Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  The SD Man took out a document. “It says on the warrant that on the 17th of June you said in front of witnesses that in your opinion, and I quote, ‘This mad man Adolf Hitler is leading us to disaster, he’s leading us from one defeat to another’.

  “Yes, so? What I said is absolutely true,” he said incredulously. “We all know it, Stalingrad, the Kursk salient was another disaster. The Allies have landed in Sicily. Need I go on?”

  “You need not, no. What you have just repeated is indeed treason. Hoffman, get your men to take him away!”

  The adjutant and staff stood watching with expressions of horror as we marched their CO out to our waiting vehicle. The adjutant had already been on the radio to OKH to confirm the order and he had to stand back and watch the charade take place. I felt sick as I led the brave, front line officer out of his office, but I had no choice or they’d arrest me too. I knew we couldn’t go on like it, arresting our valuable and knowledgeable senior officers and allowing one man with little or no military experience to make decisions that would plunge whole armies into disaster. We drove back to the city centre in silence. General Schmidt seemed to have gone into a state of mental paralysis. He knew it was an error from which he’d never recover and he’d be lucky just to stay alive. We deposited him in the cell and left the building, but von Betternich called me back. “I want you back here tonight, Hoffman, we may have a lead on our Lucy spy, be here for seven o’clock. With luck we might have the bastard in custody before morning.”

  I saluted and walked away, still sick to the stomach to see that Panzer general put into a cell when he was so desperately needed. We marched carefully back out of the city, wary this time of snipers but this time there were no random shots fired at us. Beidenberg had the men repairing the fortifications, Hiwis were busy helping dig trenches and carry more sandbags to the gun emplacements.

  “Any problems?” I asked him. “Apart from the obvious, of course.”

  He smiled. “All quiet at the moment, Sir, but I think the Russians must surely be massing not too far away to attack the city.”

  I nodded. “I think you’re right, this damned place has been like a bone in their throats almost since the start of Barbarossa, they’ll certainly be working out how quickly they can take it back off us. Your defences will be sorely needed before too long.”

  I left him and went to the Regimental HQ nearby, Muller was outside with Glasser, the adjutant.

  “What was that business this morning?” the CO asked me.

  “General Schmidt, they arrested him for treason, Sir.”

  He momentarily closed his eyes. “Dear God, if they take all of our best commanders we’ll have no one left to lead us. It’s almost as bad as the Stalin purges.”

  “Are there any signs of another Russian attack, Sir?”

  He shook his head. “We haven’t noticed unusual armour and troop movements, but we know they’ll come shortly. It’s a pity we lost so much of our own armour trying to take Kursk.”

  I asked him were there any estimates of our losses yet. He looked around carefully, to make sure no one was listening. It was such a common gesture in the new Germany of Adolf Hitler that I barely noticed it.

  “Unofficially, they put our losses at around a thousand Panzers across the whole of Army Group South and Army Group Centre. They’re not all totally destroyed, of course, but the ones that are just damaged are out of action until we can repair them. We have about six hundred Panzers left, if we scrape up everything including some of the more obsolete stuff.”

  It was a day for bad news. “Can we hold them with those numbers, Sir?”

  He gave me a look that was very eloquent. “You need to make up your own mind about that, I’d rather not guess.”

  Glasser was looking worried in case his CO said something that would incriminate him. I looked at them both. “I think we’ve made up our minds already.”

  They both nodded.

  The Soviet Air Force appeared to be as exhausted as we were, there were few signs of enemy aircraft in the sky and we began to relax until a flight of four Soviet fighters stormed over the lines, spraying cannon and machine gun fire in their path. We dived for cover in the newly dug slit trenches, holding our breath for the bombs that the small Russian fighter bombers carried, but these were Yak 1s, a single-seat fighter designed more for aerial superiority and escort duties for bombers and low level attack aircraft like the Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik. The fortifications protected us from the worst of the storm of fire and while the Flakvierlings sent torrents of fire skyward to bring down the raiders, we kept our heads down and waited for it to be over. As they flew away our anti-aircraft fire hit one of them but the other three flew out of range and out of sight.

