Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  16

  Summoning him back to the commandant’s office, Second Lieutenant Dürken invited him to sign a propaganda leaflet calling upon Soviet troops to surrender.

  Vlasov replied: As a soldier, I cannot ask other soldiers to stop doing their duty.

  Then we’ll take out the part asking them to desert, Dürken replied eagerly.

  Vlasov signed.

  On 10.9.42, just as General Paulus’s Sixth Army began to run into trouble at Stalingrad, the Germans dropped leaflets on the Red Army, inviting them to desert. These leaflets bore Vlasov’s name.

  17

  On 17.9.42, thanks to a word from Second Lieutenant Dürken, the Fascists installed him in the Department of Propaganda on Viktoriastrasse, Berlin. (Reader, think of them as the mechanized corps of the third echelon, meant to exploit breakthroughs.)—You may feel a bit fettered here in the Old Reich, Strik-Strikfeldt had warned him. There’s more legalism here than in the occupied territories—more obstructionism, I should say. As for the men in the office, I don’t really know them that well. If you have any problems, just ring me up, old fellow. I won’t desert you . . .

  When will I meet Hitler?

  Oh, right now he’s busy trying to decide how quickly our Tiger tanks ought to be fitted with the new eighty-eight-millimeter cannons—

  Vlasov’s new offices were brightly lit, if windowless, and the administration gave him plenty of liquor. On the wall glared the face of HITLER—THE LIBERATOR. Sometimes there were hilarious drinking parties with the secretaries, who almost seemed to have been selected for their voluptuousness (if I may be permitted to employ that word to describe creatures of the Slavic racial type). Sitting back on a faded green sofa, he smiled a little awkwardly while a drunken Cossack poet whose parents had been shot by the Bolsheviks back in ’21 declaimed strophes pertaining to this antipodal realm / where summer burns eternal. (You’re quite the relativist, but I don’t blame you! laughed a lieutenant-general who hailed from the coldest part of Siberia.) A German girl was desperately kissing a Russian girl in the corner.—Well, let them all take their pleasure where they can, thought Vlasov with an impersonally pitying affection. Soon enough they’ll be fighting for their lives.—Perhaps because he himself had become a little drunk, they reminded him of the mahorka-smoking troops he’d commanded during the battle of Moscow. Bivouacking under the snow (for the Fascists had burned down all the peasant huts), they too got tipsy, sang songs (I’m warm in this freezing bunker / thanks to your love’s eternal flame!), played chess, crushed lice, cleaned their weapons and prepared to die. At those times Vlasov found his war stories much in demand. Pouting, a typist named Olenka demanded to know why he hadn’t saved his Chinese Order of the Golden Dragon for her.—I would have worn it around my neck, Andrei Andreyevich, I really really would. And do you know what else? Every night I would have kissed it . . .—Vlasov chuckled and pinched her, his face relaxing into goodnatured ugliness.

  It was on this very same green sofa that in company with a certain M. A. Zykov (soon to be liquidated on account of his Jewish antecedents) Vlasov wrote the famous Smolensk Declaration, which begins: Friends and brothers! BOLSHEVISM IS THE ENEMY OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE. Their colleagues toasted them with vodka and then again with schnapps. It was signed on 27.12.42 and published on 13.1.43, one day after having been approved by the Führer. Although it was meant for the Red Army, Reich Minister Rosenberg arranged for it to fall on the occupied territories, where, in Strik-Strikfeldt’s words, one could come across grey wraiths who subsisted on corpses and tree-bark.

  By then the Germans had already lost the strategic initiative. Rommel was in trouble at El Alamein; then came the landing in French North Africa; Stalingrad was encircled.—Even the Führer kept saying now: The Russians will break through somehow. They always do.—As the Barons of the East began to perceive an alarmingly fluid operational situation, they cast about for a way to redirect policy. Maybe their fiefdoms could still be saved, if somebody like Vlasov . . .

  And so Vlasov felt that he had somewhat reestablished himself in the world (or, if you prefer, that he’d stabilized his defensive front). This new life offered no “security,” it’s true, but nobody had been secure under Comrade Stalin, either. Nor had he stained his conscience in any way. To be sure, all of our decisions, even self-destructive ones, contain opportunistic elements; but really the safest, most comfortable thing would have been to ensconce himself in that office on Viktoriastrasse and sign leaflets dictated by his German masters. He refused to do that. He wanted to fight for the liberation of Russia. And so the propaganda officers, promising him an imminent escape from this pleasant limbo, photographed Vlasov in his new regalia, raising his right hand in a sort of Indian salute, with smiling German officers at his side as he paced down the wall of imaginary volunteers.

