by Gary Haynes
‘When you get to my age it’s always chilly, I suppose.’
He decided he should go to what he called the ghost house, which from outside looked like a half-derelict structure amid a collection of shambolic outbuildings. He had to satisfy himself that his anonymity was assured, at least for the present.
He began examining his hands, as men do when they’ve attained a certain age. His were spidery and had protruding veins and deep wrinkles, reminiscent of fish scales.
How will it all end? he thought.
There was not a hint of fear. Fear was an emotion he’d learned to control and scoff at, years before. What he did know was that of the few activities he still enjoyed, killing with his hands would be the last to lose its allure, although he wore gloves for that now.
‘I think we should plant some herbs here,’ he said. ‘Rosemary. The symbol of remembrance.’
Vezzani nodded again. This time soberly.
The old man was remembering the war, the ubiquity of violence let loose on the world. How had he survived it all? He didn’t know, although at first he’d thrived amid the destruction and chaos, like a weed. Later, it had devastated him. He would gladly have died back then if it had meant those he loved had lived. He’d never questioned that.
12
Berlin, 1945, the same day.
The Waffen-SS man was a thick-necked section leader, with greased-down black hair. He worked out with boulders and hewn tree trunks, as he’d done since his youth on a Bavarian cattle farm. He unbolted one of the bunker’s outer steel doors and stepped out onto the flagstone, his hands on the magazine and trigger handle of his standard-issue MP40 submachine gun, the brown leather strap slung over his right shoulder.
Lutz Richter followed close behind him, the Standartenführer single oak leaf collar patches and the twin pips on his Oberst shoulder straps marking him out. He shielded his pig-like eyes, unaccustomed as they were now to natural light.
They walked up the concrete steps at the opposite end of the bunker to where Pavel Romasko and his Red Army squad had entered, Richter’s tiny eyelids blinking.
Three other SS men now exited, all wearing spring-design combat camouflage on their helmets and tunics, together with grey-green trousers. They carried bundles of documents in slatted boxes that contained written reports, detailing certain events which had occurred in the occupied territories. Richter had been told to document everything — a Nazi trait. But as dear to him as they were, he’d decided to burn the papers if there was a chance of them getting into Soviet hands. He’d never allow the secrets to be revealed to the Jewish Bolsheviks. Lives were at stake. Precious lives.
Unlike Richter, the men were originally extermination camp guards before they’d been drafted into a fighting unit, the Third SS Panzer Division Totenkopf. Heading for what was left of the driveway, they trudged through shallow puddles of blood and gas, bubbling like the bowls of macabre hookah pipes in the heavy downfall.
The outside world shocked Richter. The constant if distant shellfire. The tracer rounds like miniature meteorites falling from the sky. A sky that was blackened now by the belching smoke, which had all but hidden the jagged tops of what few buildings remained standing. A city in ruins. A life in ruins.
He’d been ensconced in the bunker for the past three days. With the fall of Berlin imminent, the second round of controlled explosions that had taken place were meant to destroy at least half of it. The first, smaller rigged ones had supposed to block off the corridors leading from the front entrance. That hadn’t worked either, and eight of his men had died, some voluntarily, it had to be said. An SS captain had even been cut off from what was now an escape route by falling masonry. He sighed, guessing this hadn’t been the only retreat to have taken place throughout the Reich in the last days that had resulted in partial demolitions and unintended loss of life.
But he was relieved that he’d ordered some of the bunker’s contents to be burned as well as buried. Just to be sure. And he’d been assured that the most sensitive room had been reduced to rubble, that the potentially damning evidence had been destroyed by flames. If it had remained intact, it was sure to have been misunderstood, so outwardly gross were the items he’d reluctantly left there. They would have ensured his immediate arrest. His death by hanging, he believed. But it was all gone. Why worry?
