Armageddon (15 page)

“Now come on, fellers. Let’s get over to the south bank. Tomorrow is another day.”

The weeping one kissed Blessing’s apple cheeks. They wove off to the pontoon bridge with a dozen farewells.

Blessing looked around the square for any late arrivals. There were none. He tucked his belly under the steering wheel, then U-turned in the direction of the jail while pondering the immediate problems of setting out night patrols.

The whole Rombaden police force had to be disbanded. So far he could find but a half-dozen whitelisted Germans trustworthy enough to augment his meager crew. There was only one company of American infantry to guard the whole Landkreis, the POW’s, and the interned SS in Schwabenwald. If there was any real trouble, he’d be in a bad fix.

He’d press Major O’Sullivan and Bolinski to let him have a few hundred Poles to put into uniform. Could he trust the Poles with weapons? In his own anger after seeing Schwabenwald, Blessing had beaten up some of the SS when they were taken out of the gas chambers. Sean let them out after three days when they began fainting from hunger, thirst, fright, and suffocation and put them under arrest

He wheeled out of the square into a narrow street His thoughts were halted by the sight of someone sitting atop a brick pile between two bombed-out houses. He pulled up and switched off the motor. An older man just sat and stared vacantly into space.

“Say there, old-timer,” he called, “it’s curfew.”

The man didn’t answer.

“Speaken sie English? Say there. It’s
schwartz
in the
himmel.
You got to get to your
haus.”

“I speaken sie perfect English!”

“It’s curfew.”

“To hell with curfew, sir!”

The man did not budge. Blessing climbed up the brick pile with a deftness that belied his size. The man was not as old as he first appeared. An empty wine bottle lay at his feet. Blessing puffed to a halt before him.

“Now where in the hell do you live?”

“In Berlin, you idiot”

“Don’t you go getting me riled up. Where do you live in Rombaden!”

“Nowhere!”

“You drunk?”

“Of course I’m drunk. Are you stupid?”

The policeman grabbed the man’s collar with a fast reflexive move, jerked him to his feet, and had him in an arm lock. The man offered no resistance, in fact dangled loosely. In this closeness Blessing smelled the unwashed body. He knew the smell. He shoved back the sleeve on the man’s left arm. The arm was engraved with the tattoo number of a prisoner of Schwabenwald. Blessing released his grip.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were from the concentration camp?”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” the man said, sitting down again. And then he began to babble. “I didn’t drink very much. Haven’t drunk in long time. It has made me drunk.”

He helped the man up, but he sat down again.

“You can’t sit here all night.”

“I used to have friends in this place. Once this was the district headquarters of the Social Democrats. No one is here ... they are all gone ... everyone is gone.”

“Wait a minute. You’re not a Pole.”

“I sir, am German.”

“Are you Ulrich Falkenstein?”

“That is correct.”

The jail buzzed with excitement over the old man who lay passed out on a cot in Blessing’s office. Ulrich Falkenstein! A major find. A man who had withstood Hitler persecution.

The team had all known he was a prisoner at Schwabenwald. When they broke into the camp, Bolinski and Arosa were able to determine that Falkenstein was alive up until a few days before the surrender. In the confusion, he had wandered off to find old comrades in Rombaden.

Ulrich Falkenstein and his brother were war horses of the Social Democratic Party. He had dared to stand up to Hitler even when the end had come. In the party paper and in fighting speeches he denounced the Nazis at a time when most of his comrades were either escaping Germany or frightened into silence.

In the beginning the Nazis tried to buy off the Falkenstein brothers with offers of high positions. It was rumored that Ulrich was enticed with an important post. He could neither be bought nor silenced, even though he almost signed his own death warrant by resisting.

At the epic trial in 1935, Ulrich Falkenstein made his last public statement. He predicted that this new era of tyranny would lead Germany to total destruction and universal damnation. His voice was the last of the thin cries of indignation drowned out by the thumping of jackboots and the choruses of “sieg heils.” Yet, not even in 1935 did Hitler feel strong enough to order the execution of “a foremost enemy of the Third Reich.”

