Lying there in the dirt, Max thought of the night he had proposed to her. They were in a small boarding house in Flensburg, the gasthaus where Mareth always stayed when she came to visit him at the Marineschule, because it was easy for Max to steal up the back stairs into her room. Of course, no men were allowed in the building, nor were Seekadetten supposed to be off base at night. But the boarding houses in Flensburg were often full of young women, and they hadn’t come for the scenery. The Marineschule was just three kilometers away.
Max had bought the ring that week without settling on when to ask her—he wanted something spectacular: a mountaintop, a sailboat on the Baltic, an intimate table at the Germania. But the ring seemed to burn a hole in his pocket once he had it, and it was all he could do to get through their first dinner together without showing her. That night, after she let him in and latched the door behind them, he dropped immediately to one knee and opened the velvet box in the lamplight for her to see. She wore a crafty smile as he stumbled through the question.
“Are you certain of this, Seekadett Brekendorf?”
“Of course I’m certain.”
“And have I been approved by the Kriegsmarine to be your wife?” The navy had to approve an officer’s choice of bride before he could marry her.
“You have, Fräulein Countess von Woller, although the request had to go to the very top of the Kriegsmarine, because of the year you spent as a showgirl at the Wintergarten.”
“Forever is a long time,” she warned him, “and that’s how long you will have me.”
“Good.” He put the ring on her finger. It was much too big—he’d never even thought of rings having sizes before the jeweler asked him. It wouldn’t stay on her finger. “Did you buy this for another girl?” Mareth said.
“Yes, I did. A fat girl I was seeing in France.”
They both began to laugh.
Max stood and put his arms around her. “Well, we have the rest of our lives to improve on it.”
“Yes, we will, Max,” she whispered in his ear, pulling his body tightly against hers. “We have the rest of our lives.”
When Max awoke from his dream it was morning. He was surprised to find that he’d slept. For how long he wasn’t sure, but when he opened his eyes, the sun was already bright and men in the hut above were filing out for the morning roll. He waited until they had all gone out and formed up in the middle of the yard. The American sergeant began calling names. Then Max scrambled out, stiff all over from sleeping on the packed earth, and joined the rear of the formation.
Over to his left he saw Carls and Heinz, caught their eyes, then looked away. When Max answered to his own name, Lehmann turned full around from where he stood, several rows ahead. He had a gash above his right eye that would need stitches. That was from the chair. Max fixed him with a hard stare. Lehmann faced forward again just as the main gate opened to admit the lumbering garbage truck.
After the men were dismissed Heinz approached Max with a haversack in his hand. “Sleep well, Herr Kaleu?”
“Well enough.” Max eyed Lehmann as the lieutenant crossed the yard to his group of Nazi toadies. They shot sidelong glances in Max’s direction, talking briefly among themselves before slinking off.
Heinz handed the haversack over. “I wish I had more to give you, Herr Kaleu, but this is a start: a suit, some food, twenty-five dollars of American money, an Esso map of Mexico, a compass, one canteen of water. The suit won’t fit you very well, but it’ll be better than your uniform.”
Max looked into the bag. “I can’t take all this, Heinz. You’ve been scavenging these things for months—it’s bad enough that I’m stealing your escape plan.”
“Take it, Herr Kaleu, take it.” Heinz smiled, not without a little sadness. “It’s like I said: scheming gives me something to do, but I can’t make it out there. I don’t speak English, and even if I could, why take the risk? You don’t got much to lose. They’ll kill you if you stay.”
“They’ll try to get you, too, you know. You and Carls both.”
Heinz shook his head. “No, sir. They won’t. I’ve been here longer than Lehmann, Herr Kaleu. I have friends among the men, and among the Americans, too. I may have helped you, but I didn’t surrender U-114. There are some other prewar petty officers in the camp. We stick together. And we know how to use our knives and the youngsters don’t. If I may beg your pardon, Herr Kaleu, it will be easier for us once you aren’t here.”
Max looked down at the ground. Pray God that was true.
