A few blocks from the Spree River, they were surprised to be stopped by an American patrol. Even more surprising, the four GIs reeked of liquor. Obviously drunk, they were far too boisterous and friendly for the serious duty they were supposedly performing.
“You ladies speak English?” a buck sergeant, apparently the patrol leader, asked.
They pretended they did not.
The alcohol had plastered a stupid but benevolent grin on the sergeant’s face. He pointed to the wristwatch on his outstretched, wavering arm and said, “Curfew. Getting awfully close to curfew, fräuleins. Better hurry to wherever it is you’re going.”
Then he performed a sweeping bow to usher them on their way.
Once they’d pedaled half a block, Sylvie said, “I thought the briefers were exaggerating when they told us about all the drunkenness, but apparently they weren’t. If the security patrols are intoxicated, all sorts of things must be going on under their noses. They didn’t even ask to see our papers.”
“It will be no different with the Russians,” Mirka replied. “Maybe worse. But that might make our job all the easier.”
A few minutes later, they were stopped by a Soviet patrol, five men this time. True to Mirka’s prediction, these soldiers were drunk, too. Three of them could barely stand; swaying unsteadily, a stiff breeze might knock them over.
But they weren’t friendly drunks like the GIs had been. From the moment the leader began to slur his crude German, the women knew this encounter could turn ugly. Speaking Russian, Mirka told the leader, “There’s no need to speak German, Comrade Corporal.”
He was startled for a moment that she’d spoken his language, but then his face twisted into a lewd smile.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“At this hour? I am going home to my mother, of course, Comrade Corporal.”
Pointing to Sylvie, he asked, “And her?”
“Yes, her, too.”
Mirka had removed her papers from the bike’s basket and was handing them to the corporal. He batted them away.
“No,” he said. “You need more than papers. You must pay.”
She played dumb and asked, “Oh, is it money you want?”
His lewd smile grew even wider. He took a step closer, appraising her from head to toe.
The other man still capable of coordinated movement—a private—had moved next to Sylvie. With crazed eyes, he was stroking her hair.
“You do not want her,” Mirka said to the private. “In fact, you do not want either of us.”
“And why would that be?” the corporal replied, one hand now clutching the handlebar of her bike. She could smell his foul breath.
“Because you might not want your pricks to fall off. You are not the first Russian soldiers we’ve ever run into. The others left behind more than their good wishes, I’m afraid. They’ve made bicycling very uncomfortable for us…and a few other things, too.” For added emphasis, she bunched her loose skirt against her pubic region and rubbed vigorously.
The smirk on the corporal’s face faded only a little, as if weighing the odds she was lying. But he did back away, if just a step.
The private either hadn’t heard Mirka’s words or was too drunk to process them. But he’d released Sylvie’s hair and taken a step back, too. His reason for doing so was very different than the corporal’s:
Women about to be raped are supposed to be scared. This one is not.
His vodka-slowed brain had become frightened by her eyes: cold, menacing orbs like weathered marbles that seemed to bore right through him.
Sylvie’s fingers touched the switchblade knife concealed in the lining of her jacket pocket. Speaking French, she told Mirka, “We should lure these two behind that wall and kill them. The other three are too busy pissing themselves to know what’s going on.”
“Not yet,” Mirka replied. “Just follow my lead.”
“Speak Russian,” the corporal demanded.
“Of course,” she told him. “How rude of us. But we are going to leave you now. Perhaps we’ll meet again soon, when we’re all in better condition. Until then…”
She reached into her basket, removed a small, flask-shaped bottle of vodka, and gave it to him. “There,” she said. “Now we have paid handsomely for our passage.”
She motioned for Sylvie to follow, and they both rode off. In a brief, half-hearted attempt to stop them, the two Russians tripped over each other and fell to the pavement. Once they were back on their feet, there was no point chasing the women. Their lead was too great; the Russians were too drunk to run and their hands too unsteady to aim.
Once they’d pedaled far enough away, Mirka said, “They were easy, probably city boys with some schooling and inhibitions. No need to kill them.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That we are diseased from the last group of Russians who raped us. I’m surprised such a blatant lie worked so easily. But the peasants—the primitive ones—they won’t care what’s wrong with you…or how young or old you are. They’ll rape you anyway.”
“And they’ll die doing it, Mirka.”
“Let’s try not to leave a trail of bodies leading straight to us if we can help it, all right? Our job is hard enough.”
Five more minutes of riding brought them to the house they were looking for.
Hermann Gestler—code name Franz—answered their knock quickly and ushered them into his Berlin home, small but opulent and amazingly untouched by war’s devastation. Nervously glancing up and down the street as they entered, he closed and bolted the door the moment the women were inside.
“Let me see your mark,” Mirka told him.
Gestler, a short, portly, but well-groomed man in late middle age, obligingly rolled up his shirtsleeve. On his upper arm was a Nazi Party tattoo, a spread-winged eagle clutching a swastika-adorned wreath in its claws. There’d been some effort to obliterate the swastika; those efforts had a long way to go before that symbol would be unrecognizable.
The women exchanged nods. They had the right man.