  “Bloody Luftwaffe again,” Voss moaned, “what the hell are they thinking of? Has anyone seen any kind of air combat patrol today?” We all shook our heads. “Damn right, they’re all lying in bed.”

  “I think many of them are lying dead on the battle field of the Kursk salient, Karl-Heinz. Some of them may have been transferred to Italy, of course.”

  “Can’t the Italians protect their own country?” he snapped. “I thought they were supposed to be Allies. They’re bloody useless.”

  “Karl-Heinz is right, you know,” Beidenberg said, surprising all of us, he rarely said anything while we were discussing the progress of the war. “They collapsed at Stalingrad where they were supposed to be holding the line and they collapsed in North Africa. They’re hopeless soldiers. They’ll lose the whole of Italy if we don’t prop them up.”

  I felt sorry for the Italians. Before I came out to Russia to join the Deutschland Regiment, I’d trained with several of them at officer training school in Lichterfelde. They tried to explain Italian politics to me. The problem was the Mussolini’s fascists were very much in the minority, unlike those who admired Hitler in Germany who were very much in the majority, especially after he enjoyed his early triumphs in Alsace-Lorraine, the Danzig Corridor, Austria and Czechoslovakia. After we conquered France he could do no wrong, unlike Mussolini who was viewed with the utmost suspicion in Italy. They maintained that it wasn’t that the Italians couldn’t fight, just that most didn’t want to. I felt bound to defend them, I remembered them as young men who loved life, who enjoyed wine, women and opera in equal measure.

  “As I recall, Rommel was defeated in North Africa,” I said quietly. “And wasn’t General von Paul defeated at Stalingrad too? It’s not just the Italians that are losing.”

  They were silent at the enormity of what I’d just said. It was only the truth, but the implications for all of us were shocking. The attack seemed to be over and we went back to work, but it was work that seemed increasingly without reason, without purpose, without hope.

  I took my trusty NCO, Willy Mundt together with Stefan Bauer into the city to report to the Gestapo. The senior SD officer von Betternich was waiting for us together with Gerd Wiedel, his Gestapo counterpart. Wiedel had a map of the city pinned to the wall, he pointed to a location on the northern outskirts.

  “We’ve pinpointed a radio transmission coming out of here two nights in succession. We deliberately kept away from him to make him feel as if he was safe to use that location. Tonight, with any luck, we’ll have him.”

  “Is it Lucy?” I asked him.

  “We think so, but his transmissions are encoded, we can’t be sure until have him in our hands. If we can take him it will change everything. The radio van is ready as soon as he starts transmitting and we’ve made the Kubi available for you.”

  Von Betternich was smiling to himself as Wiedel spoke, evidently he didn’t share his colleague’s enthusiasm. I went back outside to bring the Kubi around to the front. We scrounged coffee from the Gestapo canteen and sat around waiting. Even the Gestapo couldn’t do better than the foul-tasting ersatz coffee and as I looked around at the broken, rubble-strewn surroundings that no one had bothered to tidy for several weeks, at the peeling paintwork and cracked masonry of the
Gestapo headquarters building, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of masters of Europe we Germans had become. More and more it seemed as if we were masters of a huge, lice-ridden rubbish tip, except that the lice carried machine guns and often rode in tanks.

  “There was an article in Volkischer Beobachter last week,” Bauer said abruptly, apparently just making conversation. Mundt and I looked at him expectantly. “They’re still asking for applicants to apply for farms in the German occupied part of the Soviet Union. The General Government, what used to be Poland, is still short of people too, they say there are lots of empty farms just waiting for Germans to come forward and claim them.”

  “Did they say what happened to the former owners of the farms, Stefan?”

  “No, they didn’t mention that, Sir.”

  He was half smiling, the story was of course true, those articles were always appearing, but the way the war was going made the occupancy of a farm in the former regions of Poland and the Ukraine more like suicide with every week that went by. He was smiling broadly. It was one of those word games we often played, recounting the latest idiocy from Dr Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry with a straight face in the hopes of catching your audience with a laugh.

