Order of Battle

by Ib Melchior

  That was the beginning of the fantastic training course given the potential OSS agents. It was designed to tear a man down and reduce him to his basic survival strength, and then build him up again to be able to face anything with confidence. It succeeded—at least temporarily. After the first month Erik got up in the morning and thought, This is the last day I’ll see alive—if I get through the whole day. After the second month he got up and thought, Okay. Bring ’em on! I can lick Germany and Japan, single-handed! The course was compact and thorough. Nothing was omitted. From communications to cryptography; from terrain orientation to silent killing, and “dirty” hand-to-hand combat taught by the fabulous, fiery Major Fairburns, late of the Hong Kong police force. The budding agents learned to fire every possible weapon, Allied and Axis, and to drive every type of vehicle. They learned breaking and entering from experts—whoever they were—and the handling of high explosives. And constantly the grim men with their little black books were silent observers. If a man showed reluctance to crimp a highly unstable detonator cap onto a fuse with his teeth, he was apt not to be seen in class again.

  And finally there was the parachute jumping. They trained two whole days for that. And then they made their five qualifying jumps in one afternoon. They rode to Quantico Marine Base in Virginia in a truck and took off from there in a C-47 to make their jumps over a small clearing in a forest nearby. The truck would pick them up, take them back to the base for the next jump, and the procedure was repeated until all the jumps had been made. Erik remembered with amusement the guard at the gate, who checked them onto the base each time—but never out. His eyes had bugged bigger and bigger each time around.

  The parachute jumps had been like a graduation exercise. Basic training was over. Of the class of thirty-six, six were left. “Lars G-8” was one of them.

  Soon after, Erik was given his first mission to be carried out in enemy-held territory. He joined a group of eleven Norwegian commandos to be dropped in Norway to blow up a heavy water plant operated by the Nazis. Erik was the only non-Norwegian on the team and was selected only because the approach route to the plant followed a ski trail with which he was very familiar. With the Norwegians he went through the intense mission briefing, and a fiercely close relationship sprang up among the men. With them he flew to Westover AFB in Massachusetts to board the plane that would take the team to Iceland and on to the drop in Norway. And here he was literally taken off the plane and returned to Washington. No one would tell him why. No one would give him any explanation at all. For a week he was kept in strict seclusion. He was worried sick. And then, finally, the situation was explained to him. They’d found out the mission had been compromised. Someone had infiltrated the organization and given the show away. But the mission was too vital to cancel. The raid had to be carried out at the time planned, or it would be too late. In the last minute the approach route had been changed. Erik no longer would have been useful; in fact, as the only non-Norwegian he would have been a liability in a tight situation. He had consequently been taken off the team and kept incommunicado until the operation was completed. The infiltrator had been ferreted out, and the mission had been successful. But all eleven commandos had been caught trying to make good their escape after the raid. And all eleven had been executed.

  Erik was shocked. His first reaction was Thank God I didn’t have to go! and then he experienced an overwhelming sense of guilt for not having been with his comrades. The organization gave him two weeks in Washington to work it out with himself. He used the time writing scripts for overseas shortwave broadcasts for the Office of War Information.

  When he reported back for assignment he found that things had changed. The big powers had carved up the European Theater of Operations among themselves, and each had a separate territory in which to operate along OSS lines. The Scandinavian countries were in the British area of operations, and Erik—who had been trained for missions in those countries—was given the choice of being transferred to British authority or remaining with the U.S. Forces. He chose the latter.

  Because of his knowledge of languages—particularly French and German—he was commissioned into the Counter Intelligence Corps, perhaps on the theory that “it takes a thief to catch a thief,” and he completed an exhaustive course in investigation and interrogation. He always felt grateful for the OSS training he’d received. It had stood him in good stead on many occasions. . . .

  It hadn’t all been duck soup. He’d done his share of griping. And with justification. But he knew that if he had it to do again, he’d write the damned letter once more.

  He got up. He went to one of the files standing along one wall. He pulled it open and started to look for the blacklist. If Colonel Gerhardt Wilke was listed, he could be crossed off.

  Murphy stuck his head in the door.

  “Ready for another one? We’ve got ’em stacked up out here like shit on shingles!”

  Erik grinned. “Okay,” he said. “Next!”

  Next. Another one. And another one. And . . .

  The war was in its final weeks. Had to be. The German fronts were collapsing all over. Berlin itself was threatened. But the CIC work was really just beginning. And a lot could happen in a few weeks. A hell of a lot. Especially in a few weeks of war . . .

  He rubbed his hand. That damned stubble had made his skin itch.

  It was 0928 hrs—almost nine-thirty in the morning. In Dachau, 183 miles to the south, two Waffen SS officers were just being checked through the main gate of the concentration camp. . . .

  Dachau

  1634 hrs

  Untersturmführer Wilhelm Richter squinted up at the smoke that belched from the tall brick chimneys. It was oily gray as it billowed into the clean blue Bavarian sky. The ovens of Dachau were roaring around the clock. There was only a little time left in which to carry out the final solution to the Jewish problem.

