by Leo Kessler
OTTO'S PHONEY WAR
By Leo Kessler
OTTO STAHL – BOOK 1
This Edition Edited and Published by Benchmark Publishing
Bootham, York, England
www.benjaminlindley.co.uk
First Published Worldwide in 2015
Copyright © Charles Whiting 1981, 2015
www.charleswhiting.co.uk
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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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‘My experience is that the gentlemen who are the best behaved and the most sleek are those who are doing the mischief. We cannot be too sure of anybody.’
Field Marshal Ironsides, 1940
‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning.’
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I first heard of the remarkable Otto Stahl, the first section of whose racy memoirs appear in these pages, three years ago now. It was at the International Book Fair held annually in Frankfurt, West Germany, where British and American publishers, who see each other virtually every week in London and New York, pay expensive air fares and an exorbitant hotel fee; all in order to greet one another like long-lost friends in those booming Germanic display halls, heady with the smell of duty-free whisky – and money.
My London publisher, one of the Eton-Oxford sort, which will explain a lot to those who know the type, had long promised me an expensive lunch at the Fair.
I should have been wiser.
We ended up eating our overcooked bratwurst and dry roll outside on a wooden bench next to the mobile snack-bar. ‘Dining al fresco,’ he called it charmingly. It was snowing lightly at the time. But then all rich publishers are like that, especially the Eton-Oxford sort. They always maintain it’s the ‘fault of the Accounts Department’. One thing, apart from a streaming head-cold, did come of the ‘lunch’ however. My publisher told me of his first encounter with Otto.
Apparently he had met the redoubtable Otto (he had long forgotten his last name) when he had been a small boy in Vienna in the early fifties, before the Four Power Control Commission had left Austria. Otto seemingly had been down on his luck at that time and was working for my publisher’s father as a chauffeur.
With what I know now, I suspect Otto was probably only using the job with an important British official as a cover for his extensive black market activities at that time.
At all events Otto had intrigued the English boy with the tales of his wartime exploits, unheroic and infamous as they were. Now years later, my English publisher had forgotten most of them, save one.
In 1943 when Otto had been on the run from the SS, he had ‘taken a dive’ and become the driver to the Inspector General, Infantry, of the German Army. The general had driven from Vienna (Later I was to discover that Otto had had a predilection for ‘taking a dive’ in the Austrian capital) to Southern Russia to inspect his brave ‘stubble-hoppers’.
There Otto with his sharp nose for impending danger had soon seen that a tremendous debacle loomed ahead. Thus, one day when the general had commanded, ‘Driver, take the car home,’ meaning that Otto should drive it from the frontline back to the general’s rear HQ, a couple of kilometres away, Stahl had interpreted the order literally. The General resided in Vienna; therefore that was home. He turned the big grey Horch around and drove straight back to Vienna, some twelve hundred kilometres to the rear, stopping only for fuel.
That autumn the Inspector General and some half a million of his ‘brave stubble-hoppers’ went into the bag; but not Otto.
He was safe in Vienna, enjoying the ample charms of the general’s housemaid, and occasionally the Inspector General’s youngish wife, who had no sense of class distinction.
The episode intrigued me, and during the years that followed that 'expensive lunch' at the Fair I kept hearing similarly fascinating little stories both about ‘Otto X’s’ wartime career and his post-war exploits. But still he remained a shadowy figure. My English publisher remembered him as very tall. But then all adults seem tall to small boys.
A cockney informant recalls him as shrunken and bowed in a trench-coat and felt hat, pulled down well over his face, when they had first met outside King’s Cross Station to begin talks about financing a robbery. An ancient SD man – the SD was the intelligence arm of the SS – remembered him as ‘a typical SS officer, medium-sized and an arrogant swine, like they all were those days. Holy strawsack, he used to look at me through that monocle of his, as if I’d just crawled out of the woodwork!’
The thought of Otto wearing a monocle had shaken me a little, but still the SD man did add one little bit of description which tallied with that of the others. ‘You couldn’t forget his eyes though … they were bright-blue and very intelligent. By looking at them, you could tell the arrogant swine had never lost a trick in his whole damned life!’
So it was that I wasn’t altogether surprised when he spoke to me (apparently by accident in that remote Spanish coastal resort last winter). Instinctively, I knew that the elderly German who seemed to know my name – and my profession – could only be the redoubtable Otto Stahl. Those sparkling, intelligent, winning blue eyes were a dead giveaway. Nor was I surprised too when he volunteered to tell me his ‘story’, as he called it with that disarming crooked smile of his.
Of course, there were ‘certain conditions’ to be met, and he reeled them off fluently like a salesman trying to sell you life-assurance. He had them all worked out, as if he had been thinking about the matter for a long, long time. His ‘story’ would be ‘sensational’ … ‘bawdy’ … ‘zany’ … ‘all knickers and knobs’ … He sounded like a cheap publisher’s publicity blurb.
