y’ – Saparmurat Niyazov, and the millions of people destroyed by sects devoid of ideas and of means.June–July 1995
I’ve been wandering around Europe for more than a month now, still retracing my father’s footsteps. I was travelling back through time. It was the story of my life. I can’t cope with being in France, with being at home, with the day-to-day routine. Too much had happened. The company finally fired me, Ophélie finally left me, my health wasn’t too good. And there was nothing I could do about any of it. To be honest, I had seen it coming but I did nothing, I just let it come. On a battlefield, such stoic acceptance and self-sacrifice would have marked me out as a hero, but I did nothing because in the situation I was in, there was nothing to be done – the evil came from within. Everything inside me was broken. I was like one of those hopeless people whose great love has died, like someone who has survived a terrible disaster and goes into mourning never to come out. I had lost my place in the social order, in life, I was a pariah, I was my father’s son – I had been told as much by my friend, that ruin of a man, the great Adolph, aka Jean 134, son of the no-less-remarkable Jean 92. At work, it was like I didn’t exist: no projects, no meetings, no phone calls. The paperwork was in hand, just waiting for a signature, everyone was waiting. There was nothing to be done, the CEO was constantly on the move, looking for some new El Dorado. When the paperwork finally arrived, I left, and it was as though I had never worked for the company. One signature wiped away ten years of loyal service. All anyone remembered were the last six months, which, admittedly, were catastrophic compared to the successes of my first nine and a half years there. Monsieur Candela shook my hand, squeezed my shoulder, said, ‘Drop by the house anytime.’ He even had a tear in his eye, he’s always been a straight-up guy. I promised to drop by and I left. I’ve had enough of selling pumps and sluices, of cavitation problems that are always the fault of the manufacturer, never the fault of the client, I don’t give a damn about the terrible quality of their water, their oil, their milk, I can admit that now I’ve been relieved of my duties. Ophélie had reached the point of no return; in her mind, she had already left me, now she could breathe easily as she slowly put her affairs in order as though getting ready to move house. I didn’t say anything. From time to time, she would look at me, head tilted back, eyes half-closed, then she’d shrug and go back to her tidying. That’s how she’s always been, more worker bee than wife. Then, one day, she walked out. She left a note on the kitchen table. I read it and put it in a drawer. I knew that she was only doing what she had to do, I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t expect her to go on living with this frightening stranger. And she had no idea what was really going on, she didn’t know the stranger she was living with was the son of a monster who at any moment might turn into an SS officer and stuff her into the gas cooker. My body no longer sent out alarm signals, I had long since passed the danger point, now I didn’t feel anything except a slight sclerosis sometimes, a sudden confused urge to tear off my skin. I was distanced from life, and the distance had grown wider, the haze had thickened, the silence had deepened, the empty hours passed, the emptiness ever deeper. I was like the outsider the prescient Camus describes, an alien on earth, everything is here but nothing means anything. Perhaps I was dead but didn’t know it. How could I know, since in my state everything was relative and therefore equally unimportant?
This is the nature of great tragedies, they hatch in the bowels of the earth, one day a small crack appears, at night you hear a rumbling and wonder whether it might be an earthquake, then just when you begin to think there may be hope, the world caves in and crumbles into rubble. An immense column of pain rises into the sky. Silence falls and with it a colossal emptiness. You are shocked, crushed, shattered, your dignity is torn from you and you slump into prostration, into autism, one step closer to the end. This is where I was now, in utter darkness, 9.0 on the Richter scale and, insofar as I was able to see in such an abyss, I was alone. More alone than anyone in the world. In saner moments, I told myself that all this suffering stemmed from the fact that I was some strange dreamer, a fool in a world of recurring nightmares, clinging to the idea of a simple, graceful, everlasting life. But more often, like dear Adolph sitting in front of his poisonous Schnapps, thought nothing at all: dreams, life, harmony, simplicity were words that held no meaning for me. What right did I have to use such words knowing how my father had flouted them? I was in a strange position. Excruciatingly painful. Utterly devastating. I was inside the skin, inside the skeletal monotony of the concentration camp prisoner waiting for the end, and I was inside my father’s skin, jealous of his vocation which brought about that end. In me, these two extremes had come together for the worse. Like the jaws of a vice.
