Claws of Steel

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Holy shit!’ Schulze cursed. ‘Did you see that poor sow, Captain?’

  He nodded, tight-lipped. There was no hope for the woman unless she got herself in water up to her neck; phosphorous would continue burning as long as it was exposed to air or a doctor managed to dig it out with a scalpel.

  ‘Get a detail,’ he ordered thickly, fighting back the bile desperately. ‘Check they’ve got their rifles, Schulze. While the rest do the best they can in this mess, we’ll have a go at trying to check the looters. You understand me, Schulze?’

  ‘Yessir, you don’t need to write it.’ Schulze pulled back the flap of his pistol holster and checked that his Walther was ready for action; he knew what the CO meant. Hamburg swarmed with army deserters, black marketeers and foreign workers who made a business of looting immediately after the raids, coming out of their dirty holes like so many longtails searching alley trashcans for carrion.

  A few moments later they set off, marching carefully down the centre of the great avenue that led from the Alster to the station, with von Dodenburg, Schmeisser machine pistol cradled in his arm in the lead, and Schulze, Walther held in his hamlike fist, bringing up the rear.

  They passed a city fire engine. Its motor was still running. But the firemen had suffocated in the baking heat. Now they sat in their prescribed positions along both sides of the ladder, the clothes burnt off them, naked save for their boots and helmets.

  ‘At the double!’ von Dodenburg yelled.

  Readily the file broke into a run, their heavy boots crunching over shattered slates and broken glass, not daring to glance at the dead men on the engine. A few seconds later the vehicle’s gas tank exploded and the firemen disappeared in a vicious ball of ugly red and yellow flames.

  They came closer to the city’s pride – the internal lake called the Alster. In the ruddy glare of the burning buildings on the other side, they could see the phosphorous victims paddling about everywhere, desperately trying to keep their burnt bodies submerged. Weakening visibly by the effort, their cries for help seemed like an age-old prayer in which they no longer believed.

  But the elderly policemen piling up the victims from the burning hotel nearby had no time for them. A few were still alive, but most were charred by the searing flames and shrivelled up to the size of black pigmies, and the policemen stacked them as if they were logs of wood.

  ‘Human child … oh, you holy human child!’, Schulze suddenly gasped with horror, ‘look at that!’

  The patrol swung round. On the other side of the road, the line of trees which bordered it had been stripped bare of their leaves by the blast, with here and there a thick branch snapped off as if it had been a matchstick. But it was not the damage which had caused Schulze’s horrified cry. It was the naked babies, blown among the branches from the nearby nursery, hanging there dead like overripe fruit.

  Von Dodenburg swung his head back nauseated, choking back the bitter bile. He marched on, feeling he himself was a dead man among thousands of dead.

  The 88s had stopped firing from the flak tower somewhere over by Dammtor station. To the north the first of the city’s sirens started sounding the thin strains of the ‘all clear’. The Tommies were going, their murderous assault on the city completed, leaving it now to its death throes. They marched by the burning Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten towards the Jungfernstieg, the port’s great shopping centre.

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ von Dodenburg forced himself to order. ‘The rats will be coming out, now they’re safe.’

  The pale-faced troopers gripped their weapons more firmly, their shadows thrown into monstrous trembling relief by the flames. But the Jungfernstieg and its stores were a burning rain; and the civilians crowding it were not looters, but panic-stricken Hamburgers fleeing the dying city, wet rags wrapped round their faces, the steam rising from their dampened clothes. Everywhere burning bodies lay sprawled out in the gutters and a little white dog kept running in front of their feet, yelping crazily, as if it were seeking some dead master. Wordlessly Schulze raised his Walther and shot it neatly through the head. It sank down almost gratefully and died on the spot.

  They plodded on through the refugees and the handful of city officials trying to organise them, without success. Once they stopped a figure running out of a burning house, a sack clutched in his hands. But the elderly man was not looting. He was the owner of the place who had risked his life to rush in and fetch out a bundle of Field Post letters from his son who had vanished at Stalingrad.

  ‘But it’s all I’ve got now, all I’ve got …’ he kept repeating as they let him go to join the stream of refugees.

