by Leo Kessler
You guys are going to be the Joes who will ensure that if the Kraut has a son, that kid will succeed to the family title real smartish. Get me?’ The challenging look gave way to a fat smile. ‘Yesterday, you see, you all volunteered to become professional killers.’
Notes
1. Popular film series in the USA in late thirties and early forties, which starred Mickey Rooney as ‘Andy Hardy, the all-American boy.’
2. European Theater of Operations.
3. i.e. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe.
4. US Army slang for reinforcement centres.
5. Officers who had taken the wartime sixty-day officer training course.
TWO: THE DEATH SQUAD
‘Do you know what we talk about all day in the cellars, Kuno? … We talk about death, the various ways that one can die – that in Catholic Aachen.’ Elke Simons to Colonel von Dodenburg.
ONE
As the third week of September 1944 passed and the Americans still did not attack, the defenders of the City of Aachen settled down to the routine of a siege. Supplies were now coming through regularly from Juelich, but although Police General Donner knew that there were some twenty thousand civilians hiding out in the ruins of the old city, he abandoned all attempt to feed them.
As he told von Dodenburg, ‘If they want to live in their cellars like rats, then they must learn to scavenge for themselves like rats!’
Now and then the Americans blocked the supply routes with their bombing and the Luftwaffe was called in to make airdrops. But the slow-moving, three-engined. ‘Auntie Jus’, as the troops called the Junkers 52s, rarely supplied them with anything worthwhile: Cellophane covers for grenades, but no grenades; boxes of official forms; great five-kilo cans of dehydrated animal fodder when they had no animals; and once over four million contraceptives, type ‘Volcano’.
As Donner exclaimed angrily to von Dodenburg: ‘What does that fat fool Goering think we’re doing out here – fighting or fornicating?’
For the most part, enemy action was limited to Ami propaganda companies, armed with nothing more lethal than powerful radio transmitters, who played the same old popular song, ‘After Every December, There is Always a May’, over and over again until the bored front-line troops would cry, ‘Can’t you bastards play anything else?’ This would usually result in a powerfully magnified voice, crying in a thick Berlin accent: ‘Give yourself up, German soldiers. We Americans will treat our prisoners-of-war fairly!’
‘We Americans!’ the Wotan men would jeer cynically, ‘Why don’t you give yourselves up and we’ll shorten your German-Jewish tails a little bit more for you than the Rabbi did!’
But, despite the overall quiet, there were signs that the Americans were preparing for an all-out attack on Aachen. In that third week, highly trained, aggressive Ami snipers started to appear in the suburbs nearest the lines of the First American Infantry Division – ‘the Big Red One’ – as von Dodenburg knew it was called from prisoners. Systematically they wormed their way into the ruins, feeling out the German strong points, testing the strength of the long line and taking a heavy toll of the SS troopers, who had grown contemptuous of the Ami’s ability to fight.
In the end, Diedenhofen, Wotan’s fat, bald chief medical officer, went to von Dodenburg to complain bitterly of the activities of the snipers on the First Division’s sector of the front.
‘Thirty in three days, sir,’ he snorted, drinking the fiery clear glass of Korn von Dodenburg had offered him in one angry gulp. ‘Do you realise what that means? The bullet passes through the helmet, scalp, skull, small blood-vessels’ membranes into the soft sponginess of the brain substance in the occipital lobe of the cerebral hemisphere.’
Von Dodenburg offered him another Korn. He drained it automatically. ‘Then you’re either paralysed or you’re blind, or you can’t smell anything or your memory is gone or you can’t talk or you’re only bleeding,’ he paused for breath, ‘or you’re dead! It all depends on how your goddam turnip is carved when that piece of lead hits you.’
Von Dodenburg poured the angry surgeon another drink.
‘Colonel,’ he concluded, ‘I’m heartily sick of picking out flattened slugs from young men’s heads, tying up the tricky blood vessels, covering up the hole in the skull with a tantalum metal plate, knowing all the time that I’m burdening the Homeland with a human vegetable, who will have to learn how to walk, talk – even goddam smell again. Sir, you’ve got to do something about those snipers, or I’ll be ending up in the nuthouse myself!’
