The Commissar
Authors: Sven Hassel
When we reach the next town the Stukas have already visited it, and prepared it for the taking. The dust of pulverized bricks and mortar hangs like a red-grey cloud in the air. Artillery and Cossack horses lie in the shattered streets, stiff-legged and with swollen bodies. Guns lying on their side, wrecked lorries and mountains of tangled equipment, are scattered among the heaps of bodies. Dead and wounded Russian soldiers lie against walls, or hang from gaping window openings.
Dispassionately we stare at the bloody scene. It has become an everyday sight. In the beginning we puked and felt sick to our stomachs. It is a long time since any of us puked.
By Sven Hassel
Wheels of Terror
Monte Cassino
SS General
Legion of the Damned
Blitzfreeze
Comrades of War
Reign of Hell
Liquidate Paris
Assignment Gestapo
March Battalion
Court Martial
The Bloody Road to Death
The Commissar
O.G.P.U. Prison
COMMISSAR
Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published by in Great Britain in 1985 by Corgi
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Sven Hassel 1985
Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1985
Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie
The right of Sven Hassel to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording
or any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing
from the publisher.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 6423 3
Orion Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.
This book is dedicated to my old friend the Scandinavian film producer Just Betzer who has thrown himelf enthusiastically into the filming of my books.
Sven Hassel
Many have suffered in war – from hunger,
from wounds and from frost
But they suffered most who bore no arms, who
died unseen – lost.
Those who suffered at human hands. Their
torturers saw each heart,
And around them the land they sprang from –
then – tore them slowly apart.
Nordahl Grieg
(freely translated)
CONTENTS
The Burial of Gregor’s General
The Mad OGPU
*
Captain
*
The Soviet Secret Police, now the KGB
A soldier’s conscience is as wide as Hell’s gate
.
William Shakespeare
The Gauleiter was in a hurry. He drove recklessly, taking no heed of the refugees choking the roads. His triple-axled vehicle was heavily loaded. He was the first to have left the city. The vehicle had been loaded for several days. Then, the sound of tank-guns in the distance persuaded the Gauleiter that the time to start on his travels was now. The only member of his large staff whom he took with him was his young secretary. She believed in the Führer, the Party and the Final Victory
.
She pulled her mink coat closer about her. It had once belonged to a rich woman who had died in Auschwitz
.
They were stopped four times by the Field Police, but the Gauleiter’s golden-brown uniform was as good as a password. At the last stop the guards warned them against proceeding further. The next sentries they would meet would be Americans. Their road-block was where the road turned off from Hof to Munich
.
A coarse-faced sergeant of snowballs
*
stuck a gun-barrel through the vehicle window. The Gauleiter had changed into civilian clothes
.
‘You
ain’t gone hungry, have you, sausage-eater
?’
‘
He is a
Gauleiter,’
smiled the secretary, who no longer believed in the Führer, the Party and the Final Victory
.
The snowball sergeant emitted a long, low whistle
.
‘
Hear
that
boys?’ He turned to his three-man MP guard. ‘This civilian sausage-eater’s a
Gau
leiter!
’
They all laughed
.
‘
Come on,’ said the MP sergeant, prodding the Gauleiter with his gun-muzzle. ‘Let’s take a stroll into the woods, and see how the spring crocuses are coming along.’ His breath stank of cheap cognac
.
The secretary heard three bursts of automatic fire. White helmets appeared again from the woods. She was halfway across the fields towards the farm, and never heard the next burst of fire which came from behind her. She was dead before her face hit the ground!
‘
What the hell you
shoot
her for?’ shouted the sergeant, in an irritated voice
.
‘
Escapin’ wasn’t she?’ said the corporal, cheerfully. He cracked a fresh ammunition clip home with the heel of his hand
.
Soon afterwards the next loaded vehicle arrived
.
*
Refers to the while MP helmet
‘Section, halt!’ The Old Man’s voice comes hoarsely over the radio. He throws up the flap of the turret with a metallic crash, and pulls his battered old silver-lidded pipe from his pocket in one and the same movement. Hard-boiled as our Section Leader is, he is still a carpenter at heart. An aura of sawdust and wood-shavings hangs about him.
‘Blast these bloody things!’ he swears, turning round with difficulty in the narrow turret aperture. The new, heavy winter underwear makes a man twice his normal size round the waist. ‘Where’s Barcelona and his lot got to?’
I open the side hatch and peer tiredly down the long column of tanks rattling along the cobbled road. They are our heavy tanks, mounted with flamethrowers. There must be something very well-defended up in front of us, or the heavies wouldn’t be in the lead.
‘Noisy lot o’ bleeders ain’t they?’ growls Tiny, showing his sooty face cautiously at the loader’s hatch. ‘Jesus’n Mary!’ he shouts, ducking quickly inside again as the muzzle flames of a pair of
degtrareva
*
spit from the windows of some business premises further down the street. Our machineguns begin to chatter back immediately. The clatter of running feet is heard on all sides, mixed with shouted orders and screams. It sounds as if the gates of hell had suddenly been thrown open.
A figure in an earth-coloured uniform, carrying a T-mine, comes scrambling up over our front apron. Tiny sweeps him away, with a burst from his machine-pistol, before he can place the T-mine under our turret ring.
Suddenly the street is swarming with Russians. They come flooding out from every door and window.
I catch sight of a Russian helmet on our open side. Reflexively I empty my pistol into a twisted face. It shatters like an egg.
‘Grenades,’ shouts the Old Man, ripping a stick-grenade from its clip.
I pull personnel grenades from my pockets, and throw them through the hatch. The little eggs explode, cracking sharply in our ears. Human screams split the darkness.
A 20 mm coughs angrily from an attic window. The small, dangerous shells ricochet between the house walls. It is as if devils were playing ping-pong with exploding balls of fire.
Without awaiting the Old Man’s order I swing the turret, and aim our gun at the building from which the 20 mm and the
degtrareva
are spitting their pearly rows of deadly light.