But I really should tell you about those famous negotiations. I didn’t participate in them directly: only once did I meet Kastner, with Becher, when Becher was negotiating one of those private agreements that made Eichmann so upset. But I took a keen interest in them because one of the propositions consisted in putting a certain number of Jews “on ice,” that is, sending them to work without going through Auschwitz, which would have suited me perfectly. This Becher was the son of a high-society businessman in Hamburg, a cavalryman who had ended up as an officer in the Reiter-SS and had distinguished himself several times in the East, especially in the beginning of 1943, on the Don front, where he had gotten the German Cross in gold; since then, he occupied important logistical functions at the SS-Führungshauptamt, the FHA that supervised the entire Waffen-SS. After he had gotten his hands on the Manfred-Weiss Werke—he never spoke to me about it, and I know how it happened just from books, but apparently it began entirely by chance—the Reichsführer ordered him to continue negotiations with the Jews, while giving similar instructions to Eichmann, no doubt on purpose, so that they would compete with each other. And Becher could promise a lot, he had the Reichsführer’s ear, but wasn’t in principle responsible for Jewish affairs and had no direct authority over the matter, even less than I did. All sorts of other people were mixed up in this business: a team of Schellenberg’s guys, noisy, undisciplined, some from the former Amt VI, such as Höttl, who went by the name of Klages and later on published a book under yet another name, others from Canaris’s Abwehr, Gefrorener (alias Dr. Schmidt), Durst (alias Winniger), Laufer (alias Schröder), but maybe I’m mixing up the names and the pseudonyms, there was also that odious Paul Carl Schmidt, the future Paul Carrell whom I’ve already mentioned, and who I don’t think I’m confusing with Gefrorener alias Dr. Schmidt, but I’m not so sure about that. And the Jews gave money and jewelry to all these people, and they all took it, in the name of their respective services or else for themselves, impossible to know; Gefrorener and his colleagues, who in March had placed Joel Brandt under arrest to “protect” him from Eichmann, had asked him for several thousand dollars to introduce him to Wisliceny, and then Wisliceny, Krumey, and Hunsche had received a lot of money from him, before the matter of the trucks came up. But I never met Brandt, it was Eichmann who dealt with him, then he left quite quickly for Istanbul and never came back. I saw his wife, once, at the Majestic, with Kastner; she was a girl of a pronounced Jewish type, not really beautiful, but with a lot of character, it was Kastner who introduced her to me as Brandt’s wife. The idea of the trucks, no one really knows who had it first, Becher said it was he, but I’m convinced it was Schellenberg who whispered the idea to the Reichsführer, or else if it really was an idea of Becher’s then Schellenberg developed it, whatever the case at the beginning of April the Reichsführer summoned Becher and Eichmann to Berlin (it was Becher who told me this, not Eichmann) and gave Eichmann the order to motorize the Eighth and Twenty-second SS Cavalry Divisions, with trucks, about ten thousand, that he was to get from the Jews. And so this is the famous story of the proposition known as “goods for blood,” ten thousand trucks equipped for winter in exchange for a million Jews, which has made a lot of ink flow and will continue to do so. I don’t have a lot to add to what has already been said: the main participants, Becher, Eichmann, the Brandt-Kastner pair, all survived the war and testified about this affair (though the unfortunate Kastner was killed three years before Eichmann’s arrest, in 1957, by Jewish extremists in Tel Aviv—for his “collaboration” with us, which is sadly ironic). One of the clauses of the proposition made to the Jews stipulated that the trucks would be used solely on the Eastern Front, against the Soviets, but not against the Western powers; and these trucks, of course, could only have come from the American Jews. Eichmann, I’m convinced, took this proposition literally, all the more so since the commander of the Twenty-second Division, SS-Brigadeführer August Zehender, was one of his good friends: he really thought that motorizing these divisions was the objective, and even if he grumbled at “letting go” of so many Jews, he wanted to help his friend Zehender. As if some trucks could have changed the course of the war. How many trucks or tanks or planes could a million Jews have built, if we had ever had a million Jews in the camps? The Zionists, I suspect, and Kastner in the lead, must have understood right away that it was a lure, but a lure that could also serve their own interests, let them gain time. They were lucid, realistic men, they must have known as well as the Reichsführer that not only would no enemy country ever agree to deliver ten thousand trucks to Germany, but also that no country, even at that time, was ready to welcome a million Jews, either. For my part, it was in the stipulation according to which the trucks would not be used in the West that I see Schellenberg’s hand. For him, as Thomas had led me to understand, there was only one solution left, breaking the unnatural alliance between the capitalist democracies and the Stalinists, and playing the “bulwark of Europe against Bolshevism” card to the end. Postwar history has since proven that he was entirely right, and that he was only ahead of his time. The proposition of the trucks could have had several meanings. Of course, you never knew, a miracle could happen, the Jews and Allies could agree to the deal, and then it would have been easy to use those trucks to create dissension between the Russians and the Anglo-Americans, even incite them to turn against each other. Himmler possibly dreamed about that; but Schellenberg was much too realistic to place his hopes in that scenario. For him, the whole affair must have been much simpler, it was a question of sending a diplomatic signal, via the Jews who still had a certain influence, that Germany was ready to discuss anything, a separate peace, a cessation of the extermination program, and then to watch how the English and the Americans reacted so as to pursue other approaches: a trial balloon, in other words. And what’s more the Anglo-Americans interpreted it that way at once, as their reaction proves: information about the proposition was published in their newspapers and denounced. It is also possible that Himmler thought that if the Allies refused the offer, that would demonstrate that they didn’t care about the lives of the Jews, or even that they secretly approved of our measures; at the very least, that would throw part of the responsibility onto them, it would