The Hess Cross (20 page)

Efficiency was Graf's hallmark. Punishment, whether whipping or hanging, took time and interrupted the day's busy schedule. Graf invented the lumberman's slash. Prisoners who merited whipping had the right side of their faces slashed with the SS dagger or bruised by a kapo's club, like trees being marked to be felled. Those deserving death were cut or clubbed on the left side of their faces. During lineup at the end of the day, Graf yanked those with bloody faces from the line, and they were dealt with as indicated. Graf's innovation was duly recorded in his SS file.

Guarding the camp was monotonous, and the Untersturmführer soon longed for a break from the routine. He was also acutely aware that the SS Totenkopfverbände was looked down upon by other branches of the SS. So Graf was delighted when, in October 1939, 6,500 members of the Totenkopfverbände were organized into the SS Totenkopf-division, which along with several other divisions became the Waffen SS, the elite fighting unit. Graf applied and was transferred to the new Death's-Head division.

During the winter of 1939–1940, the Death's-Head division prepared for Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the offensive in the West. The division's commanding officer, SS Gruppenführer (Major General) Theodor Eicke, wanted to be at the spearhead of the offensive to demonstrate the battlefield capabilities of his much-maligned concentration-camp guards. But when Belgium was invaded, the Death's-Head
division was in the second wave and saw very little fighting. In May, Eicke's luck changed. The division was pulled out of reserve and joined the Fifth and Seventh panzer divisions sweeping north across Belgium. General Rommel's Seventh Panzer Division captured Le Cateau and Cambrai on May 17 and 18. The Death's-Head division was ordered to clean up and consolidate the captured territory. Fighting small, fierce Belgian units, the division suffered sixty-nine casualties. One of them, Hans Graf, was injured when a red-hot piece of shrapnel struck him under his right ear. During the firefight, the medic applied a butterfly bandage, which pulled back the corner of Graf's mouth. The wound healed slowly, permanently distorting Graf's mouth.

The Death's-Head division raced toward Dunkirk, where they hoped to capture the British Army. The SS was again immersed in battle along the La Bassée Canal at Bethune, where the British fought fanatically to allow more time for the Dunkirk evacuation. The British Fourth Brigade was responsible for holding the canal between Robecq and Bethune but was slowly overwhelmed by the 21,000 men of the Death's-Head division. British soldiers made a heroic final stand at Le Paradis and Locon. Fighting raged, but the British could not halt the Death's-Head onslaught.

The Fourth Company of the First Battalion, Second SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment, Hans Graf's unit, under the command of SS Obersturmführer Fritz Knochlein, surrounded the 100 men of the Second Royal Norfolk at Le Paradis. After suffering many casualties, the British surrendered. Those captured were marched single file past a barn wall, where they were massacred by the fire of two SS machine guns. Hans Graf was the triggerman on one of the guns. He later bayoneted any Britisher who still showed signs of life. This was the infamous Massacre of Le Paradis.

After conquering Belgium, the Death's-Head division turned south to pursue the hastily retreating French. Engagements with French units were brief but sharp. Hans Graf's superiors noted his exceeding zeal and ruthlessness combined with his technical ability with small arms. Graf was awarded the Iron Cross First Class after the capture of Clamecy, and was promoted to Obersturmführer (first lieutenant).

Graf's proficiency was noticed by increasingly higher levels of the SS, until Himmler, on the recommendation of Obergruppenführer Eicke, personally transferred Graf to the Berlin unit of the Leibstandart SS Adolf Hitler, which guarded the Führer. Wanting a stake in the venture in the United States, Himmler assigned Graf to the mission. Anything was better than standing at attention at the Reich's chancellery day after day, so Graf was grateful for the change. He joined Erich von Stihl in August and began the arduous two months of training.

For the hundredth time, von Stihl shifted his pack behind him, trying to discover a bearable position. The boxcar adamantly refused to yield the slightest modicum of comfort. He stood and rubbed his buttocks, forcing blood back into the aching tissue. He raised his right knee to his chest and pulled it close to lossen the joints. Then came the left knee. Von Stihl walked around Graf and peered out the boxcar. Winter air coursing past the car pricked his face and rushed under his clothes, chasing away pockets of warmth and shocking his skin.

