Winter Men

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  Karl threw a few more stones into the Rhine. Then he walked down to the parking lot in front of the hotel, where four officers stood hunched over an ordnance survey map spread across the hood of a Kfz 15 half-track. A leather satchel hung from one of the car’s side mirrors. He recognized von Funck with his small, proper mustache. The commander had a long, narrow face and alert brown eyes, and when he saw Karl he waved him over.

  Karl had exchanged only a few words with the general major, but he had a positive impression of the division’s commanding officer. The ambitious Colonel Ernst-Werner Sonntag, chief of the infantry regiment, and Major Hans Beyerlein, who was the division’s operations officer, were standing with von Funck, along with Strunz, the division’s head supply officer.

  “So, Strangl, do you have your troops under control?” Strunz said, giving him a friendly pat on his shoulder. Sonntag was focused on the general major and didn’t pay Karl any heed.

  “Of course.” Karl could still hear the music from Piroska’s portable gramophone. Thank god the other officers couldn’t see his unshaven second in command, who was at that moment waltzing around the balcony with an imaginary dance partner, his belly exposed beneath his unbuttoned shirt.

  When the men turned back to the map, Karl noticed that it showed a section of northeastern Poland and East Prussia. Von Funck pointed to a city in East Prussia and explained that Colonel Rothenburg, the head of the Twenty-Fifth Panzer Division, was there with his regiment. He pointed at a neighboring city.

  “And this is where we’ll join them: Insterburg.”

  Von Funck briefly outlined the situation to the cluster of men. Over the course of the coming days, the divisions’ vehicles, materiel, and troops would be loaded onto trains and travel across Germany and Poland. He imagined the men would be eager, after a few weeks’ idleness, to get back to it, and a huge assignment awaited them there. The general major went off to put the final touches on the practical arrangements with his staff officers. Strunz remained behind with Karl.

  “We’ll be busy, Strangl,” Strunz said, offering Karl a cigarette.

  “So it’s Russia, then.”

  “Yes, it’s Russia.”

  Near Minsk, White Russia, June 28, 1941

  A flickering candle cast restless shadows on the wall. The only light in the church entered through the large vaulted window behind the altar. The sun was setting, and through the window’s frosted glass Karl could see the city engulfed in flames.

  His pen had been resting on the paper for some time. He’d been unable to write a single word. He had much to tell, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate. His arthritis had begun tormenting him at night. It bothered him a lot these days. Maybe it had something to do with the climate. In exactly one month he would turn forty-three, but his hands were already those of a dotard. He thought of Dr. Strauss and rubbed his fingers. The doctor had been right, unfortunately; he was having difficulty grasping things. Fortunately it didn’t happen often, but one of these days Paul Piroska or one of the others would notice. He stubbornly pried open his fingers’ viselike grip with his other hand, and his pen fell from his hand. He picked it up and began to write.

  Dear Gerhard,

  I’m sitting in a small village in White Russia about nine miles from the capital city of Minsk. From where I’m sitting I can see Minsk burning, and I don’t know whether it’s the evening sun or the flames from the city that’s giving the sky its fantastic glow. It’s burning because of us. I don’t know what you’ve heard back home in Germany, but on June 22 we launched Operation Barbarossa. I won’t bore you with too many military details, so I’ll keep this short: we are divided into three army groups. Army Group North is heading toward Leningrad. Army Group Center, of which I’m part, is going toward Moscow, and Army Group South is bound for Odessa, the Crimea, and the oil regions in the Caucasus. We expect to capture Moscow before Christmas. Russia will be ours, and the war will be over.