  Listening to Liszt on the gramophone in his new quarters at the Russian Court Hotel, he continued to believe in a German victory, if only because any other kind would have such evil consequences for his dreams. (What were his dreams? He lay down, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and dreamed that his wife was embracing him, but she was a six-armed monster with a face of brass and she was choking him and he could not break free. He woke up gasping, and for the remainder of the night lay staring up at the ceiling in infinite bewilderment and distress.) Europe was becoming (to appropriate Guderian’s words) a fortress of unlimited breadth and depth, and there was no reason why that fortress could not thwart any breakthrough. The disaster at Stalingrad gave him pause, but in the end he merely thought it all the more urgent to return to the front line and apply his talents, instead of signing his name to other people’s propaganda. His colleagues kept invoking the Führer with such reassuring conviction that the forthcoming meeting would obviously settle everything. And Strik-Strikfeldt rang him up again with the news that he’d now obtained the support of a powerful faction in the Supreme Command . . .

  Indeed, our merry Balt, whose motives gamboled within an inviolable perimeter of goodness, continued to do whatever he could to set up his friend on what he called “solid foundations.” If his influence was not quite as powerful as Vlasov imagined, it remained nonetheless considerable. He wrote poems and plays about the misery which Germany had brought to the East. He sent them to a winnowed list of Wehrmacht officers, many of whom were quite moved. To his more immediate colleagues he insisted: We cannot alter policy. But in the name of improved security for our combat troops, we can introduce a new factor which may persuade Berlin to reconsider policy.—And to a third constituency he proved capable of speaking still a third language. Thanks to the war, staples, goods and even luxuries kept flowing from the occupied territories into the Old Reich, where (as seemed only right) they sold for more than they had cost, which was nothing. Strik-Strikfeldt happened to be in touch with certain sources of supply. All he needed to do was bring them into contact with some factory owner, general’s nephew or bored actress in order to retain his financial freedom. So when he became Vlasov’s partisan, he got in touch with a few well-chosen individuals and said, putting the case in their language for the sake of courtesy: Gentlemen, it’s like this. Since the Slavic-Asiatic character only understands the absolute, disobedience is non-existent among them. They’ll follow our orders blindly, don’t you see? We’ll require Vlasov to do the impossible, and there’ll be no complaint—

  Allow us to ask just how you think we’re supposed to accommodate ourselves to such a shameful alliance. They’re Slavs!

  That’s just a trifle! Think of all the blood they’ll cost Stalin! Don’t worry about that. And afterwards we can . . .

  He did his best, he really did. Slipping on his glasses, he wrote many a memorandum. The Russian National People’s Army now comprised more than seven thousand paper volunteers. But General Keitel, who reported directly to Hitler, had already ruled out any Wlassow-Aktion.

  As for Vlasov, he played patience alongside Zykov, who was excellent at all card games. He rolled another cigare
tte from last week’s German newspaper. He reread Guderian: These men remain essentially unable to break free of recollections of positional warfare. What could better sum up the mistakes of the German leadership at Stalingrad? He wondered why Guderian had not been consulted there. (He didn’t know that Guderian had been relieved of his command in disgrace long ago for seeking to contract the defensive line during the battle of Moscow.) He asked for Napoleon’s memoirs, but they told him that that sort of thing wasn’t considered very uplifting. Olenka made him dance with her. Through his dreams the following words writhed in vain attempts at alignment: operating, fortified, undefended.

  By now the Soviet propaganda machine, which had first kept silence, then insisted that he was either dead or an immobilized object of Fascist propaganda, had begun to take note of his charismatic appeal. Denouncing him as a Trotskyite, it now connected his stale life with the counterrevolutionary conspiracy launched by that exterminated snake Tukhachevsky. It revealed him to the peace-loving toilers of the Soviet Union as a Hitlerite, an imperialist henchman, a traitor to the motherland.

  These compliments were timely, for on 1.3.43 the Propaganda Department opened Dabendorf Camp, where under the rubric of paper fantasias real Russian soldiers began their training at last. (The German inspection report concluded: Discipline: Slack. Men do not rise to their feet on the entrance of a German officer.) A captive Russian artist prepared no fewer than nine sketches of a proposed insignia, each one of which got returned by the authorities, each one defaced by the prohibitory “X.” Vlasov is said to have remarked: I’d really like to leave it that way—our Russian flag crossed out by the Germans because they fear it.

