Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  The story of war, as Messner knew all too well, was the story of things going wrong, but Richthofen had an implacable belief in willpower and the merits of meticulous organisation. In his view there was no such thing as defeat. There’d always be setbacks, certainly, occasions when plans threatened to fall apart, but the men under his command were expected to be masters of both themselves and the battlefield below. For Richthofen, the undisputed Meister of close air support, there was no sweeter word than Schwerpunkt, that carefully plotted moment when irresistible wrath descended on the heads of the enemy and put him on his knees.

  Messner knew the faces around this table. Like him, they’d expected – at the very least – a word or two of appreciation for their collective efforts over the last ten exhausting days. Fliegerkorps VIII were rumoured to be Hitler’s favourite Luftwaffe formation, a tribute no doubt to the sternness and brilliance of Richthofen’s leadership, and as a result Richthofen had been awarded Oak Leaves to go with his Ritterkreuz. But now, in the aftermath of yet another triumph, he seemed anything but satisfied. How many medals did a man need, Messner wondered. Just what kind of acknowledgement would slake his thirst to crush everything around him?

  They were discussing the shape of the campaign over the coming days. No one doubted for a moment that the Soviets manning the fortress at Sevastopol would be the next to receive the attentions of Fliegerkorps VIII. This, the key to the Soviet position in the Crimea, was rumoured to be impregnable, a phrase for which Richthofen had no time at all. A priceless naval base. Cliffs falling sheer to the Black Sea. One hundred and six thousand Soviet front-line troops. Reinforced concrete fortifications. Strongpoints dug dozens of metres into the bedrock limestone. Artillery protected by twenty-five centimetres of armour plate. One by one, Richthofen tallied the Soviet boasts. Then, for the first time, he smiled.

  ‘Operation Storfang,’ he murmured. ‘Remember what we did to Warsaw? Storfang will be all of that and more. No quarter, no letting up. We’ll hit the Slavs until they beg for mercy. Think opera. Trappenjagd is just the overture. Storfang will have the audience on its feet.’

  Trappenjagd meant ‘Bustard Hunt’. Storfang, ‘Sturgeon Catch’. There was an exchange of nods around the table. The war in Russia was still in its infancy. Nothing excited these men more than the prospect of another slaughter. From two thousand metres, regardless of what the Russian air force could muster, it would be a fresh chance to play God.

  Richthofen briefly consulted a file that lay open in front of him. Six bomber groups flying in formations of twenty to thirty aircraft. Close support from Ju-87 Stukas dive-bombing Soviet formations. Rolling attacks, one following another. A torrent of high explosive falling on the luckless Ivans below.

  A raised hand caught Richthofen’s attention. The Major in charge of intelligence wanted to know about artillery support on the ground. The question sparked a brief frown from Richthofen.

  ‘They’re bringing up a Gustav Dora. It’s showing off, of course, and completely unnecessary because we can finish the job ourselves, but it might give our Russian friends a fright or two.’

  The image sparked a ripple of laughter around the table. The Gustav Dora was a monstrous piece of railway-mounted artillery. From a siding forty-seven kilometres away it could bombard a distant target with surprising accuracy and the thought of sharing a subterranean bunker with the thunderous arrival of a seven-tonne shell would do nothing for the Ivans’ peace of mind.

  ‘Questions?’

  The Bavarian engineer responsible for maintenance wanted to know about the spares situation. After Trappenjagd, engines on the Heinkels badly needed servicing before an operation of this magnitude. Another officer at the table had concerns about supplies of aviation fuel. To both questions Richthofen grunted monosyllabic replies, scribbling notes to himself on the pad at his elbow. He seemed indifferent to the smaller courtesies of a meeting such as this but by now these men knew that both matters would be resolved. That was the way Richthofen liked to operate. Decisions taken in a matter of seconds. Action guaranteed.

  He glanced up from his pad as a figure appeared at the mouth of the tent. Messner recognised the adjutant who’d been with Richthofen since the early days in Spain. He paused beside the table and handed over a single sheet of paper torn from a message form. Richthofen scanned it quickly, nodded. Then he looked up again and brought the meeting to a close before beckoning Messner to accompany him to the nearby hut he was using as his makeshift headquarters.