  White Russia reminds me of Hamburg and its environs; it’s completely flat here. There are potato fields and forests of spruce, pine, and birch; there are narrow rivers, lakes, and peat bogs. Some people are glad to see us, and many in the small towns along the route welcome us with flowers and smiles. They are apparently happy to be rid of the Russians. When the invasion began, our men were in high spirits, but the journey through White Russia has drained the joy out of many. We rode through a cabinet of horrors: corpses, dead cows, and flames. It appears the army is leaving a trail of fire, death, and destruction in its wake. We saw great columns of people heading in the opposite direction, away from the front, bearing all their possessions. The luckiest among them have carts, but the rest carry whatever they can in their arms. There are old men with long white beards, girls with scarves around their heads, and mothers and children. Those people don’t give us flowers because we’ve destroyed their homes. We’ve been sequestered in a village. “Sequestered” may be the wrong word because the residents have been kicked out of their homes and our division has moved in. We sleep in the church. Despite the horrors, we sleep well and eat well. I have full faith in my men, and I hope that they have faith in me. I miss Hamburg, and I miss you. I hear that the English are bombing Hamburg, but I understand that everyone is doing all right. When this war is over, I hope that men like you and I can look ourselves in the eye and tell ourselves that we didn’t abet the evil that goes hand in hand with the war. I advise you to do whatever you can to remain in Germany because the front is no place for you. I have . . .

  The pain in his hand caused him to drop the pen. He grimaced and turned to see if anyone had seen. Most of the men lay on the wooden pews; others sat or sprawled on the church’s stone floor. He couldn’t bring himself to evict families from their homes, so he’d lodged the men from his transport column in the church. The only hurdle had been an argument with the priest.

  He looked at his hand, the damned cripple. Suppressing a sigh, he balled up the paper with his other hand. He tilted his head back to study the paintings on the ceiling. Frescoes on the whitewashed vaults depicted winged figures with golden halos and childlike angels floating in the air. The winged creatures surrounded three figures, which he had trouble distinguishing in the murky light. He presumed they were Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist.

  He stood and walked down the hallway past the arms depot, then out through the heavy double doors. The church, a crudely built structure of wood and stone, sat on a hill from which he could see all of Minsk. Karl’s eyes roamed up the tower to the onion-shaped dome topped with a cross that stretched toward the sky.

  He saw a figure approaching. The priest, a bulky man in a black cowl, had remained nearby, but when he saw Karl, he turned and darted around the other side of the building. He evidently refused to let the church out of his sight. Karl wanted to offer him one of the benches in the arms depot to sleep on, since he’d no doubt planned to spend the night tucked into one of the church’s outer walls.

  The village at the foot of the hill looked no different than any of the others he’d seen in recent days. Squat wooden houses hedged in by flimsy picket fences lined a broad, dusty path. Piroska sauntered up the hill, a triumphant smile on his narrow lips. His face was sunburned, and his brown hair had grown lighter, either from the sunlight or the dusty Belarusian roads. He handed his canteen to Karl, who sniffed it.

  “Honey?”

  “Taste it,” Paul said eagerly. “It’s a kind of beer. An old man gave it to me.”

  Karl took a gulp and handed the bottle back to Paul, who nodded toward Minsk.

  “Was that really necessary?”

  “What?” Karl asked.

  “Bombing the city to smithereens. They welcomed us.” He held up the canteen. “If we destroy everything they have, they’ll stop giving us mead.”

  “Yeah, well. What we destroy in Minsk won’t be used to defend Moscow.” Karl recognized the hollowness in his words; he’d only repeated what Colonel Sonntag had said that afternoon.

  Paul ga
ve a tired nod. The sun would soon sink below the ridge. Karl tore himself from the view and headed back toward the church. He turned briefly to study Paul, who seemed to be enjoying the sunset and his mead in equal measure.

  Most of the men were asleep. He unfurled his blanket on one of the pews and shoved his boots underneath. He lay down in his uniform. He could just make out, through the window, the flickering lights from the city. He closed his eyes and recalled the day’s events. There was the prison camp they’d come upon and the three men they’d lost. They’d kept a good distance from the action all day, and still Johan Phliegel and two drivers were dead. They’d stopped in Maladzyechna, a midsized city between Vilnius and Minsk, and Phliegel had noticed an unexploded artillery warhead, its tip lodged into the ground on the public square. Being one of the regiment’s photographers, he’d taken numerous snapshots of the two drivers posing with the dud bomb—which was as tall as a man—until one of the men foolishly leaned against it. In the resulting crater they found only the legs of the camera tripod and a boot.

