An Infinity of Mirrors (25 page)

“Fritsch could never find the nerve to shoot himself,” the Fuehrer chuckled, “so he probably stepped in front of a bullet during the attack. What a fool he was!” Veelee turned away. He was ashamed. As he stumbled down the spiral staircase from the tower he at last understood Paule's warnings. He had become the lickspittle of an Austrian
canaille—
he and the whole German Army.

The next morning, at five minutes to six, Veelee pistolwhipped an SS Sturmbannfuehrer in the main square of a Polish village. In front of an SS company of men and the people of the town, he knocked the man backward over the hood of a car which carried a banner with the rhymed slogan:
“Wir Ziehen Nach Polen Um Juden Zu Versolen!”
Eleven men and women of the town lay face down on the street with the backs of their heads caved in. When the angry mumbling of the SS men behind him rose in volume Veelee turned and told the remaining officer to form them in a single rank. Then he walked slowly toward the line, standing at attention, eyes front, and as he came to them he took his glove off, picked up three stones and dropped them into the gauntlet. Working slowly and methodically, Colonel Wilhelm von Rhode, Junker auf Klein-Kusserow und Wusterwitz, slashed the face of each man in the line with forehand and backhand strikes of his loaded glove. When he reached the officer at the end of the line he shook the stones from his glove, put it on slowly and carefully, hawked from deep within his throat and spat into the officer's face. The line of men remained at attention except for one who fell to his knees and then toppled forward on his face.

In company with hundreds of other official army eyewitness reports on the conduct of the SS, Veelee filed a protest about this incident. Outrages ranged from rape to the official filming in color of the sacking and destruction of a Polish town and its people by gun, club, fire, and explosives—all presented with music and narration as the men of the town were told to lie down naked on top of one another, forming a huge pile of bodies while the women and the children of the village looked on and oil was poured over the pile and set on fire. Reports of such incidents came in from every sector to General Blaskowitz, the army commander and military governor at Krakow. Blaskowitz poured his distilled denunciations of the SS on Keitel, on the Reichsfuehrer SS, and upon the Fuehrer himself as mass murder succeeded hopeless disgrace, until, in March, 1940, the offended Fuehrer screamed at Keitel, “Make me rid of this reactionary!” The final, bitter protest from Blaskowitz concerned a minor Party official who, reeling drunk, had ordered a Polish prison to be opened and then had shot five whores to death and clubbed two others into fornicating with him in the open, mud-soft prison yard.

In January, 1940, Veelee was promoted to Major General and put in command of the Fifth Panzer Division of the Sixteenth Army Corps, which was composed of two tank divisions and one mechanized infantry division ready for battle in the west.

In the Belgian campaign Veelee was awarded a Knight's Cross—one of only eight thousand two hundred and thirty awarded in the six years of war waged by a force of ten million one hundred and three thousand Germans.

Parachutists had penetrated the upper galleries of the fort at Eben Emael but could make no further progress. On the morning of May 11, 1940, Veelee raced ahead of a vanguard of tanks and armored cars across the only two intact bridges to the north, surrounded the fortress, and led his men in hand-to-hand fighting through its underground tunnels until the twelve hundred Belgian defenders surrendered.

On September 2, 1940, Veelee became Chief of the General Staff of Reichenau's Sixth Army. His headquarters were in Normandy, ninety-one miles from Paris, and though he ordered a telephone installed in the apartment at Cours Albert I, he did not call. He had drawn within himself and he avoided other officers except in the line of duty. He corresponded with his sisters, with Hansel, and with his army sponsor, General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel. Once he dined with Miles-Meltzer in Bruges. Every week he wrote to Paul-Alain in German.

17 November 1940

My dear Son:

The war continues. The excitement of our sweep has ended, and now we must pay attention to the thousand details of daily routine to secure what we have won. You have had a unique view of this war, being a German who lives in Paris temporarily and who finds himself occupied, as it were, by his own people. I hope the telephone which I had installed in your flat is a convenience for your mother. I thought that it could be useful in the event that you needed me urgently
.