"To hell with riding in this freezing boxcar like cattle," Graf complained. "I say we purchase passenger tickets at the next station."

"I'll tell you again, Graf," replied von Stihl, "we stay in boxcars until Chicago. I'm not going to have any trace of us showing up on bus or train tickets. I don't want our
signatures on car receipts. We can't be anywhere where we might be asked to identify ourselves. That happens at public-transportation terminals."

"What's the worry? Each of us has identification that an American cop would swear was genuine. 'Cop,' by the way, Schwachheit, is slang for 'policeman,' " Graf said as he turned to Lange.

"That's the point," von Stihl explained as he returned to his spot at the front end of the boxcar. "Our identification, as foolproof as it might be, is our last resort. There's no sense putting ourselves into a position where we have reached the last resort. So we'll stay in boxcars. If no one sees us, then no one asks questions."

"We're being too careful," Graf persisted.

"Wrong. There's no such thing as too careful on this mission. SS Major General Hausser wouldn't have issued your orders personally, had it not been important, and you wouldn't have undergone that miserable two months of training, either."

"Who needed that shit? I didn't learn anything."

True, thought von Stihl. Graf, like all Waffen SS troops, possessed an amazing arsenal of knowledge. Von Stihl could teach him nothing about wiring explosives or walking silently through underbrush. The Obersturmführer's handling of a Schmeisser submachine gun was impressive. Graf was excellent in hand-to-hand combat, although, like many Waffen SS, he preferred boxing methods to swifter, surer killing techniques. Students at Bad Tölz boxed an hour a day during their training. In addition, Graf was in incredible physical shape. He could run two kilometers in an impressive five minutes and forty seconds and could scale fifty feet of rope in under twenty seconds without using his feet. Graf never perspired, just smiled malignantly. The training was vital, though, because it taught the three commandos to anticipate each other's moves. They gained a
coordination and a timing which made them a team. Their competence would lessen luck's role.

The sound of crunching couplers rolled from the front of the train, through their car, and to the rear, like falling dominoes, and meant the train was slowing. Graf leaned out the door, saw the switchyard sign pass, and said, "Dammit, here we go with another stop."

Willi Lange concealed the oilskin roll behind him and slumped forward. Von Stihl took his Luger from his waistband and held it under his paper sack, pointed at the door.

Because their door was open, they had been checked only twice during the past three days, and it was unlikely the railroad police would search the boxcars in this tiny switchyard. But they were prepared.

For ten minutes their car was pushed back and forth as cars were added to the train. The roar of the locomotive's big diesel engine reverberated in their car. From the smell, von Stihl guessed a car of pigs was being shuttled into place upwind from their car.

Graf wrinkled his nose and said, "Christ. We'll smell them all the way to Chicago."

Without warning, a railroad policeman stuck his head into the car. "I thought I smelled some assholes on my train. Get out," he ordered.

"Officer," Graf said, "we've got to get to—"

"Hold your bullshit and get off my train," yelled the cop as he beat his billy club against the car floor. He had an immense double chin, and von Stihl guessed the man weighed 350 pounds. "Or I'll come aboard and throw you off, and believe me, you don't want that."

Lange erupted with a phlegmatic, tortured cough. He breathed erratically and whooped sickly again, as if a hand was twisting his throat. A thin strand of spittle dropped from his lips. His eyes were open but were sightless and were raised to his eyebrows. The cough went on and on and
racked Lange's entire frame. He grimaced and sank lower to the floor.

"Our friend's got tuberculosis, officer. He's gonna die in a couple of weeks," Graf said in his lunch-bucket accent. "He wants to be taken to Chicago to see his brother."

The policeman cocked an eye at Lange. The little hobo was wearing two weeks of stubble on his cadaverous face, and three days' grime on his hands. His jacket was stained and ragged, and the undershirt hanging out was filthy. One of his bootlaces was untied, as if he lacked the energy to reach his foot. Lange emitted another wrenching cough and slumped sideways, almost to the boxcar floor. He gasped for breath between coughing fits. Mucus dribbled from his nose and caught in his wispy mustache. He wheezed and coughed again, and the cough rattled to a low, exhausted moan.

"All the poor son of a bitch wants to do is visit his brother in Chicago before he dies. We got to get him there," Graf pleaded.

