A perpetual summer haze kept you from seeing the mountains of the Caucasus until you were at their feet. I crossed the foothills, passing the towns of Armavir and Labinskaya; as soon as you left Cossack territory, flags, green with a white crescent, burgeoned on the houses, raised by the Muslims to bid us welcome. The town of Maikop, one of the great oil centers of the Caucasus, was nestled right against the mountains, crossed by the Bielaya, a deep river above which rises the old city, perched atop tall chalk cliffs. Before the suburbs, the road ran alongside a railroad cluttered with thousands of cars, loaded with goods that the Soviets had not had time to evacuate. Then you crossed a bridge, still intact, and entered the city, a grid of long, straight streets, all identical, running alongside a Park of Culture where the plaster statues of heroes of labor slowly went on crumbling. Braune, a man with rather equine features, his large moon-face surmounted by a bulbous forehead, welcomed me eagerly: I sensed he was reassured to see again one of the last of “Ohlendorf’s men” still left in the Group, even though he himself was awaiting his replacement from one week to the next. Braune was worried about the oil installations in Neftegorsk: the Abwehr, just before taking the city, had managed to infiltrate a special unit, the Shamil, made up of mountain peoples from the Caucasus and disguised as a special battalion of the NKVD, to try to seize the oil wells intact; but the mission had failed and the Russians had dynamited the installations under the Panzers’ noses. Already, though, our specialists were working to repair them, and the first vultures of Kontinental-Öl were making their appearance. These bureaucrats, all connected to Göring’s Four-Year Plan, benefited from the support of Arno Schickedanz, the Reichskommissar-designate of the Kuban-Caucasus. “You know of course that Schickedanz owes his appointment to government minister Rosenberg, who was his high-school classmate in Riga. But then he had a falling out with his former schoolmate. I’ve heard that it’s Herr Körner, Reichsmarschall Göring’s
