The Kindly Ones

I began to see that these fruitless discussions could go on indefinitely, and this prospect alarmed me; so I decided to change tactics: prepare a concrete suggestion, and have it endorsed by the others, or else modify it a little, if necessary. For that, I decided to come to an agreement first with the specialists Weinrowski and Isenbeck. When I approached Weinrowski, he quickly understood my intentions and promised me his support; as for Isenbeck, he would do whatever he was told to do. But we still lacked concrete data. Weinrowski believed the IKL had already carried out research on this subject; I sent Isenbeck to Oranienburg with a mission order; triumphant, he brought back a pile of files: at the end of the 1930s, the medical department of the IKL had in fact carried out a set of experiments, at the KL Buchenwald, on minimal feeding for inmates subjected to forced labor; with punishment or the threat of punishment as the sole incentive, they had tested a large number of formulas, frequently changing the rations and weighing the subjects regularly; a whole array of statistics had been generated from this. While Isenbeck analyzed these reports, I talked with Weinrowski about what we called the “secondary factors,” such as hygiene, cold, illness, beatings. I had a copy of my Stalingrad report sent to me by the SD, which dealt with precisely these subjects; skimming through it, Weinrowski exclaimed: “Oh, but you quote Hohenegg!” At these words, the memory of that man, buried inside me like a glass bubble, detached from the depths and rose up, gathering speed by the second, before bursting at the surface: how curious that is, I said to myself, I hadn’t thought of him in a long time. “Do you know him?” I asked Weinrowski, overcome with intense emotion.—“Of course! He’s one of my colleagues from the faculty of medicine in Vie

I immediately set out looking for him: he was well and truly alive, and I had no difficulty finding him; he too was working in Berlin, at the medical department of the Bendlerstrasse. Happy, I called him on the telephone without giving my name; his throaty, musical voice sounded a little a

Hohenegg, as soon as he saw me, wanted at all cost to feel my scars; I graciously permitted him, under the surprised eye of the maître d’hôtel, who had come to proffer the wine list. “Good work,” Hohenegg said, “good work. If you had had that before Kislovodsk, I would have cited you in my seminar. All in all, I did well to insist.”—“What do you mean?”—“The surgeon in Gumrak didn’t want to operate on you, which is understandable. He had pulled a sheet over your face and had told the nurses to put you out in the snow, as they did then, to get it over with. I happened to be walking by, I noticed this sheet moving at mouth level, and of course I thought that was curious, a dead man breathing like an ox under his shroud. I turned down the sheet: imagine my surprise. So I told myself that ordering someone else to take care of you was the least I could do. The surgeon didn’t want to; we had a few words, but I was his hierarchical superior, and he had to give in. He kept complaining that it was a waste of time. I was in something of a hurry, I let him get on with it; I imagine he made do with a hemostasis. But I’m happy it was of some use.” I remained motionless, riveted to his words; at the same time I felt immensely remote from all that, as if it concerned another man, whom I scarcely knew. The maître d’hôtel brought the wine. Hohenegg interrupted him before he could pour: “Just a minute, please. Could you bring us two Cognac glasses?”—“Of course, Herr Oberst.” With a smile, Hohenegg took a bottle of He

Weinrowski invited us to his place. He lived with his wife in a three-room apartment in Kreuzberg. He showed us two photos on the piano of young men, one framed in black with a ribbon: his eldest son, Egon, killed in Demiansk; the younger one was serving in France and had been quiet till then, but his division had just been rushed to Italy to reinforce the new front. While Frau Weinrowski served us tea and cakes, we talked about the Italian situation: as pretty much everyone expected, Badoglio was just waiting for the occasion to switch sides, and as soon as the Anglo-Americans had set foot on Italian soil, he had seized it. “Fortunately, fortunately, the Führer was cleverer than he!” Weinrowski exclaimed.—“You say that,” Frau Weinrowski murmured sadly as she offered us sugar, “but it’s your Karl who is there, not the Führer.” She was a rather heavy woman, with puffy, tired features; but the outline of her mouth and especially the light in her eyes hinted at past beauty. “Oh, be quiet,” Weinrowski grumbled, “the Führer knows what he’s doing. Look at that Skorzeny! Tell me that wasn’t a master stroke.” The raid on the Gran Sasso, to liberate Mussolini, had made headlines for days in Goebbels’s press. Since then, our forces had occupied northern Italy, interned six hundred and fifty thousand Italian soldiers, and set up a Fascist republic in Salò; and all that was presented as a significant victory, a brilliant maneuver of the Führer’s. But the resumption of raids on Berlin was also a direct consequence; the new front was draining our divisions, and in August the Americans had managed to bomb Ploesti, our last source of oil. Germany was truly caught in the crossfire.