Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  Nehmann smiled. They’d done the third glass now. Helmut had coyly admitted to another bottle hidden in his rucksack and Nehmann watched him struggling off the bed to fetch it.

  ‘That truck,’ Nehmann murmured. ‘The SS truck.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You mentioned bodies.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What bodies?’

  ‘God knows. They could have been Jews. They could have been anyone. I think those bastards have given up counting.’

  ‘But what were they doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You saw the bodies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I didn’t count. Maybe a dozen? All the faces were the same, even the little ones.’

  ‘The same?’

  ‘Smashed to pieces. Pulped. All over the place. Think of your friend Messner. They were much worse than that.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone? The SS people maybe?’

  ‘Christ, no.’ At last, he’d found the vodka. He returned to the camp bed in triumph, the new bottle held aloft. The first time he tried to refill Nehmann’s glass, he missed. ‘Kyiv.’ He licked the vodka from his fingertips. ‘Did anyone ever tell you about Kyiv?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘We were there last year. September. Most of the Ivans had gone and the rest were prisoners. Things were settling down nicely then bombs started to go off all over town. People were dying, our people, important people, people who mattered. Our SS friends aren’t subtle. One good deed deserves another. An eye for an eye. Very Old Testament. Ironic, eh?’

  Helmut was swaying, the new bottle cradled in one arm like a baby. Nehmann gazed up at him. He was as keen on looted vodka as the next man but knew he had to remember some of this.

  ‘An eye for an eye?’

  ‘Ja. Kyiv was a bad place to be a Jew last year. The Ukrainians didn’t like them either. Our SS friends did what they do best, rounded them all up, kicked them into line, took them out of the city. There’s a ravine called Babi Yar. You could hear the shooting all over town. It went on for days. Like I say, no one was counting but in the end I think they ran out of ammunition.’

  ‘Hundreds?’

  ‘Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Kyiv’s a big place but there wasn’t a tailor or a pawnbroker left. All gone.’

  Nehmann watched Helmut collapsing softly onto the camp bed. Miraculously, he kept the bottle upright.

  ‘More, Nehmann?’

  Nehmann shook his head. He was thinking about Maria. What was her real name? And how soon before she, too, disappeared into the darkness?

  Helmut had closed his eyes. For a moment, Nehmann thought he was asleep but again he was wrong.

  ‘You know about any of this stuff?’ he mumbled.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should. Everyone should. Tolstoy would, if he was still around.’ His face creased into a smile and his fingers crabbed across the bare earth where he’d left the book. ‘You ever read Tolstoy?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You should,’ he said again. His eyes opened. ‘There are photos. I took photos.’

  ‘In Kyiv?’

  ‘Here. Yesterday. Of the SS truck.’ He tried to hoist himself up on one elbow but failed completely. ‘They’re in that shithole of a developing room, Nehmann. Box on the floor. Maybe you ought to take a look.’

  Moments later, finally unconscious, he began to snore. Nehmann was drunk, too, but it made no difference. Maria, he told himself. For her sake. He sat beside the camp bed until he was sure that Helmut had gone. A key, he thought. I have to find a key. The developing room will be locked and there has to be a way to get in.

  He started with Helmut’s rucksack, emptying it item by item, clothing, notebooks, a map of Hamburg, half a bar of chocolate, various items of cutlery, a metal cup, three rotting plums tucked inside a sock. No key. Then he found another bag, much smaller, stitched canvas, lying on the other side of the camp bed. More notebooks, a pair of binoculars, two light meters and a small framed photo of a woman sitting on a beach. She had the sun in her eyes and she was squinting at the camera. She looked much older than Helmut, but she was blowing him a playful kiss. Nehmann studied the image for a while, wondering about the life this man had left behind him, then repacked the bag. Still no key.

  Helmut was wearing a pair of the loose black trousers favoured by the Propaganda Companies. They had deep buttoned pockets ideal for storing bits and pieces of equipment and he knelt beside the bed, easing the pockets open, slipping his fingers inside. Helmut never stirred, not once. In the second pocket, at the bottom, Nehmann found the keys. There were half a dozen of them on a knotted length of cord.