Ophélie’s lawyer came by. A pretty tubby little woman who seemed to have asthma. Or maybe she panted and wheezed to impress her clients and alarm the opposing side. Her cheeks were perfectly pink, her breasts so white they could blind oncoming traffic. She gave me a fiercely professional smile and offhandedly asked me to sign some papers. I did as she asked, not bothering to read them and said to her, ‘You don’t have to give me the silent treatment, it’s only fair that everything goes to my future ex-wife. I would be grateful if you would intercede on my behalf, I’d like to stay in the house until I can find a place somewhere far away from here.’ She promised she would, and gave me a sympathetic smile. On that note we went our separate ways, each happy with the outcome.
I must have done everything mechanically. I don’t remember anything. One morning, I found myself at Roissy Airport clutching a boarding pass for Frankfurt, carrying a small rucksack with a change of clothes, Papa’s military service record and the big notebook I’ve been carrying around with me since . . . since April 1994, or maybe a little later, since Aïn Deb, when the thing entered into me.
As I was going through security, I wondered, why Frankfurt? It was only once I was on the plane that I remembered. According to his military record, Hans Schiller studied Chemical Engineering at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, at Frankfurt am Main. The rest I had deduced or discovered from my research. I read that it was in the laboratories of the industrial chemical group IG Farben, with the support of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, under the direction of the sinister Nebe, head of Einsatzgruppe B, that they had developed Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers. From the moment I found out, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Papa, who had just finished his degree at the time, was somehow involved in the research and in the endless arguments that the proposal to gas camp prisoners had triggered among the dignitaries, the intellectuals and the bleeding hearts of the Third Reich. The problem they were fretting over was this: having decided to gas the Lebensunwertes Leben – Jews and other Minderwertige Leute, the mentally handicapped, the ill, the gypsies, the homosexuals – should the procedure be humane, or were the results all that mattered? The first approach, the humane solution, called for the use of odourless gas, or, better still, prussic acid which has a sweet smell, something IG Farben produced in industrial quantities for agricultural and domestic purposes, for fumigating grain stores and for domestic rat poison. Those being gassed would feel nothing, would not know they were dying, at a certain point they would simply drop like flies and it would all be over. This would be the most humane way to kill them, eine der humansten Tötungsarten. Moreover it would spare their killers much of the horror of the work. But it turned out that this method posed a serious risk to German soldiers and those who operated the gas chambers, the Sonderkommodo – camp prisoners who were subjected to the torment of having to remove the bodies of their brothers and take them to the crematoria – since they might venture into the chambers after a batch of killings and be poisoned without realising it. Others – and these were the people who won the argument – were in favour of making the gas highly irritating by the addition of an odorant – Warnstoff – which would alert them to any residual gas in the chambers or to any leaks when handling gas canisters. The choice, they maintained, was between the soldier and the prisoner, between the safety of the former and the comfort of the latter. The problem having been formulated in such a way that it led naturally, humanely, to favouring their own, they decided this would be the wisest course of action. Those being gassed would suffer terribly, but since the eventual intention was to kill them and burn their bodies, this minor inconvenience hardly mattered and was morally acceptable. To placate more sensitive souls, they decided on a ruse: those taken to the gas chambers would be told that they were going to shower, this way they would be happy and grateful. But this is the sort of ploy you can only use once. Word quickly spread in the camps, everyone knew everything. Eventually, this hollow promise was reserved for those newly arrived: the worthless, the old, the children, the pregnant women, the sick and the handicapped who would be only too happy to believe it.
