by Eric Meyer
I gave the order to Wasser and he put the vehicle into gear and drove away, when I looked back the CO was watching us, as if we’d dive for cover again when his back was turned. Shells dropped all around us, pieces of hot shrapnel sliced through the thin armor of the hull and it was only by a miracle that no one was hit. When I looked around Kurz was still watching us, miraculously unharmed by the barrage. We drove through the firestorm of shells for almost a kilometer, there must have been more than a hundred artillery pieces ranged against us. When we finally left the barrage behind we were able to take stock. The hull had been hit with numerous shell splinters, the bodywork was perforated with scores of small holes where the splinters had penetrated. Pieces of metal were lying loose on the floor, but there was no serious damage.
“You’d better make the fastest possible time, Wasser, I’m not going through another barrage. If we run into any further artillery we’ll have to divert, that’ll mean we’ll be hard pressed to reach there before nightfall.”
“What the hell is wrong with that crazy bastard Kurz?” Blomberg asked angrily. “That was stupid, making us drive through the barrage. Has he had an attack of madness?”
I had long held the opinion that Kurz was completely mad and had been for some considerable time. But in this case it was something more than madness.
“It’s a mental disease called Heinrich Himmler, Rottenfuhrer Blomberg. His arse is on the line.”
I’d managed to get Blomberg promoted to full corporal, or Rottenfuhrer as it was known in the SS. The lean, tough, dark-haired Hamburger, an ex-docker, was a good man to have at your back in an emergency. Unlike my Scharfuhrer, Walter Goethe, who could be relied to take the course that offered the most profit to him.
“Kurz is aware that if we don’t get through and rescue this cousin of Heydrich’s, it could mean us all doing time in a penal regiment, him included. As bad as the Sonderbattalion Kurz is, at least we are not forced to walk through minefields to clear them for our Panzers.”
“It damn well felt like it back there,” Goethe grumbled.
But we were alive, that was all that mattered, to live for the present. On the Eastern Front, that was our mantra. We had a half-track for transport, the most durable and practical on the primitive Russians roads, we were well armed and we were on the road to Ryabovo. The Moscow road.
Chapter Two
We drove past the town of Tosno, yet another miserable collection of ramshackle wooden isbas. As usual, the only brick structure in the town was the Communist Party HQ. Everyone was equal in the socialist utopia, none more so than the communists, naturally. It was strange, I’d been brought up by a left-wing father, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Germany. I’d been so convinced of the rightness and honesty of the Communist cause that I’d abruptly ended my Luftwaffe service as a pilot and gone to Spain to fly for the International Brigade, helping to defend the democratic Republican government from Generalissimo Franco’s fascists. After my aircraft crashed I joined another International Brigades Unit, the Thalmann Battalion, fighting on the ground. Captured by Franco’s black Moroccan Army of Africa, I’d been sent back to Germany in chains. When Adolf Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union he needed troops and so I was forced to ‘volunteer’ for the Sonderbattalion Kurz. Our job was to follow in the rear of the advancing armies, seeking out and destroying partisans. In fact, our work so far had been nothing more worthwhile than looting artworks for the Nazi leaders. Occasionally Kurz introduced a little variety by locating and executing supposed guerrilla fighters. His method was exactly that, a two-stage process, locate and execute. Kurz had little time for the inconvenience of a trial. It was not a happy existence for someone like me who had actually fought for the communists out of a belief in their cause. Except that in Russia I discovered what communism meant to the wretched lives of the peasants and it was not something to be envied. In short, I came to understand that there was little to choose between the regimes of Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler.
“We’re coming up on Ushaki,” Blomberg shouted. “About ten kilometers to Ryabovo.”
“Very well, Werner. This could be a good place to hide the half-track, we’ll go in on foot from here. According to Kurz, we’re quite close to the First Shock Army, they’re deployed all around this area. Tell Wasser to find some good cover for the vehicle.”
