Sprachregelungen already absolutely strict, the rule of tact perhaps, that tact he spoke of in his first speech, evoking it in the context of the execution of Röhm and his SA comrades, a kind of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, he said, a consequence of this tact due to which we have never spoken about it among ourselves, but perhaps it was also a matter of something other than the question of that tact and of those rules, and that’s when I began to understand, I think, the profound reason for these declarations, and also why the dignitaries sighed and sweated so much, for they too, like me, were beginning to understand, to understand that it wasn’t by chance that the Reichsführer, in the beginning of the fifth year of the war, was thus openly referring to the destruction of the Jews before them, without euphemisms, without winks, with simple and brutal words like kill—exterminate, he said, meaning kill or order to have killed— that, for once, the Reichsführer spoke to them quite openly about this question…to tell you how it was, no, that certainly wasn’t by chance, and if he allowed himself to do it, then the Führer knew about it, and worse, the Führer had wanted it, hence their anguish, the Reichsführer was speaking necessarily here in the name of the Führer, and he was saying this, these words that you weren’t supposed to say, and he was recording them, on a disk or a tape, it doesn’t matter, and he was carefully taking note of those present and those absent—among the SS leaders, the only ones who didn’t attend the October 4 speech were Kaltenbrunner, who was sick with phlebitis, Daluege, who had a serious heart disease and was on leave for a year or two, Wolff, just recently appointed HSSPF for Italy and plenipotentiary to Mussolini, and Globocnik, who had just, although I didn’t know it yet and heard about it only after Posen, suddenly been transferred from his little Lublin kingdom to his native town of Trieste, as SSPF for Istria and Dalmatia, under Wolff’s orders in fact, accompanied—but this I wouldn’t know till even later on—by almost the entire personnel of Einsatz Reinhard, T-4 included, everything was being shut down, Auschwitz would henceforth be enough, and the beautiful Adriatic coast would make a fine dumping ground for all these people we had no further use for, even Blobel would come join them a little later on, let them go get killed by Tito’s partisans, that would spare us some housekeeping; and as to the Party dignitaries, note was also taken of the missing heads, but I never saw the list—all that, then, the Reichsführer was doing deliberately, on instructions, and for that there could only have been one reason, hence the perceptible emotion of the listeners, who grasped this reason very welclass="underline" it was so that none of them could, later on, say that he didn’t know, couldn’t try to make people think, in case of defeat, that he was innocent of the worst, couldn’t think he might someday be able to get off scot-free; it was in order to drag them in, and they understood it very well, hence their distress. The Moscow Conference, at the end of which the Allies swore to pursue the “war criminals” to the furthest corners of the earth, hadn’t yet taken place, that would come a few weeks later, before the end of that month of October 1943, but already, especially since summer, the BBC was conducting an intensive propaganda campaign on this theme, naming names, and with a certain precision, for it sometimes quoted officers and even noncoms from specific KLs, it was very well informed, and the Staatspolizei certainly wondered how, and this, it is entirely correct to note, provoked a certain nervousness among the interested parties, all the more so since the news from the front wasn’t good, to hold on to Italy we had had to strip the Eastern Front, and there wasn’t much chance we could remain on the Donets, we had already lost Briansk, Smolensk, Poltava, and Kremenchug, the Crimea was threatened, in short, anyone could see that things were going badly, and certainly there must have been many who were asking themselves questions about the future, the future of Germany in general of course but their own in particular too, hence a certain effectiveness of this English propaganda, which demoralized not only some who were named, but also others not yet named, by encouraging them to think that the end of the Reich might not automatically mean their own end, and thus rendering the specter of defeat a tiny bit less inconceivable, hence, one can well understand this, when it came to the cadres of the Party, the SS, and the Wehrmacht, the necessity to make them understand that a potential defeat would concern them too, personally, so as to remotivate them a little, that the so-called crimes of some would in the eyes of the Allies be the crimes of all, in the upper echelons at least, that all the boats, or bridges, if you like, were burning, that no return to the past was possible, and that the only salvation was victory. And indeed victory would have settled everything, for if we had won, imagine it for an instant, if Germany had crushed the Reds and destroyed the Soviet Union, there would have been no more question of crimes, or rather, yes, but of Bolshevik crimes, duly documented thanks to the archives seized (the archives of the NKVD in Smolensk, evacuated to Germany and recovered at the end of the war by the Americans, played precisely this role, when the time finally came when they had to explain almost overnight to the good democratic voters why the evil monsters of the day before now had to serve as a bulwark against the heroic allies of the day before, now revealed as even worse monsters), we might even perhaps have conducted full-blown trials, why not, have prosecuted the Bolshevik leaders, imagine that, doing things seriously as the Anglo-Americans later sought to (Stalin, we know, couldn’t have cared less about these trials, he took them for what they were, a hypocrisy, and pointless to boot), and then everyone, with the British and the Americans leading the way, would have made do with us, the diplomats would have adjusted to the new realities, and despite the inevitable squalling of the New York Jews, the European Jews, whom in any case no one would have missed, would have been written off as a loss, like all the other dead, the Gypsies, the Poles, what do I know, the grass grows thick on the graves of the defeated, and no one holds the victor to account, I’m not saying this to try to justify us, no, it’s the simple, frightening truth, look at Roosevelt, that good man, with his dear friend Uncle Joe, how many millions had Stalin already killed, in 1941, or even before 1939, many more than we did, that’s certain, and even if you drew up a full balance sheet he might well remain ahead of us, between collectivization, de-kulakization, the great purges and the deportations of peoples in 1943 and 1944, and all that, everyone knew it at the time, everyone knew more or less what was happening in Russia during the 1930s, Roosevelt knew it too, that friend of mankind, but that never prevented him from praising Stalin’s loyalty and humanity, despite the repeated warnings of Churchill, who was a little less naïve from a certain point of view, a little less realistic, from another, and so if we Germans had in fact won this war, it would certainly have been the same, little by little, the stubborn ones who kept calling us the enemies of mankind would have fallen silent one by one, for lack of an audience, and the diplomats would have smoothed things out, since after all,