Last Flight to Stalingrad

by Graham Hurley

  Schultz was closest. Kalb held his gaze, unblinking.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Schultz growled. ‘Before these men eat you alive.’

  Kalb ignored him. He’d spotted the Leutnant from the Feldgendarmerie. Like the SS, he was still wearing service uniform. He wanted to know the whereabouts of the prisoner. No name, no rank, just ‘the prisoner’.

  ‘Down there, Herr Standartenführer.’ He pointed at the floor.

  ‘It’s locked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Komm mit uns.’

  Kalb turned on his heel, gesturing to his SS colleagues. The Leutnant followed them out of the church, closing the door carefully behind him. The moment of silence that followed was broken by Schultz. The pistol he carried in the waistband of his trousers had appeared in his hand. He glanced at Nehmann and then nodded in the direction of the door.

  Outside, it was colder than ever. Beneath the building was a damp basement room that had served as a vestry. A door on the side of the church was open. A flight of stairs led into the darkness and Nehmann could hear murmured fragments of conversation from below. Then came something sharper, the slap of flesh on flesh and a sudden gasp of pain.

  ‘Kirile,’ Schultz said. ‘That’s where they keep him. That’s where I pick him up every morning. Poor little bastard.’

  Schultz was checking his automatic while Nehmann tried to imagine how this scene could possibly end. The mathematical odds, five to two, were hopeless. Every SS man would be carrying a weapon, probably the Leutnant as well. He knew what these men were capable of. He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes. Were matters to be resolved downstairs? In the vestry? Or might it be better to stage some kind of ambush up here, in the open, where they at least had the advantage of surprise?

  Schultz was evidently determined to intervene. Kirile was getting a beating now, the SS staging a little anniversary celebration of their own, and Schultz had taken a first step into the darkness when other figures appeared. There were dozens of them, then more. They were streaming out of the church, still wearing their Stalin masks and their crude make-up, and they’d paused only to pick up whatever weapon came to hand. Some had the knives they always carried, the blades unsheathed and gleaming in the moonlight. One or two had firearms. Several had paused to pick up half-bricks or small rocks from the drift of debris outside the church. One of them, wearing a trophy fur hat, had seized a candlestick from the altar.

  The beating had stopped now and Nehmann could hear footsteps ascending from the vestry. First into the open air was Kirile, his wrists tied together, his face webbed with fresh blood. Schultz had the gun in one hand. With the other, he pushed the Georgian towards Nehmann.

  ‘Yours, my friend. Tell him it’s going to be fine. Tell him we’ll take care of everything.’

  Kalb was next to emerge. The sight of Schultz’s automatic brought him to a halt. He demanded to know what was going on.

  ‘We have custody of the prisoner,’ Schultz growled. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Myself and my Kameraden.’ He gestured at the watching faces. ‘The Bolsheviks turned the world on its head. Maybe we’re doing something similar.’

  ‘That’s treason,’ Kalb said. ‘And you know what happens to traitors.’

  ‘Treason is your word, my friend. I can think of a number of others. The prisoner will be safe in our hands. Any complaints, I suggest you address them to Admiral Canaris in Berlin. This man is an important intelligence asset. These last few weeks he’s earned the Reich’s gratitude. I think you’ll find it pays not to waste men like that.’

  There came a murmur of agreement from the ever-growing mob of partygoers. Yet more had appeared around the corner of the church.

  Kalb glanced back at his men, then shrugged. His body language spoke volumes. Not now, he seemed to be saying. We’ll take care of this later. He stepped past Schultz, then stopped again, barely centimetres from Nehmann.

  ‘You’re Goebbels’ little monkey, aren’t you?’ Dead eyes behind the mask. ‘He told me you’d be here.’

  28

  STALINGRAD, NOVEMBER 1942

  Two days later, the temperature plunged to minus eighteen degrees and forecasters warned of an impending storm. Frozen clumps of horse dung, rock-hard, littered the streets. Nehmann watched men from a bicycle company wheeling their machines past the bus depot, needles of ice hanging from their nostrils. Listen hard between spasms of artillery fire, and you could hear the grinding of ice floes drifting down the river.

