by Gary Haynes
‘SS?’
‘Yes, and I have admitted I am an SS officer.’
‘A racial project?’
Richter didn’t know how to respond at first. He said, ‘Not in the sense you are implying. In the broadest sense. Yes, you could say that.’
‘You Nazis are obsessed with race. It infects you, like a plague,’ Volsky sneered. He wiped what looked like stale snuff from his left nostril. ‘We captured an NCO, a young SS man, a short time before we captured you. He was the one who first told us about the bunker.’ He stopped, scratched his right nipple. ‘He refused to speak at first. He said he would rather die than betray his honour.’
Richter nodded, although he was distinctly ruffled by what he’d just been told. He recited the Waffen-SS oath silently to embolden him: my honour is called loyalty.
‘He was tortured to find where the bunker was. The exact map co-ordinates. He spoke, of course. For some reason the men who do this vital work like to shave off all body hair before they begin. But who am I to judge such things?’ Volsky raised his hands.
Richter shifted his buttocks on the hard chair.
‘Tell me about your racial project,’ Volsky said.
‘It was to ascertain if the Caucasus and its environs would be a fit place for the resettlement of German farmers.’
Blood and soil, Richter thought.
‘Lebensraum,’ he said. Living space.
‘You actually thought you could defeat us and take our land.’ Volsky smiled. ‘Now we have yours.’
‘Indeed.’
‘As for race, just think of how many little Jewish communists your Aryan bitches will give birth to.’
Richter felt as if his head would explode, but he held himself in check and merely clenched his fists under the table. What else could he do?
‘The SS man we captured said that men from the east were in the bunker.’
‘From the east?’
‘Yes. He said he heard screaming. He said other things.’
‘It had a hospital wing. Of course, he heard screams. Besides, the young have vivid imaginations,’ Richter said, wondering what else the NCO had said. Troubled by it.
‘Maybe. You, on the other hand, are not young.’
‘What?’ Richter said.
‘Your ears are too big, and your eye bags are too heavy. You look sixty years old.’
‘I was a non-combatant.’
He watched Volsky nod.
‘I told you. I was assigned specific administrative tasks.’
‘We will find out, German. We always find out.’
Richter bowed his head, as if he hoped to placate the major by doing so.
‘Why were dead Soviet soldiers in the bunker? We know about them, and we know the SS man wasn’t lying. A Red Army assault squad entered it before you left. They saw things too.’
Richter didn’t like the way the interrogation was going. He didn’t know what the major knew and what he didn’t know.
‘I will tell you. May I have another cigarette?’
Volsky handed him one and lit it. Richter closed his eyes as he inhaled the smoke, thinking again of his beloved opium.
Volsky sighed, scratched his chin. ‘Have you heard a man beg for his life?’ He looked Richter up and down. ‘Yes, of course you have. You will know most people die crying for their mama.’
Richter watched Volsky’s eyes rise to the meat hook. He turned and grinned at the NKVD guard, who grinned back.
‘I don’t want to be tortured.’
Volsky cocked his head to one side. A look that said: well, tell me then.
‘The men were caught in Berlin. Soviets, as you say. The Waffen-SS men in the bunker were sometime camp guards. They said they wanted a little revenge for the destruction of Berlin. Nothing more.’
He felt guilty about what he’d said. He lied, in part, too. But no one could say how they’d react in such circumstances. And the war was over. Wasn’t it?
But the Waffen-SS oath came to him once more and he felt desolate.
I need opium, he thought.
24
Three hours later.
Kazapov had been ordered by Major Volsky to take a platoon of ‘suitable’ NKVD men and extract what was left of the bunker’s contents, just as he’d been promised. It was the one place he wanted to be, other than interrogating the German officer, Lutz Richter.
He’d been told that, during the initial interrogation, Richter had said that the bunker was now safe, in the sense that there were no other contingency plans. No booby traps, or mined corridors that could maim or kill. The NKVD had waited until the battle for Berlin was all but over, although as far as the war proper was concerned, the Germans had yet to surrender to the Allies. They were holding out in strength in isolated pockets of Europe, and northern Germany was still under their control. But Volsky had told Kazapov that enough time had elapsed. There were no discernible risks.
