HHhH Бине Лоран

45

I am thirty-three, considerably older than Tukhachevsky was in 1920. Today is the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Heydrich—May 27, 2006. Natacha’s sister is getting married, but I’m not invited to the wedding. Natacha called me a “little shit.” I don’t think she can bear me anymore. My life is in ruins. I wonder if Tukhachevsky felt this bad when he realized that he’d lost the battle, when he saw his army routed and understood that he had failed miserably. Did he believe he was finished, done for, washed up? Did he curse fortune, or adversity, or those who’d betrayed him? Or did he curse himself? Anyway, I know he bounced back. That’s encouraging, even if it was only to be crushed fifteen years later by his worst enemy. The wheel turns: that’s what I tell myself. Natacha doesn’t return my calls. I am in 1920, standing before the trembling walls of Warsaw, and at my feet, indifferent, flows the Vistula.

46

That night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: “A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.” That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes.

47

Imagine a map of the world, with concentric circles closing in around Germany. This afternoon, November 5, 1937, Hitler reveals his plans to the army high command—Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder, Gring—and to his foreign minister, Neurath. The objective of German politics, he reminds them (although I think everyone’s understood by now), is to ensure the safety of Germany’s racial identity, to guarantee its existence, and to aid its development. It is therefore a question of living space (the famous Lebensraum) and it is here that we can begin to trace the circles of the map. Not from the narrowest to the widest, to take in at a single glance the Reich’s expansionist aims, but from the widest to the narrowest, focusing ruthlessly on the ogre’s first targets. For reasons he never bothers to explain, Hitler decrees that the Germans have the right to a bigger living space than other races. Germany’s future depends entirely on the solution to this problem. Where can this space be found? Not in some distant colony in Africa or Asia, but in the heart of Europe (he traces a circle around the Old Continent), in the immediate neighborhood of the Reich. So the circle encompasses only France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland—plus Lithuania, if we remember that the top of Germany at the time extended from Danzig to Memel and bordered the Baltic countries. So Hitler’s question was this: Where can Germany obtain the greatest profit for the lowest price? France was ruled out because of its presumed military power and its links to Great Britain—and Holland and Belgium, too, due to their strategic importance for the French. Mussolini’s Italy was naturally excluded straightaway. An eastward expansion toward Poland and the Baltic countries would create a premature conflict with the Soviet Union. Switzerland was saved as usual, less by its neutrality than by its role as the world’s piggy bank. The circle is therefore retraced and moved above a zone reduced to two countries: “Our first objective must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.” As we see, no sooner has he targeted his “first objective” than Hitler is thinking of widening the circle.

Apart from Gring and Raeder, both of whom were genuine Nazis, Hitler’s audience is shocked by his plans—literally so in the case of Neurath, who suffers several heart attacks in the days that follow the unveiling of this brilliant scheme. Blomberg and Fritsch—respectively, the war minister and commander in chief of the armed services, and commander in chief of the army—protested with a vehemence wholly inappropriate in the Third Reich. In 1937, the old army still believed that it could sway the opinions of the dictator it had, imprudently, helped to seize power.

They didn’t understand Hitler at all. But they soon would. And Blomberg and Fritsch would pay dearly for their education.

Not long after this stormy conference, Blomberg married his (much younger) secretary. To his displeasure, and perhaps to his surprise, it was revealed that his wife was a former prostitute. And to make the scandal as great as possible, nude photos of her were passed around government circles. Though Blomberg bravely refused to divorce, he was forced to resign his post. Relieved of all military responsibility, he remained faithful to his wife till the end—that’s to say, until 1946 in Nuremberg, where he died in detention.

As for Fritsch, he was the victim of an even more indecent plot, skillfully conducted by Heydrich.

48

Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up.

His mission is to compromise General von Fritsch, the commander in chief of the army. Heydrich doesn’t need to be head of the SD to know that Fritsch has anti-Nazi feelings: he has never made any secret of them. At a military parade in Saarbrcken, in 1935, he was heard openly and sarcastically abusing the SS, the Party, and many of its most eminent members. It would probably be quite easy to implicate him in a plot.

But Heydrich has something more humiliating in mind for the old baron. Knowing how proud and touchy the Prussian aristocracy are when it comes to their moral rectitude, he decides to compromise Fritsch, as he did Blomberg, in a sex scandal.

Unlike Blomberg, Fritsch is a confirmed bachelor. This is Heydrich’s starting point. In cases of this kind, the angle of attack is obvious. In order to put together the dossier, Heydrich calls on the Gestapo’s “department for the suppression of homosexuality.”

And guess what he discovers? A shady individual, known to the police as a blackmailer of homosexuals, claims to have seen Fritsch, in a dark alley near Potsdam Station, having sex with a certain “Jo the Bavarian.” Unbelievably, this story appears to be true, except for one minor detail: the Fritsch in question is not the general, but someone else with the same surname. To Heydrich, this is of little importance. He inds out that this second Fritsch is a retired cavalry officer—a soldier, then—which will help add to the confusion, even more so as the blackmailer, encouraged by the Gestapo, is ready to identify whoever Heydrich wants him to.

