She brushed her dress with her palm. “I wonder sometimes. This man may bring us to ruin.”
I instinctively looked around to make sure no one had heard that. Fortunately we were alone on the grassy bank. “It’s not wise to second-guess the Führer.”
She shot me a look. “Please don’t tell me you’ve fallen under the spell too. I don’t want to lose you.”
“What are you talking about?” I chuckled. She was not smiling.
“Do you know how much you sound like Johann lately?” she said.
“I sound like me,” I retorted, more insulted than I would have expected. “I sound like a true German.”
“How could you ever defend this Third Reich? Can you not see it’s built on a foundation of lies?” she said, holding her ground.
I reminded her of the dark years. “You remember how miserable our country was not so long ago? I was only a boy when my father took me to Münich, but I can still see the sallow, anxious faces. The abject despair. Men wandering the streets in tattered clothes. Most shameful were the beggars in Wehrmacht uniform. Some even had medals attesting to their courage on behalf of a fat kaiser and then a Weimar fraud that abandoned them to the alleyways. To see our people reduced to rags. Thanks to the Allies and their damned reparations bleeding our nation dry. As if they were so noble. Well, Hitler changed all that. I don’t follow him blindly, Amelia. I’m not Keitel or my kid brother. But I do admire his accomplishments. He gave men work, security, and above all self-esteem. Aren’t you grateful for this?”
I think that was how many of us felt at the time. Though not a member of his party, I’d been impressed by his achievements.
She just stared at me gravely. “And what of the hatred?”
I shrugged. “I can’t tell if it’s hatred or just renewed national pride. A pride stifled at Versailles, but since then come into its own as—”
“Oh enough!” Amelia could take no more as rage struck her with all the expectation of a cruel surprise. She leapt to her bare feet and turned away from me, storming several yards down along the riverbank to stand with her arms at her side, gazing out to the far shore as if hoping to glimpse some happier promised land. “If I need to hear the Nazi party line, I’ll turn on the radio and get an earful of Goebbels.” She shielded her eyes from the bright sunlight gleaming off the moving water. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the flesh. “I’ve grown tired of excuses. The Long Knives, Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht. They weren’t brought about by Versailles. This blot on our soul that is National Socialism comes from some corruption of our own national self.” She cast her eyes to the blued folds of the faraway mountains in the mist. “This is not the Germany of my childhood.”
“There’s only one Germany,” I reminded her as I rose to a stand and walked towards her. “And I’m a part of it.”
She turned to me. “What about the way the Nazis terrorize Leopold? He’s your friend, for God’s sake. What about all the Jews?”
I stiffened. I’d actually gone to see Krup just the week before at his house in the country, where he now spent his days, far removed from the tormentors who were once his townsfolk. It was the first time since November ’38. When the pogroms began. I’d kept my visit clandestine because I didn’t want Amelia to follow me; I knew my movements were being watched. Nor did I want her to hear what I had to say to him. That I needed to forget about him. For my family’s sake. It was a painful last meeting I tried to forget. But it would come back to me in vivid detail when my world suddenly was knocked off its axis right in the middle of a war…courtesy of the woman who now stood in judgment before me.
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “I don’t completely understand the Führer’s animosity towards the Jews. But then again,” I added dutifully, “my only experience with them has been with Krup and his family. I don’t know, Amelia. Maybe things really are different in the big cities. Perhaps what they taught us in school, about how the Jews were behind our capitulation in the Great War just so they could wrest control of the businesses and finance away from German Christians, is true.”
Amelia’s look shifted from anger to sweet despair. “Will you listen to yourself? What happened to that boy who held me when the glass was raining down? That young musician who knows right from wrong? This is not you talking. I know you, Harmon Becker.”
“I’m not saying I agree with everything about the New Order. But I must accept it. War is coming,” I warned her. “The fact that my call was accelerated tells me fighting will start any day now.”
Her eyes reddened. “This is why I hate Hitler so. He will kill your soul, if the war doesn’t kill you in the flesh. You have an extraordinary gift that will be wasted in the Wehrmacht. You just turned eighteen. So much life to live. So much talent! To throw it all away to march for a spiteful bully.”
“I have a duty to the Fatherland.”
“Duty!” she snorted. “Duty to who? Hitler and his thugs?”
“To the people of Germany,” I said. “To you.”
“Don’t you dare turn this back on me!” And she slapped me on the face! I was more startled than hurt. My cheek stung, and marks stood out like red exclamation points on my face, but I was no worse for the wear. I’d never seen her so passionate…so reckless with her own safety. I shuddered to think what fate might befall her had anyone heard her traitorous rants. This should have been a clue as to what lay ahead of me.
The little blonde demon looked up at me wide-eyed, as much in shock over her primordial spasm of violence as her target. “I hope you didn’t re-open that old wound,” I said with a coy I-deserved-it grin.
She shook her head at her folly and with a hint of shame said: “I made sure I clocked you with my right hand.”
“Christ, I hope whoever we fight doesn’t hit us like that,” I said, rubbing my cheek while I flashed her a come-hither smirk. “It’ll be 1918 all over again.”
