-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein cannot help clothe the skull in beloved Berthe’s image.
On Ash Wednesday of that year, he’d been present when those few pastors of the Prussian Confessional Church who dared read a sermon about the commandment Thou shalt not kill. Even then his colleagues failed to suspect him, such was their own confidence in themselves.
Following the collapse of the Ostfront on a secret map, he shouted: Christ will overcome those devils! The neighbors must have heard, but no one ever reported him. Every evening he read from the Bible, then prayed aloud, lying weakly in bed.
Next came the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which struck everybody as no less viciously, ruthlessly useless than the way that encircled Russians will fight to the death.
Why wouldn’t the Allies do anything? They must dread the responsibility for sheltering so many millions—or were they themselves anti-Semites?— He stood between the columns of the church nave, trying to ask. Glaring arches of candle flame replied. What was the use? He might as well have kept on bowing and clicking his heels to Berthe’s ghost.
Helmut Franz whispered into his ear that the British, who alone could have done it, had deliberately refrained from bombing the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Switzerland refused to grant asylum to Jews. Only Kurt Gerstein was willing to act!
We now see him alone and impeccably uniformed, silver on black, his face as resolute as the death’s head on his forehead as he sped down the road from Warsaw to Krakow in a military truck, with a spade and six fifty-kilogram cannisters of sky-blue Zyklon B crystals under a tarpaulin in the back, and around him the wet and gentle crests of Polish fields in summer rain, tall flowers behind house-fences, wet roads, lush trees bearing white stars for blossoms, and on the far horizon ahead of him stood other trees as grey as the North Sea. At each checkpoint they clicked their heels, saluted and gestured him through. If they could have seen within his soul, they would have shot him, shot him, shot him!
Tall, blond -Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein rushed on toward Auschwitz. Soon now he’d arrive at the black-and-white signal barrier, the sign ARBEIT MACHT FREI, and it would be too late. (He’d just told Helmut Franz about the female victims of medical experiments in Nr. 1 Block.) How many cannisters could decompose in transit? Quick, into the slender-trunked, green green forest shining with new rain! Were there any partisans here? Let them kill him. Screened by trees, sweating and trembling, he began to dig a grave for the prussic acid: two cannisters’ worth today, a hundred kilograms. In theory, he was saving a hundred thousand lives. Out it came into the pit, glittering, celestially beautiful; he retched at the fumes. They’d shoot him, shoot him, shoot him! Why didn’t he just stuff a handful into his mouth and be done with it? Give ’em something to chew on! That was what Sergeant Möll always said, when they swished it down the distribution cones into the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And Gerstein laughed; he actually laughed so that they’d leave him free to fulfill his pledge… Afterwards he’d spend the night in Krakow. He usually managed a visit to Saint Mary’s Basilica, the terrorized crowds rushing aside to let him through to lurk within that dark wooden labyrinth smoothed by many hands, gazing emptily at dark candelabra, darker portraits, windows as deep as a skull’s eye-sockets. Their pale Christ had risen, but, alas, risen nailed to His cross. There He was, hovering helplessly in the high blue firmament of the groined ceiling with its golden stars.
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!