Heydrich has imagination, and it’s a useful quality in his job. But in order to work properly, this type of plot also requires an attention to detail that Heydrich doesn’t really demonstrate here. Still, he almost gets away with it.

In the chancellery offices, before Gring and Hitler himself, Fritsch finds himself face-to-face with the blackmailer. This latter is, by all accounts, utterly degenerate, and the haughty baron does not even deign to respond to the accusations against him. Unfortunately, covering oneself in one’s dignity is not the kind of attitude that goes down well in the higher echelons of the Third Reich. Hitler demands Fritsch’s immediate resignation. Up to this point, everything is going to plan.

But Fritsch refuses. He asks to be court-martialed. And suddenly Heydrich is in a very delicate position. A court-martial entails a preliminary inquiry led not by the Gestapo but by the army itself. Hitler hesitates. He has no more desire than Heydrich for a full and proper trial, but he is also a little fearful of the reactions of the old military class.

Within a few days, the situation has been turned on its head: not only has the army discovered the truth, but it has managed to pull the two key witnesses—the blackmailer and the retired cavalry officer—from the claws of the Gestapo. Heydrich’s plan fizzles out completely. His fate is now hanging by a thread: if Hitler agrees to the trial, his trickery will be exposed in broad daylight, which will lead at the very least to Heydrich’s dismissal—and the end of all his ambitions. He will find himself more or less where he was in 1931, after his discharge from the navy.

Heydrich is not very happy at this prospect. The icy killer is now the terror-stricken prey. His right-hand man Schellenberg recalls how one day in the office, during this crisis, Heydrich asks for a gun. The head of the SD has his back to the wall.

But he is wrong to doubt Hitler. In the end, Fritsch is put on sick leave: no resignation, no trial. It’s simpler this way, and his problems are solved. All the same, Heydrich did have a trump card up his sleeve: his interests were the same as Hitler’s, because the latter had decided to take control of the army himself. In other words, Fritsch would have had to be eliminated, come what may—it was the Fhrer’s unshakable will.

February 5, 1938—a prominent headline in the Vlkischer Beobachter:

“All power concentrated in the hands of the Fhrer.”

Heydrich needn’t have worried.

The trial does finally take place, but, in the meantime, the balance of power has shifted irrevocably: after the incredible euphoria provoked by the Anschluss, the army bows down before the genius of the Fhrer, and stops making trouble. Fritsch is acquitted, the blackmailer is executed, and the whole affair is forgotten.

49

Hitler never joked about morals. Since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it is officially forbidden for a Jew to have sexual relations with an Aryan. The crime is punishable by a prison sentence.

But, amazingly, only the man can be prosecuted. It was evidently Hitler’s wish that the woman, whether Jewish or Aryan, should not be at the mercy of the law.

Heydrich, more Catholic than the pope, doesn’t see it that way. This discrimination between men and women offends his sense of equity (although only when the woman is a Jew, of course). So in 1937 he gives secret instructions to the Kripo (criminal police) and the Gestapo that, in the event of any German man being found guilty of sleeping with a Jew, the woman would automatically be arrested and sent discreetly to a concentration camp.

In other words, when the Nazi leaders are—for once—ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Fhrer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honor and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.

50

A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss. Austria has finally “decided” to be “reunited” with Germany. It’s the first step in the birth of the Third Reich. It is also Hitler’s first conjuring trick, soon to be repeated: conquering a country without meeting any resistance.

The news spreads like wildfire across the continent. In London, Colonel Moravec wishes to return urgently to Prague, but it’s impossible to find a flight. He manages to take off for France but ends up in The Hague, from where he decides to complete his journey by train. The train is a fine way to travel, of course, but there is a slight problem. To reach Prague, he must cross Germany.

Unbelievably, Moravec decides to risk it.

So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is traveling through Nazi Germany by train.

I try to imagine the journey. Naturally, Moravec attempts to be as discreet as possible. He speaks German, admittedly, but I’m not sure that his accent is beyond suspicion. Then again, Germany is not yet at war, and the German people—though heated up by the Fhrer’s speeches about the Jewish international conspiracy and the enemy within—are not yet as alert as they will later become. But, taking no chances, when Moravec buys his ticket he doubtless chooses the friendliest-looking clerk. Or better still, the most half-witted.

Once he was on the train, I suppose he sought out an empty compartment, and that he sat down either:

next to the window, so he could discourage anyone who attempted to begin a conversation by turning his back and pretending to admire the countryside, all the while watching the compartment’s reflection in the glass

or

next to the door, so that he could watch all the comings and goings in the corridor.

Let’s put him next to the door.