At first I wasn’t convinced. One could say intercourse had taken place, but without conception. Yet there was no denying Otto’s crooked, slightly cynical charm; and the tales he told were really quite remarkable. He seemed to have been everywhere, done and seen everything. ‘Otto once got the iron cross from Hitler for deflowering a Dutch countess during the Battle for Holland!' he would announce in that oblique manner of his with a little grin. Or: ‘Did you know that old Father Christmas, Admiral Canaris, head of the wartime German Secret Service to you, Leo, cooked and served me my dinner – in a chef’s tall hat – the first time I ever met him?’ he would say while I stared at him in open-mouthed disbelief.
Later when I was ‘sold’ and started to check his seemingly impossible tales, I found out that most of them were true. Hitler had awarded him the iron cross – and the knight’s cross too! What Otto omitted to mention was that both of them were speedily taken away from him again when the authorities, to their consternation, found out exactly how he had won them. Admiral Canaris, the little spy-master with his two dachshunds and gay North African body-servant, had been wont to cook his subordinates’ dinners, complete with chef’s high cap and apron. And so on …
There in that remote winter resort within the confines of ‘Rocki’s Place’ where Otto drank his breakfast champagne – ‘the strain of creation’, he would plead as an excuse for the
mid-morning tippling – it began to be clear to me that Otto had seen a side of the history of World War Two reserved normally to chambermaids, mistresses and discreet doctors of medicine, people not given usually to writing their memoirs. He had seen the great, with their knickers down, and recognised them for what they were. ‘The bad jokes of Fortune: village pierrots yesterday, arbiters of life and death today, tomorrow’s keepers of public latrines,’ as Juvenal has it.
Otto began to grow upon me. He had been – and undoubtedly still was – a rogue, but a charming one. As he was wont to say himself to explain away his behaviour in that war of so long ago: ‘In the Bible, Leo, it says that there was both a good thief and a bad thief on Calvary and the good thief went rapidly to heaven.’ I doubt if Otto has ever read the Holy Script in all his life, but I don’t doubt for one instant that when his time comes he will follow the Good Thief in the upwards direction …
Leo Kessler, Denia-las-Rotas Spain.
Spring, 1980.
BOOK 1: OTTO GOES OUT INTO THE WORLD
‘Often most valuable clues can be picked up by spies who get beneath windows and peer in at the comers at critical times.’
William Le Queux
CHAPTER 1
‘Morgen Leute!’ Oberstabsarzt Kieler croaked.
‘Morning Senior Staff Doctor!’ three hundred hoarse young voices bellowed back, their breath rising in a grey fog about their faces in the icy examination room.
Senior Staff Doctor Kieler hobbled forward a little, the sabre which he affected under his white medical smock slapping against his highly polished riding boots. Behind the ancient white-haired doctor, his juniors advanced apprehensively, as if they expected him to collapse at any moment. Kieler halted again and adjusted his pince-nez to stare hard with rheumy eyes at the young men, all of them stark naked, with their medical examination sheet held rigidly in front of their genitals as army regulations prescribed.
‘Today,’ he commenced, using the same speech he had been giving since the beginning of the summer when it had become pretty clear that the Führer intended to go to war over Poland, ‘you are to be given the great honour of becoming a soldier. Not any old kind of a soldier, but a member of the Greater German Army.’
Just as the Senior Staff Surgeon paused to take breath, a tiny wine became audible – the sound of someone trying their hardest to hold a lot of air inside them. But before the recruits could turn around to stare, it cascaded down into a dirty, flatulent explosion. Someone in the back row of the naked young men had farted.
Kieler’s wrinkled face flushed angrily. ‘If I catch the man who made that disgusting noise, I’ll sew his arse up so that from now onwards he’ll be shitting out of his ears!’
The ribald threat had its effect. Now the recruits listened to the senior staff doctor’s set speech in complete silence, not even daring to shiver in that terrible cold.
‘All of you are perfectly fit,’ Kieler announced. ‘There is absolutely no need to examine you for military service. But regulations demand that we must do so, and so it will be done.’ He raised the index finger of his grey-gloved hand in warning. ‘However, there will be some among you, rogues and folk-parasites, who will maintain that they are unfit. They will state they are blind in one eye, are deaf, have weak hearts, rotten stomachs and all the rest of those idle excuses such low individuals always have prepared.’ Kieler’s voice rose. ‘It will be of no use. Even malingerers of that kind will be given the honour of joining the Wehrmacht and laying down their miserable lives on the holy field of battle for our beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler. I am, therefore, warning such carrion here and now that the eagle eye of Oberstabsarzt Kieler will be upon them. And nothing has ever escaped that terrible optic in fifty years of service to the Fatherland!’
Behind him one of the juniors sighed; the Old Man was as blind as a bat. The Medical Corps hadn’t been able to trust him with a scalpel these twenty years or more.
‘Gut!’ Kieler barked and turned his back on the naked young men, ‘Let the mustering commence!’
