“Won’t Uncle Führer be pleased when he finds we’re soldiers, too.” Magna was trying hard to be festive. “You know he says—everyone to their duty.”
Having experienced her first menstruation, Helga was pleased to be treated as an adult. Dr. Morell donated cotton from the tops of his medicine bottles to reinforce her underwear. When the cotton ran out, he pulled soiled bandages from the wounded that the nurses then washed and folded in little pads for her.
Helga was Adi’s favorite as well as her father’s. Both men wanted every detail about Helga’s first monthly that arrived according to Dr. Morell at a very early age, a natural sign of superiority. This young blood, her German heritage, Blut Träger, came forth in shy little bursts as if she had been pricked between the legs. We had prepared her for this monthly event, so Helga was not frightened. It helped that she was not afflicted with cramps. Adi insisted on inspecting the first bloody pad, so I wrapped it in the pages of my favorite magazine, Illustrierte Beobachter, and put it on his desk. He screamed at me saying the wrapping was contaminating Helga’s blood. Anything that was not Goebbels’ paper, Das Reich, was filthy. Disgusting print had bled on the cotton and distorted his examination. I had never thought of this possibility and was sorry telling Adi I would save him Helga’s second menstrual pad in the Panzerbär, the combat newspaper Goebbels so lovingly edits. But it was the first smear that he wanted. Finally he decided that the original sample was not ruined after all and wrote his name with her scarlet smear saying Nietzsche declared that those who wrote with blood would learn that blood was spirit.
Blondi’s doggy-afterbirth was also saved, carefully dried and pressed in a glass bowl like a paperweight. But it was Adi’s clinical study of Helga’s menstrual blood that impressed Dr. Morell. The doctor watched Adi study the ruby streaks under a microscope. The tiny lumps fascinated Adi, those delicate jagged red knots that came from a child. Extracting clots from the pad carefully with a tweezers, he put them in the palm of his hand tasting the innocent blood as if he were confirming the fact that this was indeed a rare and precious substance. It affected him peculiarly, however, as he began to shiver. Klara had given him dripping blood pudding to eat as a child, and he was hit with a stab of pure and innocent memories—Helga connected with his beloved mother.
After a breakfast of fried duck eggs and horsemeat bacon in the Officers’ Mess at Panzer Division Munchenberg, General Krebs arrived at the Bunker. We tumbled into an armored Mercedes in late afternoon, ready for pistol practice. Krebs thought about having a squad of Hitler Youth to escort us, but he and General Heinrici and Oberleutnant von Roon had made enough early ground reconnaissance to be quite certain of our safety. Krebs was eager to take full credit for the “Führer’s surprise” and insisted his orderly not drive on such an important mission. Helga sat on her mother’s lap in the back seat, mother and child tucked in tightly next to orderly Oberleutnant Bickisch in his hussar’s jacket with frogging and gold epaulets, a bayonet slash across his cheek acquired from his military sports school at Wunstorf. I sat in the front seat next to General Krebs with his large mouth and square teeth, dressed in a simple overcoat with gray tin buttons and no rank insignia, a watch on each wrist, a map case and a Steyr army pistol strapped to his side. The dour general was trying to be casual, but I could see lines of sweat on his forehead. When we drove up a hill, Helga vomited on Bickisch’s shoes. Magda had failed to tell us that Helga got carsick. We snaked around a woman using scissors to hack at a dead horse, then continued driving by burnt tanks, partial buildings, slabs of street pavement, and scattered shoes, many with human feet or legs still in them. Some bodies in the street had boiled cabbage all over them. One dead soldier lay in the road, steam still rising up from the mug of coffee he clutched in his hand.
“Germans do not like to die in bed,” the General declared.
“Look at that,” Bickisch added in excitement, “a hollow cavity wound… the brains swept right out of the head. I’ve only read about that.”
“Enough! Not in front of the women,” Krebs ordered.
“Does the front of our car get in the war first?” Helga trilled.
“What do you mean, darling?” Magda asked patiently.
“If the Russians are in front of us… and none are in the back.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Bickisch.
“Why not?”
“The First World War had a long, straight front. If we drove—at that time—the front seat would certainly have reached the war first.”
The general smiled, pleased that the child was receiving a first hand history lesson while under his supervision.
“And now?” Helga leaned forward.
“Modern war is elastic. It can reach up, down, forward, backward.”
“War is so silly.” Helga held a frown in a monotonous frozen way like a face held forever on some lacquered vase.
Civilians were digging trenches in yards and parks. Adi’s beloved Reich Chancellery had only two walls standing after a hollow charge had exploded on the roof. “A hollow charge,” Krebs explained without emotion, “is an explosive that burns through steel and concrete.”
People lay dead on the ground, face to face, some with gas bubble wounds bursting from pus. Slogan Squads had painted walls with: “We Will Never Give up” in bright white paint. The fancy jingles of Magda’s pompous husband had not helped Berlin. Barricades and trenches were of little defense. Helga looked at everything, but her mother often shielded her own eyes with a scarf. I was fascinated with the little wooden swastikas people planted everywhere on various piles of rubble, swastikas crudely made from pieces of scarred and jagged wood. Some had a cross attached. How beautiful that surviving family members had risked their lives to walk in all this chaos to honor and bury loved ones the only way they knew how. General Krebs was not impressed as idiot civilians and all their stupid practices were hindering important military operations needed for the war.
Our car moved slowly through smoke, the tires smeared with the paste of human remains. From the car’s half opened window, the smell of gasoline, mud and scorched iron blew into our faces as we drove by a bombed home for blind soldiers and allotment gardens filled with glass shards. Chimneys with no roofs spiked upward like steeples. What Krebs called bomb tramps, Bombenfrischler, were living in the open and cluttering our way.
Loaded with bottles, a milk truck’s tire exploded and the vehicle spun around crashing on a pile of roof tiles. In that brief stop it was being looted by two old men and some children. This fight for milk filled me with hope for if civilians were willing to struggle for milk, men and children alike, then we Germans were not defeated.
Staring at her own intestines on the ground, a girl tried to push them back into her gaping stomach. Stuck to a collapsed wall was the lower half of a horse, so many pieces of animal flesh in a torrid design. Surrounded by newspaper covered corpses, old men and women stood dazed and stiff as if planted in the ground. A boy looking no older than ten was shot by a sniper, and I heard the bullets make a harsh metallic sound and then thunk into his chest as dust flew off his shirt.
“Mothers and children should not leave Berlin. Soldiers fight harder to keep their women safe—though there’s been an increase in premature births,” General Krebs remarked as a tank slowly crawled over the hiding place of a woman and her infant. A body hung from the tank’s turret, charred white from phosphorus shells.