405 Ribbentrop: “That man is finished…” and Jodl’s reply—Gilbert, p. 148 (12 February 1946).
406 Colonel Heim’s characterization of Paulus: “Well groomed…”—Goerlitz, pp. 47-48.
406 Ernst Paulus’s postwar relations with his father—The silver-framed photograph from Poltava is, of course, my fabrication. For what it is worth, Ernst Paulus inserted the following into Goerlitz’s compilation (p. xiii): “So, in all reverence, I dedicate this book to the memory of Sixth Army.”
407 Hitler’s wilclass="underline" “:… and therefore to choose death of my own free will…” Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Documentation Center, Long Dark Nazi Years: A Record of Documents and Photographs of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution (Haifa, 1999), testament p. 4 (pages of this book not consistently numbered). This document was discovered in a secret compartment of a suitcase in possession of a Frau Irmgard Unterholzer in Tegernsee.
407 Ditto: “May it be one day a part of the code of honor…”—Ibid.; testament p. 6.
407 Hilde Benjamin, nicknamed the Red Guillotine—She makes a few cameo appearances in Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). There is no information available to me that she ever met Paulus in real life.
407 Hitler to Paulus: “One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web…”—Slightly altered from Warlimont, pp. 326-27 (fragment no. 5; discussion with Sonderfuuhrer von Neurath concerning Italy on 20 May 1943).
408 Field-Marshal von Manstein on closeness between officers and men as the “Prussian tradition”—Op. cit., p. 207.
408 Paulus’s prewar service report (1920): “Modest, perhaps too modest…”—Quoted in von Mellenthin, German Generals, p. 104.
408 Hilde Benjamin on Paulus: “An innocuous representative of the former military-professional caste…”—I have fabricated this.
409 Paulus’s Dresden lecture: “At the same time, particular attention was invited to Sixth Army’s inadequate stock of supplies”—Goerlitz, p. 219 (memorandum: “The basic facts of Sixth Army’s operations at Stalingrad [Phase I],” by Paulus).
409 Gehlen: “My department predicted ten days in advance precisely where the blow would fall at Stalingrad!”—After Gehlen, p. 56. In his memoirs, Gehlen is nearly always right. David Thomas paints a different picture.
409 The show trial of the Gehlen Organization—On 11 November, two ringleaders were guillotined in Dresden between 4:18 and 4:22 A.M., for the crime of industrial espionage.
409 “Five hundred and forty-six spies arrested!”—Number supplied by Gehlen, p. 174, who contemptuously adds: ‘A fantastic figure which should itself have sufficed to convince any neutral observer that this was pure propaganda; it reminded me of the RAF and Luftwaffe claims in the Battle of Britain.”
As transliterated in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 13, p. 433), her name is Zoia Anatol’evna (Tania) Kosmodem’ianskaia. In this story I have preferred the looser, less forbidding orthography of World War II Anglo-American accounts. The encyclopedia informs us, in typical fashion omitting any mention of the mundane stables, that “she was captured by the fascists… while fulfilling a combat mission.”
411 Epigraph: “The essential thing about anti-guerrilla warfare…”—Warlimont, p. 289 (Hitler at staff conference, fragment no. 29, evening session, 1 December 1942 in Wolfschanze).
412 Zoya: “You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.”—Karpov, p. 150. The first two of the three photographs of Zoya are reproduced here.
413 Number of Vlasov’s mortars and heavy guns—Erickson, p. 534.
413 Marshal Tukhachevsky: “The next war will be won by tanks and aviation”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 100.
413 The song of the two beardless boys: “Into battle for our nation, into battle for our Stalin”—Alexander Werth, Leningrad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), p. 33. To follow the meter of the original Russian (which appears on the same page), I’ve added an “our” before “Stalin” (the original runs za Stalina) and accordingly rendered za rodinu, “for the nation,” as “for our nation.”
415 Streets named after her—In addition to a number of Kosmodem’ianskaia Streets, there is a monument to her on the Minsk highway.
