Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “Von Betternich, Sturmbannfuhrer, Sicherheitsdienst. I’m here on the orders of Reichsfuhrer Himmler.”

  Eicke snapped at the NCO. “Get out, man. Out and close the door after you!”

  He scuttled through the door and closed it. We waited outside. At first, we heard nothing, then the sound of a raised voice. It had to be Eicke, I knew that the SD man never raised his voice. Eicke shouted louder and louder, ‘who the hell are you to ask me that kind of question’ and so on. Then the door opened abruptly and Eicke came storming out, still shouting at von Betternich, who followed him out of the barn.

  “You’ve no business coming here, the SD, we’re trying to fight a war, people like you...”

  He didn’t get any further, the roar of aircraft engines drowned out his voice, together with the wail of the air raid alert, men shouting.

  “Alarm!”

  I looked up and saw the fighter coming in, a Yakovlev Yak-1, the description from my officer training etched in my mind. Our soldiers often mistook it for the British Spitfire, which was understandable, the British supplied their famous fighter to the Russian Front and they had become feared by the Luftwaffe after they began to appear in increasing numbers. But the Yak-1 was no slouch either, it had proved to be a match for many of our ME-109 Messerschmitts. As we scattered for cover, I looked around for other aircraft but it seemed to be a lone raider. Machine gun and cannon fire rained down on us as the pilot opened fire, we were sheltering underneath a Sonderkraftfahrzeug 251 armoured half-track, similar to the vehicle being repaired for us. The protection of the half-track was more for morale than reality, the fourteen-millimetre armour would not protect us from the 12.7mm machine gun bullets from the Yak, even less from its 20mm cannon. The Yak roared overhead and climbed away from the camp. Our anti-aircraft guns were slow to react, but now they started to fire in deadly earnest, sending streams of bullets after the Yak. I watched it turn in the sky less than a kilometre away from us, and then it came in again. A salvo of combined cannon and machine gun fire hammered into one of our machine gun positions, reducing it to a bloody pile of scrap and torn human tissue. The remaining gunner fired after him, but his shots went wide as the Yak swept past still shooting. A storm of fire enveloped an armoured half-track and left if a broken, shattered ruin, smoke and flames pouring out of it. The screams of the men sheltering underneath heard for several seconds until they went silent.

  We ran over to try and pull out the casualties, but the flames kept us back. The men underneath would already have been dead anyway, burning fuel had saturated them and they had become human torches, hopefully dead through lack of oxygen before the worst of the flames started turning their bodies into charred meat. Firefighters ran up and started spraying the wreckage to put out the flames, but it was more for form’s sake than anything else, there was nothing left to save, neither man nor machine. I looked around for my charge, the SD officer. Eicke was getting up from behind a pile of old engines parts, his uniform smeared with grease. Von Betternich had not moved, had just stood outside the barn in full view throughout the raid leaning on his cane. He looked at Eicke with a straight face.

  “Sturmbannfuhrer, I imagine you’ll be busy for some time dealing with the damage. I would like a full, written report on those matters I have mentioned, together with names and locations of the officers concerned. Would you send it over to SS Deutschland HQ, my office is located there. If you have any questions, I suggest you contact Berlin, Office of the Reichsfuhrer SS. Good day.”

  He came towards us. “Ah, Hoffman. Did our transport survive undamaged?”

  “I believe it did, Sir.”

  “Good, then let’s get back to Headquarters. If we leave now we’ll be in time for lunch.”

  We drove back along the bumpy track to Korenevo. Von Betternich kept checking through his notes and the journey was conducted in silence. The smell of roasted flesh was still in our nostrils, we’d come close in our own half-track to suffering the same fate as those poor devils at the Langemarck Regimental HQ. Voss stopped outside the monastery and I was about to walk away when the SD man stopped me.

  “Hoffman, I’m going to speak to that Russian you captured, would you care to come with me?”

  “Of course, Sir.”

  We found Commissar Captain Tereschova in his cell, von Betternich asked the guard to open it and we went in. Then he dismissed the guard. Tereschova looked nervous, I think I would have in his position. There was a standing order that all Political Commissars should be shot out of hand, he would be well aware of it and well aware of the author of that order, Adolf Hitler. Equally, I had been told that many unit commanders ignored the order, especially when the prisoner was a uniformed soldier, as was the case here.

  “Captain, I wonder if you would answer some questions for me.”

  The Russian looked at the older man, his face was white. Did he think I was here to start pulling out his fingernails? Probably. The Russians deliberately spread myths about SS brutality to encourage their troops to fight on when they would otherwise surrender. Not all of them were myths, however.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Your Russian rifles, Captain, tell me about them. Are they better than ours, would you say?”

  “Rifles? What the hell would I know about rifles?”

  “Hoffman, ask the guard to bring us a pot of coffee, let’s make it more comfortable in here. You do drink coffee, Captain?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. Now, tell me what have you heard, do you form the impression that the German Kar 98 is better regarded than your Mosin–Nagant? What’s the impression amongst the troops? Come, Captain, this isn’t a military secret, I ask only out of curiosity.”