Apart from the NCOs, the twenty men Kazapov took with him were young NKVD fanatics, mostly from the Great Steppe, the huge featureless grassy plains of the Motherland. He’d heard them speak of their lives prior to the outbreak of the war. They were goatherds and crop farmers, and such like. Uneducated men who knew the significance of the seasons. They’d been given a weapon each and a semblance of power and now they’d do anything for the state, however extreme. They could be trusted, too.
The platoon also included the remnants of the squad that had stumbled upon the bunker the day that Richter and his four SS men had vacated it. Kazapov knew why. They’d seen things, and they would not be allowed to speak about them, beyond those who were now their comrades. Besides this, their presence was a practical one. They’d been here before. They could point the way. They knew where the corpses of the Red Army soldiers were.
The sergeant’s name, he now knew, was Pavel Romasko. He had a youngster with him, whom he called the Kid. He’d asked about their visible injuries and the sergeant had told him that he’d thought he was a goner, but it was just concussion. He’d been given a shot of morphine in his thigh, and his head and left knee had been bandaged. After downing a quarter of a bottle of vodka, a hot meal of potatoes and beans, and having eighteen hours of sleep, he felt remarkably fine, he’d said.
Other than these conscripts and fewer regulars, a platoon of Poles had been assigned to assist with the clearance of the bunker. They were young men too, who’d fought with the Red Army all the way to the Reichstag and Reich Chancellery. They were exhausted and had been told that this was a chance to recuperate from battle, although Kazapov had decided to work them relentlessly. But he’d been ordered not to let them inside the bunker. Volsky had told him that these Polish mules could not be trusted to tell nobody of the things they might otherwise see. Such was the Soviet hierarchy’s paranoia concerning the contents of the bunker, their paranoia regarding any contact with the West. Even regular male and female ex-POWs were being tortured by SMERSH, just in case their communist credentials had been damaged by their German captors. Even heroes. Even the former Russian prisoners at Auschwitz. It was outrageous, Kazapov thought.
Stalin had ordered that no member of the armed forces should surrender, although many divisions had. Kazapov knew that Stalin had established a camp system, separate to the Gulag, for them. It was overseen by the GUPVL, another main administration within the NKVD. He guessed this was Stalin’s punishment for those that had survived. It didn’t seem to matter that over 3,000,000 had died in captivity. They were deemed traitors by Order Number 270.
He stood inside the doorway of one of the bunker’s rooms now, the contents illuminated by torch beams. He saw it filled with a collapsed ceiling and dead bodies, including those of the tortured Soviet men. He also saw what Pavel Romasko had told him was a vat of incense, although it was barely visible. Kazapov had shuddered and fought to control his breathing when he’d been told about it. The last time he’d seen a vat of incense had been in Kalmykia, at the centre of an underground cave that was used as a Buddh
ist prayer room. One of several that had survived Stalin’s frenzy of desecration.
Now, he could still smell the fragrance of incense, even above the stench, which was chokingly rank. The visible corpses were decomposing, and flies and insects moved over them like rippling blankets. He looked around at Pavel and the Kid, at the NKVD men. He knew the sight of the bodies didn’t worry them. The savaged earth from Stalingrad to Berlin had been littered with dead people of all ages, and all manner of horrors had been visited upon them.
There was a jarring noise. Dust and small fragments from what was left of the lintel and jagged concrete just inside the door rained down upon them. Glancing back, he saw that the men looked nervous, suddenly unable to maintain their composed stance. A bullet in the stomach was a lingering death. But dying slowly underground, buried by rubble, was worse.
‘Collect everything in the bunker,’ he said. ‘The bodies, furniture, documents. Everything. Cover your mouths with handkerchiefs and wear your gloves. And do it quickly. Ensure that the bodies can’t be seen when you take them outside. That vat too.’