Blomberg leaned down to shout to Wasser. We were driving through the small town of Ushaki. More wooden isbas, but all of these had been torched to deny their use to the German armies. Then he found a narrow gulley, it looked as if it was part of a railway siding, now fallen into disuse. He drove down into a shallow dip in the ground and it quickly became obvious that we were in the right place. We were just below the level of the road, no one would see the half-track unless they actually stumbled on it. Wasser braked to a halt.
“Good work, Wasser. Men, we need plenty of foliage to disguise the vehicle, I’d hate a passing Sturmovik to drop a bomb on it. Walking back to Leningrad doesn’t have any appeal for me.”
We hadn’t seen any Russians and two hours later we were on the outskirts of Ryabovo, a small town midway between Moscow and Leningrad. The town stretched out in front of us, just visible through the gloom of the early evening twilight. Then we saw the Soviets, temporary fortifications that formed part of the 1st Shock Army. There were several sandbagged emplacements, two field guns, a host of Maxim machine guns and at least three hundred troops. Felix Brenner borrowed my field glasses to confirm the enemy numbers. I watched him as he panned across the landscape. He stood as erect as he could, before the war he had planned a career as a professional footballer. As a result of a poor diet during the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic, his formative years, he’d grown up with bow legs, putting an end to his sporting ambitions. I could still rely on him, he put the energy he would have used playing football into being a good soldier. Sadly, he was not much of a hit with the girls, to his eternal regret. Thin, pale-skinned and with untidy, lank blonde hair over disappointed, sad, grey eyes, they tended to look at his bow legs and move on. He’d volunteered for the Sonderbattalion Kurz, one of the few that I could rely on absolutely.
“I’d say more than three hundred, at least four hundred. How the hell are we going to fight our way through that lot?”
“We don’t fight them, Brenner, we need to sneak through them. If we get involved in a firefight, we’re dead. As soon as it’s fully dark we get going. I want a...”
We dived under cover as a Soviet Zil truck came trundling down the road from the direction we’d just come. He must have joined the road at some point before Leningrad, I had little doubt he was bringing supplies for the 1st Shock Army. I had an idea, we could borrow the truck, it might just work to get us through their lines undetected.
“Take off your helmets. Blomberg, you look most like a Soviet with that PPSh you’re carrying, we’re going to pretend to be NKVD.”
He carried the distinctive PPSh, a Soviet submachine gun designed by Georgi Shpagin. With a drum magazine firing 7.62mm Tokarev rounds it was also capable or firing our German 7.63 Mauser cartridges. The PPSh was therefore easily supplied with ammunition, in fact so many were captured that it became the second most common submachine gun used our troops on the Eastern Front. The MP38 machine pistol was of course the most common.
The men removed were looking at me as if I was crazy to try such a rudimentary deception. Perhaps I was, there was little in this war to be sane about, not least my enforced service in Kurz’s battalion of looters and murderers. But I thought we could get away with it, I pushed Blomberg out into the road where he stood looking embarrassed and uncomfortable. And not a little frightened.
“Wave, Blomberg, get him to stop. Make sure he sees your PPSh. Try and look like the NKVD.”
I heard him shout back, “How does the NKVD look?”
“Nasty,” I shouted back. But he was concentrating on the truck, he did look the part, confidently waving the vehicle to a stop with his subm
achine gun. It stopped and the driver’s head poked out of the window and asked Blomberg a question in Russian. His face changed from curiosity to puzzlement and then recognition in the space of a couple of seconds. It was too late, I had crept to the side of the cab, I jumped up on the step and jammed my own machine pistol into his face.
“Do you speak German?”
He looked confused, it seemed that he did not. I gestured to him to climb out of the truck and the men took hold of him and held him firmly at the side of the road. Wasser stepped up into the driver’s seat and looked at the controls.
“Can you drive this thing?”
He nodded. “No problem, it’s no different to one of ours.”
“Good.” I called the men over to the truck. “We’d better mount up and keep moving, we don’t know what we’ll find up ahead.”
“What about the Russian?” Brenner asked.
