by Sven Hassel
Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.
Out of the red-black mist came an infantryman. He was laughing – madly – and then with a scream he threw away his carbine and crept close to the ground like a wounded animal. A steel rain of shells whipped up the earth around and he went on screaming. He was mad. No one could scream like that unless they were mad.
Then the MGs began to spit tracer fire and, rank by rank, the Russians fell to the ground. They fell in thousands, but there were more, always more behind them. They picked up the weapons of the dead and continued to advance, a hideous wave of death that rose from the corpse-strewn battlefield and surged towards the German lines . . .
This was Hitler’s glorious conquest of Russia . . .
By Sven Hassel
The Commissar
OGPU Prison
Court Martial
The Bloody Road to Death
Blitzfreeze
Reign of Hell
SS General
March Battalion
Liquidate Paris
Monte Cassino
Assignment Gestapo
Comrades of War
Wheels of Terror
The Legion of the Damned
Translated from the Danish by
Tim Bowie
‘I am leading you towards wonderful times.’
Hitler in a speech on 3 June 1937.
The dead metallic crackle of machine-guns
Echoed in the cold silence.
The tramp of boots, sounding like shots,
The yelp of a dog,
Human screams.
Crying children, murdered women
In the last sunlight of a dying day.
Never forget it, the blood of the murdered,
It was war –
To Dorthe, my life’s companion.
Contents
Cover
Title
Dedication
About the Author
By Sven Hassel
1 The Girl Sergeant
2 Herr Niebelspang’s Via Dolorosa
3 Anti-tank
4 Porta helps the padre
5 The Tepluschka
6 The Meat Depot
7 Before Moscow
8 The Mongol Captain
9 The Generals Depart
10 The Partisan Girl
Copyright
‘Once the Germans have accepted the Bolshevik doctrines, I will move my headquarters from Moscow to Berlin, because in the coming world revolution the Germans will make much better cadre than the Russians.’
Lenin to the Turkish Ambassador,
Ali Fuad Pascha on 14 January 1921.
In the ’30s SS-Overgruppenführer Heydrich laid a crafty plan, designed to break the back of the Red Army. Using Gestapo agents, within the GPU, he filtered information through to Stalin naming traitors in the highest posts in Russian defence. Stalin’s sick suspicions were aroused and the results far exceeded Heydrich’s greatest expectations. Stalin and Police Minister Beria sent a wave of terror rolling across the giant Soviet state. Some of the most talented military leaders of the times were executed: Marshals Tuchatschewskij, Blücher and Iegorow, Army-commanders Uborewitsch and Jakir and the chiefs of the Red Fleet, Admirals Orlon and Wiktorow. With them went the commanders of every Military District and ninety-eight percent of the Corps and Divisional commanders. Almost every Regimental and Battalion commander was removed from his post and despatched to a forced labour camp as an enemy of the people. SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Stalin himself had eliminated the brains of the Russian Army and replaced them with useless sycophants and hypocrites capable at most of leading a machine-gun section.
In the course of one night several thousand incompetent captains and majors were promoted to General rank. Some had not even attended an officer’s school and none had ever seen Frunse Academy. Countless frontier incidents took place before June 1941. German planes penetrated deeply into Russia on overt reconaissance, but Stalin had forbidden that they be shot at. The slightest provocation on the part of Russian frontier regiments was punished by death. Quite simply, Stalin forbade the Russian soldier to defend himself. ‘Why?’ asks Major-General Grigorenko. Yes, why? Most of those who could have answered this question were executed in the first two months of the war. Stalin and Beria were busy. Busy silencing witnesses to the greatest blunder in history. ‘Or was it treason?’ asks Pjort Grigorenko.
1 | The Girl Sergeant
‘What’s wrong with you?’ the lieutenant asks.
‘I can’t do it,’ says the girl sergeant.
‘You won’t!’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Tell me why you won’t,’ the lieutenant begs softly. He smooths her hair, and her forage cap falls to the ground.