Richter looked too old to be in uniform, let alone the SS, with an obvious pot belly. His grey hair was clipped close to his head, his ears fist-like. A wispy moustache exaggerated rather than detracted from his sagging mouth. He glanced down now at the tailored, earth-grey service tunic of the Allgemeine-SS, an essentially administrative branch that ran the main SS departments, including the concentration camps. Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, had ordered black uniforms to be worn only by the panzer crews and the so-called Germanic-SS, Nordic collaborators employed to organize the rounding up of Jews in their own countries. But he missed the black. Himmler had said people felt sick when they saw it.
The tunic had been covered with a layer of fine dust like talcum powder, and was now becoming sodden. He wiped the huge raindrops from his eyes. He squinted as their vinegar-like quality stung his eyeballs and the fine grains they contained became lodged under his eyelids. He took off his visor cap, brushed off the heavy wool and bullion cockade, and stared for a few moments at the imperial eagle, the Reichsadler, perched atop the swastika, the death’s head beneath it. Militaristic emblems that he’d embraced with enthusiasm.
The fusty air in the bunker had been replaced by something pungent and disconcerting, a mixture of cordite fumes and countless immolations. The stench of both the destruction of the city and the people that had inhabited it, he knew. He watched the orange-tipped ashes rise above the glowing cinders beyond the bunker’s crater-ridden garden. As they reached the mass of low-slung smoke, hovering like an airborne leviathan, they vanished forever. The symbolism was not lost on him.
They walked to the front of the bunker and Richter saw a German in uniform, lying beside a bomb crater some distance away. He took out his field binoculars. It was a dead teenage girl, with tendons and ligaments hanging like crimson tentacles from a stump where her leg had been. He sighed.
Taking heavy breaths, the SS men lowered the boxes onto either side of the driveway that now looked like a battered sluiceway, with a channel of muddy water running down it. Richter watched them occasionally scan the wide and wasted street for any signs of the enemy.
He scowled. They were on their own. No more men could be spared. He’d been told that few combatants survived. Only remnants of the Volkssturm, the Berlin militia, together with pockets of Hitler Youth, and two thousand Waffen-SS that were stationed around the Reich Chancellery. The last line of defence against hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened Red Army infantrymen. He feared the worst.
He turned to the section leader. ‘The truck’s late.’
‘It will be here, colonel.’
A rifleman looked petrified, despite the words that had been spoken. He was puny in comparison to the well-built NCO, Richter too, with eyes like coals and the cruel mouth of a reptile.
A few minutes later, Richter heard a vehicle approaching. His men raised their Karabiner 98 kurz rifles and MP40s, straining to see if it was theirs.
‘It’s ours, colonel,’ the section leader said, evidently relieved.
Richter saw the Waffen-SS Opel Blitz truck manoeuvre around the bend. It inched over the twisted gates and proceed up the pitted driveway towards them. A regulation camouflage design, it had a huge frontal engine grille, and two prominent headlamps atop the bulky wheel arches. The roofless truck was graceless, but Richter couldn’t remember seeing anything more appealing. Red crosses had been painted over the SS insignia, and a hammer and sickle flag had been draped over the bonnet. They would proceed as far as possible, masquerading as a Red Army ambulance crew. If they were caught, they’d likely be shot on the spot, even though they still wore their own uniforms.
Richter watched his
men shoulder their weapons. Two climbed up to the truck’s bed as the engine revved. The other pair lifted the first box above the lowered tailgate. They edged it towards the outstretched arms, gasping. The box was secured with thick rope.
‘Faster,’ Richter said, rubbing his right hand up and down his thigh.
When all the boxes were on board, they were covered with a mouldy tarpaulin, and the SS men positioned themselves underneath it, in each of the four corners of the bed.
Richter had told them it would be a perilous journey, but he’d heard talk of a corridor that still existed to the west of the city. Maybe it was just a story. Maybe it was meant to foster hope among the would-be escapees. Who knew for sure?
He got in beside the driver, another SS section leader, with a thin nose and a severed earlobe, whose regulation goggles were fastened around his steel helmet. He wore a stinking greatcoat.
