BERLIN: Reaping the Whirlwind (The Schultz family story Book 2)

by Paul Grant

  ‘I will, son. I will.’

  The train started to move. The Dog Chain gave me another look, ‘Come on, Sergeant. You should know better.’

  I dropped Ulrich to the floor, wiping the tears tenderly from his cheeks. He stared longingly, ‘Don’t be long, Papa.’

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was choked. I turned to the train and a sea of arms pulled me up onto the moving carriage. I managed a look over my shoulder as I scrambled up. Ulrich looked crestfallen, like he believed I was going for good.

  CHAPTER 6

  DECEMBER 1942, STALINGRAD

  Given the hammering we’d handed out to Ivan in the last few months, nobody believed they had the resources with which to mount an offensive. What followed wasn’t just a small offensive. It was a massive pincer movement enveloping the city. Literally hours after returning from leave and meeting up with the men again, we were surrounded. The disorganisation and panic that Meissner and I had witnessed getting back to the front line didn’t bode well.

  It was bitterly cold, -30 degrees centigrade. My mouth was dry as we awaited the signal to attack. We were lying in wait inside the rear of the Stalingrad tractor works. They didn’t produce tractors now, in fact, they didn’t produce anything. T34 production had ceased on our invasion of the city. I looked around the mangled machinery which littered the building. The place was a haven for booby traps and snipers, yet, somehow, we were all still alive. Marz, Wiebke, Scharner, Schram, Koegel, Meissner and me. Our job, along with three hundred or so others, was to clear the courtyard of the enemy. It didn’t feel right. Hastily convened as we were, there appeared to have been little planning or foresight.

  We heard the signal and I was first out into the open. My bayonet fixed, I was ready to look Ivan in the eye. After covering the first ten metres of the pitted landscape, there was no response from the enemy. Had we caught them with their pants down? Scharner and I reached their point bunker simultaneously. He threw in the first stick grenade whilst I took cover. Seconds later, we slid down into the bunker. I landed deftly, bracing myself for contact, but there was nothing. Nobody.

  ‘Clear!’ I bellowed.

  Then I heard the same repeated over and over. Ivan had pulled back. I hopped out of the bunker, catching sight of the rest of the men still streaming from the building onto the attack. I was ready to move on to the next line of bunkers, when the machine gun opened fire.

  Back out in the open, men started to fall around me. I threw myself down, catching sight of Scharner doing likewise. The injured started to cry out. The machine gun went on with its death chatter, raking the area with unerring accuracy. A man to my left screamed in pain. It was always the hardest thing to hear, and the most difficult to ignore. I scrambled in his direction, but before I could reach him, he took another round. I flinched, pushing myself into the ground as the frozen dirt flew around me. We were pinned down out in the open. I knew something was badly wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint what.

  The gun continued its relentless tirade. Then I heard a distinct click and there was a pause. I lifted my face from the floor and looked over my shoulder in time to see the muzzle flash as the gun opened up again. It was coming from behind and above us. Once again, our intelligence had failed us. The sights of the gun were vectored on the courtyard to cause maximum damage, and it was doing a bloody good job.

  There was a pause again.

  ‘Behind us, second floor window,’ I bellowed.

  Within seconds, single rifle shots started to crack. The men were homing in on Ivan’s position. I knew we had to get back to the safety of the main building, but we could only manage that when the machine gun position was taken out.

  As if they could read my thoughts, the machine gun started up again, showering me with clods of mud in the process. Rifle shots continued from the ground. The chatter of the gun ceased suddenly. I lifted my head to see a dead Russian being pushed from the window. It wouldn’t be long before a replacement was in position.

  I was up. ‘Back to the building! Move!’

  ‘Scharner, Meissner. Keep them pinned down!’ Their return fire again became incessant. I signalled for the other men to fall back. Men were already sprinting back to cover, some scuttling through windows.

  I was closest to Scharner, so I waved Meissner back to the building first. Scharner must have scored another hit, because I could see one of the Russians trying to heave his dead comrade off the machine gun he was now slumped over.

