the knife-edge path. Futurity became a black tomb with an iron ring.

  So now he’d pulled the iron ring; the pleasure wasn’t his.37 He dreamed that its blackness came off on his hands, and then . . .

  He went home, to his father’s house. His wife was waiting for him. She offered her waxen cheek to be kissed. His father came slowly downstairs, greeting him with a sleepy Heil Hitler. The children were long in bed. There was dinner, a good dinner under the circumstances; Elfriede had done the best she could; and he wondered what the poor thing would have thought of him had she known that he’d turned down all that Jewish butter.

  11

  Below the portrait of his eldest brother, whom he scarcely remembered (fallen on the Westfront back in 1918), his father sat in the armchair, frowning at a feature in Signal magazine about three winsome young workers from the East (R-maidens from the look of them) who posed in knee-length skirts on the summer lawn of the Potsdam Palace, giggling. They have already adopted European fashions and have quickly learned the Western European style of hairdressing. On the facing page was another color photograph of tanks rolling onto an Italian freighter, the picture saturated with the Mediterranean hues of ocean and earth, everything summery. The caption read: “Supplies for Tunis.”

  Ha! said the old man suddenly, remembering. I forgot to write you this, Kurt. Another Yid tried to steal our name! Another Goldstein. But this time they caught up with him. Do you remember when I complained about the last case back in ’33? And my complaint went unanswered. Well, this one they smoked out, thanks be to the All-Highest. Shipped him off!

  Where did they catch him, father?

  At the Technical University, right in Berlin if you can believe it! He was a cheeky one, not wearing the yellow star. His first name was something Russian. I suppose they’ll have to make an example of him. The things that go on nowadays! Although I remember another case, in which a certain Richard Goldstein of Hamburg . . .

  Father, you’ve told us that story many times.

  Ludwig Gerstein stared at his son. Then he rose, departing like a dark planet falling silently to one side.

  Kurt, why couldn’t you have let him have his say? It’s harmless, and it makes him happy. Now he’ll worry that you think he’s senile . . .

  He used to say that he regretted what was being done.

  Of course you don’t care that he’ll avenge himself on me after you leave.

  But Kurt Gerstein gazed at her with sternness as ungiving as his father’s.

  12

  She could never understand why he wouldn’t allow her and the children to come to Berlin.—Father needs to be cared for, was all he said. And in times like these, if we give up this house, we’ll never get it back again.

  We’d all rather be with you, Kurt. But I suppose you prefer those widow’s sons you’ve taken in.

  You’ve seen for yourself how poor Frau Hedwig is!

  To be sure, that was a perfectly executed charitable maneuver, said Elfriede with a nasty smile. Meanwhile, you leave your own three children alone with me.

  He said nothing. Tübingen was the city of his childhood, the place where he’d failed his theological studies. He’d been someone else here. Thank God for the blackout curtains! He hated the sight of Tübingen.

  Well, his wife pursued, and how are they doing now?

  Who?

  Who’s under discussion? Hedwig’s boys.

  Feeling as if they were speaking of people whom neither of them had ever met, he cast about for something to say, and finally told her: They’re in the Hitler Youth, of course.

  They must look stunning together, in their matching uniforms. Twins, yet!

  What are you implying?

  Nothing. I’m going to bed.

  God keep you then, he said.

  When he was courting her, they used to pretend together that he had saved an enchanted castle from ogres, thereby winning its beautiful mistress. Elfriede had long since grown beyond such foolish games.

  13

  In spite of his good manners and magnificent pedigree, Obersturmführer Gerstein remained less popular with his-comrades than anyone would have expected.—He found God, they said of him. We would have liked him better if he hadn’t.—Or, to tell the tale more positively, no friendships distracted him from his official duties. Accordingly, Gerstein’s professional life became as pretty as the mountains one sees to the south on the way to Auschwitz. His service record from this period reads: G. is especially suitable for all tasks. Proficient and sure. He is disciplined and has authority. Gassing van inspectors learned to come to Kurt Gerstein whenever they wanted to complain about inappropriate procedures. They’d sink into the low leather sofa, reach for the latest issue of Signal magazine from the coffee table, bored by the very first full-page photograph (the shining metal grillework of a Ju-52 transport plane being swabbed clean by our tanned blond soldier-boys in Africa), say sugar or no sugar to the alert schoolmarm of a secretary-typist, and then they’d wait until the man on the far side of that immense office finished roaring into the telephone: You tell them they’d better finish by noon tomorrow, or they’re up the chimney! Did you hear me? You’d better have heard me. Heil Hitler! and he’d clang the heavy black receiver down into its cradle, “like a swordsmith with hammer and anvil,” the poets among them thought, and none of them ever caught on that the person to whom he’d been shouting (and for that matter the shouter himself ) did not exist. Now here he came, lopsidedly smiling because those three missing teeth humiliated him; they leaped up for a Heil Hitler! and then-Obersturmführer Gerstein, dear blond Kurt Gerstein, his hair combed back, was asking what he could do for them.—The operators keep calibrating the engines incorrectly, Herr Obersturmführer, and it doesn’t do any good to bawl them out! It’s not very nice for the cleaning crews, I’ll tell you! The Jews shit and puke all over the floor before they . . .—And smiling, blond Kurt Gerstein, the one man in thewho understood them, agreed that this was unseemly, promised to request an investigation, asked for details as to the quantities of Jews being killed, the locations of the temporary extermination centers, the widths and depths of the mass graves, etcetera, which, these matters being, they really shouldn’t have revealed, but if one can’t trust an-man, it’s hopeless! In fact, working methods throughout our Eastern territories gradually did improve as Auschwitz came up to capacity. Some of them thanked Kurt Gerstein for that.

  Have you ever seen our tank parks and artillery parks all arranged in neat squares
upon the green grass of Germany? (If you have, I hope they won’t shoot you!)-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein’s office was laid out in just that orderly fashion, with every stack of files compulsively squared up, as if he feared inspection, and that latest issue of Signal centered on the coffee table, all the file cabinets locked, half a dozen framed portraits of our Führer marching around the walls according to size; and the pens and pencils absolutely vertical, crammed in the holder like Jews in a gas chamber—well, you get the picture. Gerstein was always helpful and correct with his colleagues, no matter that he did pray. An old pensioner named Greisler, who if you ask his former occupation mutters something about being a diesel mechanic, sings Gerstein’s praises to this day: He helped my nephew get into an Adolf Hitler School!—We must not over-emphasize the testimony of Frau Alexandra Bälz, who remembered visiting him at summer’s end ’42; after sobbing that he couldn’t go on, he poisoned her life forever with his horrid secret. (If thehad heard, he would have been shot immediately, and his family all sent to Dachau.) On the very next evening, Obersturmführer Gerstein was dining quite merrily with “Clever Hans” Günther in one of Prague’s subterranean restaurants—an establishment so deep and dim, in fact, that both men had the feeling of being inside a wine cask. Abstaining from the wine, he assured his superior that he longed only to be of use to our Reich. How could he best further the completion of Operation Reinhard?