by War
"No, just pick up Louis, he's exhausted." She lowers her voice.
"And for God's sake, let us get in touch with Berel."
At the mica factory about noon, a few days later, a ghetto guard comes to Natalie and tells her to report toSS headquarters at eight in the morning with her child. When the workday ends, she runs all the way to the Seestrasse apartment. Aaron is there, murmuring over the Talmud. The news does not seem to upset him. Probably she is due for a warning, he says. The SS knows, after all, about the scheme to alert the Red Cross, and she is the only one of the group left in the ghetto.
She must be humble and contrite, and she must promise to cooperate from now on. That is undoubtedly all the Germans want of her.
"But why Louis? Why must I bring him?"
"You brought him there last time. The adjutant probably remembers that. Try not to worry. Keep your spirits up.
That's crucial."
"Have you heard from Berel yet?"
Jastrow shakes his head. "They say it may take a week or more."
Natalie does not close her eyes that night, either. When the windows Turn gray she gets up, feeling very ill, puts on the gray suit, and does her best with her hair, and with touches of color from her dry old rouge pot, to look presentable.
"All will be well," Jastrow says, as she is about to go. He looks ill himself, for all his reassuring smiles. They do something unusual for them; they kiss.
She hurries to the children's house, and dresses and feed!
Louis. As the clock on the church strikes eight, she enters S headquarters. The bored-looking SS man at the desk by the door nods when she gives her name. "Folios me." They g( down the hall, descend a long staircase, and walk through another gloomier hall. Louis, in his mother's arms, is looking around with bright-eyed curiosity, holding a tin soldier. The SS man halts at a wooden door. "In here.
Wait." He shuts the door on Natalie. It is a windowless whitewashed room, with a cellar smell, lit by a bulb in a wire mesh.
The walls are stone, the floor cement. There are three wooden chairs against a wall, and in a corner a mop and a pail full of water.
Natalie sits on a chair, holding Louis on her lap. A long time goes by. She cannot tell how long. Louis prattles to the tin soldier.
The door opens. Natalie gets to her feet. Commander Rahm comes in, followed by Inspector Haindl, who closes the door. Rahm is in black dress uniform; Haindl wears the usual gray-green. Rahm walks up to her and roars in her face, "SO, YOU'RE THE JEWISH WHORE WHO PLOTTED AGAINST THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT! YES?"
Natalie's throat clamps shut. She opens her mouth, tries to talk, but no sounds come.
"ARE YOU OR AREN'T YOU?" Rahm bellows.
Low hoarse gasps.
Rahm says to Haindl, "Take the shitty little bastard from her.
The inspector pulls Louis from Natalie's arms. She is losing any belief that this is'really happening, but Louis's wail forces hoarse words out of her throat. "I was insane, I was misled, I will cooperate, don't hurt my baby-"
"Don't hurt him? He's GONE, you dirty cunt, don't you realize that?" Rahm gestures at the mop and the pail of water. "That's for cleaning up the bloody garbage he'll be in ONE MINUTE. You'll do that yourself. You thought you got away with it, did you?"
Haindl, a squat burly man, turns Louis upside down, holding one leg in each hairy hand. The boy's jacket hangs around his face. The tin soldier clinks to the floor. He utters muffled cries.
"He is DEAD," shouts Rahm at her. "Go ahead, Haindl, get it over with. Rip him in half."
Natalie shrieks, and rushes toward Haindl, but she trips and falls to the cement. She raises up on her hands and knees.
"Don't kill him! I'll do anything. Just don't kill him!"
Rahm, with a laugh, points his stick at Haindl, who is holding the wailing child upside down still. "You'll do anything? Fine, let's see you suck the inspector's cock."
It does not shock her. Natalie is nothing but a crazed animal now, trying to protect a baby animal. "Yes, yes, all right, I will."
Haindl takes both of Louis's ankles in one hand, holding the whimpering boy head down like a fowl. Unbuttoning, he pulls out a small penis in a bush of hair. On her hands and knees, Natalie crawls to him. The exposed penis is limp and shrunken. Odious and unspeakable as all this would be if she were sane and conscious, Natalie only knows that if she takes that object in her mouth her child may not be hurt. Haindl backs away from her as she crawls. Both men are laughing.
"Look, she really wants it, Herr Kommandant," he says.
Rahm guffaws. "Oh, all these Jewesses are cocksuckers at heart.
Go ahead, let her have her fun. German cocks is what they want most."
Haindl halts. Natalie crawls to his feet and raises her mouth to do the horrible thing.
Haindl lifts a boot, puts it in her face, and pushes her tumbling backward on the floor. Her head hits the cement hard. She sees zigzag lights. "GET away from me. Think I'd let your Jewish shit-mouth dirty my.cock?" He stands over Natalie, spits down at her face, and drops Louis on her stomach. "Go suck off your uncle, the Talmud rabbi."
She sits up, clutching at the child, pulling the jacket away from his purpled face. He is gasping, his eyes are red and staring, and he has vomited.
"Get to your feet," says Rahm.
