The Kindly Ones

Voss had left too, suddenly transferred to the AOK of Generaloberst von Kleist, whose Panzers had already passed the Ukrainian border and were charging toward Millerovo. I felt a little lonely. Bierkamp was absorbed in the reorganization of the Kommandos, some of which were to be dissolved in order to form the permanent structures of the SP and the SD in the Crimea; Seibert was getting ready for his own departure. With summer, the interior of the Crimea had become stifling, and I continued to take advantage of the beaches as much as possible. I went to visit Sebastopol, where one of our Kommandos had set to work: around the long harbor of the southern bay stretched a field of still-smoking ruins, haunted by exhausted and shocked civilians who were already being evacuated. Haggard, filthy kids ran between the soldier’s legs begging for bread; the Romanians especially responded by cuffing them or kicking their backsides. I went down to visit the underground bunkers of the harbor, where the Red Army had set up weapons and ammunition factories; most of them had been looted, or burned out by flame-throwers; sometimes too, during the final battle, Commissars, entrenched there or in caves under the cliffs, had blown themselves up with their men and the civilians they were sheltering, along with German soldiers who had advanced too far. But all the Soviet officers and high-ranking functionaries had been evacuated by submarine before the city fell; we had captured only soldiers and underlings. The bare mountaintops overlooking the immense northern bay, around the city, were covered with ruined fortifications; the steel housings of their 30.5-centimeter artillery had been crushed by our 80-centimeter shells, fired from giant howitzers mounted on rails; and their long twisted gun barrels lay on their sides, or else stood aimed straight at the sky. In Simferopol, AOK 11 was packing up; von Manstein, promoted to Generalfeldmarschall, was leaving with his army to finish off Leningrad. Of Stalingrad, of course, no one spoke at that time: it was still a secondary objective.

In the begi

The city rose up in the distance, spread out on a high plateau surrounded by fields and orchards. The road here was lined with overturned vehicles, wrecked heavy weaponry and tanks; on open stretches of track, in the distance, hundreds of freight cars were still burning brightly. In old times this city was called Stavropol, which in Greek means “the city of the Cross,” or rather “the city of the Crossroads”; it had been established at the junction of the old roads to the north, and at one time, in the nineteenth century, during the campaign to pacify the mountain tribes, it had served as a military base for the Russian forces. Today it was a little provincial town, sleepy and peaceful, which hadn’t grown fast enough to be disfigured, like so many others, by hideous Soviet suburbs. A long two-lane boulevard framing a mall of plane trees climbs up from the train station; toward the bottom, I noticed a fine Art Nouveau pharmacy, with an entryway and bay windows in the shape of circles, their panes blown out by the detonations. The Kommandostab from Ek 12 was also arriving, and they put us up temporarily at the Kavkaz Hotel. Sturmba