Falkenstein joined a legion which swelled to a half-million Germans thrown into concentration camps for real or imagined opposition to the regime. When the night of terror was done, Hitler’s surviving opposition was a pitiful handful like Falkenstein and a few priests, a few writers, and a few thinkers. For practical purposes, there was no German opposition to the Nazis.

Somehow or another Ulrich Falkenstein managed to stay alive. At one time he possessed a powerful body, which resisted the beatings and kickings, the weeks and months in solitary. When it became known that no torture unto death could break his spirit he became the object of calculated degradation. The SS delighted in such humiliations before the entire prison. He bore the indignity with a dignity that increased his stature and enraged his tormentors. There could be no victory in his death unless he begged for life. And this he refused to do.

Falkenstein apologized for his drunken scene to Blessing the next morning and thanked him for his understanding.

For the first time in Rombaden, Sean O’Sullivan stood up in the presence of a German and greeted him warmly.

“I am overwhelmed,” Falkenstein said, “to be remembered.” He reveled in the luxury of a cigarette. The tobacco made him heady. And the coffee! A long time ago he had forgotten how to cry, but now the taste of coffee brought him nearly to tears.

As they chatted, Sean wondered what kind of man sat before him. The history of concentration camps showed it only took a year or two to completely break a normal man ... to debase him ... to drain his will ... to lower him to an animal instinct for sheer survival. Those whom Hitler released from the camps never dared speak of it.

What was the thing that kept Ulrich Falkenstein defiant? What was the thing that made him refuse the exchange of freedom for the promise of silence?

Except for a tiny scar at the edge of a horseshoe of white hair on a bald head, he showed little outward signs of the punishment. He seemed a little tired. His eyes were an amazing blue, like the Danube, and he radiated a look of tenderness that sometimes one obtains only through long and difficult suffering. His eyelids gave him a drowsy look—deceptive, and concealing the thoughts that were hidden behind them.

“How does the war go?” he asked.

“The Western Front is in a state of collapse. It will only be a matter of days,” Sean answered.

“And Berlin?”

“We have stopped at the Elbe River. The Russians are assaulting Berlin from the Oder-Neisse Line.”

Falkenstein meditated for a long time, lit another cigarette. “I am a Berliner,” he said at last. “I have a family there, a wife, two brothers, Bruno and Wolfgang, and Bruno’s family of course. I suppose it is impossible to obtain information about them?”

“I’m afraid it can’t be done now.”

“You know, it is a pity you are letting the Russians capture Berlin.”

“But the Russians are our allies. They’ve suffered terribly at the hands of the Germans.”

“Haven’t we all? It is a pity, none the less. Berliners are different. They were never truly Nazis.”

Sean could not cover his shock at what seemed to be a strange pronouncement.

“You look amazed, Major.”

“I am, in the light of what has happened to you, Herr Falkenstein. Not a German in Rombaden thinks of himself as anything but an innocent bystander. You left Berlin in 1935. Perhaps it was too early to realize that the Nazis truly carried out the will of the German people.”

“But, Major ... I also am a German.”

“A unique German.”

Falkenstein shrugged. “But, no matter how you dissect me, I am a German. Perhaps I am one of those ‘good’ Germans, but that does not make me English or French. Furthermore, my dear Major, I believe I know more from firsthand experience about German weakness and German sickness than you do. It still does not make me less of a German.”

“It sounds incongruous coming from Ulrich Falkenstein after nine years in Schwabenwald.”

“Let us say I have had ample opportunities and forceful persuasion to give up hope on the German people. What you say is true, in part. Most of the so-called ‘good’ Germans died in places like Schwabenwald. But now, what happens if those of us who are left turn our backs on the German people?”

The revelation of Ulrich Falkenstein’s stubborn beliefs was annoying and frightening. Yet, Sean could not help but admire this man who had suffered so brutally, yet retained his identity.

“So you see, I must get back to Berlin.”

Was this better or worse than those Germans who had fled the Nazis and now worked with military government? Those Germans who hated their country and their own people, who turned on all things German with savagery ... sought revenge ... detested their Germanness? How easy it would be now for Falkenstein to join that now fashionable anti-German clique. He was instead choosing the way of a missionary among the lepers. Sean knew the Nazis could not beat Falkenstein’s love of the people from him. Yet, in Falkenstein he had an adversary, not a puppet. Still, he made their choice.

