The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  The Russians are orderly and restrained, just as the lieutenant said they would be. Bandy spots no pillaging. The locals and refugees are bullied but mostly unaccosted. Likely, Bandy thinks, it’s the same for the Soviet army as it is for the Americans. If you have to battle for a town, you treat it with anger when you take it. If the town surrenders—or, in the case of Brandenburg, if the enemy has fled out of it—then more humane rules apply.

  The cars ahead of Bandy turn to the western end of the city. The road runs along the banks of the Havel. The lieutenant stays close at Bandy’s bumper. In minutes, a massive fortified structure looms beside the river. The cars are stopped by Russian guards at a gate. This is not some castle outside the city limits. It’s too new. One of the soldiers in the vehicles in front speaks with the guards. They are waved through. One guard salutes Bandy.

  This is a prison. The design is modern and stark. A vast courtyard surrounds the central structure, a four-story rectangle with a high-pitched slate roof. The effect is foreboding. Bandy slows his jeep, ignoring the lieutenant behind him. He will go at his own pace now.

  Bandy passes through a perimeter of metal girders cemented into the ground; barbed wire is strung between them. Watchtowers built into the outer walls have at their crests unmanned machine guns lodged behind sandbags. Bandy comes to a stop. The lieutenant pulls alongside and says nothing. The other two cars drive on.

  The courtyard is filled with meandering men. They all wear the same ill-fitting outfits, ragged and woolly, with wide, powder-blue vertical stripes. Many wear caps of the same material. Bandy steps out of his jeep.

  The lieutenant calls after him.

  “Bandy. Your camera.”

  Bandy ignores this. What he sees is beyond what a photograph can depict.

  The men are like scattered litter. They seem to move not by walking but are blown where they go, drifting on some current unwilling to lift men who’ve not endured what they have. There are a thousand, two thousand of them, tracing the limits of the barbed wire. One by one they reach the fence and lift a hand to touch it, an act that might have gotten them shot down, perhaps even this morning. Bandy approaches one of them.

  For the first time in his life, Bandy gazes into living eyes that do not peer out. It’s like looking into a lightless doorway, the man’s visage only beckons Bandy in, into the dark room across its threshold. This is not just a face starved but a mouth that has had emptiness fed into it.

  Bandy wants to speak. Others waft by; the barbed wire draws them, brows creased with the defiance of laying a hand to it.

  He asks the man, “Are you okay?”

  The prisoner looks upward, as if Bandy’s voice has come from above instead of in front. Bandy follows the slow glance to a vacant gun tower on the wall.

  The marble eyes return to Bandy. They bring nothing back from their sojourn to the wall.

  The man nods.

  “Ja.”

  The invisible breeze blows and the prisoner strays beyond Bandy.

  The lieutenant walks up.

  “This is not worst, Bandy. Come. There is more.”

  He drives behind the lieutenant down the central lane. On every side prisoners wander the grounds. Bandy is shocked to see them so aimless. To his eye they look alike, ravaged men, frames bent and slender like draughted plants. In the way there is one uniform for the prisoners, there is one gait among their thousands of legs, a slow and stunned march. Every hand and wrist is veined and weak. A single set of eyes is set in every head, the dulled orbs of the one Bandy spoke to. This man is inside all of us, Bandy thinks, the last living creature at the end of the road. What a terrible journey.

  The lieutenant pulls up at the front door to the prison. Bandy stops behind. He grabs his camera bag. The building is tall and sheer, a brick cliff of barred windows. They go inside past thick, studded doors. The only light intrudes from the few windows.

  More inmates ramble the linoleum floor. The lieutenant tromps fast among them, not letting Bandy pause to take pictures. They speed down a long, bland hall.

  The Russian waves his hand. “This is prison, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We took from Nazis two hours ago. They know we come. They should run, yes? They should just go, leave prison alone. We take, set people free.”

  “Who are the prisoners?”

  “Usual German enemies. Jews, Russians, Poles, Slavs.”

  “Was there a fight to take the place?”

  “No. Soviet army come too fast. Nazis of this prison had other business.”

  With this statement the lieutenant pushes on a thick door. Bandy steps alongside him into a vast cavern of cells, three tiers high. Skylights do not ease the foggy, gray color in here. Concrete catwalks run the length of the building. Bars cross every aperture.

  “There are three rows like this,” the lieutenant says. “Prison must take two thousand. Nazis put five thousand in here. Come.”

  Bandy follows the Russian into the block. All the cell doors have been flung open. With the first steps he smells the odors of human loss: feces, decay, disease. In addition to the multitude outside on the prison grounds, the hundreds ambling in the halls, there are a thousand more lying in these cells, three or four to a cage, men too sapped of life or too hurt to rise. The hard walls and metal will not soften their groans. Bandy walks past, looking in each open cell. He beholds again the common being in misery, the lone one who can tell five thousand terrible tales.

  “These men not fed,” the Russian says. “There is typhus. Tuberculosis. Nazis let them rot.”

  Bandy unslings his shoulder pack to take out the Leica.

  “Wait,” the lieutenant says. “See everything first.”