I am well, and I always keep busy. I would like to be able to see you and to play with you and your boats in the park, which you tell me about. I know that park very well. It is a beautiful park and since I want very much to have a picture of you and your boats, I am going to request that someone in military headquarters in Paris telephone your mother and arrange to have some photographs taken. Please look directly into the camera and smile or not, as it pleases you. Please greet your mother for me
.

With love and devotion
,

Your Father

Veelee's news of home came mostly through Hansel, who could easily pass such information through army channels from general to general. A super-specialist, Hansel was still at the Bendlerstrasse, where he belonged if things were to continue to prosper.

24 January 1941

My dear Willi:

This time he is all out to bring down the upper classes, the intellectuals, the educated, and the cultivated. I don't understand how we could have fooled ourselves that he ever had any program beyond his hope for the destruction of the world. I heard him speak today—a bad carbon copy of his best work, I would say
.

We are groping onward here. We haven't had a soldier worth a damn to run things since Beck resigned, indignant and unbending. Keitel is completely incapable of understanding things and I have long since ceased to look to him for help. He might have risen as high as major with any other government in power, but with these unmentionables he is now Chief of the High Command of all the armed services. If I hear Brauchitsch say once more, “I am a soldier and it is my duty to obey” I shall send for my father's old dress sword and run him through
.

Dr. Professor Ernest Gold, the only man since Wagner whose music soothes Hitler, tells me that the Fuehrer now takes his shoes off during arguments with Jodl and Warlimont and continually hurls them at the walls until his point has been made. This calls for considerable running around the room by the Fuehrer and the generals, and Gold feels that if rubber shoes were used the rebounds might be better
.

Miles-Meltzer tells me that because one
SS
man was killed a week ago in the old city in Warsaw, five hundred Polish intellectuals were selected at random from lists of lawyers, teachers, doctors, writers, et cetera, and were murdered. The looting in Poland, judging by the Reichsmarschall alone, has been prodigious. Hans Frank and the SS do their level best to keep up with him, but of course it isn't possible
.

Here is a joke: an indoctrination takes place in a half-filled sewer in Dusseldorf. “Who have we to thank for the night fighters?” The crowd answers, “Hermann Goering!” Then: “For the whole air force?” “Hermann Goering!” Then: “Upon whose orders did Hermann Goering do all this?” “On the orders of the Fuehrer?” “And where would we be if it were not for Hermann Goering and the Fuehrer?”
“IN OUR BEDS???”

Gretel and Gisele are well. Gretel talks French in her sleep, and you may take it on good authority that very soon it will be even more dangerous to talk Russian
.

Keep warm and sleep well
,

Hansel

Veelee refused home leave. He was transferred to North Africa in April, 1941, and put in command of the Fifth Light Mobile Division, one of the two German armored divisions which made up Rommel's Afrika Korps.

General von Rhode was wounded for the first time in Africa, with second-degree burns of the waist and legs, when his tank was hit by an anti-tank shell. He was out of action for forty-two days. In October, 1941, he was awarded the Order of St. Mauritius and St. Lazarus by the Italian government for preventing the capture of the entire staff of an Italian division by a British commando unit. Veelee shrugged the episode off as an accident. He had left the Italians' perimeter to hunt gazelle, and on his way back he had nearly blundered into the British transport hiding in a wadi near the camp. He killed the two soldiers left in charge, then destroyed one of the British cars with the guns of the other, and thus raised the alarm for the Italians to defend themselves from the surprise attack.

In January, 1942, General von Rhode was transferred to the command of the Twenty-first Panzer Division. He was en route to Rommel's headquarters for his orders when his car was attacked by three British dive bombers. The driver was killed instantly, and the car, moving at more than seventy miles an hour, bucketed off the road into a stone kilometer marker which sent it high into the air. The crash severed Veelee's left arm above the elbow, crushed his ribs at the right side of his spine, and destroyed the sight of his right eye. He was flown unconscious to a rear-area hospital in Munich that night.

The series of operations on Veelee were completed on February 27, 1942. He had lost his left arm, the sight of his right eye, had suffered unascertainable brain damage, and the muscles of the right side of his face had been completely paralyzed.

