As for the hunters, they didn’t give a hang about Division 1005. Demobilizing against (I mean in advance of) orders, they planned to buy tiny white houses on various meadow-cliffs. Their pasts remained, it’s true, like rocks bony under the lushness, but, saying to themselves, just as they’d always done, we need to face facts, they’d remove a few photographs from their wartime albums; they’d plan new careers in the surprising stillness of the Swiss Alps, the moist warm summer silence. Just as Swiss mountains open out into wide steep valleys of green and grey across which time passes disguised as clouds, so “the postwar era,” which our Führer would have called the interval between two wars, would expand before them, bordered not by prison walls but avalanche fences and terraced vineyards. In the guest room, or maybe in the closet, but most likely in a safe deposit box they’d keep that shirt of golden armor from Transylvania. Every Christmas and every Easter would be often enough to break out that wine cup comprised of an immense snail shell (or was it a chambered nautilus?), whose base was a golden woman, naked save for a loincloth, standing on a gasping golden fish; somehow she reminded them of Poland’s blonde fields. But all that was half a year away. Until the last minute they kept shooting intellectuals, Jews and more Jews, Communists, Polish and Russian soldiers, hospital patients and lunatics. (Naturally, they did it out of sight of the generals, according to a procedure stamped 
.)
As for Gerstein, he continued to hold his dangerously illegal gatherings, seeking always to warn about and learn about the Third Reich’s latest crimes: the mass hangings at Plötzensee, the reprisals in Slovakia, Dr. Brachtl’s liver puncture experiments, Jewish hands in the air, Jewish eyes looking desperately away, 
-men and Order Police looting the silent houses, army trucks shuttling convenient batches of Jews to the antitank ditches in the forest. At the office he kept doing his accounts. “Clever Hans” Günther, for instance, seemed to have murdered about two hundred thousand people. Gerstein tried and failed to compute subtotals from Bohemia and Moravia. His mind rode on through the dark forest. Afterwards he lay weak in bed, awaiting his final arrest.
In 8.44 we find him writing to his father: You are wrong about one thing. I never participated in any of this. Whenever I received orders, I not only didn’t follow them, but made sure they were disobeyed. For my part, I leave all this with clean hands and a clear conscience. At terrible risk, he had misdirected a few more shipments of Zyklon B. He also modified the formula to make the deaths less excruciating. Why not call him as heroic as -Obersturmführer Michael Wittmann, who won the Knight’s Cross for destroying sixty-six Soviet tanks singlehanded?
On 25.5.45 he turned himself in to the Americans, presenting them with detailed and incriminating documents against Wirth, Pfannenstiel, Günther, Eichmann, Brack, Höss, and all the rest, each paper adorned by the swastika-clutching eagle within its circle. He told his wife: People will hear about me, you can be sure of that! You will be astounded to learn all the things I have done…
She and the children were living on stale breadcrusts by then, “Stalin tarts” we’d already learned to call them. When summer came, they might be able to pick a few gooseberries.—Your father says we’ll be astounded, she said to Christian with a weary laugh.
But the Americans sent Kurt Gerstein home. So he went to pledge himself to the French.
They imprisoned him in Paris with other -officers. On 10.7.45 they commenced proceedings against him for the crime of genocide.
When Parzival was dishonored for not questioning the evil which infested the Grail Castle, he set out to cleanse his name. In due course he met his piebald brother, redeemed himself, converted his brother and became King. Unfortunately, Kurt Gerstein could not follow any of these measures once he’d been dishonored, because on 25.7.45, the turnkey looked into his cell and found his corpse hanging there.
In 1949 the Denazification Council of Tübingen refused to rehabilitate his memory, calling him a “petty Nazi.” He was no comrade to us.
A court in 1955 noted regretfully: It may be that the mere fact of making such efforts, associated with a constant risk of death, had been sufficient to persuade him that his conscience and his hands were unsullied. But this conviction does not indicate whether those efforts always achieved the desired success.
On 20.1.65 he was in fact rehabilitated. By that time, anti-Semites around the world were already denying that anything untoward had happened. After all, as Göring laughed during his own trial for war crimes at Nuremberg: Anybody can make an atrocity film if they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor shoving them back in again… ‣
THE SECOND FRONT
All the faces seem familiar, even those I never met: probably because we were all soldiers fighting for the common victory.
V. I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, and not incidentally “the hero of Stalingrad,” writes surprisingly lyrical prose in his memoirs. Guderian, Paulus, Rokossovsky, Meretskov, even von Manstein—the other generals all fall short in this respect. Chuikov’s career is blemished by several failures, not least his incorrect deployment of Ninth Army during the Finnish War. But now that everything has ended, with the Fascists blotted out, Germany sundered into a pair of nearly harmless bookends, and the Finns, as it just happens, anxiously subservient to us, we can afford to praise his literary efforts. He takes time to mention the black humped shapes, like camels on their knees, of dead enemy tanks. He has a way of bringing alive for us Fediuninskii with his pencil-written order to take command of Forty-second Army—what was Forty-second Army then? nothing but skinny men, many of them without weapons and uniforms, who shivered as they crouched shoulder to shoulder—of showing us the human being within the ruthless Rokossovsky, whose prior arrest and rehabilitation were now state secrets; of leading us dangerously close to Zhukov’s pale, pouchy face (Zhukov was the one who eternally warned: I’ll have you shot! or I’ll court-martial you!) Less prominent individuals also get their due. A certain Russian woman whose initials are E. E. K. receives warm mention; Chuikov seems to have been especially captivated by her long black hair. From reliable third parties I’ve learned that their relationship was platonic, that indeed he never saw her except in a photograph; she seems to have been the wife of a documentary cameraman who was temporarily attached to his staff. Discretion prevents me from recording the cameraman’s name. The story goes that the cameraman, who succeeded in filming at extremely close range the first interrogation of the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus, obtained his vantage point only through bribery: someone, we needn’t say who, gained possession of the photograph of the mysterious E. E. K., who was actually, so I’ve heard, rather plain. Not long after this episode, the cameraman and E. E. K. divorced. This tale may well be a fabrication, and I report it only for the sake of completeness. Certainly you won’t find any but the most elliptical allusion to it in Chuikov’s account, whose optimism, by the way, takes on an almost individualistic taint after the surrender of Paulus. About our massive offensives after Stalingrad he writes: The spring was with us, but behind the enemy’s lines it was autumn. Well, he was right about that! I’m happy to say that in spite of such embellishments his book never fails to hammer home the political lessons of the war, which we all know was foisted on us by the predatory interests of the international bourgeoisie. What you shouldn’t expect from this general is an overall strategic perspective. Europe, the Central Front, the Voronezh Front, with the Steppe Front as a strategic reserve, all these integers and quantities have already been tabulated for us in the equations of a far greater mathematician (of course I mean Comrade Stalin); nonetheless, Comrade Chuikov makes sure we remember what’s what. In particular, this long delay in the opening of the second front causes us to understand the actions of our Western allies much more correctly than the way they’re represented in those soothing messages.