After the meeting, I went to say goodbye to Weseloh. She shook my hand warmly. “Hauptsturmführer Aue, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I was to be able to carry out this mission. For you, here in the East, the war is an everyday affair; but in Berlin, in the offices, you soon forget the mortal danger the Heimat is in, and the difficulties and sufferings of the front. Coming here has allowed me to understand all that in a profound way. I will carry back the memory of all of you as a precious thing. Good luck, good luck. Heil Hitler!” Her face was shining, she was in the grip of a surprising exaltation. I returned her salute and left her.
Jünger was still in Voroshilovsk, and I had heard that he was receiving admirers who sought him out; he had to leave soon to inspect Ruoff’s divisions in front of Tuapse. But I had lost all desire to meet Jünger. I went back to Pyatigorsk thinking about Prill. Obviously he was trying to harm me; I didn’t really understand why: I had never tried to pick a quarrel with him; but he had chosen to take Turek’s side. He was in continual contact with Bierkamp and Leetsch, and it would not be hard, by dint of little insinuations, to set them against me. This matter of the Bergjuden risked putting me in a bad position: I had no bias, I just wanted to respect a certain intellectual honesty, and I had trouble understanding Bierkamp’s insistence on wanting to liquidate them at all costs; was he sincerely convinced of their Jewish racial origins? For me, that didn’t emerge clearly from the documentation; as to their appearance and behavior, they didn’t at all resemble the Jews we knew; seeing them at home, they seemed in every point like the Kabards, the Balkars, or the Karachai. They too offered us sumptuous gifts, it was a tradition, you didn’t have to see that as corruption. But I had to watch out: indecisiveness could be interpreted as weakness, and Prill and Turek would take advantage of the slightest misstep.
In Pyatigorsk, I again found the map room sealed: Hoth’s army, formed from the reinforced remnants of the Fourth Panzer Army, was launching its breakthrough from Kotelnikovo toward the Kessel. But the officers were acting optimistic, and their comments served to fill out the official communiqués and rumors for me; everything led us to believe that once again, as before Moscow the previous year, the Führer had been right to hold out. In any case I had to prepare for the conference on the Bergjuden and didn’t have much time for anything else. As I reread the reports and my notes, I thought about Voss’s words, during our last conversation; and examining the different accumulated proofs, I wondered: What would he have thought of this, what would he have accepted or rejected? The case, all things considered, was very thin. It honestly seemed to me that the Khazar hypothesis was untenable, that only the Persian origin made sense; as to what that meant, I was less sure than ever. I regretted Voss’s death enormously; he was truly the only person here with whom I could have talked about this seriously; the others, the ones in the Wehrmacht or the SS, couldn’t care less, really, about truth or scientific rigor: it was just a political question for them.
