SS General (19 page)

Eicke waited in vain for the group to stand up and salute him. Nothing happened.

"I am here as the representative of the Fuhrer," he said at last.

Captain Weinkopf glanced up at him. "Oh, yes?"

"I have come to inspect your regiment."

"You're welcome," said the captain. He waved a hand. "Most of them are out there, in their dugouts. You can go and look them over any time you like. But I ought to warn you they're all a bit jittery at the moment. They'll shoot at anything that moves, so you'd best watch your step."

The lieutenant turned away, possibly to hide a grin.

Eicke puffed out his cheeks. "Did you say watch my step?" he glowered.

"Unless you want your head blown off," said the captain, turning back to his game of cards.

"That is hardly the way to address a superior officer!" snapped Eicke.

Slowly Captain Weinkopf looked up at him. Slowly he laid down his cards. "SS," he said. "That doesn't count so much out here. We're soldiers."

"Soldiers!" Eicke snorted. "You call yourself soldiers, do you? Sitting here playing cards when there's a war to be won! The Fuhrer shall hear about this!"

"Just as you like," said the captain indifferently.

Eicke glared down at one of the soldiers. "What about you?" he demanded. "What's your job, when you're not gambling your time away?"

"Antitank," said the boy briefly.

He did not bother to elaborate. He could have told Eicke how only the day before he had destroyed no less than twelve T-34s with hand grenades and mines, but it never occurred to him. He was barely nineteen years old and simply took his work for granted. He was an expert in the demolition of tanks, but if he ever survived into peacetime, he would find there was no demand for his skills.

Eicke grunted and turned away, followed by his silent companions. The lieutenant called out to him, "Watch out for snipers, Obergruppenfuhrer! A major got his brains blown out yesterday for not keeping his head down!"

Eicke gave him a look of distaste, but he crouched on all fours and crawled ponderously through the snow toward the first line of dugouts. The watchful Russians at once began firing. Oberscharfuhrer Willmer was the first to suffer, with a bullet between the eyes. Scharfuhrer Dwinge trod on a mine. As the group reached the first of the dugouts, a soldier gave a shout of amazement as his leg was wrenched off his body by an exploding shell. He seemed in no pain; just sat staring at the jagged edge of the stump and at the blood spilling out into the snow. A second shell landed nearby.

"Christ almighty!" shouted Eicke, throwing himself flat.

The Dachau murderer, the killer of Jews in their thousands, had unthinkingly called upon a Jew to save him, but he saw no anomaly in the fact. He pushed the injured soldier out of the way. A man with one leg was of no further use, let him die quickly and quietly with the snow to cover him as a shroud.

Eicke crawled doggedly on and finally jumped down to join a machine gunner, who looked at him askance. "Shouldn't hang around here too long if I was you, sir. The Russians seem to be able to spot officers a mile off. We had a general here yesterday what copped it, on account of he went too far forward."

"Is that so?" said Eicke nervously.

He left the machine gunner and moved on, until he was stopped by a young lieutenant with the face of an old man, wanting to know what he thought he was doing.

"Just looking around," said Eicke coldly. "The Fuhrer wishes me to make a report."

"Good." The lieutenant grabbed Eicke and unceremoniously pulled him into a dugout. "In that case, perhaps you could tell him that my men are trying to fight the enemy on empty bellies. No hot food for over a week! How can men be expected to win victories if they're not given proper rations?"

"That is hardly a matter for the Fuhrer," said Eicke. "I'm surprised that an officer of your standing can't deal with it himself. I suggest you take it up with whoever is in charge of your field kitchen. The man's probably stealing."

"Field kitchen!" The old-faced young lieutenant gave a harsh cackle. "My men haven't seen a field kitchen for so long that I doubt if they'd even know what one is!"

"I find that very difficult to credit, Lieutenant. How do you provide for yourselves if you have no field kitchen?"

The lieutenant leaned forward and put his face close to Eicke's. It was gray and lined. "We forage. We kill. And if there's no time to go out hunting, then we starve."

"Preposterous!" Eicke turned and snapped his fingers at one of his men. "Gratwohl! Make a note of it! See that things are put in order around here." He turned back to the lieutenant. "Whoever is responsible for this state of affairs will be shot, I can assure you of that."