Natalie obeys.
"Now -LISTEN, Jew-sow. When the Red Cross come YOU will be the guide for the children's department' You will make the finest impression on them. They will write you up in their report, you will be such a happy American Jewess. The children's pavilion will be your pride and joy. Ja?"
"Of course. Of course. Yes."
"After the Red Cross goes, if you've misbehaved in any way, you'll come straight here with your brat. Haindl will tear him in half like a wet rag before your eyes. You'll clean up the bloody crap with your own hands and take it to the crematorium. Then you'll go to the hut of the POW road gang. Two hundred stinking Ukrainians will fuck you by Turn for a week. If your whore's carcass survives, you'll go to the Little Fortress to be shot. Understand, cunt?"
"I will do everything you say. I'll make a wonderful impression.
"All right. And one word about any of this, to your uncle or anybody else, and you're kaputt!" He shoves his face directly into her spittle-wet face, and howls with a corpsesmelling breath, so loud that her ears ring, "DO YOU BELIEVE ME?"
"I do! I do!". "Get her out of here."
The inspector pulls her by the arm out of the room, up the stairs, along the hall, and shoves her, with the inert child in her arms, out into the square glorious with spring blossoms.
The band is playing the morning concert, selections from Faust.
Jastrow is waiting when she returns. The child, his face still smeared with vomit, looks stunned. 14!atalie's face sickens Jastrow; the eyes are round and white-rimmed, the skin dirty green, the expression one of deathbed fright.
"Well?" he says.
- "It was a warning. I'm all right. I must change my clothes and go to work."
He is still there a half hour later, when she comes out in her threadbare brown dress with the child, who is washed and seems better.
Her face is dead gray but the hellish look has faded. "Why aren't you at the library?"
"I wanted to tell you that word has come from Berel."
"Yes?" She grasps at his shoulder, her eyes wild.
"They'll try."
(from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon)
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon treats the Normandy landings and the Soviet attack in Juneas a combined operation. This is valid only in a very general sense. At Tehran the Grand Alliance did agree to strike at Germany simultaneously from east and west.
But the Russians did not know our operational plans, nor we theirs. Once we landed it was touch and go for two weeks whether Stalin would actually keep his word and attack.
This chapter combines passages from Roon's strategic essay and his concluding memoir about Hitler. - V.H.
In J
une 1944, the iron jaws of the vise forged at Tehran began to close. The German nation, the last bastion of Christian culture and decency in middle Europe, was assailed from west and east by the long-plotted double onslaught of plutocratic imperialism and Slav communism.
In Western writings, the Normandy landings and the Russian assault still pass as a triumph for "humanity." But serious historians are beginning to penetrate the smokescreen of wartime propaganda. At Tehran, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered eastern Europe into Red claws.
His motive? To destroy Germany, the strongest rival on earth to American monopoly capital.
England was already skinned like a rabbit, in Hitler's colorful phrase, by her overstrained war-making, and by Roosevelt's wily anticolonialism. Brave Japan was sinking to her knees in the unequal contest with von Nimitz's ever-swelling fleets. Only Germany still blocked the way to the world hegemony of the dollar. it is a shallow commonplace that Roosevelt was "outsmarted" at the later conference in Yalta and gave away too much to Stalin. In fact, he had already given everything away at Tehran.
Once he pledged the assault on France, he made the Red Asian sweep into the heart of Europe inevitable. To assure this, he flooded Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. The figures still beggar the imagination: some four hundred thousand motor vehicles, two thousand locomotives, eleven thousand railway cars, seven thousand tanks, and more than six thousand self-propelled guns and half-tracks, with the two million seven hundred thousand tons of petroleum and other products required to put the primitive Slav horde on wheels; to say nothing of fifteen thousand aircraft, and millions of tons of food, together with raw materials, factories, munitions, and technical equipment beyond calculation.
The picture of Roosevelt as a naive outwitted humanitarian in his dealings with Stalin was his greatest propaganda swindle. r These two icy butchers thoroughly understood. each other; they just struck dissimilar poses for domestic consumption and for history.
Of the two, Roosevelt always had the upper hand, because Soviet Russia was half-devastated and in desperate straits, while America was rich, strong, and untouched. Stalin had no choice but to sacrifice millions of Russian lives to clear the way for world rule by American monopolists. He did explore the possibility of making peace with us on reasonable terms, in very secret parleys that we at Headquarters knew nothing about at the time; but here Roosevelt's Lend-Lease "generosity" frustrated us. Naturally Hitler was not prepared to yield all our gains.
Given all that materiel, Stalin decided he would do better by fighting on, at the cost of rivers of German and Russian blood The quarrelsome and impoverished lands of eastern Europe were Roosevelt's sop to Stalin for his country's terrible sacrifices.
Roosevelt's policy was simply to let them fall to the Russians.
Of course, the treacherous Balkans were a dubious prey. The Soviets already belch with indigestion from those swallowed but intransigent nationalities. The strategic importance of that turbulent peninsula is not what it was in past centuries, or even to us in 1944 as a conduit for Turkish chrome. But even so, to invite Slav communism to march to the Elbe and the Danube was monstrous.
