Then the soldiers in the cordon ordered the Jews to stand up and march. Blobel got into his car with Häfner and Zorn; von Radetzky invited me to come with him and also took Thomas. The crowd followed the Jews, there was an immense commotion. Everyone headed outside the city toward what people called the Pferdefriedhof, the horse cemetery: a trench had been dug there, with thick beams stacked up behind, to stop stray bullets. Obersturmführer Grafhorst, who commanded our company of Waffen-SS, was waiting with about twenty of his men. Blobel and Häfner inspected the trench, then we waited. I was thinking. I thought about my life, about what relationship there could be between this life that I had lived—an entirely ordinary life, the life of anyone, but also in some respects an extraordinary, an unusual life, although the unusual is also very ordinary—and what was happening here. There must have been a relationship, and it was a fact, there was one. True, I wasn’t taking part in the executions, I wasn’t commanding the firing squads; but that didn’t change much, since I often attended them, I helped prepare them and then I wrote the reports; what’s more, it was just by chance that I had been posted to the Stab rather than to the Teilkommandos. And if they had given me a Teilkommando, would I too have been able, like Nagel or Häfner, to organize the roundups, have the ditches dug, line up the condemned men, and shout “Fire!”? Yes, certainly. Ever since I was a child, I had been haunted by a passion for the absolute, for the overcoming of all limits; and now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of the Ukraine. I had always wanted my thinking to be radical; and now the State, the nation had also chosen the radical and the absolute; how, then, just at that moment, could I turn my back, say no, and at the end of the day prefer the comfort of bourgeois laws, the mediocre assurance of the social contract? That was obviously impossible. And if this radicalism was the radicalism of the abyss, and if the absolute turned out to be absolute evil, one still had to follow them to the end, with eyes wide open—of that at least I was utterly convinced. The crowd was arriving and filling the cemetery; I noticed some soldiers in bathing suits; there were also women, children. People were drinking beer and passing cigarettes around. I looked at a group of officers from headquarters: Oberst von Schuler was there, the IIa, along with several other officers. Grafhorst, our Kompanieführer, was positioning his men. Now we were using one rifle per Jew, a bullet in the chest at the level of the heart. Often that wasn’t enough to kill, and a man had to go down into the trench to finish them off; the screams resounded among the chatter and clamor of the crowd. Häfner, who was more or less officially commanding the action, was shouting himself hoarse. Between the salvos, men emerged from the crowd and asked the Waffen-SS to trade places with them; Grafhorst didn’t object to this, and his men handed their rifles over to the Landsers, who tried one or two shots before returning to join their comrades. Grafhorst’s Waffen-SS were quite young and, since the beginning of the execution, seemed disturbed. Häfner began bawling one of them out, who at each salvo handed his rifle over to a volunteer soldier and stood off to the side, white as a sheet. And then there were too many shots that missed and that was a problem. Häfner had the executions stopped and started to confer with Blobel and two officers from the Wehrmacht. I didn’t know them, but could see from the colors of their collar patches that one was a military judge and the other a doctor. Then Häfner went to talk things over with Grafhorst. I saw that Grafhorst was objecting to what Häfner was saying, but I couldn’t hear their words. Finally Grafhorst had a new batch of Jews brought over. They were positioned facing the trench, but the shooters from the Waffen-SS aimed at the head rather than the chest; the result was horrifying: the tops of their skulls flew into the air, the shooters got pieces of brain splashed in their faces. One of the volunteer shooters from the Wehrmacht was vomiting and his comrades were making fun of him. Grafhorst had flushed completely red and was cursing Häfner; then he turned toward Blobel and the debate started up again. Once again they changed methods: Blobel added some shooters and they shot two at a time into the neck, as in July; Häfner himself administered the deathblow when it was necessary.
The evening of that execution I accompanied Thomas to the Kasino. The officers from the AOK were discussing the day animatedly; they saluted us courteously, but seemed embarrassed, ill at ease. Thomas started up a conversation; I withdrew into an alcove to smoke alone. After the meal, the discussions resumed again. I noticed the military judge whom I had seen speaking with Blobel; he seemed particularly upset. I approached and joined the group. The officers, I understood, had no objection to the action itself, but to the presence of many soldiers from the Wehrmacht and their participation in the executions. “If we give them the order, that’s one thing,” the judge argued, “but as it is, it’s inadmissible. It’s a shame for the Wehrmacht.”—“So,” Thomas cut in, “the SS can shoot, but the Wehrmacht can’t even look?”—“It’s not that, it’s not that at all. It’s a question of order. Tasks like this are disagreeable for everyone. But only those who have received the order should participate in them. Otherwise, all military discipline will collapse.”—“I agree with Dr. Neumann,” Niemeyer, the Abwehroffizier, said. “It’s not a sporting event. The men were acting as if they were at the races.”—“Still, Herr Oberstleutnant,” I reminded him, “the AOK had agreed that this be publicly announced. You even lent us your PK.”—“I’m not criticizing the SS at all, which is carrying out some very difficult work,” Niemeyer replied, a bit on the defensive. “We did discuss it beforehand and we came to an agreement that this would be a good example for the civilian population, that it was useful for them to see with their own eyes how we are smashing the power of the Jews and the Bolsheviks. But things went a little too far here. Your men shouldn’t have been handing their weapons over to ours.”—“Your men,” Thomas dryly retorted, “shouldn’t have been asking for them.”—“At the very least,” barked Neumann, the judge, “we should raise the question with the Generalfeldmarschall.”
The result of all this was a typical order from Reichenau: referring to our necessary executions of criminals, Bolsheviks, and essentially Jewish elements, he forbade soldiers in the Sixth Army, without orders from a superior officer, from attending, photographing, or participating in the actions. In itself that would probably not have changed much, but Rasch ordered us to conduct the actions outside the towns, and to set a cordon on the perimeter to prevent the presence of spectators. Discretion, it seemed, would henceforth be the rule of the day. But the desire to see these things was also human. Leafing through my Plato, I had found the passage of The Republic that my reaction in front of the corpses in the Lutsk fortress had brought to mind: Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed, near the executioner, some dead bodies lying on the ground; and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time loathing the thought he tried to turn away. For a time he struggled with himself, and covered his eyes, till at length, overcome by the desire, he forced his eyes wide open with his fingers, and running up to the bodies, exclaimed, “There! you devils! gaze your fill at the beautiful spectacle!” To tell the truth, the soldiers rarely seemed to feel Leontius’s anguish, only his desire, and it must have been this that was disturbing the hierarchy, the idea that the men could take pleasure in these actions. Still, everyone who participated in them took some form of pleasure in them—that seemed obvious to me. Some, visibly, enjoyed the act itself, but these could be regarded as sick men, and it was right to ferret them out and give them other tasks, even punish them if they overstepped the bounds. As for the others, whether the actions repelled them or left them indifferent, they carried them out from a sense of duty and obligation, and thus drew pleasure from their devotion, from their ability to carry out such a difficult task despite their disgust and apprehension: “But I take no pleasure in killing,” they often said, finding their pleasure, then, in their rigor and their righteousness. The hierarchy, obviously, had to consider these problems as a whole; the solutions could necessarily only be approximate or rough.