by John Pearce
“Kraft!” It was Major Steinhauer calling to him from the front door. “Come quickly.” He signaled with an impatient wave.
Eric caught up with him in the hallway. “I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me how to find the garage.”
“It’s not far.” The major led the way down a hall for fifty paces then turned into a staircase that led down to the ground floor. At their right stood a door, which he opened to find himself in the garage, an immense room full of staff cars. The nearest was a six-wheel Mercedes bearing fender flags — his uncle’s official car.
The major beckoned to a sergeant, whom he introduced to Eric as the senior guard. “Lieutenant, please show the sergeant your laissez-passer.”
The sergeant stiffened when he read it, saluted, and said, “I will tell all the guards you’re here, lieutenant.”
The major led him to a repair bay at the back of the garage behind Hans Frank’s grand Mercedes. There, surrounded by canvas panels, stood a prewar Citroën two-ton truck. Two Wehrmacht carpenters were painting the wooden bed.
“Eric, this is your duty. This truck must get to Paris safely and intact,” he said.
Eric leaned close to hear him over the sound of the large ventilation fans. “You will leave today. The cooks have prepared enough food for several days and will store it in a trunk. There are also blankets and other bedding. We will put up the canvas top, giving you a place to sleep if you need to avoid the American fighter planes by parking in a forest during the day. As an officer you will have a Luger as a sidearm. The armorer will be here soon to issue the pistol as well as a carbine with 200 rounds.”
“But,” Eric interjected hesitantly. “But what about the cargo?”
The major smiled. “The cargo is safe.” He patted the wooden sides of the truck’s bed. “The entire cargo is under the new bed they are painting now. There will be one more box, under the seat in the cab.”
He led Eric out of the carpenters’ hearing.
“Eric, you have been chosen for one of the most important missions in Germany. We soldiers work hard to do our duty, but seldom does our work result in the salvation of the nation. Yours, on the other hand, just might.
“The Governor-General gave me this duty because he knows I believe strongly in it. I have tried to give you the best information possible, but there is one more thing I need to tell you.”
“And what is that?”
“You will not be alone on this trip. You will have another lieutenant to assist you. He is older than you and also a native of Memmingen. I had intended that he would make the trip with an enlisted driver but your uncle wanted someone more trustworthy. We discussed it and he suggested your name, then sent me to find you. I think he was right, although it certainly wasn’t easy.” He smiled slightly.
“Who is the other man,” Eric asked.
“I know this will sound unusual, but he is a priest. The Governor-General brought him here and they are very close. Your uncle is becoming more and more religious. He and Father Otto pray together several times a week.”
“A priest? In the SS? I knew there were a few in the Wehrmacht, but not the SS.”
“Father Otto is here now so your uncle can protect him. But he has been away from his flock for four years, so he will return with you. It will be your decision, but your uncle and I will approve if he remains in Memmingen and you go on alone.”
“Jesus! My uncle, a senior Nazi, with his own private priest. I thought only the old French Nazis were still interested in God.”
The carpenters had left and removed the canvas privacy walls, giving Eric his first chance to look closely at the truck. It was at least six years old and battered. Only the bed had been painted. The rest of it looked like it was just back from the front.
As he ran his hand over the hood he heard a footstep behind him and turned to find a Wehrmacht mechanic in grease-stained overalls. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, wearing regulation eyeglasses with thick lenses that caused his blue eyes to appear out of focus behind them. His blond hair was cut short.
“I’m Schmidt, sir. This is a good truck. She’s a Citroën 23R, the best we could do right now. She was built in France in 1939 but hasn’t had a lot of hard duty, not as far as we can tell. She’ll give you an honest 45 miles an hour on a good road, less if you have to move cross-country. We put on a new set of tires and gave you two new spares as well, and you’ll have enough fuel to fill up twice, although I’m sure you can get gas from any army post if you need it.
“You should blend in wherever you go. There are thousands of these still in service. One of the officers told me 14,000 were built and we only took 6,000 for army use.”
Schmidt walked him around the truck, pointing out the twin gas tanks behind the cab, the windshield that swung out from the bottom to let air flow through the cab, and the blackout headlights. In the bed he showed Eric the tool kit he had assembled personally, the two spare tires bolted to the left side, and the spare battery in a wooden box with the jack, next to the tires.
“It’s a lot of stuff,” Eric told him. “Still, there will be room for us to sleep.”
“Yes, there should be. You and Father Otto should find it cozy back there.” For an instant Eric thought he was going to add something but the moment passed.
“Let’s go over the controls. Do you know the truck?”
“Not this one, but I drove another Citroën when I was in the Milice, in Toulouse.”
Schmidt showed him the gearshift pattern and cautioned him against using reverse any more than necessary. “I think the gear is wearing, and we don’t have a replacement for it here.”
Eric felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Major Steinhauer and a dumpy man wearing a baggy uniform. Looks like he slept in it, Eric thought.
“May I present Father Otto? Father, this is Lieutenant Eric Kraft, with whom you’ll spend the next few days.”