  Outside the tent, the night was darker than ever. Layers of cloud had rolled in from the west and Nehmann could taste rain in the air. He set off across the airfield, making his way through lines of parked Heinkels, ghostly shapes that suddenly materialised from nowhere. Twice he fell, once heavily, rolling over onto his back and staring up at where the stars had once been. The maintenance workshop, with the darkroom attached, felt much further away than he remembered but finally he recognised the pert shape of Richthofen’s Storch and knew he was nearly there.

  The door he needed was at the back of the building. He had the keys ready for whatever lock he found but to his surprise the door was already open. He paused in the darkness, running his fingers down the wooden frame. Where the tongue of the lock seated into the rim latch, the wood had been splintered. He paused a moment, trying to remember if the door had been this way before, but knew he couldn’t be certain. Then he put his face to the damaged frame and sniffed. A hint of fresh resin, he thought. Someone’s been here. Recently.

  He stepped inside, feeling his way by touch alone. A tiny lobby, then another door into the cubbyhole that Helmut had converted into a darkroom. A box on the floor. Helmut had been specific. Nehmann found it within seconds, bending in the darkness, his arms outstretched. It was a metal box with a flap on top and once again it was unlocked. He knelt beside it, feeling inside.

  Nothing.

  20

  TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 2 SEPTEMBER 1942

  Over the next month, Tatsinskaya became a second home for Werner Nehmann. For the first week, when the Generaloberst’s hectic schedule permitted, Nehmann spent more time with Richthofen, exploring his past, inviting his views about the Reich’s strengths and weaknesses as campaign after campaign unfolded, trying to get a feel for the man. To his surprise, Hitler’s favourite airman was remarkably candid. He had no patience for arse-licking of any description. He viewed the upper reaches of the Berlin military as completely out of touch. Time and again, he insisted that only commanders in the field, especially here in the east, could truly be relied on for the truth.

  Nehmann wove the best quotes from these interviews into a longish despatch for Goebbels, knowing only too well that he’d reshape them for his own purposes. The Minister had debts to settle with the likes of Goering and Ribbentrop and in both cases Nehmann was more than happy to supply bullets for his gun. Within days, Nehmann received a brisk note – handwritten – from the Promi. ‘Excellent material. Mehr, bitte.’

  More, please. Nehmann needed no encouragement. Over the next couple of weeks, interview by interview, he moved among the airmen and the ground crews, the maintenance teams and the resupply echelons, and began to assemble a series of supplementary reports.

  His subject now, all too easy, was the most obvious. Who was this enemy? What were the Russians like?

  Luftwaffe personnel he sat down with were only too happy to oblige with an answer or two. Many of them hadn’t been home for more than a year. They’d mingled with tank crews and infantry as the Reich’s armies pressed ever deeper into Russia and picked up a mass of anecdotal stories.

  The Ivans are Asiatic sub-human garbage, said one. Thieves, said another. They put on thin German trousers in the winter because they’re warm under their own kit, and you’
ll never meet an Ivan who isn’t wearing at least two German watches. They pillage our dead and leave shit and piss everywhere. Look for yellow snow and somewhere nearby you’ll find an Ivan.

  Ivans, according to a medical orderly, spend most of their time drunk. They call vodka Product 61 because that’s the way it’s numbered on the commissary issue lists. A brimming mugful of Product 61 is what they drink when they get a medal. The medal’s in the bottom of the mug, you open your throat, swallow the lot, and emerge with the medal clamped in your teeth.

  Another medic, a nurse this time, was even more graphic. When the vodka’s all gone, and they’re desperate for anything, she told Nehmann that the Ivans drink anti-yperite liquid from their anti-chemical warfare kit which drives most of them clinically insane. The lucky ones sober up on water drained from central heating systems or scooped up from puddles. These people live like animals, she said. They deserve to be put down.

