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  We were a special Waffen-SS unit, part of the Kommandostab of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, and we were deployed in shooting situations against civilians. As an Untersturmfuhrer, I led one of the fifteen companies that made up the 8th SS Infantry Regiment, which fell under the umbrella of the brigade. We moved through northern Ukraine, from Dubno to Rowno to Zhytomyr. What we did was just what I had done years earlier in Poland--except there were fewer Jewish leaders and political prisoners left.

  My supervisor, Hauptsturmfuhrer Voelkel, had given us our orders: round up all political undesirables, and all racial inferiors--Gypsies, for example, and all Jews--men, women, and children. We were to collect their valuables and clothes, to march them to open fields and ravines on the outskirts of towns and cities that had been conquered, and to kill them.

  The Reinigungsaktionen went as such: we would require the Jews to report at a given site--school or prison or factory--and then take them to a place that had been prearranged. Some of these places were natural ravines, some were dugouts built by the prisoners themselves. After they'd given up their clothing and valuables, we would drive them into the pit and make them lie facedown. Then, as the commanding officer of the regiment, I would give the order. The NCOs and volunteers, Waffen-SS men, would lift their Karabiner 98ks and shoot the prisoners in the back of the neck. Then some soldiers would haul in a load of dirt or lime before the next group was driven into the pit.

  I would walk among the bodies, find the ones that were still moving, and deliver the coup de grace with my pistol.

  I did not think about what I was doing. How could I? To be stripped naked, shouted at to move faster and faster toward the pit with your children running beside you. To look down and see your friends and your relatives, dying an instant before you. To take your place between the twitching limbs of the wounded, and wait for your moment. To feel the blast of the bullet, and then the heaviness of a stranger falling on top of you. To think like this was to think that we were killing other humans, and to us, they could not be humans. Because then what did that say about us?

  And so, after each Aktion, we got drunk. So incredibly drunk that we drove from our nightmares that unholy image of the ground bleeding, the red runoff swelling like a geyser after all the bodies were in the pit. We drank until we could no longer smell the shit that coated the corpses. Until we did not see, printed on the backs of our eyelids, the occasional child who clawed his way to the top of the tangle of limbs, shot but not dead, and who ran around the pit bleating for his mother or father until I put us out of our misery and killed him with a single bullet.

  Some of the officers went crazy. I feared I might, too. There was another second lieutenant who had one of his men get up in the middle of the night, walk out of camp, and shoot himself in the head. The next day the second lieutenant refused--simply refused--to shoot anyone. Voelkel had him transferred to the front lines.

  In July, Voelkel told us there would be an Aktion on the road between Rowno and Zhytomyr. Eight hundred Jews had been rounded up.

  Although I had given the men explicit orders about how they were to conduct themselves and when to shoot, when the third group of prisoners stood naked at the edge of the pit, shaking and weeping, one of my enlisted men began to fall apart. Schultz put aside his rifle and sank to the ground.

  I ordered him to stand down and picked up his weapon. "What are you waiting for?" I barked at the soldiers who were responsible for bringing the next group of prisoners forward. This time, I was the first to fire my weapon. I would set the example. I did this for the next three sets of prisoners, and as blood and gray matter sprayed onto my uniform, I set my jaw and ignored it. As for Schultz, he would be posted behind the front. The SS did not want anyone on the front lines who might not be able to shoot.

  That night, my men went carousing at the local tavern. I sat outside under the stars and listened to the glorious silence. No crackerjack of bullet shots, no screams, no cries. I had a bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty after two hours of nursing it. I did not go into the tavern until my men left, staggering down the street and balanced precariously on each other like a child's wooden blocks. At this hour, I expected the tavern to be unoccupied; but instead, there were a half dozen officers gathered, and in a corner, Voelkel stood in front of one of the tables. Seated before him was Annika Belzer, the support staff who traveled with the Hauptsturmfuhrer. An executive secretary, she was much younger than either Voelkel or his wife back home. She was also an abysmal typist. Everyone in the 8th SS Infantry Regiment knew exactly why she'd been hired, and why the Hauptsturmfuhrer needed secretarial support even when his unit was mobile. Annika had hair that was an unearthly platinum blond, wore too much makeup, and was currently sobbing. As I watched, Voelkel jammed the barrel of his handgun into her mouth.

  The others in the bar were not paying attention, or at least they were pretending not to, because you didn't mess with the leader of the infantry brigade.

  "Well then," Voelkel said, cocking the trigger. "Can you make this come?"

  "What are you doing?" I blurted out.

  Voelkel looked over his shoulder. "Ah, Hartmann. So you think just because you got an enlisted man to listen to you, you can boss me around?"

  "You can't get it up, so you're going to shoot her?"

  He turned to me, his lips curling upward. "Why should you have all the fun?"

  It was different. A Jew was one thing, but this girl, she was German. "If you pull that trigger," I said calmly, although my heart was hammering so loud I could feel it move the heavy wool of my uniform jacket, "the Obersturmbannfuhrer will hear about it."

  "If the Obersturmbannfuhrer hears about it," Voelkel said, "I will know who to blame, hmm?"

  He removed the gun from Annika's mouth and smacked her across the cheek with it. She fell to her knees, then scrambled upright and ran out. Voelkel strode toward a group of SS officers and began to drink shots with them.

  Suddenly I had a headache. I didn't want to be here; I didn't want to be in the Ukraine at all. I was twenty-three. I wanted to be sitting at my mother's kitchen table, eating her homemade ham soup; I wanted to be watching pretty girls walk down the street in high heels; I wanted to kiss one of them in the brick alley behind the butcher's shop.

  I wanted to be a young man with his life ahead of him, not a soldier who walked through death every waking day, and scraped its entrails from his uniform each night.

  I staggered out of the tavern and saw a flash of something bright from the corner of my eye. It was the secretary, her hair catching the light of a streetlamp.

  "My knight in shining armor," she said, holding out a cigarette.

  I lit it for her. "Did he hurt you?"

  "No worse than usual," she said, shrugging. As if she'd conjured it, the door to the tavern opened, and Voelkel stepped into the cold. He gripped her chin and kissed her hard on the mouth. "Come, my dear," he said, smooth and charming. "You aren't going to be angry with me the whole night, are you?"

  "Never," she replied. "Just let me finish my cigarette."

  His glance flickered over me, and then he disappeared back into the tavern.

  "He's not a bad man," Annika insisted.

  "Then why do you let him treat you that way?"

  Annika looked me in the eye. "I could ask you the same," she said.

  *

  The next day, it was as if our altercation had never happened. By the time we had arrived in Zwiahel, we were no longer using rifles but rather machine guns for our Aktion. Soldiers funneled the Jews in an endless stream into the trenches. There were so many of them, this time. Two thousand. It took two days to kill them all.

  There was no point in spreading sand between the layers of the bodies; instead, others in the regiment simply herded the Jews on top of their relatives and friends, some of whom were still in the throes of dying. I could hear them whispering against each other's necks, soothing, in the seconds before they were shot themselves.

  One of the last groups ha