What I do know is that he believed—aware, and perhaps quite proud, of his own importance—that the Gestapo would pay a great deal of money to know who the German railway was transporting that day.

Each movement in the carriage must have been a test of nerves.

Each time the train halted in a station.

Eventually, a man boarded the train and sat down in his compartment. Soon, it was full of suspicious-looking people. Poor men, families—those wouldn’t have worried him too much. But also some better-dressed men.

A man without a hat, perhaps, passes in the corridor, and this detail intrigues Moravec. He remembers from his journeys as a student in the USSR that they had told him how, in that country, any man in a hat must be either a member of the NKVD or a foreigner. In which case, what does it mean in Germany to be hatless?

I suppose there were changes of train, connections to be made, hours of waiting, and all the added stress they bring. Moravec hears newspaper vendors yelling out their headlines in hysterical, triumphant voices. He must surely buy several more tickets, if only to conceal for as long as possible his final destination.

And then… the customs barrier. I presume that Moravec had a fake passport, but I don’t know what nationality it was. And, in fact, he might not have had a fake passport, because he’d been in London on a mission conducted with the agreement of the British authorities. Before London, he’d spent a few days in the Baltic countries, where I believe he went to see his local counterparts. So he didn’t need a false identity, and perhaps hadn’t prepared one.

Perhaps, after all, his passport being in order, the customs officer—having conscientiously examined it, during those special seconds in a life when time seems to stop—had simply given it back to him.

Anyway, he made it through

When, at last, he got off the train and stood upon his native soil, free from danger, he surrendered himself to an immense wave of relief.

Much later, he would say that this was the last pleasant feeling he would experience for a long time.

51

Austria is the Reich’s first acquisition. The next day, the country becomes a German province and 150,000 Austrian Jews suddenly find themselves at Hitler’s mercy.

In 1938, no one is really thinking about exterminating them. The idea is to encourage them to emigrate.

In order to organize this emigration of Austrian Jews, a young SS sublieutenant, appointed by the SD, is sent to Vienna. He quickly gets to grips with the situation and he’s full of ideas. The one he’s most proud of—if we trust what he would later say at his trial, twenty-two years later—is the idea of the conveyor belt: in order to be allowed to emigrate, the Jews must put together a thick dossier made up of many different documents. Once the dossier is complete, they report to the Jewish Emigration Office, where they place their documents on a conveyor belt. The real aim of this process is to strip them of all their possessions as quickly as possible, so that they do not leave the country before having legally transferred everything they own. At the end of the conveyor belt, they retrieve their passport from a basket.

Fifty thousand Austrian Jews will thus escape Hitler’s trap before it closes on them. In a way, this solution suits everyone at the time: the Jews can think themselves lucky to get out in one piece, while the Nazis get their hands on a great deal of loot. Heydrich, in Berlin, considers the operation a success. And for some time yet, the emigration of all the Reich’s Jews is seen as a realistic solution, the best response to the “Jewish question.”

As for the young lieutenant who does such a good job with the Jews, Heydrich will make a note of his name: Adolf Eichmann.

52

It’s while he’s in Vienna that Eichmann invents the method that will form the basis of all the Nazis’ politics of extermination and deportation. This involves seeking the victims’ active cooperation. The Jews are always invited to make themselves known to the authorities, and in the vast majority of cases—whether for emigrating in 1938 or for being sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1943—this is exactly what they do. Without this, the Nazis would have had to deal with insurmountable demographic problems, and no policy of mass extermination would really have been possible. There would still undoubtedly have been countless crimes, but everything suggests that we would not be talking about genocide.

Neither Heydrich nor Eichmann can suspect that 1938 is paving the way for 1943, even if—with characteristic intuition—the former immediately sees in the latter a talented bureaucrat, whom he can turn into a valuable assistant. And although the eyes of Nazi Germany begin now to turn toward Prague, Heydrich and Eichmann have no idea what roles they will play in that city.

53

There are signs, though. For years, Heydrich has been ordering numerous studies of the Jewish question from his heads of department. And this is the kind of response he’s been getting:

It would be advisable to deprive the Jews of their means of survival—and not only in the economic sphere. There should be no future for them in Germany. Only the old generation should be allowed to die here in peace—not the young ones. Hence the incitement to emigrate. As for the means, street-fighting anti-Semitism should be rejected. You don’t kill rats with a revolver, but with poison and gas.

Metaphor? Fantasy? The subconscious rising to the surface? In any case, you feel that this department head already has an idea in the back of his mind. The report dates from May 1934. The man is a visionary!

54

In the heart of old Bohemia, east of Prague, on the Olomouc road, is a little town: Kutn Hora is on Unesco’s World Heritage List, and has picturesque alleys, a beautiful Gothic cathedral, and above all a magnificent ossuary—a genuine local curiosity where the white vaults and ribs of the sepulchral architecture are constructed out of human skulls.

