The officers ate together in the sanatorium’s dining room. Conversation dealt mostly with military events, and most of the diners showed proper optimism. “Now that Schweppenburg’s Panzers have crossed the Terek,” argued Wiens, Müller’s adjunct, a bitter Volksdeutscher who hadn’t set foot outside of the Ukraine until he was twenty-four, “our forces will soon be in Groznyi. After that, Baku is just a matter of time. Most of us will be able to celebrate Christmas at home.”—“General Schweppenburg’s Panzers are making no headway whatsoever, Hauptsturmführer,” I politely remarked. “They’ve barely managed to establish a bridgehead. Soviet resistance in Chechnya-Ingushetia is much stiffer than they expected.”—“Bah,” exclaimed Pfeiffer, a fat red Untersturmführer, “it’s their last gasp. Their divisions are bled dry. They’re just leaving a thin screen in front of us to try to deceive us; but at the first serious thrust, they’ll collapse or cut and run like rabbits.”—“How do you know that?” I asked curiously.—“That’s what they’re saying at the AOK,” Wiens answered for him. “Ever since the beginning of the summer, very few prisoners have been taken in the areas surrounded, like at Millerovo. From that they deduce that the Bolsheviks have exhausted their reserves, as our high command had foreseen.”—“We talked a lot about this aspect of things at the Gruppenstab and with the OKHG,” I said. “Not everyone shares your opinion. Some think that the Soviets learned a lesson from their terrible losses last year, and changed their strategy: they’re withdrawing before us in an orderly way, so as to mount a sudden counteroffensive when our lines of communication are vulnerable and stretched too thin.”—“I think you’re too much of a pessimist, Hauptsturmführer,” grumbled Müller, the head of the Kommando, his mouth full of chicken.—“I’m not a pessimist, Sturmbannführer,” I replied. “I’m just saying that there are different opinions, that’s all.”—“Do you think our lines are stretched too thin?” Bolte asked curiously.—“That depends on what’s actually facing them. The front line of Army Group B follows the course of the Don, where there are still Soviet bridgeheads that we haven’t been able to eliminate, all the way from Voronezh, which the Russians still hold despite all our efforts, down to Stalingrad.”—“Stalingrad won’t last much longer,” said Wiens, who had just emptied his stein. “Our Luftwaffe crushed the defense last month; the Sixth Army will just have to clean up.”—“Maybe. But since all our troops are concentrated on Stalingrad, the flanks of Army Group B are held only by our allies, on the Don and in the steppe. You know as well as I do that the quality of Romanian or Italian troops doesn’t come close to that of the German forces; the Hungarians might be good soldiers, but they have no supplies. Here, in the Caucasus, it’s the same, we don’t have enough men to form a continuous front along the ridges. And between the two Army Groups, the front peters out in the Kalmuk Steppe; we only send patrols out there, and we’re not safe from unpleasant surprises.”—“On that point,” interrupted Dr. Strohschneider, an immensely tall man, whose lips jutted out from under a bushy moustache and who commanded a Teilkommando on assignment in Budyonnovsk, “Hauptsturmführer Aue is not entirely wrong. The steppe is wide open. A bold attack could weaken our position.”—“Oh,” said Wiens as he drank some more beer, “they’ll never be anything but mosquito bites. And if they take a shot at our allies, the German ‘corsetting’ will be more than enough to control the situation.”—“I hope you’re right,” I said.—“In any case,” Dr. Müller sententiously concluded, “the Führer will always be able to impose the right decisions on all those reactionary generals.” That was certainly one way of seeing things. But the conversation had already shifted to the day’s Aktion. I listened in silence. As always, there were the inevitable anecdotes about the way the condemned behaved, how they prayed, cried, sang the Internationale, or were silent, and then commentaries on the problems of organization and our men’s responses. I put up with all this wearily; even the old-timers were only repeating what we’d been hearing for a year, there wasn’t a single authentic reaction in all these boasts and platitudes. One officer, though, stood out because of his particularly prolonged, coarse invectives against the Jews. He was the Leiter IV of the Kommando, Hauptsturmführer Turek, a disagreeable man I’d already met in the Gruppenstab. This Turek was one of the few visceral, obscene anti-Semites, in the Streicher mode, whom I had met in the Einsatzgruppen; at the SP and the SD, traditionally, we cultivated an intellectual kind of anti-Semitism, and these kinds of emotional remarks were poorly viewed. But Turek was afflicted with a remarkably Jewish physique: he had dark curly hair, a prominent nose, sensual lips; behind his back, some people cruelly called him “Jew Süss,” while others insinuated that he had Gypsy blood. He must have suffered from this since childhood; and at the slightest provocation he boasted about his Aryan ancestry: “I know it’s hard to see,” he would begin before explaining that for his recent wedding he had had to carry out exhaustive research and had been able to go back to the seventeenth century; he would go so far as to produce his RuSHA certificate attesting that he was of pure race and fit to procreate German children. I understood all that, and might have pitied him; but his outrageousness and obscenities surpassed all bounds: at the executions, I had heard, he taunted the condemned men for their circumsized penises, and forced women to strip naked so he could tell them that their Jewish vaginas would never produce any more children. Ohlendorf would not have tolerated such behavior, but Bierkamp closed his eyes to it; as for Müller, who should have called him to order, he said nothing. Turek was talking now with Pfeiffer, who directed the firing squads during the action; Pfeiffer was laughing at his jokes and egging him on. Sickened, I excused myself before dessert and went up to my room. My bouts of nausea had started up again; since Voroshilovsk, or earlier maybe, I was again suffering from the brutal retching that had so exhausted me in the Ukraine. I had vomited only once, in Voroshilovsk, after a rather heavy meal, but sometimes I had to make an effort to control the nausea: I coughed a lot, grew red, I found this unseemly and preferred to withdraw.