  This was excellent copy but on a more personal level, Nehmann was uneasy about ‘put down’. Helmut had already confirmed that the shots he’d taken of the SS truck had disappeared but when Nehmann pushed him further – who? why? – he said he didn’t know. The photos, he insisted, were graphic: head and shoulders shots in extreme close-up, useless for individual ID, but ample proof that the SS were sadistic as well as merciless. Why they’d bother to bring the smashed-up bodies to Tatsinskaya was beyond him but this act of trespass by some stranger breaking into his darkroom had disturbed him, and he couldn’t hide a fear of possible consequences. The SS had powers you wouldn’t believe, he told Nehmann. If I disappear one day, you’ll know where to look.

  Messner, Nehmann decided, might know the answer. By that first week of September, the two men were getting to know each other. Messner never bothered to hide his attitude towards journalists in general, partly mistrust, partly a kind of dismissive contempt, but he seemed to regard Nehmann as an exception. In his busy working days, he’d always find the time to brief Goebbels’ pet Waise on progress inside the besieged city: how the Stukas were flying from sunrise to sunset, managing as many as eight sorties while the daylight lasted. How the Heinkels were pounding key industrial targets: the Lazur chemical factory, the Red October metallurgical works, the Barrikady gun factory, and the sprawling complex that was the Dzerzhinski tractor assembly plant.

  Nehmann dutifully noted this tally of ruins but more interesting was the physical evidence around him. The airfield, it seemed to him, was getting less busy rather than more. Ground crews were still swarming over every returning aircraft, trying to beat the turnaround times and get them back in the air, but of the aircraft themselves there seemed to be fewer and fewer. When he put this thought to Messner, the Oberstleutnant shrugged. It was early evening, and Nehmann had joined Messner for a smoke.

  ‘We certainly have problems,’ he muttered. ‘It’s true. Maybe you should talk to the Generaloberst.’

  ‘Maybe I should. Can you fix it?’

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘I need to get up to the front line, too. Possible, you think?’

  ‘Anything’s possible. You’re getting bored here? We don’t frighten you enough?’

  The two men were sprawled in the grass, enjoying the early evening sunshine. Over the last day or two, Nehmann had been aware that Messner had begun to lower his guard. At first, every exchange with Nehmann had ventured no further than a formal recitation of facts, statistics, the dry leavings of Fliegerkorps VIII’s working day. How many sorties completed. The precise weight of bombs dropped. Target damage assessments recounted with a slightly grim attention to detail. Now, though, Messner seemed in the mood for something more intimate.

  ‘That little girl of yours, the one I met at Wannsee.’ Nehmann was lying on his back, his eyes closed. ‘Do you miss her at all?’

  ‘Lottie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s my daughter, Nehmann. A father has responsibilities.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question. You had a family once. I met them out at Wannsee. You remember?’

  ‘Of course.’ Messner nodded. He was watching a pair of Heinkels wheeling towards them at the end of the landing run. The roar of the engines made conversation impossible for a minute or two, then the aircraft came to a halt and a sudden silence descended. ‘She wanted me to call her Noo-Noo,’ he said softly. ‘Can you believe that?’

  ‘Lottie?’

  ‘Beata. My once-upon-a-time wife.’

  ‘You make it sound like a fairy tale.’

  ‘Never. It was never that. We were sensible people, Nehmann, my wife and I. Sensible in our professions. Sensible in our choice of friends, in what we ate, in how much we let ourselves go. Sensible in every way you might like to consider.’

  ‘Sensible in bed?’

  The question brought a frown to Messner’s face. He plucked at a tiny blade of grass, sucked it briefly, spat it out.

  ‘I take it you know about Olga,’ he said at length.

  ‘I heard one or two things.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Did the Generaloberst tell you? Be honest, Nehmann. It doesn’t matter. The man is a grown-up. He knows what matters and what doesn’t.’

  ‘Did Olga matter?’

  ‘For a while, yes.’

  ‘And Beata?’

  ‘No. Not any more. I wrote letters, lots of letters, schoolboy letters. These matters are always more complicated than you think.’

  ‘These letters were to Olga?’

