Kolchak's Gold
Page 21
He was filled with vitriol toward “the Jewish vermin” and “these Russian swine” but at the same time he was very sentimental about Christmas and wrote long maudlin passages—how he missed the candle-lit windows, the decorated trees, the laughing children. In 1942 he was nearly forty years old but his letters home are the letters of youth: callow, unsophisticated, cynical but with a fatalism that left no room for compassion, even toward himself.
Demonstrably a sadist, he doubtless looked forward keenly to his own violent destruction at the hands of infuriated would-be victims. Twice in his letters to von Geyr* he expresses surprise that the sheeplike prisoners do not at least make an effort to overwhelm their German murderers-to-be, whom they outnumber by factors of hundreds to one.
Despite his masochism and fatalism he was ambitiously an opportunist. He declared it was one of his keenest hopes to make Battalion “E” the most “successful” of all the Einsatzgruppen (that is to say, to murder more Jews than any other Group murdered) in order to bring himself to the Führer’s grateful attention. Evidently Nirvana to Krausser was to stand at attention while the Führer in person pinned a medal on his tunic.*
“I never met this Krausser but I knew his kind. I knew these instruments of Germany’s glorious historical mission to cleanse the world of Jews. They were mediocre men you know, not great fire-breathing villains twisting the ends of their mustaches. They were utterly ordinary. In all of them you saw a great self-pity—they wanted someone to sympathize with the distasteful job they had to do. Once I overheard two SS Leutnants talking, complaining, and then a Stürmbannführer, a major, came into the place. He had heard some of what they were saying.
“He said to the two subalterns, ‘You don’t like your orders, do you?’ And then there was a pause, nobody said anything, and afterward the Stürmbannführer continued, ‘You don’t like your orders, but you will obey them. If you were Russian soldiers you probably wouldn’t. Which is why we are winning and they are losing.’
“They were always pouring sentimental tears for their own exile—from their wives and children at home, from German food and German this and that. Always they sought excuses—those pious patriotic euphemisms they used in order to convince themselves that mass murder was not a crime.
“At this time there were a number of national units that helped the SS assassinate Jews. These were guard units mainly. The Slovak Hlinka Guards, the Croat Ustasa, the Ukrainians and the Rumanian and Bulgarian Fascisti. Now I went from Palestine into Europe by way of Italy in the end of nineteen forty-two. I was sent from Palestine, I was in the Mossad then. I had been provided with papers and uniforms which identified me as a Gestapo Ortsgruppenleitung with the military rank of Hauptmann. You know it isn’t true that the Gestapo wore those civilian overcoats and trilby hats with the brims turned down. In military areas the Gestapo wore uniforms just like all the other Germans. It was the grey Wehrmacht uniform. The boots and headgear were black like the SS, including the scuttle helmet, but the long leather coat was brown.
“My papers had been prepared by the Mossad. We had discussed my identity at great length.
“It was decided I should appear as a Nazi bureaucrat, inspecting the Eastern Front with orders to report on the efficiency of the Totenkopfverbanden. Those were the sentry units which guarded prisoners and disposed of the mass dead and that sort of thing. Essentially they did the work that was too menial for the heroes of the Einsatzgruppen. You see in this way I was protected from too close contact with the SS officers who commanded the Einsatzgruppen. Those people—like this Krausser—were naturally very suspicious, and if they thought I had been sent to spy on them, I’m sure some of them would have sent angry inquiries to Berlin, demanding to know what this meddlesome Gestapo Hauptmann was doing interfering with them. Obviously I couldn’t afford that sort of inquiries. So I was sent to examine the efficiency of these subordinate groups—the Croats and Slovaks and Bulgarians and so forth. That was my cover.
“Of course there was no Israel then. We had no official standing in the world. As you know, Roosevelt and the others found the Zionist cause suspect and contemptible. But our people were being slaughtered. The world knew this, but chose to ignore it—to pretend it wasn’t happening. You would read in the American press about the heroic resistance of the brave Russian people but you didn’t read much about the Jews dying by the tens of thousands.
“In Palestine we also knew it was happening. But like everyone else we had only hearsay evidence. The purpose of my trips into the Soviet Union during the war was to bring out real evidence.
“It was not feasible for us to infiltrate the camps in Germany itself. The security in those camps was very tight. It is quite true—although one is tempted not to acknowledge this—that many Germans who lived quite near the extermination camps actually had no inkling of what went on inside.
“At the time of my first journey they had not yet devised the death chambers, the Zyklon poison gas. The only gassing was done with gasoline exhausts in mobile vans. There were a few such vans in Russia but most of them were in Poland. In Russia the murders were done in the open, mainly by gunfire or flamethrower. There was no great amount of security to circumvent. For the most part, the Einsatzgruppen didn’t mind having spectators around. It gave them an opportunity to share their shame.