They’d tied soldier’s arms with rope, he was shivering in terror. Guerrilla doctrine, operating behind the lines dictated that we should kill him, but it was not my style. I had little choice.
“We’ll take him with us, you’d better find something to gag him, we don’t want him shouting out at the wrong time.”
They looked reluctant at the idea of dragging a Soviet prisoner through enemy lines, but none of them were keen on killing him out of hand. Except for Goethe, of course.
“It’s a bad move, taking him with us. Leave him to me, I’ll kill him and get him out of our hair.”
The fleshy, cruel face of my Scharfuhrer glared at me. I couldn’t be certain if he genuinely wanted to take care of the problem or to wallow in the death of another human being. He was certainly capable of it, perhaps it was both. Of more interest to me was the reaction of the Russian, when Goethe spoke of killing him his face became as white as the snowy landscape and he shook even more. I walked over to him.
“So you do speak German?”
He nodded. “Yes, is true, I speak some German. A little.”
“He could be useful to us, I don’t want him killed. He comes with us, Goethe.”
The Scharfuhrer looked angry and muttered something my being stupid for taking along a Russian prisoner, but I ignored him. The men climbed into the back of the truck, Wasser put on the Russian’s steel helmet, I sat in the middle of the cab and Blomberg on the outside, holding his PPSh prominently. The Russian prisoner was pushed to the floor out of sight.
“Where is the position of our German soldiers, the ones you are trying to capture?” I asked the prisoner.
He pointed further along the road. “When I left earlier they were up ahead, about one kilometer. It’s on the edge of the town, they’re defending a disused factory. We are supposed to attack them tomorrow morning, the NKVD will attack also, from the other side.”
So we had very little time to get them out.
“Are there any other roads from the north into the town?”
He shook his head. “Only this one.”
So it was this road or nothing. We could abandon the idea of the truck and go in on foot, but I was convinced the truck was our best chance. What was needed was a bold bluff to get us through the Russian lines.
“Wasser, start driving towards the town. They’ll try and stop us when we reach their sentries, but wave and smile and keep going.”
I dragged the Russian up to squeeze in between us and covered his tied hands with a greatcoat.
“When we reach your sentries, tell them we’re carrying women for the officers and the orders are not to stop.”
He nodded emphatically. I’d have no way of knowing what he said, but if it was the wrong thing, he knew that my machine pistol pressed into his side would correct his ‘error’. I told the men in the back to keep out of sight as Wasser drove forward. It worked perfectly, when we reached their position the sentries waved us down. Wasser slowed, Blomberg waved, the prisoner said a few hurried words in Russian and we went past them without any shots being fired or alarms being raised. At least until we’d traveled another half kilometer, then there were shouts from the Russian lines. In front of us were two MG34s aiming at the truck from the broken windows of a low, half-destroyed factory building. Wasser stopped and an SS officer came out, armed with an MP38.
“Halt!”
We’d arrived.
Once we’d convinced the officer, an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer, a Captain, that we were who we said we were he allowed us to dismount. We walked into the factory building, it was little more than an echoing, empty shell. We shook hands.
“Hauptsturmfuhrer Jurgen von Raasch, in command of the Third Company, Waffen-SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.”
I identified myself and looked around.
“Where are the rest of your men?”
All I could see was fifteen men, together with the machine gun crews. Including him, twenty men in all. “I thought you had a company here.”
“I do have a company,” he answered grimly. “This is all I have left. We’ve been in a number of ambushes, the Russians hit us pretty hard and we had a series of running battles. I started off with two hundred men.”
“What about Standartenfuhrer Heydrich?”
His lip curled and he pointed to a dark corner. A figure was lying underneath a woolen greatcoat, asleep.
“He’s there.”
I walked over and shook him by the shoulder.
“Standartenfuhrer Heydrich, we’ve come to take you back to our lines, Sir.”
His eyes opened slowly, then he stood up and fixed me with a slight sneer.
“How exactly do you plan to do that, Obersturmfuhrer?”
