Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  In the small hours, shaking with cold, he must have drifted away because the next thing he heard was a voice whispering in his ear and a rough hand giving him a shake. It was the Unteroffizier from the despatch team, telling him he had just thirty minutes to make his way across the airfield to the plane for Berlin.

  Nehmann nodded, grunted his thanks, then lay back, trying to make sense of the nightmare. He’d been a kid again, back in the mountains around Svengati. It was winter, bright moonlight, the theatre of the surrounding peaks shrouded in snow. Then came a low rumble he first mistook for artillery but then realised were footsteps. They grew louder and louder, thump-thump, and he looked up, terrified. A giant, he thought, striding over the Caucasus, pitiless, hungry for flesh of any kind, and then a head appeared, dwarfing the frieze of peaks, and a slender neck, and bare shoulders, and he saw only darkness where the eyes had once been, and he knew he was looking once again at the little girl in the back of the SS truck.

  Kalb’s work.

  Nehmann pushed the blanket away. His booted feet found the bare earth. He stood up, aware that he was trembling, hoping that Messner would forgive the theft of his greatcoat. God willing, I may be back here one day, he thought, slipping out of the tent, trying to remember how to find the plane.

  25

  BERLIN, 28 SEPTEMBER 1942

  Nehmann was last onto the aircraft. The pilot had already started all three engines and Nehmann tried to duck the icy blast from the propeller on the port wing as he clambered up the ladder with his single bag. There was one seat remaining and the plane was already on the move when he finally made it up the narrow aisle.

  He sank back, groping for his seat belt, but something had happened to the buckle and it wouldn’t work. He shrugged. He suspected that the little figure across the aisle with the dumpling face and the ready smile was Wilhelm Knaus, but he didn’t care about that, either. The flight to Kyiv would take hours, and after that came the even longer leg to Berlin. Just now he wanted to close his eyes and bask in the warmth of the cabin. Within seconds, still bumping towards the runway, he was asleep.

  He awoke five hours later. The aircraft was still droning west above a carpet of fluffy cloud. Sunshine streamed in through the window and when Nehmann took a second look he recognised the two silver shapes high in the sky behind them. Bf-109s, he thought. Just in case I think this fucking war is over.

  They landed at Kyiv in time for a snatched lunch in the windowless room that served as a cafeteria. While ground crew refuelled the Tante-Ju, Nehmann found a table and took advantage of the peace and quiet to have a word with the Reich’s new hero. Messner had been right. Knaus was a small, unassuming figure, a one-time baker from Koblenz, and he seemed oblivious to the place in Nazi folklore that Goebbels was preparing for him.

  Faced with Nehmann’s racing pencil, he confirmed that he was a flak gunner. He’d enrolled with the Luftwaffe, half intending to become a pilot, but his mum had been right about his eyesight and he’d ended up in the Luftwaffe’s Flak Regiment. He had good mates there. He also had a mongrel dog he’d christened Gustav for no particular reason that he could think of. He’d tried to smuggle Gustav aboard the plane at Pitomnik but had been caught out. The mutt was white with grey patches which sometimes made life tricky trying to find him in the snow.

  Nehmann underlined the name Gustav. Readers loved nonsense like this. As Goebbels was the first to point out, it made them feel better about the war.

  Nehmann looked up.

  ‘Twenty-one tanks? Have I got that right?’

  ‘Twenty-two really. One got away but it was trailing smoke and I blew one of the tracks off it. We found it later that day.’

  ‘And the crew?’

  ‘Still inside.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Ja, very.’ He was eating a plate of pickled cucumbers. He chased the smallest one with a corner of his bread and then sucked at the vinegar. The bread, he said, was Scheisse. Kyiv needed a decent baker.

  Nehmann tried to tease out a quote or two about the 88mm flak gun, about blowing all those tanks apart, about what it took to be in a battle, and hold your nerve, and steady your aim, and chose exactly the right moment to squeeze the trigger.

  ‘Trigger? Have I got that right?’

  ‘Lanyard. It’s a kind of rope. You lay the gun first. Then give the rope a yank.’

  Nehmann wrote the word down. Yank. The Reich’s new hero might have been preparing a tray of Brötchen.

  ‘Did you shoot before? As a kid, maybe?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And the funfair? As a kid? Did you ever try for the coconuts?’