  A little later they came across a white-haired old woman who could have been anyone’s grandmother; save that she was completely naked and had a dead baby clutched to her ancient leathern dug, which had not given milk these fifty years, urging it to drink with the clucking noises nursing mothers make to encourage their infants. She would not move, nor would she answer their shouted questions and in the end they were forced to leave her, squatting on the curb, the dead child clutched to her skinny ancient body, as the sea of flame swept ever closer.

  Five minutes later they were pressed into service to keep back a crowd of screaming frantic civilians while an officer in the combat engineers and a handful of men prepared to blow up an underground air raid shelter to make a fire break which might prevent the fire storm from spreading.

  ‘But there are still women and children in there!’ a hysterical middle-aged woman, whose hair had been burned away to a military crop, kept screaming at the harassed young officer. ‘I know, I tell you! I just heard them shouting for help before you came … You must listen – there are children down there!’

  But the young officer ignored her as he fumbled frantically with the detonator, and she relapsed into a heart-broken sobbing.

  ‘If there were a God, He wouldn’t allow this to happen – I know He wouldn’t!’ a woman next to her said angrily.

  ‘Leave God out of this,’ an old man, who looked like a former NCO in the old Imperial Army, snapped sharply. ‘God doesn’t make war – men do!’

  With a grunt the young engineer officer pressed the detonator plunger. There was a thick throaty muffled crump, a vicious stab of ugly yellow flame shot into the red air and what was left of the building above the underground air-raid shelter collapsed on top of it, sealing it off for good, leaving its occupants to die slowly from lack of oxygen.

  Grimly they plodded on, leaving behind them the sobbing women.

  It was just before they reached the main station once again that they bumped into the two elderly policemen leading the seven RAF prisoners burdened with their parachutes and sweating heavily in their thick fur-lined flying overalls.

  ‘Tommies?’ von Dodenburg snapped in a strange voice, stopping the patrol.

  The bigger of the two city policemen, his fat chest covered with World War One decorations, snapped to attention, his eyes warily taking in the SS runes.

  ‘Yes, Captain. They came down just behind the Fish Market. We’re taking them to the central police station. The Army can collect them there—’

  ‘You’re shitting well not!’ Schulze burst in savagely, his teeth bared like those of some wild animal.

  ‘Schulze!’ barked von Dodenburg.

  But the big Hamburger was beyond listening. He stared at the RAF men, a couple of them who were injured, his eyes glittering crazily.

  ‘Those sodding bastards don’t deserve to sit out the rest of the war in some shitty POW camp, living off their Red Cross parcels. Not when they’ve done this!’ He swung his big hand, with the pistol in it, around at the fiery burning background. ‘They’re not soldiers – they’re cold-blooded killers!’

  ‘Now careful, Sergeant,’ the bigger cop said. ‘You can’t talk like that. We’ve got our orders—’

  ‘Piss up your sleeve,’ Schulze swung round to von Dodenburg. ‘What do you say, sir? Are we going to let the Tommy bastards get away with this? Isn’t
it our duty to punish them – here and now?’

  Captain von Dodenburg bit his lip. He thought of the blind amputees crawling on their stumps to the safety of the station, the naked old crone with her dead infant, the bodies hanging in the trees; then he looked at the Tommies staring at the armed SS men uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Put them against that wall,’ he snapped suddenly.

  ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’ the bigger cop said angrily.

  ‘Hold yer trap and give your arse a chance,’ Schulze roared, pushing him aside as he tried to place his fat body in front of his prisoners.

  The other one tried to bring up his pistol, but one of the troopers brought his rifle butt down sharply onto his arm. He howled with sudden pain and his pistol dropped to the littered cobbles with a clatter of metal.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ cried a burly Tommy with a great curling moustache stained red with the blood running down the side of his face, in broken German. ‘We’re prisoners of—’ He broke off suddenly. The looks on the sweating faces of the young SS troopers told him all he wanted to know.

