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KITTEL: It was terrible. I once saw them being transported but I had no idea they were people who were being driven to their execution.

SCHAEFER: Have the people any idea what is in store for them?

KITTEL: They know perfectly well; they are apathetic. I’m not sensitive myself but such things just turn my stomach; I always said: “One ceases to be a human being; that’s got nothing more to do with warfare.” I once had the senior chemist for organic chemistry from IG FARBEN as my adjutant and because they had nothing better for him to do he had been called up and sent to the front. He’s back here again now, though he got there quite accidentally. The man was done for weeks. He sat in the corner the whole time and wept. He said: “When one considers that it may be like that everywhere!” He was an important scientist and a musician with a highly strung nervous system.¹⁹⁶

Now it’s Felbert’s turn to steer the conversation in a different direction:

KITTEL: If one were to destroy all the Jews of the world simultaneously there wouldn’t remain a single accuser. ¹⁹⁷

Kittel assumed the role of the pragmatist in his story. What bothers him about the mass murder of Jews is not the killings per se, but the haphazard methods with which they are carried out. He fails to grasp that Felbert wants to discuss the moral dimensions of mass executions in general and not the specifics of one particular case:

KITTEL: Then one must admit that our State system was wrongly built.

FELBERT (shouting): It is, it’s obvious that it’s wrong, there’s no doubt about it. Such a thing is unbelievable.

KITTEL: We are the tools…¹⁹⁸

Felbert explicitly assumes a position diametrically opposed to Kittel’s. In outraged tones, he speaks of a “scandal” and the necessity of holding those in charge responsible for it—although he clearly excludes his present company from moral culpability.

Yet the source of even Felbert’s outrage is not primarily ethical. It, too, stems from practical, personal considerations: “That will be marked up against us afterwards, as though it had been we who did it.” Major General Johannes Bruhn seconds that thought: