Himmler's war

by Robert Conroy

Jessica had heard rumors from her uncle that some GI’s in the supply units were pilfering large quantities of supplies and selling them on the black market. A little thievery was common enough when temptation presented itself and, as Tom had said, who counts paper clips and pencils? Still, stealing to provide one’s self with creature comforts was one thing, but this level of thievery was much more ambitious. Jessica was glad that the apartment was in her name and that she could prove where the money came from.

  “Monique, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” she said with a mocking pout. “Now it will take me weeks to find a replacement for him.”

  ***

  Jim Byrnes’ career in the United States government had been varied, even spectacular, although he’d been denied his nation’s highest honor, the presidency. And, at age 65, he knew it would never happen. He’d been a congressman from his native state of South Carolina and then a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He had stepped down as a Justice in order to head the War Mobilization Board for his good friend, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He’d also been born a Catholic, which offended many Protestants, and then converted to Episcopalian, which offended Catholics, thus making him unelectable to national office.

  Still, the President trusted him and liked to use him for unofficial duties like the one he was pursuing today. Andrei Gromyko, the gloomy looking Soviet ambassador to the United States awaited him in a conference room in the uninspiring red stone castle that was the Smithsonian Institute. Gromyko was much younger than Byrnes and was considered a rising star, a Red Star, Byrnes thought whimsically.

  Typically, Gromyko came right to the point. “Why do you wish to speak to me, Mr. Byrnes?”

  And a bright good morning to you too, James F. Byrnes thought. “We would like to know what is happening to your army. It seems to have disappeared,” he said dryly.

  “I don’t understand,” Gromyko said, either ignoring or not understanding the sarcasm. “We are fighting bravely and enduring casualties on your behalf.” Gromyko was known to be a stubborn negotiator.

  “Ambassador, your vaunted Red Army does not appear to be moving. What has happened to your great advances and even greater victories?”

  “The Red Army continues to fight. As you are aware, the Germans are now fighting far more intelligently than in the past. I believe your own forces are discovering this unpleasant fact in France. The Red Army’s senior commander, Marshal Zhukov, has informed our high command, the Stavka, that the army is exhausted. It requires far more in the way of supplies and manpower; thus, a period of relative rest is required. However, do not fear, the pace will increase once the situation improves.”

  Byrnes continued in his soft Southern drawl. “In the meantime, the American army bears the brunt of fighting the Nazis. We are seeing German units in France that had been in Russia until recently.”

  Ultra was providing disheartening information that numerous other German units were moving from the Soviet front to France. Aerial reconnaissance, along with captured enemy soldiers was confirming this.

  Gromyko laughed unpleasantly. “Now you know what it is like to fight alone, even temporarily. From 1939 until now, Russia stood alone while your country dithered. My people bled. Our soldiers were killed and maimed, our cities ruined, our women raped, and all the while you Americans slept snug in your beds.”

  Byrnes bristled. The accusation, however truthful, was unfair. The American people weren’t going to go to war against anybody until the Japanese had conveniently attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany subsequently and foolishly declared war on the United States. FDR had correctly identified Germany as the greater evil and had ordered the military focus to be against Hitler, even though there had been fierce opposition to that decision by those who felt that Japan should be defeated first. They both knew that an American focus on Japan would have meant defeat for Russia, and perhaps even Great Britain.

  “It takes time to prepare an army,” Byrnes said, “and we were separated from the war in Europe by an ocean, whereas you had the Nazis by the throat. In Teheran, less than a year ago, we promised a cross channel invasion this spring and we have done it. We expected to be marching in lock step with you, and not have you giving the Germans a respite.”

  Gromyko nearly sneered. “I concede that, however late, your army has arrived. But it is nowhere near the size of ours or that of the Germans confronting us. Your invasion of France is, for all intents and purposes, a sideshow.”

  Byrnes nearly gasped at the insult. “Our army is large, getting larger, and will continue to grow, as will the amount of aid we are giving you. Our concern is that the Red Army isn’t fighting.”

