Europe Central (82 page)

27

By 31.1.44 the front line had broken into segments of flotsam on an ebbing wave.—They’ll never breach our Atlantic Wall! cried his father loyally.

How could they? agreed
-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein. He was the perfect picture of our Aryan race; quite obviously he possessed a firm resolve to harshly but fairly enforce German authority.

Kurt, old as I am, I feel I should be doing something.

Look at you, father! You can scarcely walk!

That’s all right. Give me a shovel, and even if it takes me all day I can still dig my meter of antitank trench!

That’s commendable, father.

Recently I had a nightmare. I dreamed that the Slavs were in Berlin! You don’t suppose they’ll ever come here?

God will do what’s best.

What exactly does that mean? In the name of the All-Highest, do you support our Führer or not?

You see the uniform I wear, said Kurt Gerstein through clenched teeth.

I see what you think of that uniform. Even your children see that. And Elfriede! What that poor girl suffers on your account you’ll never understand. If you want to live a worthy life, Kurt, you must never treat a woman badly. A woman, you know, bears no weapons in her hands. Your duty—

Excuse me, father, but how do you define your
Christian
duty?

Did you mean to criticize me just now, Kurt? Was that your intention?

No.

Well, then what were you trying to say?

Father, I . . . To me, the worship of Our Lord means nothing unless it’s expressed in practical acts of charity.

But that in and of itself is impractical, because if each of us decided to express his Christian love in the way he thought best, no one would do his duty. The truth is, we’re all selfish, and we all look for excuses! You know, Kurt, in the course of my career I often had to condemn some poor wretch to the gallows. From an individual, human point of view, he might not have done anything wrong, and nobody will ever know how much I sympathized. For example, one fellow’s mother was dying an agonizing death of cancer. They could do nothing for her; on account of those damned Versailles sanctions, the pharmacies didn’t even carry any opiates to reduce her pain. And so he suffocated her with a pillow—purely out of love, do you understand me, Kurt? But one has to do one’s duty.

Suppose you’d refused to convict . . .

First of all, I might have faced disbarment, and I don’t know what would have become of your mother and all you children in those years. We were already poor enough, not to mention the disgrace. One must not lose sight of such things. But setting aside my obvious family duty, the larger principle is this: If the man who suffocates his mother for love gets acquitted, then you may be sure that the man who suffocates his mother for hate will seize on that fact!

But there’s a distinction, after all—

And you continue arguing against me, your own father! You stand against all of us. Just what do you stand for?

Forgive me, father, but this distinction—

We see a distinction only because we’re abstracting the two cases of matricide; we’re letting them be hypothetical, so that we can play God and peer into the defendants’ hearts. But in real life we’ll never know.

But
you
knew.

Yes, I do
believe,
I’m humanly
certain,
that the man whom I sentenced to death was a mercy-killer; and the current law of our land might well allow his mother to be released from her agony, provided that it was the Reich itself which—

Speaking of such things, father, I’ve obtained proof that Berthe was euthanized at Hadamar.

You’re interrupting me. What if she was? Poor girl, she’s better off! Have you forgotten how she used to touch herself in church? I hope you’ll show the decency never to tell Elfriede. The point is, we shouldn’t have the impertinence to play God. It’s not up to us to decide who should live and who should die.

Father, said Kurt Gerstein desperately, if I had been you I should have resigned my office.

For shame! To think that I would ever hear my own son . . .

Forgive me, father. I don’t mean—

Then why don’t you resign yours?

I won’t lay down my responsibility, the blond man steadily replied, and then, in an effort to defuse this conversation: By the way, where is Friedl?

Shopping, shopping, said the old man with an indulgent wave of the hand.

Gerstein smiled, trying to hide his rage. Friedl was probably standing in a queue to buy watered-down milk.

Unlike you, his father continued (Ludwig Gerstein never got distracted from a topic), I’m not a quitter. When I was a magistrate
I did my duty,
no matter how painful it was. I also fought on the Westfront in the last war, Kurt; you can’t imagine the things I saw . . .

The son almost laughed.—No, father. I can’t imagine.

I did my duty, and I never played God. I kept to the humility that befits a human being.

And you don’t think we ought to choose for ourselves?

As Adam and Eve chose, against the commandment of God? As the Bolshevists continue to choose today? Have you forgotten that Katy
Forest massacre? That’s their bloody, bloody work, which our Führer would save us from—

Kurt Gerstein whispered: We need to choose as Jesus chose.

