Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  “Sir, stop!” said Sanger, standing up. “You can’t shoot them without a trial.”

  Rommel turned to look at him. He was enraged, livid. He spoke slowly, his rage growing with each word. “A trial? Did they give these children a trial? Animals like this don’t deserve a trial.”

  “You’re right, sir,” said Sanger, moving in between Rommel and the guards. “They don’t deserve a trial. But these children do.”

  “Get out of my way, Colonel, before I shoot you,” growled Rommel, and pointed his pistol at Sanger’s face. “Now.”

  Sanger didn’t budge. Looking the Desert Fox directly in the eye, he stammered out his argument. “This has to be part of the record. What they did here. What we see. It’s got to be documented. They don’t deserve a trial, but the world has to know the truth about this. This has to be done by the book. Not for their sake, but for everyone else.” Sanger had never been this close to death and his body was shaking.

  The pistol was inches from his face and the expression on Rommel’s face made him think of flames. They stood together for a long time, and then Rommel lowered his gun. His eyes never left Sanger’s face as he said, “Take them away and put them in a cage somewhere. We’ll give them a fair trial and then we’ll kill them by the book. Does that meet with your approval, Herr Oberst?” The last was a sarcastic snarl.

  “Yes, sir,” Sanger replied, standing at rigid attention. His lips were thin and white. As Rommel’s knifelike gaze pinned him to the spot, the soldiers pulled the SS guards to their feet and prepared to hustle them out the door.

  “Stop!” Rommel ordered. “The guards—they have warm clothes. Strip them. Give the clothes to the children. All of you. Give them your coats. Now.”

  Sanger took off his coat at once and started a pile. It was cold in the barracks, even with his uniform jacket on. He took that off, too. A pile of coats grew as other soldiers contributed their own. The Totenkopf guards were stripped to their underwear before being roughly hauled away.

  “Food. Food and blankets. Bring them to me,” Rommel ordered as the soldiers left. When only Sanger was left, Rommel said in a low and harsh voice, “If you ever interfere with me again, I’ll shoot you where you stand. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sanger stood his ground.

  “Then get out of my sight.”

  With that, the field marshal turned away, and took a slow, deep breath. Then he slowly took off his coat and then his uniform jacket. He knelt down on the floor and began unpinning the decorations. Holding each one in his open palm, he offered his medals to first one child, then another, until one took his gift. Then he took another medal, and repeated the process. The children looked at him, some with dulled, expressionless eyes, some with cringing fear, but with wordless coaxing, he distributed all his medals. Then he gave his coat to one child, a rail-thin girl with matted hair, and his jacket to another.

  Sanger stepped outside.

  He shuddered as the frigid air rushed into his lungs; he felt weak and drained. He had ruined his relationship with the Desert Fox over the fate of two men who clearly deserved to die and by the most horrible means available. He hadn’t felt like this since he was in his teens and resigned from his cousins’ Hitler Youth chapter in Augsburg. More friendships sacrificed on the altar of morality.

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one into his shaking hand. His gloved thumb couldn’t work the wheel on his Zippo, but when he took off his glove, he dropped his cigarettes into the snow. Gathering them back up, he tried again to light his cigarette, but this time the wind blew it out.

  A hand reached out with a flame in it. “Here, Colonel. Let me help you.”

  It was Captain Kranz, the battalion commander from Panzer Lehr that Rommel had drafted for this assignment.

  “Thanks,” said Sanger, taking a deep pull off his cigarette, enjoying the feel of the warm smoke entering his lungs. The frigid air was not nearly as terrible now that he was out of the barracks.

  “I was looking for the field marshal, and overheard you. Don’t worry. He’ll calm down and realize that you were right. People don’t stay on his shit list unless they really deserve it. Although, I must say shooting those scum on the spot does seem like a very good idea.”

  “Hell, I agree. I wanted to shoot the bastards myself,” said Sanger. He didn’t believe Kranz was right about Rommel’s shit list, but he was glad of the thought. He held out his cigarette pack to the captain. Kranz took a Lucky Strike and lit it. “Is the camp secure?”