The Soviets went about stripping the bunker bare in a methodical manner. They moved in well-organized lines, back and forth to the Poles, who hauled the concealed contents onto numerous trucks parked in what was left of the bomb-damaged street outside. It had been cordoned off with barbed wire, a heavy machine gun at either end. Twenty NKVD troops had also been deployed to ensure it was inaccessible to any unauthorized individual, civilian or military.
25
Two hours later, Pavel found a smouldering wooden crate, lying halfway out of a doorway, and in it a brass casket, about two feet square and smirked by fire. It was secured with an outsized padlock that bore an embossed image of the military eagle, its head turned to the right. He used his torch to make a cursory check of the room, seeing that it contained nothing but ashes and debris. But a brick wall had partially collapsed to the rear, half blocking off an archway that led, he guessed, to another room. He decided that he should take the casket back to the bunker’s entrance and hand it to a Pole before investigating the other room.
But after carrying the casket for no more than ten seconds, his curiosity kicked in. That was a bad trait in war, he knew. He lowered the casket and used the butt of his weapon to dislodge the padlock, although it took four blows. Resting his weapon against the wall, he crouched down and lifted the lid the first couple of inches. He winced. There was a peculiar smell, like a mixture of ammonia and preservatives. The unmistakable odour of incense, too.
He pushed the lid against a shattered doorframe and pointed his torch. He saw what appeared to be the ends of scrolls wrapped in something like cowhide. Placing the torch next to his Shpagin, he rummaged about and picked out a metal cylinder. Nothing was written on it. He unscrewed the lid with ease; inside was a reel of film. He put the torch under his armpit and held a frame of the film up to the beam. Vaguely, he saw what he took for a Kazakh or an Uzbek, a man with similar facial features to those butchered thirty yards or so away.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, sergeant?’
Pavel looked to his side. The NKVD officer who’d introduced himself to the men as Lieutenant Kazapov was standing there, his expression furious.
‘Put it back.’
Pavel obeyed and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He berated himself. In truth, he didn’t care about the bunker. He didn’t care about the rest of the war. He’d survived, hadn’t he? The Kid had survived, and Doc had been taken to a field hospital and he’d been told that his wounds weren’t life-threatening. He’d also been told that after this last task he could go home.
Now all that mattered to him were imagined embraces and imagined kisses. His little Darya and Marat, and his wife, Ludmila. What else was there?
*
Kazapov examined the brass casket, smeared with black smoke. The Red Army sergeant, Pavel Romasko, had stepped back from it after his rebuke. He used the sleeve of his khaki shirt to clean it up a little. It had the regular symbols of the Third Reich embossed on three of its sides. The swastika. The Reich eagle. The twin sig runes of the SS. But there was something else. Something he recognised too. The image looked roughly like a swastika, and was part of the elaborate, circular belt buckle worn by the Kalmücken-Kavallerie-Korps, the Kalmykian Volunteer Cavalry Corps. His breath became shallow and he felt a spasm in his neck.
The corps had been made up of what Kazapov regarded as 5,000 Kalmyk traitors from the surviving, original volunteers, when German Army Group A had retreated from the Caucasus at the end of 1942. The volunteers had originally fought alongside the Heer’s Sixteenth Motorized Infantry Corps, despite being Soviet citizens, after the Germans had entered Elista, the capital of the autonomous Soviet republic of Kalmykia, in early August 1942.
He’d volunteered to go to Kalmykia with a ChGK war crimes investigation team in early 1943, after more atrocities had been reported, following the end of the occupation in December 1942. Another round of eyewitness testimonies and exhumations of mass graves had ensued. Another round of listing dead people’s names in his logbook. Hundreds of Russian Jews had been murdered by Einsatzgruppe D and their collaborators. There hadn’t been any sanctuary on the Kalmyk steppe, the land of the Buddhist horsemen. It had sickened him. But who would have believed the Germans would have reached the shores of the Caspian Sea by September 1942?
However, the real reason he’d joined the NKVD department and had gone to Kalmykia had had nothing to do with atrocities against loyal partisans and persecuted Jews. He’d heard no word from his mother and sisters since a week after they’d entered Kalmykia, and he’d hoped that he might find a trail he could follow in tandem with his official duties. How else would a young man from Stalingrad explain his presence there without being accused of desertion? How else could he have carried out investigative work without being accused of spying?
