Death's Head

by Leo Kessler

  “Then you must get the mortars to fire at the ground to make shell-craters,” Hitler replied. “That’s what we did in Flanders in the Great War.”

  “In Flanders the ground was soft,” Guderian reminded him. “But in Russia the shells produce holes no more than ten centimetres deep and the size of a wash basin – the soil is as hard as iron.” Before the Führer had time to object, he went on: “Positional warfare in this miserable terrain will lead to the same terrible losses as in the Great War. We shall lose the flower of our Officers and NCOs and those losses will be irreplaceable.”

  There was a deathly silence in the conference room. Guderian could see the whitening of Hitler’s knuckles as he tried to control his temper. Hitler brought his face closer to Guderian’s and said softly, “Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers died gladly, Colonel-General? And yet the King was justified in demanding of them the sacrifice of their lives. I too consider myself justified in demanding of each German soldier that he should sacrifice his life.”

  The front began to melt away. Just before dawn when they knew the fighting would start yet again, they would sneak out of their foxholes, rags tied around their boots, and stumble into the forests, leaving their comrades to discover yet another empty hole. Others would pull out the Russian safe conduct which they had secreted in their lousy rags on pain of death2 and squirm through the icy night to the Russian positions, hissing: “Comrade nemtyski – ponemayu?” And there were a few who took the only other way out: rifle positioned along the body, naked big toe pressed through the trigger guard. A quick squeeze and an end to the hunger, cold and endless misery.

  Two days before Christmas, the Vulture found that his communications with the infantry regiment to his immediate rear had gone. At first he thought that the usual morning artillery ‘hate’ had blown out the lines, but when at mid-day the infantry cooks did not come up with the hayboxes full of the usual ‘giddiup soup’, he knew that it was something more serious than that. He sent Metzger off to check, although he knew he couldn’t rely on him in the least, especially if there were any danger involved. An hour later Metzger burst into the HQ, his face greyer than ever. “The shits,” he gasped, “the wet-tailed shits, they’ve…” He broke off, as if he dare not utter the words.

  “Done what?”

  “They’ve buggered off, sir!” he said weakly and looked as if he might begin to cry at any moment. “Left us here on our sodding tod.”

  “So that’s it,” the Vulture said and stroked his nose. “So Wotan’s on its own at last.”

  That same afternoon the Russians sent a captain riding slowly over the ice on a sturdy little mare, a white flag clasped in his gloved hand. He looked down at the survivors contemptuously, his face fresh and well-fed, the thick furs he wore protecting him from the icy wind. “I have come to ask your commander to surrender,” he said in flawless German.

  “Are you a Russian, sir?” Schulze asked in mock innocence. “A real Russian?”

  “Of course I am,” the captain retorted. “What do you think?”

  “Well, sir,” Schulze said hesitantly, “you speak such good German that I thought you might be an emigrant3 – a Jew.”

  “A yid!” the captain said in horror. “I’m a pure-blooded Russian!”

  “Well, if that’s the case,” Schulze said, reaching up and grabbing the white flag, “you might as well stick this up your pure-blooded Russian arse!” He broke the pole neatly over his raised knee and flung its two halves contemptuously on the frozen snow. “Sod off, you Popov bastard, we’re not surrendering!” Smartly he brought his hand down over the mare’s flank. It whinnied and next moment broke into a wild gallop back the way it had come, with the captain fighting desperately to regain control.

  “And tell your Popov boss that Wotan is not to be had for the asking,” Schulze shouted after him. “We aren’t finished yet, comrade.”

  But the Vulture knew that they were. Time was fast running out for the battered survivors.

  The CO looked round the exhausted faces of his surviving officers and NCOs in the tiny smoke-filled HQ. He had already made his decision; the battalion was down to exactly forty-five men fit to march. “We’re moving out tonight,” he said.

  There was a gasp of surprise from the three remaining officers. Fick, who had a bad chest wound, but who insisted on staying in the line, gasped: “Orders, sir? Orders from above?” The Vulture shook his head. “No, my orders.”

  “But sir,” Schwarz said. “The Wotan never retreats.”

  “We are not retreating.” The Vulture smiled. “We are tidying up our front.”

  “The Reichsführer will regard it differently.”

