‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome. I just wish I could give myself the same orders.’

  The following morning, I awoke at dawn. It was bitterly cold, with a brisk wind driving and snow still on the ground. As I got dressed I made a particular effort to ensure that my uniform was neat and tidy, for I was going to have exalted company as I went about my duties. Deputy Reichsminister Meyer had spent the previous day in meetings with Hofmann and Kube. He now wanted to observe the disposal process itself, and following our meeting on the plane had requested me as his guide. Merbach, the officer in charge of the motor pool, drove Meyer and me out to Koidanov personally, making inane, supposedly humorous, conversation like an over-excited taxi-driver, until I politely requested that he remain quiet so that I could answer any questions Dr Meyer might have about today’s events. I got the impression Merbach was desperately trying to cover up the fact that he was not at all looking forward to what he was about to do. But then, who was?

  37

  Koidanov itself was a modest little town, scarcely more than a village, that sat in the lee of a steep, tree-covered hill. We arrived just as the first wagonloads of Jews were being unloaded. Their train had been parked in a siding since the previous afternoon and they had been kept without water, food or sanitation throughout that time, so they were very weak and their clothes were rank with human waste. Even in the cold air, the smell was quite noticeable, and I could see Meyer’s mouth curl with distaste.

  The Jews were ordered to strip and their clothes were taken away to be searched for valuables – it was remarkable how many of them, still hoping that they might not be doomed, sewed gold coins, paper money or even diamonds into their garments. Then they were lined up and one by one ordered to open their mouths, and any gold teeth or fillings they possessed were extracted by the Jewish dentists from the ghetto who were used for this task.

  Barefoot, reduced to their underclothes and in some cases entirely naked, the shivering Jews clasped their arms against their chests, desperately trying to retain the slightest bit of warmth. Many of them had blood smeared around their mouths as a result of the dental work. By now they could have no doubt as to their fate. One or two tried to run away, more in panic than any serious resistance, and were immediately shot. Others shouted curses or cried out in anguish: women were wailing and weeping, tearing at their faces and their bare blue-white skin with their fingernails. And of course there were considerable numbers of distressed children. But most of the adults – male and female alike – were astonishingly calm.

  I cannot say whether they were resigned to their fate or just too hungry and exhausted to care any more. But just as I had seen mothers fussing over their children on that day in late November when the Vienna transport arrived, so now I observed them stroking their little ones’ hair and whispering calming words in their ears.

  We walked past the Jews, taking the route that they would soon be using as they were led to their execution. On the way we passed the pit that had been filled yesterday. It had only been covered with a thin layer of earth and blood was still oozing from one corner of the grave. I heard Meyer whisper, ‘Mein Gott!’ to himself. The distaste of the Berlin hierarchy for the physical consequences of the orders they so blithely gave was a topic of much bitter discussion in the KdS officers’ mess. Himmler himself had famously visited Minsk back in August ’41, ordered a shooting to be arranged for his benefit, and damn near fainted when blood and bits of brain had splashed on to his greatcoat. It was only thanks to his adjutant grabbing his sleeve that the mighty Reichsführer, his complexion almost as pale and waxy as a corpse, had not fallen into the mass grave himself. Meyer was no less squeamish.

  A fresh pit had been dug. It was approximately twenty-five metres long, ten wide and three deep: the size of a modest public swimming pool. As Meyer stepped to one side together with Hofmann to watch the proceedings I summoned my loader, told him to grab a box of ammunition and made my way to the killing line.

  Roughly twenty of us shooters were arrayed along one side of the pit, approximately one metre from the edge. I could see Schlegel two men down from me. Merbach and Stark were beyond him and von Toll beyond them.

  Once we had all been assembled, the first load of Jews were marched towards the pit in single file and told to walk along the narrow rim between the shooters and the edge of the pit until each of us had a Jew standing directly in front of him. The Jews were ordered to turn to face the pit. We all then placed our pistols against the back of the neck of the person in front of us and fired a single shot. The impact of the bullet simultaneously killed them and sent them flopping forward down into the pit. Then the next twenty Jews, who had been standing just a few metres away, watching their brethren be slaughtered, stepped forward and took their place in the line.

  From the point of view of the shooter, there was a terrible intimacy to the whole thing. One was standing so close to the Jews that every hair on their head, every blemish or vein on their skin, was visible; close enough to smell them; close enough to hear them breathe. My first was a middle-aged woman. She must once have been much heavier, for the skin was loose around her belly and thighs and her breasts hung on her chest like deflated balloons. When she stood in front of me I could see the marks on her shoulders left by the brassiere she had only recently removed. She was hanging her head and my hand was shaking so that I did not manage a clean shot through her neck. The bullet went too high and took off part of her skull, and her death could not have been instantaneous because I can still to this day hear her crying out in pain.

  As she fell into the pit I could see the open wound at the back of her head and an image came to me of the skulls on the table when Lüdtke interrogated Ogorzow. I wanted very much to be sick, but there was no time. I had to swallow the vomit back down into my stomach and ready myself to kill the next one. We all fired again … and so it continued. The trucks kept rolling in from the railway siding. The clothes were stripped. The teeth were pulled. The Jews walked to the pit. Men, women, children and old folk took their place before the muzzles of our guns. Most of the time they were still. At others, we had to reach out and grab them to hold them in place.

