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The next morning, I took a military shuttle and went up to Simferopol. Ohlendorf welcomed me with his usual politeness, which perhaps lacked warmth, but was suave and pleasant. “I forgot to ask you yesterday how Frau Ohlendorf is doing?”—“Käthe? Fine, thanks. Of course she misses me, but Krieg ist Krieg.” An orderly served us some excellent coffee and Ohlendorf launched into a quick presentation. “You’ll find that the work will be very interesting to you. You won’t have to worry about executive measures, I leave all that to the Kommandos; in any case, the Crimea is already nearly judenrein, and we’ve almost finished with the Gypsies too.”—“All the Gypsies?” I interrupted, surprised. “In the Ukraine, we’re not so systematic.”—“For me,” he replied, “they’re just as dangerous as the Jews, if not more so. In every war, the Gypsies act as spies, or as agents to communicate through the lines. Just read the narratives by Ricarda Huch or Schiller on the Thirty Years’ War.” He paused. “At first, you’ll mostly have to deal with research. We’re going to advance into the Caucasus in the spring—that’s a secret that I recommend you keep to yourself—and since it’s still a mostly unknown region, I’d like to gather some information for the Gruppenstab and the Kommandos, especially about the different ethnic minorities and their relationships among themselves and with the Soviet government. In principle, the same system of occupation will be applied as in the Ukraine; we’ll form a new Reichskommissariat, but of course the SP and the SD have to put their two cents in, and the better backed up those two cents are, the more chances they’ll have of being listened to. Your immediate superior will be Sturmba
I knew Seibert vaguely; in Berlin, he headed the SD Department D (Economics). He was a serious man, sincere, cordial, an excellent economist from the University of Göttingen, who seemed as out of place here as Ohlendorf. The premature loss of his hair had accelerated since his departure; but neither his broad bare forehead nor his preoccupied air nor the old dueling scar that gashed his chin managed to make him lose a kind of adolescent, perpetually dreamy look. He welcomed me kindly, introduced me to his other colleagues, and then, when Ohlendorf had left us, took me to the office of Ulrich, who seemed to me a fussy little bureaucrat. “The Oberführer has a somewhat loose vision of transfer procedures,” he informed me sourly. “Normally, you have to send a request to Berlin, then wait for the reply. You can’t just pick people off the street like that.”—“The Oberführer didn’t find me in the street, he found me in a Kasino,” I pointed out. He took off his glasses and looked at me, squinting: “Tell me, Hauptsturmführer, are you trying to be fu
Dr. Thomas quickly gave his assent. While we waited for Berlin to endorse the transfer, I was “temporarily detached” from Sonderkommando 4a to the Einsatzgruppe D. I didn’t even have to return to Kharkov; Strehlke forwarded to me the few things I had left there. I was quartered in Simferopol in a pleasant pre-Revolutionary middle-class house, emptied of its occupants, on Chekhov Street, a few hundred meters from the Gruppenstab. I dove with pleasure into my Caucasian studies, begi