  “As secure as we can make it under the circumstances. We need supplies and medical personnel more than anything. This is going to be the world’s nastiest cleanup job, I suspect.”

  “Until we find the rest of the camps,” Sanger replied.

  “You think there are more?”

  “Quite a few more. I’ve seen the photographs and heard some of the stories. This evidently isn’t even the worst.”

  “Scheisse. When it comes time to execute those Hurensohne, I want a piece of them myself,” Kranz growled.

  “You’ll have to stand in line,” replied Sanger.

  A figure in a thick coat was running toward them. “Where’s the field marshal? I’ve got to see him now!” It was Müller, the supply officer.

  “He’s inside,” said Sanger, “but I wouldn’t interrupt him right now. He’s found the barracks with the children.”

  “Children? Here? Oh, my god!” Müller gasped, stunned. Then he collected himself. “But I have to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve found Mutti.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here in the camp.”

  “Oh, my god,” Sanger echoed.

  19 FEBRUARY 1945

  UNITED STATES EMBASSY, MOSCOW, USSR, 0600 HOURS GMT

  It was still dark at nine o’clock in the morning Moscow time. Hartnell Stone looked out the ambassador’s window at the colorful lit onion domes of the Kremlin across Red Square.

  “Ready to visit the bear in his den again?” Averrell Harriman said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hartnell replied. He drank the remainder of his cup of coffee and put it down on the tray. “Why do you think he hasn’t replied to the president’s letter?”

  “You’ve got to understand one important difference between the United States and almost every other nation in the world—time. We’re the youngest major nation in the world. We’ve got less than five hundred years of total history, and only about three hundred years of serious history. We’ve been a nation less than two hundred years. In Europe, they call that ‘contemporary studies.’ You think that because we’ve been sitting around waiting for an answer for almost three weeks that we’ve been waiting forever. Stalin doesn’t have to play on our schedule, and so he doesn’t. Berlin isn’t an immediate issue, so why deal with it yet? So, we’ll go to round two and see what happens, but don’t be surprised if the answer is ‘nothing much.’ It won’t be the first time.”

  “Then why go?”

  “The Russians are the world’s greatest chess players, but the world’s greatest poker players are Americans. Stalin is going to lay out his plan, whatever it is, with subtle steps and a long time horizon. What we’re going to do is look at personality and psychology and see how we can read it and influence it, and that’s our strategy for winning. Either way, it’s time to make another move on the chessboard or bet another round in the poker game. Neither Stalin nor we are in a hurry. If one of us gets in a hurry, that one loses.”

  Stone looked at the senior diplomat. “But you still don’t know what cards you have in your hand.”

  Harriman smiled. “In this kind of poker, that’s not always the most important knowledge. Besides, you play what you have, not what you wish you had. By the way, here’s some diplomatic advice for you. Always take a leak before entering a long meeting. Your ability to negotiate is a function of the capacity of your bladder.” The ambassador picked up his briefcase.

  “Do you follow your own advic
e?” Stone asked.

  “Always,” Harriman replied.

  Stone felt his nose hairs freeze as he paced the ambassador across the square. The Soviet guards recognized Harriman, snapped to attention, and opened the courtyard gate. A military escort awaited them inside the building, took their coats, then marched ahead of them with precision, boot heels clicking on the polished floor. They followed the escort through a wide corridor and up a formal staircase, then along another corridor lined with statuary and portraiture that Stone wished he had time to admire properly.

  Midway down the corridor, another set of guards flanked large double doors made of dark wood. At the escort’s approach, they snapped to attention, and opened the doors. A receptionist stood, and welcomed the visitors in English. “The chairman is ready to see you now,” she said, and opened another door leading to Stalin’s official inner office.