‘Where did you find this?’ Kazapov said.
‘Poking out of a room down the corridor, comrade lieutenant. It was in the remains of a wooden crate. It was the only thing in it,’ Pavel said. ‘There’d been a fire in the room. Everything else was burned to ashes. The back wall has collapsed. I didn’t go into the room beyond it.’
Kazapov struggled to contain himself. ‘Another room?’
‘Yes, comrade lieutenant.’
‘Show me.’
Kazapov turned to an NKVD soldier who had just appeared in the corridor. ‘Take that to my car. Guard it personally,’ he said, nodding towards the brass casket.
‘Yes, comrade lieutenant,’ the soldier said. He had a sturdy frame, his eyebrows singed to little patches, and noticeably bad teeth.
Kazapov’s sense of anticipation rose in his chest like a great wave breaking on a cliff’s face, although he had no rational reason to believe either the contents of the casket or the room would be significant. There was just a feeling — the same feeling he’d had on several occasions throughout the war. When to duck. When to beat a prisoner and when to give him alcohol. When to speak and when to be silent. When to step to the right rather than the left.
Instinct.
26
He followed Pavel Romasko down the corridor, illuminated by the sergeant’s torch. They passed several dead SS guards. Some of them had committed suicide by a bullet to their temples or through the roofs of their mouths, as was evident from the Walther PO8 pistols that lay next to their fetid bodies. But some were charred. The familiar smell of burned hair and flesh lingered in the air, a charcoal-like odour, mixed with sulphur and a hint of musky sweetness. Rats emerged from under the stained uniforms, their eyes sparkling. To Kazapov, they were the only living thing that had ultimately prospered from the war. Fat, confident and omnipresent.
Stepping over one of the corpses, he wondered what the revealed room might hold, and he felt dizzy for a second or two.
Further on, the sergeant’s torch beam lit up a large space beyond a double doorway. There were galvanized pipes, smeared gurney
s, industrial sinks of both porcelain and stainless steel, and operating tables. Translucent bags of now congealed blood were split open, and buckets of water overturned. Amid the dead that had been unsuccessfully operated upon, or who had died subsequently, surgical implements were strewn about: scalpels, hacksaws, a surgeon’s shears. Littering the cracked tiled floor by the rear door were an assortment of disposable gloves and syringes, lengths of rubber tubing and hairnets.
The bunker’s medical facility, Kazapov thought.
He’d been told by Major Volsky that the SS colonel told him the bunker contained a hospital wing. He hadn’t lied about that, at least. It looked to him like a chaotic human abattoir, although it was all but intact. He had an inkling then that the Germans had left it that way, or perhaps the fire had been as indiscriminate in its destruction as the war had been in the lives of the innocents it had snuffed out.
Twenty seconds later, Kazapov walked beside Pavel Romasko through the ash-ridden room where he’d said he’d found the brass casket. The sergeant directed the beam of his torch towards the undamaged section of the bunker that had been revealed by the half-collapsed, red-brick inner wall, damaged by the conflagration. The bricks that were left in the wall were cracked and singed, the rendering like powdered charcoal.
Kazapov scrambled over the bricks and through the archway behind Pavel and, as the torch scanned about, he had to stop himself from gasping.
Together with a handful of investigators from the ChGK, Kazapov had been one of the first NKVD officers to enter Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, close to the Soviet border, in July 1944. It was the first major camp to be liberated. In other camps, he knew, the SS had destroyed the industrial structures of their Final Solution: the gas chambers and crematoria. They’d blown them up and had ordered the remaining inmates to burn the rotting bodies, the victims of typhus, shootings and starvation. But the extent of their vileness had been such that he’d known they couldn’t hide it all. They’d left Majdanek relatively undamaged. The truth of what the Germans and their foreign supporters had done in such places had become well-known, even among the lowliest Red Army privates. It had fuelled their desire for revenge.
