by Leo Kessler
‘And that is, sir?’
‘That your men are trained killers, men who have no loyalty to anyone but their comrades and their regiment – the Wotan.’ He looked at von Dodenburg keenly. ‘There is only one gap in my information. To whom do you owe your loyalty?’
Schulze caught his breath and tightened his grip on the Schmeisser machine-pistol which hung from his neck. Ever since the July Plot he had appointed himself the CO’s unofficial bodyguard, a necessary precaution in a Germany lousy with informers and Gestapo spies. They could make a simple wet fart into a statement of disloyalty to the Führer, and that could mean being garrotted to death by chicken wire in some stinking Gestapo cellar. Would his handsome young CO put his foot in it with this monstrous-looking policeman?
‘To whom do I owe my loyalty?’ von Dodenburg echoed. ‘Why, I owe it to the men of Wotan in the first place and then to Germany.’
Donner’s thin mauve line of a mouth puckered into the semblance of a smile. ‘Good, von Dodenburg. This is exactly what I wanted to hear from you. Excellent. It is for that reason that I have volunteered for this command. This goddam Catholic Aachen is Charlemagne’s city — the heartland of Germany, not National Socialist Germany, but all Germany. If it falls to the Amis, the rest will not be long in following. For two reasons – the door to the Reich will be opened for good and the psychological effect will kill the man in the street’s will to resist. Aachen must remain German.’ He pointed the withered claw at von Dodenburg and the young officer felt the blond hairs rise at the nape of his neck. ‘And you and your Wotan will help me to ensure that it does. Now let us get down to business.’
As they grouped themselves around the big wall map and tried to forget the roar and thunder of the Ami barrage which was already pounding the town’s suburbs, the Police General briefed them on the situation.
‘Aachen stands directly in the path of the US First Army. At present its commander, the Ami Hodges, is grouping his three corps on the Reich’s frontier with Belgium and Holland, here and here.’ He placed the blackened claw on the map. ‘But it is more likely that he will try to break into the Aachen Gap with this corps here – the Seventh – commanded by an Ami named Collins. Lightning Joe, I believe they call him. With the kind of enemy the good General Collins will find opposing him in and around Aachen, it will not be too difficult to justify such a nickname.’
He drew breath and they could hear the air wheeze through his ravaged lungs. ‘In essence, I have one good division to defend Aachen – von Schwerin’s 116th Panzer out in the forest area to the east. You may ask what an armoured division is doing out in the woods. The answer is simple. Von Schwerin has exactly ten tanks left from the debacle in France, but his men are well trained and skilled. That is more than can be said for my force in the west. There I’ve got three stomach battalions, one ear-and-nose and four fortress battalions.6 Cannon-fodder, in other words. But they’ll hold out well enough as long as they’ve got a metre of ferro-concrete bunker in front of them, and,’ he smiled, ‘a company of chain-dogs 7 behind them ready to string them up at the nearest tree in case they lose their patriotic fervour’.
He took his eyes off the map and turned to the three SS men.
‘Now, von Dodenburg, I want to keep your Battle Group as a mobile reserve, at least till your panzer grenadiers arrive. You will bolster up any section of the Aachen front which comes under undue pressure. Once the Amis launch their full-scale attack, the front will begin to spring leaks everywhere, believe me. But we will have to worry about that eventuality when it occurs. For the time being, I want you to take up positions in the city and carry out certain special tasks I have in mind for you.’
‘And they are, sir?’
Donner did not answer for a moment. Instead he reached up with his forefinger and thumb and squeezed out the glass eye. Behind it was a deep cavity filled with red mucus. Von Dodenburg barely repressed a sound of disgust as Donner began to wipe the glass eye with an immaculate silk handkerchief.
‘Blood and scum,’ the Police General explained easily, ‘it collects there. I have to clean it regularly. There are other, more unpleasant chores that I have to carry out in the privacy of my own quarters. Apparently the product of a surgeon’s knife is not as efficient in ridding itself of its waste products as nature is.’
