Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

I stepped back and saluted, “Heil Hitler,” turned on my heel and went back to my platoon. The men were cheering and I felt my cheeks bright red with embarrassment.

  “Shut up and behave yourselves,” was all I could think to say, it had the immediate effect of making them cheer even louder.

  Hausser went on about glorious feats of arms performed by the SS, the ambitious plans for Greater Germany, how we would win the war by superior soldiering and weaponry. I wasn’t really listening, I had mixed feelings, pride at my awards and dread for the immediate future. Once again, the position was under threat, Kharkov was under threat and that meant Heide was under threat. Even as the General was driving out of camp, I was trying to work out how I could safeguard the future, for Heide, for my platoon and myself, I was definitely not giving up, not yet anyway. In training, we had been told to keep going forward, always go forward, never give the advantage to your enemy. That’s exactly what I planned to do. Once I had worked out exactly who my enemy was and who it wasn’t, in the snowy steppes of the Eastern Front, I could indeed go forward, but for now, it was by no means clear.

  A week later I was just stepping out of the half-track, we had come in from a particularly hard fight and I felt more tired than ever. I’d lost two men, the regiment had been hit especially hard and our casualties were lying on the snow in rows, waiting for medical attention. Suddenly a military ambulance drove into camp with the distinctive red cross on the side. My spirits leapt, could Heide be assigned here? But when the nurses climbed out she wasn’t among them. I walked up to ask them about her.

  “Heide Thalberg,” they looked worried, “didn’t you know?” a nurse asked me, she was the suet pudding-faced woman I had met in the hospital at Kharkov.

  “Know what, is she hurt, tell me?”

  I trembled with fear waiting to hear the worst.

  “No, she wasn’t hurt. She was arrested three days ago under a Gestapo Schutzhaft.”

  Von Betternich, or Wiedel, of course! I hadn’t realised at the time but they had obviously already targeted her. Their offer made sense now but stupidly I hadn’t understood it at the time. ‘Join us and we’ll leave her alone.’

  I suddenly was aware the nurse was speaking to me. “Herr Hoffman, I have a letter for you.”

  She was thrusting an envelope into my hand, looking around to make sure that no one saw her do it.

  “It is from Heide. She said to get it to you if I could.”

  I tore the letter open and read it with shaking hands.

  My Dearest Jurgen,

  They are coming here to arrest me, I haven’t much time. I have deceived you, my love, but only out of necessity and fear. The truth is I am Jewish. The name you know me as, Heide Thalberg, I took from a girl killed in an air raid. My true name is Rachel Kaufmann, but I had hoped to be able to live my life under an assumed name without fear of arrest and imprisonment. My father, Aaron Kaufmann, was a well-known communist and disappeared into the camps, I have been on the run ever since his arrest. I now realise that it was only a matter of time before the Gestapo caught up with me. They will of course put me in a concentration camp. My love, you should know that these camps are not simply places of imprisonment, they are death camps, it is most likely that I will be dead by the time you read this letter. Jewish prisoners are often executed on arrival.

  Do not grieve for me. It is over. I will remember your face until the moment of my death. Find someone else to love and live your life in as much happiness as we shared in the brief time we were together. It was worth a lifetime.

  Rachel

  I thanked the nurse and walked away, I knew it was of little use enquiring further, no one ever concerned themselves with concentration camp victims. I desperately tried to think of a way to help her, was there anything I could do? But it was beyond me, stories abounded of people disappearing under the Schutzhaft, even high ranking Nazis had been known to vanish into the camps and for Jews it was invariably their only sentence. Despite what Heide said, or Rachel, I didn’t care what her real name was, her religion even less, I would try, but I knew it would certainly be hopeless.

  I had to force myself to accept that this was to be my war, never knowing on which side the enemy was or where they came from. All I could do was fight to the very limits of my ability and from this moment on, I had to understand that my enemy would not always be wearing a Russian uniform.

