The running of such camps is anything but easy. When I put myself in papa’s shoes, when I consider the incredible difficulties he faced and compare them to the problems of a multinational like ours, even in an adverse economic climate, faced with criticism from newspapers, takeover bids form speculators, disloyalty from clients, edicts from civil servants and union terrorist ploys, I have to laugh. The achievements of the formidable Nazi military-industrial machine are unparalleled, they are without equal.
Was the journey necessary? Technically, no. I already knew what there was to know. What I wanted was to be in this place where my father had been, to talk to him across the years. Who else could tell me what I needed to know, what his career path had been, what his state of mind had been when he meted out death on such a scale? Had he resisted? Did he glory in his power? Why this loathing of the Jew, this all-consuming hatred? What did he think might come of it? When the Third Reich was crumbling, was papa thinking that it was the end of the world or simply the end of a world? What did he feel when the extermination camps were discovered and humanity gave a howl of terror that surely echoed to the ends of the universe? Did he suddenly come to his senses? Did he become affronted? Did he say to himself that humanity had clearly understood nothing, that at the ends of the universe the end of a world is a triviality, it is in the order of things? Chaos is born of chaos and returns to chaos, it is mathematical, it is written in the heavens. Untold civilisations, vast empires, great peoples have vanished, this is not news, the old must die to make way for the new. These questions drive me insane because I know the answer: Papa did not kill himself, did not give himself up, he ran away, he lied, he forgot. He told me nothing.
I got a room in a tiny boutique hotel as bright as a small spring sun. From my window, I could see the university in its lush, magical setting. Manicured lawns, hundred-year-old trees, hedges clipped and sculpted with lasers, fountains with, I imagine, fat fish fed by an invisible hand with the best of intentions, or at least with impeccable attention to punctuality, scale and quantity. In the middle of the campus, on a grassy hill, the majestic Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität sits enthroned. It is a magnificent building, stately, opulent, in delectable warm shades of stone. I thought back to my university, the École Centrale in Nantes, a poor relation by comparison. This, clearly, is a temple to science. The hordes of regimented students walking in groups or single file already had the austere, preoccupied look of veteran scientists while also being tousled, smiling, pleasantly scruffy like all students their age. The professors, old-fashioned, shambling, essentially innocuous, carrying baskets or old canvas bags, looked as though they had just arrived from the country and gone to the wrong place. Germany, I remembered, was in the throes of an environmental crisis, something that dovetailed neatly with is formidable industrial infrastructure. Leather and faux-leather satchels were clearly the fashion in Frankfurt this year. When I was a student in Nantes, it was nylon rucksacks, and I remember Monsieur Candela, self-obsessed soxiante-huitard that he was, telling me that in his day, you turned up for lectures empty-handed and left with a girl on your arm. Things change.
Until now, I had been able to allow my future father some extenuating circumstances, to see in him the conscientious schoolboy, the fun-loving student, the decent, happy-go-lucky soldier. He is young, he doesn’t know, the Final Solution is a state secret, a confidential matter known only to the Führer perched in his Eagle’s Nest, in the impregnable Berghof, and the starving prisoner in some far-flung part of Eastern Europe, in a death camp cut off by snowstorms from the rest of the world. People suspected, they spoke in euphemisms, they had noticed that there were fewer and fewer Jews and other Minderwertige Leute on the streets, that many shops were closed and derelict, that the Judenhaus and the synagogues had been repurposed, but a war is a war, it must first be fought, only afterwards can you calculate the dead and the disappeared, only then do state secrets, like corpses, float to the surface.
I wandered around the university campus. Students spend their lives in cafés and bars, that’s where they talk, where they set the world to rights, where they drown their sorrows, it was where I spent most of my four years in Nantes. In Frankfurt I visited every café, every bar, but nowhere did I feel the oppressive, arrogant, feverish atmosphere of Nazi Germany. In the model, European, impossibly liberal Germany of today, everything is immaculate, pristine, warm and young, although the populace seems older than ever. I wanted to be a conjuror, to wave a magic wand, turn back time and shroud everything in black and grey and fog, restore to the streets their cobblestoned past, to the buildings their pre-war decrepitude, to the ladies that bourgeois charm perched somewhere between decorousness and depravity, to the girls that air of Olympian athletes, to the civil servants the starched formality of dangerous automata, to the working-class the demeanour of bankrupt country squires ripe for exploitation and manipulation, to the politicians, the shrill rhetoric of the madman. I couldn’t picture the young Hans Schiller, too many other images cluttered my mind, the irreproachable SS officer in his black uniform, the Cheïkh of Aïn Deb I remembered from childhood in his spotless white burnous, the image of the German businessman trussed up in his dark suit, the picture of these promising students who seemed prematurely solemn. This youthful Hans I cannot picture deserves my compassion, he is young, he does not know. He fell in with the muscular Hitler Youth, the Hitlerjugends, and there lost what little adolescent wisdom had survived from childhood. I did much the same thing in the FLN youth, the FLNjugends, it was not as extreme, just the crackpot rantings of rank amateurs, but I know the symptoms, the dull roar in your head, the spit-flecked slogans in your mouth, the murderous twitch in your hands. His years at university did nothing to improve Hans, his character by now was mapped out, and the spirit of the times was of relentless propaganda, iron vigilance and, shortly afterwards, of Blitzkrieg. It’s easy to understand how difficult it must have been to think for yourself. From here to his induction into the research team working on Zyklon B is a matter of simple probability. He was in the right place at the right time, they needed men in white coats to hold the test tubes, monitor the distillate, take notes. Hans, the newly qualified chemical engineer, surely thinking he had been recognized, chosen, honoured, patted himself on the back. He probably genuinely believed that the gas they were working on would be used, as he had been told, to eradicate lice in the camps. What camps? he might have asked. The Arbeitslager—the labour camps of the glorious Reich! someone would have snapped, as though talking about a campaign to end poverty and degradation. The real question, What the hell is going on? would have come one day, at dusk, at dawn, between two pale pools of light, in some remote Frankfurt suburb in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, as he witnessed his first live experiment — the gassing of a Jewish family too bewildered to protest or of a group of tramps too drunk to realise what was happening; and with that first question a flood of others would naturally have come: What am I doing here? Is this really happening? Why? I’d like to think he objected, but caught up as he was in some vast secret Reich, he realised there was no way out. The first step is the only one that matters, and he had already taken several. The rest follows, you brood over your own pain, you lick your wounds, you keep going, you keep your opinions to yourself, you forget them, and every day forgetting becomes a little easier, you parrot the common view and every day you believe it a little more fervently; you see cowards, braggarts, killing willingly, zealously, and this persuades you that you are on the right path, the only path. Papa quickly penetrated the inner sanctum of his horror, something which must have required some special trait. An incurable innocence? A healthy dose of cowardice? A little fervour? Perhaps a lot. Maybe a heartfelt rage at the Jews and other Minderwertige Leute.