“Stay near the garbage truck, Herr Kaleu. Watch me and Carls and be ready. When we make our diversion, go.” Heinz turned, strolling back to where Carls stood alone in the sun.
Max strapped on the haversack and walked briskly over to hut five, which stood beside the garbage shed in the shadow of the truck. The garbage workers dumped a can into the back of the truck, then took it back empty to the shed. Max leaned against the wall of the hut and watched them make another trip, then another, keeping his eyes also on Carls and Heinz loitering by the flagpole out in the yard.
The trash men returned the last can to the shed and came out with their hands empty. Heinz had still done nothing. Two guards approached the workers. Just as Heinz had predicted, the four of them all lit cigarettes. One of the guards said something that made the others laugh. Max’s heart pounded. He glanced up at the guard towers, their mounted guns pointing down into the compound. In the nearest tower, a soldier leaned on the rail reading a comic book. Suddenly, Carls pushed Heinz with both hands and Heinz stumbled backward. He shouted something unintelligible, recovered his balance, and punched Carls in the face. Now Carls was shouting, too, in his deep voice that could wake the dead. “She wasn’t a whore, you swine! She was a proper young woman!” He punched Heinz in the stomach and cursed him again. “Call her a whore again and I will punch your mouth out of your asshole!” The guards dropped their cigarettes, ran toward the flagpole. Max dropped to the ground, rolled underneath the truck.
He wedged his feet above the rear axle, reached up to wrap his arms around the thick pipe running down the center of the undercarriage, then locked his hands around smaller pipes on either side until his grip felt solid. Heinz and Carls were still cursing at each other but he couldn’t see them anymore. What he could see were the boots of the two garbage men. They stood with their backs to the truck, watching the fight. They went on watching for another minute or two, then let their cigarettes fall into the dust and crushed them out before separating to board the cab from opposite sides. Max heard the truck drop into first gear, and the pitch of the engine rose as they began to roll forward.
His hands sweated against the greasy pipes. He pulled himself up, closer to the undercarriage, and braced his arms for the truck to pick up speed. It eased to a stop instead. Max felt his stomach drop. He couldn’t hear over the noise of the engine, couldn’t see what was happening at the front of the truck. It was like being trapped in the U-boat, waiting for the depth charges to explode. He closed his eyes. Dear God and the Virgin Mother and all the Saints, just get me outside the fence. A minute passed. Heinz had said nothing about this part of the procedure, it wasn’t normal, someone had seen him—but then they lurched forward and were moving again. Max turned his head and saw the little guardhouse pass by, along with the boots of the sentry on duty.
They were on the outside.
Now the truck began to speed up. The road was dirt and Max heard pebbles turned up by the wheels striking the undercarriage, but he was far enough behind the front axle to avoid being hit. The vibration of the engine rattled his body, though, and he wondered how long he would have to hold on.
They drove for five minutes, then turned left onto asphalt. The ride was smoother now and Max’s muscles hadn’t yet begun to burn. Moving faster, they rolled down the highway for ten minutes, then fifteen. His fingers started to ache. Should have worn gloves. If his grip gave out, his feet would remain locked in place and he would be dragged into a bloody corpse on the pavement.
Don’t think about that. How long now? Thirty minutes? His muscles burned like fire from holding on. Suddenly the truck slowed and turned back onto dirt and a heavy smell hit Max in his nostrils: trash.
The land itself smelled like trash.
The truck growled up a hill and turned again, paused, dropped into reverse, then backed to a stop. Max pulled his feet free, slowly unwound his hands and fingers from the chassis, eased himself to the ground, drew the Nazi dagger from his boot. He lay still, breathing hard, flat on his back with the haversack on top of him, flexing his cramped fingers. He could see piles of trash off to either side. One of the workmen jumped down from the cab, walked to the back of the truck, and then the truck itself began to rise into the air over Max’s head. A hydraulic motor had been engaged and whined loudly above the rumble of the engine idling beneath the hood.