  THE END

  DEVIL'S GUARD BLOOD & IRON

  by

  Eric Meyer

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Swordworks Books

  Copyright © 2011 by Eric Meyer

  FOREWORD

  After the bloody battles that took place around Kharkov, the Germans eventually retook the city. Under the control of Field Marshall Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South, Hitler felt that once again he was in such a position of strength that his offensives into the Soviet Union could begin again. To the north and east of von Manstein’s forces lay the Kursk salient, a tempting bulge into the German lines in the centre of which lay the city of Kursk. Despite evidence that the Soviets had constructed massive defences in depth, it was too much for Hitler to resist.

  The Battle of Kursk began in July 1943. It became the largest armoured clash in history and at its climax, the Battle of Prokhorovka, thousands of armoured vehicles were deployed throughout the salient. That battle was also to be the costliest single day of aerial warfare. It was the last strategic offensive the Germans were able to mount on the Eastern Front. The result was neither a convincing victory nor a defeat for either side, but the German losses were irreplaceable and the Red Army took the initiative for the rest of the war.

  Like most battles in most wars, there were colossal errors or judgement, as well as epic feats of bravery. Hitler’s insistence on waiting for the new Panzer V heavy tanks was to prove disastrous, the delay allowed the Soviets to reinforce their positions even further and when they did arrive the new Panzer Vs proved to be unreliable and virtually useless in the battle.

  Arguments still rage over a number of issues related to the battle. Perhaps chief among these would be the role of the intelligence services of both sides. The Lucy spy ring certainly did exist and was a thorn in the side of the Germans and they never truly uncovered the traitors who were passing their secrets to the Russians. The role of Martin Bormann was never fully understood either, whether he was a Russian spy or not, as unlikely as it seems. Other leading Nazis were suspected of treachery too, not least of which was Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Military Intelligence, who was executed in 1945 for complicity in the plot to kill Hitler.

  After the battle, von Manstein insisted to Hitler that his forces should be allowed to continue and he maintained his view that victory was possible. Nonetheless, the high tide of Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union had passed. The Italians had surrendered in Africa, the Allies had landed in Sicily and his armoured divisions were needed to plug the holes in his defences.

  Afterwards, Hitler was asked, "Was it really necessary to attack Kursk, and indeed in the east that year at all? Do you think anyone even knows where Kursk is? The entire world doesn't care if we capture Kursk or not. What is the reason that is forcing us to attack this year on Kursk, or even more, on the Eastern Front?"

  Hitler replied:

  "I know. The thought of it turns my stomach.”

  There are indications that The Fuhrer may have realised even then that his forces were unlikely to ever recover .

  INTRODUCTION

  After his experiences in Devil’s Guard – Blood and Snow, the young SS officer Jurgen Hoffman leads his men into the maelstrom of the Battle of Kursk. Before the main battle has even begun there are opportunities for Obersturmfuhrer Hoffman to lead his men into action. The pressing need is for intelligence and he leads his men on a dangerous mission behind the lines to uncover the secrets of the Soviet defences.

  Once more, the enemy is not always recognisable by the uniform he is wearing. There are traitors sending the German
military secrets directly to Moscow. Known as the ‘Lucy’ spy ring, the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst and Abwehr hunt the traitors who are leaking information, yet it seems that not every senior German officer is anxious that the traitors are found. Even Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and the second most powerful man in the Nazi hierarchy behaves in a way that suggests his motives are far from clear.

  Under attack from the Red Army, Cossacks, Soviet partisans and German traitors, Jurgen finds that this time he is up against almost insurmountable odds. Escorting the Sicherheitsdienst is no guarantee that they will treat him fairly and he finds that they are as brutal with his friends and allies as they are with the enemy.

  When General Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army moves to attack the southern part of the Kursk salient, Jurgen finds himself pitted against a storm of fire from the Russian defences that have been built into an impregnable wall of tanks, guns and mines. It is a battle of attrition and victory will be decided by who is left standing on the battlefield when all else had fallen.

  Chapter One

  ‘Whenever in future wars the battle is fought, armoured troops will play the decisive role.’