  I tapped Scharner’s shoulder. ‘Go!’

  We ran for the shelter of the building, jumping over the remains of the lifeless, ignoring the cries of pain coming from those not yet dead.

  I flung myself down next to the wall and crawled through a gap in the brickwork.

  ‘That was a bloody massacre!’ Marz was first in my ear. ‘We’re bloody sacrifices so that somebody can tell Adolf we’re still attacking.’

  In normal circumstances I would have shut him up, especially with other men around us, but I felt the same way. It was senseless slaughter.

  My mind was ready to form a party to go up above and deal with the machine gun position, when it became irrelevant.

  ‘Urrah!’ The shouts of the Russians went up. Poking my head up, a mass of green was charging across the yard. We’d been well and truly suckered, but there was no time to worry about that. I knew if they got close we’d be sitting targets for hand grenades. We had no choice but to go out and look the enemy in the eye.

  ‘Every man out!’ I bawled.

  We streamed out into the courtyard to meet the oncoming enemy. A Russian boy of no more than eighteen ran at me fast, but I was able to sidestep him. He fell to the ground and I stuck my bayonet in his back. I turned to look for the next threat. I saw Koegel to my right, fighting off one man, whilst his fingers squeezed around another’s neck. With one finished off, he dealt with the other by breaking his neck. Marz ferreted from bunker to bunker, dispatching the enemy with impunity.

  A smaller, older Russian came shrieking towards me, a knife high above his head. I shot him before he reached me, his head disappearing into the frosted air. To my right, Meissner was pulling his knife from a dead man’s ribs. He must have lost his gun in the melee.

  The hand-to-hand fighting went on for a long time. I couldn’t say exactly how long, but we limped back to the safety of the main building once there were no more of the enemy left. We had taken the courtyard, but only at enormous cost.

  Back in the building, I looked around the faces of our troop and was very relieved to see most of them still there. It had been a disastrous attack and yet it seemed they had all made it through.

  ‘Wiebke!’ It was Meissner’s voice.

  I checked around the men again. Koegel looked like he’d barely been in a fight, Marz was bloodstained from his antics with his trusty blade. Apart from a few bumps and bruises we were intact.

  Meissner scrambled over the fallen masonry. ‘Wiebke’s missing. He’s not here.’ He sounded panicked and out of breath.

  ‘Check down the line,’ I shouted. ‘He won’t be far away.’

  ‘He’s not there, I tell you,’ Meissner was shouting, his voice cracking.

  We shared worried glances among the group.

  ‘I didn’t see him out there,’ Schram said.

  Koegel shrugged, ‘Me neither.’

  Meissner was close to me now, real fear in his eyes. ‘We have to find him.’ He started towards the courtyard then said, in desperation, ‘Well, am I going out there on my own?’

  To the credit of the men, I didn’t need to give any orders on this one. They were all on their feet, ready to search the battlefield. We knew if he had been injured, we needed to get to him quickly. If it was the worst, as I feared, then at least we could give him a decent burial. It was what we would want in the same position; confirmation for our families, no uncertainty.

  So we went out together and searched. We scoured the battlefield for the body or at least a sign of Wiebke. It was a mess of m
angled German and Russian corpses. I didn’t care to focus on the human devastation. It was too hard to comprehend. However, if there was the smallest possibility he could be found, we were determined to do so and at least bury him with honour.

  Despite our painstaking search of the battlefield, and I mean every corner of it, Ernst Wiebke’s body was nowhere to be found. Meissner was distraught. We were all affected, even Marz. That was because, after nearly nineteen months of fighting our way across Russia, our small group had lost its first man.

