Gerstein said: I take it you haven’t yet been invited to Auschwitz, Herr Doktor, because they’re employing Zyklon B over there, which makes them pink!
You don’t say! But that’s the merest curiosity, Gerstein. The relevant question is this: Can science devise a way to render this process of exterminating human beings devoid of cruelty?
It’s for your wife, said Captain Wirth, smiling. You’re so impossible about accepting gifts, I finally said to myself, I said, hit the armored man in his wife-spot!
Thank you, said Gertstein, stroking the soft supple leather of the handbag a little absently.
Human skin, said Captain Wirth. Don’t worry; it’s not Jewish. A good Russian peasant-boy; I picked him out myself.
When he was still a schoolboy, before he’d even passed his Abitur exam, in fact, his friend Helmut Franz had shown him a reproduction of Käthe Kollwitz’s famous chalk drawing entitled “The Volunteers,” which depicts young, young men with gaping, hypnotized faces marching off all in row, with a skeleton leading them. Well, but after all, that image, made in 1920, in no way corresponded to the realities of our current world-historical situation, which can be easily represented by the empty acorn-caps and squashed chestnuts one sees in the gravel alongside the Landwehrkanal.—Neither he nor Helmut Franz had liked “The Volunteers.” They’d found it anti-German.
Helmut Franz had elaborated: Yes, I grant that a skeleton led us last time, but there will never be another World War!
Naturally not, said Gerstein. Anyhow, it’s up to all of us to will the best for Germany, not the worst.
For a long time he had continued to believe this, and in a sense he continued to believe it. He wanted to be Hagen, standing up for Germany in the world. When the sleepwalker became Chancellor in 1933, he granted that the man had faults, but Helmut Franz reminded him that if each of them, and every German, simply and unceasingly willed his goodness, then the sleepwalker would become good. This meant volunteering in the highest sense, intuiting and working toward what our Führer would want, setting aside any flaws in the leadership.
And so, when he told his friend of the crimes he had seen in the huge industrial green of Birkenau with its many strands of barbed wire bent over curving concrete light-poles, Helmut Franz, who’d been shocked to learn the secret of Belzec, now warned him: It’s better not to investigate evil things too deeply, Kurt, not only for your safety and ours but also because evil deserves to be respected! Would you strip a leper of his clothes and expose him? Would you call attention to the ugliness of someone who owns the power to do you harm?
I reject that! Gerstein replied. Parzifal’s sin was not asking, not inquiring into evil’s source. That’s why he became accursed and lost the Grail.
You’re too much the mystic. Nowadays, the only hope for us Germans is to forge our own Grail. If it’s not perfect, may our loyalty make it so!
Loyalty? When Dr. Mengele stands whistling a tune as he points with his thumb, left or right! And then they—
Where’s your own evil in this, Kurt?
What do you mean? I bear no responsibility.
All your life, you’ve been the martyr. You’ve suffered the strictness of your father, but bearing it never brought you any peace. You stood up to evil and got your teeth knocked out. You warned us all of evil and went to a concentration camp. When all of us helped you get rehabilitated—and you know, Kurt, it wasn’t just your father; it really was all of us—you promptly did everything you could to get sent to Belzec, and now you have nightmares! I can’t help wondering whether you’re bringing your own fate upon yourself.
Are you claiming that I want to suffer? That’s—
No. You’re not a masochist in the clinical sense. These terrible things keep happening to you because you insist that you’re not evil like everyone else.
What specifically is my sin?
Pride, Kurt, or willed blindness. You think that you’re better than we are. So you attempt the impossible. Of course you’ll get punished.
Perhaps that’s so. But in that case, your sin is relying on impossibility as a shield against any kind of commitment.
In other words, Kurt, you accuse me of standing still while you rise up and volunteer. But who’s your leader?
I follow our Lord Jesus Christ, he replied through clenched teeth.
You think you are. But what if you’re in that Kollwitz drawing, following the skeleton?
They parted coldly. The subway was crowded with invalids and old women. He remembered how back in ’32 it would have been packed with Storm Troopers who sang rude songs and threatened everybody in their goodnatured way; then the Führer had liquidated Röhm, and after that one saw mainly 
steady and professionally cool; now the folders for Case White and Operation Barbarossa had sprung open, and men got swallowed up in the war. He missed the Storm Troopers. In those days he’d still believed in victory. Thrilled by the phrase radical measures, he’d almost joined the Steel Helmets.
Helmut Franz was partly correct about him; Kurt Gerstein had always been a volunteer. The first time he joined the Party, it was out of true German ardor; Berthe was still alive. Then he’d volunteered to be a spy for God.
Helmut Franz was also, perhaps, jealous. For one thing, he would never look as wholesome as Kurt Gerstein.
Down the dark way! Berthe lay under the earthen mound into which a path led, underneath the tall, tapering brick chimney. Hadn’t he won the right to love her as he did her sister? Let gape the gates! The Commandant’s watchdogs howled; the formed up in a double line with rifles raised; they were an honor guard; MY HONOR IS MY LOYALTY. What would happen next? Geheim.
He could no longer imagine what would have happened next. He was finished; he’d done everything; it was over.
Yes, it was over. Soon the hunters would have to hide whatever they could. Like Kurt Gerstein, they must take the knife-edge path. For Operation Reinhard was approaching its close! In the official records, Captain Wirth was murdered by Jewish-Bolshevik partisans in the autumn of ’44, while Brigade Chief Globocnik, in despair at the way that the armed forces kept betraying our Führer, shot himself in the head with his Walther pistol (Geco, 7.65 millimeter). Their bodies were never found. The Jewish gold was already entering Switzerland, in accounts classified 
. Division 1005 (corpse obliteration) had almost wound up its work throughout the Eastern territories we still controlled; they’d slipped up at Majdanek, unfortunately; they’d left traces in Lemberg, which was already Lvov again; but at Auschwitz the gas chambers and crematoria stood ready to be blown up when the time came, so that nothing could be proved against us. Naturally, Division 1005 kept requisitioning large quantities of methanol. Gerstein did the little he could, which was nothing, to impede the work. He’d tried to tittletattle again to Baron von Otter. For the convenience of some postwar prosecutor whose existence he no longer imagined, he recorded the locations of the pits and the approximate volume of the matter within, the tight-packed mass I should say, whose shape partook of the same irregularity as the fireball which blossoms from an airplane after a direct hit; this thing, which Division 1005 had to pickaxe apart into its component members before they could burn it, infested Gerstein’s nightmares to the point of literal stench; he woke up choking, with the reek of Belzec in his mouth. Needless to say, the instant that the war ended, he’d draw up all his affidavits and get free.