I read that tests had been carried out on human subjects in Frankfurt and in one of the suburbs which no longer exists. Experiments were carried out on groups of five, groups of ten, on standardised groups – all men, all women and all children – and on mixed groups: families – father, mother, son, daughter, grandmother, even the maid if she was Jewish or a little soft in the head. The purpose of the experiments being to determine how much gas was needed in both cases to kill quickly and efficiently. Since lung capacity differed from one subject to another, it was possible to establish a correlation between the volume of air inhaled and the time taken before death ensued, taking into account natural disparities, such as the fact that though a baby inhales less air than an adult, being considerably weaker, it takes less gas to kill it. It’s the story of Galileo when, before an audience of stunned prelates, he demonstrated that, whether light or heavy, bodies in freefall fall at the identical speed which is, therefore, independent of their mass. An adult is resilient but inhales considerably more air than a baby, but the baby is physically weaker. In the end, death comes to both at the same time. These experiments demonstrated that people could be gassed in groups without regard to sex, age or physical condition. Whether by bullet, by rope or by gas chamber, they died just the same. There was no need to separate prisoners into groups, something of an advantage in a mass extermination. The problem, however, remained a complex one with many variables – the stress levels of the subject, the dosage, the shape and size of the gas chambers, the skill of those operating them, etc. There were fears that, though life and death are abstract concepts, the supernatural and the religious might produce unwelcome thoughts in the minds of those operating the chambers, there was talk of the rabbi’s curse, of avenging ghosts, of strange miracles. A production line process, they concluded, would put paid to such nonsense by giving each individual worker the impression that he was performing only the most innocuous task in the extermination process. Just as in a firing squad, every soldier is free to believe that he fired the blank. A production line approach was applied to every stage of the process, from the rounding up of the Jews, through their arrest and transportation to the burning of the bodies in the camps. The link does not know it is part of the chain. We are not all equal in the face of death, a breeze may be enough to kill one man, while another, no bigger, no stronger, no more intelligent, may survive an earthquake. It falls to the Machine to equalise our relationship with death. A means therefore had to be found to take into account the principal variables. Calculating devices were created to make the process easier for a workforce that was not especially bright. By turning a dial to the number of people packed into the chamber, and moving a slider to the volume of the chamber in cubic metres, it was possible to read off the quantity of Zyklon B necessary, this quantity was further refined by setting one slider to the temperature of the chamber and another to the initial figure for the quantity of Zyklon B. In warm weather, say 25ºC, death could be guaranteed for 95 per cent of the subjects in a thirty-minute period. In cold weather, however – below 5ºC – the mass of air is stationary, gas disperses poorly and productivity is negatively affected, making it necessary to repeat the procedure or increase the quantity of Zyklon B, either of which represented a waste of the Reich’s time and money. A loss of ten minutes and three Reichsmarks per subject may seem insignificant, but with some 10 million subjects marked out for death, the shortfall would amount to 100 million minutes and 30 million Reichsmarks, an unacceptable folly for a country already involved in an otherwise profitable world war.
It was later discovered that this theory was mistaken and held true only in small-scale, controlled laboratory conditions. In practice, things worked differently. Leakage presented a significant problem. Hermetically sealing a tiny cubicle containing two or three weak experimental subjects was a very different matter to sealing a vast hanger filled with 2,000 people hardened by incarceration. Productivity, it turned out, was disastrous in periods of warm weather and cold conditions proved to be ideal. This anomaly perturbed a number of scientists, but this mystery was quickly solved just as others emerged – since nothing is ever as it seems on paper. The canisters of Zyklon B, it turned out, did not contain 200 litres, as stated on the invoices and on the labels printed on each canister, in fact the volume varied so widely that one out of three gassings was compromised. The obvious explanation was leakage, but much of the blame lay with the exaggerated claims which friends of the Reich – IG Farben in particular – made in order to massage the statistics sent to their supervisors. There was a lot of money involved, a lot of back-slapping and ‘backhanders’. The anomaly concerning temperature – a variable which created considerable problems, deserves further explanation. In warm weather, gas expands and rises, the greatest concentration being found at the ceiling of the chamber. That, after all, is one of the intrinsic properties of a gas. The victims quickly realised this and, at the first sign of sickness, they threw themselves to the ground, closed their eyes and slowed their breathing. Thirty minutes later, when the doors to the chamber were opened, the operators were stunned to find the subjects lying on the ground, weakened, but for the most part still alive. It seemed likely that those who died did so as a result of panic, overcrowding and suffocation rather than the effects of the gas. In cold weather, on the other had, the gas remained concentrated at floor level and productivity was excellent. There were still survivors, mostly infants whose parents had held them on their shoulders for as long as they were able, but such exceptions merely confirmed the rule and the poor mites were usually in such a bad way that they usually died on the way to the Krema – the furnace – so it was unnecessary to gas them a second time, a horrifying prospect for those operating the chambers. The shape and size of the chambers also proved to be critical. Although a long, narrow, low-ceilinged chamber produces excellent results, it is difficult to persuade subjects to go inside, they panic when they see what looks like a tomb. Were they to refuse it might result in chaos, something which had been declared a cardinal sin in Germany. This happened in a number of camps, and the authorities were obliged to enlarge the chambers. A large, high-ceilinged chamber reassured the subjects. Who knows why – human nature is unfathomable – since the end result, as even the prisoner knows, is the same. The Sonderkommando preferred large chambers. Less work, more bodies, but this was frustrating for those operating the Kremas, whose furnaces did not have the capacity to deal with the deliveries. Corpses began to pile up, they rotted, attracting rats and flies and all sorts of vermin, which again resulted in chaos.