  “Stefan, I’ve thought about another article in the Beobachter.”

  “Yes, Sir, what’s that?”

  “It’s about an SS Schutze playing word games outside of Gestapo HQ.”

  He looked around quickly and his face fell. “I’d forgotten that.”

  Mundt and I both laughed then, the joke had fallen on his head like a bolt of lightning.

  “He’s broadcasting, we need to leave now,” Wiedel said as he rushed out into the courtyard. Von Betternich came limping after him and Wiedel helped him into the funkwagen and then joined us in the Kubi. We roared out of the courtyard and made our way at speed across the city.

  “We want him alive,” Wiedel said as Mundt and I checked and cocked our MP38s.

  I nodded. “Don’t worry, we’ll only shoot if he starts shooting at us.”

  The truck stopped just before an intersection.

  “This time we’ll go forward on foot, Hoffman, if he sees the vehicles he’ll make a run for it.”

  I nodded. We left Bauer with the Kubi and walked carefully forward, I saw the door of the truck open and von Betternich climbed out and followed at a distance. We rounded the corner and Wiedel pointed out the target building.

  “Willy, take Bauer and go around the back, I’ll go in the front with Herr Wiedel.”

  The Scharfuhrer nodded and walked quietly along the street and disappeared down a lane that led to the rear of the building. Wiedel led the way to the front of the building and tested the front door quietly. It was locked.

  “Can you smash it open, Hoffman?”

  I nodded, handed him my machine pistol to hold and stepped back three paces. Then charged the door with my shoulder, it splintered and opened inwards. I grabbed my weapon from Wiedel as I rushed through the entrance. The sound of a Morse Code transmission in progress was coming from an upstairs room. I charged up the stairs with Wiedel close behind, there was a second flight of stairs and we went up to the top floor, the beeping of the Morse Code was loud, then it stopped. I went into the room where I estimated it had been coming from. There was a dressing table and a brass bedstead. On the dressing table was a potable radio set that was packed in a canvas case, opened to allow the set to be used. At the side was the Morse key, a wire came out of the side of the radio and stretched upwards, I looked up and there was a trapdoor into the ceiling above the dressing table that led into the roof space.

  “Whoever he is, he’s obviously gone up there,” I said to Wiedel. “I’ll go after him, I would suggest you check the rest of the house in case there is another way out.”

  I climbed onto the dresser and swung myself up through the trapdoor. The wire aerial disappeared through an opened inspection cover in the roof, I ran across the tops of the roof beams to reach it when it suddenly slammed shut. I pushed hard but whoever had closed it had bolted it, it was a dead end. I went back through the hatch, climbed down again, and ran out to the stairway. Wiedel was on the next landing down. I shook my head.

  “He was up there, but he’s bolted his escape route shut, we need to go outside to find him!”

  We ran back down the stairs and out of the front door. There was no sign of him, he had to come down the outside somewhere, but where?

  “Wiedel, you go to the left, I’ll go to the right.”

  He nodded and ran off to the side of the house, I went the other way but still there was nothing. Mundt and Bauer came towards me, how could he have slipped through our net? Then I saw a small building tucked into the corner of the garden wall, covered in green ivy that almost completely hid it from view. The door was shut so I went carefully towards it, kicked it in and rushed in with my machine pistol ready. A German officer was sitting on an old wooden stool. He looked up as I crashed through the door.

  “There was no need to smash the door, my friend, it wasn’t locked.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked him, keeping my weapon pointed at him.

  He sighed. “Captain Helmersdorf, Abwehr, Army Intelligence. What the hell are you doing here?”

  I was taken aback, it was almost as if I was the quarry and not him. I told him who I was and what we were doing here.

  “There seems to be a misunderstanding,” he said. “You have interrupted an Abwehr operation, I suggest you leave.”

  “And I suggest you explain yourself to the Gestapo,” Wiedel’s voice interrupted as he walked into the tiny room.

  The Abwehr man stared at him. “The Gestapo has no jurisdiction over the Abwehr.”

