by Leo Kessler
He raised his voice. “What about Schwarz, Fick and the others?” Von Dodenburg shrugged. “I haven’t been able to raise them, sir. There’s so much metal and radio interference around here that they could be at the other side of that church and we wouldn’t know.”
“Yes, I see. Well, perhaps they’re dead.” He looked around the exhausted faces in the tram shed. “We’ll have to make do with this bunch, won’t we?”
“Do what, sir?”
“Take the Church,” the Vulture said calmly.
“But those anti-tank positions, sir! Without armour we can’t…”
“But we have the armour, my dear von Dodenburg,” the Vulture cut him short.
“Where, sir?”
Without taking his eyes off the Russian positions, the Vulture pointed his cane behind him. “The trams,” he said softly. “The trams.”
For the next two hours they worked like crazy men. Ignoring the solid shot which streaked through the tram shed at regular intervals, they stacked two of the one-deck Russian trams with whatever they could find in the way of protection – chunks of girder, a pile of fire buckets, mattresses from the tram crews’ dormitory. Then under the Vulture’s personal direction they collected their own and the Russian dead and propped the ghastly corpses in the seats.
While the SS men and the infantry of the 45th pushed up the third car to link it with the other two, the Vulture strode down its length smashing windows with the butt of a borrowed rifle. Finally he was satisfied that there would be no danger from splintered glass. “Any of you men know how to drive a tram?” he asked. There was a stony silence broken only by the sound of the heavy artillery, the ever-present background music of war.
“Well, come on! Holy arsehole, there must be somebody!”
Schulze raised his hand. “I’ll have a go, sir.”
“Good,” the Vulture beamed, then turned to the men of the 45th. “Now listen. My battalion will attack in the tram. I know you’re tired and you’ve been here longer than we have, but I’m relying on you to support us.” He pointed his cane at a tall corporal. “What’s your name?”
“Meier, sir.”
“All right, Corporal Meier, you’re in charge of the 45th chaps.”
“Sir!”
“Once we’re underway, I want you to take your men and cover our flanks. We’ll bear the brunt of the operation, but you’ve got to give us support, do you understand?”
“Sir!” Corporal Meier shouted, thrusting out his chest smartly.
“Stupid shit!” the Vulture said sotto voce to von Dodenburg, as they turned away. “That sort really is designed as cannon-fodder.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
The Vulture smiled. “Do you really think I’m going to sacrifice what’s left of the Wotan? When we start up that track, the Reds are going to fire at the leading cars. Once they discover their mistake – that they’re full of dead men – what will be their reaction?” He answered his own question. “They’ll turn their attention to the only live men they can see – the men of the 45th.”
“But sir,” von Dodenburg protested in horror, “it’ll be a massacre!”
“Naturally, my dear von Dodenburg,” the Vulture said. “What a naive young man you are.”
“All aboard, who’s coming aboard!” Schulze shouted with the light-headed humour of the exhausted. “No fare on this one, lads!” He rang the bell furiously. The Vulture took his place next to him in the driving compartment. “All right, Corporal Meier,” he shouted through the shattered window. “When the Russians start banging away at us, move out!”
“Sir!”
“We’re ready to move out, sir.”
“All right, von Dodenburg, off we trot!”
Schulze whirled the twin brass handles in opposite directions. The ancient tram cars groaned in rusty dismay and shuddered. Up front the dead bodies planted in the wooden seats trembled. One fell forward with a clatter of equipment. And then the cars began to move out of the shed.
“We’re trotting now, sir,” Schulze announced unnecessarily. At the rear, Metzger took a last swig at his vodka bottle and flung it out of the window. The sound of breaking glass was drowned by the crash of the Soviet artillery.
“All right, move out men,” Meier ordered. Dutifully like the cannon-fodder they were to be, they rose from their holes and began to spread out on both sides of the battle-littered road. The attack had started. The victims were ready for the slaughter.