  The office was immense, with a long carpet leading to an elevated platform where Stalin sat at a large desk. There was a conversation area with a sofa and several chairs around a blazing fireplace, a conference table, and several cupboards. The chairman stood as Harriman and Stone entered. “Good morning, good morning,” Stalin boomed in a cheerful voice. “Welcome! How are you? Please, sit down. Tea?” He gestured to his receptionist, who drew cups of tea for each of the three from an ornate silver samovar, flavoring each with a spoonful of strawberry jam. A translator stood behind Stalin’s chair.

  “Thank you, Chairman Stalin. How have you been?”

  “Oh, busy, always busy. The paperwork never stops, you know. As long as a tree stands anywhere in the world, someone will chop it down and pulp it so they can write a memorandum asking for more funding.” He laughed at his own joke. “In this respect, I think there is probably no difference between capitalism and communism, am I right?”

  Harriman laughed. “I am sure you are right. It is the bane of my existence as well.”

  “Oh, before I forget,” Stalin said. “I have a gift for President Roosevelt. A small thing, but it may amuse him.” He walked back to his desk and picked up a small envelope. “He collects postage stamps, and this is a ten-kopek stamp from 1858, the very first Russian postage stamp.”

  “Oh, really?” Harriman opened the envelope to look at the stamp. In the center it had the Romanov eagle in white surrounded by a blue oval, with a printed black drape and “10” in each corner. “Very nice. Thank you. I know the president will appreciate it very much.”

  “Good, good. I worry about him all the time, you know. Such a great man, and a dear friend. How is his health?”

  “I hear he’s in excellent health. His doctors want him to slow down a bit, but that’s all.”

  “Bah, doctors want everybody to slow down a little bit. And eat less and drink less and fornicate less and basically eliminate all joy from life. And for what? Sooner or later we all die, right? Right.”

  “That reminds me of a Mark Twain story you might like,” Harriman said.

  “Ah, Mark Twain. I like him. He would have made a good Russian, I think. Tell me the story.”

  “It seems that Mark Twain caught pneumonia. When the doctor visited, he saw Mark Twain smoking a cigar. He asked, ‘How many of those do you smoke each day?’ Twain said, ‘Oh, a dozen or so.’ And the doctor said, ‘I see a bottle of whiskey. How much do you drink?’ Twain said, ‘I’m a moderate drinker, only a bottle or so a day.’ The doctor said, ‘If you’ll temporarily give up drinking and smoking, you’ll recover quickly.’ Twain followed the doctor’s advice, and got well. Later, a woman he knew got pneumonia, and Twain told her that if she temporarily stopped drinking whiskey and smoking cigars, she’d get well. She said, ‘I don’t drink whiskey, and I don’t smoke cigars.’ And you know, she died. The moral is, you need a few vices to serve as ballast to throw overboard in case of emergency.”

  Stalin laughed. “She died!” He slapped his leg so hard he nearly spilled his tea cup. “Ah, your Mark Twain is so funny. She died! Hilarious! Well, if you will allow me vodka instead of whiskey, then I shall live a very long time indeed.” He continued to chuckle for a few minutes. “Well, my friend, how can I help you this fine day?”

  “We should talk about Germany and the end of the war. Last time we talked, I gave you a letter from President Roosevelt having to do with Berlin. We had expected a reply, and having received none, it is time to ask more directly.”

  “But all that was long since settled,” Stalin said with a shrug. “We talked in Teheran, and all was decided. Nothing has changed as far as I can see. The Nazis are finished, except for a few scurrying cockroaches that we’ll crush over the next couple of months. You gave me that letter from President Roosevelt about Berlin, and that’s why I asked you about his health. Surely, only ill health would explain how he could have forgotten the arrangements he had previously made with me.”

  “Refresh my memory, Chairman. Which arrangements were those?”

  “I’m shocked, Harriman. You know those as well as I do. I’m talking about postwar spheres of influence in Germany. Our plans to make sure that those criminal bastards don’t rise up again and give us a third world war to fight.”

  “Oh, those spheres of influence. But you had canceled those, as far as we were concerned.”

  Stalin looked innocently shocked. “Canceled them? I did no such thing.”