  When Piroska awoke Karl the next morning, his back was sore from the hard pew. Karl stretched and looked sleepily at his next in command, who was awaiting his orders.

  “Find out when they want us ready to march,” Karl said, more brusquely than he’d intended.

  “Yes, sir. I wonder if it’ll be a short journey?”

  “We’re going only as far as Minsk today,” Karl said as he put on his boots. He didn’t need to lean forward very far before the unpleasant stench of his socks reached his nose.

  An hour later, the supply column was ready to go. All the trucks were parked at the bottom of the hill, and Karl climbed into the lead vehicle, an Opel Blitz. A former state champion in light heavyweight boxing who now weighed a little more than was allowed in that class, Dirk Bongartz was a seasoned driver who’d been with them in Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France. He was known for his good-natured disposition and his crooked nose, the result of several breaks during his boxing career. He didn’t talk all that much, but at least he didn’t whistle. In Belgium and France, Karl’s driver had been a skillful man by the name of Günter Quast. Everyone called him Tuneless because he always whistled snatches of random tunes, assembling an unbearable confusion of medleys that drove the men—and especially Karl, who rode with him—mad.

  Bongartz turned the key in the ignition, and the engine sputtered to life. Karl signaled to the other vehicles that they were ready. The dispatch rider, who was so filthy that Karl almost couldn’t tell the color of his uniform through the thick layer of dust, slowly pulled his motorcycle alongside the truck. As Bongartz put the vehicle in gear, Karl took one last look at the church’s onion-shaped tower.

  “Stop!” he screamed.

  He jerked open his door and practically fell out of the cab when the vehicle behind them rammed their truck. He righted himself and sprinted up the hill. The arms depot was ablaze, and the fire had already begun spreading to the church. A soldier stood a little ways off, a gasoline can in his hand.

  Karl ran over to him. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled, tearing the can out of the alarmed soldier’s hand.

  “Orders from Colonel Sonntag,” the soldier said apologetically as he took a couple of steps backward, terrified of Karl’s incensed expression. Karl gazed down at the town, where several of the wooden houses were engulfed in flames.

  “Did that fool ever consider that we might have to return someday?”

  “The colonel doesn’t believe in retreat.”

  Karl snorted. He had a hard time believing that a colonel could give such an ill-advised order. But he knew the reason. The motorized infantry had followed the panzer troops during the past few weeks, and now that they’d caught up to them, they wanted to show their balls.

  He ran back to the trucks. Paul, who stood with a group of men watching the fire, rushed toward him.

  “Didn’t someone borrow Johan’s reserve camera?” Karl asked, out of breath.

  “Yes, Remmel did.”

  “Tell him to take pictures of the town. Sonntag’s not getting away with this.”

  Twenty minutes later, medical officer Thomas Remmel was done, and the column trundled off toward Minsk. A dispatch rider had marked a path for them to follow by planting small flags on the edge of the road with the division’s logo, a yellow Y. The air was stagnant, and it looked like it was going to be another hot summer day. They were so close now that they could smell the dense smoke that hung above Minsk like a storm cloud. Parts of the city had been reduced to smoking ruins, and their eyes stung as they approached; in spite of the heat everyone rolled up their windows. It was a paradox: German soldiers running through the streets putting out fires their own bombs and artillery had started.

  After four days in Minsk Karl’s company was given orders to leave the city and follow the combat troops, who were already on their way to Vitebsk. So the column quit the vast area that had been established only days before as the army’s supply depot, laden with full twenty-liter gasoline cans. As they drove down a broad boulevard, Karl noticed that painters had begun camouflaging a number of buildings so that they would be harder to spot from the air. He figured that was probably where they’d house high-ranking officers, or perhaps those houses had been selected for the different departmental headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SD, SS, Abwehr, and whatever else might be there.

