Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Vlasov had known all these things, but in the interests of that certain kind of “realism” which allows us to live life, he’d never confessed them until now. Now he shuddered. He saw into himself. He grew more rational than ever before.

  (Two days before he dissolved Second Shock Army, with the pocket already nearly as narrow as a corridor of the Lubyanka, the Supreme Command had sent a Lavochkin SFN fighter to fly him out. Vlasov refused, preferring to remain with his men. Was he brave? Everybody said so. But Comrade Stalin had told him that no retreat would be tolerated. He preferred not to share the doom of Generals Pavlov, Klimovskikh and Klich.)

  Munching on a handful of bog billberries, he heard artillery bursts from the direction of Leningrad. How many ditch-digging schoolgirls were dying there today? Supposing that their bravery equaled, since nothing could excel, that of the pair of Russian soldiers at Smolensk who’d hid for ten days in a tank’s hulk beside the decomposing corpse of their comrade, radioing the positions of the German victors who passed all around them, what then?

  (What must have happened to those two soldiers in the end?—Discovered, shot.)

  5

  Directed by German fires shining between roof-ribs, he found an old peasant who fed him. The peasant said: When there is no more Red Army, the Germans will give us our land back.

  Mutely, Vlasov held up the Geco 7.65-millimeter shell.

  The peasant said: Excuse me, Comrade General, but in the last war the Germans behaved very correctly.

  Vlasov had his own memories of war. They resembled the hardened blood on his uniform, mementoes of the lieutenant-colonel and the scout.

  6

  On 12 July 1942, round about the time that Stalin issued Order Number 227 (“Not a Step Backward”), Lieutenant-General Vlasov was captured by the Fascists. He’d been betrayed yet again, this time by a village elder of whom he’d begged a little bread. How did he feel when the lock-bolt clicked behind him? Let’s call his night in the fire brigade shed the fifth stage of his political development. Nobody brought him even a cup of water. Late next morning, when he’d begun to swelter, he heard the growl of a vehicle, probably a staff car, coming up the bad road. He heard the hobnailed footsteps of German soldiers. The bolt slammed back. Through the opening door he saw two silhouettes with leveled machine-guns, and then a voice in German-accented Russian shouted: Out!

  Don’t shoot, he murmured, exhausted. I’m General Vlasov . . .

  For the moment they allowed him to keep everything except his pistol. (In the pocket of his greatcoat was a shell: Geco, 7.65 millimeter.) Perusing his identification papers, which were bound in the finest morocco leather, they lighted upon the signature of none other than Comrade Stalin himself, and stroked it in a kind of awe. Just to be sure, they made him show them his gold tooth, which had been mentioned in the “wanted” messages.

  Strangely enough, they did not place him within one of those open boxcars already crammed with Russians packed and stacked vertically—still alive, most of them (soon they’d commence eating each other). Nor did they give him unto those German murderers straight and clean whom archivists and war crimes prosecutors would later spy in photographs, lightheartedly posing halfway down the slope of the newest mass grave. Instead, they took him to the frontline Stalag to be classified.

  Their field police recognized him immediately. They said to him: Don’t worry, General. You’re a politically acceptable element.

  Vlasov kept expecting to be shot. But instead they conveyed him respectfully to the headquarters of a German general in a field-grey greatcoat. The name of the German general was H. Lindemann. He commanded Eighteenth Army. And General Lindemann said to Vlasov, with exactly the same gentleness as he would have bestowed upon one of his own wounded soldiers: Well, your war’s ended. But I must say you fought with honor. Upon my word, dear fellow, you gave us a devil of a time—

  Vlasov bowed a little, sipping the tea which General Lindemann’s orderly had poured out for him.

  If you’d ever gotten the reinforcements you deserved, you just might have outflanked us! Ha, ha, look at this map! Do you see that break in my line down here just behind Lyuban? Every day, oh, until almost April, I should say, I used to tell my staff officers: Gentlemen, we’d better pray that Vlasov doesn’t get reinforced . . .

