It was for himself as much as for them—it had been a difficult year. The Tausendjahriges Reich was inevitable, but of course there would be setbacks along the way. If they could only reach some sort of agreement with the British and the Americans, then they might concentrate on the Slavs.
He gazed down at his slender, pale hands, their delicate blue veins. They’d always been too girlish, but if he kept them still they seemed to keep the rest of him calm.
He removed his pince-nez and cleaned it again. It wouldn’t do to misread a figure because of some speck on the glass. He’d had some trouble with that recently, blurred objects appearing along the edge of his field of vision, vague disturbances in the air. Perhaps these were the harbingers of some immanent vision, but probably that was too much to hope for. Although it embarrassed him, he considered that his eyes might be weakening further.
Minutes later he walked out into the hall. Something bothered him about the crowd, something that did not fit, some disturbance. Something stirred there on his left, skin paler even than his own, eyes which did not blink, as if there were no eyelids, and dark holes in the milky eyeballs where the pupils should have been. But he had a task to perform and his men were waiting. He scanned the crowd again but could find nothing more.
Daniel could tell that he was less into this part than normal, his consciousness only partially absorbed. Certainly this mind was a twitchy, uncomfortable place to be. But part of the issue, he thought, was that Himmler was so difficult to pin down exactly, his mouth always saying one thing while his mind was thinking another, and more. Himmler was like a robot with more than one program running inside.
Among the SS higher-ups in their stiff uniforms and feigned expressions of attention,a dirty young boy in striped pajamas drifted in and out between the seats, floated along the floor, insinuated his stick thick arms and legs among the chair legs and uniformed legs, pushed his twig-like fingers upwards in a reach for the sky.
Had Himmler noticed? Yes, but only vaguely. He was not yet quite ready to see.
Heinrich climbed the podium. He looked about to see who was in the high-backed chairs, how many were empty. The town hall was not as impressive as he would have liked, but at least there were the vaulted arches, a Teutonic feel to the stone work.
“In the months which have passed since we last met in June of 1942, many comrades have fallen and given their lives for Germany and for the Führer. Before them, in the forefront—I ask you to stand in their honor, and in the honor of all our dead SS men and dead German soldiers, men and women—in the forefront, from our ranks, let us honor our old comrade and friend, SS Obergruppenführer Eicke.”
They rose from their seats. Eicke had been a difficult loss for him personally. He’d taken the man out of an asylum and made him commandant at Dachau. If nothing else he would make sure Eicke was remembered as a hero. He gazed at the men assembled before him, seeking some sign of the disturbance he’d sensed earlier. There—a bit of ragged cloth, a filthy foot, but he could not see what they were attached to. His men shifted their weight impatiently. Some boy had gotten in. Someone would pay. But for now Himmler said, “I ask you to sit.”
Heinrich usually felt in control in these situations, speaking authoritatively, those he commanded hanging on to his every word. At times like these he thought of his father and all those years he’d stood in front of a classroom. His father must be proud of him, but the old man had no idea how far Heinrich might take this. No one did. He had to rid himself of that filthy intruder. A brutal bit of housekeeping was called for.
“I have considered it necessary to call you all together, the High Leadership Corps of the SS and Police, now at the beginning of the fifth year of the war, which will be a very difficult year...”
Heinrich had his fears, more than he would name. Throughout the year he had utilized his control over the courts and civil service to advance the racial reordering of Europe, paying particular attention to the fates of the 600,000 Jews he estimated to be in France. Earlier last month one thousand Jews had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz.
This Autumn there had been the Allied air raids on Hamburg in early August, followed by the destruction of the armament center of Peenemünde at mid-month. The Allies were calling for Germany’s unconditional surrender.
Some days, they seemed much further away than others from the supermen they would one day become.
Heinrich heard his own voice continue on and on, and it seemed to him he was putting parts of himself to sleep. His men continued to sit bolt upright in their chairs, but here and there he could detect some glassiness in the eyes, some strain in the necks. They would all let him down eventually, and he would become the commander of an army of corpses. They needed stirring. They needed a bit of mayhem.
But the future still lay before him. In the years ahead he would expand Wewelsberg into an SS kingdom. It would be his great city, his SS Vatican, the center of the new world. An 18-meter-high wall with 18 towers. The whole of the complex would be in the shape of a spear pointing north. Part of him focused on this and nothing else. He liked to imagine all his brave knights gathered together in the castle dining hall, sitting in their pig leather chairs and eating from silver plates with their names engraved on them. This would be just the beginning of the next phase of human evolution.
