One of the Ukrainians led in the handcuffed man. He wore a tank crewman’s short yellow jacket, oily, its right sleeve torn at the seam; his face was completely flayed on one side, as if peeled open; on the other, a bluish bruise almost closed his eye; but he must have shaved right before he was captured. The Ukrainian brutally sent him flying into a little classroom chair in front of my desk. “Take off his handcuffs,” I ordered. “And go wait in the hallway.” The Ukrainian shrugged his shoulders, undid the handcuffs, and went out. The Commissar massaged his wrists. “Nice guys, our national traitors, aren’t they?” he said pleasantly. Despite his accent, his German was clear. “You can keep them when you leave.”—“We’re not going to leave,” I replied curtly.—“Ah, all the better. That will save us the task of running after them to shoot them.”—“I am Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue,” I said. And you?” He made a slight bow on his chair: “Pravdin, Ilya Semionovich, at your service.” I took out one of my last packs of cigarettes: “Do you smoke?” He smiled, revealing two missing teeth: “Why do cops always offer cigarettes? Every time I’ve been arrested, they’ve offered me cigarettes. This being said, I won’t refuse.” I handed him one, and he leaned over so I could light it. “And your rank?” I asked. He exhaled a long puff of smoke with a sigh of contentment: “Your soldiers are dying of hunger, but I see that the officers still have good cigarettes. I’m a Regimental Commissar. But recently they gave us military ranks and I was made a Lieutenant-Colonel.”—“But you’re a member of the Party, not an officer in the Red Army.”—“That is correct. And you? You’re also from the Gestapo?”—“From the SD. It’s not quite the same thing.”—“I know the difference. I’ve already interrogated enough of your own.”—“And how could a Communist like you let himself be captured?” His face darkened: “During an assault, a shell exploded next to me and I was hit in the head by some rubble.” He pointed to the scorched part of his face. “I was knocked out. I suppose my comrades left me for dead. When I regained consciousness, I was in the hands of your people. There was nothing I could do,” he concluded sadly.—“A high-ranking politruk who goes up to the front line, that’s pretty rare, isn’t it?”—“The commanding officer had been killed and I had to rally the men. But in general, I agree with you: the men don’t see enough Party leaders under fire. Some abuse their privileges. But these abuses will be corrected.” With his fingertips, he delicately felt the purplish, wounded skin around his swollen eye. “Is that from the explosion too?” I asked. He gave a gap-toothed smile: “No, that’s from your colleagues. You must be quite familiar with that sort of method.”—“Your NKVD uses the same.”—“Absolutely. I’m not complaining.” I paused: “How old are you, if I may?” I finally asked. “Forty-two. I was born with the century, like your Himmler.”—“So you witnessed the Revolution?” He laughed: “Of course! I was a Bolshevik activist when I was fifteen. I was a member of a workers’ soviet in Petrograd. You can’t imagine what a time that was! A great wind of freedom.”—“It’s changed a lot, then.” He became pensive: “Yes. That’s true. Probably the Russian people weren’t ready for such an immense, immediate freedom. But that will come, little by little. They must be educated first.”—“And your German, where did you learn that?” He smiled again: “On my own, when I was sixteen, with some prisoners of war. Afterward, Lenin himself sent me to the German Communists. Can you believe that I knew Liebknecht, Luxemburg! Extraordinary people. And after the civil war, I returned to Germany many times, secretly, to keep up contacts with Thälmann and others. You don’t know what my life has been like. In 1929, I acted as an interpreter for your officers who came to train in Soviet Russia, to test your new weapons and your new tactics. We learned a lot with you.”—“Yes, but it didn’t do you any good. Stalin liquidated all the officers who had adopted our concepts, beginning with Tukhachevsky.”—“I miss Tukhachevsky. Personally, I mean. Politically, I can’t judge Stalin. Maybe it was a mistake. The Bolsheviks make mistakes too. But the important thing is that we have the strength to purge our own ranks regularly, to eliminate those who deviate, who let themselves be corrupted. It’s a strength that you lack: your Party is rotting from within.”—“With us, too, there are problems. In the SD, we know it better than anyone, and we’re working to make the Party and the
Volk better.” He smiled softly: “In the end, our two systems aren’t so different. In principle at least.”—“That’s an odd statement, for a Communist.”—“Not really, if you think about it. What difference, at bottom, is there between National Socialism and socialism in a single country?”—“In that case, why are we locked together in such a death struggle?”—“You’re the ones who wanted it, not us. We were ready to make compromises. But it’s as once before, with the Christians and the Jews: instead of joining forces with the People of God with whom they had everything in common, to form a united front against the pagans, the Christians preferred, no doubt out of jealousy, to let themselves be paganized and to turn against the witnesses of truth, to their own misfortune. That was a huge waste.”—“I’m guessing that in your comparison, the Jews are you?”—“Of course. After all, you took everything from us, even if only to caricature it. And I’m not talking about symbols, like the red flag and the First of May. I’m talking about the concepts that are dearest to your Weltanschauung.”—“In what sense?” He began to count on his fingers, in the Russian way, folding them down one by one, starting with the little finger: “Where communism aims for a classless society, you preach the Volksgemeinschaft, which is basically strictly the same thing, reduced to your borders. Where Marx saw the proletariat as the bearer of truth, you decided that the so-called German race is a proletarian race, incarnation of Good and morality; consequently, for class struggle, you substituted the German proletarian war against capitalist governments. In economy too your ideas are just deformations of our values. I know your political economy well, since before the war I translated articles from your specialized newspapers for the Party. Where Marx posited a theory of value based on labor, your Hitler declares: Our German mark, which is not backed by gold, is worth more than gold. This rather obscure phrase was glossed by Goebbels’s right-hand man, Dietrich, who explained that National Socialism had understood that the best foundation for a currency is confidence in the productive forces of the nation and in the leadership of the State. The result is that for you, money becomes a fetish that represents the productive power of your country, hence a total aberration. Your relations with your great capitalists are grossly hypocritical, especially since your minister Speer’s reforms: your leaders continue to advocate free enterprise, but your industries are all subject to a plan and their profits are limited to six percent, with the State appropriating the rest in addition to the production.” He fell silent. “National Socialism also has its deviations,” I finally replied. I briefly explained Ohlendorf’s theses to him. “Yes,” he said, “I know his articles. But he too is mistaken. Because you didn’t imitate Marxism; you perverted it. The substitution of race for class, which leads to your proletarian racism, is absurd.”—“No more than your notion of the continual war of classes. Classes are a historical given; they appeared at a certain moment and will likewise disappear, harmoniously dissolving into the