He gave the tattoo one last, forlorn look before rolling the sleeve back down over it.
Sylvie asked, “Is there anyone else in the house?”
“Only my mother,” Gestler replied. “She is very old. There is no place else for her.”
“Where is she?”
“In her bedroom upstairs. She rarely leaves it.”
“Good,” Sylvie said. “Keep it that way.”
Mirka removed some papers from her bag. “Do you understand the terms of your service fully, Herr Gestler? If you do not, we can review them again.”
“That won’t be necessary…but what do I call you?”
“I am Mirka Braun. She is Sylvie Kohler.”
“Those are your real names?”
“They are the only names you need to know, Herr Gestler. But let me rephrase my question: you understand what will happen to you if you do not fulfill the terms of your service, do you not?”
He understood perfectly. One of two things would happen: either the American OSS would snatch him from the Soviet sector and imprison him with the other, less exploitable Nazi Party officials; or, if that proved impractical, they’d make his Nazi past—one he’d managed to conceal from the Soviets so far—common knowledge to the Russian occupiers.
And in all likelihood, the Russians would kill him outright.
On the other hand, if he proved himself to be the asset the Americans hoped, he and his ailing mother would be resettled at a location of his choosing in Allied-occupied Germany and his past associations conveniently overlooked.
“Yes,” Gestler replied, “I understand perfectly.”
“Excellent,” Mirka said. “So let’s begin. Our positions in your hotel—are they arranged?”
“Yes, they are. I have placed you both on the housekeeping staff, effective immediately.”
Sylvie asked, “And our sudden appearance will not be suspicious to the Soviet officers housed there
?”
“No, not if your papers are in order. The hotel staff turnover is quite high. That’s to be expected in these uncertain times, is it not? Besides, most of the officers have been shuttling back and forth to Potsdam for the big conference. They’ve been too busy to notice administrative matters within the hotel.”
Mirka said, “The conference will end tomorrow. Things should settle down then.”
With great hesitation in his voice, Gestler asked, “May I know what my hotel has to do with your mission?”
Almost in unison, the women replied, “No, you may not.”
Mirka slid the papers back into her bag. “As arranged,” she said, “we will stay in your house tonight, to avoid being on the streets after curfew. You have quarters ready for us?”
“Yes, of course.”
As they walked down a hallway to the rear of the house, Gestler said, “Such a shame that Churchill has been booted out the door. He had to slink away from the Potsdam conference a broken man. All the Russians are laughing about it. You people do not appreciate your leaders properly.” He left no doubt he was gloating.
“Isn’t that odd,” Sylvie said. “Roosevelt has passed on, Churchill has been voted out…but despite it all, Germany has still lost the war. And your beloved Führer is just a pile of ashes while his vermin—like you—try to erase their shame from their arms.”
There’d been several rumors about 17th SS Panzer Division’s surrender of arms ceremony. That division was the one encamped south of Patton’s Tegernsee headquarters, the one whose commander would only lay down the unit’s weapons to a general of equal or better rank. Patton’s return from his trip to the States—and the four stars on his shoulder—had solved that problem.
One rumor was that Patton had arrived at the surrender ceremony—a vast formation of every man in the eight-thousand-strong division—in a helicopter.
A confused GI asked Sean, “What the hell is a helicopter, Sarge?”
“Never seen one,” he replied. “Only heard some stories that say it looks like a big eggbeater and can takeoff straight up and land straight down. Doesn’t need a runway or nothing. Supposed to be some brand new toy the Army’s playing with. Can’t figure out what the hell it’ll be good for, though. Maybe my little brother the flyboy can shed some more light on it…if I ever get to see him again.”
Another rumor contended that when Patton asked that formation of SS men if they were willing to fight the Russians with him, every man had stepped forward.
Sean didn’t put much stock in the first rumor. As far as helicopters went, if all they could do was be a fancy staff car, he wasn’t much interested. But there must’ve been something to that second rumor, because at the moment Sean’s unit—37th Tank Battalion—was escorting a mile-long convoy of trucks taking over one thousand of those SS men to a new camp across the German border in Czechoslovakia. It would be the first of many such convoys scheduled throughout the week.
A rookie tanker asked, “What the hell was wrong with their old camp, Sarge?”
“Too far away from the Russians, probably,” Sean replied.
“If we’re taking them that close, maybe we should just turn them over to the Reds and be rid of them.”
Sean replied, “I don’t think that’s the plan, Private.”
The convoy bivouacked for the night on the banks of the Danube outside Deggendorf, Germany. As the sun set, the lights of the town—less than a mile to the north—acted like a beacon for the SS troopers. Dismounting from the deuce-and-a-halfs, a few seemed intent on walking out of the cordon of Sherman tanks the GIs had set up around the bivouac area. More SS men joined them, until the throng of Germans looking to leave the cordon numbered over a hundred.
A tank platoon leader radioed the commander’s CP. “We’ve got trouble,” he reported. “Looks like some of the Krauts are trying to stage a breakout.”