She stepped in close. “I’m sorry. I just get so frustrated when I see my two years of age on you are a chasm at times. Can you not see the signs, Harmon? I see apocalypse. Don’t fall under that man Hitler’s wicked spell. Promise me.”
I opened my arms out to her. She smiled contritely and moved in to hug me. We stood together as one on the edge of the Main. “You worry too much. Everything will be fine.”
She squeezed me tighter. “Fine for us. But for the world at large, I’m not so sure.” I could still hear Johann’s prediction that the world would hold its breath when Germany finally went on the march.
We both peered down into the running waters at our toes, searching for our future. It was such a beautiful day, the sky so deep, the fragrant smell of pine, the cree-cree of grasshoppers leaping about in the tall grass of the meadows creating a chorus that surrounded us.
“Harmon, tell me you’ll come home safe after this war everyone’s predicting is over.”
That I could not do. And she knew that. I could only continue to embrace her quavering form in silence as we awaited the advent of wartime, once more, on all the Angeluses of the world. It was the first time I ever saw Amelia Engel angry. And it was the first time I ever saw her cry.
18
“A part of me still found it hard to imagine that the Führer would lead us to war,” I confide to my reporter guest. She scribbles this down.
“But the war came,” Rachael says.
I sigh at the stupidity of it all. “At 5:40 a.m. on September 1, 1939, our armies smashed into Poland. And so ended the last summer of my boyhood.”
“What part did you play in the beginning?”
“I attended the Kriegshule, the military academy, as an NCO. Flight training, drill parades, studies, indoctrination. A year after I left home I was commissioned a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. It was a very proud day for me, as you can imagine.”
Rachael shakes her head admonishingly. “No, Mr. Becker. I can’t.”
I close my eyes. “They were confusing times, my dear. We stood in the rain on the parade grounds of the school, in our fitted uniforms, with shiny helmets dripping water on our mud-soaked boots. We raised our right hands, with index and middle finger pointed to the gray clouds, and we took the Führereid.”
“The Führ-er-eid?” She struggles to pronounce it.
“Our sacred oath of allegiance to Hitler. It may help you understand our mindset at the time. Perhaps it’s beyond anyone now.”
I can still recite it by heart:
“I swear by almighty God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.”
“That’s a little too convenient. I’m not buying it. The oath made you do it?”
“No,” I reply vigorously. “It’s just an explanation, not an exoneration.”
“Did you see Amelia in all that time? Your family?”
“I saw them briefly, before my first assignment in Yugoslavia in spring 1941. By that time,” I continued, “we Germans were masters of all Europe. Poland, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, even the mighty France with her million-man army was crushed by our swiftly moving armored columns in just thirty days. Crete, Greece, North Africa. Only the island nation of Britain held out. This was the time of the Blumenkrieg. The War of Flowers. When the men would return to Germany to march in triumphant parades while ladies showered us in bouquets.”
“And then?”
“And then came Russia,” I say. “And the series of events that brought me back to the West and put me on the path of treason.”
19
The vast emptiness of the Russian steppe, a mustard-yellow ocean of wheat, sunflowers, and shoulder-high grasses, stretched out to the distant horizon, where the edge of the earth touched the wide-open sky. Warm breezes whipped up from the south and rippled across the plains, heralding the end of the excruciating cold. Although it was only mid-April, already the second horrible winter I’d endured there had ended and was receding into the shadows of my mind. The thaw caused me to wonder whether the dirge of titanic battles with the Red Army that rolled eastward in 1941 for 600 miles from the River Bug to the very suburbs of Moscow—only to be beaten back by the massive Russian counter-attack supported by their insidious ally, the brutal winter—and then the catastrophe of Stalingrad in the second half of ’42, had all been just a terrible dream. But for the families of the half million German dead and many times that wounded and maimed, Hitler’s foray into Stalin’s Russia was no dream. It was an agony. It was also showing all the hallmarks of being one of the greatest blunders in military history, although we in the Luftwaffe were too preoccupied with flying missions and staying alive to think too much on that.
Now it was the springtime again, 1943. Sitting out in the open, the sun drenching us in its warm glow, our little group of pilots were hunched in our folding chairs around card tables enjoying the fine weather. We appeared but specks on the surface of a sea of waist-high grass. Out here one could easily grow disoriented, as the topography had no discernable features against which you could figure out where you were or which direction you were even facing. No matter which way you turned, you confronted a land spread out for miles in front of you, only to abruptly terminate at the false crests of the horizon that were illusions created by the curvature of the earth. You really did come to suspect that you were at the farthest end of the world.
Our ground crews were taking advantage of the warm spell along with the relative quiet in our sector to give our aircraft a much-needed re-tooling. While they worked hard to keep us flying, we pilots had not much to do but smoke cigarettes and play cards in impromptu games of Skat set up in the shadows of our parked fighters. I was losing money in one such game with three other members of my squadron.