“It will be a long time before you are able to return to Berlin. Meanwhile, your services here with us are sorely needed.”

“I will work with you, Major, if you will remember that I am German and my first duty is not to Allied victory but to the redemption of the people.”

Chapter Twenty-one

S
EAN WAS DISTURBED BY
the worsening scene that played below his office in the square. A dozen or more wildly drunken Poles were howling, hurling bottles against buildings, urinating in the streets, scuffling.

“We’ve got to put a stop to this before it gets out of hand,” Sean said, turning into his office and facing Blessing, Maurice Duquesne, and Bolinski.

“Shucks now, Major,” Blessing soothed, “we’ve got to use us a little Kentucky windage in our thinking. Some of them poor fellers have been locked up for four or five years.”

“We have more complaints than we can keep track of.”

“Why hell, they’re just celebrating a little. Don’t take very much to liquor them up. We’ll sweep them off the streets at curfew.”

“And what do you intend to do about the looting and the beatings?”

“Well, so they broke into some German shops and homes. They’ve got a lot to get out of their systems,” Blessing pleaded.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The celebration had been particularly rowdy today. A large, untapped wine cellar had been stumbled upon. A monumental binge followed. The streets were empty of terrified Germans.

“It’s not that I have any desire to protect Germans,” Sean said, “but our own authority will break down if we let the Poles go unchallenged.”

“They’re good people,” Bolinski said. “They are what is left out of maybe a hundred thousand who passed through Schwabenwald. Less than a thousand of them left, Major. Every morning they were awakened at five o’clock, given a bowl of watery broth, and marched from the camp to the Machine Works. Six miles, two hundred and thirty yards, sixteen feet and nine inches. Anyone who fell down was jumped on by the dogs. The last men pulled carts to pick up the dead piled up along the roadside. They worked fourteen hours, chained to their benches in those underground hell holes, and they were marched back, six miles, two hundred and thirty yards, sixteen feet and nine inches. They were given the fine reward of fifteen hundred calories a day ...”

“I’ve read all your reports,” Sean interrupted.

“I say to hell with it. Let them celebrate! Let them knock in a few faces!”

Sean blew a long breath and slumped into his chair. “Bolinski ... you and Blessing get these Poles to work. Get them signed up for guard duty. Give them any choice jobs open. How about their leaders? Can we trust them?”

“They carry authority,” Bolinski answered.

“Here’s the deal. We’re not going to be too technical on loot or roughing up a few Germans. We draw the line at rape and murder. I won’t be crossed on it.”

Bolinski and Blessing left to sweep up the streets.

Maurice Duquesne, who had followed the conversation with detached boredom, finally spoke up. “Putting them to work is an unrealistic solution. For these first few days they are content to drink their freedom under, but soon they will want to find out if they are still men.”

“I’ve already thought about that. We’re going to use some of Blessing’s Kentucky windage.”

A few moments later Baron Sigmund Von Romstein, still acting mayor, answered a summons to Sean’s office. The sight of Duquesne made him doubly nervous. Each time he came he was certain it would be for his head to roll.

“One of the streets running off the square, Princess Allee, had a reputation for gaiety, did it not, Baron?”

“Oh yes! Many beer halls. Many night clubs. During the festivals it was one of the most raucous streets in all of Schwaben ... and Bavaria, too, for that matter.”

“I’m talking specifically about whorehouses.”

The baron threw up his hands in innocence. “The Nazis closed down all the brothels. You know how Hitler was.”

“According to our information Princess Allee was never entirely or really closed. Is it not a fact that you always had women working as prostitutes for the overnight stops of the river-barge pilots? Their numbers could be augmented from Munich on paydays and during festival times.”

“Well, you know how these things are. Not even Hitler could stop prostitution entirely.”

“What is more,” Sean said, “you were mayor and your brother Nazi Gauleiter. Weren’t there a number of unwritten agreements, a number of things overlooked for sake of the economy of the district?”