  The Russian shrugged. “Some of your rifles have fallen into our hands, it’s true. There’ll doubtless be large stocks of them after your defeat at Stalingrad.”

  He smirked as he said the name Stalingrad and I felt angry. A quarter of a million of our men were in the Sixth Army, the largest army in the German Order of Battle. All were dead or had surrendered to the Soviets in the ice-cold wastes on the banks of the River Volga.

  “You weren’t up against the Waffen SS in Stalingrad,” I said hotly. I was proud of my place in an elite regiment, sure that we would not have allowed the surrender to the Russians.

  “Wehrmacht, SS, it makes no difference, the result would have been the same,” he said wearily. “An army cannot fight without food, fuel or weapons, Lieutenant.”

  I was about to snap back an angry retort when von Betternich told me to keep quiet.

  “But, Sir, we lost a hundred thousand men killed at Stalingrad.”

  “And we lost three hundred thousand,” Tereschova snapped back. “You shouldn’t have come, SS man.”

  “Gentlemen, enough,” the SD officer stopped us. “We are not here to discuss Stalingrad. Now, the rifles, Captain, is it true that some of your men prefer using captured Kar 98s?”

  The guard returned carrying three steaming tin mugs of coffee. He brought them into the cell and left again. Von Betternich tasted it and pulled a face.

  “Captain?”

  “Well, yes, a few do prefer them, a very few, mainly partisans who have more access to captured German weapons and ammunition. But our regular troops, no, it is quite rare, I would imagine.”

  “What about your snipers, would they tend to prefer the Kar 98, especially the longer variants, over your own rifles?”

  “Never!” the Captain snorted. “Our Mosin–Nagant is the finest sniper rifle in the world. Did you not hear of the record of Vasily Zaitsev in Stalingrad?”

  We had all heard of Zaitsev through the unofficial grapevine at training school, where an appreciation of the tactics of Soviet snipers was part of the curriculum. The Soviets claimed that his career started in Stalingrad when Zaitsev’s commanding officer pointed at one of our officers in a window eight hundred metres away. Vasily took aim from his standard issue Mosin-Nagant rifle
and with one shot, our officer was down. A few moments later, two other German soldiers appeared in the window, checking their fallen comrade. He fired two more shots, and they were both killed. For this Zaitsev became a sniper and was awarded a medal. He became elevated to the status of virtual hero through the use of Soviet propaganda and established a snipers’ training school in the Metiz factory in the ruined city of Stalingrad. Zaitsev’s trained snipers were nicknamed leverets, or baby hares. They were extremely lethal hares too. Their toll on the morale of the Sixth Army was out of all proportion to their number of kills.

  We chatted on for ten minutes more, but von Betternich had got what he wanted, the significance wasn’t wasted on me. The person who was killing our senior officers wasn’t likely to be a Soviet soldier. We left the cell and walked out through the camp.

  “What are you thinking, Hoffman?” he asked me abruptly.

  “It had to be the partisans, Sir.”

  He didn’t reply as we walked on. Then Voss ran up to us.

  “Sir, I need you to take a look at the Kubi, someone has interfered with it.”

  “Interfered, Oberschutze? In what way?”

  “They planted a bomb, down in the engine compartment.”

  We hurried over to look at what they had found. A box, that seemed to be made of brass. Attached to the side was a pair of copper contacts, the whole thing wrapped in thick, rubberised insulating tape and coated with thick grease.

  “Stand back, Sirs, Merkel is taking the top off to disarm it.”

  “Is that safe, Voss?”

  “Safer than leaving it armed, Untersturmfuhrer, it could go off at any moment.”

  I didn’t say anything, but we stood back ten metres from where Merkel was working with a box of tools. He finished unscrewing the lid and gently, very carefully prised off the lid. Then he snipped through the internal wires.

  “It’s safe now, I’ve disconnected the firing mechanism,” he said, standing up and coming towards us to show us the bomb.

  We inspected the device. It was filled with enough explosive to destroy the Kubi and all of its occupants.

  “Why didn’t it go off?” I asked him.

  “Useless battery, look, they used a dud. Probably didn’t realise it, else we would have gone up like Mount Vesuvius.”

  “The materials to make the bomb, do you recognise them?”

  “Oh, yes, Sir. Before I transferred to the SS I was in an engineer regiment. It’s all standard stuff. German, of course.”

  I went with von Betternich back to his office.

  “Well, Hoffman, what do you think now of my investigation? More of your partisans?”

  “Possibly not, Sir, but I’m not sure who could have done it.”

  Clearly the bomb could have been planted at any time recently, when we visited the Langemarck Regiment, even before then at the camp of Der Fuhrer Regiment. Or here, within Deutschland Regiment itself.

  “So the questions we have to ask ourselves are who is doing it and why is it so vital to them that they stop my investigation?”

  “Maybe it is a conspiracy, Sir, one to destroy the SS from within.”

  Even as I said it I realised how absurd that premise was. I wasn’t aware of the current strength of the Waffen SS on all fronts, but it had to be more than half a million men under arms.

  “But surely it must be partisans behind it, what other explanation would there be?”

