SS General (2 page)

Very calm, very dignified, Brigadier General Paul Egon Hatzke walked across the courtyard and took up his position against the blood-splashed wall. With arms crossed and head held high in defiance, he awaited his death.

The firing squad raised their rifles. Hatzke looked across at them with neither fear nor hatred, but a kind of patient resignation. He felt himself to be a martyr in a great cause. As the rifles fired in unison, he shouted out his final words on earth, "Long live Germany and Adolf Hitler!" and crumpled up into the warm, welcoming sand. The next SA officer was already being brought into the courtyard.

The slaughter continued throughout the day and well into the night. Word was sent to Eicke that the men who were dying, the men who had been his former comrades, were one and all expressing a wish to speak with him. He waved his hands impatiently. He was a man with a mission, he had no time to indulge in- sentimental farewells.

"Get rid of them! Just check their names and get it over with! They're there to be shot, and the quicker the better."

The furies and follies of that day were not quickly forgotten in Germany. It was those massacres of June 30 which accelerated the rise to power of a trio of men: Himmler, vain as any peacock and hitherto a totally unknown bureaucrat; Heydrich, a disgraced naval officer; and Theodore Eicke, a publican from Alsace.

Fifteen days later the soldiers who had formed the firing squads, together with all but four officers, were thrown out of the SS--a total of six thousand men. Before the year was out, thirty-five hundred of them had been executed under various trumped-up charges. It was an idea of Eicke's, a final clean sweep, as it were, and it was loudly applauded by an appreciative Goering. Those who survived were packed off to the waiting camp at Borgemoor where, for the most part, they were simply left to rot. According to Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, they had met their death while quelling the SA revolt, and Rudolph Hess even went so far as to hold them up to the public as brave men and martyrs.

The Fuhrer, of course, had known all along of the plans for the massacre. He had taken care to remove himself to more pleasant surroundings on that hot summer's day, and even as the murders were being carried out, Adolf Hitler was enjoying himself as a guest at a wedding party at Gauleiter Terboven's house in Essen.

The Bridge

Somewhere on the road before us lay Stalingrad, and we stopped the tank and stepped out into the open air to have a look. We recognized the town in the distance, by the thick clouds of smoke that still hung overhead, the thin wisps that still curled upward into the mists. It was said that Stalingrad had been burning since August, since the dropping of the first German bombs.

There was not much joy in looking ahead; there was nothing lying in wait for us there but death and destruction. There was no joy at all in looking back; what had passed was a nightmare best forgotten. So we stared down instead toward the far-off river, the silver ribbon of the Volga, where the dancing rays of the autumn sun made shining rings on the water. And for a short while we were almost hypnotized into believing that the present could last forever, and the past could be wiped out and the future avoided.

But the tank that had borne us through the past was a solid reality at our side, waiting to carry us on into the inevitable future, and there could be no escape. For four months we had lived in that tank--slept in it and eaten in it, fought our battles in it, both with each other and with the enemy--until we had become as much dependent on it as a tortoise is on its shell. The only times we had ever come to a halt were to take on more fuel or more ammunition, and even then the supplies had been brought to the doorstep while we sat and waited in our steel burrow. Small wonder we had long ago begun to hate each other more than we hated the Russians! Within the four walls of the tank there were perpetual warring factions, feuds and bloodbaths and petty squabbles which ended in a man half dead or at the least disfigured for life. The latest victim was Heide. He and Tiny had come to blows over a missing hunk of stale black bread, and when the rest of us had lost patience with two bodies crashing into us and kicking us and raining stray blows on our heads, we intervened in the matter ourselves and passed judgment against Heide, with the result that he was condemned to travel the next fifty miles lashed to the outside of the rear door. It was not until he dropped unconscious, saturated in carbon monoxide, that we remembered his presence and hauled him back to safety.

All day long the tank rumbled on toward the Volga. Shortly after sunset we made out the shape of another tank, stationary at the edge of a wood. A man was sitting on the turret, calmly smoking a cigarette and contemplating the smoke as it rose into the dusk. Both he and the tank seemed marvelously at peace with the world.

