Blobel put an end to the Aktion a few days after the New Year. They had kept several thousand Jews in the KhTZ for forced labor in the city; they would be shot later on. We had just learned that Blobel was going to be replaced. He had known it for weeks, but hadn’t said anything. It was high time in any case for him to leave. Ever since he had arrived in Kharkov, he had become a nervous wreck, in just as bad a state, almost, as in Lutsk: one moment he’d gather us together and wax enthusiastic about the recent cumulative totals of the Sonderkommando, and the next he’d shout himself hoarse with incoherent rage over some trifle, a remark taken the wrong way. One day, in the beginning of January, I went into his office to bring him a report from Woytinek. Without returning my salute, he threw a sheet of paper at me: “Look at this piece of shit.” He was drunk, white with anger. I took the paper: it was an order from General von Manstein, the commander of the Eleventh Army, in the Crimea. “Your boss Ohlendorf sent me that. Read it, read it. You see, there, on the bottom? It is dishonorable for officers to be present at the executions of Jews. Dishonorable! Those assholes. As if what they were doing was so honorable…as if they were treating their POWs with honor!…I was in the Great War. During the Great War we took care of our prisoners, we fed them, we didn’t let them die of starvation like animals.” A bottle of schnapps stood on the table; he poured himself a glassful, which he swallowed in one gulp. I was still standing facing his desk, not saying anything. “As if we all didn’t take our orders from the same source…. The bastards. They want to keep their hands clean, those little Wehrmacht shits. They want to leave the dirty work to us.” He raised his head, his face flushing bright red. “The dogs. They want to be able to say, afterward: ‘Oh no, the atrocities, that wasn’t us. That was them, those guys, those SS killers. We had nothing to do with all that. We fought like soldiers, with honor.’ But who the hell captured all these cities we’re cleansing? Whose ass are we protecting when we eliminate partisans and Jews and all the scum? You think they’re complaining? They’re begging us to do it!” He was shouting so much that he was spluttering. “That prick Manstein, that hypocrite, that half-yid who teaches his dog to raise its paw when it hears ‘Heil Hitler,’ and who hangs a sign behind his desk—Ohlendorf told me—that says
What would the Führer say about this? Well, then, that’s just it, what would he say, our Führer? What would he say, when AOK Eleven asks its Einsatzgruppe to liquidate all the Jews of Simferopol before Christmas, so the officers can have a judenfrei holiday? And then they spew this garbage about the honor of the Wehrmacht? The swine. Who signed the Kommissarbefehl? Who signed the Jurisdiction order? Who? The Reichsführer maybe?” He paused to catch his breath and down another glassful; he swallowed the wrong way, choked, coughed. “And if things go sour, they’ll put all the blame on us. All of it. They’ll come out all clean, all elegant, waving about this kind of toilet paper”—he had torn the sheet from my hands and was shaking it in the air—“and saying: ‘No, we’re not the ones who killed the Jews, the Commissars, the Gypsies, we can prove it, see, we never agreed, it’s all the fault of the Führer and the SS…’” His voice turned into a whine. “Hell, even if we win they’ll screw us. Because, listen to me, Aue, listen to me carefully”—he was almost whispering, now, his voice was hoarse—“someday all of this will come out. All of it. Too many people know, too many witnesses. And when it does come out, whether we’ve won or lost the war, there’ll be hell to pay. Scapegoats needed. Heads will have to roll. And it will be our heads they’ll serve up to the crowd while all the Prusso-yids like von Manstein, all the von Rundstedts and von Brauchitsches and von Kluges, will return to their comfortable von estates and write their von memoirs, patting each other on the back for having been such decent and honorable von soldiers. And we’ll end up in the trash. They’ll pull another thirtieth of June on us, except this time the suckers will be the SS. The bastards.” He was spluttering all over his papers. “The bastards, the bastards. Our heads on a platter, and them with their little white hands all clean and elegant, well manicured, not one drop of blood. As if not a single one of them had ever signed an execution order. As if not a single one of them had ever stretched out his arm shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ when people talked to them about killing Jews.” He leaped out of his chair and stood at attention, thrusting out his chest, his arm raised almost upright, and roared: “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!” He sat back down hard and began muttering. “The bastards. The honorable little bastards. If only we could shoot them too. Not Reichenau, he’s a muzhik, but the others, all the others.” He was growing more and more incoherent. Finally he fell silent. I took advantage of that quickly to hand him Woytinek’s report and excuse myself. He started shouting again as soon as I got through the door but I didn’t stop.