Overseeing an operation of this nature is not as easy as it might seem. It is a complex industrial process with all the flaws inherent in such systems: a poorly-educated workforce prone to absenteeism, power failures, stock shortages, disparities between supply and demand at the Kremas which disrupt schedules and break the working rhythm, creating bottlenecks and resulting in workers unable to work. Then there is the necessary micromanagement – as we call it these days because it sounds more complex than management – with all that this entails: unfeasible performance targets imposed like religious tenets, inter-departmental rivalry, the cliques, the clashes of interests, the scrabbling for seniority, the blunders. The extermination camps competed fiercely for everything: the best equipment, the biggest budgets, the top-flight experts; they vied with each other in their savoir-faire, their passion, their inventiveness, each trying to please the Führer, each trembling at the thought of disappointing Himmler. But it’s impossible to keep track of everything, and when one thing breaks down, there are repercussions all down the production line. In such conditions, it’s impossible to allocate blame and, by the time the problem is fixed, half a dozen more have appeared elsewhere. It might be a catastrophic event – a fire, an explosion, a virulent pandemic, an escape, an act of sabotage – with all the attendant disruption: reports to be written up, stress levels to be calmed, disciplinary action to be taken, another purging of the ranks, all of which negatively impacts on the Great God productivity. Experts had to be on site to do real-time problem solving. There was no place in the Machine for incompetence and amateurism – two things which, in the Third Reich, were considered to be greater than the seven deadly sins. It only takes five minutes to round up a firing squad, and a lot less to sign a transfer to the Russian front. An experienced chemical engineer needed to be on hand for the gas chambers, and a combustion expert was needed for the furnaces. Then there were the doctors, the lab assistants, the accountants and quartermasters; the operation involved much more than the gas chambers and the Kremas. There was everything else to consider: the various workshops and farms responsible for keeping the Reich supplied with everything it might need. A good-sized camp, after all, comprised 3–4,000 prisoners, turnover was high, you needed enough guards to supervise everyone, a dozen service sectors and a systems management team keeping everyone working to full capacity. Ask any CEO, he’ll tell you, running a town or a company of that size is no easy task. Murder on this scale is not something that can be achieved by a random serial killer. And coordinating twenty-five extermination camps spread over several countries is a colossal undertaking, one that would cripple many a government today. The logistics of the railway system alone give some idea of the countless tasks which have to be timed to the split-second. A railway system is not a toy. Before they could be gassed, these millions of people had to be tracked down, identified, inventoried, captured, grouped, transported and shipped out according to various, sometimes contradictory, criteria, then re-registered, fed, clothed, examined, made to work according to the standards of the Reich, guarded, disciplined and finally destroyed, and all of this had to be done according to a strict timetable and in complete SECRECY. Let us not forget: secrecy was the sine qua non of the final solution, the one thing without which it could not function. Secrecy was to the Final Solution what invisibility is to God – take away the one, make visible the other and the whole system collapses. I read somewhere that at its height, Auschwitz alone cremated more than 15,000 people a day. They must have been working flat out. Papa worked in Auschwitz for a while, it must have been tough work, but he’d already spent time at most of the camps in Germany and Poland so his experience would have stood him in good stead.