I’d made some good friends in the past two years of combat. Lieutenants Gerhard Borner, a Clark Gable clone, and the portly “Big Werner” Gaetjens, seated at opposite ends at my elbows, were two of them; but my closest friend was my cigar-chomping wingman, Josef Mueller, who was sitting next to me analyzing my hand. He and I had been paired up upon our assignment to Jagdgeschwader 54, an air group known as the Greenhearts, and it was an uneasy match in the beginning. He thought me cold and aloof and had no qualms about telling me so. I thought he drank too much and talked more so. But our differences melted away when in combat together with the Red Air Force. To our mutual delight we soon discovered that we had an uncanny feel for each other’s movements in the sky and covered each other with textbook fluidity. On the ground we came to understand that our differences were at first tolerable and then, as the crucible of war formed a deep soldiers’ bond between us, we eventually grew fond of each other’s quirks.
Josef was a lithe twenty-one-year-old from Saxony, and as such his tastes for the finer things were more discriminating than mine. Discussions about our lives before the war were rare though. It was as if we wished not to dwell on home should we grow too melancholy. His devil-may-care bearing prompted me to imagine I was flying with the spoiled son of a wealthy baron who was too embarrassed to say so. When the mood would turn serious, if the squadron suffered losses, he would be the one to lift our sagging spirits with a practical joke or two—often at my expense. His favorite was to cover the earpiece of my phone with boot polish. Childish and cliché, I admit. But when you’re under the chronic stress of combat, even the silliest prank can be more valuable to the psyche than a box of medals from the Führer himself.
Major Johannes Trautloft’s staff car, a weathered BMW convertible, skidded over to us in a cloud of dust. I hadn’t noticed our wing commander’s approach, as I was contemplating not so much my losing hand as the thunderstorm several miles distant along the horizon. A great blackened mass of cumulonimbus clouds, its anvil top swollen with moisture, towering fifty thousand feet over the steppe. The rain falling from its flat base resembled wispy brushstrokes of gray mist pulled down to the ground.
My daydreaming was interrupted by Borner, who leapt to his feet and called out: “Achtung!” We all jumped stiffly to attention, my cards fluttering down to my dust-covered boots.
Major Trautloft stepped out of his car onto the grass, the Ritterkreuz under his collar gleaming in the sunshine. He was a svelte and handsome man. He was thirty-one, and I looked to him as a mentor. He was a skilled fighter pilot and excellent leader destined for advancement. I would find out later that as Inspekteur der Tagjäger, inspector of all German day fighters, in late 1944 he personally intervened to save the lives of one hundred sixty Allied aircrews just days before their scheduled executions. When compared to Major Seebeck, Trautloft was a god to me.
“As you were,” he said.
We returned to our chairs, and I collected my losing hand from the dirt. “Trouble, Herr Major?” inquired Mueller through clenched teeth as he puffed his cigar.
Gaetjens studied his cards. “We ain’t flying today, are we, sir?”
“No, nothing like that,” replied Trautloft. I noticed he was clutching some official-looking documents in his gloved hand.
I looked up at him, shielding my eyes from the sun. “What do you have there, Herr Major?” They seemed to be the reason for his visit.
He uttered a disgruntled sigh. “These, Lieutenant Becker, are transfer orders. To the Western Front.”
Our eyes lit up.
“Whose?” I pressed. “I hope they’re not yours, sir?”
“No,” said the major. “They’re yours, Becker.”
“Hah!” I guffawed while frowns formed on my comrades’ faces. Then Trautloft looked at the other three men. “And Lieutenants Mueller’s, Gaetjens’, and Borner’s. The full swarm. Pack up your things, report to the duty officer for processing, and be on the next transport out. I must say I’m not happy ab
out this. I’m losing four good pilots.”
Mueller and I glanced at each other. Smiles wormed across our young faces. Any place was better than this sullen, dismal land of Stalinist oppression and its wretched hordes. A wasteland of endless steppe where the new spring grasses were spouting over the thawing graves so many German youths. We were getting away from this campaign of annihilation and hatred; a crusade without honor. This Keineblumenkrieg: war without garlands.
Trautloft caught our joyous expressions and tried to temper our moods. “Don’t look so thrilled, gentlemen,” he cautioned. “You’re being transferred to a base in Belgium to replace comrades lost by the score. The Tommies are a tougher foe than Russian women in biplanes. And now with the Americans jumping in with both feet, the bomber offensive will only grow more intense. Quite frankly, I don’t expect more than maybe one of you to survive.”
Mueller grinned and looked at the rest of us. “You poor, doomed bastards.”
“We’ll take our chances, sir,” I said. I was already thinking of Amelia and home.
I was rather mystified that our swarm was being transferred on the eve of the summer offensive, which we all suspected would be against the Russian salient, like a bulge into our lines, centered around the village of Kursk. I figured that Luftwaffe support would be in high demand, thus requiring every man and machine available to be on the line.
“Makes no sense to me,” commented the major. “Why I should have to give you up now. And you, Becker, a sixty-bagger. I envy your new commander.”
“Who is he, by the way?” I asked.
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