446 Captain Wirth, on the capacity of Auschwitz’s crematoria and open pyres: After The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, pp. 169-70 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).
447 “Our fiendish enemy on the Ostfront,” on the German mood after Stalingrad: “Bitter resistance, bordering on unthinking rashness; and timidity shading into morbid cowardice” —Chuikov, p. 15.
448 Bishop Dibelius, who “advocated only the exclusion of the Jews from our economic life”—Information given in Friedländer, pp. 38-39. This is a heartbreaking datum; Gerstein was so far from Germany normalcy, such a crier in the wilderness, that he had to consider somebody like Dibelius his ally!
449 The typist from the motor pooclass="underline" “What you are under the uniform is nobody’s business” —Actually, this was an old woman whose slightly anti-Nazi son had joined a Nazi group just to get some peace. She is quoted in Karl Billinger, Fatherland (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935; no date given for what must have been the original German publication), p. 243. Billinger was a rather dreary German Communist who was lucky enough to be amnestied after about a year in a camp. I have stolen two or three details from him for my scenes of Gerstein’s 1936 arrest and internment.
451 “The historian-ethicist Michael Balfour”: “One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer…”—Michael Balfour, Withstanding Hitler in Germany 1933-45 (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 240-41 (entry on Gerstein).
452 “Whoever gazes into Isolde’s eyes feels both heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame.”—Strassburg, p. 150, slightly “retranslated” by WTV.
452 Colloquy between Gerstein and Berthe—Very loosely based on the dialogue between Svipdag and his dead mother Gróa in the Poetic Edda, pp. 141-43 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanzas 1-16). Gróa is giving her son spells and guidance for travel in the other world to win his bride.
453 Michal Chilczuk, Polish People’s Army: “But what I saw were people I call humans…”—Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, ed., The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945 (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987), p. 38 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).
454 “In theory, he was saving a hundred thousand lives”—It is unknown how much prussic acid Gerstein destroyed, and exactly by what manner. Friedländer (p. 181) quotes Gerstein as saying in one of his affidavits that “the actual amount involved was approximately 9 tons 7 cwt, enough to kill 8,000,000 people.” Of course the Germans used metric measures: 18,700 pounds equals 8,500 kilograms. Since 8,500 goes 941.2 times into 8,000,000, we might as well say that 1 kilogram of Zyklon B can kill 1,000 people; hence Gerstein’s desperately theoretical computation that withholding 100 kilograms saved 100,000 people. Like most of Gerstein’s computations, this one would have exaggerated Holocaust numbers. According to Commandant Höss, who ought to have known, “five to seven kilograms of Zyklon B sufficed to murder 1,500 people” (The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 171), so Gerstein was off by a factor of five to seven. Once again, I’ve thought it best to be faithful to his thought processes, and to the information available to him at the time, rather than give hindsight’s corrected statistics.
455 Ludwig Gerstein: “If you want to live a worthy life, Kurt, you must never treat a woman badly. A woman, you know, bears no weapons in her hands”—Substantially “retranslated” and abridged from von Eschenbach, p. 268 (the hermit Trevrizent to Parzifal).
457 Die Ostschweiz headline on the Hungarian Jews: “People are Disappearing” —Mentioned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 254 (Henryk Swiebocki, “Disclosure and Denunciation of SS Crimes”).
458 Description of Roman Karmen’s body language as he filmed the captured Nazis of Maidanek—After a photo in Ognev.
458 Details on the suppliers on Zyklon B and Gerstein’s own shadowy but probably negligible role in supplying Asuchwitz—Friedländer, pp. 184-88. There is no record of Gerstein’s ever having any such conversation with Höss as the one which I have imagined. Presumably he must have had close calls here or elsewhere.
460 Gerstein to his wife: “What action against Nazism…”—Gerstein testimony of 1945; in Friedländer, p. 160.
461 Signal magazine: “‘I’ll have the second from the right,’” says Hilde…”—Mayer, op. cit. The following sentence, “I don’t care how many bombs they drop…” is my invention. The repaired shop window through which Hilde is bravely peering was damaged by an Allied air raid.
462 Gerstein to Hochstrasser: “If Hitler should lose, he’ll slam the door…”—Loosely after Gerstein to Nieuwenhuisen, to whom Gerstein was in fact speaking; in Friedländer, p. 163.
462 “They” at Oranienburg: “What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental” —Klee et al, p. 163 (letter from S.S.-Obersturmführer Karl Kretchmer, Sonderkommando 4a, 27 September 1942).
463 Details on Ravensbrück concentration camp—Based on Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück: An Eyewitness Account of a Women’s Concentration Camp, trans. by Gerald Satter-white (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975).
464 Gerstein’s father: “Hard times demand hard methods”—Friedländer, p. 203.
466 Dr. Pfannenstiel to Gerstein: “You’re the man who invented the gas chamber”—An allegation (not made specifically by Dr. Pfannenstiel or anyone) quoted by Balfour.
466 Dr. Pfannenstieclass="underline" “I noticed nothing special about the corpses…”—Friedländer, p. 118 (Pfannenstiel’s testimony before the Darmstadt Court, 1950, slightly abridged).
466 Gerstein on the pink color of the corpses killed by Zyklon B—Described in The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 168 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).
466 Dr. Pfannenstieclass="underline" “Can science devise a way to render this process of exterminating human beings devoid of cruelty?”—In his postwar testimony before the Darmstadt Court, Pfannenstiel actually said: “I wanted to know in particular if this process of exterminating human beings was accompanied by any acts of cruelty” (Friedländer, p. 118). I would think that my alteration does perfect justice to his thought processes during the days when he could participate in the Holocaust with impunity.
466 Gerstein and Helmut Franz on Kollwitz’s “Volunteers”—Imagined by me. Helmut Franz’s views on the need to respect evil and leave it alone are based in part on the argument in von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales.
466 The same conversation, on voluntarism and willing Hitler to be good—Somewhat based on Rudolf Hess’s notion of loyalty to Hitler, as quoted in Krebs, pp. 206-07. Hess actually does compare himself to Hagen.
468 “Let gape the gates!”—Poetic Edda, p. 151 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanza 43).
470 “Clever Hans” Günther’s victims: two hundred thousand Jews in Bohemia and Moravia—Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 369 (HQ BAOR, interrogation reports from No. 1 Sub-Centre, 3-10 December 1945).
470 Gerstein to his father: “You are wrong about one thing…”—Levin, p. 310; Friedländer, p. 208 (“retranslated” a little).
470 Gerstein to his wife: “People will hear about me…”—Friedländer, p. 211.
471 “It may be that the mere fact of making such efforts…”—Friedländer, pp. 198-99 (Frankfurt court document, 1955).
471 Göring: “Anybody can make an atrocity film…”—G. M. Gilbert, Ph.D., Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo, 1995, repr. of 1947 ed.), p. 152 (15 February 1946). Göring was of course sentenced to death. It may be worth noting here that his wife told him: “I shall think you died for Germany!” and “then all suffering vanished from his face.” Her verdict: “He was devotion and goodness incarnate.”—Emmy Goering, My Life with Goering (London: Bruce and Watson Ltd., 1972), pp. 157, 159.