In 1237, unsuspected by the town’s inhabitants, Kutn Hora carries within it the virus of history, which is about to begin one of its long, cruel, and ironic chapters. This chapter will last seven hundred years.

Wenceslaus I, the son of Premysl Ottokar I, part of the glorious founding dynasty of the Premyslids, rules over the lands of Bohemia and Moravia. The sovereign has married a German princess, Kunigunde, the daughter of Philip of Swabia, king of Germany and a Ghibelline—in other words, part of the fearsome house of Hohenstaufen. So, in the quarrel between the Guelphs (allies of the pope) and the Ghibellines (allies of the emperor), Wenceslaus chose the side of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. From this point on, the split-tailed lion decorates the royal armories, replacing the old eagle in flames. Dungeons proliferate, and the spirit of chivalry reigns.

Soon, Prague will have its Old New Synagogue.

Kutn Hora is still nothing but a village—not one of the biggest towns in Europe.

This could be like a scene from a medieval Western. As night falls, a Falstaffian tavern welcomes the inhabitants of Kutn Hora as well as a few rare travelers. The regulars drinks and joke with the waitresses, pinching their asses, while the travelers eat in silence, exhausted, and the thieves watch and get ready for their night’s work, hardly touching their drinks. Outside it’s raining, and you can hear a few whinnies from the stable next door. An old white-bearded man appears at the door. His clothes are soaked, his leggings mud-stained, water streams from his cloth hat. Everyone in Kutn Hora knows him—he’s an old madman from the mountains—and no one pays much attention to him. He orders drink, then food, then more drink. He demands a pig be killed for him. Laughter explodes from the nearby tables. The landlord, mistrustful, asks if he has enough money to pay. At this a look of triumph flashes in the old man’s eyes: he puts a small, cheap leather purse on the table, and undoes the laces. He takes out a little grayish stone and, pretending to be casual, gives it to the landlord to inspect. The landlord frowns, takes the stone between his fingers, and holds it up to the light coming from the torches on the wall. Stunned, suddenly impressed, he takes a step backwards. He has recognized the metal. It’s a silver nugget.

55

Premysl Ottokar II, son of Wenceslaus I, carries (like his grandfather) the name of his ancestor Premysl the Plowman—who, in times immemorial, was taken for a husband by Queen Libuse, the legendary foundress of Prague. More than anyone else, except perhaps his grandfather, Premysl Ottokar II felt himself to be the guardian of his kingdom’s greatness. And no one could say he wasn’t worthy in this respect. From the beginning of his reign, Bohemia produced—thanks to its silver deposits—an average annual revenue of 100,000 silver marks, making it one of the richest regions of thirteenth-century Europe: five times richer than Bavaria, for example.

But the man nicknamed “the King of Iron and Gold” (which hardly does justice to the metal that made his fortune) is, like all kings, not content to make do with what he’s got. He knows that the kingdom’s prosperity depends on its silver mines, and wishes to speed up their exploitation. All these sleeping deposits, still untouched, keep him awake at night. He needs more manpower. And the Czechs are peasants, not miners.

Ottokar contemplates Prague, his town. From the heights of his castle, he sees all the markets around the immense Judith Bridge. (This is one of the first brdges built from stone rather than wood, located on the site of the future Charles Bridge.) Little colored dots bustle around goods of all kinds: fabrics, meat, fruit and vegetables, jewels and finely worked metals. All these merchants, Ottokar knows, are German. The Czechs are a people of the land, not of the city, and as he thinks this the king feels perhaps a tinge of regret, if not contempt. Ottokar also knows that it is towns that are responsible for a kingdom’s prestige, and that a nobility worthy of its name does not remain on its lands but forms a court—as the French call it—around the king. But when Ottokar thinks of this great concept of chivalry, he thinks not of France but of the Teutonic Knights, at whose side he fought in Prussia during the Crusade of 1255. Hadn’t he himself founded Knigsberg at the point of his sword? Ottokar turns to Germany because the German courts are, in his eyes, incarnations of nobility and modernity. To bring these qualities to his kingdom, he has decided to begin a vast policy of German immigration to Bohemia, justified by the need for mineworkers. Hundreds of thousands of German colonists will be encouraged to come and settle in his beautiful country. By favoring them, by giving them lands and financial privileges, Ottokar hopes at the same time to find allies who will weaken the position of the greedy and threatening local nobility—the Ryzmburks, the Viteks, the Falkenstejns—for whom he feels only distrust and disdain. History will show, with the rise in power of the German aristocracy in Prague, Jihlava, Kutn Hora, and eventually throughout Bohemia and Moravia, that the strategy worked perfectly, even if Ottokar won’t live long enough to benefit from it.

But in the long term, you’d have to say it was a very bad idea.

56

The day after the Anschluss, Germany, showing uncharacteristic prudence, sends messages of appeasement to Czechoslovakia. The Czechs shouldn’t have the slightest fear of being the next victim, they are told, even if the annexation of Austria and the consequent feeling of being encircled might seem a legitimate source of anxiety.