  General Lindemann, would a German officer in my place have shot himself?

  Heavens, no! Capture’s no disgrace for someone like you, who’s fought with his unit up to the very last instant . . . Why do you look at me that way?

  I beg your pardon, General Lindemann. I’m a little tired . . .

  We are not the monsters your Premier Stalin makes us out to be. We are human beings.

  Vlasov smiled drily, waiting to be shot.

  I suppose you’ve wondered why we came, said Lindemann. Personally, I was against it, but personal opinions are of no importance nowadays. Fate has sent Germany a great genius: Adolf Hitler. We must obey his will.

  Vlasov was silent.

  Now let me tell you something, continued General Lindemann with the utmost kindness. To my mind, Bolshevism is a crime inflicted against the world in general, and Russia in particular. You Slavs are perfectly capable of ethical conceptions, as I know from Dostoyevsky and—hm, Tolstoy’s not really manly—and yet you’ve allowed yourselves to be tricked into following these, well, excuse me, these murderers.

  On that subject I can hardly begin to answer you, General Lindemann.

  Both of them heard the scream of the incoming shell, but that meant nothing. Then the adjutant rushed in with a dispatch, stood a little foolishly, then slowly backed out, still holding that piece of paper which after all must not have been so important. The Russian shell continued overhead and finally exploded dully somewhere to the west.

  Very well, General Vlasov. What if it’s not true? What if we are in fact monsters? Tell me why that should invalidate our critique of your monsters. Think about that. And now I’m afraid our lads in Military Intelligence must impose on you a little . . .

  And so he was swallowed up by Germany. Germany was a monster of rubber, oil, gold, steel and chromium ore.

  7

  The man behind the steel desk offered him a cigarette. A blackout curtain covered something on a wall, perhaps a military map. The man said: Don’t think I approve of all these measures.

  Which measures?

  And now he talks back to me, the man said. Imagine that. It’s 1942, and I have to tolerate a Slav talking back to me. I don’t give a shit what the General says. This must be happening in another country. This must not be Russia. What do you think, Slav? You think that explains what’s going on here?

  Vlasov waited to be tortured or shot.

  Where were you?

  I was captured in Tukhovetchi Village.

  We know that. Now tell me why it took so long for us to catch you.

  I never stayed in one place.

  Who hid you?

  I’ve heard about your Barbarossa Decree, said Vlasov, expecting to be shot.

  So you don’t want your partisan friends executed. Your little Zoya took care of you, eh? Well, we can understand that. We’ll get their names and locations out of you later. But maybe you have incorrect ideas about us. We don’t mind working with people who admit their mistakes in full.

  I’ve made mistakes, said Vlasov palely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

  Well, think about it, said the man behind the desk. You have all the time in the world.

  How much time?

  The rest of your life.

  8

  They all kept telling him to think about it. General Lindemann, who was an extremely handsome man, and rendered still more resplendent by the black cross at his throat, the glittering metal eagle, the row of six buttons each as glowing and glaring as the sun, had advised him to consider the issue of moral equivalency. Vlasov was compelled to remind himself that such arguments were not in the least objectively motivated; nevertheless, they might be true. He
thought about it. Even when they asked him how many tanks and artillery pieces he’d commanded in the Volkhov pocket and he told them, they asked him to reconsider, just in case he might be forgetting something. When they asked him about Meretskov’s new divisions, he told them (his head awkwardly bowed just as it would usually be in the official photographs of the propagandists, his dark strange new uniform—plain and brown, not German—too big for him, enwrapping him like bends of sheet-metal) that his soldier’s honor prohibited him from any comment, and they said that they understood. Then they suggested that he contemplate the matter further. Pale and anxious, he traced invisible arcs on a map with his forefinger while General Lindemann looked on. Their typist recorded everything. They thanked him for his information, which they said was very helpful and important. Half-guilty now, he wondered what he’d given away, or whether that was just one of their tricks . . .

  But he said to himself: I need to be realistic. I need to save what can be saved.