"Must have caught up with the rest of the company at long last," said Barcelona.

"Thank God for that." The Old Man shook his head wonderingly. "I'd begun to wonder where the bastards had got to. These Russian maps are impossible, they all seem to be at least a hundred years out of date."

We moved slowly up to the edge of the wood and Porta pulled to a halt a few yards from the other tank. Joyfully we pushed open the observation slits and allowed the fresh night air to penetrate the sweaty hell of our prison.

The Old Man hoisted himself out into the open and called across to the unsuspecting smoker. "Hi, there! I thought we'd never make it, we've been looking for you all over the place. What the hell have you been up to?"

He was about to jump down to the ground when the other man tossed away his cigarette, made a dive for the hatch and disappeared inside the tank like a fox going to ground.

"It's the Russians!" yelled the Old Man.

As he fell back among us, we prepared for combat. We were lucky; the enemy, lulled no doubt by the calm of their surroundings, must have taken the opportunity for a nap. Even before they had managed to swing their cannon around to face us, we had sent an S grenade, superexplosive, straight into their turret. At that range we could hardly miss. The tank was transformed instantly into an active volcano, throwing up great chunks of mutilated men and machinery and belching black smoke and yellow flames into the dusky sky.

Carefully now, with observation slits closed and ears and eyes on the alert, we nosed our way forward in a wide detour.

"Enemy tanks ahead!"

Porta once again pulled to a halt. Several yards ahead, tucked away at the side of the road, were nine T-34s. They looked peaceful enough, expecting no trouble, but their guns were all turned in our direction. The Old Man hesitated. The Russians had obviously not spotted us yet, but they were almost certain to do so if we turned about and retraced our path.

"OK." The Old Man nodded at Porta. "Start her up again, full-steam ahead. We'll just have to try and bluff our way through."

He opened the hatch and peered out. In the gloom of the approaching night his helmet looked not unlike its Russian counterpart. He was gambling on the chance that the enemy were not expecting any German tanks to be in the vicinity.

As we moved forward, it occurred to me that no one but a complete cretin could fail to notice the difference between the sound of our engine and that of a T-34, but possibly the Russian crews were tone-deaf. In any event, they made no hostile gestures, merely waving at us, giving us thumbs up as we passed. The Old Man responded graciously, while we sat and sweated inside.

An hour later and we appeared to be approaching civilization. Isolated houses, then little knots of them, and finally long straggling rows were sure signs that we were coming to a town. We drove past a railroad station, where a freight train stood roaring and puffing, and then drove through to the town center. The place was crawling with enemy tanks and soldiers, but in the darkness and the general confusion we passed unnoticed. As we slowly emerged on the far side, a policeman waved us down and yelled at us to give way to an armored car containing some general in a hurry. We obediently fell back and allowed him to pass.

Not far out of town we found ourselves tagging onto the end of a column of Russian tanks. Under their protection we moved past a battery of antitank guns and only parted company, quite reluctantly on our part, when we came to a crossroads, the Russians going straight on while we turned off for Stalingrad.

The roads were full of traffic. We had not gone far before we had once again to run the gauntlet, passing along the length of a column of stationary T-34s. They let us go by without comment, and we guessed that their crews were snatching what sleep they could before being pushed once more into battle.

Next we came on an infantry battalion, footslogging it along the road. They resentfully broke ranks for us, but our passage was punctuated by oaths of such vehemence and vulgarity that they might almost have known us for the enemy we were.

Another detour, to avoid taking the road through a forest, and we were at last on the way back to our own lines.

Three days later the company had reached the banks of the Volga, twenty-five miles north of Stalingrad, and there was an uncontrolled scramble down the slopes to fill our canteens. It looked as though everybody wanted to claim the privilege of being the first man to taste the Volga.