  Then, overnight, the wind picked up, and Nehmann awoke to the metallic clatter of corrugated iron sheets, torn loose by the gale, cartwheeling away across the apron of asphalt where the buses had once parked. Soon the falling snow became a full-scale blizzard and when he ventured out again, accompanying Schultz to yet another interview, the corpse of the city lay under a thick white shroud.

  Schultz was worried about Standartenführer Kalb. He’d done his best to locate SS headquarters but had so far drawn a blank. Just the mention of the men in black was enough to seal most lips and, in the end, he’d had to resort to a long conversation with Nehmann. Nehmann was reluctant to talk about Goebbels but Schultz had picked up enough to know that the little Georgian had incurred some kind of debt to his Minister, and that Kalb had probably been tasked with obtaining settlement. Himmler and Goebbels, he said, were on the best of terms. Which in turn put Nehmann in a position of some danger.

  ‘You think Goebbels has the ear of the SS?’ Nehmann asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because in the Abwehr we follow their every fucking move. Himmler knows where the power lies. That means Hitler. Hitler has always had a soft spot for Goebbels’ wife, the saintly Magda, whore that she is, and as for the man himself, Hitler has him in the palm of his hand. Your little boss has always been halfway up the Führer’s arse, which happens to suit the Führer very nicely because the man is clever, too. He’s a believer. He makes things happen. And when he needs a favour, he knows he can rely on Hitler’s backing. Believe it or not, that puts the whole of the fucking SS at his disposal. Something you’d be wise to bear in mind.’

  Schultz, ever practical, had laid hands on a bodyguard for Nehmann, an enormous infantryman called Ernst Grimberger. The Bavarian was a dog-handler by trade and had somehow taught an Alsatian called Mitzi to detect anti-vehicle mines laid during the chaotic days of the Soviet retreat. Most of the mines had now been located and dealt with, leaving Grimberger at a loose end. Schultz, who had highly placed contacts at Sixth Army headquarters, secured Grimberger’s service in turn for a guarantee that Werner Nehmann would continue to put General Paulus and his men in the best possible light.

  ‘Go nowhere without Ernst,’ Schultz told Nehmann. ‘This man’s like his dog. He can smell shit like Kalb at a thousand metres. He’s as close as you’ll get to safe.’

  And so Nehmann, after his brief interlude in Berlin, began to write again. Mitzi was an obvious place to start and Ernst was delighted with the results. The story centred on a truckload of badly injured men from the front line en route to the airfield at Pitomnik where they were to await evacuation. Mitzi loped ahead, nose to the ground, tail wagging, and despite several centimetres of frozen snow she still managed to find the anti-tank mine that would have blown the truck apart. The wounded men were on special rations and every single one of them insisted on sharing their good fortune with Mitzi. The story was, of course, a fiction but Ernst didn’t seem to care. Had a mine really been there, he insisted, then she’d definitely have found it. So, who’s making a fuss about whether it’s true or not?

  *

  On 11 November, in a last spasm of violence, Richthofen’s Stukas and battle groups newly organised by Sixth Army HQ made a final bid to winkle the Ivans out of their positions in the ever-shrinking pocket that was their last remaining hold on the city. The Russians, as ever, fought like tigers. A handful of them were forced back to
defend a narrow strip of land barely seventy metres from the riverbank.

  That evening, Nehmann talked to a tank commander from Bremen who’d been in the front line, baffled by the odds the Ivans were facing. ‘In the end,’ he told Nehmann, ‘their ammunition ran out and you know what they did then? They got their own artillery, on the eastern bank, to shell us. We were that close…’ his hands were a centimetre apart ‘…and they all died under their own shells. If you think that was some kind of accident, you’d be wrong. They called in fire knowing that was the only way of stopping us. And you know something else? It worked.’

  *

  Two days later, Nehmann met Georg Messner at the airfield at Pitomnik. Messner had brought a Tante-Ju with supplies from Tatsinskaya and he looked gaunt with exhaustion. Richthofen, he said, was beginning to despair about the prospects for any kind of victory at Stalingrad. Ice floes on the river were threatening Soviet efforts to keep their front line in food and ammunition yet somehow the Ivans still managed to improvise night after night and keep the supply lines open.