To avoid any needless tension, orders are given that no German troops in Austria should approach within ten to fifteen miles of the Czech border.

But in the Sudetenland, news of the Anschluss provokes an extraordinary enthusiasm. Suddenly people talk only of their ultimate fantasy: being reunited with the Reich. There are protests and marches everywhere, political tracts and propaganda pamphlets. The pervading atmosphere is of conspiracy. The Czech government gives orders aimed at suppressing this agitation, but they are systematically sabotaged by public workers and German employees. The boycott of the Czech minority in German-language zones is enforced on an unprecedented scale. Bene will write in his memoirs that he was stunned by this mystical romanticism that seemed to suddenly seize all the Germans of Bohemia.

57

The Council of Constance is guilty of having called on our natural enemies—all the Germans who surround us—to fight an unjust war against us, when they have no reason to rise up against us except their unquenchable hatred of our language.

(HUSSITE MANIFESTO, C. 1420)

58

Once, and once only, France and Britain said no to Hitler during the Czechoslovak crisis. And even then, the British “no” was rather halfhearted.

May 19, 1938: reports of German troop movements at the Czech border. On May 20, Czechoslovakia orders a partial mobilization of its own forces, sending out a very clear message: if the country is attacked, it will defend itself.

The French, reacting with a firmness we hardly expect of them anymore, immediately declare that they will honor their commitments to Czechoslovakia. In other words, that they will come to the military aid of their allies in the event of a German attack.

The British, unpleasantly surprised by the French attitude, nevertheless fall into line with their ally’s position. With this small qualification: that they will under no circumstances guarantee a military intervention. Chamberlain makes sure that his diplomats do not promise more than is contained in this muddled phrase: “In the event of a European conflict, it is impossible to know if Great Britain will take part.” Not the most decisive of statements.

Hitler will remember these weasel words, but at the time he takes fright and retreats. On May 23, he makes it known that Germany has no aggressive intentions toward Czechoslovakia, and withdraws the troops massed at the border as if nothing had happened. The official line is that these were simply routine maneuvers.

But Hitler is mad with rage. He feels that Bene has humiliated him, and the urge to make war is rising within him. On May 28, he summons the Wehrmacht’s field officers and barks at them: “It is my staunch desire to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map.”

59

Bene, worried by Great Britain’s reluctance to honor its commitments, calls his ambassador in London for the latest news. The conversation, recorded by the German secret service, leaves no doubt about the Czechs’ disillusionment with their British counterparts—beginning with Chamberlain, who gets it with both barrels:

“The dirty bastard just wants us to lick Hitler’s ass!”

“You have to talk him around! Make him get his wits back!”

“The old bugger hasn’t got any wits left. All he does is sniff the Nazis’ shit.”

“So talk to Horace Wilson. Tell him to warn the prime minister that England, too, will be in danger if we don’t show ourselves resolute. Could you make him understand that?”

“How do you want me to talk to Wilson? He’s just a jackal!”

The Germans rush to get the tape recordings to the British. Apparently, Chamberlain was dreadfully upset and never forgave the Czechs.

This same Wilson, Chamberlain’s special advisor, made a bid for conciliation between the Germans and Czechs, with Britain acting as referee. Not long afterward, Hitler would talk about it in these terms:

“Why should I care about the British being involved? The filthy old dog is mad if he thinks he can con me like this!”

Wilson is surprised:

“If Herr Hitler is referring to the prime minister, I can assure him that the prime minister is not mad. He is simply interested in the outcome of the peace talks.”

Hitler then really lets loose:

“I’m not interested in what these ass-lickers say. The only thing that interests me is my people in the Sudetenland; my people who are tortured and assassinated by that vile queer Bene! I won’t take it any longer. It’s more than a good German can bear! Do you hear me, you stupid swine?”

So there is at least one point on which the Czechs and Germans were in agreement: Chamberlain and his clique were a bunch of ass-lickers.

Curiously, however, Chamberlain was far less offended by the German insults than by those of the Czechs. With hindsight, you’d have to say that’s a shame.

60

On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio:

Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France—both more impoverished and more threatened—delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defense.

Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back o work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays.

Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defense minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defense minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defense not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week—one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.

61

On September 26, 1938, Hitler must deliver a speech to the crowds gathered at the Sportpalast in Berlin. He practices his speech on a British delegation who come to tell him that the Czechs have refused to evacuate the Sudetenland. “They treat the Germans like blacks! On October 1, I will do what I please with Czechoslovakia. If France and England decide to attack, let them go ahead! I couldn’t care less! It’s pointless to continue negotiations—they’re going nowhere!” And he leaves.