  “Quite frankly, Schwarz,” the Vulture said calmly, “the Reichsführer can go and piss up his sleeve. I’m here; he’s nice and warm somewhere in Berlin.”

  “I must protest,” Schwarz began, but the Vulture waved him to be silent.

  “I want a volunteer,” he said. “Someone who will stay behind and keep firing the Spandaus. Perhaps for two hours. That should be sufficient time to give us a start. It will be an Ascension Day mission, of course.” He said the words as if he were announcing the date of some pre-war Battalion sport’s day. “There’ll be the sore throat in it for the man who volunteers.4 That goes without saying.”

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Fick stepped forward. “I’ll do it!”

  “But Fick,” von Dodenburg protested, “you’re in no shape to…”

  “Fick will do,” the Vulture interrupted with an air of finality. “Thank you.” He thrust out his hand and took Fick’s. “I thank you in the name of the Battalion. We shall not forget you.”

  Fick’s weary face flushed with pleasure. “I’ll go and see to the guns now before it gets too dark.”

  As one the assembled officers and NCOs clicked to attention and saluted the young Lieutenant as he went out into the howling blizzard.

  Von Dodenburg waited till he had gone, then he turned on the Vulture angrily. “How can you let him go like that, sir? He’s bushed. Let me do it. I’m still fit enough and I’m unwounded.”

  “Will you be quiet, von Dodenburg?” the Vulture snapped. “The man’s a fool, a brave one, but still a fool. And as you rightly point out, he’s wounded too.”

  Von Dodenburg drew himself up. “As a National Socialist officer, I must fight for the cause…”

  “The cause,” the Vulture sneered. “I know what you and Schwarz think of me, von Dodenburg. But it’s people like me who keep Germany going. People like Schulze there, or my pet coward Metzger trying to steal my bread ration. Those poor stupid booty Germans in the corner.” He pointed at the badly wounded men slumped against the wall. “They are the reality. They want to live out their petty little lives. They don’t want to croak for the cause, the Horst Wessel Lied, the bands playing in the Unter den Linden, the Party rallies at Nuremberg. They are the true face of Germany, trying to survive for their own petty reasons, fighting like fury simply to keep alive – not for some vulgar, nebulous cause.”

  He stopped and waved his hand at von Dodenburg contemptuously, as if he and his point-of-view were too absurd to waste any more time on. “Now then, let’s get on with it,” he continued, his voice as calm as ever.

  They moved out in a long weary file just after dusk, stamping through the deep snow with dogged persistence. When they had reached the cover of the first line of firs, the Vulture pulled out his signal pistol and pulled the trigger. It was the signal for Fick, sitting next to the Spandau, their last can of creme de crime at his side.

  The machine gun began to chatter almost immediately, sending white tracer zig-zagging across the ice of the Don. They plodded on. Behind them the Spandau continued to stutter. It accompanied their steady, gasping progress through the waist-deep snow for another half-hour. Then finally the last machine gun fell silent.

  The Vulture stepped to one side and let the survivors plod past him. Von Dodenburg fell out too and joined him. In a silence broken only by
the crunch of the men’s boots over the snow they stared back at the way they had come.

  Von Dodenburg felt the Vulture’s fingers round his arm. “They’ll never believe it,” he said, as if he were talking to himself. “In years to come, no one who wasn’t here will ever believe it could have happened.”

  Notes

  1. PAK = anti-tank cannon.

  2. The German soldiers were forbidden to keep Russian safe conduct leaflets, dropped over their lines by aircraft or fired in special shells.

  3. German euphemism for refugees from Nazi Germany.

  4. SS slang for the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, worn around the throat.

  SIX

  “Come on you heroes,” Schulze urged them, wiping the snowflakes off his face. “Don’t tell me the élite of the nation can’t take it!”

  They had been marching two days now, with the Cossacks on their heels all the time. Everywhere the front had broken down and the Germans were streaming west, concerned only with putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the marauding Cossacks and their unbelievable cruelty to prisoners. Twice the thirty-odd survivors of Wotan had been slotted into a patched-up German line and twice the line had broken in the first hour of the Russian attack.

