I put my papers in order with the personnel office and returned to see Brandt. He had freed up one of the small, light-filled offices fitted out in the attic of the old hotel. I had an antechamber with a telephone and a work room with a sofa; a young secretary, Fräulein Praxa; the services of an orderly who assisted three offices; and of a pool of typists available for the whole floor. My driver was named Piontek, a Volksdeutscher from Upper Silesia who would also serve as my orderly whenever I went anywhere; the vehicle was at my disposal, but the Reichsführer insisted that any trip of a personal nature be itemized separately, and the cost of the gas taken from my salary. I found all this almost extravagant. “It’s nothing. You have to have the means to work correctly,” Brandt assured me with a little smile. I couldn’t meet the head of the Persönlicher Stab, Obergruppenführer Wolff; he was recovering from a serious illness, and Brandt had in effect taken over all his duties for months. He gave me a few additional instructions on what was expected of me: “First of all, it’s important that you familiarize yourself with the system and its problems. All reports addressed to the Reichsführer about this are archived here: have them brought up to you and look them over. Here is a list of the SS officers who head the various departments covered by your mandate. Make appointments and go talk with them, they’re expecting you and will talk frankly to you. When you’ve gotten a suitable overall impression, you can go on an inspection tour.” I consulted the list: they were mostly officers from the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (the SS Main Office for Economics and Administration) and from the RSHA. “The Inspectorate for Concentration Camps has been incorporated in the WVHA, isn’t that right?” I asked.—“Yes,” replied Brandt, “a little over a year ago. Look at your list, that’s the Amtsgruppe D now. You’ve been referred to Brigadeführer Glücks, who heads the directorate, and his deputy Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel—who between you and me will probably be more useful to you than his superior—along with some department heads. But the camps are only one facet of the problem; there are also the SS enterprises. Obergruppenführer Pohl, who heads the WVHA, will receive you to talk to you about that. Of course, if you want to meet other officers to go more deeply into certain points, please do: but see these people first. At the RSHA, Obersturmbannführer Eichmann will explain the system of special transports to you, and he’ll also present you with the current progress of the resolution of the Jewish question, and its future perspectives.—“May I ask you a question, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Of course.”—“If I understand correctly, I can have access to all documents concerning the definitive solution to the Jewish question?”—“Insofar as the resolution of the Jewish problem directly affects the maximum deployment of manual labor, yes. But I should point out that this will make you a Geheimnisträger, a bearer of secrets, to a far greater degree than your duties in Russia did. You are strictly forbidden to discuss this with anyone outside of the service, including the civil servants in the ministries or the Party functionaries with whom you will be in contact. The Reichsführer allows only one sentence for any violation of this rule: the death penalty.” He again pointed to the sheet he had given me: “You can talk freely with all the officers on this list; for their subordinates, check first.”—“Understood.”—“For your reports, the Reichsführer has issued Sprachregelungen, language regulations. Any report that doesn’t conform to them will be returned to you.”—“Zu Befehl, Obersturmbannführer.”
I plunged into my work as into an invigorating bath in one of Piatigorsk’s sulfurous springs. For days on end, sitting on the little sofa in my office, I devoured reports, correspondence, orders, and organizational tables, smoking a discreet cigarette from time to time at my window. Fräulein Praxa, a somewhat scatterbrained Sudeten-lander who would obviously have preferred spending her days chattering on the telephone, had to keep going up and down to the archives, and complained that her ankles were swelling. “Thank you,” I said without looking at her when she came into my room with a new bundle. “Put it down there and take these; I’m done with them, you can take them back.” She sighed and left, trying to make as much noise as possible. Frau Gutknecht quickly revealed herself to be an execrable cook, knowing three dishes at most, all with cabbage, which she often spoiled; so at night I got into the habit of dismissing Fräulein Praxa and going down to the mess for a bite, and then to keep working in my office till late at night, returning home only to sleep. So as not to keep Piontek waiting, I took the U-Bahn; at those late hours the C line was almost empty, and I liked observing the rare passengers, their faces worn out, exhausted; it took me out of my work a little. Many times I found myself in a car with the same man, a civil servant who like me must have been working late; he never noticed me, since he was always immersed in a book. This man, otherwise so unremarkable, read in a remarkable way: while his eyes ran over the lines, his lips moved as if he were saying the words, but without any sound that I could hear, not even a whisper; and I felt then something like Augustine’s surprise when he saw for the first time Ambrose of Milan reading silently, with his eyes only—a thing the provincial Augustine didn’t know was possible, since he could only read out loud, listening to himself.
In the course of my own reading, I came upon the report turned in to the Reichsführer at the end of March by Dr. Korherr, the glum statistician who had questioned our figures: his, I have to admit, horrified me. At the end of a statistical argument difficult to follow for a non-specialist, he concluded that by December 31, 1942, 1,873,549 Jews, not including Russia and Serbia, had died, been “transported to the East,” or had been “sluiced through the camps” (durchgeschleust, a curious term imposed, I imagine, by the Reichsführer’s Sprachregelungen). In all, he estimated in conclusion, German influence, since the Seizure of Power, had reduced the Jewish population of Europe by four million—a number including, if I understood correctly, prewar emigration. Even after what I had seen in Russia, this was impressive: we had long since moved beyond the primitive methods of the Einsatzgruppen. Through a whole series of orders and instructions, I was also able to form an idea of the difficult adaptation of the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps to the requirements of total war. Whereas the very formation of the WVHA and its absorption of the IKL, which were supposed to signal and implement a passage to maximal war production, dated back to March 1942, serious measures to reduce the mortality of the inmates and improve their output had not been promulgated until October; in December still, Glücks, the head of the IKL, was ordering doctors in the Konzentrationslager to improve sanitary conditions, lower mortality, and increase productivity, but once again without specifying any concrete measures. According to the statistics of the D II that I consulted, mortality, expressed in monthly percentages, had gone down considerably: the overall rate for all of the KLs had gone from losses of 10 percent in December to 2.8 percent in April. But this reduction was entirely relative, since the population of the camps continued to increase; the net losses hadn’t changed. A semiannual report of the D II indicated that from July to December 1942, 57,503 inmates out of 96,770, or 60 percent of the total, had died; since January, the losses continued to hover at around 6,000 or 7,000 a month. None of the measures taken seemed able to reduce them. What’s more, certain camps appeared clearly worse than others; the mortality rate in March at Auschwitz, a KL in Upper Silesia that I was hearing about for the first time, had been 15.4 percent. I began to see what the Reichsführer was driving at.