Then, on the podium, in front of his fanatical supporters:

For twenty years, the Germans of Czechoslovakia have been persecuted by the Czechs. For twenty years, the Germans of the Reich have watched this happen. They were forced to watch it: not because they accepted the situation, but because, being unarmed, they couldn’t help their brothers fight these torturers. Today, things are different. And the democracies of the world are up in arms! We have learned, during these years, not to trust the world’s democracies. In our time, only one state has shown itself to be a great European power, and at the head of this state, one man has understood the distress of our people: my great friend Benito Mussolini. [The crowd shouts Heil Duce!]

Mr. Bene is in Prague, and he thinks nothing can happen to him because he has the support of France and England. [Prolonged laughter.] My fellow countrymen, I believe the moment has come to speak clearly. Mr. Bene has seven million people behind him, and here we have seventy-five million. [Enthusiastic applause.] I assured the British prime minister that once this problem has been resolved, there will be no more territorial problems in Europe. We don’t want any Czechs in the Reich, but I tell the German people this: on the Sudeten question, my patience is at an end. Now it’s up to Mr. Bene whether he wants peace or war. Either he accepts our offer and gives the Sudeten Germans their freedom, or we will go and free them ourselves. Let the world be warned.

62

It’s during the Sudeten crisis that we have the first positive indications of the Fhrer’s madness. At this time, the merest mention of Bene and the Czechs would send him into such a rage that he could lose all self-control. He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (“Carpet Eater”). I don’t know if he kept up this habit of crazed munching, or if the symptom disappeared after Munich.[3]

63

September 28, 1938: three days before the Munich Agreement. The world holds its breath. Hitler is more menacing than ever. The Czechs know that if they give up the natural barrier they call the Sudetenland, they are dead. Chamberlain declares: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

64

Saint-John Perse belongs to that lineage of writer-diplomats, such as Claudel or Giraudoux, who fill me with disgust. In his case, this instinctive repugnance seems to me particularly justified. Consider his behavior during September 1938:

Alexis Leger (his real name, fittingly, as leger means “lightweight”) accompanies Daladier to Munich in his position as general secretary of the Foreign Office. A hard-line pacifist, he has worked tirelessly to convince Daladier to give in to all the Germans’ demands. He is there when the Czech representatives are shown in to be informed of their fate, twelve hours after the Munich Agreement, drafted without them, has been signed.

Hitler and Mussolini have already left. Chamberlain yawns ostentatiously, while Daladier tries and fails to hide his agitation behind a faade of embarrassed haughtiness. When the Czechs, crushed, ask if their government is expected to make some kind of declaration in response to this news, it is perhaps shame that removes his ability to speak. (If only it had choked him—him and all the others!) It is therefore left to his colleague to speak, and he does so with such casual arrogance that the Czech foreign minister says afterward, in a laconic remark that all my countrymen should ponder: “Well, he’s French.”

The Agreement being concluded, no response is expected. On the other hand, the Czech government must send its representative to Berlin this very day, by 3:00 p.m. at the latest (it is now 3:00 a.m.), to attend a meeting of the commission responsible for enforcing the Agreement. On Saturday, a Czechoslovak official must also appear in Berlin to settle the details of the evacuation. The diplomat’s tone hardens with each command that he utters. In front of him, one of the two Czech representatives bursts into tears. Saint-John Perse, irritated by this, and as if to justify his own brutality, adds that the situation is beginning to get dangerous for the whole world. He’s not joking!

Thus it is a French poet who pronounces, almost performatively, the death sentence of Czechoslovakia, the country I love most in the world.

65

At his hotel in Munich, a journalist asks him:

“But, Mr. Ambassador, in the end this agreement must be a great relief, no?”

Silence. Then the Foreign Office secretary sighs:

“Oh yes, a relief… like when you do it in your pants!”

This belated truthfulness, coupled with a clever joke, is not enough to salvage his reputation. Saint-John Perse acted like a big shit. Or, as he would have said—with the ridiculous affectation of a stuffy diplomat—an “excrement.”

66

The Times wrote of Chamberlain: “No conqueror fresh from victory on the field of battle has come back adorned with more noble laurels.”

67

Chamberlain, on a balcony in London: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

68

Krofta, the Czech foreign minister: “They have put us in this situation. Now it’s our turn; tomorrow it will be their turn.”

69

Out of some kind of childish pedantry, I have scrupulously avoided using the most famous French quotation to come out of this whole sad affair. But I can’t not cite Daladier, who after getting off his airplane, cheered by the crowd, said: “Oh, the fools! Those fools, if they knew what was coming…”

Some people doubt whether he actually spoke these words, wheter he had enough clarity of mind, or enough wit. In fact, this apocryphal quotation became widely known because of Sartre, who used it in his novel The Reprieve.

70

Churchill’s words, spoken in the House of Commons, are distinguished by their greater perceptiveness and, as always, their grandeur:

“We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

(Churchill has to stop speaking for some time while he waits for the whistles and shouts of protest to die down.)