  The children were the worst, wanting to run to their mothers, crying and kicking out as we clenched our fists ever tighter round their arms. They had to be still, you see. If they were moving it was much harder to get a good shot. But we got them anyway.

  We shot. They died. The pit got fuller. Again and again, the exact same events being repeated with barely any discernible difference, like a factory production line – more and more Jews coming to the end of the conveyor belt, dying and falling into the pit.

  From time to time there were pauses: hold-ups in the system as we waited for more trucks to arrive, or more Jews to be stripped and searched. After we had been going for a while – I honestly couldn’t say how long, for one loses all sense of time in a situation like that – one of the men broke down and started screaming, even more hysterically than the most crazed of the Jewish women. He worked in the motor pool, and my God, how I envied the look of relief on Merbach’s face as he saw that he now had a perfect excuse to leave the shooting line and take his man back to Minsk.

  Von Toll, too, emptied his magazine, left a dozen Jews dead in the pit in front of his position and went off to join the guards. Someone else, of course, had to take his place, and there was quite an argument among the guards until a Latvian could be found to volunteer.

  We were working in two-hour shifts. When my group’s was over we were given paper bags filled with sandwiches for our lunch. I tried to force one down, but no sooner had I swallowed the last bite than it all came back up again and I was horribly sick. And so history repeated itself: I vomited when I first saw a murder victim and I vomited when I first committed murder too. This time there was no hip flask of schnapps to steady my stomach, but several cases of vodka were piled beside the ammunition boxes. I took a bottle with me. It was empty soon enough.

  By the afternoon, the shooting had just become a blur of noise and sound and the smell of cordite, blood and shit filled the air. At one point Schlegel shouted out in shocked surprise: ‘No! That’s our damn waitress!’ as he realized that one of the Jews in the line being marched towards our pistols worked at the KdS mess. We were killing our own staff, like Saturn devouring his sons, and that more than anything else seemed to sum up the lunacy of it all. We would rather have Frau Levy lying dead in a hole in the ground than bringing us our evening bowls of soup.

  The atmosphere at dinner that night was terrible. The men were sweating vodka and festering with resentment at what we were having to do. A few muttered curses at the bastards in Berlin: some of the things that were said verged on the mutinous. Others insisted that the Führer would never condone such mindless slaughter and couldn’t have been informed about what was happening out here, so far from his headquarters.

  ‘Wait till Adolf hears about this – he’ll put a stop to it, just mark my words!’ Merbach insisted, and there were plenty of men who were desperate enough to agree with him. Schlegel didn’t join in the argument. He was too busy staring at his dinner-plate and rambling on about the dead waitress.

  Dr Meyer, I later discovered, had left early in the afternoon, while it was still light. He had a meeting in Riga the following day and wanted to be sure of getting to his destination before night fell. I, meanwhile, had killed my first human beings. I’d crossed that Rubicon of blood and, like Caesar, could never go back to the other side.

  38

  There was a secure area around the Lenin House that was fenced and guarded to keep us secure from partisan saboteurs. I had a room in a large house within this compound that had been requisitioned as officers’ quarters. It was run like a boarding house, with a breakfast room downstairs that doubled as a sitting room in the evening. There were a couple of round tables with four simple wooden chairs, a colourful rug on the parquet floor, a small dresser filled with decorative china, and paintings of Russian country life on the wall; also a small portrait of the Führer. At the far end of the room stood a small table with a radio on top and a baby grand piano, covered with a white cloth on which a jug of fake flowers had been placed, though our landlady, Frau Aranski, assured us that she would place real flowers there once the warm weather came. All in all it was a nice enough place, and I had no complaint about the cleanliness of my room, or the comfort of my bed.

  Night after night, however, I was woken from my sleep by the sound of men shouting and screaming as they were seized by nightmares and that fear of death that can overcome even the strongest man in the earliest hours of the morning. One time, soon after the Koidanov shootings, I woke at about 02.30, hearing a man’s raised voice disturb the stillness of the night, but when I sat up in bed and listened, trying to work out who it might be, the house was absolutely quiet. There wasn’t a sound from any of the other rooms. I realized then that I had woken myself. The screaming man was me.

  It was no real surprise. I’d been having bad dreams ever since I’d arrived in Minsk. Ogorzow had stalked me through the ghetto, while the Jews packed like sardines in their wooden huts yelled garbled words of abuse in a language I could not understand, or reached out to grab me so that I could not escape the killer. The frozen bodies on the Smolensk road split open like ripe figs to reveal their guts then laughed at my nausea and weakness at the sight of it.

  Since Koidanov these dreams had grown even worse. The terrible images from the killing-pit swirled around my mind in a kaleidoscope of savagery. I felt as though my brain had been indelibly branded with the sights, sounds and smells of that terrible scene. They haunted me day and night. There was always vodka to dull my senses, but the alcohol that numbed me in my waking hours only seemed to fuel the flames of my torment at night. The other men felt exactly as I did, I was sure of it. But no one ever spoke of these things. How could any of us have gone on if we did?