  ‘My father hated the funfair. He locked us up, me and my brother.’

  ‘Did you ever go to the movies? American films, maybe? Westerns?’

  ‘No.’ He reached for the last of the cucumbers. ‘You think Gustav’s going to be OK? You think he might find his way back to those mates of mine?’

  *

  The departure of the plane for Berlin was delayed by a problem in one of the engines. At first it was a question of hours but then a Ukrainian engineer appeared and announced that the plane wouldn’t be taking off until early next day. By now, Knaus was dozing at the table, his head pillowed on his folded arms. Nehmann stared at his pad, flipped a page and then got to his feet to find somewhere more private to start writing.

  Next door to the cafeteria was a bare, empty room with a single folding chair propped against the wall. Nehmann unfolded the chair, found a pencil and began to write. Present tense, he told himself. Make it real.

  His mates, he wrote, call him Billy the Kid. His real name is Wilhelm Knaus. On the battlefield he’s known as the fastest gun in town and his fame in this little corner of the Wild East extends to even the Soviet trenches. When little Willi Knaus appears, enemy tank crews know their days are numbered. Why? Because Billy the Kid and his trusty 88mm flak gun never miss.

  Nehmann smiled and sat back a moment. He especially liked ‘the Wild East’ and he knew that Goebbels would, too. It was funny. It would raise a laugh or two. And only the handful of veterans who’d made it back to the Reich in one piece would understand the irony. Wild, indeed. And not in a good way.

  Half an hour, and the profile was complete, a cheerful confection of falsehoods, another rung in the ladder that would take this little gunner to heights he’d never dreamed about. For a moment or two, he toyed with letting Knaus have a peek at what he’d written but then decided against it. The man was a peasant at heart, and most peasants – uncursed by imagination – had a respect for the truth. Nehmann doubted whether their paths would ever meet again, and even if they did he’d mutter something about the editing process and blame the whole thing on his boss.

  What was left of the day slipped past. A truck arrived from the city and drove the marooned passengers to a nearby army barracks where they spent the night. Nehmann, keen to avoid Knaus, spent a pleasant hour or so with a surgeon from the biggest of Sixth Army’s field hospitals, returning to Berlin to plead for more resources. He took a wider view of what was happening in Stalingrad and agreed with Nehmann that even a hundred ack-ack regiments wouldn’t guarantee any kind of victory. We’re overextended, he said. Geography and the weather have a brutal logic of their own. And that’s before we even start discussing the Ivans. It was only at this point in the conversation that Nehmann admitted working for the Promi. This confession prompted a shake of the head.

  ‘That boss of yours has a lot to answer for,’ the surgeon murmured. ‘As you doubtless know.’

  *

  Goebbels, as it turned out, had sent a car to Tempelhof to meet the incoming flight. Expecting to be driven straight to the Promi, Nehmann found himself drawing up outside Guram’s apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse.

  ‘You’re going to drop me here?’

  ‘That’s right. The Minister’s office will be in touch. I’m told there’s Weisswurst in a cupboard in the kitchen. That makes you a lucky man, Herr Nehmann.’

>   Nehmann let himself into the apartment, relieved that the key still worked. The Bavarian sausage was a favourite of his, as Goebbels well knew, and the weather in Berlin was fabulous, a perfect autumn day. Late afternoon sun was streaming in through the windows and wherever he looked there were stands of fresh flowers. He could smell perfume, too, a scent he recognised, and for one giddy moment Stalingrad had never happened.

  ‘Maria? Liebchen?’

  Nothing. Not a sound. He was looking round. On the wall above the piano was a picture he’d never seen before, not here in the apartment. It was the front cover of a magazine called NS-Frauen-Warte, one of the Reich’s top sellers, and it showed a black and white photo of the half dozen soldiers who’d scaled Mount Elbrus. The shot was beautifully framed, no expense spared, and Nehmann sensed at once that it was here for his benefit. A thank you? A ministerial pat on the back? He’d no idea.