Casually he replaced the glass eye. Von Dodenburg thought he could now understand the reason for the unpleasant odour of the crippled Police General.
‘Now where was I, von Dodenburg?’
‘Certain special tasks?’ he prompted thickly, imagining what Donner’s body must look like under the immaculate black uniform, and feeling the vomit rise in his throat.
‘Yes. I want you to tidy up the city.’
‘Tidy up, sir?’
‘Yes, there is a bloody awful situation here at the moment. As you probably know Aachen is nearly one hundred per cent black8 and now those damn warm brothers of popes are encouraging their flock to stay behind in the city.’
‘But I thought the Führer himself had ordered the evacuation of the civilian population, sir?’
‘Yes, he did. So who do you think evacuated the city first, leaving the population and those mealy-mouthed masturbating priests to do exactly as they liked? No other than our brave folk-comrades of the SA, who were supposed to be in charge of the evacuation, including their courageous leader County Leader Schmeer, who is now safely lodged fifty kilometres away in Cologne. But by God, not for long!’
Schulze guffawed suddenly. ‘Typical golden pheasants,’ he snorted, using the soldiers’ contemptuous name for the gold-braided SA leaders, ‘it’s the migratory season for them – they always fly away at the slightest sign of danger, General.’
Donner nodded stiffly, as if his scarred neck were worked by steel springs. ‘Quite right, Sergeant-Major, but it is not too advisable to go about risking a big lip like you do. Someone might sew it up for you one day for good!’
Schulze’s big grin vanished. Donner was not a man to be fooled around with.
‘As a result the remaining population of Aachen – some twenty thousand – has buried itself in the ruins and cellars of the old city to wait for the Amis – those teatime soldiers – to come. Then those damned black crows will pause from fingering their genitals to use their flock as a means of putting pressure on me to declare Catholic Aachen an open city. Well, von Dodenburg, they are not going to pull that kind of trick on General Degenhardt Donner! So your first task will be to clear the old city of the civilian population. They are only useless mouths to feed.’
‘And if they won’t go, sir?’
Donner’s mouth twisted in a horrible parody of a smile. ‘Won’t, the word does not exist in my vocabulary, my dear Colonel. The answer to your problem is simple.’ He pulled an imaginary trigger with his forefinger. ‘This is, after all, total war, if we are to believe our own little poison dwarf.9 We shot the useless mouths in the Ukraine. What is to stop us doing the same thing in Holy Aachen?’
‘Nothing, sir’ von Dodenburg answered weakly.
‘Fine. Then that is all for the present. Get to it, Colonel von Dodenburg.’
The dèbris-littered, shattered street, still smoking from the morning’s artillery bombardment, was deserted save for two old women in rusty black looting an abandoned coal stock.
Schulze pushed his cap to the back of his big head and breathed, ‘By the great whore of Buxtehude – if you’ll forgive my German, gentlemen, that man in there looks like the shitty devil himself!’
Colonel von Dodenburg nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were fixed on the wall sign which had appeared everywhere these last few weeks, ‘Hush, the enemy is listening,’ accompanied by the sketch of a listening Ami spy, but he was remembering Donner’s horribly mutilated face.
‘You might be right, Schulze,’ he said at last. ‘A devil – but a devil whom I think I can follow.’ His voice rose with growing confidence. ‘For if General Donner is a devil, I wish Germany today were full of such f
ighting devils.’ He shouldered his Schmeisser machine pistol more comfortably. ‘Come on, gentlemen, let’s see if we can’t sort out those shitty civilians now.’
Notes
1. The attempt on Hitler’s life by the Werhsmacht generals in July 1944. (Transl.).
2. Satirical reference to Hitler.
3. Chimney – SS slang for concentration camp ovens.
4. Operational name for the invasion of Russia.
5. Berlin HQ of the SS.
6. Second-class troops grouped in special battalions according to their physical disabilities. (Transl.).
7. i.e. Military policemen, who were given the name because of their silver chains of office which they wore round their necks.