The tale of Gerstein has haunted me for a number of reasons. “At the beginning of Nazism in Germany,” writes Marie-Louise von Franz, “I was several times asked by Germans in what respect they were abnormal, for though they were unable to accept Nazism, not doing so made them doubt their own normality… misery fell upon people who had done the right thing.”—The Feminine in Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), p. 36. Some of the remarks in “Clean Hands” about the conflicting necessities of parleying with evil and of respecting it by not investigating it are partially indebted to this book; likewise the notion that someone who continues to fight evil and gets victimized is from a psychological perspective complicit. Basically, what von Franz is arguing is that if we repress our own evil side, it will come out somewhere else. My motivation in placing such arguments into the mouths of the other characters is to deepen our sense of what Gerstein’s biographer has called “the ambiguity of good.” All the same, I firmly believe that there was nothing ambiguous about Gerstein’s good, unavailing though it proved to be. He is one of my heroes.
417 Hans Günther: “This is one of the most secret matters, even the most secret…”—Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-45 (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 311 (“retranslated” a little). However, in his own affidavit, which is presumably more accurate, Gerstein assigns these words not to Günther but to S.S. Brigade Chief Otto Globocnik; see Saul Friedländer, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf [Borzoi], 1969), p. 104. For narrative reasons I have employed Levin’s version.
417 For a full version of Gerstein’s affidavit, see Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst: Dokumentation zur Massen-Vergasung, Heft 9 (Bonn: Printed by Oberfränkische Verlangsaft und Druckerei G.m.b.H, Hof/ Saale, 1955), pp. 7-16 (affidavit of 4 May 1945).
421 Gerstein’s journey to Belzec—In fact, he, Günther and Pfannenstiel traveled together by truck. Since literal faithfulness here would have made it impossible to introduce Berthe’s Doppelgänger, I gave him a train trip.
422 S.S. Brigade Chief Otto Globocnik: “Now, you’re going to have two jobs at Belzec…” —Ibid., p. 311 (altered and expanded).
423 Dr. Pfannenstieclass="underline" “The whole procedure is not entirely satisfactory…”—Closely after Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 244 (“‘The camp had clean sanitary facilities’: Professor Wilhem Pfannanstiel, Waffen-S.S. hygienist, on a gassing at Belzec”).
424 Captain Wirth to Gerstein: “There are not ten people alive…”—Friedländer, pp. 108-09.
425 Gerstein to the Swedish attaché: “The people stand together… You can hear them crying, sobbing…”—Abridged from Gerstein’s report of 4 May 1945 (presumably to the Americans); in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 242. In Friedländer this testimony appears in the past tense.
426 Working capacity of Belzec and other extermination camps—According to Gerstein’s 1945 estimate, as reproduced in Friedländer, p. 104. Given the statistics which have since been more or less agreed upon for the number of people murdered in the Holocaust, Gerstein’s count is far too high. For instance, based on his figure for Sobibor, the yearly “output” of that camp would be more than 7,000,000 victims. In fact, one of the murderers estimates that a total of “only” 350,000 Jews died there (Erich Bauer, “the Gasmeister”; in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 232). The commandant of Auschwitz states that “the highest number of gassings in one day was 10,000. That was the most that could be carried out… with modern facilities” (ibid., p. 273). According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, “of the circa 50 million people who died during World War II, around twenty million were victims of the unprecedented policy of extermination of the Third Reich” (p. 11; Franciszek Piper, “The Political and Racist Principles of the Nazi Policy of Extermination and Their Realization at Auschwitz”). In order to better respect and re-create Gerstein’s thought processes, I have let his count stand. About Maidanek Gerstein writes only “seen in preparation,” so for quantification of its “productivity” I have relied on the 1944 account of Alexander Werth (op. cit., pp. 890-94, which includes that grisly detail about the cabbages). Werth seems to have been the first credentialed Western journalist to see the camp.