  Shaking his head, he explored the rest of the apartment. In the bathroom he found a collection of soaps and lotions he knew Maria liked. They, too, were expensive – way beyond the means of a Moabit nightclub singer – and when he opened the bathroom cabinet he found a small, square bottle of French perfume, Shalimar by Guerlain, Maria’s favourite. The bottle had been here since Nehmann arrived at the flat. It had belonged to a girlfriend of Guram’s and Maria, at Nehmann’s invitation, had helped herself. When he’d left for the east, it had been a third full. Now there was barely any left.

  She’s moved back in, Nehmann told himself. He’d left the bathroom now, and he was looking down at the bed where they’d slept. On one pillow was a carefully scissored rectangle of newsprint. Nehmann picked it up, recognising the font, the layout, even the trademark style of clipped, flat reportage. He’d last seen prose like this in Paris, he thought, in the pages of the Wehrmacht newspaper published locally for German occupation forces in the capital and the major provincial towns beyond, a publication that never raised its voice, never risked a joke, but relied solely on a bland diet of foreign victories and news from home. Goebbels, he knew, had been itching to get his hands on it. He’d put fire in its belly, rouse the Wehrmacht from its torpor, give the idle captors of France a bit of a shake.

  Nehmann went to the window and read the report. It seemed there’d been an unfortunate incident at Montparnasse Metro station in central Paris. A man in his early forties had fallen in front of a train and been killed. This individual, unnamed, had an important role with the occupation forces, reporting directly to Ambassador Otto Abetz. Suspecting the involvement of French terrorists, ten hostages had been seized and shot that very afternoon.

  Nehmann settled on the bed. He knew that there was a tariff that applied in circumstances like these. Kill a German in occupied France, or Brussels, or Amsterdam, or anywhere else in the Greater Reich, and you’d normally expect fifty hostages to be taken and held under sentence of death. In this case, only ten had faced the firing squad. Was there some doubt about the circumstances of this man’s death? And, in any case, who on earth was he?

  Nehmann read the report a second time. Like the framed photo hanging on the wall next door, he suspected that it must have been deliberately left for him, part of a carefully composed tableau he couldn’t fail to notice. Goebbels, he thought to himself, trying to send some kind of message. He frowned, trying to understand the implications, then he shrugged and ducked his head to sniff the pillow. Shalimar by Guerlain, again. Maria.

  Nehmann was in the kitchen, wolfing the last of the Weisswurst, when he heard a knock on the door. It was the Promi driver who’d picked him up from the airport. The Minister presented his compliments, he said, and would welcome Nehmann’s company for a drink or two. Nehmann finished the sausage and accompanied the driver down the main staircase to the street. It was nearly dark by now.

  Expecting a lift to the Ministry, Nehmann found himself being driven north, over the Spree. Beyond the suburbs, the houses thinned, the land rising and falling, dark stands of pine trees in every direction. Already he’d asked the driver where they were going, getting no response. Now he had a suggestion of his own.

  ‘Bodensee?’

  ‘Ja,’ the driver laughed. ‘Where else?’

  The recently built villa at Bodensee was yet another of Goebbels’ residences, his country retreat, and already a national byword for the kind of indulgence to which a senior Party member could treat himself. It was alleged to have seventy rooms, though Nehmann had never met anyone who’d counted them, and the Minister used the place to brood, to write and to entertain. It was here that he’d courted Lida Baarova and doubtless others, and it was here, too, that he’d probably penned the letter Nehmann had taken to Rome.

  The entrance gate, hard to spot, was hidden in the gloom of the pine trees. The driver led Nehmann to the big front door beneath the white stucco of the arch. Goebbels himself welcomed his visitor.

  ‘The Wanderer’ – he had a pencil in his hand – ‘returns.’

  The driver stepped back into the darkness while Nehmann followed the Minister into the house. It was cavernous, an uneasy mix of Third Reich kitsch and something altogether more modern. Through a pair of open doors halfway down the hall, Nehmann caught sight of what he assumed was a huge reception room, black and white diamond chequers on the floor, the ceiling boxed in varnished wood, a long rectangular table set for a single place.

  At the end of the hall, among a selection of looted French Impressionist paintings, was a framed photograph Nehmann had never seen before. He paused beside it. Goebbels, in a military greatcoat and a cap, was on the right, his gloved hands clasped in front of him, about to address an unseen figure. Behind him, at the very centre of the photo, was a woman in a three-quarter-length white fur coat. She had a flower in her hair and her gown extended to her ankles. She, too, was looking at someone on the right. An occasion of some kind, Nehmann assumed. He was right.