  “In matters of treachery we have absolute jurisdiction, as you know. Hoffman, arrest him, we’ll take him back with us and question him more!”

  “I insist that I contact Army Headquarters to clear this up,” Helmersdorf said firmly.

  Wiedel walked up to him and punched him hard in the face. “Traitors don’t insist on anything, you piece of shit. Shut up or the next one will be a kick in the balls. You should save your energy for later, I’m sure you’ll have lots to tell us.”

  I felt slightly ashamed at seeing the Gestapo man hit the officer, but I turned a blind eye. Meddling in Gestapo business was never a good idea and besides, if he really was the traitor, he deserved whatever he got. I sent Mundt and Bauer to fetch the spy’s radio equipment. Von Betternich limped up to us, eyeing the Abwehr man.

  “So this is the Lucy traitor, is it?”

  “We think so, Sir.”

  “I am on a mission for Army Intelligence, you fools,” he snarled. He winced as Wiedel went to hit him again but the SD man put up a hand to stop him.

  “Which mission is that?”

  “We had a report of unauthorised transmissions coming from this area and I came to investigate,” Helmersdorf said. “I was looking in that garden workshop when your men came crashing in, they made so much noise that if there was a spy here he’s long gone.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Wiedel said. “Are you saying that you came here on your own?”

  “Sometimes it is better to be subtle, not something the Gestapo had much of a reputation for,” he sneered.

  Wiedel raised his hand but von Betternich stopped him again and gave the Abwehr officer a hard stare. “I warn you, whatever you may think of the Gestapo, their methods of extracting information are very effective. We’ll discuss this further when we get back, take him away.”

  Mundt and Bauer took an arm each and escorted him to the Kubelwagen. Von Betternich looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s him, Sir. He was almost certainly hiding from us. Besides, there’s no one else around. It has to be him.”

  He nodded. “I’m sure you’re right, we’ll soon find out either way. Wiedel, while you’re questioning him I’ll make some discreet enquiries at Army Headquarters and see if they have anything to say about
him.”

  We rode back into the city centre in silence, unsure as to whether we’d uncovered a traitor or fallen foul of an ongoing Abwehr investigation. As we got near the centre it was obvious that something was wrong, lights were coming on, vehicles and armour were starting to move and men running through the streets. We were stopped at a crossroads by the Feldgendarmerie checkpoint. Wiedel asked the sergeant what was up.

  “It’s the Soviets, Sir, they’re attacking the city. They’ve got two or three fucking Soviet armies descending and coming straight at us!”

  Chapter Ten

  ‘One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we should have no civilization’

  Erwin Rommel

  We reached the Gestapo Office and left the two security officers with their Abwehr captive, then we made our way back to Regimental HQ and I reported to Muller.

  “Obersturmfuhrer, the signs are that we’re in for something of a shit storm. Our intelligence reports that the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts are coming out of the Kursk Bulge and heading for Kharkov. Von Manstein and von Kluge have just got back from the Wolfschanze, our orders are to hold the city at all costs!”

  “How long have got before they hit us?”

  “I’ve no idea, Hoffman. Perhaps two weeks, that’s the word from HQ.”

  I left him reflecting how the fortunes of war had changed so suddenly, only recently we were attacking the Kursk salient with a view to putting the impetus back into our Eastern Front offensive. Now we were just talking about hanging on at all costs. That evening I was able to get away and I only had one destination in mind. Irina. I knocked on her door and she opened it “Yes? What do you want?”

  “Irina, in spite of everything, I want you to come and have dinner with me.”

  She stood for a moment, indecisive. She’d been about to say no, I realised that, but a glint came into her eyes. “Yes, alright. I’ll get my jacket.”

  She came out of the house with a thin cotton jacket, the evening was warm and balmy, at least the weather hadn’t turned on us, it seemed that everything else had. We found one of the few remaining restaurants still open. This one was tiny, little more than the front room of a private house. She’d hardly spoken to me but after the first course was served and the waiter opened a bottle of local wine, I asked her what was on her mind.