"Shit," said the policeman as he turned away from the door. "You bums is always sick with one thing or another." He looked back and said, "O.K., you guys can ride, but don't tell anyone along the line I said so."

After the cop disappeared down the rail, Lange sat up and wiped spit and mucus from his face. He breathed hard to catch his breath.

"You know, Schwachheit, I wonder how much of that sickness is an act," Graf said with his inevitable leer.

"Nicely done, Lange," von Stihl said.

Willi Lange had been in von Stihl's Wehrmacht commando unit for a year and a half, during which time the colonel had come to appreciate Lange's single talent. On April 23, 1941, von Stihl's troops surprise-attacked the Athens airport where the bulk of RAF planes in Greece were
stationed. Von Stihl and his men charged the airfield hangar. The hangar was empty, and the colonel, then a major, saw the RAF pilots racing from their huts to the Spitfires and Hurricanes on the field. The object of the Germans' mission, to capture the Greek RAF, would have been thwarted had the planes taken off.

Several of the fighters began to taxi down the runway to escape. Exasperated, von Stihl foolishly yelled at anyone in hearing distance to stop them. Before the major could retract the order and perhaps apologize for it, a little corporal whose name he had not known ran forward twenty or thirty paces, lifted his submachine gun, and squeezed off a short burst. The lead plane, perhaps 150 yards away, lurched and bounced to a stop on the runway, its right tire blown out. Without sighting the weapon, Lange fired several more bursts, and the next two planes in line jerked to a stop, each with a flat tire. The two planes behind them swerved violently onto the grass trench along the runway and slid to a halt. The runway was completely cluttered, and escape for the remaining fighters and bombers was impossible.

As von Stihl's men rushed from the hangar to capture the RAF pilots, von Stihl approached the corporal. "That was an impressive performance."

Willi Lange shrugged his shoulders and reached for another clip from his belt. Each magazine had 32 bullets, and von Stihl was to learn that Lange would go to great lengths to avoid wasting a shell. Without saying more, they ran to assist the roundup of RAF pilots.

As his unit marched toward Athens the next day, von Stihl found the corporal walking a considerable distance behind the rest of the troops.

"You don't enjoy the other men's company?" Von Stihl smiled.

Without breaking pace, Lange shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

"Do you talk, Corporal?"

"Sure, what would the major have me say?"

Von Stihl foresaw important uses for the corporal, and he was determined to get Lange to commit himself to the unit.

"The major would have you tell me the effective range of that Schmeisser you've got."

"For most soldiers, it's a hundred and fifty yards. For me it's about two hundred yards."

"How do you explain the difference?"

"If I point my gun up the road and hold it so it's exactly parallel to the road surface, do you know how long it'll take for my bullet to hit the ground after I fire?" asked Lange.

"No."

"Exactly as long as if I take a shell and drop it to the ground from my hand. The bullet's velocity has no effect on its rate of drop to the ground."

"So what you're saying is that you arc the bullets when aiming at distant targets. I could have figured that out," said von Stihl dryly.

"Maybe you could, but most don't. I have the amount of arc figured out for all distances up to two hundred yards. And I'm a good guesser of distances."

Quiet perhaps, thought von Stihl, but not unduly modest. He goaded, "Why the attachment to the submachine gun? Semiautomatic rifles are useful in more situations."

"Perhaps so, Major, but not German semiauto rifles. In case you haven't noticed, German-designed and -produced rifles, like the 7.92 rifle that your men up there have, are made by fools and used by fools. They're unreliable and dangerous. I once got hold of an American-made M1, and I just couldn't believe the difference in quality."

"But you're satisfied with the quality of the Schmeisser?"

"They're the finest submachine gun in history. No country can match it."

Von Stihl looked at the squat, ugly weapon hanging from
straps around Lange's shoulders. With the metal stock folded in, as Lange's was, the submachine gun was only two feet long. It weighed less than nine pounds and consisted of a striated pistol grip, a small housing for the internal mechanism, a short barrel with a superfluous sight at the tip, and a magazine holder. From this holder protruded the clip, which was the size of two square pounds of butter placed end to end. The Schmeisser's official name was MP40, and it looked enough like a pistol that the German word for "submachine gun" literally meant "machine pistol."