“I cannot use words to describe myself at that time—my state of feeling. It would be useless. To speak of these things at all, one must be utterly factual, utterly emotionless. It was not the first time I had betrayed my people—I had turned my back on them in the war twenty-five years earlier, I had denied I was a Jew. Now I went into Hitler’s world in the guise of Gestapo.
“I was, of course, not the only agent sent in. I believe I was the only one to survive the war.
“I know of one who broke. He had to witness the extermination of a hundred Jews in a village in the Ukraine, and he seized one of the Spandaus and turned it against the other machine-gunners and the officers. They say he killed more than a dozen SS before they shot him down. Perhaps he was an idiot, perhaps a hero; in any case it is impossible not to understand what forced him to do this. At the time I thought him a fool. I felt sorry for him—his lack of strength. Since the war I have realized how wrong I was to feel that way. But you must see how, at that time, it was necessary for me to feel that way. It was the only way I could do what I’d been assigned to do.*
“I had a miniature camera. The assignment was to secure photographic and documentary proof of the Nazi atrocities. This then could be released to the world. In our naïveté we believed that the world could not continue to ignore the facts once we had presented such irrefutable evidence.” *
“I arrived in Poltava in December of nineteen forty-two. The area was the headquarters of Standartenführer Krausser’s Einsatzgruppe, but as I have said I never encountered Krausser face-to-face. I did meet two or three Scharführeren and a completely insane Haputscharführer [respectively, SS sergeants and a master-sergeant] who were under Krausser’s command. Later, sometime in nineteen forty-three, I was to meet a man from my brother’s village whom I took into my confidence. In the end I assisted him to escape from the Germans and the Russians and brought him back to Palestine with me. His name was Lev Zalmanson, if it matters. He was a man of volatile emotions and extremely quick intelligence. I felt he would be a valuable addition to our small force. In Palestine over a space of some weeks I had an opportunity to learn from him almost all the details of the story I’m about to tell you. Unhappily he began to brood on the events, he became terribly depressed—pathologically so—and then he suddenly turned violent and had to be confined in an institution. Not long after that, he committed suicide.
“Now I shall tell you about my brother and Heinz Krausser. You will understand that my information comes from Lev Zalmanson, and from things told to me by the three SS sergeants I have mentioned.”
“My brother had become very religious. Have I told you that? After he returned from Siberia. He w
orked for some years as clerk to an apothecary in a shtetl near Poltava, and then around nineteen thirty he moved to a poultry farm outside the village. He had married—I never met his wife—and there were three children. He took a job as director of the workers on this farm; I believe I’ve mentioned Maxim’s extraordinary leadership qualities.
“He was still a young man but the community regarded him almost as an elder, because of his wisdom and leadership. He wrote me that he would like to have taken up formal rabbinical studies. But this was not allowed under the Soviet regime. Still, one could almost say that my brother became a rabbi, although an unordained one.
“The Soviets had boarded up the synagogue and there was no rabbi nearer than forty or fifty kilometers away. As a result, the poultry farm became a sort of informal community center. When the Red Army began to fall back through the village and it was obvious that the Germans would be upon them at any moment—this was in August or the beginning of September, in nineteen forty-two—the people gathered at the poultry farm.
“The people knew the Germans would be upon them in a matter of days—possibly hours. They didn’t know what they should do. They had heard of the atrocities of course; the village harbored a number of refugee survivors of the Nazi murders to the west.
“There were partisan bands in the hills. Fighting both the Germans and the Reds. It was suggested the people desert the village and join the partisans.
“Many people rejected this idea because their wives and children and the old people couldn’t possibly survive winter encampment in the open with the partisans. Besides, the partisans were not Jews and would not welcome them except perhaps at gunpoint.
“Some others suggested they form their own partisan band—not to fight but to stay out of the hands of the Germans. It was then suggested that perhaps the village should retreat eastward, en masse—into those areas which were far beyond the German advance.
“Zalmanson told me this idea [that the entire village retreat toward the Caucasus] was the most popular one until one of the Ukrainian refugees pointed out that no one had the necessary internal passports, and that in the Ukraine he’d known of a case where a shtetl tried to flee en masse and had been machine-gunned off the road by a retreating Red Army battalion, because they were in the way.
“And then as always there was the question whether the children and the old people could survive such a march.
“The people prevailed upon Maxim for his opinion. Maxim had witnessed the winter retreat across Siberia with Kolchak and he knew too well what flight would mean to these people. None of them was equipped for survival under such circumstances. These were not soldiers, not nomads, not outdoor people in any way. They were villagers and a few farmers.
“He told them they must stay. Stay here and pray that the Nazis did not come to the village.
“If you have seen the German army move at night you do not forget it. The heavy measured tramp of their boots, growing louder. The soldiers’ faces blackened with burnt cork, the ribbons of light stabbing through the slits of the blackout headlights on the vehicles. The silhouette of an officer up in the turret of the thirty-seven-millimeter gun of a Panzerwagen, talking into a radio, calling down artillery on some suspected shadow ahead—first the rushing approach of an HE shell, then the ground shuddering.