  Schulze looked at the stragglers, staggering after the main body like very old men, their eyes glazed with tiredness, seeing only the boots of the man in front. “Get the lead out of your butts,” he called. “The Ivans’ll have the eggs off you in a couple of seconds flat – with a blunt razor.”

  A Russian shell whined over their heads and exploded harmlessly in the deep snow a hundred metres away. Instinctively they dropped and waited. But the Ivans weren’t ranging in on them; it was just an odd shell. Painfully, they began to clamber to their feet again, not even attempting to knock the snow off their rags. A straggler, his feet bundled in Ivan footrags, looted from some dead Soviet, did not get up. He lay there panting in the snow, as if he had just run a great race.

  Schulze staggered over to him. “Get up – get yer arse up!”

  The boy lifted up his head. “I can’t…can’t, Sarge,” he whimpered.

  “The Popovs’ll pull it off you with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs, son,” Schulze threatened.

  But his threat had no effect. The boy’s head sank down on the snow. He was beaten.

  “Get up!” Schulze cried.

  “Can’t!”

  Angrily Schulze kicked him in the ribs. “Come on, you bastard,” he roared, “haul ass!”

  But the boy just groaned. With a grunt, Schulze bent down and slung the boy over his shoulder. With his free hand he tossed the boy’s rifle into the snow. “Fuck this for the sodding victorious Wotan,” he grunted scornfully and staggered after the rest.

  Some hours later they heard the faint sound of boots moving cautiously through the thick fir forest. The Vulture hobbled to the rear of the line, gave the hand signal and they sank to the ground.

  “Popovs!” the word was hissed from mouth to mouth. Suddenly their weariness was gone. Even those who a few minutes before had been racked by the gut-twisting pain of bleeding dysentery were alert. In these last terrible days they had seen enough mutilated German stubble-hoppers who had fallen into the hands of the Russians to know that they didn’t want to be taken alive.

  The Vulture gave Schwarz and von Dodenburg an urgent hand signal. Frantically tugging off his bandages, Schwarz doubled into the firs while von Dodenburg took his position next to Schulze who was the rearguard. He plumped down in the deep snow and pulled the looted sheet over his head. The Soviet ski troops came gliding down the hill like a line of white ghosts, and in the forest the waiting SS troopers could see the first of them cautiously approaching their position. Their frozen fingers curled around the triggers of their weapons.

  “The first Popov,” Schulze hissed under the sheet, “the one with the red star on his helmet. I’ll take him. Horosho?”1

  “Horosho,” von Dodenburg replied, switching his sights to the men following the officer. Schulze was the better shot. In the forest more and more Russians were approaching Schwarz’s hiding place in the clump of snow-bound bushes.

  “Fire!” the Vulture screamed. Just as they had planned, they ducked beneath their sheet as the Russians came in for the attack.

  With a sharp hiss the first ski-trooper shot by them. And another. In the heat of battle, the Popovs missed them completely. They flung back the sheet. Schulze took aim. The commissar, always the heart of any Popov unit, threw up his arms and pitched on his face. Von Dodenburg fired from the kneeling position, just as Schwarz emerged from his hiding place in the forest. Together they poured slugs into the unsuspecting Soviets’ backs. Desperately the Cossack ski-troopers tried to break out of the trap, but the men of Wotan had no mercy. The Russians hadn’t a chance. It was sheer massacre.

  Then the surviving Cossacks burst through the trap and fled across the snow, flinging their weapons away in their eagerness to escape.

  The moment of mayhem and murder was over. Exhausted, the troopers staggered through the forest like drunks, searching for dead Russians they could loot.

  The Vulture, leaning wearily against a tree, shook his head as he took in the scene. “Animals,” he sighed, as if he were talking to himself. “Absolute animals.”

  Von Dodenburg looked at his CO anxiously. For the first time since he had known him, the Vulture was beat. He had even forgotten to screw his monocle into his eye, and his voice had lost that cynical Prussian rasp that seemed so fitted for delivering his usual cynical barbs.

  “What now, sir?” he asked.

  “Now, my dear von Dodenburg,” the Vulture said slowly. “Now we march, but if we don’t find food and warmth by tonight there will be no more SS Assault Battalion Wotan.”

  He levered himself up from the tree and shuffled towards the centre of the glade like a very old man.