His voice was slow and precise, his tone overbearing and supercilious. Obviously I was far beneath his exalted rank and status. Unlike his cousin Heydrich, who was very tall and very thin, this man was rather short and stout with wire framed glasses on his pale, flabby face. I doubted he’d ever been a world class sportsman like his famous cousin. Unless there was a competition for stamp collecting. One feature he shared with Gruppenfuhrer Heydrich, as well as his lank, blonde hair, was the long, beak-like nose. People had once whispered that Reinhardt Heydrich’s nose was evidence of Jewish ancestry, but after several of them disappeared into the concentration camps, the rumors died away.
“We’ll need to go out on foot, Sir. I suggest we make a start very soon.”
“I thought I heard a truck. Why can’t we use that, I’ve had enough of walking?”
“They saw us come in with the truck, they’ll be waiting for us to drive it out again. It would be suicide, Sir.”
He sighed. “Oh, very well. But I need to get some rest, call me when it’s time to leave.”
Von Raasch was watching with an exasperated look on his face. I went over to join him. “Is he always like this?”
He nodded. “Usually, yes. Often he’s a lot worse, thinks he’s a master tactician. That’s why I lost half of my men, he forced us into an ridiculous position, totally indefensible and the Russians slaughtered us. I was lucky to get away with the few men I have left.”
I told him about our Russian prisoner and the two pronged attack he’d said was due at dawn.
“I’m not surprised, it was only a matter of time. What are your orders?”
I told him about the plan to extricate Heydrich while his Leibstandarte troopers covered the escape.
“So we’re being thrown to the wolves, are we?” He smiled bitterly. “I imagine this is goodbye then, Roth.”
I shook my head. “It’s not the way I work, Hauptsturmfuhrer. We all go together or not at all.”
“But what about your orders?”
“Change of plan. I suggest we leave inside of an hour, we haven’t much longer.”
He nodded. “We’ll be ready, how do you intend to do this?”
I outlined the idea I’d been forming in my head. He laughed. “It’s pretty risky.”
“I saw it work once in Spain, it’s the best hope we have of our all getting out together.”
“You w
ere in Spain too? I was there with the Condor Legion.”
“I was with the International Brigade, fighting on the other side. Isn’t life strange?”
He grinned. “It is certainly that.”
Half an hour later Heydrich appeared beside us, yawning loudly. “Is it time to leave, Obersturmfuhrer?”
“Almost, Sir. Do you know the whereabouts of this religious artifact they seem to think is so important?”
“I found out that it is in a different location, we were misinformed. We were not able to retrieve it, there was no possibility of reaching its hiding place. But that is none of your business. Tell me, when do we leave?”
“About thirty minutes, the men are making preparations now. We need to carry as much ammunition as possible, you can load up your backpack with MP38 clips.”
He stared at me, horrified. “Do you know who I am? I don’t fetch and carry, how dare you suggest it.”
I’d had enough of this pompous fool, I couldn’t help but put him in his place. “I know who you are, Standartenfuhrer Heydrich. You are a senior SS officer about to take part in an escape through enemy lines. I had the honor to fight alongside Obergruppenfuhrer Paul Hausser, I recall on that occasion he had no problem with carrying the same load as his men. So you can fill your pack with machine pistol clips, unless you’d sooner stay here on your own. Every man that comes with me fights, and I promise you, nobody quits. We haven’t got any capacity for passengers.”
Von Raasch was staring at us shocked, waiting to see the outcome. Finally Heydrich gave in and shrugged, but his voice was like ice. “Very well, it seems I have no choice but to take orders from a junior officer. I assure you, Obersturmfuhrer, Berlin will hear about your behavior.”
I almost laughed. “We’re not back in Berlin yet. I’d wait until we get through the Russian lines before you make any plans.”
He looked pale as he realized at last that he was in for a hard fight. I ignored him, he had two choices.
“Haupsturmfuhrer, is everything ready?”
“Almost,” he smiled. Under his breath, he added, “You’re a brave man, Roth, but I wouldn’t push him too far. He has a long memory.”