It was thinking about him, about his incredibly stressful, unrewarding work that prompted me to collate all this information on the gas chambers and the Kremas. I wanted to be able to picture his daily routine in the death trade. I also felt that to judge my father I needed to understand his crimes, to set down each stage, to reconstruct everything as accurately as possible. There would still be a chapter to be written about extenuating circumstances but, having given this some thought, I decided that a man engulfed by evil who does not commit suicide, does not resist, does not give himself up and demand justice in the name of his victims but runs away, hides, conspires so his family are oblivious, has no right to compassion, no claim to extenuating circumstances. Children always judge their fathers harshly, but they do so because they love and respect them more than anyone in the world. I also thought – thought first and foremost – of the victims in this vast hell, and it occurred to me that all the meaning in the world had gone up in smoke with them. We live in a new era, an era in which the impossible is the only thing that is possible. With computing, automation and modern methods of manipulating the masses, the great Miracle is now within our grasp – just look at the horrors visited on so many honourable peoples by homilies as pathetic as Mein Kampf, and with only the meagre resources of third world countries: Mao’s Little Red Book, Qaddafi’s Green Book, the writings of Kim Il-sung and Khomeini, and those of the ‘Türkmenbay’ – Saparmurat Niyazov, and the millions of people destroyed by sects devoid of ideas and of means.
I studied so many other things. One question was never adequately answered – by which I mean in general terms, which might be applied to all the camps: what is the optimum physical condition for camp prisoners – that which best corresponds to the demands for productivity and imperatives of security? When prisoners are sick and weak, they don’t work, they are a drain on the assets of the Reich, but when they are healthy, they are dangerous, they think, they rebel, they foment unrest, organise escapes, sabotage equipment, lie to the Kapos who are too stupid to fear what they cannot see, they sap the morale of younger soldiers not yet inured to evil. This problem, which is easy to formulate but difficult to solve, was the subject of countless studies and numerous experiments. There are a number of considerations: firstly, the sick are not always genuinely sick. Research demonstrated that those who claimed to be at death’s door often watched countless co-religionists die before they finally succumbed; and many of those who claimed to be in perfect health were actually suicidal and attempting to kill themselves through work. These are the most dangerous prisoners, desperation makes them cunning, bitter, depraved, they are capable of anything, capable of grabbing a machine gun and firing wildly until they have emptied the last round, of setting fire to the barracks, of rushing a guard and slitting his throat or slamming him against the electric fence until their burning bodies fuse in death. The best advice, often repeated, is to flush them out and eliminate them as a warning to others or – if possible, since they represent the workforce – give them hope. There are many ways of going about this, sometimes a friendly gesture is enough to calm their self-destructive fury, often strong-arm tactics are the only solution.
In today’s parlance we call this Operations Research Modelling, a particularly complex paradigm involving quantifiable behaviour models that can be studied by doctors, and other factors which cannot, like the impact of long winters on behaviour, the stench that saps the soul and tears it apart, the boundless agonising loneliness, the squabbles between prisoners, the impact of rumours, the arrival of new prisoners which may spark new tensions or bring fresh despair, the prevailing winds; what do I know, morale is like a wisp of smoke, it takes little to send it one way or the other and eventually it fades, dissipates into madness. Only the intuition and experience of old hands in the camps made it possible to overcome these problems. All of the solutions were discovered in the camps through trial and error, never in the labs in Berlin where researchers indulged in wild speculation and secret experiments. As with most problems solutions proved more likely to present themselves in the field, rather than in sterile, artificial reconstructions designed to impress the Bonzen, to curry favour, to earn their stripes. Small-scale models are meaningless, they have no bearing on reality, revulsion is not some minor experimental variable, it is at the very heart of the Machine. In the camps, the personnel are constantly dealing with blood and shit, they risk their souls, they struggle, everything depends on keeping up staff morale, on fostering rivalry, you organise parties, competitions, fights, you disseminate false information, tell the guards the camp is about to be liberated, that there are massive new deliveries of potatoes, of bread, of pots and pans, that the camp is to be expanded, the work detail reorganised, that real showers are being installed, that libraries will be opened, that they will be able to send letters, why not? In a vacuum you can say anything, there is always someone to believe it. Then again, you can do the reverse, you can crush the spirits of the guards, deprive them of everything, thrash them, spread fear, work them day and night, beat them hollow. When they have a glimmer of hope, they become animated, they work hard, they become daring, it only takes a single spark. By lying to them, blowing hot and cold at precisely the right moment, it is possible to regulate working conditions, stamp out subversion, break up factions and, in doing so, gain time and maintain – or perhaps even improve – productivity. It is the age-old method used in drilling army conscripts: you march them around for no reason until they are exhausted, force them to muster every five minutes for no reason until they are dazed, work them from dawn till dusk for no reason until they forget even the notion of freedom, organise alerts for no reason until they are constantly unsettled, punish them for no reason until they realise their lives hang by a thread, then one morning you hound them out of their barracks for no reason and send them off to die somewhere else. The only difference is that, in the camps, work is death, punishment is death, cruelty is death, kindness is death, time off is death, recreation is death, rations are death, alerts are death and redundancy is summary execution. A man who dies at a yes or a no. The safest strategy, obviously, is to weed out old hands before they become inured, before they infect the new recruits. The problem with this approach is that it is the old hands, the veterans, who maintain productivity, new recruits are too terrified to work efficiently. Fear spreads and in a twinkling fear turns to panic. This, too, presents a difficult operational problem, a balance needs to be struck so that the system runs efficiently, constantly, without excessive risk. Let us not forget that the purpose of the camps is extermination, and although everyone knows this, no one says it or even thinks it – neither the prisoners, who need to cling to hope, nor their executioners who think only of productivity – everyone behaves as though death were simply one particularly harsh punishment in the disciplinary arsenal, it is this which makes their working relationships exceptionally complex.