“We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. The road down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea has been opened. All those Danubian countries will, one after another, be drawn into this vast system of power politics radiating from Berlin. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning…”

Not long afterward, Churchill sums it all up with his immortal phrase:

“You had to choose between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor. You will have war.”

71

(FRANTIEK HALAS)

72

On the half-corpse of a nation betrayed, France went back to belote and Tino Rossi.[4]

(MONTHERLANT)

73

Faced with Germany’s arrogant pretensions, the two great Western democracies keep their mouths shut—and Hitler can gloat. Instead of which, he goes back to Berlin in a really bad mood, cursing Chamberlain: “This person deprived me of my triumphant entry into Prague!” By forcing the Czech government to make all their concessions, France and Britain—these two cowardly countries—briefly prevented the German dictator from realizing his true goal: not only taking a slice of Czechoslovakia, but “wiping it off the map.” In other words: turning it into a province of the Reich. Seven million Czechs, seventy-five million Germans… to be continued…

74

In 1946, at Nuremberg, the representative for Czechoslovakia will ask Keitel, the German chief of staff: “Would the Reich have attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Western powers had supported Prague?” To which Keitel will reply: “Definitely not. Militarily, we weren’t strong enough.”

Hitler can curse all he likes. The truth is that France and Britain opened a door to which he did not have the key. And, obviously, by displaying such servility, encouraged him to start again.

75

This is where it all began, exactly fifteen years before, at the Brgerbrukeller in Munich. But tonight, for once, the three thousand people gathered here have not come to celebrate the past. The speakers have taken their turn onstage and all of them have screamed for vengeance. The day before yesterday, in Paris, a seventeen-year-old Jew killed a German ambassadorial secretary because the Germans had deported his father. This is no great loss, as Heydrich is well placed to know: as a staunch anti-Nazi, the ambassadorial secretary was under Gestapo surveillance. But there is an opportunity here and it must be seized. Goebbels has entrusted him with a great mission. While the evening is in full swing, Heydrich gives his orders: there will be spontaneous demonstrations during the night. All police stations must immediately contact the commanding officers of the Party and the SS. The demonstrations will not be suppressed by the police. All the police need do is ensure that there is no danger to German lives or goods (for example, synagogues will be set on fire only if there is no risk to the neighboring buildings). Jewish shops and private apartments may be destroyed, but not pillaged. The police must arrest as many Jews, especially rich ones, as the prisons can hold. As soon as they are under arrest, officers are advised to make immediate contact with the appropriate concentration camps so that they can be sent away at the earliest possible moment. This order is transmitted at 1:20 a.m.

The SA is already on its way, with the SS following. In the streets of Berlin, and all the other cities of Germany, the windows of Jewish shops are turned to flying shards of glass. Furniture is thrown from the windows of Jewish apartments, and the Jews themselves are arrested, beaten up, or even shot. Typewriters, sewing machines, even pianos, are seen smashed to pieces on the ground. The honest folk stay in their houses; the more curious go out to watch, careful not to get involved, like silent ghosts. Not that we can ever know the true nature of their silence: complicit? Disapproving? Incredulous? Satisfied? Somewhere in Germany, an eighty-one-year-old lady hears a banging at the door. When she opens to the SA, she sniggers: “Oh, what important visitors I have this morning!” But when the SA tell her to get dressed and follow them, she sits on the sofa and declares: “I won’t get dressed and I won’t go anywhere. Do with me what you will.” And when she repeats, “Do with me what you will,” the squad leader draws his pistol and shoots her in the chest. She collapses on the sofa. He puts a second bullet in her head. She falls off the sofa and rolls over on the carpet. But she is not yet dead. Her head turned toward the window, she emits a quiet groan. So he shoots her again—in the middle of her forehead this time, from four inches away.

Elsewhere, an SA guard climbs onto the roof of a sacked synagogue, brandishing scrolls of the Torah and yelling: “Burn yourselves with these, Jews!” And he throws them like carnival streamers. Already, we see the inimitable Nazi style.

In a report written by the mayor of a small town, we read: “The acts against the Jews occurred promptly and without any particular tension. Following the measures taken against them, a Jewish couple threw themselves in the Danube.”

All the synagogues are burning, but Heydrich, ever the professional, has ordered that any official records to be found in them must be sent to SD headquarters. Boxes of documents arrive at Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives…

The next day, Heydrich sends the first confidential report to Gring: the scale of destruction is not yet measurable in terms of numbers. According to the report, 815 shops have been destroyed, 171 houses burned or destroyed, but this is only a fraction of the actual damage. One hundred and nineteen synagogues have been set on fire, another 76 completely destroyed. Twenty thousand Jews have been arrested. The number of deaths is reported as 36. The number of serious injuries is also 36. All the dead and injured are Jewish.

Heydrich has also been informed about all rapes: in these cases, the Nuremberg racial laws apply. Anyone guilty of having sex with a Jew will be arrested, kicked out of the Party, and handed over to the courts. Those who have committed murder, on the other hand, have nothing to worry about.

