SS General (24 page)

"Down!"

Gregor gave me a tug and we clung together in the bottom of the shallow pit. They must have seen us, they were aiming right at us. The first shot flew over our heads, the second was so close we could feel the wind as it zipped past. And all the time the great white monster was coming nearer. The ground was shaking beneath its twenty-six tons of steel.

"Jump!" I shouted.

But we didn't jump. We just caught each other's hands and held on tight like children, crouching paralyzed in our hole as we waited for death.

From a short way ahead we heard the chilling shrieks of men in agony as the T-34 claimed its first victim. I saw the barrel of the cannon, and then the belly of the tank itself, rearing up and over us, poised to strike. In that second, without even thinking, I snatched up a magnetic mine and hurled it under the body of the creature. Gregor and I flung ourselves flat with our hands pressed over our ears. There was no time to speculate whether the mine would stick: it either would or wouldn't, and if it didn't, we should probably never know about it.

With a great roar, the tank exploded. Flames shot over our heads, flying debris filled the air and rained down on us. We rolled ourselves in the snow, and Gregor peered over the top of the hole and fell back again in a fresh spasm of terror. A second tank passed by, so close we could have reached out and patted it. After the tank came running feet and swiftly moving khaki legs. Russian infantry. We remained where we were. There was really nothing else we could do.

One pair of feet stopped running. Their owner had evidently spotted our bodies. We held our breath and lay still. I received a vicious blow in the kidneys; Gregor's head was trodden down deep into the snow. We bit our lips until they bled, but we made no sound. I could hear the heavy breathing of the soldier, and I expected that at any moment he would use his bayonet, just to make sure. But no, thank God, he was in too much of a hurry to catch up with his comrades. He turned and ran off with an impatient
"Chart vozmi!"*

*Devil take [it]. The approximate Russian equivalent of "Damn."

Painfully Gregor and T heaved ourselves out of the snow. Gregor was red in the face and half suffocated. I felt that at least one of my kidneys was probably ruptured.

We remained crouched in our foxhole. It was dangerous even to raise your head, and quite useless to contemplate surrender. The Russians were remaining true to their threat and taking no prisoners. The generals who could have saved our lives had indulged in a form of ostentatious suicide and left the rest of us to fight it out. Those generals had never known what it was to suffer. They had never known the gnawing, gut-twisting agonies of constant hunger; they had never been cornered in a shallow shell hole with the belly of an enemy tank poised over their heads; they had never been exposed twenty-four hours on end, in thin summer uniforms and sheets of newspaper, to wind and snow and air so cold that it cut deep into your lungs with a sharp, knife-edge pain every time you drew breath. They had gone plump and padded to meet their fate, and even in death they had been cushioned from the real horrors of warfare.

Gregor suddenly nudged me. "Siberians," he mouthed.

I turned and saw them coming. Our most dreaded enemies. They ran heavily, clumsily, through the snow, their sturdy bodies bloated like round waterlogged loaves in their quilted uniforms, their faces blue with cold beneath their thick fur helmets. One would have said, at first glance, a band of jolly farmers out for a cross-country run--except that their walking sticks were rifles, and their rallying cries were, "Kill! Kill! Kill!"

No German is an innocent German; neither those who are on the point of death nor those about to be born. The master race must be exterminated. We must be fanatical in order to kill the fanatics. Kill, kill, kill . . .

Gregor and I turned and fired. We stood no chance, but years of experience imposed their will on us. And for one moment the Siberians hesitated. They stopped in their tracks as we stood and fired. They had not expected to meet death in their moment of triumph.

Hitler's worst enemies could scarcely dispute the advantages already gained from a restored civilisation.

The Times,
London, July 24, 1933

Seen from behind, the lieutenant colonel looked to be drunk. His shoulders slumped forward, his head hung down, his gait was slurred and uncertain. Only those who watched his approach could see that his wrists were tied in front of him and that he was evidently still dizzy from a fierce blow on the head, which had torn open part of his scalp and caused the blood to run down into his eyes. His sparse gray hair was matted. His uniform was torn and filthy.