“At my brother’s village the infantry stopped just short of the town. A scout company went among the houses to make sure it was secure, but the main body encamped outside the shtetl. The soldiers unfolded their shelter-halves and dug holes while the villagers watched. Whenever a German patrol came close, the villagers would put their hands in the air to indicate their noncombatant status. Many of them went around with white handkerchiefs displayed at all times.
“These Germans did not arrest them. They hardly paid attention to them at all. Civilians were of no interest to the Wehrmacht as long as they stayed out of the way. The soldiers were too tired for sadistic sport.
“Zalmanson said they all trembled in terror that whole night, but there were no incidents and the next day the Germans folded up their shelter-halves and moved on past the village, leaving only a small squad to secure it.
“The sound of the guns dissolved to the southeast. The German squad kept to themselves, having commandeered a farmhouse on a small height overlooking the village.
“The lines of battle had veered away to the south, and there were no heavy movements of Germans through the area; the rear echelons and reinforcements had gone past to the south, on their road eastward to the fighting. For a few days it appeared there was room for hope that the Germans had forgotten their existence in the little valley.
“Finally, of course, some sort of minor official of the German Occupation arrived in the village in the sidecar of a motorcycle, and that was that.”
“It was in September that this Heinz Krausser came on the scene. The shtetl was only one of several on his list.
“He arrived in one of those open armored cars and he was carrying a Schmeisser machine pistol in one hand. His headquarters platoon was with him—fifty or sixty men. They went through the village tacking up posters on the walls, ordering all Jews to present themselves at eight o’clock the next morning in a field at the edge of town, for what was called “registration and resettlement.” At the bottom in very large letters it said Bei Fluchtversuch Wird Geschossen’—anyone who tries to escape will be shot. I have seen these posters in other villages.
“The SS went through people’s houses, looting them. They did everything except rape. They didn’t wish to be contaminated by contact with Jewish women. Zalmanson told me there were no rapes reported in the shtetl. These SS were often expert rapists. Many of them were only sixteen years old.
“Krausser was a different sort, much older than his troops. At his home in Bavaria, I was told by one of the sergeants, Krausser kept a Rumanian slave in the kitchen and a young Jew was chained outside the house like a watchdog.
“Zalmanson described him to me—he had a shaven head and one of those inhumanly monotonous German voices. He would walk strutting around the village square, slapping the Schmeisser into his open palm. He had a crude sort of humor—very cynical, a sort of dull sarcasm. The sergeant told me one of Krausser’s favorite remarks—‘Our little war is going better. Much better than next year.’ He was referring to the fact that there wouldn’t be so many Jews to kill next year. Otherwise the story would not ring true. I think he was a fatalist, but not a defeatist, and anyway at this time it still looked as if the Nazis were winning the war, didn’t it?
“The village was not fooled by the resettlement announcement. Too many refugees had told them what happened to villages where the Jews lined up for ‘registration.’ In the afternoon there was a meeting out at the poultry farm—the Nazi SS had not come that far yet. Zalmanson was there, and my brother.
“It was too late to flee, yet there was no other choice. They did not know what to do. The SS were already setting up Spandaus on tripods along the edge of the field where the people were ordered to assemble in the morning. A truckload of shovels had arrived.
“They must have been chilled by the hopelessness. You know the kind of paralyzing fear which prevents flight?
“Zalmanson said my brother withdrew to meditate privately. When Zalmanson came upon him, Maxim was retching into his handkerchief.
“Dear God we can never forgive them! Never in a thousand years!
“Zalmanson told me he saw Maxim’s face drawn with pain. But Zalmanson had no way of understanding the dilemma my brother faced. The community was scheduled for annihilation—this is what Zalmanson knew, and he attributed Maxim’s agony solely to this. I never told Zalmanson the truth, but the events themselves can only be explained by the assumptions I must make.”
“Maxim had a giant’s gentleness. He had made himself over into a man of faith, a man of peace. Through that blind indifference of fate he found himself, as I did, a forgotten survivor of that terrible Civil War in Siberia.
“We carried in our heads the secret of that heavy royal treasure, buried in the Sayan heights. Neither of us had ever revealed the secret.
“Why? Well that is easiest to explain by asking another question: to whom could we have revealed it? The Red government? Hardly. Some other government? What for?
“I had thought of discussing it with my fellow Mossad people but it seemed pointless. Granted we needed money, we were chronically without it in Palestine. But you cannot simply go into Siberia and remove five hundred tons of deep-buried gold. Or so I assumed. And also of course we had no way to know whether the gold had already been removed from its hiding place. In fact I rather took it for granted that it had. I assumed the Bolsheviks had got it, in the end. Evidently Maxim did not make the same assumption; at least he acted as if he had not.
“So we kept the secret because there was no one to whom we could usefully reveal it.
“But then Krausser came to the shtetl.”
“I have pieced these things together. Many of them are guesses but I shall relate them as if I know them to be fact; the outcome we know.