  ‘If Paulus can’t finish this business when the Volga’s icing up and supplies are down to a trickle,’ Messner said, ‘then the game’s up.’

  Nehmann would have been glad of a longer conversation. He wanted to tell Messner about Kalb, about Kirile, about the madness that was settling on the ruined city, but he never got the chance. The weather forecast for the afternoon, said Messner, was dire. Already they were having to light fires under the aircraft engines every morning at Tatsinskaya to thaw out the oil before start-up, and if he didn’t take off within the next fifteen minutes he wouldn’t get home at all.

  Home. The word had ceased to mean anything. That night, Nehmann sat up with Schultz and Ernst Grimberger over a bottle of vodka. Kirile, much to his relief, now had a corner of his own at the bus depot and accompanied Schultz during the day when Nehmann was otherwise engaged. He’d made a primitive chess board with a full set of pieces and he played a series of games with Grimberger most evenings while Schultz and Nehmann talked.

  ‘This is a paper war for our Leader.’ Schultz was toying with his glass. ‘His maps tell him there’s a pocket or two he needs to clear out. To do that he has to lay hands on more infantry because Paulus, believe it or not, is running out. So that means that cooks, medics, signals staff suddenly find themselves in the front line. Even tank drivers, fucking Panzers, are given a rifle and a spare magazine and told to kill a few Ivans. Can you believe that? Just to make Hitler’s map look neater? The man’s obsessed. He thinks it’s his city already and no one’s got the balls to tell him different.’

  It got worse. The following night, after a lengthy radio conversation with Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, Schultz appeared to call Nehmann aside.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to. We just got the latest production figures. Two thousand two hundred a month.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Soviet tanks. They come out of factories out beyond the Urals. Can you imagine that? Over two thousand? Month after month? The figures went to the Chancellery and guess what? The bloody man doesn’t believe them. He thinks we’re making them up. He’s convinced it’s some kind of plot. It shouldn’t happen, therefore it hasn’t. What chance do we have, Nehmann? Be honest, for once.’

  Honest. Nehmann thought about the conversation overnight. He didn’t know what 2,200 tanks might look like. Kilometre after kilometre of tanks. Hectares and hectares and hectares of Soviet armour. An eternity of low shapes on the unending steppe, and muzzle flashes, and huge explosions where men had once been. Hitler had given the Russian bear a poke and now hundreds of thousands of men – underfed, frozen, stoic, resigned – were about to pay the price. Should he write about the real betrayal? Should he risk the truth for once? Would Goebbels even read stuff like that?

  *

  The following day, in the late morning, a special prisoner arrived. He’d been sent back to the bus depot by a front-line Oberst who knew and respected Schultz. The prisoner had been only lightly injured but his nerve had gone. He said he’d discovered God and he wanted to talk.

  ‘About God?’ Nehmann was looking at the man. He was tall and he had the pallor and the blank-eyed listlessness that comes with too many days and nights under fire. He’d already been talking to Kirile and he indicated that he’d like this conversation to continue.

  Schultz, for once, seemed uncertain what to do. Nehmann made the decision for him. Kirile, he knew, was deeply grateful for the part Schultz had played the night he’d fallen foul of the SS. Maybe now was the moment he’d repay that debt.

  Schultz agreed. Kirile and the Russian prisoner retired to the privacy of Nehmann’s sleeping space. Within the hour, he was back again. Nehmann was alone in the room that served as an office.

  ‘He’s got a desk at Chuikov’s headquarters.’ Kirile nodded at the prisoner, visible through the open door. ‘He knows most of the same men I knew.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a huge attack in the offing, armies north and south.’ He cupped his hands, brought his fingers together. ‘It’s an encirclement with us in the middle. Zhukov’s in charge. That man knows what he’s doing, believe me.’

  ‘When is this supposed to happen?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. He’s even got the code name. Operation Uranus.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’ Nehmann checked his watch, wondering where Schultz might be. ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘I do, yes.’ Kirile looked away. ‘If you want the truth, I’ve known since you took me prisoner.’