After the lieutenant colonel came three other officers: the colonel's adjutant, a major, and a paymaster general. They were all in a similarly distressed condition, and they all had their wrists tied together with pieces of barbed wire.

A group of SS men, rifles tucked under their arms, hustled the condemned men into position. The clear moonlight illuminated the scene and picked out the sinister death's head emblems in their tracery of silver.

In the center of the square was an oak tree. Beneath the oak tree stood four chairs. A few sleepy soldiers, pulled from their beds and bidden to attend, stood shivering and yawning around the gallows.

A Sturmbannfuhrer strutted self-importantly before the doomed officers. "Well, you bunch of yellow-bellied traitors! If you've anything to say, you'd better hurry up and say it. Now's the time, because you won't be given another chance in this world. And make it brief, nobody's interested in it but you."

The lieutenant colonel pulled himself trembling to his full height and raised his bloodied head. "I am innocent of all the charges," he said, in tones that indicated it was not the first time he had made the protestation. "I have always done my duty. I have never asked anything for myself. I should not have . . ."

"Enough!" barked the Sturmbannfuhrer. "We're not here to listen to your lies!" He turned, sneering, to the others. "Well? What about you? You want to add your bleats to his?"

The major looked boldly across at him with clear blue eyes that seemed indecently naked in their hostility. "A band of perverts and sadists is running this country! Sick men, the lot of you--emotionally retarded and mentally degraded, with twisted minds and filthy habits. Under anyone else but Hitler you'd all be locked up in a lunatic asylum, where you belong."

"That's enough of that!" The Sturmbannfuhrer, visibly shaken by the major's words, snapped his fingers at an Oberscharfuhrer. "Get them ready."

The four officers were hoisted onto the chairs. Expert hands slipped lengths of rope around their necks, tied the knots, fixed the slack to a branch of the tree. The Oberscharfuhrer stepped forward, a smile of anticipation on his face. Gustav Kleinkamp was an SS executioner of distinction. He claimed to be holder of the world record in hangings, and no one disputed his right to the title. The Sturmbannfuhrer nodded, and Kleinkamp, with a fine precision and an almost theatrical sense of timing, swept away the chairs with a neat movement of the foot, and bowed his head to some imaginary applause that seemed to ring in his ears.

The SS men stood watching as the bodies twitched and jerked at the ends of the rope. The soldiers went on yawning. They had seen it all before.

A few yards away, in the background, Theodor Eicke sat watching the scene through the window of a truck. The moon lit up his profile and he was seen to be smiling.

Gruppenfuhrer Eicke enjoyed doing his duty. He could easily have surpassed Kleinkamp's record, had he not felt that the physical act of hanging a man was somewhat beneath an officer's dignity. Nevertheless, he could appreciate such zeal in an inferior. It was Eicke who had had painted on the side of all vehicles in his division the words, "WE WANT CORPSES, NOT PRISONERS!" until General Model, his commander in chief, had indignantly ordered their removal.

Model was the only general of whom Eicke was reputed to stand in awe. He held all the others in cold contempt, which perhaps was not to be wondered at since he had early in his SS career crossed swords with no less a personage than General Field Marshal Busch and gained the better of him. It was on May 26, 1940, and Eicke had committed the first of his many war crimes: he had enclosed a hundred British prisoners of war in a Belgian farmhouse and shot them one by one. Busch, almost as outraged as the British themselves must have been, had threatened a court-martial, and it was Himmler who had intervened on Eicke's behalf. Himmler had no particular wish to save Eicke's skin, but he felt the honor of the SS to be at stake and his own powers challenged.

"In any case," he had scoffed, "what's all the fuss about a few dead Englishmen? Who asked them to interfere in the first place? Why couldn't they have stayed at home in their miserable little island and left us alone?"

From that day on, Eicke had felt himself to be someone apart. It seemed to him that by his intervention, Himmler had given him carte blanche to carry out whatever atrocities he would. He was not bound by the general laws of humanity that governed others.

Christmas on the Steppe

For five days a snowstorm had blown and howled over the Volga. It came to us all the way from Kazakhstan and it whipped itself up into a fury as it raged across the steppe. The Russians were accustomed to it and equipped to deal with it, and the wind blew in their favor. We Germans were terrorized by it and it left in its wake a long trail of corpses with every fresh gust that hit us.