  Messner settled himself in the only other chair with intact legs, doing his best to avoid the draught through the ill-fitting door, and waited while Richthofen attended to a number of telephone calls.

  He’d first caught the Generaloberst’s eye back in the days when he was assigned to the Führer’s special squadron. Messner’s task was to ferry Nazi chieftains around the Reich and from time to time the passenger manifest had included the flyer who’d turned Fliegerkorps VIII into a legend. Richthofen, cousin of the great Red Baron, knew a good pilot when he saw one and had – as it turned out – made a note of Messner’s name. Aside from his skills in the air, he liked the way Messner handled himself: unshowy, highly organised, with little time for small talk. In short, Richthofen’s sort of man.

  Then had come the accident, and the weeks of surgery, and the months of slow recovery, and Messner’s days in the Führer’s cockpit were over. With his mutilated face and a deep chill where his heart had once been, he’d emerged from convalescence a different man. His wife had left him for his best friend. His only daughter had become a stranger. He had no one he could truly call close.

  But none of this meant anything as far as Richthofen was concerned. Messner was still a fine pilot. Richthofen demanded an aide’s undivided loyalty – total dedication – and in this respect he was never disappointed. Over the last year or so, he’d become Richthofen’s eyes and ears as Fliegerkorps VIII pushed east, and his growing reputation as the Generaloberst’s snitch barely registered. Recently, in a gruff gesture of thanks for all his work, Richthofen had secured his tireless aide a promotion. Oberstleutnant Messner had yet to spare the time to celebrate.

  The last phone call had come to an end. Richthofen produced the sheet of paper and put it carefully to one side.

  ‘Your days in the Reichsregierung,’ he said. ‘You flew our Leader on countless occasions. What did you make of him?’

  Messner frowned. Questions like these were rare. Richthofen rarely troubled himself with other people’s opinions.

  ‘Well?’ Richthofen never bothered to hide his impatience.

  ‘The Führer is a man you’d treat with a great deal of respect.’

  ‘You think he’s clever?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Ruthless?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you ever trust him?’

  ‘Of course not. But that didn’t matter.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was the one at the controls.’

  Messner’s answer drew a nod of approval. Then Richthofen glanced at the message on the desk.

  ‘Read it.’

  Messner picked it up. It appeared to be confirmation that the Generaloberst’s personal Storch would be readied for take-off by first light tomorrow. He always flew it alone, shuttling from one forward airfield to another, urging his commanders to yet greater efforts. On this occasion, an extra fuel tank had been fitted.

  Messner looked up. ‘Somewhere special?’

  ‘Berlin.’

  ‘Am I allowed to ask why?’

  ‘Of course. Our Leader wants a conversation tomorrow night. It’s a long way to go for a shit meal but let’s hope he makes it worthwhile. Something else, Herr Oberstleutnant.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Goebbels’ film people are still at work. I’d take the latest footage to Berlin myself but they say they need an extra day. These pictures will do us nothing but good. Can you sort this out, Messner? Make sure the film is in the right hands as soon
as possible?’

  2

  BERLIN, 21 MAY 1942

  Werner Nehmann was summoned to 20 Hermann Goering Strasse in an early evening phone call from the Ministry of Propaganda. The call came from one of the secretaries in Goebbels’ private office, an old-stager in the Promi called Birgit.

  ‘Why the invitation?’ he asked on the phone.

  ‘I’ve no idea. The Minister said ten o’clock. He’s still on the way back from München. I’m sending a car to Tempelhof.’

  Nehmann was still living at Guram’s apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse. His Georgian friend’s business empire had lately expanded to France and he was currently occupying a handsome three-storey house in Tours while he cornered the market for quality vintages from the Loire Valley.

  Nehmann hung up and glanced at his watch. Still early, barely seven o’clock. For the next couple of hours or so, over a glass or two of Sekt from Guram’s personal cellar, he worked on a couple of articles he owed Das Reich, Goebbels’ weekly offering to neutral countries abroad. Then, as darkness fell, and the city centre’s Blockwarten began to police the nightly blackout, he checked his own curtains and headed for the street.