Von Dodenburg smiled at the surgeon’s rage. In spite of his toughness and chronic drinking, Diedenhofen cared deeply about his ‘young blackguards’, as he called the Wotan men; the tragic cost in human suffering was really affecting him.
The first clue to the fact that they were faced by a really expert sniper came in the shape of a captured copy of the US Army paper Stars and Stripes. Under the banner headline, ‘New Volkssturm1 on Aachen front made up of old men, stomach cases, cripples with glass eyes and wooden legs’, there was a small paragraph, concluding the account of the fighting on the Aachen front, detailing the activities of a Master-Sergeant Smart, ‘a latterday Alvin Yorke from the backwoods of Kentucky’, who could ‘thread a piece of lead through the eye of a needle at fifty paces’, and who boasted that he had already ‘rid the world of twenty Krauts in the last three days alone’.
Thus while both sides prepared for the great battle to come, Colonel von Dodenburg, supported by Major Schwarz, both armed with sniper’s rifles, set out on a little private war. Together they intended to outsmart Sergeant Smart!
For two days the First Division was quiet. Then on the third, two young SS men who had grown careless again in the lull, were neatly drilled through the head. They were both dead by the time Diedenhofen reached them.
On the fourth day, Schwarz and von Dodenburg sneaked out just before dawn into the shell-pocked waste of brick rubble which was no-man’s land and started to study the ground carefully at a time when they guessed that Sergeant Smart from the backwoods of Kentucky would not be his usually alert self, and there would be no sun glinting on their binoculars to betray their position. Together they swept the battlefield. A reddened, burnt-out Sherman.
‘Too obvious,’ von Dodenburg whispered. ‘Our Mr Smart wouldn’t be that foolish.’
Schwarz nodded. ‘The pillbox to the left of the Sherman?’
Hastily von Dodenburg focused his glasses. But that was not the Ami sniper’s hiding place either. ‘The slit’s been blocked up, Schwarz. He’s not in there.’
The glasses continued their sweep of the area. They passed over a rusty sheet of corrugated iron that might have once been used to roof some farmer’s shed, a pile of brick rubble, and on to a series of surburban gardens or fields in which the spring-sown cabbages now rotted. Nothing!’
Von Dodenburg cursed bitterly. ‘Where the hell is the Ami arsehole hiding, Schwarz?’
Schwarz’s black eyes narrowed. ‘Sir, he can’t be in the cabbages. There’s no cover. The tank and pillbox are out. So?’
‘Of course – the sheet of corrugated iron!’
The two officers focused their glasses on the innocuous pile of rubble surmounted by the rusty metal sheet. Nothing stirred. Everything seemed to be perfectly in order. But von Dodenburg knew that Schwarz was right. The place was the only hiding place available to the sniper.
He bit his bottom lip in irritation and bewilderment. ‘I’m sure the bastard’s in there, Schwarz. But how are we to find out?’
Schwarz did not hesitate. Slowly, but deliberately, he raised his artificial hand, encased in its black leather glove. Von Dodenburg peered through his glasses. A white fast-moving blur. The harsh dry crack of a high-velocity rifle. Schwarz swore and withdrew his hand hurriedly. There was a neat hole drilled through the centre of the black leather.
‘Christ on a crutch,’ von Dodenburg cursed excitedly, ‘We’ve got him!’
In the end they decided that they had to place him at the greatest possible disadvantage by finding a spot where his position would be bathed in the maximum amount of sunlight. They found it and prayed that the September sun would do them the favour of appearing the next afternoon once they were in position.
Fortunately it did, and after firing a blind shot to attract the Ami’s attention, the two officers settled in beneath their shell-crippled oak tree to wait. By late afternoon they had Smart at a disadvantage. Von Dodenburg, concealed now in the shade while Smart’s position was bright with sunlight, focused his telescopic sight on the rusty sheet of corrugated iron. Suddenly something glinted. Glass! Smart’s own telescopic sight.
‘Schwarz,’ he hissed, ‘Mr Smart’s showing himself!’
