Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  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 promptl
y 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 mainlysteady 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.

  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.

  37

  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; theformed 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.

  38

  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

  All the faces seem familiar, even those I never met: probably because we were all soldiers fighting for the common victory.

  —V. Karpov, Hero of the Soviet Union, ca. 1987

  1

  V. I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, and not incidentally “the hero of Stalingrad,” writes surprisingly lyrical prose in his memoirs. Guderian, Paulus, Rokossovsky, Meretskov, even von Manstein—the other generals all fall short in this respect. Chuikov’s career is blemished by several failures, not least his incorrect deployment of Ninth Army during the Finnish War. But now that everything has ended, with the Fascists blotted out, Germany sundered into a pair of nearly harmless bookends, and the Finns, as it just happens, anxiously subservient to us, we can afford to praise his literary efforts. He takes time to mention the black humped shapes, like camels on their knees, of dead enemy tanks. He has a way of bringing alive for us Fediuninskii with his pencil-written order to take command of Forty-second Army—what was Forty-second Army then? nothing but skinny men, many of them without weapons and uniforms, who shivered as they crouched shoulder to shoulder—of showing us the human being within the ruthless Rokossovsky, whose prior arrest and rehabilitation were now state secrets; of leading us dangerously close to Zhukov’s pale, pouchy face (Zhukov was the one who eternally warned: I’ll have you shot! or I’ll court-martial you!) Less prominent individuals also get their due. A certain Russian woman whose initials are E. E. K. receives warm mention; Chuikov seems to have been especially captivated by her long black hair. From reliable third parties I’ve learned that their relationship was platonic, that indeed he never saw her except in a photograph; she seems to have been the wife of a documentary cameraman who was temporarily attached to his staff. Discretion prevents me from recording the cameraman’s name. The story goes that the cameraman, who succeeded in filming at extremely close range the first interrogation of the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus, obtained his vantage point only through bribery: someone, we needn’t say who, gained possession of the photograph of the mysterious E. E. K., who was actually, so I’ve heard, rather plain. Not long after this episode, the cameraman and E .E. K. divorced. This tale may well be a fabrication, and I report it only for the sake of completeness. Certainly you won’t find any but the most elliptical allusion to it in Chuikov’s account, whose optimism, by the way, takes on an almost individualistic taint after the surrender of Paulus. About our massive offensives after Stalingrad he writes: The spring was with us, but behind the enemy’s lines it was autumn. Well, he was right about that! I’m happy to say that in spite of such embellishments his book never fails to hammer home the political lessons of the war, which we all know was foisted on us by the predatory interests of the international bourgeoisie. What you shouldn’t expect from this general is an overall strategic perspective. Europe, the Central Front, the Voronezh Front, with the Steppe Front as a strategic reserve, all these integers and quantities have already been tabulated for us in the equations of a far greater mathematician (of course I mean Comrade Stalin); nonetheless, Comrade Chuikov makes sure we remember what’s what. In particular, this long delay in the opening of the second front causes us to understand the actions of our Western allies much more correctly than the way they’re represented in those soothing messages.