My bouts of nausea and vomiting caught me at irregular intervals; and harrowing dreams began to deepen my unease. Often they remained black and opaque; morning erased all images and left only the weight of them. But sometimes too this darkness was ripped apart all of a sudden, revealing visions blinding in their clarity and horror. Two or three nights after I returned from Nalchik, I ill-advisedly opened one of these doors: Voss, in a dark, empty room, was on all fours, his rear end bare, and liquid shit was streaming from his anus. Worried, I seized some paper, some pages from Izvestia, and tried to sponge up this brown liquid, which was becoming increasingly darker and thicker. I tried to keep my hands clean, but it was impossible, the almost black pitch covered the pages and my fingers, then my whole hand. Sick with disgust, I ran to wash my hands in a bathtub nearby; but during this time it was still streaming. Waking up, I tried to understand these frightful images; but I must not have been completely awake, since my thoughts, which seemed to me at the time perfectly lucid, remained as cloudy as the meaning of the image itself: it seemed to me in fact from certain signs that these people represented others, that the man on all fours must have been me, and the one who was wiping him, my father. And what could the articles from Izvestia have been about? Could there have been a piece there that might have settled the Tat question once and for all? The mail from VII B 1, sent by a certain Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Füsslein, did nothing to resolve my pessimism; the zealous Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat, in fact, had simply contented himself with culling excerpts from The Jewish Encyclopedia. There were some very erudite things there, but their contradictory opinions, alas, led to no conclusion. Thus I learned that the Jews of the Caucasus were mentioned for the first time by Benjamin of Tudela, who had traveled to these lands around 1170, and Pethahiah of Ratisbon, who asserted that they were of Persian origin and had come to the Caucasus around the twelfth century. Willem van Ruysbroeck, in 1254, had found a large Jewish population east of the massif, in the region of Astrakhan. But a Georgian text of 314 mentioned Hebrew-speaking Jews who had adopted the old Iranian language (“Parsee” or “Tat”) after the occupation of the Transcaucasus by the Persians, mixing it with Hebrew and local languages. The Jews of Georgia, however, called, according to Koch, Huria (perhaps derived from Iberia), speak not Tat but a Kartvelian dialect. As for Daghestan, according to the Derbent-Nameh, the Arabs had already found Jews there during their conquest, in the eighth century. Contemporary researchers only complicated the affair. There was reason to despair; I resolved to send all of it to Bierkamp and Leetsch without commentary, insisting that a specialist be summoned as soon as possible.
The snow stopped for a few days, then started up again. In the mess, the officers spoke in low, worried voices: Rommel had been beaten by the English at El-Alamein, then, a few days later, the English and Americans had landed in North Africa; our forces had just occupied the Free Zone in France, in retaliation; but that had pushed the Vichy troops in Africa to go over to the Allies. “If only things were going better here,” was von Gilsa’s comment. But before Ordzhonikidze our divisions had gone on the defensive; the line ran from south of Chegem and Nalchik to Chikola and Gizel, then followed the Terek to the north of Malgobek; and soon, a Soviet counterattack recaptured Gizel. Then came the real blow. I didn’t learn about it right away, since the officers from the Abwehr blocked my access to the map room and refused to give me any details. “I’m sorry,” Reuter said. “Your Kommandant will have to discuss it with the OKHG.” At the end of the day I managed to learn that the Soviets had launched a counteroffensive on the Stalingrad front; but I couldn’t find out where or how large it was: the officers from the AOK, their faces somber and tense, obstinately refused to talk to me. Leetsch, on the telephone, told me that the OKHG was reacting in the same way; the Gruppenstab didn’t know any more than I did, and asked me to pass on any new information immediately. This attitude persisted the next day, and I got angry with Reuter, who retorted curtly that the AOK had no obligation to inform the SS about operations under way outside of its own area of responsibility. But already the rumors were spreading, the officers could no longer control the Latrinenparolen; I fell back on the drivers, dispatch riders, and noncoms and, in a few hours, by cross-checking the various tidbits, managed to form some idea of the extent of the danger. I called back Leetsch, who seemed to have the same information; but as to what the Wehrmacht’s reaction would be, no one could say. The two Romanian fronts, west of Stalingrad on the Don and to the south in the Kalmuk Steppe, were collapsing, and the Reds were evidently aiming to take the Sixth Army from the rear. Where had they found the necessary troops? I couldn’t manage to find out where they were, the situation was evolving too quickly even for the cooks