  The two walk to the end of the row. The Russian shoves open another armored door. In echoed strides he leads Bandy to a small room at the rear of the building. Inside stands a tall wooden contraption. In the floor at the foot of the machine is a drain.

  Bandy recognizes a guillotine.

  The lieutenant licks his lips.

  “Two thousand prisoners put to death in this room.”

  Bandy does not walk up to the thing to look down the black drain or feel the wide blade. He keeps his distance, as though this is where the real contagion of the prison is.

  The Russian pivots and walks on.

  “Where are the Nazis?”Bandy asks, keeping up.”The ones who ran the place?”

  The soldier arms open a last door. This lets out onto a courtyard. He lets the metal portal slam with an un ugly clang.

  “Take your pictures, Bandy.”

  Several dozen corpses lie piled against a high wall. They are so emaciated, the mound looks more like a discarded stack of the gray-and-blue-striped uniforms. Bullet marks dent the bricks where rounds pierced the bodies of these final victims. With the Russians bearing down, the Nazi keepers of the prison made a last, desperate effort to complete their charge. These prisoners were selected for some reason. Bandy wonders, Who were they, not to be allowed to live another hour? He takes a step closer to the heap. No answer comes from it. Whatever lumped these men together or made them different in life, they shared this end. Did there need to be a reason? What could possibly make sense?

  Lined along the opposite wall are two dozen German guards. Like the prisoners, they wear a single uniform. Black and merciless in attire, they stand at rigid attention. These zealots stayed behind while the rest of the prison staff fled.

  Bandy takes out his Speed Graphic and enough film packets. He unfolds the accordion of the lens and locks it in place. The Russian lieutenant steps back to let the American photographer do what he was brought here to do, record for the United States press the Nazi atrocities of Brandenburg prison.

  Bandy considers the bodies. He turns instead to the line of Nazi guards.

  He walks close to the first, raising the camera, focusing tight on the man’s face. The Nazi is still as wax.

  These are the features of evil, Bandy thinks, not the dead piled at th
e wall. We’ll see the dead time and again in every war, every conflict. But this wicked man. This is what we have to be on watch for. This is what we must recognize and stamp out of humanity. Bandy levels the viewfinder. It’s a common face, not inhuman and twisted. Not beautiful and mesmerizing. A typical, grocery store, gas station, salesclerk face in Germany, or America. Waiting for the shot, Bandy questions, how to spot them? They look like the rest of us. The Nazi smirks. Bandy thinks, There you are, you fuck, and releases the shutter.

  He files down the column of Nazis, aiming his camera in every face, waiting, waiting for the profanity inside each man to surface. And it does. Bandy snares it on his film like flypaper. With every portrait, he senses the approach of his own finish line, like the poor prisoners who want only to reach the barbed wire, the outer limit of their existence at this prison. With every fresh film pack, Bandy senses a growing exhaustion.

  History has been his livelihood. War—the individuals who wage it and the ground they fight for—has been his passion and art. For nine years Bandy has served as handmaiden to history. Now he can go no farther. Not if these are the abominations he must report.

  He takes another picture, flips the film pack over, and steps in front of the next Nazi. Are these humdrum-looking men really abominations? Or is their touch of massacre, is the Russian taste for vengeance, is the American tolerance for politics and its millions of victims, just business as usual for the conduct of history? Has Charles Bandy, Life magazine photographer—with all his travels and pictures and his notoriety for bringing home the truth in images—simply not seen the truth until now? Is cruelty the actual face of history, the way vileness lurks in the faces of these lined-up Nazis? Bandy has hidden behind his camera so long, he’s atrophied his own eyes.

  All the history he’s shot around the world has been the crushing of the nameless, the conquest of the weak, the exalting of the victor regardless of how he became so. How could Bandy have allowed himself to see it all as tidy and glorious, rewarded with medals and honor? How could Bandy have taken half a million photos of so little truth? Why would he spend one more day in the service of such heartless masters as war and history?

  He’ll take fifteen, twenty more pictures, then he’s finished. He feels used, monumentally fooled. This will be his closing gallery. Again—and this is more evidence that he’s done this chore long enough with his life— Bandy sees only one man looking back at him from the two dozen Nazi faces. One loathsome man, the conductor on the passage to hell. The historic face in front of his viewfinder is normal, a mask, abhorrent.

  Bandy prepares to squeeze the shutter.

  The man lifts his chin and sucks his cheeks. He spits past the camera, venom striking Bandy’s brow.

  Without thought Bandy lets fall the Speed Graphic. The camera cracks on the ground at his feet. Before it rolls to a stop he attacks the Nazi. He throws his hands around the man’s neck to slam him against the brick wall. The German defends himself. Bandy chokes with all his might. The Nazi flings his own fingers around Bandy’s throat.

  Bandy feels nothing but what the Nazi feels, hatred.

  They are the same now, one man.

  * * * *

  ELEVEN

  * * *

  April 28, 1945, 8:50 a.m.

  Wilmersdorf, Berlin

  A

  nd now the enemy is children.

  Four hundred boys in black school uniforms push down the street toward Ilya’s position. Each one carries against his shoulder a Panzerfaust, like a bat for a big game to be played.

