The Berkut (14 page)

They had jumped off in the darkness of the morning of May 3.

The plan was bold. They walked out of th
eir hiding place in the green
building and pressed westward until they intersected the main flow of civilian refugees near the Tiergarten. In a stroke of good fortune they found an abandoned cart with spoked wooden wheels and metal rims at the end of the street. They loaded Herr Wolf into it and joined the exodus. Two of the girls pushed the cart, their weapons carefully stowed just below their hands. The rest of the group dispersed in the crowd, keeping visual contact but for the most part remaining distant from the cart and its passenger.

Herr Wolf was in terrible shape. His eyes had finally closed from the swelling; he was blind and his skin was an unhealthy gray. A warm drizzle soaked them during the early going, and the girls covered their passenger with a discarded brown canvas picked up along the route. Around noon the rain moved off to the southeast and the sun peeked out, white-hot. At one point-Brumm wasn't sure when-someone had placed three small children on the cart and they rode along quietly, happy to be off their feet. If their mother was nearby, she did not identify herself. With the children, their gear in small bundles and the old man curled up in a fetal position, the wagon's passengers looked like the remnants of three generations of a family.

Russian troops were all along their route, but they seemed to be more interested in the sunshine than in the German civilians.
Ivans
were perched on their tanks and vehicles, on logs and flat rocks, barechested like cold-blooded reptiles warming themselves in the sun.

Parts of the Tiergarten were filled with livestock, and Soviet troops milled around the animals. The horses they rode; the cattle they led away for fresh meat. On a grassy plain Brumm watched several Ivans playing some kind of polo, riding their mounts bareback, holding on to their horses' manes. They rode naturally and wildly, shouting and swearing good-naturedly at one another, seemingly unafraid that they might break their necks now that the war had ended. He lost interest in the equestrian game when he realized that they were using a human head for a ball. The field twinkled with tiny flowers of light as the sun reflected off tens of thousands of brass cartridges.

Near the Havel River, the Russians had gathered a pile of toilets that reached nearly twenty meters in height and twice that in width. Russian soldiers were streaming toward the cache from all directions, toting more of the fixtures. Beard caught his colonel's attention and raised his eyebrows. Brumm smiled.

On an island in the Havel River they saw thousands of German soldiers and men from the Volksturm. The pines on the island had been stripped by artillery fire, and in and among the slash, unprotected from rain or sun, sat the vanquished. Suddenly one of the prisoners dove into the water and began swimming northwest against the current, but a fusillade of bullets bracketed him, then covered him, driving him under the surface in an angry froth. He did not return to the surface. Russian riflemen on the riverbank brandished their weapons in triumph, and one of them did a little dance on a sandy spit of land across from the island as the prisoners watched.

Near the west end of the forest there was a small manicured park with a statue of Frederick the Great, and here several Ivans were setting up camp. The flowers were gone, trampled by horses and vehicles. The head of the statue had been knocked off and was sitting on its neck on the ground. At the wall of a fountain below the statue's pedestal, a young girl-no more than twelve, Brumm guessed-was astride a black-headed Russian, riding him like a horse to the shouts and cheers of his comrades. Two officers watched quietly from a low wall, smoking. Brumm had no doubt about her ultimate fate; the civilians who tramped by for the most part pretended they did not see. The poor creature was no better or worse off than thousands of others, and at this point it was every man and woman for themselves. Still, Brumm felt an urge to spray a clip of live rounds into the Ivans and to bolt into the forest. But his sense of mission intervened, as did
his own desire for self-preservation; he kept walking west as the pathetic shrieks of the girl echoed through the forest and finally faded.

Brumm's biggest fear was that he and Beard would be singled out; as far as he could see they were the only able-bodied men in the crowd. But they had gone unnoticed. He had been certain that once the fighting was ended, the Ivans would relax. It was a natural reaction to the end of a battle, especially after one that marked what everyone knew to be the end of the war. In such situations one did not take foolish chances. For all their lack of sophistication, the Ivans were human and as fond of living as any German.

Their destination was a forested area west of Potsdam. Brumm's intent had been to cross the Havel River on a bridge southeast of the town of Werder. Once over the bridge, they could move north into the forest and find cover. The bridge crossing had been his biggest concern, but when they arrived, the Russian detachments guarding it were below on the banks, splashing happily in the shallows with several German women. As they walked across the bridge, Brumm watched as a small baby, left unattended on the bank by its mother, crawled to the edge beyond the group and toppled into the water. He watched the infant struggle and roll in the current as it passed unnoticed under the bridge. It was not a bad ending, he thought; its suffering was over.

After the bridge, the pace of the refugee pack quickened as they tried to put as much distance between them and Berlin as possible. Brumm walked far ahead of his group, helping an old woman hobble along until the road made a severe bend. There he walked off the road into the forest, followed immediately by Waller, and they waited for the others to catch up with them. Beard was the last. After the Werder Bridge he had taken over the cart; Herr Wolf was awake, calm but complaining about the jolting from the metal-rimmed wheels. The children were gone; Brumm did not ask his sergeant what he had done with them. The Valkyries fluttered around Herr Wolf, rubbing his back, trying to comfort him.

Brumm gave them a short break while he and Beard transferred their passenger to a litter. After ten minutes they moved out again, tracking cross-country along the ridges. After the sickening smell of death and sulfur in the city, the fresh air and scent of pines in the countryside were welcome; even Brumm felt better to be in the woods again and off paved roads. But they were not alone. From time to time they saw other individuals and small groups, but none of them seemed anxious to come close.

