Legion of the Damned (24 page)

". . . and I would ask you to convey my greetings to the many thousands who will be granted the proud fate of dying in battle, fighting for the Fatherland and the honor of our army."

Thus our army commander to his divisional commanders, among whom was the commander of the division to which the 27th Tank Regiment belonged. The bemedaled, fat mass murderer with the monocle then saluted and drove back to his HQ far, far behind the front, while the divisional commanders returned to their divisions to prepare for an offensive so that the bemedaled ones might be able to go on playing with their little flags and nice, big maps.

"Regiment! For prayer--KNEEL!"

The chaplain was in officer's uniform with purple tabs. He had the rank of major and was thus on a level with the staff officers. On the left side of his tunic an Iron Cross hung and glinted.

"Holy Father! Bless these proud arms that stand here in Thy honor! Let them crush and torment the red barbarians, we beg Thee. Our Father in Heaven, give us strength to be the instrument of Thy punishment of these red marsh dwellers."

Later I shall relate what happened when Porta and I got hold of this chaplain during a big battle.

"Out, out," shouted The Old Un. "And quickly. This is the end of the 27th Tank Regiment."

Twenty minutes later our six hundred tanks were mere twisted burning wrecks. Another twenty minutes later Oberst von Lindenau drove up in his all-purpose vehicle and, having had a look at the smashed tanks, said in a tired voice:

"All those who are fit make their way back to our old quarters. The 27th Regiment no longer counts now that the air force has made that mess of it."

The air force was our own. By some deplorable mistake we had been bombed by our own Stukas.

A few days later we were in action again with new crews and new tanks brought up in a hurry from Kharkov.

It was then that I discovered to my horror how war poisons your mind.

I have always hated war and I hate it today; and yet I did what I ought not to have done, just what I hated and condemned, and which I regret doing, and still cannot understand how I did it.

In my periscope I saw a Russian infantryman jump out of a shell hole and make a dart for the next hole. Quickly I got my sights on him and gave him a short burst from the machine gun. The bullets kicked the earth up around him, but he was not hit. As our tank approached he darted out of this second shell hole and ran like a hare to the next. Again the bullets spattered around him. Pluto also began shooting at him, but neither of us hit him.

Porta howled with laughter and held Stalin up so that he could see out of the observation slit:

"Have a look at the work of our crack shots," he said to Stalin.

The Russian must have been crazed with fear, for he now ran round in a circle. Again our machine guns chattered at him, yet to our amazement we still could not hit him. The Old Un and Stege laughed almost as much as Porta, and Stege said scornfully:

"Good God, can't you even lay the horizontal?"

I swore to myself, and as the fellow jumped into yet another shell hole I turned the flame thrower onto it and sent a jet of flame roaring across the ground. Then I turned to The Old Un and said:

"He won't get up after that."

"Won't he?" said The Old Un. "Take a look in your periscope!"

I could scarcely believe my eyes: there was the fellow, blackened with soot from the flame thrower, running and just disappearing into a house. A mighty roar of laughter came from the other four.

It now became a point of honor for me to kill that man, so I fired at the house till I had it blazing.

A point of honor. How could I? How could I kill a man just for the sake of my pride?

But that is what I did, and I regret it. War with its everlasting murdering and noise and flames and destruction had stealthily poisoned me.

Even the most fanatical Nazi now had to admit that the Germans had lost the great offensive, for we were preparing for a withdrawal on a grand scale. One last superhuman effort was made to wrest victory for German arms. Our company reached as far as Birjutsk, where we surprised a whole cavalry unit in rest billets. At short range, and in a short time, we transformed men and horses into a shrieking, bloody mass of terrified men and kicking animals. Then we had to withdraw because a large force of T34's was sent against us.

Everywhere there was heavy fighting and heavy losses.

We massacred one regiment that had been surrounded but, like our 104th Grenadiers, had not been able to bring themselves to surrender. We drove our tanks into position and shelled them for three hours. Their screams were ghastly. When they were destroyed it was a grim sight we saw: everywhere were smashed trucks, weapons and fantastically mutilated soldiers every one of whom was a woman. Many of them were young and pretty with white teeth and red, varnished nails. That was a mile or so east of the village of Livny.