  ‘Of course. And in the end, they found their way to my wife. She’s a scientist, Nehmann. She lives in the world of cause and effect. She believes in evidence, in putting things to the test, and in the name of good sense she decided that the marriage was over. Very wise.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I understand her decision.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘You mean the decision?’

  ‘I mean Olga Helm.’

  ‘Not in the slightest. A man does what a man does. Everything in life carries a lesson. Perhaps I married the wrong woman.’

  ‘And you and Olga?’

  ‘Gone. Over. Finished.’

  Nehmann nodded. He was up on one elbow now, watching the bomber crews sharing a joke as they walked away from the Heinkels. This brief insight into Messner’s private life, he thought, was beyond bleak.

  ‘So what matters now?’ He gestured round the airfield. ‘Is all this shit enough?’

  ‘More than enough. The Generaloberst gives me certain freedoms. On one level I’m flattered. On another I’m simply grateful. Take a good look at my face, Nehmann. And then ask yourself what the rest of me must be like.’

  ‘You’re carrying other injuries?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Most of them on the inside. Accidents like mine either kill you or nearly kill you. And you may have noticed that I didn’t die, not properly, not for good.’ He got to his feet, his eyes never leaving Nehmann’s face. ‘Any more questions, Nehmann? Or are you happy, now?’

  Nehmann didn’t get up. He’d pushed his luck, but he didn’t care. Something had been troubling him for days.

  ‘Helmut,’ he said. ‘The cameraman.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s gone. The rest of his team are still here but not him. Was he ill? Have you flown him out?’

  ‘Ill? No. And, yes, we made arrangements for him to leave.’

  ‘He’ll be coming back?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He hesitated a moment, a busy man checking his watch, then he was looking down at Nehmann again. ‘War can be harsh, my friend. It might be wise to keep that in mind.’

  *

  In the second week of September, the first frost. Nehmann emerged from his tent, feeling the chill and the crispness of the grass beneath his feet. He’d talked to enough veterans by now, men who’d struggled through the previous winter, to know exactly what lay in wait. The fast-melting frost was nature’s down payment on the months to come. T
he wind from the east was blowing the remains of the summer’s dust and chaff across the airfield. It would get far, far, colder.

  And it did. On 17 September, the temperature suddenly plunged. Nehmann awoke at dawn. He was still alone in the tent. He’d already helped himself to the blanket folded on the next bed but now, shivering, he struggled out to lay hands on a third. Back in bed, he drew his knees up to his chest, his hands between his thighs, desperate to conserve every particle of warmth. He’d tried to sleep like this as a kid in Svengati, with the cold sluicing off the mountains, but it had been January then, the very depths of winter, while here on the steppe it was still autumn.

  Last night he’d been summoned to the Generaloberst’s command tent. Richthofen himself wasn’t there but Messner, barely raising his head from the usual pile of paperwork, had told him that there might be a possibility of Nehmann making it into the city. Supply flights to the forward airfield at Pitomnik were scheduled throughout the day and Messner himself would be piloting one of them. Weather permitting, Nehmann was welcome to come along.

  Nehmann had asked him what he’d be carrying.

  ‘Food, fuel, letters from home, plus the man from the Promi,’ Messner muttered. ‘What else could a soldier possibly want?’

  Back in his tent, the temperature already below zero, Nehmann had wondered what might be lying in wait for him among the ruins of the city. He talked to returning bomber crews every day. They were in the air for as long as six hours, sortie after sortie, clambering down from their aircraft for a snatched meal and a brief check of the maps and air recce photos waiting in the operations tent. Bombing specific targets, they told him, was like bombing in the dark. There was smoke everywhere from burning oil tanks, thick, viscous. The stuff penetrated the aircraft itself, catching in the back of the throat, insidious, evil, and getting even a glimpse of anything on the ground was impossible. The only thing worse than flying through shit like that, said one pilot, would be trying to survive underneath it.

  Messner appeared shortly after eight. He stood in the entrance to the tent, stamping warmth back into his feet. He had an armful of clothing which he tossed at Nehmann.