With several spines of the ridges stretching ahead of them, Brumm
led them down to the lowest of them on a hunch. It took them back toward the river, finally ending in a fifty-meter bluff, which dropped straight to a narrow field of rocks at the water's edge. It was exactly what he was looking for. The spot at the end was tree-covered and flat, the ground covered with a deep matting of brown needles, and it connected to the main ridge by a narrow isthmus, which pinched in and suddenly widened again.

He called his group together and gave them their instructions for the night. He placed his sentries along the narrow point; he and Beard would alternate with one of the women to cover the entry from two sides. He trusted the girls' enthusiasm, but they still lacked training and experience. He would not let them build a fire, a decision that brought Herr Wolf's wrath in the form of an angry stare, and they contented themselves with a meal of hard biscuits and thick slices from a cured salami. Herr Wolf did not eat. Angrily he called Brumm over to his litter and pointed out to everyone within earshot that he was a vegetarian; as such, the food provided was inadequate for his needs. Brumm replied that if he did not remain quiet, they might all find themselves with no further need to eat. If their journey took any unexpected twists, they might all end up as vegetarians, scrounging from the land for their food. Herr Wolf hissed an unspoken response, rolled over on his litter and turned his back on the group.

"We'll start before sunrise," Brumm told the group. Then he and

Beard went off together for a private huddle.

"Too easy," the sergeant major said. "I don't like it." "What do you want?
To fight every step of the way?"

"I just don't like the feel of it. The Russians are lax; it's not like them. Their discipline has broken down."

"Consider their viewpoint," the colonel said quietly. "They've won; they've had enough. They don't want to find any more trouble, not now. They've come too far to die in some stupid incident during the aftermath. If we can keep to ourselves, the Ivans shouldn't be a problem."

"But you're still worried," Beard said. "I can read you."

Brumm nodded. "You know what it's like after a battle. There'll be looting, troublemakers. We had plenty of our own. They're the real danger. It could be bad until we get into the mountains."

"Maybe we should shoot him and roll his carcass into the river." Brumm laughed quietly. "To what end?
To turn ourselves in?
To become civilians? We're not conscripts; we do the impossible. All we
have left is this mission and our duty. You and I are professionals, Hans. As long as he lives, we have a purpose;
it's all we have."

"He'
s…
Insane
,"
Beard whispered. He pointed a finger at his temple and made small circles with it. "Did you see his eyes? Like a madman. There were camps for Jews and Gypsies, for Poles, for the old people and the retarded-the whole world will want to get its hands on him. We can't hide from the whole world, Gunter, not from all of them."

The colonel patted his sergeant on the arm and smiled. "Can't
we?
There's a lot more to this than you imagine, my friend. Not everybody in the world wants Adolf Hitler dead."

20 – SS Oberfürher Gunter Brumm

An only child, Gunter Brumm was born in 1910 in Kaiser's Military Hospital, Berlin. His father had been a career army officer, commissioned as a Leutnant in 1905, who rose to the rank of Oberst and was killed in action while leading an assault on American positions in Belgium on November II, 1918. It was the final day of the Great War, and he was among the last Germans to be killed in combat during hostilities.

Each August, Elisabeth von Brumm took her son to her family's home in Bad Harzburg, a small rural city of twenty thousand people in the inhospitable Harz Mountains. The boy had barely known his father; as a result, his maternal grandfather, Walther Halter, became a substitute. In Berlin, at the age of six, Gunter was enrolled in a prestigious school for the sons of officers. He immediately showed himself to be of high intellect and steely perseverance. At seven he was placed in an accelerated curriculum in the school. After his father was killed in action, his mother moved back to Bad Harzburg, and the boy continued his education in the local school there, again quickly establishing himself as a student of great promise.

Gunter's grandfather, an apothecary who compounded medical remedies from natural ingredients but had no formal education, spent a great deal of time with the boy, taking him for numerous outings
into the wilds of the Harz, teaching him the ways of wilderness living and survival, camping under the stars, even in the winter months. Under his grandfather's guidance the boy became an accomplished outdoorsman and hunter, a development that his schoolmasters found difficult to equate with his intellectual talents for virtually every subject he encountered. The grandfather, a lifelong resident of the Harz, showed the boy its mysteries: little-known caves and caverns, Teutonic ruins and tight, deep canyons where herds of wild boar dwelt. At eleven Giinter was placed in the local
Realschule
for further training preparatory to entering the university. Again his performance was superior; his comprehension of chemistry and mathematics soon threatened to outstrip the knowledge of the local faculty.

His grandfather urged Gu
nter toward a career in medicine, but by the time the boy was fifteen he had already made his own decision: he would follow in the footsteps of the father he had hardly known and pursue a career as a military officer. The grandfather was only slightly disappointed; the boy would be a success at whatever he chose to undertake. With his academic record Giinter had no trouble finding a place for himself in a military training academy. This was postwar Germany; under the Treaty of Versailles the German army was limited to a maximum force of one hundred thousand men. The economy was in trouble, unemployment was high, and because of this, the number of men seeking employment in the military was exceptionally high. The boy was enrolled in the military training school in Stuttgart, the same academy that claimed Erwin Rommel as a graduate.

At twenty Brumm became a Leutnant of infantry, and dropped the "von" from his name, not liking the elitism it connoted. He was the top graduate of his class, known both for his brilliance in the classroom and for his cool and flawless decision-making under the harshest conditions in the field. Despite his competence, his rise in the army was anything but spectacular. He advanced to the rank of Hauptmann in 1935, and was given command of a company patrolling the German-Czech border in the Ore Mountains south of Dresden.