  Heinz Guderian

  We were on an island called Kharkov, an island of shattered, broken apartment blocks, houses and factories. An island surrounded by a sea of mud and line after line of parked, mighty but impotent Panzers, the armoured might of the Third Reich, waiting for the chance to strike again into the Russian heartland. The rasputitza had arrived, the twice-yearly season when unpaved roads become difficult or impossible to traverse in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine. Immediately outside the city the paved roads ended and the mud started, in some cases it was a metre deep, possibly more. The mud stopped all movement in the countryside. We could at least content ourselves that the enemy suffered similar difficulties, so the risk of counterattack was low. I remembered reading an information leaflet written by General von Greiffenberg, ‘the effect of climate in Russia is to make things impassable in the mud of spring and autumn, unbearable in the heat of summer and impossible in the depths of winter’. He finished with the dramatic statement, ‘climate in Russia is a series of natural disasters’. Was I the only military officer that had listened to his warning? We’d suffered the counter-offensive outside Moscow in December 1941 when our armies had reeled back from the Russian ability to fight in sub-zero conditions when we were all but immobilised. We’d retreated and attempted to fight back through the clinging mud of the rasputitza in 1942 and then seen the Sixth Army literally freeze to death in Stalingrad before the weakened survivors were forced to surrender. Yet the Red Army still seemed able to constantly catch us on the back foot. From knocking on the door to Moscow eighteen months previously, we had been thrown back into the Ukraine and now we were facing the battle of our lives around the Kursk salient. It was a battle that many of us suspected would decide the victor and the loser in this war. We were certainly all agreed on one factor, a German victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. As soon as the mud began to dry we had to hit the Russians hard and fast before they could use the drier conditions to put in place the formidable defences that we had encountered in the past. And yet there was no obvious sign that we were ready to attack any time soon, we were still very understrength, deficient in men, materiel, food, fuel and even aircraft. Armour was the most serious shortage, the open steppe inside the salient was tank country and yet we had barely two hundred tanks operational within our Army Group South to combat the massed Soviet armour that we knew we would have to face when the battle started.

  My platoon was quartered in a house on the edge of the city, sharing it with a surly Ukrainian family who showed their bitter resentment every time a German soldier came through the door of their miserable concrete dwelling. There was only one opening that served as a window but it was normally covered with a piece of tarpaulin, there was no glass. Neither was there any electric light, a huge luxury in the Soviet Union, this dwelling had an old oil lamp to light up the room and even that was a luxury for most. The walls were papered with old newspapers with prominent pictures of Stalin, Communist Party newspapers, probably all that was available in the workers’ paradise. The family slept outside with the animals, a cow and two pigs that were kept in a straw lined shed at the back, and only came inside during the day. Despite the primitive conditions, the lice that caused us to scratch incessantly, the stink of unwashed bodies, rancid cooking fats and animal dung, we were relaxing around the warmth of the stove of the single room that comprised as the whole house. Voss had cooked up a meal using our pooled rations. He’d become quite a good chef and sometimes talked of his ambition to open a restaurant after the war. Another soldier’s dream, none of us expected to survive the Eastern Front but we had to keep our dreams alive, otherwise we would collapse into a welter of despair. Scharfuhrer Mundt was as good a thief as Voss was a cook and he spent part of each day foraging for supplies, fresh meat and vegetables, often in the Division’s stores.

  When the meal was prepared we offered part of our food to the Ukrainian family, it wasn’t their fault that enemy soldiers were billeted on them. They looked half-starved, as did most of the citizens in Stalin’s benighted empire. The children looked especially malnourished, with the extended bellies of the starving, and yet we were in the Ukraine, supposedly the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. It seemed to us more like a basket case than a breadbasket. Mundt passed around a flask of Ukrainian vodka and we lit up cigarettes. Mundt lit his pipe and we settled down to spend a rare, peaceful afternoon, warm, well fed and lubricated with alcohol. Even the occasional hit and run raid by Soviet fighter-bombers was no more than a nuisance, except for the mysterious U-2 night bombers, the almost silent, black biplanes that flew over, dropped their bombs and disappeared. They were invisible to our fighters and anti-aircraft guns in the dark sky. Here in Kharkov we were outside of enemy artillery range and our main worry was the local snipers, partisans who popped up, shot a couple of soldiers and vanished. The Gestapo were doing their best to track them down, aided by an Einsatzgruppe company, but their tactics were too heavy handed. Most of us thought they did more harm than good, often they captured ordinary citizens and then tortured them for information they didn’t possess. As far as we could see, all they achieved was to create hostility against us that served to recruit even more partisans. Why couldn’t their senior officers see what damage they were doing?