"Thank you very much," said the lieutenant. "That's a great help."

At that moment a sergeant appeared. He jumped into the dugout, elbowing Eicke out of the way. "Enemy's attacking, sir!"

The lieutenant at once snatched up his submachine gun and a pile of grenades and dashed off, followed by the sergeant. Eicke and his men were left alone, trembling together in the abandoned dugout. They had no experience of this type of warfare. They crouched with their hands over their heads, listening terrified to the whine of bullets, the shattering of shells, the heavy pounding of the big guns. Above and all around them there was ceaseless activity. Men ran and ducked and fell. Boots pounded in the crushed snow. Heavy machines were dragged past. Whistles blew, voices cried out. Eicke had no idea what was happening, he could only make himself as small as possible and await the outcome.

The attack was contained. The young lieutenant returned to his dugout and spread his map out on the floor, ignoring Eicke.

Eicke cleared his throat, self-importantly. "Are you able to hold the position, Lieutenant?"

"What?" The lieutenant looked up, saw Eicke and frowned. It was plain that he had totally forgotten him. His brow slowly cleared as he remembered. "I don't really know, Obergruppenfuhrer. Probably not, but we'll hang on as long as we can. The war's already over, of course, but we might as well die fighting as any other way."

Eicke stiffened. "I could have you shot for that, Lieutenant! The war is by no means over."

"That," the lieutenant said, "has precisely the same ring about it as the Fuhrer's statement that we were fighting a nation of underdeveloped savages. Crap and nonsense! The nitwit! Why doesn't he come out here and see for himself?"

Three shots rang out, one after another. The young lieutenant fell like a stone to the ground, crumpling the map beneath him. Eicke put his revolver away and beckoned to his men to follow him. They left the dugout without a backward glance.

The inspection continued in the direction of the 9th Tank Regiment. Eicke demanded to see the cook. "Well, Sergeant, I've heard that the men are half starving out here. What do you have to say about that?"

"You gimme the grub, sir," the sergeant told him, "and I'll go to work on it. Can't do nothing without, can I?"

"What about your field kitchen?" demanded Eicke. "How can you fight a war without a field kitchen?"

"Search me, sir," said the sergeant cheerfully. "But we haven't got none."

"Then how do you feed the men?"

"Mostly we send out foraging parties, sir. Knocking off horses and suchlike. Makes quite a nourishing stew, a horse does. That's when you can get hold of one, of course. They're not that easy to come by."

"And when you can't lay your hands on a horse?" said Eicke sarcastically. "What do you eat then? Bullfinches?"

"Not so far, sir. If we can't get hold of nothing else, we usually have a bit of liver."

"Liver?" said Eicke, startled. "Where do you get liver from?"

The sergeant looked at him somewhat pityingly. "Human liver, sir--from the corpses. It's quite tasty, you'd be surprised. Nice bit of braised liver . . ."

With a handkerchief to his mouth, Eicke stumbled away. He didn't mention field kitchens again. The men of Stalingrad had become cannibals!

"Why aren't you attacking?" he screamed at a middle-aged major, catching him by the arm to gain his attention.

The major looked him up and down out of sad, bloodshot eyes. "Attacking where?" he asked.

"Anywhere, damn you! I'm tired of seeing men hanging around waiting for the Russians to come and get them!"

"What else can they do? We're surrounded--besides, we're running out of ammunition and there aren't enough of us to put paid to a flock of sheep." He laughed reflectively. "I'm commanding a battalion that's been reduced to about half the size of a company! And still that maniac in Berlin screams for victory!"

The major was tied to a tree and shot. Eicke and his party moved on in search of fresh victims.

A captain of the engineers was the next to be dispatched; he had blown up his equipment rather than leave it for the Russians, but he had not asked permission to do so and was therefore, in Eicke's view, guilty of sabotage. He, too, was summarily shot, and died unrepentant.

The chase continued. Colonel Jenck of the Ninth Infantry had ordered a retreat after most of his men had been butchered. He was hanged from the sails of a windmill.