‘You’re unreasonable. A girl can’t do it when she’s feeling down in the mouth.’
‘That’s a lot of nonsense. Even when you’re wounded you can do it. I once did it with both legs in plaster.’
‘When did you have both legs in plaster?’
‘When I was serving with the Soviet Laplanders. The time the Finns attacked us.’
‘Were you there? I didn’t know you’d been garrisoned in Leningrad. Stop it, Oleg! I can’t, I tell you!’
‘You mean you won’t! You don’t like doing it. I’m a holder of the Krasnoe Znamja,1 you know.’
‘Do you think a girl flops into bed with a man, just because he’s got a Krasnoe Znamja? Where did you win it, anyway?’
‘Suomussalmi.’
‘Where’s that? Out east? There’s always war out there.’
‘No, Finland. It’s where we crushed the Finnish fascists and imperialists.’
‘Do you mean the big tank battle?’
‘Yes. They destroyed the division. But then the Commander-in-Chief sent in the whole army corps. We drove deep into their flanks, and got six decorations for bravery.’
‘And you got one of them?’
‘Yes!’ He tries to slip his hand up under her potato-brown army skirt.
She closes her legs. They roll about in the tall maize.
‘You mustn’t, she whispers hoarsely. ‘I tell you I can’t. I’m a soldier like you. All that filthy perversity’ll have to wait till we’ve crushed the occupation force.’
‘Oh, I understand you thoroughly,’ growls the lieutenant bitterly. ‘Hell! how I understand you. I understand you night and day, every hour, morning and evening. Especially evenings when I sit alone in that blasted battlewagon. I understand you the way the devil understands Karl Marx. Job Tvojemadj!’2
‘Do you have to talk filth?’ she says quietly. She straightens her military skirt and shifts the belt supporting the Nagan3 to a more comfortable position.
‘I’m a soldier,’ she repeats, ‘a tankman like yourself.’
‘You’re a soldier, yes, a telegraphist in a battlewagon, Jelena Vladimirovna.’ He catches her by the neck and throws her on her back in the golden maize.
She kicks out at him, resists violently. Her skirt slides up, and a pair of well-formed thighs in khaki stockings come to view. ‘Hell, stop it,’ she snarls savagely. ‘I’ll report you to the Sampolit!’4
>
‘Do you think I’m afraid of those swine? If we don’t crush the Nazis before they get into Moscow, all the Sampolits will be swinging in the breeze. They’re shaking with fright, every one of them, and with reason. We’re not going to beat the fascists!’
‘Have you gone mad, Oleg Grigorjewitsch? Do you doubt the victory? That’ll cost you your head if I report you!’
‘Jelena Vladimirovna, can’t you be honest with me? You doubt the victory too! Hitler’s manhunters have been chasing us around like frightened chickens since June. Thousands upon thousands have fallen in just a few months. Countless others are behind barbed wire in Germany. Impregnable fortifications have gone down before we knew what was hunting us. We’re finished! Hitler and his generals will be in the Kremlin before Christmas. Where’s General Bagramja and his unbeatable Division of Guards? Crushed, Jelena! We stand on lost positions.
‘We’ve been at war three months and Hitler’s panzer divisions are little more than 200 miles from Moscow. If the weather holds, and it looks as if it will, fascist tanks will be in the Kremlin in less than a week. Did you hear the enemy radio the other day:
‘“Panzer, forward march! Let the tracks roll! Don’t stop till they’re striking sparks from the cobblestones of Moscow. Crush international Communism! Didn’t you hear it, Jelena? The Germans are devils. They’ve never been beaten. Anywhere! You’ve seen their yellow tanks crushing everything before them. For every one of their’s that went up in flames a hundred of ours went. Our own tank brigade has been destroyed and re-formed five times. Do you think that can go on? I heard this morning that they were packing up all ready to evacuate the Kremlin. Josef Stalin lets us be liquidated to save himself. He’s as brutal as Hitler. It’s a question which of the two is Russian’s greatest scourge. You know the order: He who retreats is a traitor and will be shot! If we surrender, they shoot our families.”’