Schwarz wiped the sweat off his brow. Drawing a deep breath, he took off his camouflaged helmet and raised it carefully over the edge of their hiding place. Smart’s rifle cracked. The slug whanged loudly against the helmet. The force of the impact flung it from Schwarz’s hand. It clattered to the ground. For a moment, a surprised Schwarz did not react.
Von Dodenburg dug him in the ribs angrily. ‘Scream, Schwarz – scream, Schwarz!’ he hissed.
Schwarz wet his lips and screamed, throwing his head back to do so, giving it all his energy, as if he were suffering the agony of death throes. Von Dodenburg waited. He could feel the icy cold drops of sweat trickling down the small of his back. His heart was racing madly and he had to fight back the urge to blink.
Sensing victory, Smart raised his head slightly from beneath the sheet to see his thirty-third victim. It was the last thing he did.
Von Dodenburg squeezed his trigger gently. The sniper’s rifle slapped against his shoulder hard. The high-velocity 9-mm slug sped through the September sunshine, and buried itself in Sergeant Smart’s skull. When, after a suitable pause, they crawled out cautiously to check their victim, they found Smart sprawled on his back in the rubble, his red, leathery face relaxed in death, a neat hole between his eyes. Schwarz hawked and spat into his face.
Thereafter sniping stopped on the Aachen. The Amis returned to their saturation bombing; it was safer, it seemed.
Now as the autumn nights closed in, the besieged city took on a deserted look. Stretched out in the pale September moonlight, its ruins bathed a ghostly silver, it offered a submissive, clear target for the night enemy – and a chance for Colonel von Dodenburg to meet the beautiful, pale-faced redhead who had so excited him at the demonstration a few days before. For although the city might look deserted from the air, it Was alive with civilians at night, in spite of the bombs and Donner’s chain-dogs who seemel everywhere. Like neolithic cave dwellers, confined to their holes during the day, the Aacheners emerged from their cellars and basements into the ruins to scavenge for fuel, to loot abandoned food stores and above all to find sufficient water for the next day.
Kuno von Dodenburg and Elke Simons met for the first time during a raid. With the flak slamming burning red balls into the sky and the searchlights stabbing icy white fingers around the darkness, searching for the Ami Fortresses, they looked at each other in silence, until finally he asked: ‘Where to, Elke?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We have to go somewhere,’ he reminded her gently.
She laughed and pressed her hand on his black leather sleeve. ‘I know, Colonel. You don’t want to be seen with me – what would General Donner think? And I can’t be seen with you. My fellow citizens would not be too gentle with me. What a mess, eh?’
He bent down and kissed her soft cheek. ‘Home?’
‘The cellar?’ She shrugged. ‘All right then, the cellar. It’s the only home I’ve got left – all of us have got left.’
They walked swiftly down the dark street, the shadows of her fellow Aacheners scuttling around in the ruins, more sensed than seen. He held her tight to him. Now the sky in the east was ablaze yet once again.
‘Bloody war,’ he cursed softly, as the fiery white ‘Christmas trees’2 began to descend slowly, indicating that Aachen was in for a full-scale attack.
‘Yes, bloody war,’ she echoed sadly.
In the candle-lit cellar, with the walls heaving from the first 500-pound bombs, he put his arms around her and kissed her passionately, almost brutally. She responded wildly, with an abandon he had not expected from her, pressing her slim, rounded stomach against his. Gasping crazily, they fell on to the ancient bed, the room’s sole furniture save for a chair and a crucifix.
His eager tongue burrowed deep into her open mouth. His hard hand followed the soft silken line of her stocking till his greedy fingers, striving fingers, found the wet softness they sought. The ruined city outside, Wotan, the war, the death all around him were forgotten as they writhed back and forth on the squeaking wooden bed.
Once a 1,000-pound bomb landed close by and sent the whole cellar shivering with the shock, showering their sweating naked bodies with tiny flakes of plaster. They did not even notice. Their shadows, gigantically magnified by the yellow, wildly-flickering light of the single candle, continued their frantic dance. Their fevered desire consumed them; it was as if there had never been another lovemaking against the background of a world gone mad.