  *

  Soviet armies fell on the flanks of the German bridgehead the following morning. Within four days, the twin arms of the Soviet thrust had closed the circle sixty-five miles west of the city. It happened to be a Sunday, Totensonntag, the one day in the year that Protestants all over the Fatherland remembered the dead, and more than a quarter of a million men of Sixth Army were now cut off. Over the days to come, as Berlin slowly admitted the truth about the battle for Stalingrad, the German bridgehead on the Volga was renamed a Kessel.

  Kessel. ‘Cauldron.’

  29

  STALINGRAD, 28 NOVEMBER 1942

  Kirile disappeared five days later. He’d been sleeping in a nook in the basement where boxes and boxes of passenger tokens for use on the city’s buses were kept. There was barely space for a couple of blankets on the floor, and a nest of field pouches for a pillow, and there was a door that really wasn’t a door but that didn’t matter because everyone knew where Kirile’s real interests lay. The last thing on his mind was a life outside the bus depot. He feared the SS and he feared his fellow Russians. Two good reasons to stay safe in his new home.

  At first Nehmann assumed he’d gone out for some fresh air. It happened sometimes. He’d get up for a piss, still fully clothed after a night’s sleep, and Nehmann would meet him on the stairs that led up to the freezing concrete space that had once been a waiting room upstairs. Kirile had the knack of acquiring supplies of the harsh Russian tobacco from newly taken prisoners and always smoked outside because he knew everyone else loathed the smell. But when Nehmann went upstairs to look, there was no sign of him.

  By mid-morning he still hadn’t returned. Nehmann and Grimberger were due to meet a supply flight from Tatsinskaya at Pitomnik. The flight was carrying sacks of Luftpost, including a special package for Schultz. The plane was late, wallowing in to land through yet more flurries of snow, zigzagging across the airfield to avoid shell craters. Nehmann knew the pilot, a friend of Messner, and he listened to him moaning about Goering while Nehmann’s gaze settled on a nearby bunch of prisoners, two of them barefoot in the snow, unloading the aircraft. The big plane was only half full and Nehmann watched the boxes passing from hand to hand, wondering whether Kirile might be planning to somehow make it onto a plane out.

  The pilot was checking his watch. Goering had evidently promised Hitler aircraft and supply flights he knew he couldn’t possibly
deliver. Worse still, the fucking man had now gone off to Paris to buy yet more fucking pictures, leaving Fliegerkorps VIII to pick up the pieces. The staff sergeant on the airfield had been keeping a tally of deliveries over the last week and yesterday he’d threatened to jump on a plane to Tatsinskaya and have it out with Richthofen personally, and the pilot didn’t blame him. A bare handful of tons a day when the army needed ten times that? Madness.

  Back at the bus depot, Nehmann met Schultz in the empty shell of the waiting room. Schultz was looking up at the fading map of the city’s bus routes that dominated one wall. He drew Nehmann’s attention to a black daub on the bottom right-hand corner of the map, within easy reach of someone standing amid the litter of broken glass. Two letters. SS.

  ‘Was that here yesterday?’ he asked.

  Nehmann said he didn’t know. Might have been. Might not.

  ‘You’re thinking…?’ Nehmann took a closer look.

  Schultz shrugged. Kirile had gone, and the black daub explained why.

  ‘Fuckers’, he grunted, looking at the route map again.

  *

  Nehmann didn’t give up. He blamed himself for not keeping a closer eye on his fellow Georgian. Schultz was probably right about the SS. People like Kalb were fanatics. They lived in a world of their own making and they never gave up. Would they use Kirile the way Schultz had? Would they put his perfect Russian to work when they conducted their own interrogations with Soviet prisoners? Was that why they’d bided their time, and hatched the plans, and waited for the moment when Kirile – sleepy, badly needing a smoke – had emerged into yet another grey Stalingrad dawn? Nehmann rather hoped so. That way, the poor bastard would at least stay alive.

  Grimberger had a different take on the incident. He started carrying an extra gun, a Walther P38 with a nine-round magazine. In his view, Kirile’s disappearance was a declaration of war. Nehmann, for whatever reason, would be next. He’d been at the church on the night of the party. He’d witnessed the scene at the top of the vestry steps. He knew these SS people and he knew that a moment of humiliation like that wasn’t something they’d ever tolerate. Sooner or later they’d be back.