It was, at this point, about fifteen miles across from bank to bank. The scene looked peaceful and pleasant enough, with a small tugboat pulling a string of barges behind it and not a tank or a soldier in sight, apart from ourselves. Suddenly, as we splashed about on the bank, a battery of 75s went into action. Great spouts of water rose into the air and the unfortunate tug began a frenzied zigzag in an effort to avoid the worst of the onslaught. It might as well have saved its energy, it stood no chance whatsoever. Shells fell fore and aft, to right and to left of it, and finally, and inevitably, one landed amidships and the little tug snapped in two like a matchstick. The barges floated erratically on, a flock of silly sheep without their leader, and the 75s picked them off at will. Ten minutes later and the river was peaceful once again. Had it not been for the wreckage still floating on the surface, the little tug and its charges might never have existed.

Stalingrad was still burning. Even at this distance the pungent odor of roasting flesh and cinders, of brick dust and ash, was nauseating and made us retch. It was a smell that clung to our hair, to our clothes, to our very skin, and it was to be with us for months afterward.

We had seen many cities burn, but never a city that burned like Stalingrad. The sight and the smell of Stalingrad, voraciously devouring itself as it roared headlong toward its own death, was something that etched itself deep into our memories, and none who experienced it could ever forget.

The company dug itself in opposite the hills of Mamaev, where an entire Russian staff was entrenched in a network of old grottoes. During the night our heavy mortars bombarded the face of these hills, keeping up a constant barrage, hour after hour. Whenever they fired short, the blast of their high-explosive grenades almost tore us bodily from our dugouts. Tanks went into action, but without any success. The bombardment renewed its fury and the 14th Panzer Division was finally sent in and managed to push ahead through the grottoes and sweep them clean with flamethrowers, assisted by small-arms fire. No prisoners were taken. Any men captured were killed outright. Any who attempted to surrender were slaughtered before they had time to speak. It was the sort of bloodbath the SS might have enjoyed, but for most of us it was a sickening and degrading exercise in murder, forced upon us by one of those uncompromising orders from the top, which made wild beasts out of human beings and merely incited the Russians to return outrage for outrage and swear to fight to the death rather than give in.

Summer had given way to autumn, and autumn was now giving way to winter; slowly at first, so that we scarcely noticed the creeping cold and only complained bitterly of the incessant rain which fell in torrents from the gray skies and turned the ground into one vast, squelching bog that sucked at our boots as we marched through it. It rained for three weeks without stopping. Men and uniforms began to acquire a greenish tinge. We stank of mold, and clumps of furry white mildew sprang up overnight. We were given a special powder, which we ritually sprinkled over ourselves and our equipment, but it had no noticeable effect.

After the rain came the cold, and the first of the nightly frosts. We were still forbidden to wear greatcoats, not that many of us had a greatcoat left to wear. They had either been lost in the course of a battle or deliberately discarded back in the summer, when we had been fighting on the steppes in temperatures of a hundred in the shade. Deliveries of winter uniforms were promised regularly from day to day, but they never came. Instead, they sent us more troops, truck loads of reservists older than God and probably unfit even to run for a bus, or raw recruits with beardless faces and innocently shining eyes. They came to us to fight in the hell of Stalingrad, fresh from their training schools and barracks. They had no notion of what war was about, but they had been pumped full of propaganda and a determination to die for a useless cause. They flung themselves straightaway into the fighting, into the gaping mouths of the Russian guns. There was nothing to be done in the face of such ignorant heroics. Their misplaced zeal took us all unawares and we could only stand back and listen to them die, as they lay limbless and moaning on the ground or hung screaming on the barbed wire, handy targets for enemy sniping practice.

That first mad suicidal gesture was enough to knock all the spirit from the few who survived. Propaganda was thrown back where it belonged, on the trash heap, and reality took over. They walked about with glazed eyes and defensively hunched shoulders, treating the enemy with the respect they deserved and placing the value of their own lives far higher than any spectacular death for Adolf Hitler and the Fatherland. Nevertheless, they didn't grumble, these babes in arms and old men who had been forced to volunteer for active service. They were still Germans, and Germans were too proud to whine. They suffered the discomforts of the battle without complaint, and went on dying stoically.