Eric put out his hand. The priest moved a small brown canvas bag to his left hand and shook Eric’s limply.
“I am so pleased to meet you. Of course I know your mother well and she told me about your life in Paris.”
Eric shot a quizzical look at the major. “Of course I had to tell him your real name so he would make the family connection,” the major said. “No one else knows.”
Eric calculated quickly. His mother had moved back to Memmingen only after his father’s death in 1940, so he could have known her only briefly.
“I can see you’re curious. I met Frau Frank during her visits to her family but I’ve not seen her since your father’s unfortunate death. She was a strong member of the parish.”
Eric spread the map on the hood of the truck.
“Father, we have 600 miles to cover, probably at an average speed of 20 miles an hour, and that’s if we’re lucky. On the way here from Paris the major and I watched our train being blown up by American planes well inside Germany, so there’s no telling what this trip will be like. I hope they’ll ignore a single small truck on its own, but they might not.
“In any case, we have 30 hours or so of driving ahead of us. It’s summer, nights are short, so we may be able to drive for only five or six hours when we get closer to the French border.”
He turned to the major and said, “We are ready to depart. May we leave now?”
“Of course. You’ll have an escort out of town, but when you get to the highway you’ll be on your own. Drive carefully. Much depends on you.”
Eric climbed into the driver’s seat. The priest heaved himself into the right side of the bench seat and crossed himself as a guard on a motorcycle signaled to follow him out of the garage, then led the way along the river to a military highway that led to the northwest, toward Dresden, almost three hundred miles away. For all but fifty miles they would be in rural Poland and thus reasonably safe from air attack, so they would drive through the night and find an Army post near Dresden to verify the one-armed navigator’s route suggestion.
They stopp
ed once, at the little town of Görlitz. Father Otto had driven the last hour and had found a sheltered spot by the bank of the river. They took blankets from the small trunk the carpenters had fastened to the bed.
“You sleep first, then we’ll change places,” Eric told the priest.
Two hours later he shook Otto’s shoulder and told him, “it’s eight o’clock. Let me sleep for a couple of hours and we can get back on the road.”
Eric awakened to a breakfast of sausage and dried eggs, which the priest had heated on a small alcohol stove, along with water for ersatz coffee.
Better than the stuff I get in Paris, Eric mused, and he was glad to have it. If the good father can cook some, this may seem like a short drive.
During the long night’s journey they had begun to exchange personal information. Eric learned that the priest had lived in Memmingen for twenty years and that St. Anselm’s was the first parish he had ever served. For five years he was the designated cook for the four priests, and to fill their larder he had made friends with many of the parishioners, who then contributed food for the priests’ table.
“One of my favorites was a farmer. He was very generous. Every year he slaughtered a hog for us, and one year he gave us half a cow. She was an old dairy cow, tough, but we’d never had so much beef.
“He was a widower with one son and four daughters. I will always remember the son, a beautiful boy who was twelve when I knew him, and a faithful altar boy. It was sad when he was killed at Stalingrad.”
Eric told of how his mother had been sent by her stepfather to school in Paris early in the twenties, primarily to clear the way for his own younger children in his new family. There she had met a dashing young captain of the French cavalry and married him over the objection of her stepfather but with the surreptitious support of her mother, who had always dreamed of living in Paris. The captain was so persuasive, Eric said, that he was born nine months after their first meeting at an Army dance.
As a boy Eric had lived two years in Berlin, where his father was a military attaché at the embassy.
“That’s what got me interested in Germany,” he told Father Otto after breakfast. “The Germans seemed so organized, so full of purpose. This was before the Führer and the economy was in shambles, but they seemed to know what they wanted. The French seemed weaker, less determined. Anyway, I suppose that’s why we’re all here today.”
Outside Dresden they found an army post where they learned there had been no bombing along their planned route for two weeks. “Before that the Americans bombed by daylight, and they had escorts. From Nuremberg south you will have to travel by night and hide during the day,” the intelligence officer told them.
He pointed at Schweinfurt on Eric’s map. “Here’s where the danger is greatest. The industrial plants around here and Regensburg have been bombed without end since last year. There is no way to predict when they will be back, but you’d better plan to stay completely off the roads during the daylight hours from there to Memmingen.”
Eric looked at Father Otto, then back at the intelligence officer. He said, “That’s only 180 miles. If the roads are good, we can get to Nuremberg today.”
The two-lane highway was clear of civilian traffic and most of the military traffic they saw was driving east to reinforce the troops fighting the Soviet army.
Military police patrols stopped them twice but both times Eric’s laissez-passer worked its magic. The policemen saluted and waved them on.
As sundown approached, Eric drove deep into a forest north of Nuremberg. Once they had to stop to move a tree blown over by a bomb that had missed its target by miles, then just as the forest plunged into darkness they found a sheltered place in a grove next to a brawling stream.
“That’s all for today,” he said as he turned off the engine. “We stay here tonight and tomorrow. If the roads aren’t too cratered or the traffic too bad we should be at my mother’s for breakfast the next morning. Otherwise we’ll have to find another campsite.”