  “How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?” Schutze Bauer asked me. “Some of the lads from Der Fuhrer Regiment reckoned that we’ll be moving on down to Sebastopol soon, what do you think, Sir?”

  I looked up. They were all watching me, waiting on my reply. “As soon as they let me know, I’ll tell you, but until we’re told to move, Bauer, you may consider that we’re stuck here for the duration. Where’s Wagner, he’s overdue?”

  He’d been sent to collect our mail from Division and was due back almost an hour ago. They shook their heads, but just then we heard a shout outside, “It’s me, Wagner, I’m coming in, I had to use a longer route because of the snipers.”

  Mundt stood up and moved the tarpaulin to one side to look out. “Yeah, it’s him, he’s carrying our mail packet.”

  I saw him wave to Wagner, and then sit down. We all heard the shot, the loud ‘crack’ of a rifle bullet fired from somewhere close.

  “Sniper!” several voices shouted at once, we dived to the floor, out of sight of the window, grabbing for our weapons.

  “Mundt, see if Wagner is ok,” I called out to my Scharfuhrer.

  He crawled over and peered over the window ledge. “He’s down, Sir, the sniper got him, a head shot.”

  “Damn. Voss, Bauer, set up the MG34 to cover us, the rest of you, let’s go out through the front and work our way around. We need to finish this bastard, he’s making our life a misery!”

  The day before the Second Platoon, billeted three houses along the same street, had lost two of their men to a sniper, probably the same man. He’d never be
en caught. We picked up our MP38s, put on our steel helmets and stuffed stick grenades into our webbing, all done on the run. One of the men opened the door carefully, shouted, “Clear!” and we swept out into the street.

  “Mundt, take Voss and Bauer and work around to the south side, I’ll take the rest of the men to the north. Trottman, Beidenberg, Wesserman, come with me and keep your heads down!”

  We sprinted around the side of the building and I skidded to a stop. The sniper’s stand was obvious, a tall warehouse less than a hundred and fifty metres away, an unshuttered window was on the top floor. While the men waited I looked through my binoculars, there was no sign of a rifle barrel poking through. We had to move fast, he had already moved away.

  “Follow me, we’ll run across to the alley between the next two buildings.”

  One was a house, the other some kind of a small workshop, with a narrow alley in between, strewn with rubbish. I ran across the open space, jumped over a heap of rusting ironwork dodging into the alley, out of direct sight of any windows. We kept running and came to the end where we could see the warehouse, but there was no sign of the sniper. As we watched, a person wearing a long black coat and clutching a rifle darted out of a side door and walked diagonally away from us across a patch of open ground. I heard Beidenberg catch his breath, “The fucking bastard, he thinks that he doesn’t even need to run.”

  “Probably because it would attract more attention if he ran, Josef. Let’s disabuse him of that notion, we’ll get him before he vanishes.”

  We ran out, there was little need for caution now that we could see him. We got halfway across when he heard the clatter of our boots and looked around in alarm. Then he jerked up his rifle as if to shoot, decided that he was vastly outgunned and turned and walked quickly away. We ran at full speed, I looked around as I heard a grunt and a clatter as one of my men tripped and fell, when I looked again the sniper was disappearing into an apartment block, thirty seconds later we reached the door. I looked around. Josef Beidenberg and Gerd Wesserman were still with me. Roland Trottman was walking towards us, nursing an obviously sprained ankle.