The few survivors from the massive Russian attack had crawled for comfort into a bunker near the banks of the Volga, and there we huddled, day after day, listening to the wind and the rumbling of our empty bellies. Faces were stark and gray beneath their helmets; uniforms hung in limp rags from skeletal frames. We had discovered that hunger was more demoralizing than either fear or defeat.

Reichsmarschall Goering had promised Hitler to send his airplanes over to the stranded Sixth Army and drop food supplies to us, but Hitler had not thought to ask him where the airplanes were to be found. Even we, isolated as we were, knew that Goering could not keep his promise. There were no airplanes. So what was Hitler counting on? Goering and his nonexistent aircraft? Or God and his angels? Either way, it seemed we were doomed. Goering was fallible and God was no longer with us. For many weeks past he had been on the side of the enemy. Even that rabid anti-Communist in London, Winston Churchill, was lending his aid to the Soviets. Nobody loved the Russians, but everybody hated the Germans.

All along the front the enemy loudspeakers shouted their defiance: "Stalingrad has become a German graveyard! A German death every minute!"

For once, propaganda was the voice of truth. But it was not the Russians who were killing us, it was the weather and the lack of food. Men dropped dead in their tracks. Literally dropped dead. One minute you would be talking to someone, the next minute he could be lifeless at your feet. Men dug themselves holes in the snow, seeking warmth, and were discovered stiff and frozen next morning. We found tanks which had run out of gas, with their crews dead inside them. Officers leaned against the parapet of trenches, giving orders to their men, and died in midsentence. Men died overnight inside the bunker and no one realized that the brittle, twiglike heap beneath the threadbare blanket was now a corpse.

"Stalingrad a German graveyard--a German death every minute..."

Our little group was probably luckier than other isolated bodies of survivors in that we had two excellent foragers and scroungers in the persons of Tiny and Porta. Whenever we were on the point of foundering, that redoubtable pair would pick up their rifles and an old jute sack and slip off into the night on a food-finding mission. They never once came back empty-handed. Sometimes it was only the putrefying bones of a dead horse, but with careful preparation even they made enough soup to preserve us for another few days. On one occasion they turned up with thirty-seven cans of assorted food and half a duck which they had stolen from beneath the noses of the enemy. They had not set out with the intention of stealing from the Russians, not even Tiny and Porta were as outrageous as that; but they had lost their way in the dark and ended up behind Russian lines, and while they were there it had seemed silly not to take advantage of the situation. Unfortunately, two of our men died as a result of overeating.

"Dirty gluttons!" grumbled Tiny as we slung their bodies outside.

The whole of the German front line, such as it now was, was perpetually bathed in flames. Our bunker trembled under the constant pounding of heavy artillery fire, and those survivors who were still existing in scattered trenches and dugouts found themselves literally blown from their shelters like dead leaves in a high wind. Occasionally men lost their minds and could be seen galloping along in a hail of shells and machine gunfire, waving their arms in the air and laughing happily like children.

We were no longer a regiment, scarcely even a company; simply a gathering of remnants brought together for the final days of Stalingrad.

After a while we were joined by an SS Unterscharfuhrer. He staggered exhausted into the bunker and promptly took possession of Porta's camp bed. That bed was now Porta's most prized belonging. He had picked it up from an abandoned farmhouse on one of his foraging trips, and when he was not using it himself, he was in the habit of renting it out at so much an hour. The sight of a stranger, and an SS man at that, lying on his bed without paying the fee, was altogether too much for Porta.

He turned to Tiny. "Get him off," he said.

Tiny shambled amiably across the room, lifted the man bodily and dropped him on to the floor where, to everyone's intense astonishment, he continued to sleep and to snore as if nothing had happened.

The district was populous that day. Only minutes after the Unterscharfuhrer's arrival, the door was kicked open by a booted foot and an SS general stormed in, submachine gun held at the ready. He stood in our midst like the Colossus of Rhodes, glaring down at us, his face blue with cold beneath his fur bonnet.