Churchill's itch to funnel the main-Allied thrust into the Balkans at least showed some political sensitivity, and some sense of responsibility for middle Europe and for Christian civilization.
His blood was not as cold as Roosevelt's. Roosevelt cared nothing for the Balkans or for Poland, though in a strange moment of candor he told Stalin at Tehran that he had to make some sort of fuss about Poland's future, because of the large Polish vote in the election he faced.
Clash of the Warlords
Franklin Roosevelt took a great risk with the Normandy landings.
This is not well-known. When one weighs the opposing forces, the elements of space and time, and the sea-land transfer problem, one sees that Churchill's foot-dragging made sense.
The landings were very chancy and might have ended disastrously.
A pyramiding of mistakes and bad luck on our side gave Roosevelt success in his one audacious military move.
Eisenhower himself knew the riskiness of Overlord. Even as his five thousand vessels were steaming toward the Normandy coast in the stormy night, he drafted an announcement of the operation's failure, which by chance has been preserved: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.
If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." That this document did not become the official Allied communiquls was due,.to several factors, chiefly: a. Our abominable intelligence; b.
Ourconfusedandsluggishresponsetotheattackinthe first decisive hours; c.
Unbelievable botching by Adolf Hitler; Failure of the Luftwaffe to cope with Allied air superiority.
The mounting of the invasion armada was certainly a fine technological achievement; as was the production of the huge air fleets, with crews to man them. General Marshall's raising, equipping, and training of the land armies that poured into Normandy showed him to be an American Scharnhorst. The U.S. infantryman, while requiring far too luxurious logistical support, put up a nice fight in France; he was fresh, well fed, and unscarred by battle. The British Tommy under Montgomery, though slow-moving as usual, showed bulldog courage. But essentially what happened in Normandy was that Franklin Roosevelt beat Adolf Hitler, as surely as Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo. In Normandy the two men at last clashed in head-on armed shock. Hitler's mistakes gave Roosevelt the victory; just as at Waterloo it was less Wellington who won than Napoleon who lost.
The core of Franklin Roosevelt's malignant military genius-lay in these simple rules: to pick generals and admirals with care; to leave strategy and tactics to them, and attend only to the politics of the war; never to interfere in operations; never to relieve leaders who encountered honorable reverses; and to allow all the glory to those who won victories. When Roosevelt died, his supreme command in the field was virtually the original team.
This steadiness paid dividends. Shake-ups in military command can cost much momentum, plan, and fighting effectiveness. The shuffling of generals by Hitler was our plague.
For the Fuhrer had arrogated supreme operational command to himself, and we were suffering bad reverses. He could never admit that he was responsible for any setback. Hence, heads had to keep rolling.
Ambitious rising commanders abounded, eager to plunge in where their elders had been sacked for Hitler's failures. I watched these temporary Fuhrer favorites come and go, taking over with zest, only to be worn down by Hitler's meddling and at last fired for his bad moves; likely as not to kill themselves or die of heart failure. It was a sad business, and absurd war-making.
The Normandy Landings
Three questions governed the invasion problem, on which the fate of our nation hung: 1. where will they land?
2. When will they land?
3. Where do we fight them?
By all military logic, the place for the Anglo-Americans to land was the Pas de Calais, opposite Dover. it offered the shortest. route to the Ruhr, our nation's industrial heart. The Channel is there at its narrowest. Waterborne troops are all but helpless, and common sense demands getting them ashore the quickest way. The turnaround time for ships and for air support would have been shortest on the Dover-Calais axis. The Normandy coast, where the enemy struck, was a much longer pull by sea and air.
By preparing so well for invasion at the Pas de Calais, we set our minds in one groove, and gave the foe the chance to spring a surprise.
Hitler somehow guessed that Normandy might be the place. At one staff meeting he literally put his finger on the map and said, "They will be landing here,"dwith what we used to call his undeniable coup doeil.
But he made many such guesses during the war, as often as not extremely wild. Of course he remembered onl
y the ones that turned out right, and made a great noise about them. Rommel, charged with repelling the invasion, also became concerned about Normandy. So, very late, we hardened up those beaches, and augmented the armed forces poised there; and we could have crushed the landings despite the surprise, except for the unspeakable manner in which the first day was bungled.
The chief British planner of the landings, General Morgan, has written: "One hopes and plans for battle as far inland from the beach as may be, for if the invasion battle takes place on the beach, one is already defeated." I confess that we of the O.K.W staff erred on this.
We agreed with Rundstedt that the mobile reserve should lie in wait far enough inland to avoid the naval and close air bombardment; and that once Eisenhower was ashore and moving inland in force, we should attack and wipe out the whole enterprise, as we had repeatedly bagged Russian armies. It was an "eastern front" mentality. Rommel knew better. In North Africa he had tried to fight a war of maneuver against an enemy controlling the air. We were between the devil and the deep, and the only time to stop the Normandy invasion was when the enemy was floundering ashore under our guns.