Fatherland

the rate of one per day. Deduction: twenty-five thousand persons per week; one hundred thousand persons per month; one and a quarter million persons per year. And this was the average achieved in the depths of the Central European winter, when the switches froze and drifts of snow blocked the tracks and partisans materialized from the woods like ghosts to plant their bombs.
    Deduction: the numbers would be even greater in the spring and summer.
    He stood at the bathroom door. Charlie, in a black slip, had her back to him and was bending over the washbasin.
    With her hair wet she looked smaller, almost fragile. The muscles in her pale shoulders flexed as she massaged her scalp. She rinsed her hair a final time and stretched a hand out blindly behind her. He gave her a towel.
    Along the edge of the bath she had set out various objects—a pair of green rubber gloves, a brush, a dish, a spoon, two bottles. March picked up the bottles and studied their labels. One contained a mixture of magnesium carbonate and sodium acetate, the other a twenty-volume solution of hydrogen peroxide. Next to the mirror above the basin she had propped open the girl's passport. Magda Voss regarded March with wide* untroubled eyes. "Are you sure this is going to work?" Charlie wound the towel around her head into a turban. "First I go red. Then orange. Then white blonde." She took the bottles from him. "I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush on Jean Harlow. My mother went crazy. Trust me."
    She squeezed her hands into the rubber gloves and measured the chemicals into the dish. With the spoon she began to mix them into a thick blue paste.
    SECRET REICH MATTER. CONFERENCE MINUTES. 30 COPIES. COPY NUMBER . . .

    (the figure had been scratched out)

    "The following participated in the conference of January 20, 1942, in Berlin, Am grossen Wannsee 56-58, on the final solution of the Jewish question.
    March had read the minutes twice that afternoon. Nevertheless, he forced himself to wade through the pages again. "Around 11 million Jews are involved in this final solution of the European Jewish question. . . ." Not just German Jews. The minutes listed more than thirty European nationalities, including French Jews (865,000), Dutch Jews (160,000), Polish Jews (2,284,000), Ukrainian Jews (2,994,684); there were English, Spanish, Irish, Swedish and Finnish Jews; the conference even found room for the Albanian Jews (all 200 of them).
    In the course of the final solution, the Jews should be brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner to the East for labor utilization. Separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be led into these areas in large labor columns to build roads, whereby doubtless a large part will fall away through natural reduction.
    The inevitable final remainder, which doubtless constitutes the toughest element, will have to be dealt with appropriately, since it represents a natural selection which upon liberation is to be regarded as a germ cell of a new Jewish development. (See the lesson of history.)
    In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from west to east.
    ". . . brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner.. .the toughest element will have to be dealt with appropriately..." Appropriate, appropriately. The favorite words in the bureaucrat's lexicon—the grease for sliding around unpleasantness, the funkhole for avoiding specifics.
    March unfolded a set of rough photostats. These appeared to be copies of the original draft minutes of the Wannsee conference, compiled by SS-Standartenführer Eichmann of the Reich Main Security Office. It was a typewritten document full of amendments and angry crossings-out in a neat hand that March had come to recognize as belonging to Reinhard Heydrich. For example, Eichmann had written:

    Finally, Obergruppenführer Heydrich was asked about the practical difficulties involved in the processing of such large numbers. The Obergruppenführer stated that various methods had been employed. Shooting was to be regarded as an inadequate solution for various reasons. The work was slow. Security was poor, with the consequent risk of panic among those awaiting special treatment. Also, this method had been observed to have a deleterious effect upon our men. He invited Sturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Lange (KdS Latvia) to give an eyewitness report.
    Sturmbannführer Lange stated that three methods had been undertaken recently,