to follow, but it seemed urgent that the Sixth Army begin a retreat to keep from being surrounded; yet the Sixth Army wasn’t moving. On November 21, Generaloberst von Kleist was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and named Commander in Chief of Army Group A: the Führer must have been feeling overwhelmed. Generaloberst von Mackensen took Kleist’s place at the head of the First Panzer Army. Von Gilsa passed me this news officially; he seemed desperate, and hinted to me that the situation was becoming catastrophic. The next day, a Sunday, the two Soviet pincer movements met up at Kalach-on-the-Don, and the Sixth Army as well as part of the Fourth Panzer Army were surrounded. Rumors spoke of a debacle, of massive losses, of chaos; but every seemingly precise piece of information contradicted the previous one. By the end of the day, finally, Reuter took me to von Gilsa, who gave me a quick summary on the maps. “The decision not to try to evacuate the Sixth Army was made by the Führer himself,” he told me. The surrounded divisions now formed a giant Kessel, a “cauldron” as they said, cut off from our lines, but stretching from Stalingrad through the steppe almost to the Don. The situation was worrisome, but the rumors were exaggerating things terribly; the German forces had lost few men or materiel and kept their cohesion; what’s more, the experience of Demiansk, the previous year, showed that a Kessel, if supplied by air, could hold out indefinitely. “A breakthrough operation will soon be launched,” he concluded. A meeting called the next day by Bierkamp confirmed this optimistic interpretation: Reichsmarschall Göring, Korsemann announced, had given his word to the Führer that the Luftwaffe was able to supply the Sixth Army; General Paulus had joined his staff in Gumrak to direct operations from within the Kessel; and Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein was being recalled from Vitebsk to form a new Army Group Don, tasked with relieving the surrounded forces. This last piece of news especially created a great sense of relief: ever since the taking of Sebastopol, von Manstein was regarded as the best strategist in the Wehrmacht; if anyone could resolve the situation, it was he.
In the meantime, the expert we needed arrived. Since the Reichsführer had left Vinnitsa with the Führer at the end of October to return to East Prussia, Korsemann had applied directly to Berlin and the RuSHA had agreed to send a woman, Dr. Weseloh, a specialist in Iranian languages. Bierkamp was extremely unhappy when he learned the news: he wanted a racial expert from Amt IV, but no one was available. I reassured him by explaining that a linguistic approach would turn out to be fruitful. Dr. Weseloh had been able to take a mail plane to Rostov, via Kiev, but from there had been forced to continue by train. I went to greet her at the Voroshilovsk station, where I found her in the company of the famous writer Ernst Jünger, with whom she was having an animated conversation. Jünger, a little tired but still spruce, wore a captain’s field uniform from the Wehrmacht; Weseloh was in civilian clothes, with a jacket and a long skirt made of thick gray wool. She introduced me to Jünger, obviously proud of her new acquaintance: she had found herself by chance in his compartment at Krapotkin, and had recognized him immediately. I shook his hand and tried to say a few words to him about the importance that his books, especially The Worker, had had for me, but already some officers from the OKHG were surrounding him and taking him away. Weseloh, visibly moved, waved as she watched him leave. She was a rather thin woman, her breasts scarcely visible, but with exaggeratedly wide hips; she had a long horselike face, blond hair drawn back in a crisp bun, and glasses that revealed slightly bewildered but eager eyes. “I’m sorry I’m not in uniform,” she said after we had exchanged a German salute. “They asked me to leave so quickly that I didn’t have time to have one made.”—“That’s fine,” I replied amiably. “But you’ll be cold. I’ll find a coat for you.” It was raining, and the streets were full of mud; on the way, she enthused about Jünger, who had come from France on an inspection mission; they had spoken about Persian inscriptions, and Jünger had congratulated her on her erudition. At the Group, I introduced her to Dr. Leetsch, who explained the object of her mission; after lunch, he entrusted her to me and asked me to put her up in Pyatigorsk, to help her in her work, and to look after her. On the road, she spoke again about Jünger, then asked me about the situation in Stalingrad: “I’ve heard a lot of rumors. What exactly is happening?” I explained to her the little that I knew. She listened attentively and finally said with conviction: “I’m sure that it’s a brilliant plan of our Führer’s, to draw the enemy forces into a trap and destroy them once and for all.”—“You must be right.” In Pyatigorsk, I found her quarters in one of the sanatoriums, then showed her my documentation and reports. “We also have a lot of Russian sources,” I explained.—“Unfortunately,” she answered curtly, “I don’t read Russian. But what you have there should be enough.”—“Fine, then. When you’ve finished, we’ll go to Nalchik together.”