Sunlight poured in on Max as the body of the truck tilted upward, away from the cab. He was totally exposed but the view of the man at the back of the vehicle was blocked by the tipping trash compartment, and his partner remained behind the wheel in the cab. No one else was there—just garbage, stinking heaps of garbage. Max stayed flat to the ground, holding the dagger down at his side, ready to use. The compartment reached its apex and began dumping its contents. Blood pounded in Max’s ears. One of these days his heart would just give out, explode from the strain of beating so hard. Could that happen? The hydraulic motor kicked in again, lowering the empty compartment back down. It seemed to take an age. It locked into place and the motor cut out. The workman’s boots walked past Max and disappeared upward as he returned to the cab. Max waited.
There was no end to it, really. Survive a sea battle off the Rio Plata, cross the Argentine pampas on foot, and the next thing you knew, they were sinking a glorified cruise ship out from under you in the Indian Ocean. Survive eleven days in a lifeboat full of corpses. Get stuffed into a U-boat with a bunch of greenhorn virgins for a crew. Make it through that and your own German brothers vow to kill you in a nameless POW camp, and if you get away from them you end up sprawled in the foul-smelling dust of some godforsaken American nowhere, waiting to be run over by a garbage truck.
The truck dropped into gear. Max realized one of the back tires might roll him flat if the driver moved forward at an angle. He didn’t. The truck moved away and left Max blinking up into the white desert sun. Don’t look back in the mirror, he thought. Don’t look back in the mirror. He waited to hear the truck pause, hear it turn around and head back in his direction. Nothing. The sound faded away, leaving only the noise of scattered birdcalls carried on the hot, dry breeze.
He stood, body exhausted, hanging loose at the joints; his primal will to survive was nearly spent and he knew it. Trash surrounded him on all sides, the smell powerful—much worse than the inside of a U-boat that had been a month at sea.
Max reached into the haversack and pulled out the new suit of clothes. He stripped down to his underwear and stuffed his tattered uniform, stained with blood from the fighting the night before, into a soggy cardboard box lying amid the refuse. The suit must have been made for Heinz—the pants were too short but loose in the waist, and the jacket fit loosely as well. But it would do. Max wondered where Heinz had even gotten the material. He wondered if it was right to leave Heinz and Carls behind to deal with the Nazis in the camp. He wondered where in the name of God he was.
Climbing a pile of trash, Max saw that he stood at the center of a vast landscape of garbage. The dump stretched out for hundreds of meters on either side of him, occupying the top of a rocky plateau, and the birds he’d heard screeching were black-winged turkey buzzards. They gathered in packs here and there, squawking at one another, fluttering their long dark wings, pecking at their unearthed treasures with their horrible beaks.
In front of Max a broad valley of scrub brush and white sand stretched out to another line of hills far in the distance. Taking out his compass, he saw that he was looking south: toward Mexico. There was no sign of life in the valley, save for a single thread of empty blacktop running down the center of the empty land. It must have been the highway on which the garbage truck had come, though it could have been any highway at all. The sun was searing now, the distant ridgeline wavering in the heat. Max could feel sweat on his brow, a scratchy dryness in his throat. He turned and saw one of the vultures staring him down. The Americans would not know he was gone until the next morning, but then they would know. He looked down at his feet in their camp-issue cardboard shoes. He was standing on the headless body of a child’s doll, on the disembodied back of a kitchen chair, on broken milk bottles and cereal boxes and an old cabinet radio, one hundred and twenty kilometers from Mexico. He’d come halfway around the world and survived five years of war to stand on this trash heap in the desert summer, surrounded by ugly scavenger birds that might soon be picking the flesh from his bones. Soon enough: he would finally be picked clean.