Eight

Advertisements normal for the spring of 1942 appeared in the newspapers of Paris.

You are eating less!

Strengthen yourself with
QUINTONINE
!

Workers! Leave now for Germany!

More Opportunities! Bigger Pay!

Lissac must not be confused with Isaac, that particularly Jewish

name. No matter how many rumors you may hear, our house is

completely exempt from Jewish elements
.

Shop Now!

Das Haus fuer Gescherke mit dem Gesten Namen

Pierre Auber, Frères

Jumelen—
SCHMUCK—
Uhren—
BRILLANTEN—
Rubinen

SECRETARY
,
24, very loyal, not Jewish
.

Write Delamoindre, 36 rue de Nation
.

ARYAN MAN
looks for job, veteran salesman
.

Vaudier
, 15
rue Pavois-Leval
.

MECHANICAL DENTISTS ARE URGENTLY REQUIRED IN GERMANY
.
ALL INQUIRIES MUST BE MADE TO GERMAN EMPLOYMENT BUREAU
,
72 AVENUE DE SAXE
,
LYON
.
DO NOT DELAY
.
WRITE NOW
!

In the winter of 1941–42 both men and women wore their hair long for warmth, and shoes were so old that people preferred to walk barefoot when it rained, or made new shoes out of wood. Women's shoulder lines were very square and the men's very sloping. The women wore high roll-neck sweaters, very short
plissé
skirts and, as compensation, elaborate hats trimmed with feathers and flowers. Men's suit material was so shoddy that jackets and trousers shrank to half-size after a shower.

Europe was on German time; when it was five
P
.
M
. by the sun in Paris, the clocks said it was seven
P
.
M
.

In the whole of France, all but seventy-nine motion-picture theatres were reserved for German armed forces. The most popular film shown was
Les Visiteurs du Soir
, which portrayed a feast in which eleven servants brought in immense silver platters of roast suckling pig, venison, peacock, and swan. Thanks in part to a severe lack of hard liquor and wine, the French became avid sport fans, some even going so far as to participate. Novels of espionage, stories of the war of 1914–18 and—because one of its heroes was called Israel—
Pilote de guerre
by Saint-Exupéry, were among the thousands of books censored or forbidden.

The new rich and the officers of the Wehrmacht and SS went to Lapéiouse, Tour d'Argent, Drouant, or Lucas-Carton. These restaurants served their clients the very best food because they paid a tax of ten percent to Secours National. At Lucas-Carton one was likely to dine next to uniformed Gestapo officers fresh from interrogations in the rue des Saussaies. At a time when the average monthly salary for a Frenchman was approximately three thousand francs,
asperges sauce hollandaise
cost fifty-five francs at Tour d'Argent. Fouquet's and Le Colisée seemed to attract German officers of the rank of colonel and upward. Black-market operators ate with them openly, cheek by jowl. At Chez Carrere, where it was made clear that the clientele did not wish to have to look at uniforms, Germans were forced to dress in civilian clothes or be cut cold.

Others ate differently as the Occupation went on:

ATTENTION

EATERS OF CATS!

CERTAIN PEOPLE HAVE NOT HESITATED

TO CAPTURE AND STEW CATS TO FEED

THEIR FAMILIES. THIS IS HIGHLY

DANGEROUS. CATS EAT RATS WHICH

CARRY THE MOST DANGEROUS GERMS

AND CAN BE FATALLY POISONOUS
.

TAKE CARE!

Crows sold for ten francs, and the number of pigeons in the Place Pierre-Lafitte in Bordeaux dropped from five thousand to eighty-nine. Food was the universal obsession. Unoccupied France had no seeds, no sugar, no coal, and no grain; Occupied France had no wine, oil, or soap. Special cards entitling the holder to extra rations were issued to aid manual laborers; but the bureaucracy also included billiard-table manufacturers, but not the makers of umbrellas; canning workers at fish factories, but not those who canned vegetables; and those who made eyes for toy dolls, but not watchmakers. The production of food had been virtually halted; eighty thousand peasants had been killed and seven hundred thousand were prisoners of the Germans.