HHhH

both leave the room. Five minutes later, Heydrich returns, alone. His face reveals nothing. He goes back to answering calls.

“Hello!… Burn the body! Send the ashes to his widow!”

“Hello!… No, Goring won’t let us touch him… Leave six men at his house… Nobody enters and nobody leaves!”

“Hello!…” et cetera.

At the same time, he methodically fills out little white sheets of paper.

This goes on all weekend.

Finally, he gets the news he’s been waiting for: the Fuhrer has given in. He will give the order to execute Rohm—his oldest accomplice, and the head of the Sturmabteilung. Rohm may be godfather to Heydrich’s eldest son but he is above all Himmler’s direct superior. By decapitating the SA leadership, Himmler and Heydrich liberate the SS, which becomes an autonomous organization answerable only to Hitler. Heydrich is named Gruppenfuhrer, a rank equivalent to major general. He is thirty years old.

39

Gregor Strasser is eating lunch with his family on Saturday, June 30, 1934, when the doorbell rings. Eight armed men are here to arrest him. Without even giving him time to say goodbye to his wife, they take him to Gestapo headquarters. He is not interrogated but finds himself locked in a cell with several SA men who crowd around him excitedly. They are reassured by his prestige as an old companion of the Fuhrer, even if he hasn’t exercised any political power in months. He does not understand why he is here with them, but he knows the mysteries of the Party well enough to fear its arbitrary, irrational side.

At 1700, an SS guard comes to take him to an individual cell with a large window in the roof. Alone in his cell, Strasser does not know that the Night of the Long Knives has begun, but he can guess what’s going on. Should he fear for his life? True, he’s a historical figure in the Party, linked to Hitler by the memory of past struggles: they were, after all, in prison together after the Munich putsch. But he knows too that Hitler is not a sentimental man. And even if he can’t grasp how he could be considered a threat comparable to Rohm or Schleicher, one must take the Fuhrer’s boundless paranoia into account. Strasser realizes he will have to play his cards cleverly if he wants to save his neck.

He is thinking this when he feels a shadow pass behind his back. With an old fighter’s instinct, he understands he is in danger and ducks at the very moment that a gun is fired. Someone has reached through the window and shot at him from point-blank range. He ducks, but not fast enough. He collapses.

Facedown on the cell floor, Strasser hears the bolt of the door slide open, then the sound of boots around him, the breath of a man bending over his neck, and voices:

“He’s still alive.”

“What shall we do? Finish him off?”

He hears the click of a pistol being loaded.

“Wait, I’ll go and ask.”

A pair of boots moves away. A moment passes. The boots return, accompanied. Heels snap to attention at the entry of the new arrival. Silence. And then this falsetto voice that he would recognize anywhere, and which sends a final chill down his spine.

“He’s not dead yet? Let him bleed like a pig.”

Heydrich’s is the last human voice he will hear before dying. Well, when I say “human”…

40

Fabrice comes to visit, and talks to me about the book I’m writing. He’s an old university friend who, like me, is passionate about history. This summer evening we eat on the terrace and he talks about my book’s opening with an enthusiasm that is encouraging. He fixes on the construction of the chapter about the Night of the Long Knives: this series of telephone calls, according to him, evokes both the bureaucratic nature and the mass production of what will be the hallmark of Nazism—murder. I’m flattered but also suspicious, and I decide to make him clarify what he means: “But you know that each telephone call corresponds to an actual case? I could get almost all the names for you, if I wanted to.” He is surprised, and responds ingenuously that he’d thought I’d invented this. Vaguely disturbed, I ask him: “What about Strasser?” Heydrich going there in person, giving the order to let him suffer a slow death in his cell: that, too, he thought I’d invented. I am mortified, and I shout: “But no, it’s all true!” And I think: “Damn, I’m not there yet…”

That same evening, I watch a TV documentary on an old Hollywood film about General Patton. The film is soberly entitled Patton. The documentary consists essentially of showing extracts from the film, then interviewing witnesses who explain, “In fact, it wasn’t really like that…” He didn’t take on two Messerschmitts that were machine-gunning the base, armed only with his Colt (but no doubt he would have done, according to the witness, if the Messerschmitts had given him time). He didn’t make such-and-such a speech before the whole army but in private, and besides, he didn’t actually say that. He didn’t learn at the last moment that he was going to be sent to France, but had in fact been informed several weeks in advance. He didn’t disobey orders in taking Palermo, but did so with the backing of the Allied High Command and his own direct superior. He certainly didn’t tell a Russian general to go fuck himself, even if he didn’t much like the Russians. And so on. So, basically, the film is about a fictional character whose life is strongly inspired by Patton’s, but who clearly isn’t him. And yet the film is called Patton. And that doesn’t shock anybody. Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: “Oh, really, it’s not invented?”

No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of “inventing” Nazism?

41

You’ll have gathered by now that I am fascinated by this story. But at the same time I think it’s getting to me.

One night, I had a dream. I was a German soldier, dressed in the gray-green uniform of the Wehrmacht, and I was on guard duty in an unidentified landscape, covered with snow and bordered by barbed wire. This background was clearly inspired by the numerous Second World War video games to which I’ve occasionally been weak enough to become addicted: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Red Orchestra…

Suddenly, during my patrol, Heydrich himself arrived to perform an inspection. I stood to attention and held my breath while he circled me with an inquisitorial air. I was terrorized by the idea that he might find fault with me. But I woke up before anything else happened.

To tease me, Natacha often pretends to worry about the impressive number of books on Nazism that line the shelves of my apartment, and the risk of ideological conversion she thinks I’m running. To join in the joke, I never fail to mention the innumerable tendentious—if not openly neo-Nazi—websites that I come across while researching on the Internet. It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.

But I must, once more, bow down before the limitless and nefarious power of literature. Because this dream