Daniel wasn’t always sure which Himmler to pay attention to—the officious accountant of the dead or the dreamer who had lost his head. Both were frightening, and equally dangerous.
“The Bolshevik system, and therefore Stalin, had made one of its most serious mistakes...”
He kept hearing a murmuring, a clanging of pots and laughter. That boy in the audience, was he causing the trouble? There—part of the boy’s face—so blue, as if the flesh had lain on frozen ground.
“... the total loss of approximately 500 km of front.
This loss required the withdrawal of the German front, in order to be able to close it again at all. This loss made the sacrifice of Stalingrad necessary from the point of view of Fate.”
There it was again. Heinrich turned. Who? Were they listening? He marked his place in the notes and stopped his speech. “Hold on. Koppe!” The men stirred anxiously. “Down there! It’s so noisy! Does a shaft lead to the kitchen?”
There were service people in the kitchen who might listen. He had to shut off the possibility.
He looked back into the audience. He didn’t see the boy. Perhaps he was still sneaking around, attempting to sabotage Heinrich’s speech? “We are going to wait for a moment,” he announced. “Because what I say isn’t for everyone’s ears, right?”
He left the microphone. His men were scattering, moving rapidly, much to his satisfaction. Now there would be action! He followed two of his staff down into the kitchen. They began to question the workers. He pulled one of his men closer, yanking on his elbow. “Are there Jews here?”
The young man looked alarmed. “Oh no, Herr Reichsführer. Everyone was checked beforehand.”
“Make sure,” he whispered. “Shoot them if necessary.”
Peering around them, Heinrich saw something on one of the counters that made him gasp: a bloody rabbit carcass, waiting patiently to be fully butchered. He shuddered, his belly twisting in knots. Vaguely, he heard one of his men explaining how they could not close the door to the kitchen, but they had found a mattress in one of the rooms. They would stuff it in front of the door.
He scurried back toward the podium, trying to leave the image of the butchered animal behind him. He had no tolerance for such things—for him a meal was ruined if he was reminded that animals had been slaughtered.
He could never understand how a hunter received pleasure from shooting an innocent creature. Every animal had a right to live. The Buddhist monks had the right idea. They carried a bell with them to keep the woodland animals away so that no harm might come to them.
He was rattled, but he went on to discuss the evacuation of Kharkov, still hearing things out in the
crowd and glimpsingmovement. Why couldn’t the child at least lie still until Heinrich was finished?
“An element basic to an overall evaluation is the question of Russian population figures. That is the great riddle... 400 times 10,000 men, or 400 new divisions. I calculate this in approximately the following manner: the Russians have already drafted all men born in 1926, and some of the men born in 1927...”
The man clearly loved his dates and figures, his theories of population. But those thoughts were not music—they were like sharp rocks rolling around inside Daniel’s head. “... amount to 1.5 and 1.8 men respectively, while our men born in the same years amount to only 500,000 to 600,000 respectively, that is, that is... the subhumans ...”
They took a break. It was very warm in the room, “Could someone open the windows?”
He took a few steps away. He could smell the boy—that’s what he had smelled earlier. That Jew flesh, that dead Jew flesh. He would never be able to get the smell completely scrubbed off. He should stop the speech. He should send his men out into the audience to find the dead Jew boy and drag him outside. It was the only way to be sure. But what if the boy had friends, collaborators? It was a sad thing, but Heinrich could trust no one.
He calmed himself. He began again. “America is waging a war on two fronts, even more than England: the Pacific...”
What was that? He turned his head. “What’s going on?” he asked. “America is waging...” He stopped and repeated himself again.
He fell back into his notes, his speech. He tried to keep his eyes down. But he kept looking up, and finding the boy’s eyes burning like twin stars in the shadows, hiding behind the men, his men.
“The Slav is never able to build anything himself. In the long run, he’s not capable of it... with the exception, therefore, of an Attila, a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane, a Lenin, a Stalin—the mixed race of the Slavs is based on a sub-race with a few drops of blood of our blood, blood of a leading race...”
He was disturbed to see more of the striped pajamas in the gaps between his brave Aryan men. Had the boy brought his friends? There on a pale hand, draped across the shoulder of one of his finest, a gleaming drop of blood. Heinrich was disgusted.
“It’s just as true that he is an uninhibited beast, who can torture and torment other people in ways the Devil would never permit himself to think of. It’s just as true that the Russian, high or low, is inclined to the most perverse of things, even devouring his comrades or keeping his neighbor’s liver in his lunch bag.”
Skinny arms were coming out between the seats. A paleness beyond pale. And yet his men did nothing. They simply sat there.