No, said his father, that’s perfect fantasy. You’re not Jesus. What you imagine is impossible.

His father, who believed in the growing might of our Reich’s air defenses, had never been like him: From birth Kurt Gerstein had always been as fearful as a Jew.

28

In 7.44 a Swiss newspaper printed an article about the situation of the Hungarian Jews, the headline being:
People Are Disappearing
. An anonymous friend slipped a clipping of the story under Gerstein’s door. His heart began to pound so fiercely that he feared he might vomit. Collapsing on the bed, he read it through, hoping not to be implicated. Fortunately,
Die Ostschweiz
credited the Polish Government-in-Exile. Then of course Gerstein felt disappointed.

That was when the Second Guards Tank Army of the USSR liberated Maidanek concentration camp. They found the mounds of clothes, the shooting room. The documentarist Roman Karmen, stern and correct in his army cap and uniform, filmed the grubby captured Nazis in front of Block 2, his camera pressed in against his body as if he didn’t want it to get too close to them; they were us; he was shooting us from underneath, aiming up at our stubbled chins to make us look even uglier than our souls. He filmed the giant cabbages; he zoomed in on the human ashes which fertilized them. And thousands of Russians saw that newsreel, maybe hundreds of thousands. The Soviet press organs printed extensive accounts. As yet, however, the Western Allies still refused to believe. Gerstein was in despair. As for his colleagues, they’d begun to look over their shoulders a little, almost as if they could see the Russians coming.

Captain Wirth, who for some reason always tilted his head back when saying
Heil Hitler!,
just as our Austrians do, poured him a drink and said: To get right down to it, that Günther of yours, they don’t call him Clever Hans for nothing. All this time he’s been complaining about being Stahlecker’s subordinate! You don’t report to Stahlecker, do you?

No, Herr Captain.

Cut the phony formality with me, Gerstein; we’re in this together. Here’s the way I see it: Stahlecker’s going to be the fall guy. You mark my words, Gerstein. If this war keeps going to shit, Clever Hans will be sitting pretty, and all the world’s going to hear about Major-General Walther So-and-So Stahlecker, who committed all these crimes against the Yids! But you know what, Gerstein? Hey, are you drunk? I said, you know what? I’m not going to be the fall guy. Now listen. Here’s what you and I have got to do . . .

But Gerstein was not listening at all.

He kept haunting churches, adventuring like a knight, approaching any pastor who preached sermons against killing; he showed almost every guest those red-edged dark grey folders which read SECRET REICH MATTER and
; and his colleagues went marching triple file along the righthand edge of a barbed wire lane, their Death’s Head insigniae baby-white against their tanned baby faces and dark uniforms; they were not all blond like Gerstein, but they marched in step, chins up, gazing straight ahead; they were as reliable as Panzer tanks. Now here came Commandant Rudolf Höss, en route from the department “Canada” with his head up and his benignly stupid eyes a little worried while helpful Kurt Gerstein,
-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein I mean, trotted alongside, bending down to murmur into the Commandant’s ear that some of the Zyklon B had been decomposed in transit and would need to be buried to avoid any risks to the health of the gassing detail.

But what’s Himmler going to say? And this has happened before. It seems as if you’re always trying to take away my prussic acid, Gerstein! Ha, ha! Is the substance really that dangerous?

I’m afraid so, Herr Commandant.

Well, this will affect our efficiency! Tell me, Gerstein, can’t you improve the reliability of the transportation process? As I understand it, the prompt and safe delivery of this essential neutralizing agent is really in your sphere of responsibility.

By your order, Herr Commandant!

I understand that you observed those preliminary
ad hoc
operations at Treblinka and Belzec. That is correct?

Yes, Herr Commandant.

At that time, you supported Captain Wirth’s argument in favor of diesel exhaust as opposed to Zyklon B. I’ve read your report. Frankly, I’m surprised that you could have expressed those views. Is that what you still maintain?

Herr Commandant, as you yourself remarked just now, Zyklon B suffers from a tendency to spoil. In my opinion, it’s better to resettle fewer Jews per day in a
reliable
fashion than to gamble with an extremely dangerous and uncontrollable toxic agent—

I see your point, but I disagree with it. We have to forge ahead. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the manpower to shoot them . . . Well, I understand that this is not your worry. We each of us work toward the Führer in the best way we can. But I must warn you, Gerstein: If this happens again, and we have to resort to diesel engines again, or, God forbid, to small-caliber weapons, I’ll file a report. Do you understand?