  Goebbels’ official Berlin residence was a ten-minute stroll away. With no raids anticipated, the late evening traffic was slightly heavier than usual and staff, uniformed or otherwise, were still emerging from the Reich ministries at the upper end of the Wilhelmstrasse. Hermann Goering Strasse was on the left, two streets from Hitler’s Chancellery.

  Number 20 lay behind a high wall, a three-storey building with the faux-classical features favoured in the upper levels of the Reich. Nehmann paused a moment to light a cheroot, acknowledging the nod of recognition from the sentry who stood guard at the iron gate. After a multimillion Reichsmark renovation, the Minister of Propaganda had been living here since the beginning of the war. Add three more properties outside the city – two on Schwanenwerder, an idyllic island on the River Havel, and another at Bogensee – and Nehmann began to wonder how Goebbels ever made up his mind where to sleep at night.

  Recently, out of curiosity as well as a sense of mischief, Nehmann had acquired a copy of the Minister’s first and only published novel, penned when he was twenty-five. It featured a troubled hero called Michael Voorman and it was, everyone quietly agreed, a pile of Scheisse, but what had caught Nehmann’s eye was Voorman’s principled rejection of materialism. What really mattered to the apprentice novelist was faith, and justice, and the pathway to a better future. What the author sought to avoid were the showy baubles of contemporary German life.

  Nehmann ground the remains of his cheroot underfoot and stepped towards the gate. An early fantasy, he thought, amused as ever by where this level of deceit might lead a man.

  A member of Goebbels’ staff, alerted by the sentry, was already waiting at the mansion’s open door. Another familiar face.

  ‘He’s back, Hildegard?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago. He’s in his study. You know the way.’

  She stood aside and let him into the house before closing the door behind them. The ground floor offered a banqueting hall, reception rooms and the overpowering scent of furniture polish. Nehmann, who had no taste for public events, had successfully resisted a number of invitations in the early days of the war without damaging his access to the master of the house. He knew that Goebbels had assigned him the role of court jester, as well as maverick journalist, and he was more than content to keep the grind of official business at arm’s length. He also knew from contacts deep in the Promi that Goebbels regarded his take on the world as scurrilous, subversive and frequently brilliant, three reasons – he suspected – to explain the immunity he appeared to have won for himself. Recently, the Minister had given him a nickname, der Über. It was shorthand for der Überlebende. The survivor.

  The grand staircase, the signature boast of so many Berlin renovations up and down the Wilhelmstrasse, was hung with fine art looted from galleries in France. Nehmann, as ever, paused beside a canvas by Courbet. He’d first seen this masterpiece a decade ago. It was hanging in a gallery on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, and even then – barely able to eat on his meagre earnings from satirical scribblings – he’d regarded it as sublime. The fall of light on the white bones of the cliff face at Étretat. The seemingly artless brushstrokes that gave the rearing breakers both depth and menace. The scurry of clouds on the far horizon. You could taste the wind, smell the ocean, and every time he took another look it seemed to offer a fresh message. Tonight, he thought, it carries a warning. Never take anything for granted.

  Goebbels was working in a small study on the second floor, a private space he regarded as sacrosanct. Nehmann knocked and announced himself.

  ‘Come…’

  Goebbels was sitting in a leather armchair beside a desk, leafing through a sheaf of notes. He was wearing a suit but he’d discarded the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He glanced briefly up, then waved Nehmann into the other chair. No words of welcome; nothing to break his concentration.

  Nehmann knew better than to interrupt his master. With his senior staff at the Promi, the Minister had never been less than imperious, and recently he’d been insisting on regular 11 a.m. meetings to tighten his grip on every full stop and comma that emerged from the Ministry. Nehmann was mercifully spared this daily inquisition but word around the building suggested that the pressure on Goebbels was beginning to show, and, looking at him now, Nehmann knew that the rumours were true.

  Although they’d spoken on the phone a number of times over the past weeks, he hadn’t seen Goebbels in the flesh since mid-April. The Minister had a face and a slightly skeletal physical presence you wouldn’t forget: high forehead, thin lips, coal-black eyes. For a small man, his voice was surprisingly deep and at his many public appearances he used it to some effect. With his repertoire of gestures – the pointing index finger, the clenched fist, the hammering on the lectern, the planting of arms akimbo – he had the ability to transcend the confines of both his body and his trademark leather jacket. For Werner Nehmann this was yet further proof of the powers of levitation, but here and now, watching Goebbels’ pencil race from line to line, he sensed the Reich’s favourite dwarf was in serious trouble.