  ‘Olympia?’ Goebbels had stopped, too. ‘You’ve seen it? That was the night we launched Leni’s masterpiece.’

  Nehmann nodded. Leni Riefenstahl was the Reich’s favourite film director and Olympia was her record of the 1936 Berlin Games. Nehmann had loved it at first sight, mainly because it broke all the rules: smash cuts, weird camera angles, extreme close-ups. Riefenstahl, he often thought, achieved on the screen effects he himself tried to put on the page. She understood, above all, how important it was to reach out and compel attention.

  ‘And that’s Baarova? In the fur coat?’

  ‘Lida.’ Goebbels barely spared her a glance. ‘Yes.’

  He opened a nearby door and stood aside to let Nehmann through. This had to be the Minister’s study, in many ways a replica of his perch in the Wilhelmstrasse. The same neatly organised desk. The same side table stacked with film scripts. The same nest of family photographs. Nehmann noticed that door was still a centimetre or so open.

  ‘A seat, Nehmann. You must be weary.’ Goebbels waved his guest into one of the two armchairs. ‘Wine or whisky? I suggest the latter.’

  Nehmann said he was happy with either. Goebbels busied himself with a cut-glass decanter, pouring two large glasses of what he said was single malt.

  ‘I expect a man can get sick of vodka.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very good to see you in one piece, my friend. Is it equally good to be home?’

  Nehmann was noncommittal. Goebbels, as ever, was setting the conversational pace, pointing Nehmann in the direction they both understood. ‘Home’ meant the apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse.

  ‘I liked the flowers,’ Nehmann said. ‘And the Frauen-Warte cover was a nice touch.’

  ‘Excellent. The Elbrus edition broke every circulation record. Men in uniform have a wonderful effect on women. Put six of them on top of a mountain and millions of Frauen are ours for the taking. You’ll be glad to know that even the Führer approved in the end.’

  Nehmann nodded. The first sip of whisky was burning his throat.

  ‘Someone left a cutting on my pillow,’ he said slowly. ‘In the bedroom.’

&
nbsp; ‘Really?’ Goebbels feigned surprise.

  Nehmann outlined the story: the crowded platform in the Metro, the approaching train, doubtless a scream or two from the women who witnessed what followed.

  ‘So, who died?’ he asked.

  Goebbels wouldn’t answer, not at first. Instead, he wanted to know about Stalingrad, about the state of Paulus’s army, about the sturdy bridge Goering’s Ju-52s had built to the supply dumps in the west.

  ‘The whole thing’s a shit heap,’ Nehmann said. ‘The Ivans fight like tigers. We don’t have enough aircraft. If anyone tells you different, they’re lying.’

  ‘But is that a surprise? Everyone has his breaking point, his line in the sand. This happens to be Stalin’s. That helps us, Nehmann. That means the gloves are off. Every play, every novel, every opera has its final act. This is the moment we have to prevail. Stalin knows it, and the Führer knows it. It’s simply a question of will.’

  ‘Schwerpunkt,’ Nehmann said lightly. ‘The military swear by it.’

  ‘Exactly. We gather ourselves. And we fall on the enemy. Remember when we went into France? Remember Sevastopol? The impregnable fortress? Stalingrad is simply more of the same but happily, once the city has fallen, we can turn our attentions elsewhere. You’re right about the Ivans. To give them a little credit, they’re tougher than we anticipated. But once the Volga is ours, we can deal with Leningrad. And then Moscow. You know what the Führer thinks?’ Goebbels leaned forward, his voice lower. He wanted to beckon Nehmann into the inner sanctum. He wanted to share a secret. ‘The Führer is convinced Stalin will sue for peace. That partly comes from something Ribbentrop said and partly from somewhere else. Ribbentrop’s a fool, of course, but at least he understands how to negotiate with these people. Stalin will be on his knees and then the whole Bolshevik racket will collapse like a pack of cards.’

  ‘Somewhere else?’

  Goebbels nodded, said nothing. The past month or so had deepened the hollows in his face but there was a strange gleam in his eye. Nehmann was still waiting for an answer. Goebbels lifted his glass.