  A red-haired Tommy, who looked all of seventeen, standing next to him asked him something in alarm. But the one who spoke German shook his head and put out his hand to steady him. To no effect. The red-haired kid dropped on his knees and raising his hands in the traditional posture of supplication, he babbled something in English. His words ended in a shriek of pain, as one of the troopers, beside himself with rage at what he had seen that night, kicked him squarely in the mouth.

  Thereafter the RAF men remained silent. Wordlessly they allowed themselves to be lined up against the nearest wall, tugging the sobbing red-haired youth with them. They tried to raise him to his feet. But failed. So they stood there, their faces ruddy and sweaty against the flames, their eyes blank of fear as hate – blank of any emotion at all.

  Von Dodenburg lined his men up to face them. Without an order, they raised their rifles. The Captain brought up his Schmeisser, while the two elderly cops looked on in horrified impotence. One word of protest from them and they knew they would join the RAF men; they were both veterans of the trenches in the First War. They’d seen men like these, shocked out of their minds by the horrors of war before, and knew there was no stopping them now.

  For a moment nothing happened. The Tommies about to die stared numbly at their killers. There was no sound save the steady crackle of the flames and the thick sobbing of the boy with the ruined mouth.

  ‘Fire!’ von Dodenburg screamed suddenly. Almost without knowing he pressed the trigger of his machine pistol. It crackled into life at his side. At such close range, his burst ripped the face off the Tommy with the big moustache, transforming it into a shapeless red pulp. Then the others joined in the murder of the RAF prisoners.

  It was all over in a matter of seconds. For a moment they stood there, listening to the heavy echoing silence, while the two elderly cops stared at them open-mouthed. Before them the smoking bodies sprawled out now in the careless, abandoned postures of the violently done-to-death. The bigger of the two policemen raised his thick forefinger and pointed it accusingly at von Dodenburg. ‘You … you,’ he began, but no other words came.

  Von Dodenburg swallowed. His mouth was abruptly terribly dry. ‘Follow me,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  Obediently they turned and followed him towards the station, stumbling through the smoking debris of a dying Hamburg, their chests heaving violently as if they had just run a great race. Behind them the two elderly cops did not move, the bigger one his thick forefinger still pointing as if in eternal accusation.

  FIVE

  The order came from the Berlin Headquarters of the Armed SS. It read:

  ‘In view of the exceedingly efficient manner in which the SS Assault Battalion Wotan recently executed its arduous mission during the English air gangsters’ terror attack on the Free Hansa City of Hamburg, the Reichsführer SS takes pleasure in granting the Battalion a three day stand down from its training schedule. This order is to take effect immediately.’

  Heil Hitler!

  (signed) Himmler.

  And even the Vulture dare not disobey the order from the ex-chicken farmer who was now the most feared man in Europe. Reluctantly he granted the whole Battalion three days’ local leave, and cursed the Reichsführer SS to high heaven as he signed the order which Captain von Dodenburg set before him.

  But the men of Wotan took no pleasure in this surprise respite from the dreary round of training. Those three terrible days in the dying Hamburg, which they’d ended by bulldozing the great heaps of dead into mass graves, had taken their toll. And there was not one of them who wanted to do anything else but blot out the ghastly memories of that place, with its 40,000 dead within five hours, by means of massive doses of alcohol.

  Even the seventeen-year-old ‘greenbeaks’, who had never touched a glass of beer before they had been rushed to Hamburg, went out that first day and began to drink themselves into insensibility with dogged sullen determination, pouring the Korn and Pils into themselves in the dark little bars all over the provincial city, oblivious to the severe looks of the elderly gentlemen sitting round their stammtische1 playing skat.

  Sergeant Schulze hardly waited for County Leader Schmeer to leave the house with his daughter before he blundered in through the kitchen door, his cap on the back of his head, his tunic ripped open and his big face flushed a sullen red.

  Mrs Schmeer, ten years younger than her husband, but just as fat, was standing at the oven watching Heidi frying his favourite Schnitzel and potatoes.

  ‘Won’t be long my big hero,’ she chirped, her face flushed with cooking. ‘I want to get it just right for you.’