  CHAPTER 7

  JANUARY 1943, STALINGRAD

  I peered out from our position, hunched in my acquired Russian greatcoat. The freezing, swirling fog sat as thick as curdled milk on the pitted landscape. I didn’t actually believe things could get any worse. Maria and the kids were never out of my thoughts. I couldn’t suppress the overwhelming feeling that I wouldn’t see them again. The worse things got, the more I thought about Ulrich. He’d be kicking a ball around the tenement courtyard, annoying the hell out of the neighbours. When I got home from work, there’d be a queue of complainants at the door headed by Ina Stinnes. I still hadn’t shaken off his look on that platform when I left. It was like he knew I might not come back. There was another reason for all the reflection, of course. It could have been the frozen corpses, German and Russian alike, scattered in front of our position. More likely, it was the fact that we were completely surrounded. Many of the men still talked about von Manstein the saviour, coming to break the Kessel, the siege, but I knew our days as a fighting force were numbered and the end was only a matter of time.

  I heard a squeal followed by a loud, insistent cursing from inside the bunker. The other men laughed. They were in good spirits, all things considered. It was the comradeship that kept us going. We’d been through so much together; the near starvation diet and the bitter cold just added to the list of experiences and emotions we’d endured as a group. Marz came out of the bunker grinning, his breath appearing before he did.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  ‘Scharner’s taken off his boots and unwrapped his feet.’

  I winced. ‘Big mistake.’

  ‘It was. Two of his toes stayed in the bandage.’

  I smiled. It wasn’t really funny, but our humour had turned a dark shade of black. Frostbite and gangrene were commonplace. Our bodies ached for salt, as our ration had been continually reduced since we’d been cut off. I still couldn’t believe we’d been rushed back into Stalingrad as the Soviets closed in. It was like the High Command had compounded the original error by condemning us to our fate.

  ‘Do you think they’ll get us out, Sarg?’

  Marz’s face still held that naïve hope. He was no more than twenty one years old.

  ‘Whilst there’s still fight in our bodies, we have to keep going, lad.’ I made a show of checking the machine gun over and instantly regretted it as my skin stuck to the freezing barrel. I felt like an idiot. He smiled at me. I didn’t know if he could see straight through me; I sincerely hoped not, for his sake. I didn’t believe for a minute they would get us out. It wasn’t that I was misleading him. I just saw it as my job to keep everyone going.

  Marz was one of a number of the younger generation, just like the digit-less Scharner and the baby-faced Schram. During the last two years, they’d had to learn fast in order to survive, but survive they had, to this point at least. Koegel and Meissner were more my age. Meissner, especially, had withdrawn to a corner of the bunker in the last few days to scribble stolen words to his loved ones. It was a bad sign as far as I was concerned, like he’d given up hope. The loss of his close pal Wiebke had hit him hard. I couldn’t help feeling there was more to his grief than met the eye, like something was churning over inside him. I put it down to Wiebke’s death and him missing home.

  Marz had propped his back against the front of the trench and pushed his hands down into his pockets.

  ‘What’s it going to be like?’ he asked.

  It was strange to hear it, refreshingly honest, if dangerous. It was the question we were all asking, but only to ourselves. We wondered what the Russians would actually do to us, because nobody believed the re-assuring words of the leaflets they’d been dropping on our lines.

  I wanted to be brutally open in my response, and ask him how we’d treated the Russian prisoners, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that.

  ‘I don’t know, Oskar. I really don’t know, but we’ll get through it. We’ve survived up until now, haven’t we?’

  It was a weak answer but I was trying to drag him out of his reflective mood. It wasn’t like him, but I didn’t blame him. He had all the questions and I had none of the answers. Who knew what went on in the upper echelons of the German High Command? Hitler had promised to get us out, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen. If they didn’t keep their word about that, how could you trust them about anything? This was the end of the line in more ways than one. We all knew it. Each man was choosing his own way out. Marz was thinking about captivity, Meissner had withdrawn into himself with his letters and dreams of home and some had already taken the choice of the bullet - their own. I was still more interested in survival, be it in the hands of the Russians or as part of some far-fetched break-out. I fully intended to get back home to see Maria’s face and hold her close to me. That final leave had intensified the feeling that burned in me and it would never be extinguished.

