FSF, July 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  Marya is preparing for bed, humming an old Cossack folk song as she shrugs into a nightgown embroidered with little roses. A faint smile lights her round face, like the face of a matryushka doll, and her slanted eyes touch me lightly with a certain glance. She says, “Are you going to scribble in that silly notebook all night?"

  Nein, meine Liebe, nein! A moment only, and I'll put it away inside my big, ornate presentation copy of The Complete Writings and Speeches of Adolf Hitler—in the space I've hollowed out with a razor (as if the original contents weren't hollow enough!). Then back into the safe my silent friend and father confessor will go, for the time has come to live my life, not write about it.

  * * * *

  3 September 1949. Waked at 0530 by a call from Müller's adjutant. Nevsky has been beheaded by guillotine.

  Very curious, this fondness of the Gestapo for the chief implement of the French Reign of Terror. At least it's painless, unlike their other methods involving piano wire and meat hooks.

  I was ordered to drive Nevsky's family out onto the road to starve, as a warning to others. Well, one advantage of being a big landowner is that I can move them to another of my villages, where they'll lie hidden until the whole episode is forgotten. Sent Marya to the estate to take charge of this duty, which I'm sure she will discharge with her usual cleverness and womanly compassion.

  Meanwhile, I sat down to deal with a vast pile of paperwork generated by the bureaucrats at the Ostministerium. I'd barely started on this unpleasant duty when the telephone rang again. I picked it up with foreboding, only to hear—with astonishment—a friendly voice!

  My wartime comrade Dietrich Wallenstein had arrived, all the way from Berlin. At once I abandoned my task and drove, a happy man, to the Veteran Officers Club where Dietrich was staying. And there he sat at the bar, clutching an elegant new attaché case and looking as much like his old self as anybody can after gaining thirty kilos. Well, he's a big cheese now, a troubleshooter for the General Staff, so I suppose he comes by his big gut honestly.

  Soon he and I were seated at a quiet table, a schnapps bottle and two glasses between us. When I asked for news, he passed one fat hand over the pepper-and-salt bristles on his head and responded, “Na, can you guess who's become a nobleman?"

  I groaned. “Not you!"

  "Jawohl! I am now Graf von und zu Rostock."

  "Another Nazi nobleman,” I said, when we'd toasted his new distinction. “And to think how Hitler hated the aristocracy!"

  He leaned toward me, small pouchy eyes gleaming. “It grieves me deeply to tell you this,” he whispered, “but our beloved Führer is dying."

  No surprise there. On 20 April of this year—his sixtieth birthday—Hitler visited the Volga frontier to see the War Memorial dedicated. I was granted the honor of being seated close enough to smell his farts, which were frequent. He looked dreadful—gray-faced, trembling. Astounding contrast with the heroic figure on the monument. I'm surprised he's lasted this long.

  I nodded, and Dietrich went on, his voice sinking even lower:"Last week there was a funeral rehearsal at the Great Hall of the Reich. Pal of mine's a theatrical director, did some work with Riefenstahl, and he was in on it. The whole thing's to be broadcast on television—first time ever—so Goebbels had actors play the leading Nazis to get the lighting perfect. They got hold of a 300-kilo freak from the circus to stand in for Göring. Since he was too fat to walk, a couple of Polish serfs wheeled him in. Everybody had to keep a straight face, but I understand there was a lot of giggling in the wings.

  "By the way,” he added casually, “you've been invited to the funeral. I made sure of that."

  "I won't go."

  "Oh, yes you will. I'll tell you frankly, rumors have reached Reich Security that you're no longer politically reliable. High time for you to do some fence-mending, old boy! Attend the ceremony, look solemn, wipe away a tear, salute like an automaton, and prepare to enjoy the spectacle when the long knives start flashing. Things are going to get nasty as the satraps fight for the succession. With luck, they'll kill one another off, and the Nazi business will be over for good. Here—take this."