Colonel Abrams, commander of 37th Tank and this convoy, frowned in disgust. He told Sean, “Well, you won that bet, Sergeant. I figured ol’ Patton had them buttered up enough so they’d behave, but I guess I was wrong. Let’s you and me go lay down the law.”
At the head of the angry mob of SS troopers was a man they recognized—despite his unadorned uniform—to be a sturmbannführer, the equivalent of a Wehrmacht major. After the surrender of weapons to Patton, the Germans had been told to strip all insignia from their field uniforms, to include insignia of rank. The immediate protest that resulted was quelled when Patton assured them, once they were working with the Americans, a new system of rank—one more easily recognizable to their new GI allies—would be instituted. That hadn’t happened yet.
“We are not your prisoners, Colonel,” the sturmbannführer said in excellent English. “We are allies now, are we not?”
“Yes,” Abrams replied, “that’s what General Patton tells me, anyway. But you are under my command until we’re told differently, and as such, you are not entitled to privileges that I will not extend to my own soldiers. Therefore, you will remain in this bivouac with the rest of us.”
The sturmbannführer surveyed the scene around them. There were hundreds more SS men hanging back, waiting to see how this confrontation played out.
There were also two platoons of American tanks facing them, their main guns useless at this short range. But each was equipped with several machine guns whose combined firepower could wipe out most of the Germans in a matter of seconds.
It all depended on whether this American colonel had the nerve to use them.
He noticed something about the ordinary American soldiers of this convoy: many of them seemed uneasy, even frightened, at the thought of impending conflict, like men who’d never heard a shot fired in anger. The rest, however, had that heightened alertness and tension about them of combat veterans who—like his own SS men—would fight rather than run away or cower in a hole should conflict erupt. But frightened or not, the Americans were armed to the teeth. His SS men were armed with nothing but their fists plus the shovels, axes, and pickaxes they’d begun to snatch from the trucks’ pioneer equipment lockers.
“So we are your prisoners, then, Colonel?”
“No, you’re my soldiers,” Abrams replied with chilling composure. “And as such, you’re subject to my authority and discipline. That was the deal offered you, as I recall—fight with us as equals or rot as prisoners in the holding pens with the rest of the German military. Note that I used the word equals.”
When the sturmbannführer scoffed, Abrams told him, “I expect your men have removed that pioneer equipment to dig themselves latrines, but there’s no need. We have a dozer tank that will dig the trenches for you…and fill them in when we leave in the morning.”
Sean couldn’t help but add, “Unless, of course, you’re planning to dig your own graves with that stuff. And even then the dozer tank does the job a whole lot easier.”
There was something in Sean’s voice that made the German hedge; he fully understood the threat buried deep in that flippant comment.
A more conciliatory tone in his voice, the sturmbannführer said, “This is our country, Colonel, and we are not currently at war. There is no need for elite German soldiers to sleep outside like animals when there is shelter so close at hand.”
Abrams replied, “Well, you’re right about one thing…we’re not at war, not technically, anyway, so there’s no cause to force quartering of troops on the good people of that town. They’ve got enough problems right now without your elite troopers adding to their list. My elite troopers won’t impose on them, and neither will yours.”
He asked Sean, “What time’s chow, Sergeant?”
“We start serving in ten minutes, sir.”
“Ten minutes,” Abrams reiterated. “Well, then, Sturmbannführer…if your men want to eat, I suggest they put down those gardening tools and get in the chow line. We’ve got a lot of people to feed and you’re only going to get one shot at being served. Don’t be late.”
“You know,” the sturm
bannführer said, “so many of your men don’t seem battle hardened, Colonel. You realize, of course, that all of mine are?”
“So? What are you getting at?” Abrams asked.
“I think if we were actually in combat against each other, we would defeat you with ease…and very quickly.”
It was Abrams’ turn to scoff. But he offered Sean the opportunity to make the reply, saying, “Sergeant Moon here has been fighting you people for one hell of a long time. What do you make of the sturmbannführer’s assessment, Sergeant?”
With an enthusiastic smile, Sean replied, “I figure it would be just like all the other times, sir. The Krauts would put up a little bit of a fight until they figured the cards were turning against them, then they’d throw down their weapons, put those hands up real high, and start singing kamerad at the top of their lungs.”
The sturmbannführer shook his head in vigorous disagreement. Then he said, “So why are you so anxious to have us fighting by your side, if that’s your opinion?”
Sean replied, “Because this time you probably won’t throw in the towel so easy since you ain’t on the losing team.”
It took four battalion field kitchens working together to feed everyone a hot meal. But as the chow line thinned, Sean noticed there seemed to be quite a lot of food that hadn’t been served. It might have all come from cans, but the cooks had whipped it up into what would be considered a sumptuous feast on a road march, where a “hot” meal usually consisted of being able to warm the mystery meat and vegetable mash-up in a C ration can. But racks of broiled beef, cauldrons of steaming vegetables, and trays full of fresh-baked bread and sheet cakes were still untouched. He asked the mess steward, “How many did you feed, Jack?”
“Looks like we fed every last GI, Sean. But the Kraut headcount looks a little low…like about three hundred low.”
This Fog of Peace (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 4) Page 10