-women there (so I’m told) were quite struck by tall, handsome Kurt Gerstein. One in particular, a bisexual opera singer who had a different Frenchwoman served up to her every week, a crime for which she later become a prisoner herself, had a scheme involving the disinfection of the -laundry, which would have brought the blond man to Ravensbrück quite often; pretending to be interested in her, Gerstein was able to hear from her own lips about the secret “Night and Fog” Gestapo stamp in certain prisoners’ dossiers; he also learned from her that since the Hungarian Jewesses weren’t dying rapidly enough, other measures were in preparation. Ravensbrück was a pretty soft camp, with only one crematorium, and Gerstein fairly quickly realized that he had seen far more than -Aufseherin Luise. I think it unlikely that she told him about the young Polish girls whose legs were slit open and injected with gangrene, to simulate war wounds.—They all whine and pretend to be specialists! giggled Luise, pinching his arm. But enough about them! Would you like me to sing the “Liebestod” from “Tristan”? It’s said I can move a man to tears. Are you ready? Kurt, I said are you ready?
Rage’s beak drilled at the back of his skull. Rage’s claws grubbed in his guts, piercing and digging.
“Clever Hans” Günther called for his advice as to whether it would be practical to liquidate the remaining Jews of Theresienstadt all at once if we herded them into open ditches and then sprinkled them with Zyklon B. The always clean and pleasing look of Kurt Gerstein’s face came into play when the blond man lied and said that it was utterly impossible. That was the last time he succeeded in saving anybody. As it turned out, those Jews got murdered anyway, by shooting.
In his flat he frequently committed the capital crime of listening to BBC broadcasts; moreover, he increased the volume until the neighbors could hear it through the walls. He lay in bed thinking what his father always called his evil thoughts; he scribbled additions to his indictments: During the French campaign they’d murdered British prisoners-of-war in the village of Le Paradis. He even tuned in to Radio Moscow. Field-Marshal Paulus was speaking on the Freedom Broadcasting Station, offering to fight for a “democratic order” in Germany. When his increasingly rare visitors taxed him with giving in to suicidal impulses, the blond man stubbornly insisted that he was doing this only so that the neighbors could have access to these broadcasts without any risk to themselves. He defended this absurd position so loudly that guests sometimes feared for his reason. Then, in a sudden fury, he began to describe to them the way Jew-brains explode high into the air when we shoot at close range. He couldn’t stop seeing that, he said.
Herr Gerstein, forgive me for asking this, but have you ever personally taken part in the actions against the Jews?
I have clean hands, he replied through clenched teeth.
His father came for a visit, and Kurt Gerstein, summoning up all his courage, began with a dry mouth to hint at some of the things which were occurring in the East. (Anyone who talks will be shot immediately, “Clever Hans” had said.)
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.
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.