The cold settled in and made itself at home, almost like a living organism stretching out over the earth and seeping in everywhere, in the most unexpected places. Sperath informed me that frostbite was decimating the Wehrmacht, and often led to amputations: the hobnailed soles of the regulation Kommisstiefel had turned out to be an effective conductor of cold. Every morning dead sentinels were found, their brains frozen by their helmets being placed directly on their heads, without a wool cap underneath. The tank drivers had to burn tires under their engines to be able to start them up. Some of the troops had finally received warm civilian clothing, collected in Germany by the Winterhilfe, but there was a little bit of everything there, and some soldiers strolled about in women’s fur coats, feather boas, or fancy muffs. The looting of civilians was getting worse: the soldiers took sheepskin coats and shapkas by force, then threw their owners almost naked out into the cold, where many died. In front of Moscow, reportedly, it was even worse; ever since the Soviet counteroffensive at the beginning of the month, our men, having moved to the defensive, were dying like flies in their positions without even seeing the enemy. Politically too the situation was becoming confused. In Kharkov, no one really understood why we had declared war on the Americans: “We already have enough to deal with as it is,” Häfner grumbled, seconded by Kurt Hans, “the Japanese can take care of them by themselves.” Others, more farsighted, saw danger for Germany in a Japanese victory. The purge of the army high command also gave rise to questions. In the SS, most people thought that the fact that the Führer had personally taken charge of OKH was a good thing: now, they said, those old reactionary Prussians won’t be able to subtly hinder him anymore; in the spring the Russians would be annihilated. The Wehrmacht officers, however, seemed more skeptical. Von Hornbogen, the Ic, spoke of rumors of an offensive to the south, with the oil fields of the Caucasus as objective. “I don’t understand anymore,” he confided to me after a drink or two at the Kasino. “Are our objectives political or economic?” Both, probably, I suggested; but for him the big question was that of our means. “The Americans are going to take a while to increase their production and accumulate enough material. That gives us time. But if we haven’t finished off the Reds by then, we’re screwed.” Despite everything, these words shocked me; never had I heard a pessimistic opinion expressed so crudely. I had already envisaged the possibility of a more limited victory than planned, a compromise peace, for example, where we’d leave Russia proper to Stalin but would keep the Ostland and the Ukraine, along with Crimea. But defeat? That seemed unthinkable to me. I would have liked to discuss it with Thomas, but he was far away, in Kiev, and I hadn’t heard from him since his promotion to Sturmbannführer, which he had announced to me in reply to my letter from Pereyaslav. In Kharkov, there weren’t many people to talk with. At night, Blobel drank and heaped abuse on the Jews, the Communists, even the Wehrmacht; the officers listened to him, played billiards, or withdrew to their rooms. I often did the same. At that time I was reading Stendhal’s diaries, where I found cryptic passages that surprisingly echoed my feeling: No to the Jews…The suffocation of these times is overwhelming me…Grief is making me a machine… As an aftereffect, surely, of a feeling of filth produced by the vomiting, I was also beginning to pay almost obsessive attention to my hygiene; several times, already, Woytinek had surprised me scrutinizing my uniform, searching for traces of mud or other substances, and had ordered me to stop gaping. Right after my first inspection of the Aktion I had given my soiled uniform to Hanika to wash; but every time he brought it back to me I found new stains; finally I took him aside, reproached him brutally for his laziness and incompetence, and then flung my jacket in his face. Sperath had come to ask me if I was sleeping well; when I told him I was, he seemed satisfied, and it was true, at night I fell asleep like a stone as soon as I lay down, but my sleep was full of heavy, troubled dreams, not nightmares exactly, but like long underwater currents stirring up the mud in the depths while the surface remains smooth and calm. I should note that I went back regularly to witness the executions; no one required it, but I went of my own free will. I didn’t shoot, but I studied the men who did, the officers especially, such as Häfner or Janssen, who had been there since the beginning and seemed now to have become perfectly hardened to their executioner’s work. I must have been like them. By inflicting this piteous spectacle on myself, I felt, I wasn’t trying to exhaust the scandal of it, the insurmountable feeling of a transgression, of a monstrous violation of the Good and the Beautiful, but rather this feeling of scandal came to wear out all by itself, one got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much; thus what I was trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being; instead of that, I now felt only a dull, anxious kind of excitation, always briefer, more acrid, mixed with the fever and my physical symptoms, and thus, slowly, without truly realizing it, I was sinking into mud while searching for light. A minor incident threw a harsh light on these widening fissures. In the big snow-covered park behind the statue of Shevchenko, a young partisan was being led to the gallows. A crowd of Germans was gathering: Landsers from the Wehrmacht and some Orpos, but also men from the Organisation Todt, Goldfasanen from the Ostministerium, a few Luftwaffe pilots. The partisan was a rather thin young woman, her face, touched with hysteria, framed by heavy black hair cut short, very coarsely, as if with pruning shears. An officer bound her hands, placed her under the gallows, and put the rope around her neck. Then the soldiers and officers present filed in front of her and kissed her one after the other on the mouth. She remained silent and kept her eyes open. Some kissed her tenderly, almost chastely, like schoolboys; others took her head in both hands and forced open her lips. When my turn came, she looked at me, a clear, luminous look, washed of everything, and I saw that she understood everything, knew everything, and faced with this pure knowledge I burst into flames. My clothes crackled, the skin of my belly melted, the fat sizzled, fire roared in my eye sockets and my mouth, and cleaned out the inside of my skull. The blaze was so intense she had to turn her head away. I burned to a cinder, my remains were transformed into a salt statue; soon it cooled down, pieces broke off, first a shoulder, then a hand, then half the head. Finally I finished collapsing at her feet and the wind swept away the pile of salt and scattered it. Already the next officer was advancing, and when they had all gone by, they hanged her. For days on end I reflected on this strange scene; but my reflection stood before me like a mirror, and never returned anything to me but my own image, reversed of course, but true. The body of this girl was also a mirror for me. The rope had broken or they had cut it, and she lay in the snow in the Trade Unions Park, her neck broken, her lips swollen, one bare breast gnawed by dogs. Her rough hair formed a Medusa crest around her head and she seemed fabulously beautiful to me, inhabiting death like an idol, Our-Lady-of-the-Snows. Whatever path I took to go from the hotel to our offices, I always found her lying in my way, a stubborn, single-minded question that threw me into a labyrinth of vain speculations and made me lose my footing. This lasted for weeks.