  He looked even thinner than usual and scarlet shell bursts of eczema had appeared on the bareness of his forearms. There was another sign of stress, too: one highly polished shoe tap-tapping on the looted Gobelin carpet.

  ‘You’re lucky, Nehmann.’ The Minister didn’t look up.

  ‘Tell me why?’

  ‘I like it that you don’t dress for dinner.’

  ‘I’m here to eat?’

  ‘You’re here to listen. And to drink. And as it happens I brought back some fine Weisswurst from München.’ He glanced up at last. ‘You think that might be acceptable?’

  Nehmann nodded. Weisswurst was a Bavarian sausage, an irresistible marriage of minced veal and pork back bacon. Goebbels knew that Nehmann adored it.

  Goebbels lifted a telephone on the table by his chair and muttered an order. Then he gestured at the notes on his lap.

  ‘We’re running out of grain seed. Can you believe that? I can explain anything within reason. I can turn defeat into victory, I can make angels dance on the head of a pin. Offer me enough money and I can even raise a thin cheer for that snout-wipe Ribbentrop. But a loaf that turns out to be half-barley? In a country like this?’

  Nehmann mentioned potatoes as a substitute for grain seed. At short notice it was the only suggestion he could muster. Kartoffelbrot. Kartoffelomelett. A Spanish tortilla on every man’s table.

  ‘Nein?’

  ‘Nein. This swinish weather has done for the potatoes, too. So far we’ve had the measure of every single enemy. And now we surrender to the fucking rain?’

  Nehmann could only agree. Lately, the weather had been evil. Even back home in Svengati, where the mountains made for serious weather, he’d never seen so much water.

  One of the kitchen staff appeared a
t the door with a tray. As well as a pile of fat Weisswurst, Goebbels had ordered a bottle of champagne. He gave it to Nehmann to pop the cork and then watched him pour.

  ‘A toast, my friend.’ Goebbels reached for a glass.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To Trappenjagd.’ He frowned. ‘The Kerch Peninsula? Key to the Crimea? You haven’t heard? Manstein cleaned out what’s left of the Soviets yesterday afternoon. The Führer’s planning a major speech. I may even say something myself.’

  The two men clinked glasses. Then Goebbels sat back.

  ‘You don’t listen to the radio any more?’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘But I thought your Coquette’ – a thin smile – ‘has been otherwise engaged?’

  Goebbels, who lived for gossip, obviously knew that Hedvika had started an affair with an Italian film director but Nehmann didn’t rise to the bait.

  ‘She’s shooting in Franconia.’ Nehmann nodded at a pile of scripts on Goebbels’ desk. ‘I have my life to myself.’

  Goebbels held his gaze, said nothing. Every night, to Nehmann’s certain knowledge, the Minister devoted time he couldn’t afford to going through pre-production movie scripts. The sight of the ministerial green ink in the margins of scene after scene in these scripts had driven a whole generation of film directors crazy yet in this corner of his empire, as in the others, the little man insisted on total control. A disease, Nehmann thought. And at this rate, probably terminal.

  Goebbels was talking about his unhappiness with the Propaganda Companies, yet another innovation for which he claimed sole credit. Nehmann had accompanied one of these outfits during last year’s lightning descent on the luckless French. Goebbels, who treated everything in life as a lamp post, wanted to cock his leg and put his personal scent on the probability of a quick German victory. The Propaganda Companies – film crews and journalists – bounced along in the wake of the Panzer columns, raiding the battlefield for images and interviews to send home. Thus, within days, cinema audiences across the Reich would be treated to victory after victory, an epic movie told onscreen in real time, and all of it thanks to the little genius at the head of the Promi. Given the cannibalism within the upper reaches of the Reich, rival warlords were quick to spot the countless benefits of sharing these spoils of Hitler’s war, and now, it seemed, Goebbels was facing a serious turf battle with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.