  They stumbled into the camp entirely by accident. Behind them the Russian flares were soaring into the darkening sky with increasing frequency and they could hear the slow tick-tick of the ancient 1905-type Popov machine gun. They weren’t far off now. And then suddenly the snow cleared for an instant and they saw the little wooden encampment, with the line of motor-sleds, engines idling to prevent them from freezing up, standing in the square. But it wasn’t the huts nor the sleds which caught their attention. It was the flag flying over the central hut – the flag of National Socialist Germany.

  Von Dodenburg felt his heart give a great jump of joy.

  “We’re saved sir!” he cried at the Vulture. “It’s our own people!”

  “Wait, wait a minute,” the Vulture said weakly and laid a feeble hand on his sleeve to restrain him. “We must check first.”

  But before von Dodenburg could answer, a door in the central hut was flung open and a girl stumbled out into the snow. Another followed, her long jet-black hair hanging loose, her big breasts flopping, her body seemingly impervious to the freezing cold. “Christ on a Christmas tree,” Schulze gasped in amazement. “They’re bollock naked!”

  Before anyone else had time to react, a pot-bellied, brown-uniformed figure lumbered after them, his open jacket flapping in the breeze to reveal the old Great War type Iron Cross and the Party Badge in Gold.

  “A golden pheasant!” someone yelled joyously. “It’s a fucking golden pheasant!”2

  There was no stopping them now. Yelling and whooping crazily, waving their weapons about their heads, they stumbled down the snowy hillside towards the huts. They had done it!

  They pushed into the dim smoke-filled central hut. Hiwis3 in ragged sheepskins and German Army trousers were busy packing cases while the drunken girls lolled in the chairs drinking out of bottles and dipping their dirty hands in bowls of sunflower seeds. “Who’s in charge here?” von Dodenburg snapped. The laughter froze on the Russian whores’ faces. They stared drunkenly at the lice-ridden, snow-covered soldiers as if they were visitors from another world.

  “Shut t
hat fucking door,” a thick voice, full of good food and drink, shouted from the inner room. “It’s cold enough in here to freeze the balls off you!”

  Von Dodenburg pushed his way through the Hiwis, whose faces had gone pale with fear at the sight of the SS runes on the soldiers’ collars. Schulze grabbed a bottle from one of the naked whores and roaring “nastrovya pan,” poured a great slug of it down his throat. The drunken whores crowded among them, giggling uproariously, thrusting their bottles into the young soldiers’ hands, feeding them sunflower seeds. While the Vulture watched them helplessly, his back propped against the wall, one of the whores picked up a balalaika and started to twang it. Another jumped up and began to swirl around.

  The Golden Pheasant glared at von Dodenburg. “The Bodyguard, eh?” he snapped, taking in the armband on his sleeve. “I know Sepp Dietrich well. Served with him in Munich in the old days.” He pulled his well-cut brown jacket straight so that von Dodenburg could see the ‘Blood Order’ on it which identified him as an ‘Old Fighter’ who had given his blood for the Movement. Without taking his little pig’s eyes off the young officer, he snapped to the girl: “Get your clothes on Ilona, will you! This young fellow is going to burst his breeches in a minute, looking at your knockers.” The honey-blonde girl stuck her tongue out at the Golden Pheasant and, swinging round, went into the big room, flaunting her bottom deliberately in front of von Dodenburg. He felt a faint twinge of long-forgotten lust, but knew there was no time for fun and games. In spite of the row outside he could hear the rumble of the Soviet artillery. He turned to the Staff officer. “We’re all that’s left of the Wotan Battalion of the Bodyguard. We’ve been marching three days now and my men are beat. We must find transport…”

  “I know, I know, Captain. In my day the German soldier did not run away from the enemy. But that’s another matter. You can have all you can eat and drink. We’re clearing out anyway. I’ve been ordered back to Kiev immediately. But transport…” He shrugged and left the sentence unfinished.

  “But Area Leader,” von Dodenburg protested, using the Golden Pheasant’s rank in order to flatter him, “don’t you understand? My men are finished. They can’t go on anymore. If they don’t get transport, they’ll have to stay here and wait for the Cossacks – and you know what that will mean?”