  And so we all carried on as if our lives bore some faint resemblance to normality. In mid-March Hofmann, who had only ever been a temporary appointment, moved on to another post and a new commander of the KdS, SS-Lieutenant-Colonel Strauch, took his place. Strauch arrived bearing the dubious honour that Bach-Zelewski was said to have called him ‘the worst human I have ever met in my life’, though whether the general had made that remark before or after he’d gone mad no one was sure. All we knew was that Strauch was thirty-five years old, came from Münster and was a lawyer by profession. He’d joined the Party in October 31 and the SS two months later. On first acquaintance it was hard to tell just how bad a human he was, but he was certainly passionate about the business of extermination. In November ’41 he’d taken part in an action at Rumbula in Latvia: 10,600 people ‘processed’ in a single day. On that occasion he’d been a direct subordinate of Jeckeln. Now that he had his own command, it seemed obvious that he would want to prove himself just as effective as his former master.

  Since he was now my boss, I had no option but to find a way of getting on with Strauch. But that task was complicated by another change in personnel. Burkhardt, the former head of Jewish Affairs, was sent off to run operations against saboteurs, economic criminals and partisans. His replacement was a new arrival at the KdS, SS-First Lieutenant Erich Lütkenhus. Like me he was a Criminal Police Commissar. Of course, that shared professional status placed us in direct competition, and this is where the Beamter system had its drawbacks. For a person of no ambition, total job security encouraged laziness and complacency. On the other hand, those of us who were determined to do as well as possible were confronted by a very large group of people chasing a quantity of jobs that would inevitably decrease the higher up the scale we went. War, of course, was easing this problem to some extent, since many potential job applicants were removed from the field. But even so, it was clear from the outset that Lütkenhus and I would be competing for the same positions and the same promotions.

  I could see at once that he was highly intelligent, competent and ambitious. He’ll have noted the same of me. We were both perfectly polite to one another. In a social context he might have made agreeable company. But professionally we were rivals, just as much as we were also comrades, and almost everything that either of us did in Minsk over the months that followed was influenced as much as anything by the need we both felt to excel and, above all, to exceed the other’s performance. One should never underestimate the competitive instincts of young men as a factor in the conduct of war.

  I scored the first points in the contest when General Heydrich paid a flying visit to Minsk at the beginning of April. He stayed overnight at Gauleiter Kube’s quarters, since they were the most luxurious in the city. But virtually all his working time was spent with us at the KdS. Heydrich confirmed in person that we were embarking upon the complete elimination of all the Jews in Europe and French North Africa. The entire continent would be combed from one end to the other so that not a single Jew could escape. ‘There are eleven million of these vermin,’ Heydrich told us. ‘And we will have them all.’

  Our contribution to the process would continue with the processing of a series of transports of Reich Jews, beginning in the spring. Heydrich made it absolutely clear that they were not to be held in the ghetto, but killed immediately upon arrival. He assured us that this was the personal wish of the Führer. We could therefore be certain that we were carrying out a true Führer order. It was some reassurance, I suppose, to be sure that we were all acting in the best interests of our leader and our country, but for every one of us who looked forward to the arrival of the first transport with eager anticipation there were more who regarded it with dread.

  Over lunch, Heydrich painted a dramatic picture of the planning required for the gigantic task he had set in motion. ‘Consider this, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We have a programme, planned down to the last detail, that will tell our comrades throughout Europe the exact quotas they have to round up for trains leaving their particular territories on a series of specific dates. We will know the destination of every one of these trains, and the route they will take to get there. The commandants and staffs of camps in the General Government area of Poland and here in the Reich Commissariat of Ostland will know precisely how many people they will need to deal with, and when.

  ‘Even now, designers, scientists and engineers are working on remarkable innovations that will greatly increase the rates of killing and disposal. We are just beginning operations at a facility in Poland that will be able to process ten thousand individuals a day. And thanks to the ingenious mind of SS-General Nebe – a man whose great talents Heuser here knows very well – we are producing gas vans that can deal with twenty-five people, just by driving down the road. I promise you, gentlemen: you will not have to worry about bullets and grave-pits for long!’

  A toast was called. Every other man might have been drinking to the successful outcome of the Final Solution, but I was raising my glass in triumph at the totally unexpected honour Heydrich had paid me, one that I knew would have cut Lütkenhus to the bone. The general continued: ‘Be proud, gentlemen, be very proud. Only the men of the SS possess the mental discipline, the determination and the courage to execute a project such as this. You must be as hard as granite to carry out your allotted task. And I know that you will succeed!’

  Later, Heydrich sought me out to ask how I was doing. I assured him that I was immensely proud of the trust he had placed in me. I might have considered my duties repugnant, they might be tormenting me every night in my dreams, but I was still determined to do them to the very best of my abilities, just as my father and Lüdtke, too, had always insisted.

  ‘I won’t let you down, General,’ I said.

  Heydrich gave me the friendliest of smiles. ‘Of course you won’t,’ he replied.