But the world outside could not be forgotten for ever. Lying side by side on the little bed, their bodies lathered in sweat, hands under their heads, staring at the shadows flickering on the ceiling, scarred by the week-long shellfire, she asked softly: ‘Why Kuno?’
‘Why what?’
‘You know. Why continue fighting? We can’t beat the Amis – they’ll win in the end.’
He shrugged, but still stared at the ceiling. ‘Probably,’ he said without emotion. ‘But we must still fight on.’
She sat up, leaning on one elbow, her long red hair hanging over her face, her left breast dangling just above his mouth temptingly. ‘But why?’ she persisted.
‘Because, my little cheetah,’ he said, stroking her gleaming fire-red hair, ‘there is nothing left for me and my men to do but to fight on.’
She was silent for what seemed a long time. Outside the flak thundered and the bombs howled down with stomach-churning regularity. But she did not move from her position, nor take her sad eyes from his worn, handsome face. He tried once to caress her nipple. But she shook her head.
‘Do you know what we talk about all day in the cellars, Kuno?’
‘Food?’ he ventured.
‘No, not food any more. That was at first, at the beginning of the siege. But no longer. We talk about death, the various ways that one can die – that in Catholic Aachen!’ She licked her suddenly dry lips. Looking at her, von Dodenburg thought how beautiful, how fragilely innocent she was. ‘Some advocate poison, others drugs or gas – but there is no gas any more.’ She turned suddenly and slid her thin hand under the pillow, pulling out an old-fashioned cut-throat razor. ‘My father’s,’ she announced simply. ‘Before he was killed in the big 1942 raid.’
He sat up, alarmed. ‘What the devil do you need that for?’
She flicked open the blade and stared at it, fascinated as it gleamed in the faltering yellow light of the candle.
‘I asked you a question, Elke. I said, what do you need it for – that razor?’
She tucked the razor under her pillow again. ‘Well, not to shave my legs with, as I hear the Ami women do. Now,’ her cold little hand slid along his hard stomach down to his thighs, ‘I want to make love again. Can I excite you?’
He did not see the tears in her eyes, as his greedy hand sought and found her nipple.
But the clandestine night life of the dying city was not all sadness. At least Schulze and his one-legged companion, Sergeant Matz, did not think so. Night after night, they staggered through the blacked-out streets, avoiding Donner’s chain-dogs, or if they could not avoid th
em, slugging them swiftly before clattering off into the shadows in their great heavy dice-beakers, laughing uproariously.
Blundering drunkenly through the blackout curtain into the SA man’s cellar, they would usually smash him in the face to send him flying into the nearest fire bucket – ‘just in case he starts getting too big for his boots’ – ripping off their jackets in the same instant and announcing their presence to the giggling whores by raising their left legs and venting two enormous farts.
The whores loved them. Schulze and Matz could do no wrong, even when they were blind drunk, which happened frequently in that last week of September, after a ‘hunting commando’ had discovered an abandoned schnapps distillery and every platoon in Wotan had its own fifty-litre carboy of fiery liquor at hand. As soon as Schulze would bellow; ‘All right, my ladies, I’m going to dance a mattress polka this night! Get those rags off at the double!’ they would respond with alacrity, ripping off their underwear like Virgin brides on the wedding night.
Even when Matz, as drunk as his senior NCO, would insist on taking off his artificial leg, ‘so that I can get on the job better’, the whores were not offended. They would tolerate the undersized sergeant’s peculiarities, as he hopped towards them, completely naked, on one leg, big hands outstretched to grab the nearest whore’s breasts, crying: ‘Stand fast, girls! Hold on to something quick! Because this piece of meat is going to hit you worse than a 88 mm shell at close range!’
As an exhausted Schulze commented one night, his head nestled in the big blonde’s breasts, while a brunette wiped the sweat off his naked chest and stomach, ‘Matz, you cunning, one-legged fart-cannon, this is a dream come true.’ He threw out a big hand to draw in the roomful of drunken naked women, being served by the downcast little SA man, who had now added a black eye to his swollen, green-coloured nose. ‘Who would have believed it, eh, you puffed-up pineapple-shitter!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘My own private whore house! Matz, old cock, at this moment, I could die happy …’