“I think it is a good idea, Herr Hauptmann,” a young lieutenant of the Austrian Alpenjaegers remarked cheerfully. “Austria is precisely the place we would like to” go. After the raid we might as well keep going south.”
“And run into a Soviet blocking party,” Eisner grunted.
“You had better stick with us, taking the longer way but arriving safely.”
“After the raid on the village we should double back toward the north and cross the border at Sebnitz,” Captain Ruell concluded.
“So be it!” Eisner stated and I agreed. Captain Ruell’s plan seemed as feasible as any we might conceive.
By five o’clock in the afternoon both trucks were loaded and the prisoners had been lined up for head count. There were twenty-three of them, escorted by twelve Russians. Schulze deployed three sharpshooters for each Red army man. “Drop them with a single bullet, otherwise some of the prisoners may get hurt.”
“Don’t worry,” one of the troopers remarked. “At two hundred yards we could hit a field mouse between the eyes.”
Schulze waited until the prisoners had climbed aboard the trucks. Standing in a small group the Russians watched them with their submachine guns ready.
“Fire!” said Schulze.
Thirty-six rifles fired a single volley. The bewildered prisoners threw themselves flat thinking that they were about to be killed. But our sharpshooters had aimed well. There was no return fire.
Our liberated comrades, as we soon learned, had been captured five days before the capitulation. The majority were officers. The captain, whose rank Eisner had recognized, was the former commanding officer of a signal battalion. He had naively believed that the Soviet commander would react chivalrously to his protest against compelling captive officers to remove roadblocks, fill antitank ditches, and perform other manual labor. The Soviet officer in charge, whose name Captain Waller never learned, had been quite drunk at the time, and having booted the “Fascist dogs” from his presence, he had ordered his troops to strip the “Gerrnanski” officers of their rank badges and insignias. Then roaring with drunken laughter he yelled: “Now you are no longer officers but ordinary ranks, …tvoy maty!” Captain Waller and Lieutenant Mayer were, however, permitted to retain their badges “To serve as an example” of what happens to complaining Fascist officers. “Now you go and cut wood, we need telephone poles.”
The Soviet officer swore. “You destroyed all the telephone poles… Now you are going to make new ones from here to Moscow.”
“You are lucky, Herr Hauptmann, that we came by here,” I said after our mutual introduction.
“You were more lucky that you could come by here at all,” he replied with a smile. “There’s no prisoner-of-war treatment for the SS, Herr Obersturmführer. I saw with my own eyes how the Russkis lined up and machine-gunned four hundred of your men into the Vistula.”
“They did that, eh?” Eisner grunted.
“Not the officers, mind you,” the captain added. “The officers are to be tried and hanged. It was all agreed upon between the Americans and Stalin.”
He uttered a short sardonical snort. “And that will be about the only Soviet-American agreement Stalin will keep! You had better watch out.”
“They won’t get us, Herr Hauptmann… at least not alive,” I stated, more resolved than ever to reach Bavaria. “Not me, that’s sure!” Schulze nodded, lifting his gun. “First they’ll have to take my toy away.”
“I expected nothing else,” Eisner fumed. “Now comes the great carnage… the revenge, gentlemen. There is going to be such a bloodbath in the Fatherland that all the SS ever did will look like a solemn church ceremony in comparison…”
“You may thank Himmler,” Waller said. “To kill the Jews was a great folly, my friends. He could have gotten away with anything but the Jews… The Jews are a world power, but not those wretched bastards whom Himmler was busy exterminating around the clock. These had done nothing and would never have done anything against the Reich. Nevertheless their ghosts are returning now, many of them wearing the conqueror’s uniform or the judge’s stola.”
“But what have we got to do with the whole bloody affair?” Schulze cried. “I was hunting partisans in the Gottverdammte Russian swamps and in the forests of Belgorod. They should hang the “Einsatzkommandos” or the Gestapo. It was their lousy job to kill Jews, not mine. Are we responsible for what those loafers did?”
“Don’t ask me, ask Stalin!”
“What does Stalin care about the Jews? He always regarded them as rotten capitalists. Most of the Ukrainian Jews were rounded up and executed by the Ukraine Militia.”
“What the hell are you arguing about!” Eisner snapped. “Himmler did kill the Jews, didn’t he? Now the world needs a scapegoat and it is the SS. Whether we pulled the trigger or just threw a ring about a village while the militia or the Gestapo rounded them up, it is one and the same thing for them. It was all because of the SS. We murdered everybody in sight, looted the corpses, and are now returning home loaded with stolen Jewish gold. We are the Scourge of God, the Devil Incarnate, the Teutons. They are murdering right now a million German prisoners in Siberia, maybe not by shooting—Stalin simply starves them to death. But is there any difference? All right… we gunned down a hundred hostages. They take a group of army officers from a prison camp, give them a mock trial, then hang them. It is one and the same treatment as far as I am concerned. I know that the SS destroyed Lidice. I have not been there, but if they did it—they had a reason. Why did the SS level that particular place? Why not the other ten thousand? Maybe it was because of the assassination of Heydrich, maybe it wasn’t, but there must have been a reason for it. They say the killers of Heydrich were Czech commandos from England, who dropped by chutes. Why did they go hide in Lidice? They should have stood up, fought, and gone down fighting—the brave paratroopers. No one would have associated them with the Czechs in Lidice. And what if the SS destroyed Lidice? Was it an overkill? How about Hamburg which the Allied bombers demolished, killing eighty thousand civilians in a couple of hours? How about Dresden and the hundred thousand civilian dead there? Just before the war’s end… Because their execution was done by bombs and not by machine guns should we call the Allies saints? Goddamit all,” he swore, wiping the sweat from his forehead, “all that kept us alive was the thought of surviving and returning home. If we still have homes to return to,” he went on. “Now everyone is telling us that we are going to hang. It is enough to drive you mad.”
“I am sorry,” Captain Waller said apologetically. “I did not want to upset you. Especially not after what you did for us. But I thought you had better know the truth instead of falling into a trap at home.”
“Just let them come and try to trap me,” Eisner fumed.
“I haven’t killed an American yet but I don’t think they are tougher than the Ivans—and I sure as hell killed a lot of the Ivans.”
“That’s enough for now!” I interposed authoritatively. “We have more urgent things to do than talk about postwar politics. How about moving on?”
“A good idea,” Captain Ruell agreed. “But before we leave let me booby-trap those CMC’s. It may help the Ivans to get downhill the shorter way.”
The troops laughed.
I knew their nerves were strained to the breaking point and each individual was a potential time bomb that might explode at any moment. My men were not killers at large, yet they already felt hunted, outlawed. They were brave soldiers bled white defending the Fatherland. The majority of them had been called up to the SS just like others had been called up to the various other services and put into uniforms. We were Nazis, to be sure, but who was not a Nazi in Hitler’s Third Reich? No one could hold any position in the Reich without becoming a Nazi. And if someone held any position in the Reich, his son volunteered for the SS—the “Elite Guard.”