  Finally they were allowed to utilize the Cross of Saint Andrew, blue on a white field.

  The next step was to actually start fighting. That was bound to happen any time now.

  18

  Strik-Strikfeldt said: Unfortunately, he didn’t agree. But I have a friend who often goes hunting with none other than Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln—

  Very slowly Vlasov raised his head from the row of cards which he was turning over as industriously as the woman who rolls muddy corpses face-upward until she can verify the particular death which will permit her to grieve. Then his crude, almost simian face sank back between the nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He crossed his long, long legs. He yawned. He said: You can’t even give me a suit that fits, and you want to conquer the world!

  Don’t get bitter, my dear fellow. After all, this is wartime, and you have a peculiar build.

  Listen to me, Wilfried Karlovich. I want to go back to the prison camp. This feels like being half awake all the time. It’s . . .

  The Führer is always convinced by results. Your Smolensk Declaration had more impact on the occupied territories than a hundred anti-partisan detachments! Once he understands that the only possible way for us to keep our territorial gains is to give your Russian National People’s Army something to do—

  But—

  Isn’t that the reality of the situation?

  And so once again the bolt clicked shut, and Vlasov found himself back inside his sweltering conceptual prison, the notion that logic, limitation and realism informed the doings of influential men.

  19

  Let’s say for the sake of argument (although it’s really not credible) that even then he didn’t know about the bloody-beaten boys wrist-tied together in pairs for easier shooting, the bandaged girls led off to be shot against a wall, the schoolteachers clambering obediently up onto barrels while the noose was tied, the families noosed and then thrown off their own balconies, the young men lined up against the wall for the double-rowed firing squad.—We’ll bypass that for now, as Strik-Strikfeldt would say. No, he knew; he groaned in his sleep; awaking once and twice, he’d drink away his pangs, struggling through the logic (which he stubbornly defended) of Stalin is worse to overtake his ideal, his love, his eastern objective; and from a sufficiently distant aerial perspective he comes to resemble the German soldiers straining eight on a side to move a truck through kilometer after kilometer of knee-deep mud whose shining puddles proclaim their ever so beautiful reflections of birch-trees. On the night table beside the almost empty bottle of schnapps there stood upended, now tarnished green by much finger-oil, a certain cartridge, Geco, 7.65 millimeter. (Call it his defensive front.) But to claim on Vlasov’s part more knowledge than that (and without knowledge it may well be that there’s no responsibility) would be as simplistic and old-fashioned as Stalin’s cordon strategy of defense. Strik-Strikfeldt insists in his postwar memoirs that it wasn’t until he was a prisoner and an American sergeant assaulted him with photographs of Dachau that he learned that in German concentration camps there had been bestialities such as in no other camps in the world. The sergeant, he indignantly writes, refused to pay credence to his cries of ignorance. But then, after all, the world still does not believe that these thugs managed to conceal their crimes from a great part of the German people. The Western world refused to believe it—just as we, at that time, refused to believe in the betrayal of freedom by free America. There you have it, and from a figure who always spoke as openly as his oath of service permitted him.