‘Can we go, colonel?’ the driver said.
‘Yes, quick as you can.’
Richter had told them they would take their chances with the favoured British and Americans, like thousands of other soldiers and civilians that were escaping the capital, and that they should swap their uniforms for those of the Heer as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
He would use the papers in the boxes to prove those named only fought against armed partisans and military units, that they should be given safe passage to the west. He desired only to save them from the wrath of Stalin and his NKVD henchmen. But even if he managed to outmanoeuvre the enemy troops within Berlin’s city limits, he knew that still left the Red Army’s outer encirclement forces. The Soviets were everywhere, like flies in summer.
13
In a makeshift observation post in the remnants of a three storey, eighteenth century mansion across the brick-littered street from the bunker, Joseph Kazapov had watched the comings and goings with rising frustration and a suppressed anger. But there was not a hint of panic. What use was panic? He knew panic could do nothing to ease the predicament someone found themselves in. The collective memories of a hundred old men could not match the sights he had seen in the last four years. A man was not meant to experience so much, and yet he believed he’d remained sane. But nothing surprised him. Nothing shocked him. Nothing brought about the hysteria of the hapless. The myriad hapless. The doomed.
The young NKVD lieutenant, along with three snipers and a signalman, all of whom were dressed in dark-green combat camouflage, had placed the bunker under surveillance three hours earlier. Until the arrival of the Red Army assault squad, nothing of significance had happened, apart from muffled explosions. But then the subterranean facility had erupted in a series of much larger explosions, and seconds later, a handful of SS had emerged.
Kazapov had decided not to act when he’d seen his fellow Soviets heading for the bunker’s entrance. No one had thought to tell him what to do if Red Army soldiers had attempted to enter it. Besides, he’d had no way of communicating with them, despite the signalman. He’d seen that the squad had been without radio communication. It had been a good decision.
He’d been told to sit tight, to follow his previous strategy and avoid giving away their position, after his signalman had reported it. He’d already let many roaming Waffen-SS units filter by. Men from France, units of the fanatical Charlemagne Division, together with SS combat platoons from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, as well as native Germans. The dregs of a once massive and diverse army.
He’d been told too that if another hour had elapsed, a sufficient Soviet force would’ve been in place to storm the bunker. He was relieved that hadn’t happened. The bunker would’ve been even more damaged in a full-on assault. As it was, he reckoned that detailed excavations could unravel almost anything, and he’d been promised that he would be the first to investigate its contents. Such a thing was a sign of trust, and he relished the task of searching it. Rumours were already circulating around the NKVD junior officers about its purpose.
A Waffen-SS NCO had been taken prisoner eleven hours before. He’d had certain papers on him that related to the bunker. They were signed by someone that Kazapov had heard of, and after checking his personal records, had been able to pinpoint. As a result, he’d requested the assignment, although he’d done so with a degree of enthusiasm that hadn’t betrayed this fact. The chance of speaking to the man, an SS officer, had been enough to spur him on.
At his short briefing, he’d been informed by the NKVD officer who’d interrogated the SS NCO that the bunker was partly a field hospital, and a group of Soviet male soldiers had been taken there, although that hadn’t been to administer morphine or liniments to their various non-life-threatening wounds. They’d been butchered. But it appeared that the SS officer who had signed the papers had just left the bunker, together with his subordinates. Kazapov knew he couldn’t leave his post to pursue them. In Stalin’s world, that could only end one way: face-down in a lime pit, with a bullet to the back of the neck.
He had to live, he told himself. Even more so now, perhaps.
Two years previously, after fighting in the Red Army, he’d volunteered to join a small, NKVD department that had been charged with overseeing the investigations into Nazi war crimes. His foreign language skills were tested — and his allegiance. He’d passed admirably. The department was seconded to the Soviet extraordinary state commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German–Fascist invaders and their accomplices. The commission had been established on the second of November 1942, with the Russian acronym ChGK. His decision to volunteer then had not been made randomly, either.