  The young Waffen SS lieutenant leaned against the squat building hiding the infernal roots of the towering smokestacks. The bricks were warm, and discolored with greasy soot, and Willi had carefully sought out a clean spot. A dozen inmates of the concentration camp were loading a military truck parked nearby. Willi was watching them.

  The men had a cadaverous look. Their threadbare striped KL uniforms hung loosely on their emaciated bodies. Across the back of each man’s pajamalike jacket a large S had been painted—S for Sonderkommando, the special details of camp inmates who’d volunteered to do the most loathsome of the crematorium jobs in return for a few weeks of life.

  Just a few weeks, Willi thought. And what kind of life? Anyway, sooner or later they all end up the same way. Up in smoke!

  He started to whistle softly as he watched the men work.

  Du kleine Fliege,

  Wenn ich dich kriege—

  It was an old German nursery rhyme he remembered from his childhood, though he was not aware of that.

  The prisoners labored wearily. The wooden boxes they were manhandling were heavy and the men were weak. It took four of them to lift each box and struggle it into place on the truck. They toiled in dull, leaden silence, and the half dozen black-uniformed SS Totenkopfverband guards ringing the pitiful work party, lazily cradling Schmeisser machine pistols in their arms, hardly seemed necessary. But Sturmbannführer Kratzer had insisted.

  Kratzer himself, standing at the rear of the truck, followed the loading intently.

  A small man, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, with closely cropped hair and an imitation Hitler mustache, the SS major was not an imposing figure.

  But there was something intense, something compelling about him, which gave even Willi an uneasy feeling.

  The last box was placed on the truck. The Sonderkommando inmates were herded together in a small group. With the unerring perception of the hopeless, they knew that they had done their final job. Their sallow, sunken eyes stared at the ground; only a few of the still defiant dared lift their eyes and watch their future billowing darkly from the chimneys.

  Stu
rmbannführer Kratzer beckoned to the Totenkopfverband noncom in charge of the guards. Almost absentmindedly he nodded toward the group of inmates.

  “You know what to do,” he said flatly, in the same tone of voice he might have used giving instructions to a file clerk.

  The noncom nodded. “Jawohl, Herr Sturmbannführer.”

  Kratzer turned toward Willi.

  “Richter!” he called. “Let’s go!”

  While two SS guards jumped into the rear of the truck, Willi walked to the cab. He kept his eyes averted from the waiting camp inmates. There was suddenly an unpleasant stench in the air. He’d be glad to get out of the place. He stepped up into the driver’s seat and took the wheel, as Kratzer joined him in the cab.

  The truck swayed ponderously as it bounced down the dirt road. The load lay heavy on the floorboards in the back. Willi drove carefully. This wasn’t the time to break a spring, or an axle.

  He whistled softly to himself: “Du Heine Fliege—”

  He remembered it now. Mutti used to sing it to him—so long, long ago.

  Du kleine Fliege,

  Wenn ich dich kriege,

  Dann reiss ich dir dein kleines Beinchen aus.

  Dann musst du hinken

  Auf deinen Schinken—

  Dann kommst du nie mehr wieder nach deinem Haus

  Funny he should think of it now. And of his mother . . .

  Willi was a war child. His father, Walter, was killed on the western front in 1916, the very day he returned from home leave. Willi was born nine months later. He was brought up by his mother. He remembered her well from his early childhood. Mutti would sing to him the old German nursery songs and she would read stories from Der Struwwelpeter: about Konrad, who sucked his thumbs, and had them cut off by the tailor; about the crybaby, whose eyeballs dropped from their sockets; about Cruel Paul and Slovenly Peter, and little Fritz, who was eaten alive by a wolf; about Hans, who was sliced in two sliding down a banister; and the little girl who burned herself to a pile of ashes. . . .

  He still remembered the book cover vividly: Konrad, with his bleeding thumb stumps. It said: “Merry Stories and Funny Pictures for Children 3 to 6 Years of Age.” He hadn’t liked the picture of Konrad at first; it made him afraid to suck his own thumb. Then he stopped that, and he was proud of it. He always secretly felt that it served Konrad right, having his thumbs cut off—because he didn’t stop. And he got used to the pictures.

  Later he was less and less close to Mutti, especially during the four years up to his nineteenth birthday, when he was in the Hitler Youth. And then, of course, he joined the Waffen SS. . . .

  Kratzer brought Willi out of his reveries.

  “Up there,” he ordered. “Turn left. Into the forest.”

  In a small clearing just inside the woods, hidden from view from the road, another truck was waiting. It was not a Wehrmacht vehicle, but a run-down civilian truck which had been converted from gasoline- to wood-burning in the wartime effort to conserve vital resources. The big cylindrical furnace tank and the wood storage bin were mounted clumsily behind the cab. A man in civilian clothes, leather jacket and cap stood puffing on a pipe nearby. He carefully extinguished it with a work-hardened thumb and put it in his pocket as Willi brought his truck to a halt next to the other vehicle.

  The men jumped from the truck.

  “Los!” Kratzer commanded. “Die Kisten umladen! All the boxes into the other truck! Get going!” He made an impatient gesture with his submachine gun.