  A military intelligence officer poured out two glasses of cognac from Paris. Vlasov was shocked by his own gratitude. The officer remarked: I admire your fanatical determination. The Polish campaign won’t get more than a paragraph in the history books. But we’re going to have to write an entire chapter about you Slavs! Do you know what I told my wife last summer? I told her what my commanding officer promised me. Don’t worry, I said. The Russian question will be solved in six weeks.

  Vlasov laughed a little, not disliking the man. Outside an amplified voice sang almost pleasantly: Jews and commissars, step forward!

  Nonetheless, with our new eighty-eight-millimeter guns, your tanks won’t have a chance.

  Anyway, said Vlasov with a sad smile, we’ve already lost twenty thousand tanks.

  9

  After a thorough but correct interrogation at Lotzen, they sent him to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, where a comfortable prison camp awaited him—a really nice one, in fact, where each of the reprieved lay licking up sleep as a cat does drops of milk. It was a hot journey, but the Fascists kept him in a special train-car where he could stretch his legs, in company with some perfectly correct S.D. policemen.—Don’t be alarmed, said the captain, but before crossing into the Reich, every Russian must be deloused at Eydtkuhnen Station . . .—Composing his face into an aloof smile, Vlasov awaited developments. His former life’s freedom of action now seemed wondrous, but he reminded himself that it had hardly been his choice to get inserted into the Volkhov pocket to fight there uselessly. What if something good could come of all this? Certainly when Comrade Stalin had dispatched him to China, he hadn’t known what to expect, and yet he’d been able to do his duty there without disappointing anyone; he’d even been awarded the Order of the Golden Dragon by Chiang Kai-shek, although as soon as he reentered the Soviet Union, the secret police confiscated it, for reasons of state. His wife had been disappointed; she’d wanted to see his golden dragon . . . Hoping and believing that he could break out of his new difficulties, he replied courteously but not obsequiously to the small talk of the S.D. men, who wanted to know which features of the Crimean landscape he considered most beautiful. (He’d fought there with distinction in 1920, against the monarchists.) After that, the S.D. captain told him about a certain sailing excursion he’d once taken on the Bodensee, seven years ago it was, when his lucky number came up, thanks to the Führer’s “Strength Through Joy” program. Had General Vlasov heard of the Bodensee? Vlasov nodded, clearing his throat.

  Seeing that he made no attempt to escape, they finally told him where he was going.—Yes, Vinnitsa, he replied with one of his meaningless smiles. I remember when that was General Tyulenev’s headquarters . . .

  (Over one-third of the people’s armed forces were already out of commission—if we didn’t count all those schoolgirls now dying for the sake of useless antitank obstacles. That figure kept exploding within his forehead, malignantly trying to break through.)

  Although their conveyance passed several of the newborn concentration camps in which Russians huddled in bare fields sealed off by barbed wire, thirsting and sickening, digging up mice and earthworms with their bare hands so as to extend the term of starvation, Vlasov is said to have seen nothing. After all, window-gazing is not one of the pastimes permitted to prisoners-of-war. Nor would it have been fair to impute any evil to the German administration on the basis of those camps, for it takes time to put conquered dominions in order. Soon, when these zones were better Germanized, the survivors, the one-in-ten, would be inducted into striped uniforms. They’d wear a red triangle superimposed with the letter R.

