I returned to Berlin and made an appointment with my old acquaintance Adolf Eichmann. He came to welcome me in person in the vast main lobby of his department on the Kurfürstenstrasse, walking in short strides in his heavy rider’s boots on the polished marble slabs and warmly congratulating me on my promotion. “You too,” I congratulated him in turn, “you were promoted. In Kiev, you were still a Sturmbannführer.”—“Yes,” he said with satisfaction, “that’s true, but you, in the meantime, got two stripes…Come in, come in.” Despite his superior rank, I found him curiously attentive, affable; perhaps the fact that I had come on behalf of the Reichsführer impressed him. In his office, he dropped into his chair and crossed his legs, negligently dropped his cap on a pile of files, took off his large glasses, and began to clean them with a handkerchief while calling out to his secretary: “Frau Werlmann! Some coffee, please.” I observed this little game with amusement: Eichmann had gained self-confidence, since Kiev. He raised his glasses to the window, inspected them meticulously, rubbed them some more, put them back on. He took a box out from under a folder and offered me a Dutch cigarette. Lighter in hand, he gesticulated at my chest: “You’ve received a lot of decorations, I congratulate you again. That’s the advantage of being at the front. Here, in the rear, we have no opportunity to win decorations. My Amtschef managed to get me the Iron Cross, but that was really just so I’d have something. I volunteered for the Einsatzgruppen, did you know that? But C (that was how Heydrich, wanting to give himself an English touch, had himself called by his coterie) ordered me to stay. You’re indispensable to me, he said. Zu Befehl, I said, but in any case I didn’t have a choice.”—“You have a good position, though. Your Referat is one of the most important in the Staatspolizei.”—“Yes, but as far as advancement goes, I’m completely blocked. A Referat is headed by a Regierungsrat or an Oberregierungsrat or an equivalent SS rank. So in principle, in this position, I can’t go beyond Obersturmbannführer. I complained to my Amtschef: he told me I deserved to be promoted, but that he didn’t want to stir up problems with his other department heads.” He made a pinched face that deformed his lips. His balding head gleamed under the overhead lamp, turned on despite the daylight. A no-longer-young secretary came in with a tray and two steaming cups, which she placed in front of us. “Milk? Sugar?” Eichmann asked. I shook my head and smelled the cup: it was real coffee. While I was blowing on it Eichmann asked me out of the blue: “Were you decorated for the
Einsatzaktion?” His complaining was beginning to annoy me; I wanted to get to the point of my visit. “No,” I replied. “I was posted in Stalingrad, afterward.” Eichmann’s face darkened and he took off his glasses in an abrupt gesture. “Ach so,” he said, straightening. “You were in Stalingrad. My brother Helmut was killed there.”—“I’m sorry. All my condolences. Was he your older brother?”—“No, the younger one. He was thirty-three. Our mother still hasn’t gotten over it. He fell as a hero, doing his duty for Germany. I’m sorry,” he added ceremoniously, “that I haven’t had that chance myself.” I seized the opening: “Yes, but Germany is asking you for other sacrifices.” He put his glasses back on and drank a little coffee. Then he put out his cigarette in an ashtray: “You’re right. A soldier doesn’t choose his post. What can I do for you, then? If I understood the letter from Obersturmbannführer Brandt correctly, you’re in charge of studying the Arbeitseinsatz, is that right? I don’t quite see what that has to do with my departments.” I pulled a few sheets of paper from my imitation-leather briefcase. (I felt a disagreeable sensation every time I used this briefcase, but I hadn’t been able to find anything else, because of the restrictions. I had asked Thomas’s advice, but he had laughed in my face: “I wanted a leather office set, you know, with a writing pad and a penholder. I wrote to a friend in Kiev, a guy who was in the Group and who stayed on with the BdS, to ask him if he could have one made for me. He answered that ever since we had killed all the Jews, you couldn’t even get a pair of boots resoled in the Ukraine.”) Eichmann was observing me, knitting his brows. “The Jews you are in charge of are today one of the main pools the Arbeitseinsatz can draw on to renew its workforce,” I explained. “Aside from them, there’s really nothing else but foreign workers sentenced for petty crimes, and political deportees from the countries under our control. All the other possible sources, the war prisoners or the criminals transferred by the Ministry of Justice, are mostly exhausted. What I would like is to have an overall view of how your operations function, and especially of your prospects for the future.” While he was listening to me, a curious tic deformed the left corner of his mouth; I had the impression that he was chewing his tongue. He leaned back again in his chair, his long veined hands joined in a triangle, index fingers taut: “Fine, fine. I’ll explain things to you. As you know, in every country subject to the Endlösung, there is a representative from my Referat, subordinate either to the BdS, if it’s an occupied country, or to the embassy’s police attaché, if it’s an allied country. I should point out right away that the USSR doesn’t come into my domain; as for my representative in the Generalgouvernement, he has an entirely minor role.”—“How is that?”—“The Jewish question, in the GG, is the responsibility of the SSPF in Lublin, Gruppenführer Globocnik, who reports directly to the Reichsführer. So the Staatspolizei isn’t concerned, in general.” He pinched his lips: “Except for a few exceptions that still have to be settled, the Reich itself can be considered judenrein. As to the other countries, everything depends on the degree of understanding about the resolution of the Jewish question shown by the national authorities. Because of that, in a way every country poses a special case that I can explain to you.” As soon as he began to talk about his work, I noticed, his already curious mixture of Austrian accent and Berlin slang was complicated by a particularly muddled bureaucratic syntax. He spoke calmly and clearly, choosing his words, but it was sometimes hard for me to follow his phrases. He himself seemed to get a little lost in them. “Take the example of France, where we have so to speak only begun to work last summer once the French authorities, guided by our specialist and also by the advice and wishes of the Auswärtiges Amt, um, if you like, had agreed to cooperate and especially when the Reichsbahn agreed to provide us with the necessary transportation. We were thus able to begin, and in the beginning it even had some success, since the French showed a lot of understanding, and also thanks to the assistance of the French police, without which we could have done nothing, of course, since we don’t have the resources, and the