They inspected an improved hospital and tore the bandages off two hundred men in order to see the extent of their wounds. Some died under this rough treatment. Others were discovered not to be injured at all, or not to be injured to an extent which Eicke considered valid: 197 men were shot, including doctors.

The SS moved inexorably on. The crack Italian Savoia Regiment proved an unexpectedly happy hunting ground: the bag was sixty-eight officers, who had authorized the pillaging of German stores in order to keep their own men from starvation.

The hot breath of an inferno was raging over Stalingrad. It was enough to face the Russians without also having to cope with the butcher of Dachau. For many men it was the last straw; they shot themselves without waiting for Eicke to do it.

At the railway station of Tsaritsa the party came across a crowd of gaunt Rumanian children, with huge eyes and legs like garden canes, begging bread from the soldiers.

"Get rid of those brats!" said Eicke.

The Rumanian troops themselves undertook the task. They were vicious and untamed, shamefully inadequate in battle, yet wild beasts when confronted by small children. Eicke watched them liquidate their countrymen and then hanged a random fifty percent of the troops on a collective charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy.

An infantry major had withdrawn his depleted battalion under heavy fire and saved the lives of his remaining men. He himself had lost both his legs in doing so and had been flown back home from Gumrak. On hearing all this, Eicke at once made it his business to have the major arrested in Germany and transferred to Torgau, where he was shot on his stretcher a few days later.

A Roman Catholic padre attached to the 44th Division was executed for having preached a sermon on Jesus of Nazareth. As someone slyly pointed out to the greedy Eicke, Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew. In a frenzy of anti-Semitism, Eicke strung the padre up by his feet and had his throat slit. The man remained on the spot for several days, his crucifix on its purple ribbon swinging to and fro. No one thought to cut him down, and men began to use the body as a kind of signpost. Keep straight on until you come to the dead priest. Take the first on your left and you're on the right road . . .

After his orgy of slaughter, Eicke flew back to Germany and delivered his report to the Fuhrer, leaving the Sixth Army to its death agonies in the crushing embrace of the advancing Soviet troops.

God has sent Adolf Hitler to help the people of Germany restore order to Europe.

August Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia, at a banquet given by the Officers' Association, June 16, 1936

A few days before Christmas, Privates Wenck and Blatt were sent through a blizzard to Gumrak to pick up the food supplies for their battalion. In the depths of the Russian winter, the allowance for each man was ten grams of bread, ten grams of jam and a quarter liter of a watery substance made from horse bones.

Paul Wenck was a well-built boy of eighteen, and even after several months on the Russian front he still had a vast frame and an insatiable appetite. It was the constant hunger that bothered him most. Until a few weeks ago he had been accustomed to exchange his cigarette ration for some extra bread, but such deals were no longer possible at Stalingrad; cigarettes had disappeared from the market and bread was a commodity more precious than gold dust.

The two soldiers were kept waiting an hour at Gumrak before the rations were handed to them: two hundred and twenty-five loaves for the battalion, plus the jam and the bone soup.

"Two hundred and twenty-five," said Blatt. "Count it with me and remember it."

They packed the precious cargo onto their sled and headed back toward the battalion. It took them eight hours to complete the journey. The weather was appalling and their team of two horses, rib-sharp and broken-down, stumbled and staggered through lack of food. It was dawn when they arrived back at Tsaritsa.

They delivered the bread to the quartermaster, who insisted they remain while he checked the number of loaves. "How many?"

"Two hundred and twenty-five," said Blatt.

They counted them three times, but there were only two hundred and twenty-four. Blatt repeated obstinately that there had been two hundred and twenty-five; Wenck was not quite so sure. Both soldiers were stripped and searched. Nothing was found on them. But in the sled, at the bottom of the toolbox, wrapped in a camouflage jacket, was the missing loaf. The jacket belonged to Wenck, and it was Wenck who carried the key of the box.

The court-martial took place in the cellars of a bombed building. Pale and desperate, Paul Wenck faced his judges. His big frame filled his uniform, but his cheeks were sunken and his skin was gray and stretched tight across the bones. He trembled as he stood, through weakness as much as fear.

"Why did you steal the loaf?" asked the president of the court.

"I was hungry," said the prisoner simply. "I hadn't eaten for three days and I was hungry."