  He handed me the attaché case, a capacious one covered in crocodile skin. Inside were some welcome gifts and one unwelcome one. A framed enlargement of an old photograph—God knows how it survived—of Dietrich and me during that other life we lived during the war. Also a bottle of good Scotch whiskey; and six cartons of real Virginia cigarettes. All most welcome and deeply appreciated. But also a large envelope of heavy cream-laid paper, with black borders and an embossed swastika, which was not appreciated.

  "I don't see why I've got to go at all,” I complained. “I'm no politician, not even a soldier anymore."

  "My friend, you're a hero. That's your burden, so don't try to escape it now. Without you we'd have lost Stalingrad—pardon me, Führerburg—and then the whole war would've been in the toilet."

  He leaned forward and gently struck my shoulder with his closed fist. “I've always regarded you as Germany's savior. The monument on the Mamayev Kurgan should be to you."

  I had to turn away for a moment to hide my emotions, which as usual were contradictory and troubling. Dietrich has a heavy thumb, and he'd put it down on my greatest shame and my sole claim to historical importance—that to save my life and the lives of my comrades, I made it possible for Hitler and his cronies to dominate the world.

  When I regained my composure, our talk turned to practical matters. Dietrich warned me that the guerrillas are growing bolder. I should watch out for the Ataman. He's supported by the Russian government in Siberia, and Khrushchev—that crude, tough Ukrainian peasant who overthrew and executed Stalin—is receiving aid from the British and Americans.

  "So don't,” said Dietrich, “be surprised if some very sophisticated weapons start showing up in guerrilla hands. We're die Übermacht, the superpower. Naturally, everybody hates us."

  Then it was time for him to go about his business—something secret, he didn't discuss it with me. I tried to return his attaché case, but he absolutely refused. The container, he said, was part of the gift. We gripped each other's hands and he exclaimed, "Auf wiedersehen, mein alter Freund und Kriegskamerad!"

  Farewell, my old friend and wartime comrade—words that sounded to me like the end of a funeral oration.

  Marya was waiting for me on my return home. I asked how the widow's holding up, and she shrugged, “Pretty well."

  "It must be hard for her."

  "Sure it is. But we all have to bear what we have to bear. Life's not just a walk across a field, you know."

  That's a peasant saying. One hears it everywhere.

  She tells me she hid the family in Gorodok village, where hatred of the Gestapo is so intense that betrayal is unlikely. Last year the Orthodox priest there turned out to be an SS informer. On a winter's night, in thirty degrees of frost, his house caught fire and he and his family were roasted alive. Later, Marya told me she'd heard that the door and the window shutters had been nailed shut.Yes, I think Nevsky's survivors will be safe enough there.

  * * * *

  4 September 1949. This evening I'm all alone in my country house on the banks of the “quiet flowing” Don. Here on my 5000-hectare estate I truly feel like the great feudal lord I'm supposed to be. But also, in Marya's absence, quite lonely.

  The wheat harvest's beginning, and like old Tolstoy I'd hoped to join the peasants in some good, honest toil. Alas, it was not to be. I spent the whole day on the damned phone, trying to find the new tractors I'd ordered. Meanwhile the serfs began reaping with scythes, and I crossed my fingers, hoping the Gestapo wouldn't decide those are weapons too, and arrest my whole workforce.

  Tonight all's peaceful. Outside the circle of light cast by my lamp the shadows press close. In the country darkness crickets are shrilling, no idea in their little heads how soon the first frost will arrive. Seemed like a perfect time to open my new attaché case and take out the photograph, the whiskey, a few packs of ci
garettes I brought with me, and of course the Writings and Speeches. The fact that I choose to hide my treasonable journal inside Hitler's book is, I suppose, an example of heavy Teutonic irony. But then, as Marya sometimes hints, I am a rather heavily ironic Teuton, in my own way!

  This month is a dark anniversary for me. Just seven years ago, I arrived on the Eastern Front for the very first time. A lifetime, no an age ago.

  I'm staring at the picture now, hardly able to recognize the skinny young fellow in the wire-rim glasses who stands beside grinning Dietrich. Twenty-nine I was then, old enough to have missed the Hitler Youth and all that Nazi rubbish. Something of a child despite my age, the product of a loving home and years of quiet work in schools and laboratories. A frightened child too, for in those days we Germans dreaded an assignment to Russia as Christians feared an assignment to Hell.

