But in any case, despite the interdictions, the promises of secrecy and Globocnik’s threats, the men of the Einsatz remained talkative. You just had to wear an SS uniform and frequent the bar in the Deutsches Haus, occasionally buying someone a drink, to be quickly informed of everything. The obvious discouragement caused by the military news, clearly decipherable through the optimism radiating from the communiqués, contributed to loosening people’s tongues. When they proclaimed that in Sicily our courageous Italian allies, backed by our forces, are holding firm, everyone understood that the enemy had not been driven back into the sea, and had finally opened a second front in Europe; as for Kursk, anxiety increased as the days passed, for the Wehrmacht, after its initial successes, remained obstinately, unusually silent: and when finally they began to mention the planned implementation of elastic tactics around Orel, even the most obtuse must have understood something was wrong. There were many who ruminated over these developments; and among the loudmouths who ranted every night, it was never hard to find a man drinking alone and in silence, and to engage him in conversation. That’s how one day I began talking with a man in an Untersturmführer’s uniform, leaning on the bar in front of a tankard of beer. Döll—that was his name—seemed flattered that a superior officer would treat him so familiarly; yet he must have been ten years older than me. He pointed to my “Order of the Frozen Meat” and asked me where I had spent that winter; when I answered Kharkov, he relaxed even further. “Me too, I was there, between Kharkov and Kursk. Special Operations.”—“You weren’t with the Einsatzgruppe, though?”—“No, it was something else. Actually, I’m not in the SS.” He was one of those famous functionaries from the Führer’s Chancellery. “Between us, we say T-four. That’s how it’s called.”—“And what were you doing around Kharkov?”—“You know, I was in Sonnenstein, one of the centers for the sick there…” I motioned with my head to show I knew what he meant, and he went on. “In the summer of ’forty-one, they closed it. And some of us, we were considered specialists, they wanted to keep us, so they sent us to Russia. There was a whole delegation of us, it was Oberdienstleiter Brack himself who led us, there were the doctors from the hospital, everything, and we carried out special actions. With gas trucks. We each had a special notice in our pay book, a red piece of paper signed by the OKW, that forbade us from being sent too close to the front: they were afraid we’d fall into the hands of the Russians.”—“I don’t really understand. The special measures, in that region, all the SP measures, those were the responsibility of my Kommando. You say that you had gas trucks, but how could you be carrying out the same tasks as us without our knowing it?” His face took on a belligerent, almost cynical look: “We weren’t carrying out the same tasks. The Jews or the Bolsheviks, over there, we didn’t touch them.”—“So?” He hesitated and drank some more, in long draughts, then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his fingers. “We took care of the wounded.”—“Russian wounded?”—“You don’t understand. Our own wounded. The ones who were too messed up to have a useful life were sent to us.” I understood and he smiled when he saw: he had produced his effect. I turned to the bar and ordered another round. “You’re talking about German wounded,” I finally said, softly. “As I told you. A real shit pile. Guys like me and you, who had given everything for the Heimat, and bang! That’s how they were thanked. I can tell you, I was happy when they sent me here. It’s not very cheerful here, either, but at least it’s not that.” Our drinks arrived. He told me about his youth: he had gone to a technical school; he wanted to be a farmer, but with the crisis he had joined the police: “My children were hungry, it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table every day.” At the end of 1939, he had been assigned to Sonnenstein for the Euthanasia Einsatz. He didn’t know how he had been chosen. “On one hand, it wasn’t very pleasant. But on the other, it wasn’t the front, and the pay was good, my wife was happy. So I didn’t say anything.”—“And Sobibor?” He had already told me that’s where he worked now. He shrugged his shoulders: “Sobibor? It’s like everything, you get used to it.” He made a strange gesture, which made a strong impression on me: with the tip of his boot, he scraped the floor, as if he were crushing something. “Little men and little women, it’s all the same. It’s like stepping on a cockroach.”
