Despite his masochism and fatalism he was ambitiously an opportunist. He declared it was one of his keenest hopes to make Battalion “E” the most “successful” of all the Einsatzgruppen (that is to say, to murder more Jews than any other Group murdered) in order to bring himself to the Führer’s grateful attention. Evidently Nirvana to Krausser was to stand at attention while the Führer in person pinned a medal on his tunic.*

“I never met this Krausser but I knew his kind. I knew these instruments of Germany’s glorious historical mission to cleanse the world of Jews. They were mediocre men you know, not great fire-breathing villains twisting the ends of their mustaches. They were utterly ordinary. In all of them you saw a great self-pity—they wanted someone to sympathize with the distasteful job they had to do. Once I overheard two SS Leutnants talking, complaining, and then a Stürmbannführer, a major, came into the place. He had heard some of what they were saying.

“He said to the two subalterns, ‘You don’t like your orders, do you?’ And then there was a pause, nobody said anything, and afterward the Stürmbannführer continued, ‘You don’t like your orders, but you will obey them. If you were Russian soldiers you probably wouldn’t. Which is why we are winning and they are losing.’

“They were always pouring sentimental tears for their own exile—from their wives and children at home, from German food and German this and that. Always they sought excuses—those pious patriotic euphemisms they used in order to convince themselves that mass murder was not a crime.

“At this time there were a number of national units that helped the SS assassinate Jews. These were guard units mainly. The Slovak Hlinka Guards, the Croat Ustasa, the Ukrainians and the Rumanian and Bulgarian Fascisti. Now I went from Palestine into Europe by way of Italy in the end of nineteen forty-two. I was sent from Palestine, I was in the Mossad then. I had been provided with papers and uniforms which identified me as a Gestapo Ortsgruppenleitung with the military rank of Hauptmann. You know it isn’t true that the Gestapo wore those civilian overcoats and trilby hats with the brims turned down. In military areas the Gestapo wore uniforms just like all the other Germans. It was the grey Wehrmacht uniform. The boots and headgear were black like the SS, including the scuttle helmet, but the long leather coat was brown.

“My papers had been prepared by the Mossad. We had discussed my identity at great length.

“It was decided I should appear as a Nazi bureaucrat, inspecting the Eastern Front with orders to report on the efficiency of the Totenkopfverbanden. Those were the sentry units which guarded prisoners and disposed of the mass dead and that sort of thing. Essentially they did the work that was too menial for the heroes of the Einsatzgruppen. You see in this way I was protected from too close contact with the SS officers who commanded the Einsatzgruppen. Those people—like this Krausser—were naturally very suspicious, and if they thought I had been sent to spy on them, I’m sure some of them would have sent angry inquiries to Berlin, demanding to know what this meddlesome Gestapo Hauptmann was doing interfering with them. Obviously I couldn’t afford that sort of inquiries. So I was sent to examine the efficiency of these subordinate groups—the Croats and Slovaks and Bulgarians and so forth. That was my cover.

“Of course there was no Israel then. We had no official standing in the world. As you know, Roosevelt and the others found the Zionist cause suspect and contemptible. But our people were being slaughtered. The world knew this, but chose to ignore it—to pretend it wasn’t happening. You would read in the American press about the heroic resistance of the brave Russian people but you didn’t read much about the Jews dying by the tens of thousands.

“In Palestine we also knew it was happening. But like everyone else we had only hearsay evidence. The purpose of my trips into the Soviet Union during the war was to bring out real evidence.

“It was not feasible for us to infiltrate the camps in Germany itself. The security in those camps was very tight. It is quite true—although one is tempted not to acknowledge this—that many Germans who lived quite near the extermination camps actually had no inkling of what went on inside.

“At the time of my first journey they had not yet devised the death chambers, the Zyklon poison gas. The only gassing was done with gasoline exhausts in mobile vans. There were a few such vans in Russia but most of them were in Poland. In Russia the murders were done in the open, mainly by gunfire or flamethrower. There was no great amount of security to circumvent. For the most part, the Einsatzgruppen didn’t mind having spectators around. It gave them an opportunity to share their shame.

“I cannot use words to describe myself at that time—my state of feeling. It would be useless. To speak of these things at all, one must be utterly factual, utterly emotionless. It was not the first time I had betrayed my people—I had turned my back on them in the war twenty-five years earlier, I had denied I was a Jew. Now I went into Hitler’s world in the guise of Gestapo.

“I was, of course, not the only agent sent in. I believe I was the only one to survive the war.

“I know of one who broke. He had to witness the extermination of a hundred Jews in a village in the Ukraine, and he seized one of the Spandaus and turned it against the other machine-gunners and the officers. They say he killed more than a dozen SS before they shot him down. Perhaps he was an idiot, perhaps a hero; in any case it is impossible not to understand what forced him to do this. At the time I thought him a fool. I felt sorry for him—his lack of strength. Since the war I have realized how wrong I was to feel that way. But you must see how, at that time, it was necessary for me to feel that way. It was the only way I could do what I’d been assigned to do.*

“I had a miniature camera. The assignment was to secure photographic and documentary proof of the Nazi atrocities. This then could be released to the world. In our naïveté we believed that the world could not continue to ignore the facts once we had presented such irrefutable evidence.” *

“I arrived in Poltava in December of nineteen forty-two. The area was the headquarters of Standartenführer Krausser’s Einsatzgruppe, but as I have said I never encountered Krausser face-to-face. I did meet two or three Scharführeren and a completely insane Haputscharführer [respectively, SS sergeants and a master-sergeant] who were under Krausser’s command. Later, sometime in nineteen forty-three, I was to meet a man from my brother’s village whom I took into my confidence. In the end I assisted him to escape from the Germans and the Russians and brought him back to Palestine with me. His name was Lev Zalmanson, if it matters. He was a man of volatile emotions and extremely quick intelligence. I felt he would be a valuable addition to our small force. In Palestine over a space of some weeks I had an opportunity to learn from him almost all the details of the story I’m about to tell you. Unhappily he began to brood on the events, he became terribly depressed—pathologically so—and then he suddenly turned violent and had to be confined in an institution. Not long after that, he committed suicide.

“Now I shall tell you about my brother and Heinz Krausser. You will understand that my information comes from Lev Zalmanson, and from things told to me by the three SS sergeants I have mentioned.”

“My brother had become very religious. Have I told you that? After he returned from Siberia. He worked for some years as clerk to an apothecary in a shtetl near Poltava, and then around nineteen thirty he moved to a poultry farm outside the village. He had married—I never met his wife—and there were three children. He took a job as director of the workers on this farm; I believe I’ve mentioned Maxim’s extraordinary leadership qualities.