  Never will I forget my first sight of Stalingrad from the rattletrap old Messerschmidt that brought me. First, brown streamers of smoke rising and dirtying the pure late-summer air. Then the city itself, its broken buildings like headstones in a desecrated graveyard. We bumped and shuddered down on the pockmarked runway, and I climbed stiffly off the plane like a damned soul disembarking on the wrong side of the River Styx. It didn't help that two dusty, disheveled veterans unloading my spotless new luggage grinned and asked sardonically, “How's the weather in Berlin, sir?"

  At HQ I met Dietrich for the first time. He was an adjutant and took me in charge, finding me a place to sleep, then arranging a five-minute meeting with General Friedrich Von Paulus. My new commander wasn't at all what I'd expected—a pale, cool, fastidious man who spoke courteously even to a Grünschnabel like me. Later on, Dietrich confided that the general always wore clean underwear, even on the battle-field.

  "He's what the Tommies call a gentleman,” he explained, using the English word. “More scientist than soldier, I'd say. You two ought to get on well, though why in the world we need a chemical officer I'm sure I don't know."

  Yes, that was my title. I was straight out of the I.G. Farben laboratories in Frankfurt-am-Main, where I'd hoped to evade military service by doing research for the war effort. Instead, by 1942 we'd lost so many men in the East that the army was ready to grab anybody—even me!

  Dietrich and I soon became pals, and began calling each other du instead of the formal Sie—in fact, the photo records the day we sealed our friendship by drinking a small glass of schnapps with linked arms. A good fellow to know. He'd already developed his remarkable talent for getting his superiors to do whatever he wanted them to, and within a month, at his suggestion, Von Paulus relieved me of my useless task as chemical officer and made me his personal aide.

  As a result, I was soon learning things about the war that I'd rather not have known. Our atrocities, for example. The full history of our treatment of the Jews has never been written and now, I suppose, never will be. At home one was aware of the vulgar Nazi attacks on them, which began with insults and ended with mob assaults. Nonpolitical people like my family thought the whole business a Kulturschande, a blot on civilization, and we averted our eyes as I suppose civilized Americans avert theirs from the lynchers who murder their blacks.

  Russia made such evasion impossible. In our own army area, seventy-five Jewish orphans were imprisoned by the SS under vile conditions, then ordered to be shot. When Colonel Mannstein, our chief of staff, tried to save them, the SS sent in a party of Ukrainian militiamen who murdered all the children right under our noses. I was present when Mannstein stormed into HQ and shouted at Von Paulus, “We can't and shouldn't be allowed to win this war!"

  Some commanders would have backed him up—others would have arrested him. Typically, Von Paulus did neither. He merely listened, shook his head, said nothing. I thought this cowardly of him, little guessing the role I myself would play in the war. Today he's Chief of Staff in Berlin and I'm a great feudal lord in the East, while Mannstein's broken bones lie in some Gestapo killing ground, buried in quicklime. In 1944 he joined a group that tried to assassinate Hitler; he was betrayed, arrested, tortured in a disgusting manner, and strangled in six stages with a piano-wire noose.

  Is this always the fate of the decent and the brave? Will Von Paulus now take vengeance for him and all other victims of the regime by staging a military coup? Surely his chance will come after the Nazis have finished bloodying one another. Looking back on the cautious general I first got to know in the autumn of ‘42, I have deep doubts whether he possesses the nerve for desperate deeds. Yet at Stalingrad he did one thing that was totally out of character, and by doing it saved all of us—yes, and the Führer too.

  * * * *

  5 September 1949. All day hard at work outside. Glorious weather!

  The new tractors finally arrived, but with them came a human pimple from the Ostministerium, who informed me that only Germans can drive them! He spouted the usual rubbish that only Aryans can handle complex machinery, when the real purpose of the SS is to prevent Russians from learning to do anything but the crudest hand labor. They are to become a people without skills, without knowledge, even without songs.