‘I’d rather die than surrender,’ whispers Jelena hoarsely.
‘Don’t be too sure of that. Death doesn’t seem so frightening at a distance. But up close even the bravest lose courage and choose life – if they have a choice at all. But who’s to say we two’ll have any choice. We haven’t met Hitler’s SS yet. They’re a thousand times worse than our own NKVD.’
‘Impossible,’ in a frightened groan from the girl. ‘Nobody could be crueller than Beria’s men.’
‘You’ll learn better! Wait till you meet the men with the skull on their caps. They kill for the love of it. It’s said they get a pint of blood to drink every morning. Soviet blood, Jelena Vladimirovna.’
‘It’s said too, that they eat young children,’ she mumbles, paling.
‘Half a million babies disappeared in Berlin alone. Jewish babies,’ she added after a moment.
‘No, not Jewish, the SS definitely wouldn’t eat them!’ he protests – indignantly.
‘Do you really think we’re losing the great patriotic war?’
‘We have lost it, Jelena Vladimirovna, God help and pity us!’
‘You believe in God, Oleg? A Soviet officer passed out of Frunse Academy?’
‘Yes, since the battle of Minsk I believe in God. He is our only hope. Jelena Vladimirovna, I love you! I’ve loved you from the moment you joined the regiment, and were put in my unit. Come on, girl! There’s a war on. Who knows if we’ll still be alive by evening?’
‘Stop it, I can’t, I won’t! I’m engaged!’
‘No you bloody well aren’t,’ he shouts mockingly. ‘I know there’s something between you and Captain Anna Skrjabina. The whole brigade knows it. They say a T-34 is what’ll come out of it.’ He throws back his head with a roar of laughter. ‘You’re Captain Anna Skrjabina’s mistress. Everybody knows that cow’s crazy about girls. But did you know, too, that they disappear but fast when the old witch gets tired of them? She’ll soon be finished with the unit at Sampolit. Colonel Botapov doesn’t like her.’
‘He can’t touch Anna. She has connections right up to the Stavka.’5
‘You’re in love with her!’
‘So what? Do I have to get my section commander’s permission?’
‘What do you do with one another?’
‘Do you think I’m perverse?’
‘No, just a lesbian. You nauseate me, Jelena Vladimirovna.’
‘Good, then let me go, tovaritsch lieutenant! They certainly didn’t hand out manners together with medals at Suomussalmi.’
‘Are you knocking the Order of the Red Banner?’
‘Report me, if you want to. I can answer for myself! If I’m to be stood up against a wall I’ll see to it I get you for company!’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll get by, Jelena. Just crawl into Anna’s little bed. She’s the one who handles all the reports.’
‘You’re an animal. I curse you tenfold – by the Holy Mother of Kazan!’
‘I’m sorry, Jelena, I didn’tmean it but you drive me mad. I will have you, cost what it may!’
‘No, I tell you I won’t I won’t have anything to do with you. Not like that!’
Suddenly he is on top of her. The maize sways. The thick stalks snap noisily.
‘I’m going to have you now, if it’s the last thing I do in my life! Fritz’ll be here before sundown, and that’ll be it. The orders are “stand and die”’ With one movement he rips off her summer blouse. ‘Afterwards you can go running to Anna and tell the old witch that it’s a lot better having it with a man!’
‘Fuckin’ arseholes!’ rumbles Tiny in his deep belly bass. ‘It’s enough to get a jack up on a neutered nigger with a paralysed pisspin! See the way that traitor to the Soviet’s gettin’ across her now! And him as ’as doubts about the final victory. Ought to be stuck up in front of a firin’ squad! Bleedin’ dog’s dinner like ’im want perforatin’!’