  Misha reaches for the binoculars. Ilya shrugs the little man off and keeps the field glasses. The boys can’t be more than fifteen years old. They don’t march in lockstep. Ilya hears no song of bravado from their ranks. They just come. Hitler sends them.

  They cannot know what they’re walking toward. Six more blocks, amassed in the ruins where Misha and Ilya are perched, wait five hundred artillery pieces. Seven thousand men and guns. Horse carts loaded with enough ammunition to slay these boys a thousand times each.

  Ilya is one of the killers of Berlin. He will kill these boys if he has to. He takes no joy in the thought.

  Since taking Seelow, Ilya has seen the German defense buckle. On the Oderbruch the enemy fought ferociously. Soviet losses in the valley were terrible. Costly too was the taking of the ridge of towns along the Heights. Once on the plateau, the assault lurched into the far eastern suburbs of Berlin. Here there were mostly summer cottages, individual wood-frame houses set in their own yards and gardens. Plenty of open space, parkland, and fields helped the Red Army move quickly through these districts. The buildings made poor strongholds, roads were wide and plentiful. The German army reeled backward towards Berlin, without the artillery and ten thousands of men they left behind on the Heights. The Russians poured in, saturating every block and avenue.

  Before entering Berlin, Chuikov’s Eighth Guards whirled south, to strike the city in its underbelly. Three days ago Ilya’s company rode on the backs of First Tanks into the city limits, entering the Neukölln district. Here the density of the buildings thickened. Ilya’s men fought past manufacturing plants and tracts of five-story, nineteenth-century rental barracks. Eighth Guards surrounded Templehof Airport, knifed through Schöneberg District, then wheeled north into Wilmersdorf. North lies Charlottenburg. After that, the giant Tiergarten. At the eastern rim of the park stands ground zero, the symbolic center of German government, the Reichstag. The watchword for the assault is speed. Zhukov has announced, when the Soviet flag flies from the roof of the Reichstag, the battle and the war will be over.

  Ilya has been surprised to find the fight for Berlin so disjointed. It was not what he, Misha, or the generals expected from the capital of Hitler’s regime. Once the clash of nations came to Berlin, they were all prepared for another Stalingrad—a Hitlergrad, the last chapter to the vicious campaigns of the steppe and citadels, the river crossings and titanic tank struggles. Instead, Berlin is like a drunk in a fight; it can’t organize its blows, swinging wild punches. The defenders are a mixed and ill-equipped bunch. Captured units consist of regular soldiers, old Home Guardsmen, Hitler Youth, firemen, and policemen, all fighting side by side without commanders. The war has been reduced to sporadic street combat, and street fighting is what Ilya pioneered and endured at Stalingrad. Now that he’s in Berlin, he knows the outcome of every skirmish before it starts, prescient like a jungle animal returned to the jungle. But this morning he faces children in battle, and he doesn’t know what will happen in the next five minutes.

  Ilya hands over the binoculars to Misha. The weapons these boys carry are powerful. They can’t be allowed to come much closer.

  The schoolmates have taken up arms because their government can’t defend them. German soldiers have begun to desert in mobs. Ilya finds uniforms discarded in the ruins. SS extremists roam from cellar to cellar looking for soldiers hiding out with civilians. Many Home Guardsmen choose to face their fates beside their families and run home to them, strewing into the streets armbands and vintage Dutch rifles. Deserters are found hung in public squares or shot in the back, with signs laced around their necks reading: we still have the power. As a result, the defense has no predictable nature; the fights are rarely more than delaying actions, ranging from flimsy to fanatical.

  The responding Soviet tactic in Berlin is straightforward and harsh. General Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, has decided that Berlin is not going to become a Hitlergrad. At the first hint of resistance from any building or block, artillery hammers the enemy position to rubble. Katyusha missiles mounted on American Ford trucks spit racks of phosphorus rockets at point-blank range, igniting firestorms. Giant 203mm cannons crank their barrels even with the sidewalks to unleash rounds as heavy as a truck. A thousand shells pour onto gardens, public squares, anyplace where defenders make themselves known. One machine-gun burst, a sniper in a single window, can bring a whole building down with no thought of the residents on the other floors or in basement shelte
rs. The Russian officers holler at the troops, ”Use your weapons!” “Fire at will!” “We’ve got plenty to spare!”

  Once the bastions are in ruins, Red tanks move in, smashing down barricades and blowing up what they can’t roll over. Obstacles put in the streets to slow the Russians down, like buses, tramcars, carts loaded with rocks, are blasted to pieces rather than driven around. The tanks fan out in search of targets, emptying their magazines at will, knowing there is plenty.

  After the tanks comes the infantry. Foot soldiers flood into the demolished blocks with guns, grenades, knives, and fists. Ilya has few equals in this. Again, he leads the men by deeds, leaving the orders to Misha. He keeps his platoon off the streets, guiding them through holes in walls, connecting cellars, alleys, back gates. Ilya’s instincts keep his men alive. They learn fast, and they become lethal. Once an area is secured, they move on, pressing north toward the city center. In their wake, the artillery hauls itself, forming up to demolish the next targeted Berlin street.