  The two SS guards put away their weapons. At once they and the civilian began the transfer of the heavy boxes from the Wehrmacht truck to the wood burner. Willi looked curiously at the battered vehicle. Kratzer joined him. He grinned.

  “We don’t want to attract too much attention,” he said. “The enemy has air patrols in the area we have to go through. But they won’t waste ammunition on a decrepit old wood-burning truck like that!”

  “Will we make it?” Willi asked dubiously. “Into the mountains?”

  “Of course. It’s four hundred and twenty kilometers to Rattendorf from here. We’ll be there tomorrow. Early.”

  Willi hoped the major was right. It wouldn’t be easy to negotiate the Alpine roads in a shitty, worn-out wood burner.

  The men had almost finished reloading the boxes. The three of them were swinging the last heavy box to heave it up onto the pile on the truck. Suddenly one of them lost his grip. The two others, unable to hold the box, let go. The box crashed to the ground, splintering open.

  The three men stared at the shattered box. Mingled with the broken wood were a number of crude gold bars! As one the men looked toward Kratzer. And frozel

  The SS major was contemplating them regretfully. His Schmeisser machine pistol was aimed directly at them.

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said softly.

  Two brief staccato bursts from the submachine gun raked in short arcs across the men.

  The bullets cut them in half. One of the SS men stared in disbelief at the bloody entrails spilling out of his torn abdomen into his hands, before he collapsed across his comrades.

  A flock of black crows in a nearby tree took wing in alarm—and flapped away with raucous cries of protest across the bleak fields.

  Willi felt the bitter taste of bile in his mouth. His knees were suddenly weak. He forced himself to swallow. He stared at the SS major.

  Holy Mother of God, he thought, they were Germans! They weren’t just Jews—they were Germans!

  Kratzer’s face was without emotion as he looked intently at the three bodies. For a split second Willi had the illusion that the man’s eyes were mere jet-black hollow pits. Against his will his own eyes were drawn toward the lifeless bodies. Again he felt the bile rise in his throat. He seemed to have difficulty getting enough air.

  Kratzer was unaware of him. He stared raptly at the bodies. He walked up to them, taking small, mincing steps. He prided himself on the fact that he was an expert in detecting fakers. But he was also very efficient. There was no need for any Genickschuss. The three men were all dead.

  Kratzer suddenly became aware of Willi. He seemed to read the young man’s thoughts.

  “Willi! Come here,” he ordered quietly.

  Willi joined him. He was still shaken.

  “They knew where we are going,” he said. “We can’t afford to have rumors spread around that twenty million Reichsmarks in gold can be found in Rattendorf.”

  He is right, of course, Willi thought. He was getting hold of himself again. He felt a little ashamed. He’d almost gone to pieces.

  Kratzer kicked the gold bars with his boot.

  “Teeth!” He grinned. “A hell of a lot of teeth!”

  He laughed coldly.

  “The Jews are not all bad,” he said. “There’s a kernel of gold in most of them.”

  He laughed again. A chilling sound.

  “And enough good little Jewish kernels will help the Third Reich survive. We’ll see to that.”

  He turned to Willi.

  “Come on. Let’s get the rest of it on the truck. The sooner we get to Rattendorf, the sooner we can return to Thürenberg. . . .”

  The old wood burner made good time rumbling down the dirt road. Willi was driving. It was a beautiful afternoon. There were only a few gray clouds in the sky. Or was it smoke from the crematorium? . . .

  Kratzer was dozing beside him. Willi again began to whistle softly his old favorite nursery tune that Mutti used to sing: “Du kleine Fliege—”

  You little fly,

  When I catch you,

  Then I’ll tear out your little legs.

  Then you must hobble

  On your hams—

  Then you’ll never again get to your home.

  He gave it up.

  For some reason his mouth was dry.

  Berlin

  2337 hrs

  The Berlin Stadtmitte—the city center—was in flames. An RAF bombing raid had just rained down destruction upon the German capital.
Many buildings had. been severely damaged by the high explosives; some, like the big, fashionable Adlon Hotel at the corner of Unter Den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse, were ablaze. But the Propaganda Ministry down the street was relatively undamaged.

  The mortally wounded city was fighting for its existence. Fire trucks, ambulances and military vehicles roared through the rubble-strewn streets, where soldiers, civilians and firemen were trying desperately to swamp the raging holocaust, and Red Cross workers, wielding their heavy utility daggers, were tearing and hacking and digging at the smoking debris in their efforts to reach the dying and the dead trapped below.

  The flames from the remains of the Chancellery licked toward the now empty night sky and were mirrored in the darkened windows of the Ministry of Propaganda, transforming the building into a looming monster of many eyes that winked with red malevolence.

  Down the street of chaos, from the direction of the blazing Adlon, a small motorcade approached the ministry. A large black limousine, with two SS motorcyclists in front and two behind, made its way through the maze of masonry rubble as speedily as the rescue and fire-fighting activities would permit. They drew up to the front steps of the ministry and came to a halt.