The juniors carried out their tasks with bored efficiency. Little rubber hammers tested reflexes. Quick search of pubic, armpit and head hair for lice. A swift touch of the stethoscope. A gloved finger in the anus for piles. A cough to check for rupture. A disdainful holding up of the penis at the end of a pencil. Stamp after rubber-stamp slammed down on the recruit’s paper as he progressed in red-faced confusion from doctor to doctor, unwittingly passing from his comfortable, civilian existence into that terrible field-grey machine that might one day soon ask him to put up his head and have it shot at. And all the while the ancient senior staff officer creaked rustily around the big hall, trailing his over-large sabre behind him on the floor, haughtily dismissing desperate hollow-chested consumptives, half-blind men who blundered from table to table with difficulty, half-wits from whose slack lips saliva ran down weak, unshaven chins; malingerers all, who would soon be experiencing the Army's rigorous regime of ‘good food, exercise and fresh air.’
It was just after a young blond man had fallen to the floor in what appeared to the juniors to be an epileptic fit, though Oberstabsarzt Kieler diagnosed the man’s condition to be the ‘result of over-excitement at the glorious prospect of being allowed to join the Greater German Army’, that a polite voice at his elbow enquired, ‘Stahl, Otto, respectfully requesting permission to speak to the Senior Staff Doctor on a private matter, sir!’
Kieler took his eyes off the naked man writhing back and forth on the floor, his body glazed with sweat, chunks of half-digested food vomiting from his gaping mouth, and creaked round slowly. A handsome young man stood there rigidly at attention, long Germanic face glowing with perfect health, body firm and muscular, obviously that of a trained athlete.
But it was the young man’s eyes that caught Kieler’s attention, even through the haze of macular degeneration: they were bright-blue, gleaming with intelligence, and somehow winning, as if their owner had never suffered a single defeat in all his life. Kieler told himself that they were the eyes of a happy man.
‘Yes, Stahl,’ he said, his ancient face wrinkling into a smile of pleasure at what he saw. ‘Nomen est omen, eh, steel in body and Steel in name.’
‘I only wish it were so, sir,’ the young naked man replied. ‘It has always been my greatest dream to be able to serve our Führer as an ordinary field-grey.’ He sighed. ‘Alas, sir, I don’t think that will be possible. That is why I would like to speak with you privately, sir.’
Kieler’s smile vanished. ‘What do you mean, Stahl? You look to me in perfect condition, healthy as a young bull. I don’t doubt one bit that you’ve been able to find enough young women to service with that monstrous thing hanging between your legs.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, sir,’ Stahl replied, a sad look on his handsome face now. ‘In my time I am sure I have helped to produce some of those children Germany will need in the future. It’s not that at all. It’s my arm, you see.’
‘Your arm – what’s wrong with it?’ He indicated Stahl’s left arm with his sabre. ‘Raise it!’
Obediently Stahl did so, the muscles rippling the length of the brawny limb, to reveal a tuft of thick black hair under the armpit.
Kieler adjusted his pince-nez and stared at the arm short-sightedly. ‘All right,’ he announced finally. ‘Nothing there.’
‘Yes, sir, I know. But it’s not that arm which is giving me trouble, sir. It’s the right arm – my firing arm.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s the green and blue swelling underneath it,’ Stahl said softly and any observer more acute than the senile senior staff doctor would have noticed that at that particular moment an element of tension had crept into Stahl’s voice and those winning eyes of his had suddenly grown wary and a little anxious.
‘Green and blue swelling?’ Kieler echoed puzzled. ‘That’s rather strange in that particular spot. Let me have a look at it, Stahl. Don’t worry, my boy,’ he forced a smile. ‘Wh
atever it is, we’ll soon have the problem solved. Never fear, my boy.’
Slowly, gingerly almost, as if he were experiencing great pain doing so, Otto Stahl raised his arm, his eyes fixed almost hypnotically on Kieler’s face, until finally the arm was stretched straight in the air and the doctor could see the large object taped by red sticking-plaster to the inside of the biceps.
‘Why,’ he stuttered, peering through his glasses at the object. ‘It seems to be … a bundle of notes, Stahl!’
Stahl flashed a quick look to left and right. None of the other doctors were looking in their direction. ‘To be exact, sir, its two thousand Reichsmark in hundred mark bills.’
‘But I don’t … understand, Stahl.’
‘Easy, sir.’ Now the eyes were warm and winning once more. ‘Due to certain other pressing engagements elsewhere, sir, I would like to be excused from military service.’
‘Excused?’ Kieler stuttered. ‘But you’re perfectly fit. How can one excuse you?’
‘It’s the swelling under my arm, sir … It could be yours – to lance if you could see your way to arrange this matter for me.’
‘A bribe! Are you trying to bribe me, Stahl?’ Kieler exploded.
‘Easy, sir,’ Stahl said soothingly. ‘We shouldn’t put it as crudely as that, sir. I mean I know you have certain extra expenditures for that little house in Berlin-Wedding, and I thought, perhaps those two thousand marks might help out with Fraulein Krause’s … domestic expenses.’
‘Fraulein Krause,’ the ancient military doctor breathed incredulously. ‘You know Fraulein Krause?’
‘And how!’ Stahl said to himself, but aloud he said as polite and discreet as ever ‘Yessir, I did have occasion to meet your – err – little friend … ’