  Heidi of the big knockers kept her head bent pretending she wasn’t aware of the big NCO’s presence. Schulze, already very drunk from the Korn he had been pouring down his throat all afternoon, was in no mood for Frau Schmeer or her Schnitzel. What he wanted this day was oblivion. With an angry swipe of his big hand, he sent the frying pan flying.

  ‘Stick yer Schnitzel up your fat arse,’ he snarled drunkenly, nearly falling over, ‘piss off into the cellar and get me a bottle of Schnaps – two bottles!’

  Heidi bent down to pick up the meat, but he caught her by the blouse to stop her. It ripped badly. Her massive breasts, unrestrained by any bra, tumbled out. She screamed and tried to cover them with her hands.

  ‘Get those hands away,’ he cried, ‘I want to see yer tits!’

  ‘But my big hero,’ Mrs Schmeer protested, too concerned that he might not give her what she needed in bed that evening to be angry about the Schnitzel. ‘You can’t do—’

  ‘Have you got cloth ears – have you been eating big beans?’ he bellowed. Can’t you hear me? I said – piss off into the cellar and get me something to drink. I’m going upstairs with Heidi and I want something to drink before I push it in her … Now fetch that flaming bottle of booze, will you?’

  ‘But she’s my maid. You can’t—’

  ‘Fetch it!’ Schulze raised his big fist threateningly and she fled in alarm, while the big Sergeant stamped unsteadily upstairs, dragging the screaming, half-naked maid with him.

  But when Frau Schmeer timorously knocked on the maid’s door and crept in, holding the tray as if she were ready to drop it and run at any moment, Schulze’s rage had fled. Heidi was standing in the centre of the room, her enormous breasts uncovered staring down puzzled at a Schulze who lay on his stomach on the bed, sobbing hopelessly, beating the bed every now and again with his big fist and crying in his utter despair: ‘Why did it shitting well have to happen … oh, why?’

  There were many others of the Wotan Battalion who could not answer that overwhelming question. Captain von Dodenburg was one. He staggered blindly through the Cathedral city’s evening streets, while Schwarz, just as drunk, marched blankly at his side. Everywhere there were drunken SS men, crowding the straight-laced, shocked civilians off the pavements, forgetting to salute the officers and NCOs (who w
ere just as intoxicated), urinating against house walls to the horror of the prudish Catholic housewives.

  Von Dodenburg was vaguely aware that they were from the Wotan and that their behaviour this day had ruined the Battalion’s reputation for discipline and order in Paderborn. But he did not care. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the dead babies hanging in the stripped trees like monstrous human fruit.

  ‘I don’t care, I don’t care, Schwarz,’ he mumbled drunkenly and nearly tripped. Gravely Schwarz steadied him and nodded his crazy head, muttering something unintelligible.

  They stumbled on. Then a voice interrupted their confused reverie as they turned into the central square. ‘Gentlemen – gentlemen, how glad I am to see you.’ A hand caught hold of von Dodenburg’s arm and pulled him to a stop.

  With a great effort of will, von Dodenburg turned slowly. A blurred brown outline filled his vision. He shook his head stupidly to bring it into focus. A piglike shining Westphalian face above a brown SA uniform appeared with next to it a blonde head of hair, rolled into little ‘snails’ over the ears, supported by a well-filled German Maiden uniform.

  ‘Captain von Dodenburg – Lieutenant Schwarz,’ the pig face said jovially.

  ‘Don’t know you,’ von Dodenburg said thickly, slurring his words. ‘Shit of,’ he threw off the restraining hand and staggered on.

  ‘Grab hold of him, Karin, for Christ’s sake,’ Schmeer snapped to his daughter, while he hung on to Schwarz. ‘He’s going to get himself in trouble with the chaindogs2 if they catch him in that state.’

  ‘At your service,’ Karin answered cheekily. ‘You’ve always been good at giving orders, County Leader.’

  All the same she ran quickly after von Dodenburg while her father beamed at Schwarz and said: ‘I think one more beer, Lieutenant, and then I feel I should show you some of those little pleasures that I promised you the last time we me. What do you say, Lieutenant Schwarz?’