Voss had left too, suddenly transferred to the AOK of Generaloberst von Kleist, whose Panzers had already passed the Ukrainian border and were charging toward Millerovo. I felt a little lonely. Bierkamp was absorbed in the reorganization of the Kommandos, some of which were to be dissolved in order to form the permanent structures of the SP and the SD in the Crimea; Seibert was getting ready for his own departure. With summer, the interior of the Crimea had become stifling, and I continued to take advantage of the beaches as much as possible. I went to visit Sebastopol, where one of our Kommandos had set to work: around the long harbor of the southern bay stretched a field of still-smoking ruins, haunted by exhausted and shocked civilians who were already being evacuated. Haggard, filthy kids ran between the soldier’s legs begging for bread; the Romanians especially responded by cuffing them or kicking their backsides. I went down to visit the underground bunkers of the harbor, where the Red Army had set up weapons and ammunition factories; most of them had been looted, or burned out by flame-throwers; sometimes too, during the final battle, Commissars, entrenched there or in caves under the cliffs, had blown themselves up with their men and the civilians they were sheltering, along with German soldiers who had advanced too far. But all the Soviet officers and high-ranking functionaries had been evacuated by submarine before the city fell; we had captured only soldiers and underlings. The bare mountaintops overlooking the immense northern bay, around the city, were covered with ruined fortifications; the steel housings of their 30.5-centimeter artillery had been crushed by our 80-centimeter shells, fired from giant howitzers mounted on rails; and their long twisted gun barrels lay on their sides, or else stood aimed straight at the sky. In Simferopol, AOK 11 was packing up; von Manstein, promoted to Generalfeldmarschall, was leaving with his army to finish off Leningrad. Of Stalingrad, of course, no one spoke at that time: it was still a secondary objective.
In the beginning of August, the Einsatzgruppe went on the march. Our forces, reorganized into two Army Groups B and A, had just retaken Rostov after bitter street fighting, and the Panzers, having crossed the Don, were advancing into the Kuban Steppe. Bierkamp appointed me to the Vorkommando of the Gruppenstab and sent us, by Melitopol and then Rostov, to catch up with the First Panzer Army. Our little convoy quickly crossed the isthmus and the immense Trench of the Tatars, transformed by the Soviets into an antitank ditch, then veered off after Perekop to begin crossing the Nogai Steppe. The heat was terrible, I sweated profusely, the dust stuck to my face like a gray mask; but at dawn, soon after we left, subtle and magnificent colors altered the sky, slowly turning to blue, and I wasn’t unhappy. Our guide, a Tatar, regularly made the vehicles stop so he could pray; I let the other officers grumble and got out to stretch my legs and smoke. On both sides of the road, the rivers and streams were dry, and traced a network of ravined
balki, carved deep into the steppe. We could see neither trees nor hills around; only the regularly spaced poles of the Anglo-Iranian telegraph line, built at the beginning of the century by Siemens, punctuated this dismal expanse. The well water was salty, the coffee tasted salty, the soup seemed to be full of salt; several officers, who had gorged on unripe melons, suffered bouts of diarrhea, which slowed down our march even more. After Mariupol we followed a bad coastal road to Taganrog and then Rostov. Hauptsturmführer Remmer, an officer from the Staatspolizei who was in charge of the Vorkommando, twice gave the order to stop the convoy, near immense beaches of pebbles and yellowing grass, so the men could rush into the water; sprawled on the burning pebbles, we dried in a few minutes; already it was time to get dressed and leave. In Rostov, our column was welcomed by Sturmbannführer Dr. Christmann, who was replacing Seetzen as the head of Sonderkommando 10a. He had just finished executing the Jewish population, in a ravine known as the Snakes, on the other side of the Don; he had also sent a Vorkommando to Krasnodar, which had fallen two days before, and where the Fifth Army Corps had seized a mountain of Soviet documents. I asked him to have them analyzed as quickly as possible and to send me any information concerning the functionaries and members of the Party, to complete the little confidential handbook that Seibert, in Simferopol, had entrusted to me for his replacement; it contained, printed in tiny typeface on extra-thin paper, the names, addresses, and often the telephone numbers of active Communists or of non-Party intellectuals, of scholars, teachers, writers, and well-known journalists, of functionaries, directors of State companies and kolkhozes or sovkhozes, for the entire region of Kuban-Caucasus; there were even lists of friends and family relations, physical descriptions, and some photographs. Christmann also informed us of the advance of the Kommandos: Sk 11, still under the command of Dr. Braune, a close friend of Ohlendorf’s, had just entered Maikop with the Thirteenth Panzer Division; Persterer, with his Sk 10b, was still waiting in Taman, but a Vorkommando from Ek 12 was already in Voroshilovsk, where the Gruppenstab was supposed to be based until Groznyi was taken; Christmann himself was getting ready, according to our preestablished plan, to move his Hauptkommando to Krasnodar. I saw almost nothing of Rostov; Remmer wanted to advance, and gave the order for departure as soon as the meal was over. After the Don, immense, spanned by one of the Engineer Corps’ floating pontoons, stretched kilometers of fields of ripe corn, which little by little died out in the vast desert steppe of the Kuban; farther on, to the east, ran the long irregular line of lakes and swamps, interrupted by reservoirs maintained by colossal dams of the Manych River, which for some geographers marks the borderline between Europe and Asia. The leading columns of the First Panzer Army, which were advancing in motorized squares with the tanks surrounding the trucks and artillery, could be seen fifty kilometers away: immense pillars of dust in the blue sky, followed by the lazy curtain of black smoke coming from the burned villages. In their wake, we met only the odd Rollbahn convoy or some reinforcements. In Rostov, Christmann had shown us a copy of von Kleist’s now-famous dispatch: In front of me, no enemies; behind me, no reserves. And the emptiness of this endless steppe was quite enough to terrify anyone. We progressed with difficulty: the tanks had transformed the roads into seas of fine sand; our vehicles often got stuck in it and, when we set foot outside, we sometimes sank up to our knees, as if it were mud. Finally, before Tikhoretsk, appeared the first fields of sunflowers, yellow expanses turned toward the sky, presaging water. Then began the paradise of the Kuban Cossacks. The road now passed through fields of corn, wheat, millet, barley, tobacco, and melons; there were also stretches of thistles tall as horses, crowned with pink and purple; and beyond all that a vast sky, pale and soft, cloudless. The Cossack villages were rich; each isba had its plum trees, its grape vines, a farmyard, a few pigs. When we stopped to eat we were warmly welcomed, we were brought fresh bread, omelettes, grilled pork chops, green onions, and cold water from the wells. Then came Krasnodar, where we found Lothar Heimbach, the Vorkommandoführer. Remmer ordered a three-day halt, to discuss and rapidly review the captured documents, which Christmann would have translated after he arrived. Dr. Braune also came up from Maikop for our meetings. After that our Vorkommando headed for Voroshilovsk.