EPILOGUE
BAD WILHELM, GERMANY
SIX WEEKS LATER
10 SEPTEMBER 1944
BUHL FELT A LUMP RISE IN HIS THROAT AS HE LOOKED DOWN AT THE telegram for Johann Brekendorf. It had come from Berlin and bore the official party seal on the outside of the envelope. How many had he delivered this year? Several dozen, maybe more; as Kreisleiter, the duty fell to him. “Volk and Führer,” he would say as he presented the envelopes, or “died for Greater Germany.” These were suggested phrases of condolence sent down from Party District Headquarters in Kiel, but the words never provided comfort. The tears were rarely immediate now—people seemed to expect the news; anger came first. They would take the telegram from his hand and stare icily at Buhl, setting their jaws, saying nothing. Of course the only reason he had not gone off to fight was the important party business he had to attend to. It was no secret. Seeing him at their door with the telegram, hearing his hollow words of sympathy, he wondered if the parents of the dead resented him for not having been killed along with all the rest. Resnau, the farmer east of town, had lost both his boys. He never left the house anymore, his farm going to ruin. Then Bruno, the tavern keeper, his son killed at Stalingrad, and Maus, who worked in the bakery, his youngest dead in Sicily. Juergen Kraus had been lost on the Volga, and August Faslem near Voronezh; Friedrich Fuge, shot down over France; Walter Guggenberger, blown up in Libya; Otto Drescher at Stalingrad; Fritz Zundorf and Kurt Hoferichter in the retreat from Rostov; Reinhard Drescher in Minsk. It seemed as if all of Buhl’s schoolmates were dead. And now Max was gone.
Buhl stood and straightened his tan party uniform, pinching the blood red swastika armband into place. He walked outside and mounted his bicycle. Even within the party, only the most senior officials could get petrol anymore. With a push he was off, pedaling slowly toward the large home where Johann Brekendorf now lived alone. The sky was cloudless, something normally welcomed, but no longer. A cloudless sky meant American bombers. Nonetheless, the air was warm and pleasantly dense. It was a good day for walking in the woods, swimming in a lake, or taking the sun.
Buhl parked his bicycle outside Johann’s two-story home and paused. What should he say to the old man, whose wife was twenty-five years in the grave and whose lover had been shot by men in the same uniform Buhl now wore? Best to say nothing at all. He took a deep breath, then stepped up to the door. Before he could even reach up to knock it swung open very slowly. Johann stood silently in the door frame. His weight had fallen off badly; the skin hung slack from his face. Even the ones who lived were hardly living anymore. Drawing himself up, Buhl gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute and thrust the telegram forward. The old man refused to take it. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, no words forthcoming. Finally he reached out and accepted the yellow envelope.
His hands shook so badly that he could hardly get it open. Buhl thought to help him, then thought: I should leave. But he didn’t. Instead he stood very still on the doorstep, arms hanging loose at his sides, and simply turned his face away. Wildflowers bloomed among the weeds in front of
the house in a patch of dirt that had once been carefully tended by Johann’s gardener, killed three years ago in Crete. Lazy bees wandered from flower to flower. Their buzzing filled the heavy air. When Buhl looked up again, Johann was holding the telegram out to him. The old man was weeping, but light burned in his eyes. Buhl took the paper and read:
Herr Brekendorf,
Your son is alive in Mexico City. My daughter is with him. Both are healthy. More news soon. Heil Hitler, Helmuth von Woller.
Acknowledgments
In the early 1980s I corresponded with the late Jürgen Wattenberg, Kapitän zur See a.D.(Captain, ret.), former senior navigation officer of Admiral Graf Spee. I wish to acknowledge the information he shared with me.
I wish to thank Mr. Joseph Gilbey of Ontario, Canada, who sent me a copy of his book, Langsdorff of the Graf Spee: Prince of Honor. This excellent biography deserves a wider circulation. Mr. Gilbey answered a number of questions and kindly gave his permission to use several quotes of Captain Langsdorff’s cited in the book.
I wish to thank Mr. Jak P. Mallmann Showell, the foremost authority on the German UBoatwaffe in World War Two, for answering my questions about U-boats and daily life in the Third Reich. I recommend any and all of his many books, all of which are excellent. Two were particularly helpful: U-Boats under the Swastika and U-Boat Commanders and Crews.
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