The running of such camps is anything but easy. When I put myself in Papa’s shoes, when I consider the incredible difficulties he faced and compare them to the problems of a multinational like ours, even in an adverse economic climate, faced with criticism from newspapers, takeover bids from speculators, disloyalty from clients, edicts from civil servants and the terrorist ploys of unions, I have to laugh. The achievements of the formidable Nazi military-industrial machine are unparalleled, they are without equal.
Was the journey necessary? From a technical point of view, obviously not. I already knew what there was to know. What I wanted was to be in this place where my father had been, to talk to him across the years. Who else could tell me what I needed to know, what his career path had been, what his state of mind had been when he meted out death on such a scale? Had he resisted? Did he glory in his power? Why this loathing of the Jew, this all-consuming hatred? What did he think might come of it? When the Third Reich was crumbling, was Papa thinking that it was the end of the world or simply the end of a world? What did he feel when the extermination camps were discovered and humanity gave a howl of terror that surely echoed to the ends of the universe? Did he suddenly come to his senses? Did he become affronted? Did he say to himself that humanity had clearly understood nothing, that at the ends of the universe the end of a world is a triviality, it is in the order of things? Chaos is born of chaos and returns to chaos, it is mathematical, it is written in the heavens. Untold civilisations, vast empires, great peoples have vanished, this is not news, the old must die to make way for the new. These questions drive me insane because I know the answer: Papa did not kill himself, did not give himself up, he ran away, he lied, he forgot. He told me nothing.
I got a room in a tiny boutique hotel as bright as a small spring sun. From my window, I could see the university in its lush, magical setting. Manicured lawns, hundred-year-old trees, hedges clipped and sculpted with lasers, fountains with, I imagine, fat fish fed by an invisible hand with the best of intentions or at least with impeccable attention to punctuality, scale and quantity. In the middle of the campus, on a grassy hill, the majestic Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität sits enthroned. It is a magnificent building, stately, opulent, in delectable warm shades of stone. I thought back to my university, the École Centrale in Nantes, a poor relation by comparison. This, clearly, is a temple to science. The hordes of regimented students, walking in groups or single file already had the austere, preoccupied look of veteran scientists while also being tousled, smiling, pleasantly scruffy like all students their age. The professors, old-fashioned, shambling, essentially innocuous, carrying baskets or old canvas bags, looked as though they had just arrived from the country and gone to the wrong place. Germany, I remembered, was in the throes of an environmental crisis, something that dovetailed neatly with is formidable industrial infrastructure. Leather and faux-leather satchels were clearly the fashion in Frankfurt this year. When I was a student in Nantes, it was nylon rucksacks, and I remember Monsieur Candela, self-obsessed soixante-huitard that he was, telling me that in his day, you turned up for lectures with nothing and left with a girl on your arm. Things change.