  Gromyko was clearly unimpressed. “I will relay your concerns. However, I will also remind you that General Winter was a Russian ally when the Hitlerites invaded, but is now a friend of the Germans. Winter in Poland might not be as severe as it is in Russia, but waging war in ice and snow and mud is still an extremely difficult enterprise.”

  Byrnes reluctantly but silently concurred. “Then please add this. We are working hard and our people are in great danger in order to send supply convoys to the Soviet Union. Those supplies could just as well be used by our own soldiers as yours.”

  Gromyko stood. His expression was one of controlled anger. “As I said, I will convey your concerns.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Colonel Ernst Varner thought he could hear Margarete’s cry of delight even before his Fieseler Storch landed in the dirt road by the farmhouse. He hopped out when it slowed and the pilot taxied towards some trees where the plane would be covered with a tarp and, hopefully, be out of sight of the damned Americans. He’d endured a couple of scares on the flight from Berlin to the farm.

  Margarete jumped into his arm and hugged him while Magda approached a little more sedately. Her eyes, however, were warm with a promise of better things to come and he winked at her. Magda’s response was to grin and lick her lips provocatively.

  As they walked to the house, Varner noted with distaste the presence of foreign workers. He felt that using prisoners and drafted foreign civilians as little more than slaves was almost as distasteful as what was going on in the concentration camps. Once more it brought home the necessity for Germany to win the war, or at least negotiate an honorable peace. If not, the world would doubtless wreak a terrible vengeance on the Third Reich, regardless of who was in charge at the end. Eric and Bertha doubtless thought having slave workers was their due as Nazis and conquerors. After all, weren’t the prisoners being well fed and cared for? What more could people who weren’t quite human want?

  Despite the gathering dark clouds of disaster outside, dinner was jovial and the food plentiful. Ernst had been on rationed food and ate too much. So too with the drinks and he made sure that his pilot, an eighteen-year-old lieutenant who appeared both too young for his rank and to be flying a plane, was well taken care of. They would not be flying tonight, so let the boy have a good meal and a couple of glasses of wine. Normally, he would have eaten with the pilot, a pleasant young man named Hans Hart, who seemed spellbound by Margarete, but Hart was intelligent and discretely excused himself and gave Varner the privacy to be with his family.

  Afterwards, Varner was told many things, including the details of the death train and the fact that his wife and daughter were working on the Rhine Defenses.

  He didn’t know which disturbed him more. The fact that the two women-Margarete clearly was no longer a girl-had seen such horrors as that train, or that they were in danger from Allied bombings while working. He made a note to try again to have them totally excused from their current assignments.

  Later, after he and Magda had made love, they lay together in their bed. “I hope we didn’t wake anybody,” Ernst said and Magda giggled.

  “Don’t worry. Eric and Bertha are at the other end of the house and they sleep like rocks. Margarete is no longer a little girl and I am reasonably confident she knows what goes on behind closed doors.”

  Ernst lau
ghed softly. “Did you see the way my pilot looked at her? My God, is this what the next few years are going to be like?”

  “I just hope we have a few years in front of us,” Magda said wistfully.

  He sighed. “I think I liked things they way they used to be. I still can’t believe that the idiot Detloff boy is nearby. I think I shall hurt his other knee for insulting my daughter.”

  “ Our daughter,” she corrected. “And she’s quite capable of taking care of herself. She can drive cars and small trucks, and Eric has taught her how to shoot his guns. The Ami’s come and we’ll be ready,” she said only half-jokingly.

  Varner visualized a line of women and old men defending the Reich against vast numbers of American tanks and planes. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so close to reality.

  “So how is the war coming?” she asked with forced casualness. He had tried to hint at the truth in his letters, using code words and phrases, but he couldn’t be too specific. Even though he was an OKW staff officer, the post office had the right to open his mail and turn anything suspicious over to the Gestapo, and candor could be defined as defeatist and suspicious.