Tangles of telephone wire hung down both sides of the street. On both sides the shattered houses were burning again. A roof collapsed, sending burning beams and broken tiles clattering down. Swaying to and fro between the houses, which looked like blazing scenery on a stage, they rattled forward. A shell hit the front of the lead tram. It rocked like a ship at sea. Von Dodenburg grabbed a support just in time as Schulze’s hands tightened round the brass handles. The car filled with choking dust. On both sides the houses swayed like loose backdrops, but the strange convoy of vehicles kept on going.
Again the Russian guns fired. Another anti-tank shell rammed into the lead tram. A shower of sparks shot into the air. There was the smell of burning flesh. Instinctively Schulze took his hands off the brass handles. “Keep your claws on the tillers!” the Vulture snapped, and brought his cane down with a vicious whack to emphasise his order. “Keep going!”
With the flames in front mounting steadily and blinding them, the strange convoy of death clattered ever closer to the Russian positions.
Suddenly the Russians spotted the cannon-fodder from the 45th. A machine gun began to chatter. The frontline of the infantrymen fell. But Corporal Meier pressed on, the men racing to their death, getting fewer by the second, as the Russians directed a murderous fire at them. Nothing seemed able to stop him. Seventy, fifty, forty metres. He was almost in between the bunkers now, his machine pistol held tucked into his side, as he zig-zagged through the rubble like a professional football player heading for the goal to the triumphant yells of his supporters. Then he stopped and looked behind him. He was alone. As they rattled closer to him, under the cover of the fiercely burning first car, with its cargo of smouldering dead men, they could see the look of utter astonishment on his stupid face. “For Christ’s sake run, man!” Schulze cried, though he knew Meier could not hear him.
But Meier did not run. Slowly, almost ponderously, his every movement reflecting his shocked bewilderment at the sudden absence of his men, he lowered his Schmeisser, and waited: a lone soldier in the middle of a battlefield, waiting for death, as if that fate had been ordained for him a long time ago. He did not wait long. The armour-piercing shell caught him squarely in the guts. They could see the great hole it punched in his stomach as he fell to the ground.
“Remember his name, von Dodenburg,” the Vulture said. “He’ll get his piece of tin for…”
With a tremendous crash the convoy smashed into something. They were flung off their feet. The burning dead were scattered on the ground. Hand grenades exploded everywhere. The cries and yells of the wounded and dying rose in a nightmarish cacophony, screaming for help in German and Russian and half a dozen other Soviet languages. But no help came. The SS troopers fought their way into the bunkers with spades, fists, claws. Von Dodenburg sprang over the body of a young blond trooper, his broken back twisting him up in agony. A potato masher sailed over his shoulder and exploded in a group of Russians further up the bunker. They disappeared in a ball of yellow flame.
And so it went on all that afternoon. They were driven out of the second bunker three times. Wherever one looked there was the glassy stare of a corpse, the severed arm or leg, the thick sticky trail of red, where some desperately wounded man had tried to drag himself to safety. But the Vulture would not give up. His hat gone, his uniform blackened with powder burns, his sweat face streaked with blood, he rallied them time and again with his cry of “Wotan to the attack! Follow me!” And they followed him, utterly exhausted, but still eager for some last desperate gl
ory before a bullet brought the blessed relief of oblivion or death.
By evening they were down to ten men unwounded. Still the Russians were holding out in the bullet-pocked bunker, their fire weak, but effective enough. The Vulture looked down at them as they sprawled among the smoking ruins. Absolutely exhausted, they lay there like the piles of corpses all around them. “Men.” He licked his lips. “Get to your feet.” As he swayed back and forth, he seemed to find it difficult to formulate the next sentence. His brow wrinkled in a frown. It was very simple. All he wanted them to do was to get to their feet, that was it, to get to their feet. “And what then?” he asked himself aloud.
“Major Geier!” a voice yelled. “Major Geier, it’s us!”
“Schwarz!” he gasped.
“Major Geier,” Schwarz said, “we’ve been fighting our way to you for the last...”