Until now, I had been able to allow my future father some extenuating circumstances, to see in him the conscientious schoolboy, the fun-loving student, the decent, happy-go-lucky soldier. He is young, he doesn’t know, the Final Solution is a state secret, a confidential matter known only to the Führer perched in his Eagle’s Nest, the impregnable Berghof, and to the starving prisoner in some far-flung part of eastern Europe, in a death camp cut off by snowstorms from the rest of the world. People suspected, they spoke in euphemisms, they had noticed that there were fewer and fewer Jews and other Minderwertige Leute on the streets, that many shops were closed and derelict, that the Judenhaus and the synagogues had been repurposed, but a war is a war, it must first be fought, only afterwards can you calculate the dead and the disappeared, only then do state secrets, like corpses, float to the surface.
I wandered around the university campus. Students spend their lives in cafés and bars, that’s where they talk, where they set the world to rights, where they drown their sorrows, it was where I spent most of my four years in Nantes. In Frankfurt I visited every café, every bar, but nowhere did I feel the oppressive, arrogant, feverish atmosphere of Nazi Germany. In the liberal, European, impossibly liberal Germany of today, everything is immaculate, pristine, warm and young although the populace seems older than ever. I wanted to be a conjuror, to wave a magic wand, turn back time and shroud everything in black and grey and fog, restore to the streets their cobblestoned past, to the buildings their pre-war decrepitude, to the ladies, that bourgeois charm perched somewhere between decorousness and depravity, to the girls, that air of Olympian athletes, to the civil servants, the starched formality of dangerous automata, to the working-class the demeanour of bankrupt country squires ripe for exploitation and manipulation, to the politicians, the shrill rhetoric of the madman. I couldn’t picture the young Hans Schiller, too many other images cluttered my mind, the irreproachable SS officer in his black uniform, the Cheikh of Aïn Deb I remembered from childhood in his spotless white burnous, the image of the German businessman trussed up in his dark suit, the picture of these promising students who seemed prematurely solemn. This youthful Hans I cannot picture deserves my compassion, he is young, he does not know. He fell in with the muscular Hitler Youth, the Hitlerjugend, and there lost what little adolescent wisdom had survived from childhood. I did much the same thing in the FLN youth, the FLNjugend, it was not as extreme, just the crackpot rantings of rank amateurs, but I know the symptoms, the dull roar in your head, the spit-flecked slogans in your mouth, the murderous twitch in your hands. His years at university did nothing to improve Hans, his character by now was mapped out, and the spirit of the times was of relentless propaganda, iron vigilance and, shortly afterwards, of Blitzkrieg. It’s easy to understand how difficult it must have been to think for yourself. From here to his induction into the researcher team working on Zyklon B is a matter of simple probability. He was in the right place at the right time, they needed men in white coats to hold the test tubes, monitor the distillate, take notes. Hans, the newly qualified chemical engineer, surely thinking he had been recognised, chosen, honoured, patted himself on the back. He probably genuinely believed that the gas they were working on would be used, as he had been told, to eradicate lice in the camps. What camps? he might have asked. The Arbeitslager – the labour camps of the glorious Reich! someone would have snapped, as though defending a campaign to end poverty and degradation. The real question? What’s going on here? would have come one day, at dusk, at dawn, between two pale pools of light, in some remote Frankfurt suburb, in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, as he witnessed his first live experiment – the gassing of a Jewish family too bewildered to protest or of a group of tramps too drunk to realise what was happening; and with that first question a flood of others would naturally have come: What am I doing here? Is this really happening? Why? I’d like to think he objected, but caught up as he was in some vast secret Reich, he realised there was no way out. The first step is the only one that matters, and he had already taken several. The rest follows, you brood over your own pain, you lick your wounds, you keep going, you keep your opinions to yourself, you forget them, and every day forgetting becomes a little easier, you espouse the common view and every day you believe it a little more fervently; you see cowards, braggarts, killing willingly, zealously, and this persuades you that you are on the right path, the only path. Papa quickly penetrated the inner sanctum of his horror, something which must have required some special trait. An incurable innocence? A healthy dose of cowardice? A little fervour? Perhaps a lot. Maybe a heartfelt rage at the Jews and other Minderwertige Leute.
My God, who will tell me who my father is?
I left Frankfurt am Main just as I had arrived, no different from when I came back from Uelzen and from the godforsaken hole near Strasbourg where my friend, my partner Adolph – his father’s son – lived. I had to keep going. To follow this path to its conclusion. To the end.