The Kindly Ones

The hierarchy was begi

For several days already, Blobel had been sending Teilkommandos outside Kiev to clean up the little towns, Pereyaslav, Yagotin, Kozelets, Chernigov, there were a lot of them. But the Teilkommandoführers were in despair: after an action, if they returned to the town, they found still more Jews there; the ones who had hidden kept coming back after they left. They complained that it upset all their statistics. According to Blobel’s accrued totals, the Kommando had liquidated fifty-one thousand people, including fourteen thousand without outside help (meaning without Jeckeln’s Orpo battalions). A Vorkommando was being formed to enter Kharkov, and I was supposed to be part of it; in the meantime, since I had nothing to do in Kiev (the Ek 5 had taken over all our tasks), Blobel asked me to go inspect the Teilkommandos. The rains had started, and as soon as you crossed the swollen Dnieper, you sank into the mud. The trucks, the cars were dripping with black, thick mud mixed with strands of the hay that the soldiers looted from the haystacks along the road to spread in front of their cars, uselessly. It took me two days to reach Häfner in Pereyaslav, towed most of the time by the Wehrmacht’s tracked vehicles and covered in mud up to my eyes from wading around trying to push the Admiral. I spent the night in a little village with some officers from an infantry division that was moving up to the front from Zhitomir—exhausted men, who anxiously saw winter approaching and wondered what their ultimate objective was. I took care not to tell them about the Urals; we couldn’t even advance up to Kharkov. They complained about the new recruits, sent from Germany to replace the casualties, but poorly trained and with a tendency to panic under fire, at least more readily than before. The equipment was falling to pieces: the modern German general-service wagons, with their rubber tires and ball bearings, were breaking apart on the tracks; they replaced them with almost indestructible panje carts, taken from the peasants. The beautiful German, Hungarian, or Irish horses with which they had started the campaign were dying in droves; only the scrubby Russian ponies were surviving, they could eat anything at all—birch shoots, the straw from the roofs of isbas—but they were too lightweight to pull the heavier carts, and the units had to abandon tons of provisions and equipment. “Every night, the men fight with each other to find a roof or a half-dry hole. Everyone’s uniform is in rags, full of lice; we’re not receiving anything, there’s almost no more bread.” Even the officers lacked the basics: no more razors, soap, toothpaste, no more leather to repair the boots, no more needles, no more thread. It rained day and night, and they were losing many more men from illness—dysentery, jaundice, diphtheria—than from gunfire. The sick had to walk up to thirty-five kilometers a day, since there was no way to transport them, and if they stayed alone in the villages, the partisans came and killed them. The partisans now were proliferating like lice; they seemed to be everywhere, and isolated couriers and dispatch bearers were vanishing in the woods. But I had also noticed among the soldiers a number of Russians in German uniforms, with the white armband of the Hilfswillige. “The Hiwis?” replied an officer to whom I had mentioned this. “No, we’re not really allowed to. But we take them anyway, we don’t have a choice. The guys are volunteer civilians or prisoners. They do all the transport and B-echelon jobs; it works out pretty well, they’re more used to these conditions than we are. And also Headquarters couldn’t care less, they close their eyes. Anyway they must have forgotten us. By the time we reach Poltava they won’t even know who we are.”—“But aren’t you afraid the partisans will take advantage of this to infiltrate your ranks and inform the Reds of your movements?” He shrugged his shoulders in a weary, disgusted way. “If it makes them happy…. In any case, there isn’t a single Russian within a hundred kilometers. Nor a single German, either. No one. Rain and mud, that’s all.” This officer seemed completely discouraged; but he also showed me how to clean the mud off my uniform, it was useful and I didn’t want to contradict him. “First you have to dry the mud by the stove, then you scrape it with a knife, see, then with a metal brush; and only then can you wash the uniform. For the underwear, you absolutely have to have it boiled.” I watched the operation: it was disgusting, the lice came off in the boiling water in clusters, thick, swollen. I understood better Häfner’s suppressed anger when I finally reached Pereyaslav. He had three Untersturmführers with him—Ott, Ries, and Damma