8. SS expression for Catholic.
9. Wartime nickname for the dwarflike vicious Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels.
FOUR
Aachen was dying. The two hundred Flying Fortresses, which had carried out the afternoon raid with such cold, majestic detachment, were flying back to their bases in England, as von Dodenburg’s ‘hunting commandos’ started to penetrate the shattered old city to root out the civilians. As the smoke started to drift away, Aachen appeared before them in stark, macabre horror. Whole blocks had been replaced by wastelands of rubble, pockmarked by hundreds of craters and laced by the grotesquely twisted, reddened girders of ruined buildings. But it was not the gutted, windowless, roofless buildings nor the mountains of rubble that caught the ‘hunting commandos” eyes as they paced the cobbled, littered streets, handkerchiefs tied round their mouths against the soot and ash still raining down from the houses set afire somewhere in the suburbs; it was the dead. They were everywhere.
‘Holy straw sack,’ Schulze exclaimed, as he led his own group through the piles of human dèbris,’ the place looks like a sodding butcher’s shop!’
‘Serves the black pigs right,’ his second-in-command, one-legged Sergeant Matz grunted, ‘the bastards should have got out when they were ordered to!’ With his good foot he took a hefty swing at a head still encased in a white-painted civilian helmet. It bounced away like a football and rolled into a bomb-crater.
A short thundering roar like that of a great wave breaking drowned his next words. It was followed by a long-drawn-out hiss, as a wall directly in front of them crumbled and came crashing to the ground in a cloud of thick grey choking dust. Bricks bounced across the road towards them and the ‘hunting commandos’ ducked instinctively. It was fortunate that they did so. For at. that same moment, a vicious high-pitched burst of machine-pistol fire cut the air just above their heads.
Schulze reacted immediately. He lobbed a potato masher blindly into the general direction from which the sudden fire had come and sent his men running to left and right, firing from the hip.
‘Amis,’ he yelled, ‘Amis have penetrated the old city!’
But Sergeant-Major Schulze was wrong; their assailant turned out to be a German. A small heavy-jowled man, with bulging eyes like glass marbles and long dangling hands which reached down below his knees, dressed in the brown uniform of a SA major, his fat chest heavy with the ‘tin’ of the old war.
Matz punched him in the face and threw him in front of a surprised Schulze. ‘A jam-shitting golden pheasant,’ he exclaimed. ‘He was hiding out over there behind that jam-shitting chimney-stack ready to take another pot-shot at us.’ Matz hit him again with his clenched fist. The man’s fat lips burst. His false teeth bulged out of his mouth and blood began to trickle from one corner.
‘All right, Matz, leave him alone,’ Schulze commanded. ‘Give him a chance to speak. Now then, you shitty golden pheasant, what are you doing here and why did you fire on us?’
‘I mistook you for civilians,’ the heavy-jowled SA man stammered. ‘A nervous reaction.’ He wiped the blood from his mouth. ‘Why should I fire on our own brave boys? You see those civilians would like to take it from me?’
‘Take what?’ Schulze snapped.
The SA man was suddenly hesitant. Schulze nodded to Matz. The one-legged NCO brought his hand down smartly in a brutal chop against the SA man’s nose. Something snapped like a twig. The SA man staggered back, tears streaming from his eyes and mingling with the thick red blood which poured from his shattered nose.
‘Now, you piece of ape-turd, let’s have it or you’ll be looking at the potatoes from below in five minutes flat!’ Schulze threatened.
In spite of his pain, the SA man hurried to explain. ‘I didn’t go with the rest when Scheer ordered the evacuation. I had too many interests in Aachen … and I couldn’t leave my girls behind. There wasn’t enough room for them in the convoy—’
‘What did you say?’ Schulze broke in. ‘Girls.’ He threw a significant look at the suddenly attentive patrol. ‘Girls with tits and legs right up to their arses?’
The fat SA man nodded.
‘Well, where, man – where?’ Schulze exploded.