Eric was confident they would reach Memmingen without having to stop again for fuel or food. Once there, his mother would do her best to feed him better on the final run to Paris. It was less than five hundred miles and he planned to do it alone, leaving Father Otto behind.
The priest put together another meal of sausage and potatoes with a few reconstituted eggs on the side, and he brought out a loaf of rough, dark bread.
“Otto, does the Governor-General eat like this?” Father Otto had asked him earlier in the day to drop the priestly title, both for their safety and because he recognized Eric was never likely to be one of his parishioners. For the same reason, he’d suggested they use the familiar “du” in conversation. One military policeman had given them a suspicious look when he’d overheard the formal address, which was not expected among soldiers of equal rank.
“It sounds strange to them and no policeman likes to hear strange things. It makes them nervous,” Otto had told him, and Eric had to concede he was probably correct.
Otto thought the food in Hans Frank’s mess at Wawel Castle was better, and lamented that living conditions would be worse yet when he was fully back in the civilian world.
Eric had a different view. “Say what you like about this, but it’s no worse than what I had in Paris. Before the war, eating in Paris was heaven, but since the invasion the Wehrmacht has stripped France of almost everything of value. However this comes out, it will be a long time before Germany and France are friends again. If they ever have been.”
“Is there any doubt in your mind how this will end?”
Eric changed the subject. Even a theoretical discussion of the war ending in Allied victory was enough to bring accusations of defeatism, which for a soldier would lead either to a quick posting in the east or summary execution. Even priests weren’t to be trusted. Some of those who’d remained in Paris were ostentatious Nazis who loved to preach that the occupation was God’s punishment for the high living and loose morals since the Great War. The ones he’d met in Vichy were worse, since their leaders came from the old Catholic establishment of rural France.
“Did you say my mother was a strong member of your parish?”
“I may have overstated it a bit. I was transferred from St. Anselm’s to St. Boniface in early 1940 and that’s where I met her. She took part but I don’t think her heart was in it. But I’ll always be grateful to her for suggesting me to her brother.”
Eric sat up straight. “She recommended you?”
“It was kind of her. I’d had some problems at St. Anselm’s and the pastor sent me away. She thought I would be happier in an army post. She wrote, and a few weeks later I had a uniform and orders to travel to Poland.”
“Why are you leaving?”
“It’s been long enough, and there’s an opening at Saint Anne, a small parish made up mostly of old people. I will be a good pastor to them.”
Eric had not intended to ask, but curiosity got the better of him. “Your problems at St. Anselm’s. Were they …?”
“I sinned miserably,” Otto said. In the dim light Eric saw him put his head in his hands. “I was weak. There was a lovely boy, son of the farmer who had been so good to us…”
“The one killed at Stalingrad?”
“Yes. And he was not the only one.” Otto wept quietly. “I’m certain God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself.”
“This departure from Cracow. Is there anything like that behind it?” Otto crossed himself and murmured, “so many beautiful young men.”
Eric broke the uncomfortable silence. “All that is between you and your conscience, if you have one. We’ll only be together another day and then we can forget that this conversation ever happened.”
“Please,” Otto said, sniffling.
Eric got up and started to take a walk but realized he could get irretrievably lost in the dark woods if he wandered too far from the truck. He and Otto had listened carefully for almost an hour before their dinner and had hea
rd nothing, not even a large animal.
“The bombing has probably run off all the wildlife,” Otto had said
“We don’t want to meet a wild boar or a German unit, and we definitely don’t want to surprise anyone. Anyone camping here is likely to be trigger happy.” He adjusted the luger so it rode more comfortably on his belt.
They agreed to keep watch in two-hour shifts. Eric slept first because he had done most of the driving. Otto’s driving experience was long behind him and he had caused the truck’s old gearbox to grind menacingly one too many times for Eric’s comfort. He’d agreed without objection that Eric would do all the driving except where the road was straight and level, and Otto would handle the cooking and cleanup.
Midway through Eric’s second sleep shift the truck moved. He thought Otto had climbed into the cab to be more comfortable, turned over, and forgot about it. But soon it rocked and awakened him again, and he heard the harsh sound of wood breaking. As quietly as he could, he took the luger in hand and crept out of the truck bed, trying to stay on its centerline so it wouldn’t move under his shifting weight.
Shoeless, he crept to the passenger door. A dim light shone through the window, so he moved away, out of its range.
He needn’t have worried about being seen. Otto had removed the bench seat and pushed it out onto the hood through the open windshield and was completely absorbed in attacking the crate of gold bars. The breaking sounds Eric had heard were the nailed wooden crate being pried open. Otto held the gray top in both hands as he looked closely at the black lettering. “Deutsche Reichsbank” identified it as the property of the German central bank.
Just as he reached the door, intending to pull it open and confront Otto, he saw the priest knock on the back window of the cab.
“Eric! Eric! Get up quickly. Come see what we have!”