  The SD officer looked at me steadily. “In my experience as a policeman there are only a limited number of motives for murder. There are crimes of passion, of course. Revenge, that’s not uncommon. Then there are the psychotic killers, they do it purely for the thrill of it. Lastly, there is financial gain, by far the biggest motivator of men.”

  “Are you saying that these officers were robbed when they were killed?”

  “It doesn’t appear that way, no.”

  “So do we have a mad killer on the loose?”

  “Probably not, no.”

  I was becoming exasperated with von Betternich. He was clearly not prepared to share his thoughts about the murders, which was his right, but if he wanted my cooperation it was making things much more difficult. It came as no surprise to me that he was almost reading my thoughts.

  “You need patience, Hoffman. I have some ideas but nothing definite. Have you decided to assist me now that they’ve tried to kill you too?”

  “Yes, of course, Sir.” And when I found them I’d like to hang them from the nearest tree.

  “There you are, Untersturmfuhrer, you have a strong incentive to keep in mind while we look for the killer. Self preservation.”

  I was certain that he would always be one jump ahead of me. As for the murderer, or murderers, if there were such people and it wasn’t just a succession of unfortunate coincidences perpetrated by partisans, it may even come down to whether they could kill von Betternich before he discovered who they were. I think I would have put my money on the wily old policeman, except that staying alive on the Eastern Front was as much a matter of luck as of skill. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. My own side may have tried to kill me, fellow SS men. I was outraged, frightened and furious in equal measures. They would have to be stopped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power, it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state and with it that of the whole nation and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem...but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

  Adolf Hitler January 1939

  Later that evening Sturmbannfuhrer Muller again approached me.

  “Hoffman, have you considered this business with the SD?”

  “Sir, I have, I shall continue to assist Sturmbannfuhrer von Betternich.”

  His face went red with anger. “I thought I made it clear that I take a dim view of my officers helping this,” he paused to think of a suitable word, “this policeman, he’s poking his nose into the regiment’s affairs when we’re trying to fight a war. If the CO hadn’t been killed he’d never have allowed it.”

  “But, Sir, the CO was almost certainly murdered by the same person, or persons.”

  “Rubbish. Colonel Brandt was killed by partisans.”

  I didn’t answer, but I was beginning to agree with von Betternich. Partisans were not known to be that selective, they’d shoot officers only when targets of opportunity appeared, otherwise they’d just snipe at anyone. Muller wasn’t done with me.

  “Hoffman, I’m beginning to wonder if you’re the right kind of officer for the SS, perhaps you should consider a transfer to the Wehrmacht.”

  I was stunned. It was almost like suggesting I desert to the Russians.

  “I would prefer to say here, Sir, in the SS.”

  “Well, you’ll need to learn to behave like an SS officer, won’t you?”

  He stormed off and I wondered had I made the right decision. Yet they had tried to kill me. I was determined to find out who was behind it and ignore Muller’s threats for the present, I know my father would have done exactly the same thing.

  I went back inside the church where my platoon had clustered around the old iron stove, the temperature outside was well below freezing, as usual. I wondered about the monks, they sat around a small fire out in the open, close to the camp. Surely they would freeze to death in these conditions, they needed to be indoors. Some of them were old men, outdoors on the Russian steppe in winter was no place for them. I felt guilty as I warmed my hands on t
he stove, after all, this was their place before we came here. I was sitting in their church, warming myself on timber that had undoubtedly come from their church property.

  “What do we do now, Sir?” Mundt asked.

  “We carry on as before, I’m determined to find out who’s behind this, Sergeant. You feel the same, one or more of our people are trying to kill our own men, to kill us, even. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Not as much as having a bomb hidden under my backside, Sir, no.”

  “So you think we should give up, Mundt?”

  He squirmed, I’d spoken sharply to him. “Well, maybe, yes, perhaps it’s not a good idea to keep going, surely you can see that? That bomb was just a warning.”

  “No, I can’t see it that way at all.” The others were watching with interest, but I didn’t care, I was sick of being pushed around. “It’s quite simple, you see. I was brought up never to walk away from a fight, and I’m not walking away from this one. Goodnight, gentlemen.”

  I got up, pushed my blanket screen aside, and slumped down on my mattress. I’d joined the SS to fight the enemy, not our own soldiers. I knew exactly where my loyalties lay, it was just that not everyone else did.

  The following morning I reported to von Betternich’s office with Mundt and three of the men. He seemed more cheerful.

  “Ah, Hoffman, we’re going to see the surgeon, come along with me, perhaps you’ll all learn something.”

  Inside the temporary morgue, Colonel Brandt’s body was laid out as I’d seen it before. There was no need for refrigeration, the temperature never went above freezing even during the day. The surgeon looked irritated again maybe he had a hangover. Heavy drinking was by no means unusual on the Eastern Front, we’d all been warned about it.

  “What now?” he snapped. “I told you everything I know.”

  “Yes, of course you did,” von Betternich replied. “Since then, I had the other post mortem reports forwarded to you, the ones concerning the previous officers that were killed.”

  “And?” the surgeon said, his manner growing surlier by the minute. “You do realise that I still have many wounded men to attend to?”