He did not hear the rest of the words. Staggering like a drunk, he raised his broken cane and pointed towards the bunker with great deliberateness. “SS Assault Battalion – Wotan – to the attack. Alles für Deutschland.”1
Note
1. Everything for Germany – the battlecry of the SS.
SECTION THREE:
THE DRIVE EAST
‘We shall be back. Believe me, von Dodenburg, the Russians haven’t seen the last of us yet. Wotan will return!”
Major Geier to Capt. von Dodenburg,
Christmas Day, 1941
ONE
“German soldiers!”
The tremendous voice reverberated across the dusty square. “Men of the SS!”
The Führer, flanked by his staff and the senior officers of the Bodyguard, stared down at the Division from the dais hastily improvised in the battle-scarred Russian square. “You have fought well. No other soldiers in the world could have done what you have done in these last few great days. You, the élite of my Bodyguard, have not failed me in spite of your grievous losses.” The Leader’s voice faltered a moment and von Dodenburg knew that his emotion was genuine; Adolf Hitler was not concerned with personal advancement, the outward trappings of glory. His sense of loss was heartfelt.
“To each and every one of you who wears the precious armband which bears my name, I pay my humble respects for devotion – your sacrifice, your idealism and your belief in the National Socialist cause. We have had a tremendous victory on the Bug. Three-quarters of a million Soviets are at present marching into our prisoner-of-war cages. Another half a million Bolsheviks dead. An enormous amount of booty has been taken. In short, the so-called Soviet giant is reeling. All that is needed are those last couple of blows which will floor him for good.” The great voice echoed from the loud speakers in the trees, stripped bare by the shellfire of the previous days.
The Führer brought up his hands dramatically, as if Stalin himself were there and he was about to strangle him. Then he let his left hand drop and stabbed his right hand into the air at an angle. “Now we must hit him in the stomach – cut off his food and oil in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Then when that is done and he is reeling, without food and drink–” The Führer brought down his hand in a vicious chop. “We must strike the monster’s head off so that he lies prostrate at our feet.”
With an impatient jerk of his head he threw back the black lock of hair which threatened to fall into his eyes and thrust up his jaw pugnaciously, his eyes fixed on the sky, as if he were challenging the Gods to dare prevent him from achieving his purpose. “I declare without any reservation,” he roared, “that the enemy in the East has been struck down and he will never rise again. Soldiers of the Bodyguard, we march on Moscow!” Sepp Dietrich, standing in the centre of the square, thrust up his arm and yelled in his thick Munich accent, “Sieg Heil!” On the dais the Prominenz – Keitel, Bormann, Himmler and the rest – stiffened to attention, hands raised in salute to their leader.
Below, ten thousand throats burst into a great roar: “Sieg Heil!” To the right of the dais, the band of the Bodyguard crashed into the Deutschlandlied.1
Von Dodenburg, staring up at the Führer, felt the sweat trickle down his body. He knew that this was a magic moment in history, an overwhelmingly great moment that he would tell his children about in years to come – if he survived – just as his own father had entranced him with his account of the first day of the war in 1914.
Sepp Dietrich marched stiffly to the centre of the square like the good Imperial Army NCO he had once been. He crashed his boots together in the position of attention and looked up at the Führer. “Permission to march off, my Führer!” he barked. Hitler looked down at the loyal face of the man who had fought at his side in the early days of the movement in Munich. “Permission to march off granted.”
Dietrich swung round and rapped out an order. It was followed by a flurry of orders. The band crashed into the Horst Wessel Lied. “Parade March!” Sepp Dietrich bellowed above it.
Ten thousand men moved forward as one. With their arms pressed rigidly to their sides, their eyes fixed unswervingly on some distant goal, ten thousand pairs of jackboots hit the ground while, up above, the Leader stared down at them, his hand raised in the Roman salute to his own élite.
“Eyes Right” the command came time and time again.