Two days later, Gring chairs a meeting at the Air Ministry to find a way of making the Jews bear the costs of all the damage. As the spokesman for the insurance companies points out, the price of broken windows alone comes to five million marks (this is why it’s called “Crystal Night”). It turns out that many of the Jewish boutiques are owned by Aryans, which means they must be compensated. Gring is furious. Nobody had thought about the economic implications, least of all the finance minister. He shouts at Heydrich that it would have been better to kill two hundred Jews than to destroy so much valuable property. Heydrich is upset. He replies that they did kill thirty-six Jews.

As solutionsare found to make the Jews themselves pay for the damages, Gring calms down and the atmosphere lightens. Heydrich listens as Gring jokes with Goebbels about the creation of Jewish reservations in the forest. According to Goebbels, they ought to introduce certain Jewish-looking animals—like the moose, with its hooked nose. Everyone present laughs heartily, except for the representative of the insurance companies, who’s unconvinced by the field marshal’s finance plan. And Heydrich.

At the end of the meeting, when it has been decided to confiscate all Jews’ goods and to forbid them from having businesses, Heydrich decides it would be useful to refocus the debate:

“Even if the Jews are eliminated from economic life, the main problem remains. We must kick the Jews out of Germany. In the meantime,” he suggests, “we should make them wear some kind of sign so they can be easily recognized.”

“A uniform!” shouts Gring, always fond of anything to do with clothing.

“I was thinking of a badge, actually,” Heydrich replies.

76

The meeting, however, doesn’t end on this prophetic note. Henceforth, the Jews are excluded from public schools and hospitals, from beaches and swimming pools. They must do their shopping during restricted hours. On the other hand, following objections from Goebbels, it is decided not to make them use a separate carriage or compartment on public transport: What would happen during rush hour? The Germans might be packed like sardines in one carriage while the Jews had another carriage all to themselves! And so on—you get the idea. Let’s just say that the debate scales new heights of technical precision.

Heydrich suggests yet more restrictions on the Jews’ movements. Then Gring—completely recovered from his brief loss of temper—raises, out of the blue, a fundamental question. “But, my dear Heydrich, you will have to create ghettos in all our cities, on an enormous scale. It’s unavoidable.”

Heydrich replies brusquely:

“As far as ghettos are concerned, I would like to define my position straightaway. From a policing point of view, I believe it’s impossible to establish a ghetto in the sense of a completely isolated district where only Jews may live. We cannot control a ghetto where a Jew can melt into the rest of the Jewish population. That would provide shelter for criminals, and also a breeding ground for diseases. We don’t want to let the Jews live in the same buildings as Germans, but at the moment—whether in whole districts or in individual buildings—it is the Germans who force the Jews to behave correctly. Surely it would be better to keep them under the watchful eyes of the whole population than to cram them in their thousands into areas where I cannot adequately control their daily lives with uniformed agents.”

Raoul Hilberg sees in this “policing point of view” the prism through which Heydrich views both his job and German society: the entire population is considered a sort of auxiliary police force, responsible for surveying and reporting any suspect behavior among the Jews. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, which will take the German army three weeks to crush, proves Heydrich right: you can’t trust those Jews. He also knows, of course, that germs do not racially discriminate.

77

Physically, Monsignor Jozef Tiso is small and fat. Historically, he belongs with the biggest collaborators—his role as the Slovak version of Ptain being determined by the hatred he feels for centralized Czech power. The archbishop of Bratislava has worked his whole life for his country’s independence and today, thanks to Hitler, he achieves his goal. On March 13, 1939, as the Wehrmacht’s regiments prepare to invade Bohemia and Moravia, the chancellor of the Reich invites the future Slovak president into his office.

As always, Hitler talks and the other person in the room listens. Tiso isn’t sure if he should be happy or fearful. His long-held wish is finally coming to pass—but why must it come in the form of blackmail and an ultimatum?

Hitler explains: were it not for Germany, Czechoslovakia would have been much more badly damaged. By contenting itself with the annexation of the Sudetenland, the Reich has made a great show of leniency. But are the Czechs grateful? Not in the slightest! In recent weeks the situation has become impossible. Too many provocations. The Germans who live there are oppressed and persecuted. It’s the spirit of the Bene government come back to haunt them. At the mention of his name, Hitler becomes heated.

The Slovaks have disappointed him. After Munich, Hitler fell out with his Hungarian friends because he wouldn’t let them take over Slovakia. He was under the impression that the Slovaks wanted their independence.

So, yes or no, does Slovakia want its independence? It is a question not of days but of hours. If Slovakia wants its independence, Hitler will help: he will take the country under his protection. But if the Slovaks refuse to be separated from Prague, or if they even hesitate, he will abandon Slovakia to its fate: the country will be at the mercy of events for which he will no longer be responsible.