  The central train station was teeming with people. Securing the railroad was a high priority since many supplies came directly from factories and warehouses in Germany and were then transported as far as possible on freight trains. Minsk would serve as a supply hub. Everyone in the supply troops liked the statistic that for every man in the battlefield, three more were necessary to outfit him, deliver food, secure lodging, and so on. It made them feel important, and their vital role was most apparent at the station. Supply troops were loading ammunition and other equipment onto trucks, which then drove to and from the loading docks. Somehow the military police managed to maintain order amid this logistical chaos. A band of bakers stacked loaves of bread by the hundreds, which were then loaded onto a trailer hooked to a Hanomag tractor. A pile of mail formed a small mountain on a sidewalk, and several men—with bare torsos and oval-shaped dog tags dangling from their necks—were busy sorting envelopes. Affectionate words from home, photographs of newborn sons and daughters, sad reports of a brother’s passing in a U-boat at the bottom of the sea, and news of a cow that had calved were all jammed into pale-yellow envelopes. Letters often felt like moral support from home, making life at the front more bearable. Not that they needed moral support—they’d begun to feel indestructible following victories in Poland, the western front, northern Africa, and the eastern front—but letters and packages from Germany nonetheless energized the soldiers.

  The column continued on past a modern government building. The courtyard in front was thick with vehicles. The apartment buildings across the street from it had been reduced to ash and mangled iron, but the government building was undamaged, and a giant hammer and sickle rested on top of the façade, mocking the German conquerors. But he knew it wouldn’t be long before it, too, would be wrapped in a Nazi flag and then melted down.

  As they drove across the Svislach River, he studied the opera house, a singular, pompous affair that emphasized the immense contrast between the capital’s architecture and that of the villages. They were nearly beyond the city limits when something caught their attention. At the edge of a lush green park speckled with oak trees with broad crowns and gnarled trunks, a group of soldiers stood assembled around a fat officer. But it wasn’t the cigarette-smoking soldiers who attracted Karl’s notice—it was the spectacle behind them. A man was tied to a light pole, his head hanging at an awkward angle and a gaping hole in his chest. Behind him on the park lawn lay three tidy rows of ten corpses, all of whom had met a similar fate by the firing squad, who were now enjoying a cup of coffee as if they were having a picnic. Give us Germans credit about one t
hing, Karl thought with disgust: Even our executions are committed in an orderly fashion. His stomach lurched, and he felt a sudden urge to vomit. He tried to stifle the overwhelming nausea, but it didn’t abate until an hour later.

  On July 10 the defense of Vitebsk collapsed following a week of intense fighting. The Russians set everything ablaze as they fled the city so that the Germans couldn’t make use of their new conquest. A dismal pile of ruins greeted the advancing army. One of Karl’s men said they might as well remove the sign at the city limits, because Vitebsk no longer existed. Smolensk was no different. Its factories had been destroyed and the entire residential district leveled. The occasional chimney or church spire protruding here and there were the only reminders that a city had once stood there.

  The Russian soldiers—the very ones who had just annihilated their own homes—marched past them by the thousands, their heads low. In their mismatched and filthy uniforms, they didn’t look like an army at all. The Germans were just 250 miles from Moscow now, and judging by the endless columns of prisoners, there were no soldiers left to defend the capital.

  Hamburg, Germany, August 28, 1941

  Gerhard awoke with a dry mouth and a lump in his throat. Even before he’d opened his eyes, his head and body were resigned to the sad anniversary. His limbs were drained of energy, his appetite nonexistent. He pulled the duvet over his head and considered staying home. It was a day he’d rather forget.

  His entire life replayed in his mind as he lay there. He and Emma had been trying to have a child for a long time, and in 1927 she finally became pregnant. They had it all planned: they would name the baby Thomas if it was a boy and Laura if it was a girl. The nursery had been ready for two years, but it was Laura who brought it to life. She had been the light switch that illuminated the room and brought the colors, sounds, and smells to life. His relationship with Emma had suffered as they’d struggled to conceive, but now it blossomed—they were capable of creating life, of creating joy. But then they discovered that they could also create sorrow.