The Old Un was white in the face: "Let us promise each other that those of us, or the one of us, who escapes alive from this will write a book about this stinking mess in which we are taking part. It must be a book that will be one in the eye for the whole filthy military gang, no matter whether German, Russian, American or what, so that people can understand how imbecile and rotten this saber-rattling idiocy is."

Our orders were that while retreating everything was to be destroyed. The result is almost impossible to describe. Bridges, villages, roads and railways were blown up. Foodstuffs of every kind that we could not take with us were soaked with gas or tar or the contents of a latrine. The vast, magnificent sunflower fields were burned or rolled flat with tractors. Pigs and all the animals were shot and dragged into the sun so that within a few hours they were stinking and rotten. Booby traps were left everywhere so that, for example, a cottage was blown up if anyone opened the door. You saw desolation everywhere, an ugly landscape of death.

As usual, the 27th Tank Regiment dwindled to vanishing point in a few weeks for, of course, we were the rearguard and fighting a running battle with the Russians' superior tank forces. Now, however, we were not sent replacements. The regiment's survival was a question of weeks, perhaps of days.

As we came rolling up a road behind the hastily retreating German troops it was sometimes impossible to make headway because of the dense columns of fleeing cavalry, infantry, artillery and tanks. Endless strings of trucks, tanks, guns, horses and men toiled desperately along the sandy roads where dust and the heat made life a feverish dream. In the fields on either side of the road was an equally dense and equally long column of people and animals, but those were civilians. They made use of the strangest vehicles, to which might be harnessed an old horse or a cow, or both, or a dog or a donkey or a person, or else they trudged along with their possessions on their backs. All were possessed by but one idea: to get away.

Strangely enough we never saw even the shadow of a Russian plane, otherwise the war would have ended a year earlier than it did. When one of our vehicles broke down, whether it was a small car or a tank, there was no time to repair it. A tank toppled it into the ditch, where it would not interfere with the traffic. Innumerable exhausted soldiers had flung themselves down in the ditch, from where they implored us to give them a lift, but lifts were not allowed. It was heartrending to hear their entreaties without being able to deaden the voice of conscience by taking at least one of them with us. No one stopped and picked anyone up. Tank after tank thundered past them, sending huge clouds of dust swirling across the fields. The refugees also fell by the hundreds and lay as though dead in the broiling heat. And no one bothered about them, either. From the driver's seat at the bottom of the tank Porta roared:

"This is something like a retreat, boys. It's worse than when we were making war in Frogland, where all the French and Tommies were haring it away from us. In those days our muck carts didn't have such a good turn of speed, but we're putting up a much better performance now. I'll eat my left leg if Goebbels ever says a word about this magnificent little race. If we keep this up I'll be in Berlin for my birthday. Stalin, old puss, you shall have a fine set of civvies instead of the filthy uniform you are forced to wear and you shall be given a good scratch at Adolf's behind. And you're all invited too; and we'll have mashed potatoes and diced pork and afterward potato cakes and sugar and jam and all the stuff you can swill down. And we'll fetch that legless ass, Asmus, from hospital with his wooden leg and private can."

He circulated the bottle and told us to drink to a happy defeat for the Prussian Nazi armed forces.

East of Kharkov we were thrown into a great rearguard action, in which our tanks were all knocked out, and so we became infantry.

Porta and I were by ourselves, a quarter of a mile from The Old Un and the others, manning a heavy machine gun. As we lay there letting the machine gun hammer away at the advancing Russians, a figure came dashing along and would have rushed on across to the Russians if Porta had not caught him by one leg.

It was the chaplain--the chaplain who had prayed that prayer so full of love and charity before the retreat began. Porta sat astride him and gave him a ringing crack on the ear.

"Where are you off to, you stinking crow? Not deserting, by any chance?"

"We have lost the war," sobbed the chaplain. "We had better surrender voluntarily, then they surely won't do anything to us."

"I'll surrender you all right, you filthy Jesuit animal! Have you forgotten your edifying little address when you told us to murder the red swamp creatures? Now you're bloody well going to help work this machine gun or I'll hammer a cartridge case into your forehead, even if we die of the stink! Now you shall have a taste of the murdering you recommended so warmly to us, you cowardly --!"

