It rained for three days straight. The sanatoriums were filling up with wounded, brought from Malgobek and Sagopchi, where our renewed offensive on Groznyi was being run into the ground by the fierce resistance. Korsemann came to distribute medals to the Finnish volunteers of the Wiking, handsome, somewhat distraught blond boys decimated by the gunfire encountered in the Zhuruk Valley, below Nizhni Kurp. The new military administration of the Caucasus was being set in place. At the beginning of October, by decree of Generalquartiermeister Wagner, six Cossack raions, with 160,000 inhabitants, were accorded the new status of “self-government”; the Karachai autonomy would officially be announced during a big celebration in Kislovodsk. With the other leading officers of the SS in the region I was again summoned to Voroshilovsk by Korsemann and Bierkamp. Korsemann was worried about the limitation of SS police power in the self-governed districts, but wanted to pursue a reinforced policy of cooperation with the Wehrmacht. Bierkamp was furious; he called the Ostpolitiker “czarists” and “Baltic barons”: “This famous Ostpolitik is nothing but a resurrection of the spirit of Tauroggen,” he protested. In private, Leetsch gave me to understand in veiled words that Bierkamp was worried stiff because of the number of executions carried out by the Kommandos, which didn’t exceed a few dozen a week: the Jews in the occupied regions had all been liquidated, aside from a few artisans preserved by the Wehrmacht to serve as leatherworkers and tailors; we didn’t catch many partisans or Communists; as for the national minorities and the Cossacks, the majority of the population, they were now almost untouchable. I found Bierkamp’s state of mind quite narrow, but I could understand it: in Berlin, the effectiveness of an Einsatzgruppe was judged based on its tallies, and a lessening of activity could be interpreted as a lack of energy on the part of the Kommandant. But the Group wasn’t remaining inactive. In Elista, at the confines of the Kalmuk Steppe, Sk Astrakhan was being formed ahead of the fall of that city; in the region of Krasnodar, having carried out all the other priority tasks, Sk 10a was liquidating the asylums for the retarded, the hydrocephalics, and the insane, mostly using a gas truck. In Maikop, the Seventeenth Army was relaunching its offensive toward Tuapse, and Sk 11 was taking part in the repression of an intense guerilla warfare in the mountains, in very rough terrain made even more difficult by the persistent rain. On October 10, I celebrated my birthday at the restaurant with Voss, but without telling him about it; the next day, we went with most of the AOK to Kislovodsk to celebrate the Uraza Bairam, the breaking of the fast that ends the month of Ramadan. This was a kind of triumph. In a large field outside the city, the imam of the Karachai, a wrinkled old man with a firm, clear voice, led a long collective prayer; facing the nearby hills, hundreds of caps, skullcaps, felt or fur hats, in dense rows, bowed to the ground and stood up in time to his threnody. Afterward, on a platform decorated with German and Muslim flags, Köstring and Bräutigam, their voices amplified by a PK loudspeaker, proclaimed the establishment of the Autonomous Karachai District. Cheers and gunshots punctuated each phrase. Voss, his hands behind his back, translated Bräutigam’s speech; Köstring read his directly in Russian, and was then thrown into the air, several times, by young enthusiasts. Bräutigam had presented the qadi Bairamukov, an anti-Soviet peasant, as the new head of the district: the old man, wearing a
cherkesska and a beshmet, with an enormous white woollen papakha on his head, solemnly thanked Germany for having delivered the Karachai from the Russian yoke. A young child led a superb white Kabarda horse up to the platform, its back covered in a bright-colored Daghestani sumak. The horse snorted, the old man explained that it was a present from the Karachai people to the leader of the Germans, Adolf Hitler; Köstring thanked him and assured him the horse would be conveyed to the Führer, in Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. Then some young natives in traditional garb carried Köstring and Bräutigam on their shoulders to the cheers of the men, the ululations of the women, and the redoubled salvos of the rifles. Voss, red with pleasure, looked on all this with delight. We followed the crowd: at the end of the field, a small army of women were loading foodstuffs onto long tables beneath some awnings. Incredible quantities of lamb, which they served with broth, were simmering in large cast-iron pots; there was also boiled chicken, wild garlic, caviar, and manti, a kind of Caucasian ravioli; the Karachai women, many of them beautiful and laughing, kept pushing more dishes in front of the guests; the young men stayed packed together at the side, whispering busily, while their seated fathers ate. Köstring and Bräutigam were sitting beneath a canopy with the elders, in front of the Kabarda horse, which they seemed to have forgotten and which, dragging its leash, was sniffing at the dishes to the laughter of the spectators. Some mountain musicians were singing long laments accompanied by small high-pitched stringed instruments; later on, they were joined by percussionists and the music became frantic, frenzied; a large circle formed and the young men, led by a master of ceremonies, danced the lesghinka, noble, splendid, virile, then some other dances with knives, of an astounding virtuosity. No alcohol was served, but most of the German guests, heated up by the meats and the dances, seemed drunk, bright-red, sweating, overexcited. The Karachai saluted the best dance movements with gunshots and that contributed even more to the frenzy. My heart was beating wildly; along with Voss, I tapped with my feet and clapped my hands, shouted like a madman in the circle of spectators. At nightfall they brought torches and it went on; when you felt too tired, you went over to the tables to drink some tea and eat a little. “The Ostpolitiker have certainly pulled it off!” I shouted to Voss. “This would convince anyone.”