  Well, we didn't have any Aryans available, so I sent the pimple away, put my men and women into the drivers’ seats, and off they went to do the job. Many had been trained as tractor drivers on the collective farms that still existed a mere nine years ago, so why not make use of them? Another black mark against my name in Herr Müller's book, damn him, and another tidbit he can pass on to Eichmann.

  I returned to the country house about sixteen o'clock, greatly in need of a bath and a nap, both of which I took. Waking refreshed, I found that Marya had arrived to help with the harvest. So we made love, a fine ending to a fine day. I need her to remind me that I'm still a young man in years, even though old in spirit.

  And now I sit here once again, pen in hand, ready to encode my memories. My lethal memories. Oh yes, they are deadly. For I am one of the few still living who know how we really won the war. Now perhaps the time has come to set it down, even if only in cipher.

  * * * *

  The battle had been raging for a month when I arrived in Stalingrad. Much of the city had been ground and pummeled to a coarse dust, and the first chill wind of the approaching fall swept up the grit and scoured my face like a sandstorm.

  The ruins stank of cordite, feces, rotting corpses. Everywhere were hidden ditches and sewers and storm drains, from which Ivans would suddenly emerge with tommyguns blazing. Shrapnel-battered steel and concrete buildings had to be cleared of their defenders floor by floor—one such fortress held out against fifty-eight days of continuous assault. We paid a heavier toll of men to win a single block of Stalingrad than to conquer whole western nations.

  We'd already lost so many that our flanks were held by our Axis allies, all of them ill-equipped and unhappy to be fighting so far from home. Von Paulus was too intelligent not to see the danger in this situation. And he was getting disturbing reports from patrols and from the Luftwaffe about vast enemy movements to the north and south of the city.

  A terrible scenario formed in his mind, and began to invade his dreams.

  I slept in the same bunker as he, and one night heard him cry out. I ran into his quarters and found him awake, sitting up on his cot, shivering and rubbing his eyes. In a whisper, he told me that in a nightmare he'd seen the Russians assail both our flanks at once, trapping the whole Sixth Army in a vast encirclement. Next day I whispered the story of the general's dream to Dietrich, and he expressed deep concern.

  "Still, what can be done?” he shrugged, with true Teutonic fatalism. “If it happens, it's unsere Schicksal, our destiny. That's all."

  Well, I thought something could be done. That evening when the general and I were alone for a few moments, I presumed to tell him a secret known to very few. The laboratory where I'd worked in Frankfurt had invented a war gas that could defeat the Russians, if only we dared to use it.

  "Poison gas?” he asked skeptically. “Everybody used it in t
he last war. A cruel and stupid weapon that made war uncomfortable, to no purpose. Anyway, Hitler's forbidden its use, maybe for personal reasons. You know he was temporarily blinded by gas in 1918. Or maybe he's simply afraid of Allied retaliation."

  "Herr Generaloberst, this is not your ordinary war gas."

  I told him how, back in the thirties, one of our chemists began to fear that he was going blind. A microscopic amount of a new organic insecticide had caused the pupils of his eyes to close part way, shutting out the light. In time we learned that the chemical was a cholinesterase inhibitor. The precise formula was a closely held secret, but everyone could see how it worked—it affected the motor nerves so that the muscles could contract, but could not relax.

  It was given the name Tabun. In larger quantities it caused violent cramps, followed by convulsions of the whole body and paralysis of the muscles that control breathing. Conventional gas masks were useless, and even rubber suits couldn't protect fully against it. We now had three types of the gas: Sarin was twice as toxic as Tabun, Soman three times as toxic as Sarin.

  "Well then,” said the General, who had been listening with obvious distaste, “we can't use it. Our lines are often only a few meters from the Ivans. We'd be poisoning our own men."

  "Then don't use it in the city,” I replied eagerly, quite forgetting my inferior rank. “With Luftwaffe cooperation you can use heavy bombers to break up the enemy concentrations to the north and south of us, and also on the east bank of the Volga. When the enemy forces in the city have no support and receive no reinforcements, we can destroy them."