“It is basically wrong for us to infuse all our inoffensive soul and spirit, our good nature, and our idealism into foreign peoples.”
He could not tell even whether they were male or female. In death all Jews became the same. He was appalled when one pale sexless head placed its lips on the mouth of one of his finest...
“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest.”
At least he had attempted to be efficient.
“Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood.”
The problem was that ordinary men had no appreciation for the larger demands of history.
He read off statistic after statistic. The numbers were spell-binding, possessed of magic. He could tell that his men were uncomfortable. There was nothing more important to him than his men, his brave SS men. They all had some very difficult work to do.
“Ich will auch ein ganz schweres Kapitel will ich hier vor Ihnen in aller Offenheit nennen. I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it... It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.”
Ausrottung? Was that the word he wanted to use? Look at them—the way they all sat up, their attention renewed. Yes. Ausrottung.
“I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about—‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one party member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our program—elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew... Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Heinrich hoped they understood the gift he was attempting to give them. A way for them to look at what he’d asked them to do, this unpleasant yet necessary task, but without guilt or blame. These were good men, SS men of fine character. Hadn’t he always been concerned about their emotional health?
Two years before while visiting Minsk he’d asked to see a shooting operation. Originally it had seemed the simplest way to handle their Jewish problem. Just shoot them. Commander Nebe arranged the execution of 98 men and two women by an einsatzgruppe unit for his benefit.
Before the execution he’d walked up to one of them. He’d asked him point blank, “Are you a Jew?”
The man had stared at him as if trying to think of a good reply. Finally he’d said “yes.”
“Are both your parents Jews?”
Again he’d replied, “yes.”
“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”
“No.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The Jews had to jump into an open grave like an upside down triangle and lie face down along the apex. One or two rows of Jews would be shot, and then the next group would have to lie down on top of the dead ones in order to be shot by the soldiers standing along the grave’s edge.
He’d made the mistake of stepping right up to the edge and peering in.
After one particular shot a bit of flesh made a high arc from the ditch into the air and landed on him, some on his coat and some on his face. He could see that it was a bit of brain. He immediately felt ill and began heaving. He felt dizzy and one of the men had to lead him away. He was quite embarrassed for his men to see him this way.
Later he gave a brief speech letting them know how much he appreciated the difficult things they had to do. Unfortunately there was no help for it. They were SS men, they had to stand firm.
But almost immediately he began his search for a better way. His SS men should not have to endure such a thing. That was what had led him, finally, to the gas.
The previous Fall he had seen a gassing at Auschwitz. He had watched the selection process. Then he had stood at a small window and gazed at the Jews dying inside. He had said nothing, but there was an interesting effect. The Jews had been packed into the room with admirable efficiency—there was no wasted space. The light was very dim, so their bodies, all heights and sexes, shapes, were these soft gray pieces fitted together against a background of a darker gray with occasional patches of blue. As they began to die there was no space for them to fall, but they moved, frantically at first, but then more slowly, the patterns their bodies made one against the other changing shape, flowing, a kind of slowly moving painting that was beautiful in its way with all its shades of gray and blue.
One of the Jews looked straight at the window. Heinrich could not tell if she saw him. There was nothing in her eyes. A spot of dazzling red appeared on her lip where she had bitten hers
elf during her final moments.
He observed the attitudes of the SS men through every step of this process. He still said nothing, but he was very concerned about their emotional well-being having to perform such a necessary but onerous task.
Finally he watched the labor crews take away the bodies for burial. He spoke up then because he had a suggestion. “You should burn the bodies instead,” he told Hoess.
Daniel forced himself into a very tiny place inside Himmler’s mind. Then he tried to make himself go to sleep.
“We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve.”
Some in his SS would let their personal greed make a travesty of his own code of ethics. The anger built in Heinrich until the internal volume of his moral outrage shook Daniel from his little hiding place.
Heinrich began to explain the punishment that would be delivered, and by the end of that explanation he was growling. “He who takes even one Reich Mark of it, that’s his death! A number of SS Men—not very many—have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own Folk, to kill this Folk which wanted to kill us. But we don’t have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else!”
Himmler seemed to blink more than the average person, or perhaps Daniel was simply intensely aware of it. Between the blinks Daniel saw the Jews in the audience moving again, but whether to get closer to Himmler and the podium or to make their own escape he could not tell.
“Again and again we have sifted out and cast aside what was worthless, what did not suit us. Just as long as we have strength to do this will this organization remain healthy. The moment we forget the law which is the foundation of our race, and the law of selection and austerity towards ourselves, we shall have the germ of death in us, and will perish...”
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