Like a perfect, well-oiled mechanical movement, their heads clicked round to look up at their Leader. Veterans and reinforcements from half a dozen countries, eager for the glory offered them by membership of this élite formation, they strode by in perfect unison. “Eyes right!” von Dodenburg yelled with hoarse enthusiasm. For a moment his eyes caught those of the Führer. How wise, how proud, how all-knowing he looked!
Just to his rear, Sergeant Schulze tore his eyes away from Archer’s.2 “Seen saner eyes than them in Elmshorn3,” he said to himself contemptuously and farted loudly as a sign of his disdain. But the music drowned the sound as it sped the young men to their appointment with death.
It was appalling country for tanks. Great pine forests that stretched for hundreds of kilometres, swamps even at the height of summer, terrible roads and bridges that could hardly bear the weight of one of the rickety Russian panje carts, let alone a 30-ton Mark IV. The maps they had been supplied with by Intelligence were all wrong too. A road marked deep red to indicate a motor highway turned out to be a sandy track and what appeared to be river crossings were really shallow fords. Still the tanks pressed on, thirty, forty, even fifty kilometres a day, with their soft skinned transport stretched out a hundred kilometres behind them, trying in vain to keep up; while the sweating infantry toiled after them in great clouds of dust.
But in spite of the terrible conditions they won victory after victory. Here and there the Russians stood and fought. When they did, the Bodyguard simply swept round them and sealed them off, leaving the follow-up infantry to finish them off.
By mid-September they were in the heart of Russia. Kiev fell and the Russians surrendered three-quarters of a million men. The news of the tremendous victory spread like wildfire through the advancing German troops. Even the Vulture seemed to be caught up in the wave of enthusiasm. Dispensing with his usual cynicism, he told his officers assembled in the shade of an old elm tree in the centre of the dusty square of some God-forsaken Russian village, “It can’t last much longer, gentlemen; first the Bug and then Kiev. They must break soon.”
“But we haven’t had a real crack at them since the Bug,” Schwarz protested. “Why I haven’t had a Russian tank in my sights for a week now, sir. Just a lot of down-at-heel Ivans whose only care is to save their own skins.”
The Vulture nodded. “I know, Schwarz. Up to now this campaign has been like a conducted tour. Five casualties this week. Five, I ask you gentlemen! How will that look back at headquarters? That Sergeant back there will say we’re rolling a pretty soft ball.”
The young officers nodded their heads in agreement. It did look rather as if the campaign in Russia was going to fizzle out ignominiously for SS Assault Battalion Wotan. That afternoon, disturbed only by the sound of artillery a lo
ng way off, von Dodenburg attempted to escape the sticky heat of the steppe in one of the miserable Russian isbas4, risking the lice with which they swarmed. Surprisingly enough it was occupied by an ancient peasant, squatting cross-legged on the earthen floor. “Hello, little Father?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
The peasant answered in German and von Dodenburg realised that Metzger probably hadn’t tuned him out of the hut because of his knowledge of the language. Perhaps Metzger had thought he would be able to use him as a translator in his dealings with the rest of the peasants whom they had locked in the communal farm headquarters at the other end of the village.
For a while he chatted with the old man. Like most of the peasants who had not fled to the forests, the old man felt that the Germans were not treating the Russians correctly; if they treated them properly, they would help in the fight against communism.
Von Dodenburg nodded and wiped the sweat from his brow. He had heard the same tale often enough in the past weeks. Perhaps the old man was trying to curry favour with the new masters. He did not know and he did not care. All he wanted at the moment was a cold bath and an iced drink. He pointed at the great green-tiled oven which ran the length of the isba. “You must have a lot of family to need an oven that size, Uncle,” he said.
The Russian grinned, his wise, old eyes almost disappearing into a sea of wrinkles. “Are you Germans going to spend the winter in Russia?” he asked.
“Of course.”
The old man tittered, revealing his toothless gums.
“What are you laughing at, you stupid turd?”
The Russian pointed a long dirty finger at him. “Then you’ll find out why I need that oven. You’ll find out, German.”
