The Kindly Ones

About the hour-and-a-half-long speech the Reichsführer gave on the night of October 6 to the assembled Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, I don’t have much to say. This speech is less well known than the one, almost twice as long, he read on October 4 to his Obergruppenführers and HSSPFs; but aside from a few differences due to the nature of the respective audiences, and the less informal, less sardonic, less colloquial tone of the second speech, the Reichsführer said essentially the same thing. Thanks to the chance survival of archives, and the victors’ justice, these speeches have become famous far beyond the closed circles for which they were intended; you won’t find a book on the SS, the Reichsführer, or the destruction of the Jews in which they aren’t cited; if their content interests you, you can easily consult them, in several languages; the October 4 speech was entered as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, under document number 1919-PS (it was obviously in this form that I was finally able to study it in detail, after the war, although I learned its general import in Posen itself); moreover, it was recorded, either on a wax disk or on a red oxide magnetic tape—the historians aren’t in agreement, and on this point I ca