Porta gave him a black eye, then butted him with his steel helmet, so that he folded up like a wet rag.

"This is--insubordination," the chaplain cried hysterically. "I'll see that you are court-martialed if you don't this moment--"

I struck him in the face with my clenched fist and pressed the muzzle of my pistol to the gold-embroidered cross he wore sewn over his breast pocket and shouted:

"Either you're on the other side of that machine gun in three seconds handing us ammunition, or you're a dead chaplain."

Sobbing with terror and fury at his humiliation, he crawled over to where we pointed. We showed him no mercy, but gave vent to all our pent-up thirst for revenge. Each time he fumbled we struck him hard on the fingers with our pistols.

"That's for Hans Breuer!"

"That's for Asmus!"

"And that--and that--and here's another--for Ursula!"

And another because I killed a dozen men in an hour with a sniper's rifle that time when I was beside myself with grief at Ursula's death!

And another because I killed that poor devil it was almost impossible to hit the other day.

There was a flickering before my eyes and I saw red. I let him have it. Porta, too, had a longish account to settle.

"Now you've got into human hands, you swine, and we're not letting you go."

When we had finished with him we made him start off across to the Russians and shot him in both legs when he had got two thirds of the way. Three Mongolians crawled out to get him. We stopped shooting till they had fetched him in.

"I don't know about you," said Porta, wiping the sweat from his face, "but I feel a new and a better man."

When we returned to the company we put in the regulation report that Chaplain von Wilnau of the 12th Panzer Division had deserted to the enemy and that we had shot at him and wounded him while he was doing so. Thus, even if he should happen to get away from the Russians the Germans would shoot him as a deserter.

"Were they Russians or Asiatics who got him?" asked Pluto.

"Asiatics."

"Then he'll have had a sound, healthy blessing."

There was general satisfaction at the chaplain having fallen into the clutches of warriors from the more barbarous parts of the Soviet Union. It was not every day they got a genuine Nazi priest to play with.

I would like to be humane. I would like to be able to say that I had no bloodthirsty instincts: but even today I still see red when I think of, let alone meet, those who incite to war, all the idiots who directly or with treacherous insinuations fan dissension and belligerent instincts. I have seen the result of the infamous activities of these propagandists, commentators, fanatics, cold business brains and lusting politicians. They are noxious vermin and, as such, should be destroyed. They must be got out of their holes and crannies, and so, away with them! I know that our treatment of the chaplain was barbaric, but we could not do otherwise. I have no compassion for those who want war, who want to make millions of peaceable people cast all human consideration aside. They are dangerous, and I know that they should be opposed with the utmost energy. I know that, as in his heart of hearts does every German. Oh, if only the Germans could get that well and truly into their heads and have the courage to act on their knowledge. A German united revolt against war, a merciless settling of accounts with the spirit and creatures of militarism--that would put things in their place.

Before we left Kharkov for good the engineers destroyed it utterly. Kharkov was a big city; it covered an area as large as Copenhagen and at the outbreak of war had a good eight hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Kharkov was one of the loveliest cities of the Soviet Union and it had the same prestige as Moscow or Odessa. Of its inhabitants some three hundred thousand were killed. As General Zeitzler proudly stated in an order of the day, it was "
restlos vernichtet
."

Should I have pity on a so-called priest?

I just can not.

"I know it only too well, my dear Beier." Von Barring gave his head an anxious shake as he set his hand on The Old Un's shoulder. "The whole thing's impossible. It isn't war any longer, but pure and simple suicide. We have to wage war with the help of children and the aged, but you must realize that it isn't easy for them, poor devils, to be sent like this, untrained, into the worst of the filth. So I would ask you to be a bit nice to them. Suppose it was your own father or kid brother; you would have a little consideration for them. One or two of you have also blubbed when you were fifteen or sixteen, I've no doubt. If you would like to do something for me, be decent to them. Help them find their feet, as far as that's possible under these crazy conditions. I don't think we ought to make things worse for them; they least of all have deserved that, for if anyone is without blame it is these boys. One thing at least is certain, judging by the recruits they are now sending us, the bottom of the barrel will soon have been scraped, and so we can assume that the war will come to a halt."