  “There may actually be a glimmer of light. With Herr Hitler no longer around to guide us with his catastrophic sense of brilliance, Himmler is letting the generals fight the war properly; thus, the Russian and American advances have been slowed dramatically. Winter will soon be upon us, which means that the Soviets will stop and the American will at best be slowed even more. All forecasts by the group of shaman who profess to understand the weather say that the winter will be colder and snowier than normal, and that will help us considerably since it will keep American planes on the ground and turn the roads into muck for their tanks.”

  Magda sighed. “Which only means that the war will go on and on. What if it never ends? What if this is only the beginning of a new Hundred Years War?”

  “I can’t argue with anything you said. However, I keep hearing rumors of a political and diplomatic solution. Perhaps a negotiated peace is not out of the question if the two sides become exhausted. First, however, we must resolve the Jewish question, although not necessarily in the way Hitler originally planned.”

  He laughed harshly. “Perhaps we will ship them all to Palestine and let the British and the Arabs fight over them. At any rate, we have to get them out of the Reich for their own good and for the future of Germany. Hitler originally wanted to ship them to Madagascar. It’s a shame it didn’t occur.”

  “Peace,” she sighed, “what a wonderful thought. And what is really happening about the Jews? Please tell me there aren’t trainloads of corpses rotting all over Germany.”

  “I’m certain that utter bureaucratic stupidity caused that and other, similar situations. Unfortunately, nobody knew quite what to do with Jews already in transit when word came down to stop shipping them. They couldn’t be returned to their homes or the camps they’d come from, and no trains were supposed to deliver them to their destination camps. Somehow it’s been straightened out by the SS, although I’m certain I don’t want to know the details.”

  She decided to change the subject. “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  Too soon, she thought. But she knew better than to argue with him. She reached down below his belly, found her target, and stroked him. He reacted and hardened immediately. “Then we’d better make sure we don’t waste any more time,” she said, “and no, I don’t give a stinking damn if Margarete hears us or not.”

  ***

  Andrey Vlasov had once been considered a rising young general in the Red Army. Then, a series of unfortunate events had resulted in his own forces being left stranded and overwhelmed by the Germans. Requests for support, and then rescue, had gone unheeded. Vlasov’s force had been destroyed and he’d been captured.

  Furious, and realizing the callousness and ineptitude of the Soviet high command, he’d turned traitor and had gone over to the Germans. Now the former Soviet lieutenant general led an anti-Soviet force, called the Russian Liberation Army.

  Vlasov understood Berlin’s reluctance to use his forces, now at nearly sixty-thousand men, in key areas. Simply put, if they’d changed sides once, what would stop them from doing it again? Time would vindicate them, he told his second in command, Sergei Bunyachenko, as they traded shots of vodka.

  However, the actions of the Nazis against Russian civilians had upset him deeply. The Germans could have been welcomed as liberators, not conquerors, and their savagery had horrified him. It was one thing to be brutal to combatants, and he didn’t much give a damn what happened to the Jews, but the manner in which the SS in particular was treating Russian civilians was appalling and he was beginning to wonder if he had indeed made the right decision. Rape and massacre seemed to be the code of the SS, especially the Totenkopf divisions who fought with incredible savagery on the Russian front. He wondered why almost all the Reich’s SS divisions were now confronting the Soviets. Why had those divisions in France and elsewhere been moved to the Eastern Front? He felt that the answer was that the SS would fight with incredible savagery against Slavic peoples they didn’t think were human.

  He looked across the table. Bunyachenko was nearly asleep. Vlasov was puzzled. Sergei hadn’t had all that much vodka and the man had the capacity of a bear. Perhaps it was because they had just eaten a good heavy meal, were tired, and that the room was warm? Yes, that must be it. They were in Berlin awaiting a meeting with von Rundstedt. The field marshal had said he wanted Vlasov’s army sent to Yugoslavia and Vlasov thought that might be a good idea. They would earn the OKW’s respect by putting down the civil war going on in that godforsaken country by squashing Tito’s partisan armies. He would succeed where the regular German Army had failed, thereby earning the German high command’s respect and gratitude.