Schmees pointed a blood-stained finger at the heap of rubble of the newly collapsed wall, his face miserable. ‘Below that – it used to be the old SA headquarters … I fixed it up myself for me and the girls so that we—’
‘Come on, lads, let’s not waste time,’ Schulze interrupted excitedly, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. ‘I’m already beginning to limp at the thought of those dames! Let’s go and have a look at this bastard’s passion parlour.’
But Battle Group Wotan’s attempts to evacuate Aachen’s remaining civilian population was not having the same pleasureable results everywhere. Von Dodenburg was driving Donner carefully through the littered smoking streets in the VW jeep when he heard the sound which told him that something had gone wrong with the evacuation plan. At first it was not much more than a subdued murmur, a distant monotone without pitch or form.
‘What’s that?’ Donner snapped.
‘I don’t know. General, but we’ll soon find out.’
With difficulty he turned the VW round in the narrow, rubble-littered street and headed slowly towards the sound, now beginning to form itself into three words, chanted over and over again by hundreds of hoarse throats:
‘STOP THE EVACUATION!’
The VW jeep swung round the corner and came to a sudden halt. Drawn up in front of them, Schwarz and Officer-Cadet Krause plus two ‘hunting commandos’ were facing a mob of screaming women: fat housewives in dark ugly clothes; plain immature girls, undernourished and pale-faced, their budding unfettered breasts pushing gently through the thin washed-out material of their dresses; nuns in great sweeping white headdresses – ‘white swans’, von Dodenburg remembered having called them in his youth; grandmothers in rusty black coats; female auxiliaries – ‘field mattresses’, the troops nicknamed them – in sloppy grey uniforms, all of them screaming hysterically at the top of their voices.
Von Dodenburg sprang from the jeep and ran across to Major Schwarz. ‘What’s going on, Schwarz?’
Schwarz swung round and shouted above the row: ‘They won’t let us move any farther. I tried to clear the street, but they wouldn’t allow me to get far.’ He turned his face to emphasise his point. His right cheek was clawed and bleeding from cheek to jaw. ‘One of the bitches did this to me!’
Suddenly the hysterical chant stopped. The women had spotted Donner. Someone gasped with horror at his face. Another cried: ‘There he is, Monseigneur – that devil Donner! He’s here himself!’
The front rank of the sweating, flushed women parted and a fat unshaven priest wearing the soutane and shovel hat of a monseigneur stepped into the space between the apprehensive young SS men and the women who had called him. He fumbled with his gold-rimmed pince-nez and cleared his throat.
Donner beat him to it. ‘What do you want, you damned black crow?’
‘Don’t you talk to the monseigneur like that, you God-forsaken devil!’ a woman in widow’s black in the front rank cried angrily.
The fat priest raised his plump soft hand to silence her. He looked up at the tall SS General. ‘Excuse my children, Gener
al,’ he said humbly. ‘But all they want is to be left in peace. Left in their homes or what is left of them.’
Donner did not deign to look at the priest. His glassy gaze was fixed on some far horizon high above his head. ‘Firstly they are not your children. They are German folk comrades, albeit female, who must obey the laws of the Reich like any other good National Socialist. Secondly they are useless mouths, which must be removed from the city, at once.’
‘But sir,’ the priest pleaded and raised his sweating hands in supplication, moving forward as if he were about to throw himself at the SS General’s gleaming jackboots and plead for mercy.
Donner pushed him away with the tip of his riding crop. ‘Keep your damn distance, Pope!’
‘But I must insist, General. You can’t do this terrible thing to my people—’
‘Schwarz,’ Donner cried, ignoring him, ‘arrest this damned black crow, will you! He’s beginning to bore me.’
‘Sir!’
The Jewish SS Major, whose hatred of the clergy was as fanatical as his hatred of his own race, stepped forward. His face empty of emotion, he raised his black-gloved artificial hand and swung it against the priest’s face. The priest staggered back, his glasses falling to the ground. Schwarz ground his iron-shod heel on them and snapped: ‘Officer-Cadet Krause, arrest this man at once!’
A roar of anger went up from the women. They surged forward. Donner backed away:
