SCHAEFER: Yes, because the Russians had dragged off 60,000 Estonians. But, of course, the flames had been fanned. Tell me, what sort of an impression did these people create? Did you ever see any of them shortly before they were shot? Did they weep?
KITTEL: It was terrible. I once saw them being transported but I had no idea they were people who were being driven to their execution.
SCHAEFER: Have the people any idea what is in store for them?
KITTEL: They know perfectly well; they are apathetic. I’m not sensitive myself but such things just turn my stomach; I always said: “One ceases to be a human being; that’s got nothing more to do with warfare.” I once had the senior chemist for organic chemistry from IG FARBEN as my adjutant and because they had nothing better for him to do he had been called up and sent to the front. He’s back here again now, though he got there quite accidentally. The man was done for weeks. He sat in the corner the whole time and wept. He said: “When one considers that it may be like that everywhere!” He was an important scientist and a musician with a highly strung nervous system.196
Now it’s Felbert’s turn to steer the conversation in a different direction:
FELBERT: That shows why FINLAND deserted us, why ROUMANIA deserted us, why everyone hates us everywhere—not because of that single incident but because of the great number of similar incidents.
KITTEL: If one were to destroy all the Jews of the world simultaneously there wouldn’t remain a single accuser. 197
Kittel assumed the role of the pragmatist in his story. What bothers him about the mass murder of Jews is not the killings per se, but the haphazard methods with which they are carried out. He fails to grasp that Felbert wants to discuss the moral dimensions of mass executions in general and not the specifics of one particular case:
FELBERT (very excited and shouting): It’s obvious; it’s such a scandal; it doesn’t need to be a Jew to accuse us—we ourselves must bring the charge; we must accuse the people who have done it.
KITTEL: Then one must admit that our State system was wrongly built.
FELBERT (shouting): It is, it’s obvious that it’s wrong, there’s no doubt about it. Such a thing is unbelievable.
KITTEL: We are the tools…198
Felbert explicitly assumes a position diametrically opposed to Kittel’s. In outraged tones, he speaks of a “scandal” and the necessity of holding those in charge responsible for it—although he clearly excludes his present company from moral culpability.
Yet the source of even Felbert’s outrage is not primarily ethical. It, too, stems from practical, personal considerations: “That will be marked up against us afterwards, as though it had been we who did it.” Major General Johannes Bruhn seconds that thought:
