Chapter 9 - The Escape.
Monday, 27th November 1944.
“I want the Lagerführer present when I interview your suspect, Brian,” stated Hunloke to his colleague sitting at his left in the rear of the Austin.
They had just reached the summit of the escarpment on the way to Flash Camp, the underpowered staff car again struggling to climb the sharp ascent. Hunloke’s ears popped. The clouds and the ground appeared to collide, the rain continued to fall like stair rods and the interior of the Austin steamed up despite the paucity of words spoken during the journey. Conway and Christine appeared to be maintaining radio silence, an alien concept for the normally garrulous pair.
“If you wish, sir.” The ‘Sir’ was emphasised with a peevishness that amused Hunloke. “The corporal and I will be continuing with our research.” This time, Conway placed emphasis on the direct pronoun.
The visitor’s arrival at Flash Camp came prior to the morning roll call. It was going to be a very wet and uncomfortable procedure and the sullen temperament of the camp’s guards reflected the tedious nature of the forth-coming task. Hunloke collared Sergeant Donovan and passed on his requirements relating to the Lagerführer and a certain Josef Overath.
It came as no surprise to Hunloke that Major Beevor was absent. He appeared to spend as little time at the camp as possible. Sergeant Donovan voiced no opposition when Hunloke stated he would be using the major’s office for his interview.
Beevor’s desktop was bare save for an empty wire in-tray and a black Bakelite telephone with its brown twisted cord. Hunloke placed a new packet of cigarettes upon the table along with a stained tin ashtray. He whiled away many minutes fastidiously adjusting the position of the cigarette packet.
A knock on the glass panel heralded the arrival of Günter Grass.
The Lagerführer saluted casually before Hunloke pointed to one of the two chairs. Grass removed his sodden peaked cap and clenched it on his lap whilst he eased himself into the chair.
“I understand you wish to talk to one of my men?” enquired Grass. The notion that Grass referred to the man as one of his own sat ill with Hunloke.
“Yes, Feldwebel. We have reason to believe he is not who he says he is.”
“And who do you suppose him to be?”
“A member of the Waffen-SS, hence deemed politically unsuitable to be housed here.”
“Not all Waffen-SS are ideologically brainwashed, Hauptmann. Some are no more pro-Nazi than the rest of us.”
“So they haven’t committed atrocities?”
“I didn’t say that. But you have committed atrocities; it is not the reserve of the German Volk.”
“But it is you who is losing the war. There will be a reckoning, Feldwebel.” Grass laughed at Hunloke’s statement. “What’s so funny?” probed Hunloke.
“You know, Hauptmann, we had a saying in Normandie. We used to say, ‘Enjoy the war, the peace is going to be awful’...”
“Do you know Josef Overath?”
“I know Sepp. He is a quiet boy. He causes no bother, keeps himself to himself.”
“Boy?”
“He is seventeen years old, Hauptmann. He doesn’t yet shave.”
Hunloke nodded and offered his cigarettes to the Lagerführer. There was no hesitation as Grass took two cigarettes and slotted them in the dry inside pocket of his jacket. The British captain lit his own cigarette with his flaming petrol lighter, cunningly dipped that morning in the petrol tank of the Austin, and grinned. “Shall we ask Sergeant Donovan to fetch Grenadier Overath?”
Hunloke did not know what to expect when Sepp Overath was escorted into the office. Thus far, aside from the Lagerführer, he had only seen the POW’s as a collective ensemble, a faceless mass of men.
The blonde man who finally stood before Hunloke’s desk took a few moments to assume any individuality. His British greatcoat was too big for him, as was the ubiquitous German field cap. He sported what Hunloke recognised as ‘prison pallor’, induced not so much by incarceration but by a state of mind. His eyes lacked any spark of curiosity. As Hunloke explored beneath the mask of disinterest, he agreed with Grass that the ‘man’ indeed barely deserved that epithet.
“Hats off, salute the Hauptmann, Grenadier!” ordered Grass.
Overath stared passively at the far wall and delivered the clock a clumsy salute. He remained standing in a sloppy at ease position.
“Wie ist ihr Name?” asked Hunloke. He purposefully remained looking at the open document file on the desk in front of him.
“Grenadier Josef Overath, 6th Battalion, 4th Panzer Regiment.” The youngster’s voice sounded hesitant.
“Would you kindly strip to the waist, please,” requested Hunloke with seeming disinterest. He purposely posed his question in English, allowing Grass to translate.
Overath looked to the Feldwebel for support. The Lagerführer simply nodded at Overath’s overcoat. “Best get it over with, son. They’ll strip you one way or another. May as well do it now rather than get a beating for your modesty,” insisted Grass.
It may have been due to the cold but Overath trembled when he finally removed his worn cotton shirt to stand topless in the office. Hunloke stood and walked around to the front of the desk to confront the youngster. If this boy was Waffen-SS, his sunken chest and emaciated body hardly conjured up the image of a Teutonic superman.
Hunloke firmly gripped the left arm prompting a grimace from the man named Overath. With a twist of his wrist, Hunloke exposed the white flesh on the inside of the youngster’s left arm.
“Well, well, what would you say that was, Feldwebel?” asked Hunloke. Grass remained silent. “I’d say that was a letter ‘A’ denoting your blood type. I’d say you were SS. What do you say, Grenadier? Or should I say SS-Schutze?”
Overath again looked at Grass for encouragement. Grass simply nodded at the clutched shirt, indicating that he should get dressed.
“Sergeant!” shouted Hunloke loud enough to summon Donovan from the main office.
“Yes, sir?” asked the sergeant from the open doorway.
“See that the SS-Schutze is taken to solitary confinement, if you’d be so kind.”
“Of course, sir.”
With Overath out of the office, Hunloke lit two cigarettes and passed one to Grass. The German NCO hesitated before accepting the offering.
“Who do you suppose he is, Günter?” Hunloke’s use of his first name unsettled the German. “We think his name is Breitner from the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. About the right age for them. Did you not have your suspicions?”
“What do you want me to say, Hauptmann?”
“What you think, Günter, what you think.”
“My responsibility is for my Kameraden. I am not here to do your job for you.”
“You remind me of a union shop steward.”
“I am a school teacher, not a Marxist.”
“You, Feldwebel are a Panzer commander.”
“If Germany is defeated you will have to fight the Bolsheviks.”
“With any luck, but at the moment, Feldwebel Grass, you are my enemy.”
“What will you do with Overath?”
“Not my call, Günter. But I’ll tell you something. Nazis are like ants, they seldom travel alone. How many more have you in your camp?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Hauptmann.”
“Oh, I think you do, Günter. Why don’t you have a think about it?”
“Is that all, Herr Hauptmann?”
“Yes, that is all for now, Feldwebel.”
Grass stood, tipped his cigarette, stowed it with the others, and saluted. Hunloke shouted for Sergeant Donovan. Before he reached the office, Hunloke attracted the Lagerführer’s attention. “Here, Günter, catch...” Hunloke smiled and tossed the cigarette packet towards Grass. The NCO nodded his thanks and hid the gold dust quickly in his pocket.
SS-Obersturmführer Hans-Georg Bonhof was the same rank as Lieutenant Brian Conway. Despite the comp
arative paper equivalence, the two men might well have come from different planets. Conway was a thinker, an administrator who fought his war behind a desk. His weapons were his fountain pen and attention to detail. Bonhof had applied a similar diligence to his work, albeit with an entirely different arsenal at his disposal.
Bonhof was now twenty-six years of age and it had been a testament to his martial prowess, and admittedly good luck, that he had reached that degree of adulthood. One thing his years had failed to endow him with was a recognisable measure of urbane maturity.
Pavlov would have been proud to cite Bonhof as a prime example of his work on Classical Conditioning and Behaviour Control. Bonhof was a product of Nazi Germany and the Waffen-SS. He felt justly proud of his achievements, for he had indeed always fulfilled the remit set by his superiors. That those conventions were not shared by the majority of the human race was not Bonhof’s fault.
He was a veteran of the Eastern Front where the fighting transcended the excepted bounds of combat convention accepted or experienced by the majority of troops fighting for the Western Allies, save for violent episodes during the Normandy Campaign. Brutality was second nature to combatants in the East. That Bonhof and his comrades did not necessarily see the perpetrated acts of brutality as such, but simply the logical consequence of hostility, spoke volumes regarding their indoctrination and commitment to their cause.
Bonhof had fought with the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler before transferring to instruct the newly formed 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. He and five men had been captured during the bitter fighting in Normandy. As Brian Conway had suspected, the five men had exchanged their uniforms for standard Wehrmacht apparel and somehow managed to slip through the PWIS screening, to be duly classified to wear the grey patch before being dispatched with haste to Flash Camp, where they had arrived in August. Bonhof was now masquerading as a simple Grenadier, a private soldier in British parlance.
That at least was the legend known to three of the group captured alongside Bonhof. What the three men did not know was that Bonhof was indeed his real name, as was the case with his accomplice, SS-Scharführer Berti Flohe, a fellow veteran the 1st SS Panzer Division. Gefreiter Flohe and Grenadier Bonhof were already in possession of the forged papers giving them Wehrmacht status. They had been planted in Britain as one of several planned teams under the code name ‘Rabe’, meaning raven in German.
Bonhof considered the three other men with whom he and Flohe had been captured stood little chance of pulling off their falsely assumed identities and was surprised by the degree of British incompetence that had allowed them to slip through the screening net. It was his belief that even had the three strangers been correctly identified as Waffen-SS, the chances were that he and Flohe, with convincing documentation, could still have pulled off their act of subterfuge.
Flash Camp came as a revelation to Bonhof. The guards were careless, the security non-existent. He had expected guard towers with searchlights and snarling dogs snapping at his heels. In reality, the only lights around the wire perimeter were provided by a set of car headlamps placed upon the concrete stanchions powered by depleted twelve-volt car batteries.
If he had found the attitude of the guards perplexing then the behaviour of his fellow inmates infuriated him no end. The majority seemed to embrace the notion of captivity as a welcomed substitute for fighting. Even if they had no likelihood of managing to escape the country, they could at least act with a little more belligerence towards their captors.
Contrary to what one might expect, the last thing Bonhof wanted was for anyone to escape for that would spoil his own plans. Now that young idiot Overath, aka Breitner, had been picked up. It would require little effort on the part of the British to make the youngster talk and reveal the names of the men with whom he had been captured.
It was perhaps unfortunate that one of the three men with whom he and Flohe had been captured was the aging Wolfgang Kleff. SS-Rottenführer Wolfgang Kleff was a brainless braggart who had proudly confessed his involvement in the shooting of British captives in Normandy to his fellow gang of five. It would take only a little massaging of the Kleff ego for him to admit to his role in the perceived atrocity. It was no coincidence that Bonhof and Flohe kept the other three men close by and incorporated them into their work detail.
In light of what was happening at the camp, Bonhof knew his plans would have to be brought forward. He needed to speak with his accomplice, Flohe.
“Bonhof!” The identity of the speaker was immediately recognisable to the SS man, revealed by the concealed cultured tones of the voice. He turned slowly and faced the approaching Lagerführer, Günter Grass.
“What is it, Feldwebel...?” Bonhof found it difficult to show any respect for the senior Wehrmacht NCO. Bonhof remained leaning in the lee of the hut, sheltered in part from the precipitous downpour. Grass had no such luxury and hunched his shoulders so that his stocky neck all but disappeared beneath his turned up coat collar and cap.
“They have requested a working party at Flash Farm to fix the barn roof. Apparently, the rain is ruining the hay. Get your boys together and go out there.”
“In this weather...?”
“They wouldn’t want you if it wasn’t, would they?” derided Grass. His antipathy for Bonhof was mutual.
“You should be speaking with Gefreiter Flohe. He is of senior rank in our detail.”
“He may be the senior ranker but I prefer to speak to the organ grinder not the monkey.”
“I really don’t know what you mean, Feldwebel...” grinned Bonhof. “What about Overath? He’s one of our team, is he coming with us?”
“He’s in solitary; turns out he’s probably Waffen-SS.”
“Now there’s a turn up for the books, a young lad like him. Who’d have thought it...?”
“You’d have thought it... It wouldn’t surprise me if you had one of those bloody tattoos on your arm.”
“You mean you haven’t been peeking in the showers, Feldwebel? I’m sure you know as well as I do who the SS men in this camp are.”
“I don’t care if you are Herr Himmler or Herr Heydrich. As long as you don’t cause any bother for the rest of the camp.”
“That is most gracious of you, Feldwebel.” Bonhof smiled disingenuously. He had little time for the Feldwebel but at least the Lagerführer had been true to his word. Most of the camp’s inmates were aware of who belonged to the SS and an understanding existed. Any internal disciplinary action required to be carried out against the allegedly barbarian Slavs was usually meted out by the camp’s SS contingent. They were the ones who generally, although not in every case, enjoyed the punishment beatings.
“I need an extra man to replace Overath,” insisted Bonhof.
“Then grab someone. They’re laying on the camp truck for you. Don’t want you to get wet, bless ‘em...” Grass ambled off to his hut leaving a grinning Bonhof. He may have been an atheist but today some benign spirit was looking out for him. He had to think quickly on his feet.
Fifteen minutes after the conclusion of his conversation with Grass, Hans-Georg Bonhof had assembled his work detail. A fifth man had been selected. Bonhof knew him to be an SS ‘wannabe’. There were many men serving in the Wehrmacht who had applied to join the Waffen-SS. Many were turned down and Grenadier Christophe Kassel was one such man. In camp, he liked to be near the known SS men, hoping that some of their supposed sparkle might rub off on him. He was only too delighted to be asked to join the work detail.
Four men of the party clambered into the back of the green Bedford truck whilst Bonhof took the seat in the cab next to the British driver.
“Morning, Fritz, lovely day for ducks!” exclaimed Private Etherington, the young driver of the lorry. Etherington suffered from severe myopia and was excused front line duties. It was his habit to call all the POW’s Fritz. His memory for names was as deficient as his eyesight. He sat very upright behind the wheel and peered through the windscreen beh
ind glass bottom spectacles, seemingly mesmerised by the wipers hypnotic beat.
“You know, they reckon this rain will keep up for a few days yet. Still, it’s better than snow. Mind you, I do love snow, it’s just a bugger trying to get anywhere around here when it snows, too many bloody hills. Where I come from we hardly ever get any snow...”
Bonhof let the driver prattle on as he often did. His English was adequate but he often missed many of the subtleties and nuances used by the British when speaking with regional accents.
“I feel sick. Could you stop?” asked Bonhof plaintively. He gripped his stomach and rocked gently forward in his seat.
“Shit, Fritz, don’t go throwing up in the cab. The serg will have me guts for garters...!” Etherington slowed the lorry and pulled up. They were somewhere midway between the camp and the junction with the tarmac estate road. The private leant over to open the door for the ailing Bonhof.
The German pounced like a trained assassin. His elbow rammed into the face of the guard, smashing teeth, bone and cartilage. Two subsequent blows from Bonhof rendered the guard insensate. Three of the Germans had already disembarked from the rear of the vehicle leaving only the confused late replacement, Kassel sitting on the wooden transverse bench seat. Bonhof suddenly appeared at the tailboard brandishing the guard’s Lee-Enfield rifle.
“Get out!” shouted Bonhof. Kassel hesitated. Bonhof levelled the rifle at the dumbstruck soldier. “Get out, now!” came the repeated order. Reluctantly, Kassel edged towards the tailgate. He jumped down and turned to face Bonhof, intent on knowing what was going on.
The heavy wooden rifle butt smashed into Kassel’s face. He was unconscious by the time his legs buckled and collapsed, dropping his body upon the sodden concrete road. He was dead after the rifle butt smashed into his face a further dozen times, reducing his features to a nebulous, bloody pulp.
Bonhof rifled through the dead man’s pockets and extracted his Soldbuch pay book, which he replaced with his own. Like many German soldiers, Kassel wasn’t wearing a dog-tag. It was no coincidence that the late replacement was blonde and of a similar build to Bonhof. Berti Flohe joined Bonhof and together they picked Kassel up and tossed him in the back of the truck. Kassel was joined by the now dead and jacketless Etherington.
Dancing with Artie (Thaddeus Hunloke Book 1) Page 9