“I told you why. Some of them don’t think the war is over yet,” Bokov said. “Our job here will have two pieces, I think. One will be to hunt down the bandits and criminals who are to blame for these outrages.”
“Da.” Furmanov nodded. “You don’t commandeer a truck and load it full of shit like that by yourself. You’re right, Comrade Captain-some kind of conspiracy must lie behind it.”
Russians saw conspiracies as naturally as Americans saw profits. Like Americans chasing the dollar, they often saw conspiracies that weren’t there. Not this time, Bokov was convinced. Furmanov had it straight-somebody who put a lot of explosives in a truck and set it off had to have an organization behind him.
Then Furmanov asked, “What’s the other piece of your puzzle?”
“What you’d expect,” Bokov replied. “Somewhere out there are Germans who know about this conspiracy without being part of it. We have to find out who they are and make them tell us what they know. And we have to make all the Germans left alive more afraid to help the bandits than anything else in the world. If even one of them betrays us, they all have to suffer on account of it.”
Colonel Furmanov nervously clicked his tongue between his teeth. “This is what I was talking about before, Comrade Captain. With policies like this, we risk driving Germans who would stay loyal-well, quiet, anyhow-into the bandits’ arms.”
“They’ll be sorry if they make that mistake.” For all the feeling in Bokov’s voice, he might have been talking about the swine at a pig farm. “But they won’t be sorry long.”
“When the Hitlerites invaded the Soviet Union, they didn’t try to win the goodwill of the workers and peasants. Because they didn’t, the partisan movement against them sprang to life.”
Colonel Furmanov walked a fine line here, and, again, walked it well. He didn’t point out that the Nazis had enjoyed plenty of goodwill when they stormed into places like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine. That was true, but pointing it out could have won him a stretch in the camps. He also didn’t point out that Stalin’s policy here would be the same as Hitler’s there. That would have been even more likely to let him learn what things were like in a cold, cold climate. And he didn’t point out that the Russian partisans got massive amounts of help from unoccupied Soviet territory. Who would help these diehard Nazis?
Nobody. Captain Bokov hoped not, anyway.
Instead of arguing with Furmanov or even pointing out any of those things, Bokov said, “We’ll do all we can to track down the Fascists. The place to start, I think, is with the truck. How did the Germans get their hands on it?”
He hadn’t expected an answer from the infantry officer, but he got one: “So much stuff is going back to the motherland, Comrade Captain, that nobody pays much attention to any one piece. Maybe that truck was ours to begin with, or maybe it was one the Germans captured from us or from the USA. If somebody told one of our sentries he was taking it somewhere on somebody’s orders, the sentry might not have bothered to check. He’d figure, Who’d lie about something like that? Or do you think I’m wrong?”
Bokov wished he did. A German with nerve could probably disappear a truck just the way Furmanov described. “Shit,” Bokov said wearily. “One more thing we have to tighten up. I suppose I should thank you.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Furmanov said, which was never the wrong answer.
“We all do,” Bokov agreed. But, while it wasn’t the wrong answer, it might not be the right one, either.
III
When Tom Schmidt thought of Nuremberg, he thought of Triumph of the Will. He was a reporter. He knew he wasn’t supposed to do stuff like that. But how could you help it if you’d seen the movie? Precision marching. Torchlight parades. Searchlights stabbing up into the air, building the columns for a cathedral of light. (Nobody then had mentioned that the searchlights were also part of the city’s aircraft-defense system.)
And Hitler haranguing the faithful. Tom’s German grandparents had settled in Milwaukee-well, one of his grandmothers was from Austria, but it amounted to the same thing. His own Deutsch wasn’t great, but it was good enough. Hitler didn’t say anything wonderful in the film, but the way he said it….
Even on the screen, it made Tom sit up and take notice. And the shots of the people listening to it live-! The men in their brown or black uniforms and the boys in Hitler Jugend shorts stared in awe. They might have been listening to the Pope, or to the Second Coming of Jesus.
The women, though, were the ones who really got to him. Wide eyes; open mouths; slack, ecstatic features…They looked as if they were on the edge of coming themselves. If old Adolf could do that without laying a finger on them-well, it was plenty to make Tom jealous.
So that was what he thought of when he thought of Nuremberg. Postwar reality was a little different. Yeah, just a little, he thought with a wry chuckle. It was a field of wreckage as far as the eye could see. A U.S. Army information officer told him the town had suffered ninety-one percent destruction. That included the vast majority of the public buildings, though a couple of churches might prove salvageable. About half the prewar housing was ruins now.
That helpful information officer said there were something like 12,000,000 cubic meters of rubble to clear away. The first big raids came in late 1943, the last in early 1945. Tom wondered how many years hauling away the bricks and timber and plaster and concrete would take. By the way Nuremberg looked now, it might take forever.
If it did, he wouldn’t be heartbroken. Along with the rubble, today’s Nuremberg had something else Triumph of the Will didn’t show: fear. American soldiers here, as throughout the U.S. occupation zone, didn’t travel in groups smaller than four. They always went armed. Representing the Milwaukee Sentinel, Tom was officially a noncombatant. That hadn’t kept him from acquiring a helmet and a grease gun. The M3A1 was almost as ugly as a British Sten gun, but it could chew up a lot of bandits at close range. Since it could, Tom didn’t sweat the aesthetics.
He did wish he had eyes in the back of his head. When he mentioned that to a GI, the dogface laughed at him. Then the fellow said, “Sorry, Mac. If I don’t laugh, I bang my head against a wall. Laughing hurts less-I guess. We’re all as jumpy as cats in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“Nice to know it isn’t just me,” Tom said. “But it shouldn’t be like this. They surrendered. If they mess with us now, we can treat them however we want. It’s all in the laws of war, right?”
“Like I know from the laws of war.” The soldier wore a PFC’s single stripe. No, he wouldn’t be chewing the fat with Patton or Eisenhower any time soon. “All I know is, we’ve shot hostages, and it don’t do no good. Fuckin’ krauts still shoot at us and plant mines and blow themselves up like they’re Japs. Me, I quit goin’ to movies on account of they go after us double when there’s crowds of us like that.”
“Uh-huh.” Tom wrote that down. “Doing without movies is a real hardship. What do you do instead?”
“Waddaya think I do, man?” the GI returned. “I do without, like you said.”
Tom wrote that down, too; it was a good line. “How do we get a handle on these German tactics?”
“Hanging that Heydrich item up by the balls’d make a decent start, I guess,” the PFC answered. “He’s the one supposed to be back of this shit, right? What’s the reward for his worthless carcass up to?”
“Half a million bucks-tax-free if an American bags him,” Tom said. “Not exactly worthless, not if you’re the one who hits the jackpot.”
“You know what I mean. I-” The soldier paused as a couple of Germans mooched past. One of them was in civvies; the other wore a beat-up Wehrmacht uniform with all the trim removed. The guy in the uniform glanced over at the Americans as if wondering what his chances for a handout were. The other man, who was older, kept his head down. With all the stones and broken bricks and other bits of crap on the ground, that wasn’t the worst idea in the world.