ROTHKIRCH: A year ago I was in charge of the guerrilla school where men were being trained in guerrilla warfare; I went on an exercise with them one day and I said: “Direction of march is that hill up there.” The directors of the school then said to me: “That’s not a very good idea, sir, as they are just burning Jews up there.” I said: “What do you mean? Burning Jews? But there aren’t any Jews any more.” “Yes, that’s the place where they were always shot and now they are all being disinterred again, soaked in petrol and burnt so that their bodies shan’t be discovered.” “That’s a dreadful job. There’s certain to be a lot of loose talk about it afterwards.” “Well, the men who are doing the job will be shot directly afterwards and burnt with them.” The whole thing sounds just like a fairy story.291
RAMCKE: From the inferno.292
Events like the digging up and burning of Jewish corpses challenged the comprehension even of people like Rothkirch who were familiar with the Holocaust. But the Holocaust had path dependencies and consequences of its own, including “Action 1005.” In 1941, none of the perpetrators reckoned that the bodies would later have to be disposed of, and the horror this entailed crossed a further boundary of what they could imagine. It’s thus no wonder that Rothkirch and Ramcke use imaginary places as points of reference. Things like “Action 1005,” they both seem to be saying, cannot be part of their normal reality. They belonged on another nonearthly plane, that of the fairy tale or hell.
Here we see that for the soldiers the Holocaust demarcated a thin, permeable boundary between the real and unreal, the imaginable and unimaginable. The shifting nature of this border opened up space for fantastic rumors:
MEYER: In a city, I think it was TSCHENSTOCHAU, they did the following. The district captain ordered the Jews to be evacuated. They gave them shots of prussic acid. Prussic acid works quickly and then, the end. They took a few final steps and dropped to the ground in front of the hospital. Those are the harmless tricks.293
Rumors of this sort floated around freely and could be attached to a variety of events. But they remained uncanny, even as the roles of the actors, in this case Poles, changed.
A low-ranking Luftwaffe officer named Heimer told of Jews being killed by diverting gas into train cars:
HEIMER: There was a large collecting place, the Jews were always brought out of the houses and then taken to the station. They could take food with them for two or three days, and then they were put in a long distance train with the windows and doors sealed up. And then they were taken right through to POLAND, and just before reaching their destination they pumped in some sort of stuff, some sort of gas, cool gas or nitrogen gas—anyway some odourless gas. That put them all to sleep. It was nice and warm. Then they were pulled out and buried. That’s what they did with thousands of Jews! (Laughs.)294