‘It’s the bitch who’s gonna get perforated,’ sniggers Porta delightedly. ‘If they knew who was lying here taking the piss out of them! War’s a terrible thing! Just one shocking thing after another!’
‘Christ, now he’s moving up into the jungle,’ whispers Stege ecstatically, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
‘Cut it out, you lecherous monkeys,’ rasps the Old Man, moving forward his LMG,6 one of the new type with a bayonet for close-quarter fighting.
Barcelona Blom chuckles lasciviously and screws the cover off a hand-grenade.
‘He’d better get a move on, that humpty-backed frog. It’ll be his last bang, before we come tapping on the door.’
The girl has pulled herself free again. Her breasts are bared. She is breathing heavily and smacks the lieutenant resoundingly across the face. But this only excites him even more. She aims a kick at his crutch.
‘She should’ve taken a course at the military academy judo school,’ opines Porta, ‘then she could’ve tossed that alik7 straight over to us.’
‘That’d stop ’is fartin’ in church,’ grins Tiny. ‘His nice little officer’s prick’d shrivel up at the sight of us, and ’e’d shoot a load about the size of a sparrer’s tear.’
The two wrestle briefly in the swaying corn. Her skirt has been torn away. The heavy Nagan and white frilly pants seem ludicrous in contrast.
Panting they fall to the grass. Something white flutters into the air and ends on a branch.
‘There go ’er arse-curtains,’ reports Tiny gleefully.
We grin delightedly, all except the Old Man and the Legionnaire. Porta emits a long shrill whistle.
‘What was that?’ asks Jelena nervously.
‘A reed warbler crying to its mate,’ Oleg calms her.
‘A Red warrior crying for his cunt, you bastard,’ Tiny grins unrestrainedly, his face pressed hard to the ground.
‘Right up,’ Porta laughs lustfully and scratches his crutch with his combat knife.
‘No!’ cries the girl hysterically, ‘why should I?’
‘To please me,’ he laughs.
‘I won’t! Can’t you hear? Leave me alone, I tell you!’
‘Just once, wh
at difference can it make?’ he pleads.
There is silence for a moment. Betraying moans come from the bushes. A stifled scream. Jumbled words.
We are dumb with excitement, our breath comes pantingly, we stare greedy-eyed.
Porta wriggles forward to Tiny.
‘Holy Mother of Kazan,’ he whispers breathlessly. ‘Ain’t this something? Here we go knocking the Red Army, when in fact it’s us who’ve joined the wrong army. Ivan understands things. He takes uniformed cunt with him right into the thick of battle. Maybe us two hard-tried Prussian veterans ought to let the faded eagle take off and follow the Communist star? These men are fighting for a holy cause.’
‘Are they ’oly?’ asks Tiny disappointedly. His experience with the missions has been uniformly bad.
‘Like fuck they are,’ grins Porta. ‘No more than the devil is in the arse-part. But they’re made of rougher stuff than our Party bums who want to serve both God and the Devil, and try to keep the latter connection a secret like the Pharisee in the Bible. I’ve heard that every Communist Obergefreiter has a piece of allotjka8 to press his pants whenever her superior feels the need.’
‘If that’s true,’ mumbles Tiny with a hectic flush rising on his cheeks and eyes shining, ‘then we’ve already wasted too much of our time in Hitler’s connin’ army.’
‘Shall we let them finish before we turn it on?’ asks Stege in a whisper.
The Old Man makes no reply, pulls nervously at his ear and plays with the ‘stovepipe’. He is not interested in what is happening in the scrub in front of us.
The girl stands up and begins to order her uniform. Wraps her skirt around her. Now she is again a sergeant of the Guards in the Red Army’s tank arm.
‘I must go,’ she smiles, with a flash of white teeth, ‘but I’ll come back to you after roll-call.’
‘No you won’t,’ answers the lieutenant. ‘You’ll never come back to me!’