  “Your separate peace with Germany. After you warned us so stringently against even thinking about such an action, you turned around and did it to us.”

  Stalin threw up his hands. “Harriman, how can you say such a thing to me? We’ve been good friends for such a long time, I thought surely you and Roosevelt would understand perfectly how little that temporary armistice meant. It was nothing, really. It surely was nothing that would in any way abrogate the arrangements we had so carefully established at Casablanca and Teheran.”

  “I’m afraid that we regarded it as something far more serious.”

  “Oh, my dear Harriman, you’re sadly mistaken. Sadly mistaken! Frankly, our decision was based primarily on the practical reality that our supply situation was such that we could not continue to advance for several months until we were able to build up our stores again. Getting a peace out of the stupid Germans saved Soviet lives at no cost to the war effort, as we would be unable to act anyway.”

  “It freed them up to move against us in the west.”

  Stalin frowned. “And this means what? That you in the west now have suffered one one-hundredth part of what we have suffered from the Germans? You Americans have never sufficiently appreciated the extent to which it has been the Soviet Union who has suffered most in the war, the Soviet Union who has fought most in this war, the Soviet Union who has made it possible for your armies to move as rapidly and as successfully, the Soviet Union who has borne the burden. We took a well-deserved rest, we fooled the Germans into leaving us alone for a few months, we came back into the war effort and are moving forward on the original timetable, and with all of that you want to use this as an occasion to cheat us out of our rightful share of the spoils and our rightful role in ensuring that the German hydra does not have a chance to grow multiple heads and return to menace us again? Make no mistake—it is us they will menace again first, not you.”

  “You took Norway and Greece.”

  “So, you think we should be satisfied with whatever crumbs you want to dole out to us from the victory table? Who appointed you Tsar of all the Russias? We liberated two nations ahead of the Allied schedule, removed the Nazi yoke from their backs, and you want to act as if this is a bad thing? Don’t be ridiculous. Do you realize what kind of shape these nations are in? What kind of shape our nation is in? The burden of rebuilding, of reconstruction, is immense. It will be greater by far than the cost of fighting the war itself. Taking on additional nations is a liability more than an asset. But like you Americans, we Soviets have a responsibility to the world, and we will shoulder our burdens as you do.

  “But I must tell you, my good friend Averrell—we
will not take a backseat to you in your big fine country that has no bomb craters in it, that cannot count even a mere million dead, that has all its factories and power plants intact and running. No, my friend. This little pretend armistice means nothing. Forget it. It never happened. It changes nothing as far as agreements at Casablanca and at Teheran.

  “And as for Berlin?” Stalin leaned forward, his mouth smiling and wide beneath his mustache. “Berlin is the capital of Germany. Germany must never pose a threat again to the Soviet Union. No nation other than the Soviet Union can guarantee that essential fact. So, you must tell President Roosevelt that our agreement still stands.

  “Berlin—and all of the eastern part of Germany—will be ours.”

  LONDON, ENGLAND, 1938 HOURS GMT

  Tube alloys. It was rather pathetic, Kim Philby thought as he worked at the desk in his flat. This was what came of allowing amateurs in the serious business of intelligence tradecraft. Having evidently once read Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” these amateurs had missed the essential point—it was just as much an error to call too little attention to the letter as it was to call too much to it.

  The Directorate of Tube Alloys, part of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, simply had far too highly credentialed a team for a project with so pathetically minor a name. Sir John Anderson, lord president of the council, was involved, for goodness’ sake, and a senior executive of Imperial Chemical Industries served as the directorate’s managing director.

  If in fact the project had something to do with tube alloys, its management would have developed a more exciting name to enable it to compete for funding: the Directorate of Advanced Missile Survivability, for example, or possibly the Directorate of Impervious Armor. No, it was clear that something important was being concealed under “tube alloys,” and something that had gone on for a long time—since 1941, in fact. The longer such a program operated, the more likely that its result was not some chimera, but a real weapon, a real potential danger.