  Vlasov yawned. Damn, he was getting sleepy too. Bunyachenko’s head came down and rested gently on the table. Vlasov couldn’t keep awake. Dimly, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong, but what he couldn’t say. Nor could he think. Nor could he fight the sleepiness.

  His last coherent thought before he lapsed into unconsciousness was the horrible realization that he’d been drugged and that he was looking at the face of Satan.

  ***

  Now it was Jack’s turn to go looking for a missing friend. After his narrow scrape with the Panthers, Carter had simply walked away and hadn’t been seen in a couple of hours. His crew, all of whom had almost miraculously survived, saw him walking off with a bottle in his hand.

  “And I don’t think it was Coca-Cola, sir,” said Carter’s driver. All but one of the crew would return to duty immediately, or as soon as they got another tank. One man had a broken arm and would be replaced, but the rest only suffered from bumps, bruises, and minor burns. The driver’s eyebrows were singed black, which made him look like he’d been made up to look like a tramp.

  Jack and Levin easily picked up Carter’s trail. Other GI’s simply pointed them in the right direction and, soon enough, they found him sitting behind a stone fence, the bottle of cognac, now half empty, cradled in his arms.

  “Want to talk?” Jack asked as they plopped down on either side of him. Jeb’s eyes were red and his face was flushed.

  “I think I’m through,” Carter said. “How many more tanks can I lose and how many more men can I get killed or maimed? Next time it might be me. I can handle that, but what I can’t deal with is people dying on my behalf or because of my stupid mistakes.”

  “What mistakes?” asked Levin.

  “We fired too soon. If we’d waited until they were closer, we might have hurt them.”

  Jack shook his head. He was hardly an expert on armored warfare, but he’d picked up a goodly amount of knowledge since joining the 74th. “It didn’t matter. They saw you and would have shot just as soon as they could, which, please recall, was only seconds after you opened up. If anything, your firing first might have rattled them.”

  “
Sure,” Carter snarled. “Of my four tanks, only two were destroyed and one, mine, badly damaged. Four men are dead and five others wounded badly enough to be sent back. Let’s face it. I fucked up.”

  Levin took the bottle. “If you’re finished with this, I’ll take a turn.” He swallowed and passed the cognac to Jack who took a healthy snort. Hell, Jack thought, if Jeb wasn’t going to finish drinking it, somebody should.

  “Jeb,” said Levin, “the problem is very simple. The Germans have better tanks with better guns and better armor. Someday, the powers that be will realize that and get us weapons that will match up better with the krauts. In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have. You know as well as I do that we outnumber them in tanks by a huge margin. Ergo, we’ve got to get on Whiteside and Stoddard’s case to keep our Shermans together in large numbers so we can overwhelm the next batch of Panthers that comes down the pike.”

  Carter wasn’t listening. His chin was down and his eyes were closed. “Nappy time,” said Levin.

  “We better get him inside before he freezes to death,” said Jack. It was mid-October and they’d already seen brief flecks of snow.

  They took him under the arms and gently propelled him into a medic’s tent. “That doesn’t look like a combat wound, sir,” the medic, a corporal said stiffly.

  “He just lost three tanks and nine men, Corporal,” Jack responded, just a little testily.

  The corporal was unfazed but a little more sympathetic. He saw the bottle and smiled. “Self medication often works quite well, Captain. Put him on that cot and we’ll take care of him.”

  Jack handed the corporal the bottle. It was still about a quarter full. “For services rendered?”

  ***

  Jessica wearily walked up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. Even though she’d worked up a little sweat, she still clutched the thin overcoat tightly. Paris in the spring and summer might be lovely, but Paris in the fall and impending winter was cold, damp, and drab.