During his first assignment, the ChGK had gathered evidence — interviewing eye witnesses, collating documents, exhuming and identifying victims, interrogating prisoners — in respect of atrocities that had taken place in the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia after the Germans had left in February 1943. The trials took place in the summer of that year. Seven thousand civilians, including Jews, members of the local communist party and suspected Russian partisans, had been murdered. Some had been shot and hung by the Gestapo, but the majority had been flung into the vans of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS paramilitary death squads, and poisoned by gas. Seven Russian collaborators had been convicted, and Kazapov had played his part. He’d watched them hang in a Krasnodar city square, in front of a cheering crowd. The fact that the NKVD had invented the vans as an instrument of death in 1936 had remained a state secret.
Kazapov was twenty-three years old, with thick hair the colour of jet, a chalky and unblemished complexion. There was something of the hyena about him. He was prone to move at a trot, tended to scowl, and his eyes were as dark as the mouth of a cave. His colouring had been inherited from his mother, and had been passed to his three younger sisters, too. His father had been a blue-eyed blond.
If only his sisters had had their father’s hair and eyes, he often thought.
‘Comrade lieutenant,’ the lead sniper said.
Kazapov moved over to the sniper’s position, the man’s right eye fixed to an optical sight on his 7.62mm Mosin sniper rifle, the sight wrapped in an oily rag. He was a diligent soldier, Kazapov knew, a 25-year-old Siberian, his round cheeks the hue of herring bones. His forefinger never left the trigger guard.
‘What is it?’
‘Movement, comrade lieutenant. Some of our men are coming out of the bunker.’
Five minutes later, after the signalman had informed a major at the NVKD Divisional HQ of the appearance of what was left of the Red Army assault squad, Kazapov watched two military trucks pull up, and a dozen or more NKVD troops disembark. The remnants of the squad were led or carried via field stretchers onto the beds of the trucks and were driven away. The Soviet frontline had already advanced to the point of the bunker, despite the desperate defence of Berlin’s every house, every room in a house, by its fated defenders.
The signalman called out to him.
‘What is it?’ Kazapov said.
‘Major Volsky, c
omrade lieutenant.’
The major ordered Kazapov to apprehend the escaping SS, who’d been under constant observation by a reconnaissance unit, he said.
Kazapov’s mother was from Georgia, like Joseph Stalin. Like Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. But she’d married his father, a schoolteacher from Stalingrad, and had settled there. His father had died in August 1942, in the first few days of the Nazi offensive on the city, buried in rubble following a multiple Stuka attack. Kazapov had spent too many nights imagining his father’s premature death. He’d seen him looking up in terror at the aircrafts’ inverted gull wings. He’d seen him hold his head in his hands as he heard the Jericho-Trompete sirens, mounted on the gear legs, as they’d dive-bombed. The Stukas were the wailing heralds of Germany’s lightening war. Blitzkrieg.
He’d vowed to kill as many Germans as he could from that day, and he’d kept that promise to himself. Now, he documented the acts of their many war criminals.
14
Outskirts of Berlin, the same day.
Kazapov had outlined his simple plan to the fourteen men now under his command, all hand-picked from an elite NKVD rifle division. They’d just disembarked from a commandeered German half-track APC. A few days ago, it had been hastily painted regulation green, with red stars prominent on the side panels. It was standard practice for all combatants to make use of their enemy’s captured military vehicles and ordnance.
Now, Kazapov and his men approached a clearing in a pinewood, a few miles from the city centre. Through underwood and berry bushes, he could just about make out an area of grass, roughly 200 square feet in size. The sky was overcast, an oppressive, pewter grey. It was 6.15 pm. The sky above the city streets had appeared devoid of life, of even the smallest bird or flying insect. But it was different here, despite the grey. There were starlings and butterflies, a hovering sparrow hawk. Fresh tussocks of grass had sprouted, the air redolent. Even the rain had stopped.