  20

  Vlasov’s integrity, then, or, if you will, his wife, had shielded herself from him behind a wall of curving steel plates; through the little bulletproof window he could see her smiling lovingly and mercifully; she was ready to talk to him; she would do whatever she could to help him; but she would never embrace him again—she who had been so weak, she who had sobbingly clung to him, seeking to prolong if only by a few instants their time together in the dark and gentle room; he’d caressed her lovingly, wondering how soon without hurting her he could rise and pull on his boots. How laughable, to think that he couldn’t hurt her! All she wanted was to stay with him forever. But he had things to do. Let’s say that there was a war on. Or let’s say that he was, like so many of us, “creative,” or “married,” “drafted,” “politically involved,” “uncommitted,” “busy,” “distracted,” or otherwise engaged and compromised. For one reason or another, he’d made the war his war. She implored him not to go, and maybe he even had to go (let’s say that a certain Adolf Hitler had invaded the country), but no, let’s say—let’s say nothing for a line or two except that of course we wouldn’t want to “trivialize” World War II by extruding its gruesomeness through the star-shaped cookie dough gun of some allegory or other—but integrity is love, and love of two entities, faithfulness to them both, may comprise betrayal of them both. (If only the pain in her eyes had killed me!) He had to go. It was like that every time until he expected it and began to manage it; it was like that every time; perhaps it even flattered him, once he became accustomed to what originally afflicted him with dread and guilt; every time it was like that, with this real and intelligent woman who loved him, I mean this allegory, mythic goddess of moral rectitude, no, I mean someone who wasn’t perfect but who loved him, someone who was better than he was, someone who said to him: Andrei, can you really live like that? He had to leave her, and hated to do it, but he promised to be right back. It is well known, explains the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, that the structure of emotional life changes from one historical epoch to another. Consequently, the feeling of love also changes, since it is influenced by class relationships, by changes in the personality and by changes in value orientations. Changes in value orientations, that’s it! Her eyes, her big brown eyes so often swollen from weeping, launched reproaches his way, sometimes scared ones, often angry ones; sometimes she wasn’t quite fair, but she was his integrity. She warned him: I don’t know how long I can do this, and then: I don’t think I can do this, because he was, let’s say, fighting on the side of someone who’d murdered so many millions. After his actions in that world, he kept coming back to her. His integrity said: I don’t think I can do this right now. I feel as if I need to get to know you again first.—His integrity said: Is your mouth clean? You don’t
taste clean.—She said: You know I’m very delicate down there. I’m just not up for it right now. She said: Please don’t go. She said: That feels so perfect. She said: Oh, sweetheart.—She was crying when she said: Don’t go. Next time he saw her, she was crying, and she said: I can’t do this anymore.—After that she stopped crying. She became very calm and gentle.

  When the one I loved finally left me, it didn’t hurt too much at first, but then my own heart, not yet killed, began to sicken with drop after drop of her poisonous absence. Then all my friends seemed to fall away, which simply means that they didn’t seem like friends anymore, being no substitute for her; and with each moment that I could no longer expect to see her, my heart grew a little more inflamed with grief. As yet it was still strong, for our love had been strong (at least I thought so); therefore the death-agony must expand, elongate, and wriggle endlessly like a parasitic worm. A strong organism can’t die. And so Vlasov still clung to the past time when he’d been intimate with his integrity. (She’d said to him: We can lie down together for a minute if you need to, as long as it’s not too intimate. I can’t do that anymore, or I’ll get confused . . . )

  She was a statue now, safe from him behind that thick glass. She wanted to be his friend. Merciful and distant, she pitied him. He was free now. He must make his own way in life.

  21

  They sent him on a tour of the occupied territories to drum up support. On 28.2.43 he arrived in Smolensk, where he spoke to the helots to great acclaim. (This man led the Fourth Mechanized against us at Lvov! Strik-Strikfeldt was explaining to everybody in a reverential voice.)—Russia must be independent, Vlasov kept saying.—Standing on a scorched and icy plinth which had once been burdened by a marble titan, he gazed down at his audience: shivering old men unfit for labor service, displaced peasant women in dark head-scarves, hungry office workers who’d been given Vlasov in lieu of a more expensive treat. To these people, who even yet hadn’t entirely abandoned their hope that the Germans might bring something good, his speech was electrifying. That one of their own—a famous general, no less—would be permitted to say anything at all, much less shout out a call for a Russo-German alliance against Stalin, while Wehrmacht officers stood around smiling indulgently, was a sign that some middle path, however provisional and solitary, to the salvation which most of them after more than two decades of reeducation continued to cast in religious terms, might be more than a tragic figment. (We told you so! the old men whispered. What with the partisans, and Stalingrad, and that breakout at Leningrad, Adolf can’t be so arrogant anymore . . . ) Vlasov’s right arm rose high in salute to forthcoming Russian victories. Then he was photographed again, at attention in a file of Fascist officers each of whom was wearing shiny knee-length boots. He toured the newly reopened cathedral: Hitler the Liberator was bringing back religion! (But wily Stalin had begun reopening churches, too.) That night, he addressed a full house at the state theater, standing room only. As yet, his sponsors dared not permit him to broadcast on the radio. He propagandized here and there for three weeks, calling for volunteers. The first Vlasov Men already stood on parade for his inspection. (Let’s assume that he didn’t know about the Russian prisoners of war who were being gassed at Auschwitz, shot at Dachau and Buchenwald. At Smolensk alone the death rate was hundreds per day.) Insisting that he was no puppet, he quoted the old peasant proverb: A foreign coat never fits a Russian. (The uniform they’d fashioned for him was brown like a Storm Trooper’s.) To hostile questioners he replied: The Germans have begun to acknowledge their mistakes. And, after all, it’s just not realistic to hope to enslave almost two hundred million people . . .