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[The news was of incredible bestialities.]

3. SEBASTOPOL* AND THE LARGER WAR

In October 1941 the Germans overran the whole of the Crimean peninsula, isolating Sebastopol against the sea.

The Wehrmacht (the Eleventh Army under von Manstein) made repeated efforts right up to year-end to broach the city’s defenses and succeeded in pushing the defense lines closer to the populated center but each German assault broke against the fervor of Russian resistance and when the winter rains stalled further German attempts the city was still holding out.

For months the suburbs burned. The pungent stench was nauseating-a clinging acridity of burning wood and flesh-but a good part of the time it was driven back across the German lines by prevailing winds.

Then, in May 1942, the Russian counteroffensive at Kerch collapsed and the German forces there were freed to wheel toward Sebastopol. The population moved into caves and bunkers; the ordeal of German shelling became uninterrupted. Early in June the Luftwaffe assembled a force of several hundred bombers and the Wehrmacht brought up a mammoth railroad gun, the siege cannon “Dora,” designed to smash the Maginot Line. The German 105s, the German bombs, the German siege-gun shells destroyed Sebastopol’s airfields and cut off the sea-lanes of supply. The rest was obvious.

[The Germans took ninety thousand prisoners and called it a great victory; but Stalin was not dissatisfied since the siege had tied down von Manstein’s three hundred thousand men for two hundred and fifty days during which they might have made a decisive difference on the center fronts.]

[Perhaps the turning point had come as early as December 4, 1941, when Zhukov and Vlasov at Moscow blunted the German drive. Vlasov’s daring counterattack broke through the German lines and halted the advance; then it snowed; Stalin’s fresh Siberian units had time to reach the front and the Germans fell back from Moscow’s suburbs under their attack.

[For the most part the war was stalled in its tracks by the severity of that winter. Casualties were high, the fighting savage, but the Germans were no longer in motion; Stalin had time to build new armies and train them and-with the aid of lend-lease-equip them.]

Nevertheless after the spring thaw the relentless Teutonic march resumed. Russian resistance was heavier, better organized, and the news of SS atrocities had firmed up Russia’s will to fight; but German air and armor kept the invasion alive and in the summer of 1942 the German hordes smashed through to Stalingrad.

Krupp shells destroyed the city but not its inhabitants; the defenders held. And in November 1942 the Red Army counterattacked: surrounded the Germans and obliterated half a million of Hitler’s soldiers at Stalingrad.

It was on November 19, 1942 that the German advance became a retreat. From that date on, there was no further possibility of a Nazi conquest. By 1945 the Reds would push the Wehrmacht all the way back to Berlin.

4. KRAUSSER AND VON GEYR: THE HUNT FOR TREASURE

Gruppenfuhrer Otto von Geyr arrived at Tempelhof on November 8, 1942, and was collected by a command car which took him silently through the blacked-out streets to the Chancellery where he met for nearly an hour with Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, in a conference that also included SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. No minutes of this meeting were kept. But later that night, von Geyr and Himmler went together to Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and Himmler’s staff notes, dated November 9, indicate that the subject of discussion was Standartenfuhrer Heinz Krausser’s dispatch of September 13 concerning the possible whereabouts of the five-hundred-ton Czarist gold bullion treasury. The phrase “Siberian iron-mine shaft” appears in the staff notes.

[Perhaps it can be assumed that the conference at the Chancellery had to do with the Reich’s need for hard currency and the plausibility of the Krausser report with reference to that need. Subsequent events suggest that Bormann ordered von Geyr to proceed to organize a search for the reputed gold treasure.]

The key figure in the investigation was Krausser, who as head of Einsatzgruppe “E” had unearthed the first references to the Kolchak cache. Heinz Krausser was thirty-nine, a veteran of the First World War on the Western Front; in 1920 he had joined an anti-Semitic organization sponsored in part by exiled Russian monarchists, and in 1927 he enrolled in the Nazi Party, when he was a foot patrolman on the Munich police force. Several years later, when the SS was organized under Himmler, he was absorbed into it as a drill instructor with the rank of captain.

Krausser’s zealous anti-Semitism, his combat background, his youth, and his cynical if not fatalistic sense of Realpolitik made him stand out even among his SS comrades. It was not surprising that Krausser was selected to lead one of the new Einsatzgruppen murder battalions in the Russian campaign of 1941.

The official photographs show a thin man of moderate height with a prominent triangular nose, eyes hidden under bony brows, a surprisingly full sensuous mouth and a veined bald skull. (Evidently he had begun to lose his hair in his early twenties and had elected to shave his skull thereafter.) His black-collared tunic conceals the double-lightning SS tattoo on his forearm but one can be sure it was there. He wore the long black cavalry boots of an officer and the Death’s Head insignia on his high-crowned, black-billed garrison cap, which in the photographs is invariably clenched at his side by the pressure of his elbow. His letters from the Eastern Front-to von Geyr and to his sister (he had no wife)-indicate that he was a highly demonstrative man dominated by crude passions.

He was filled with vitriol toward “the Jewish vermin” and “these Russian swine” but at the same time he was very sentimental about Christmas and wrote long maudlin passages-how he missed the candle-lit windows, the decorated trees, the laughing children. In 1942 he was nearly forty years old but his letters home are the letters of youth: callow, unsophisticated, cynical but with a fatalism that left no room for compassion, even toward himself.

Demonstrably a sadist, he doubtless looked forward keenly to his own violent destruction at the hands of infuriated would-be victims. Twice in his letters to von Geyr* he expresses surprise that the sheeplike prisoners do not at least make an effort to overwhelm their German murderers-to-be, whom they outnumber by factors of hundreds to one.

Despite his masochism and fatalism he was ambitiously an opportunist. He declared it was one of his keenest hopes to make Battalion “E” the most “successful” of all the Einsatzgruppen (that is to say, to murder more Jews than any other Group murdered) in order to bring himself to the Fuhrer’s grateful attention. Evidently Nirvana to Krausser was to stand at attention while the Fuhrer in person pinned a medal on his tunic.*

“I never met this Krausser but I knew his kind. I knew these instruments of Germany’s glorious historical mission to cleanse the world of Jews. They were mediocre men you know, not great fire-breathing villains twisting the ends of their mustaches. They were utterly ordinary. In all of them you saw a great self-pity-they wanted someone to sympathize with the distasteful job they had to do. Once I overheard two SS Leutnants talking, complaining, and then a Sturmbannfuhrer, a major, came into the place. He had heard some of what they were saying.

“He said to the two subalterns, ‘You don’t like your orders, do you?’ And then there was a pause, nobody said anything, and afterward the Sturmbannfuhrer continued, ‘You don’t like your orders, but you will obey them. If you were Russian soldiers you probably wouldn’t. Which is why we are winning and they are losing.’