  10

  Vinnitsa, where in the words of a German policeman-poet, we saw two worlds, and will permit only one to rule, had only recently been cleansed of Jews. Nowadays we’d probably label it a “strategic location,” for it was rapidly becoming a junction for military traffic of all kinds. From behind barbed wire, the prisoners could often see processions of armored troop carriers cobblestoned with German faces and helmets. (Yes, it’s all true, a grief-crazed major muttered into Vlasov’s ear. At Smolensk alone, they caught a hundred thousand of us . . . ) Long hospital trains clanked rearward; truckloads of ammunition and jaunty dispatch riders went the other way. Just a couple of weeks ago the Führer had established his latest military headquarters on the edge of town, in a discreet little forest compound called “Werewolf.” Precisely because Werewolf was such a secret, even the inmates of the prison camp knew all about it. It was said that the Führer wanted to give the drive against the Caucasus oil-fields his personal direction. Stalingrad wouldn’t halt him for long! Nobody knew when Moscow was slated to fall at last, but the drama of approaching victory excited everyone into a rage of impatience at considerable variance from the resignation one might have expected; for the “Prominente” could not help but feel that six months from now, when the war was over, it would be too late to prove themselves to their new masters. As for Vlasov, his unexpected proximity to the head of the German government gave him hope. (Every wall regaled him with posters which said HITLER—THE LIBERATOR.) He sufficiently understood his own worth to be aware that rationality itself required the Führer to redeem him into usefulness. At this point, he still didn’t know what he wanted. He remained determined to ensconce his own integrity within the deepest, most concentrated defenses. But on his face he felt the seductive breath of opportunity.

  A photogenic old peasant, magnificently muscled and bearded, kept saying to everyone: As soon as the Communists are finished, we can all go back home.

  You see my face, General? said a Polish colonel . With all due respect, when your Red Army captured me back in ’39, they knocked half my teeth out. I wouldn’t sign anything, so they propped my eyelids open on little sticks . . .

  Frankly, I’m surprised to see you here, Vlasov replied. I was under the impression that the Fascists were liquidating the Polish officer class.

  It’s not so simple. In fact . . . But there’s a compatriot of yours in our barracks; his name is Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky. He can explain it all to you . . .

  Although it was this Boyarsky whose assurances finally persuaded Vlasov to sit down for discussions, first with the diplomat Gustav Hilger, then with Second Lieutenant Dürken direct from the OKW Department of Propaganda, and ultimately with Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, without whom there might well have been no Vlasov Army, Boyarsky remained no more than the doorkeeper of fate.32 Much the same can be said of Hilger. But less than a week after that interview, Vlasov was summoned into Second Lieutenant Dürken’s presence. A guard led him toward the commandant’s office. And now from across the parade ground he already spied a man, a man pale and slender, sunken-eyed, narrow-lipped, with the white death’s head on his black collar-tab and an Iron Cross just below the throat; a man with a swastika on the breast-pocket, a man whose dreamily quizzical expression proclaimed him master of the world. Vlasov thought him one of the most sinister individuals he’d ever seen. During his various battles, breakouts and evacuations, he’d
spied the corpses of Waffen--men, and only those; they never permitted themselves to be taken alive. There was a certain deep ravine near Kiev, called Babi Yar. Vlasov remembered it very well. He’d read in Izvestiya that a week or two after the zone fell into Fascist hands, Waffen-- men had machine-gunned thirty thousand Jews there, but the tale seemed implausible. He’d said to his wife: That sort of conduct would only interfere with the German war effort by turning people against them. Besides, what threat would unarmed Jewish families pose to the Wehrmacht? You know, when I was in Poland I found out that most of what Izvestiya said about class exploitation there was lies. The peasants eat better than we do . . .

  I believe you, Andrei, she’d wearily replied. You don’t have to argue the matter with me. But please lower your voice; somebody might be listening . . .

  No, General, they have their honor, Boyarsky had insisted in turn. There’s a positive mist of propaganda in this war; it obscures everything! I won’t deny that reprisals were taken against a few Yids right here in Vinnitsa, but their cases got thoroughly investigated beforehand. I’ve been told that they were all Stalin’s hangmen.

  But women and children—

  It wasn’t like you think. They’re all partisans! And it was humanely done. When the Jews saw how easy it was to be executed, they ran to the pits of their own free will. After all, have you been tortured here? If not, then how can you assume that they were coerced in any way? Just think about that. And thesewhom everybody keeps complaining about, they’re actually quite noble in their way. You know how an-man takes out one of our K.V. II tanks? I’ve seen it myself. First he shoots off a tread. Then he charges right up and plants a grenade inside the muzzle of the cannon! You have to admit—