  My train of thought was brought to an abrupt end because an explosion sounded nearby. The air was rapidly filled with those toe-curdling screeches of “Urrah”. The Russian hordes were on their way again. Marz was instantly at my side, feeding the magazine with what remained of our ammunition. His face was set in determination. As I started to fire short, economic bursts into the oncoming masses, I felt sure that no matter how bad things got, Marz would be one of the survivors.

  CHAPTER 8

  FEBRUARY 1943, BERLIN

  Maria looked at the DKE radio. It wasn’t much, but she still recalled with some pride the day they’d bought it. 35 Marks was a lot, nearly a weeks’ wages back then, but it had been worth it. Klaus and she had sat together with Ulrich, marvelling at the sound filling their humble living room. It had all been about pleasure. Maria closed her eyes. It was different now; the radio only brought bad news.

  ‘Mum?’ Ulrich motioned for Maria to turn the radio on.

  Maria was back to reality. She didn’t want to do it. She knew what was coming. It would be confirmation for her. She’d been listening to the BBC, even if there were harsh penalties for doing so. She only listened when Ulrich was out, and with the volume low; people like Ina Stinnes were always looking for a reason, any reason, to denounce someone. Maria could see Ulrich was full of hope. She felt sick to her stomach. All week he’d been trying to convince himself the Sixth Army would break out from Stalingrad. She would find him staring at the map of Russia he’d made up on his bedroom wall to track the advances of the Wehrmacht. He was convinced Adolf Hitler would do something miraculous to save his father. Maria had guessed what she believed to be the truth some time ago. The foreign radio broadcasts helped her see through the lies they were constantly fed. Ulrich, however, was about to be let down cruelly.

  Maria clicked on the Goebbels’ Schnauze (Goebbels’ Gob) as they called it. As the radio buzzed through its warm-up, Maria’s focus returned to Ulrich. Maria had assumed Klaus had returned to Stalingrad in November. It was where he’d come from before his leave, where his unit had been. So, it was logical to think that’s where he had headed back to, even if, at times like these, it was easy for emotion to override logic. She’d been trying to prepare her son for the bad news, but he’d only wanted to hear positive things. Maria knew she had to be careful what she said, not to sound defeatist. Children were denouncing their parents these days.

  The music was solemn, sombre, probably an ode to something or other by Wagner, Maria thought. Even on such a desperate day, those people were still fawning to Hitler by using his favou
rite composer. The radio crackled and then the real announcement began:

  “From Fuhrer headquarters, 3 February 1943. The supreme command of the Wehrmacht announces that the battle of Stalingrad has come to an end.”

  Then it came, like a hammer blow wrapped in Nazi exhortations.

  “True to its oath of allegiance, the Sixth Army, under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal Paulus, has been annihilated by the overwhelming superiority of enemy numbers.”

  Ulrich turned in shock to look at Maria. Now there was only horror, tears already starting to prick in the corner of his eyes. Maria was confused momentarily. What were these people saying?

  “The sacrifice of the Sixth Army was not in vain...They died so Germany might live.”

  Maria closed her eyes in disgust, in realisation. The regime was trying to force another lie on the people of Germany. How could all the Sixth Army have perished? She knew very well that wasn’t the case, not according to the BBC at least, and what would they gain from lying about that? They’d reported many thousands of prisoners taken by the Russians. It wasn’t great news; no doubt their treatment would be awful, but how could the regime want to pedal such a lie? And more to the point, how was she to tell Ulrich without admitting what she knew from the foreign broadcasts?

  Ulrich fell into her arms, the tears pouring down his face.

  ‘He’s gone Mama. Papa has gone,’ Ulrich managed through the sobs.

  The anguish Maria felt was only matched by the anger she felt towards these goddamned Nazis. She hated them for what they’d done, for all the pain and suffering they’d brought to the Jews, the people of Berlin, her own family. Now, Ulrich believed his Father to be dead, just so they could use their sacrifice as an example to all. Maria felt more sickened and bitter the more she thought it through. She felt the need to fight rising inside her, the need to resist these people and what they believed in. She wouldn’t give in to them or their ilk. She knew Klaus was not dead. Deep down, she just knew it.