Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Three

December 12, 1944. Koblenz, Germany. Tuesday, 1900 Hours.

With an escort of flanking motorcycles, the convoy of military vehicles drove at speed through the blacked-out and empty streets of Koblenz, an industrial city fifty miles from the eastern borders of Belgium. In the first three cars with their drivers and aides were General Hasso Frieherr von Manteuffel (Fifth Panzer Army), General Erich Brandenberger (Seventh Army) and General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich (Sixth SS Panzer Army).

Trailing the tri-axled Mercedes-Benz command cars at orderly intervals were a dozen more staff vehicles carrying twenty-two generals of varying ranks who commanded the corps and divisions of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B.

Security was maximum. Each intersection was guarded by troops from Department Four of the Reich Security Division, the Geheime Staats Polizei (Gestapo). Batteries of Panzer-IV tanks stood at alert formations in the fields and squares along the convoy’s line of march. Antiaircraft cannons, 88-millimeter giants, had been em-placed at quarter-mile intervals along the route of the command cars.

The illumination was ghostly. Headlights tinted a deep night-blue made the curving roads barely visible in the diffused glow that glinted through spirals of heavy sleet and snow.

At a village the convoy was halted by details of Schutzstaffel (SS) troops standing guard near rows of parked trucks, swinging blackout lanterns.

There the generals and aides were escorted to trucks and when tailgates had been secured, the vans moved out on a circuitous route designed to bring them, after dozens of miles and many deliberately confusing stops and turns, to a courtyard facing a massive bunker built against the side of a mountain outside the city of Ziegenberg in Hesse — temporary headquarters of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the “headquarters” being defined by the presence of the Reichsführer of Germany, Adolf Hitler...

Colonel Karl Jaeger climbed across the tailgate of the truck that had brought him through the winter night from Koblenz. Dropping lightly onto the packed snow covering the courtyard, he gave an arm to his superior officer, Generalmajor Heinrich Kroll, a ranking commander of the Second SS Panzer Division (Das Reich) of General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army.

Karl Jaeger’s rank was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, but since Jaeger was a member of the SS Armed Forces, his title was that of an Obersturmbannführer, Waffen SS. (In the diaries of Edward G. Solvis, there is no mention of Jaeger’s Waffen SS rank; he is referred to as “the Lieutenant Colonel” and on some occasions simply as “the Colonel.”)

The convoy was quickly emptied of its high-ranking cargo.

Double ranks of SS troops were stationed at the entrance to the massive bunker, rifles at port arms, standards straining in high winds behind them. The Führer’s personal flag was prominent, a swastika circled in gold leaf with a golden eagle in each quadrant. Flanking these pennants were flags displaying single black swastikas against fields of white and scarlet, emblems of the First Company of the SS Leibstandarte, the Führer’s personal bodyguard.

An aide of Field Marshal Walter Model came through the blackout curtains and instructed groups of general officers to stand by to have their personal effects checked by security troops.

“There is no way to guess how long this will take,” General Kroll said to Jaeger. “As far as I know, there is not yet a final commitment to Christrose.” The general adjusted his Iron Cross so it hung neatly between the lapels of his field-gray greatcoat. “I can only suggest you make yourself as comfortable as possible.”

The general returned Jaeger’s salute and walked across the crowded courtyard to join the other officers who were opening briefcases and emptying their pockets under the surveillance of SS guards.

Lieutenant Colonel Jaeger walked to the far side of the enclosure where he found a wooden bench under a windbreak of linden trees. Seating himself, he stared at the great face of the bunker and the soldiers of Hitler’s personal bodyguard.

Snow and sleet fell through the blue headlights of the trucks. The illumination coated the packed white snow and spread across the courtyard to the flags and emblems of the Third Reich, gleaming on the red piping running down the trousers of the general officers standing in fine to be searched.

Karl Jaeger removed his gloves and opened the lapels of his greatcoat to feel the winds on his muscular throat. The blue lights touched the Iron Cross on his tunic, the silver runes of the SS and the three emblems of his rank on the collar tabs of his jacket. On the sleeve of his tunic was the shoulder patch of Das Reich, a crusader’s shield with three horizontal bars within its borders.

Jaeger was tall and slender with coarse, fair hair and luminous gray eyes in an angular face that was scored with tensions. He would be thirty within a month and had not smoked a cigarette for three hundred and twenty days. This wasn’t simply a matter of personal health or fastidiousness, he was certain. But on the other hand he wasn’t quite sure why he had quit smoking. Whatever was wrong with him (why else quit smoking?) Jaeger figured it wasn’t physical. He had been a soldier almost a third of his life and he had fought for thirty-one months on the Russian fronts in the campaigns code-named Barbarossa and Citadel, the first attack in ’41, the second in the massive clash of armor at Kursk in ’43. And in the invasion summer of ’44, he had been at Normandy and Avranches, when all their divisions were at half strength, not like Barbarossa where Goebbels had been able to proclaim: “The eastern continent of Europe lies like a limp virgin in the arms of a mighty German Mars.” Gross Deutschland had been on the line then. With SS Totenkopf and SS Leibstandarte, and to the south, Spain’s Blue Division.

No, he still had the strength and stamina for war, but in some fashion he had lost his ability to concentrate. Or more accurately, he couldn’t stop concentrating, couldn’t stop feeling and remembering things in the past. It was the pressure of memory that created the anxieties in him, that forced him to study the world with what had become a bewildering and frustrating intensity...

Karl Jaeger still did have an occasional insidious need for nicotine, and to distract himself had taken to smoking a dry pipe. Feeling restless now, he took an old black briar from his pocket and dug the stem into the back of his hand until the pressure sent a searing pain down into his numb fingers.

He just could not watch at ease and at peace, like a dumb beast in a field, while the Gestapo searched officers whose names rang with honor down hundreds of years of Prussian and German history. Kroll, von Seeckt, Krueger, Lutz, von Manteuffel, Beck and Brandenberger and Guderian and Scheer and Jodl and von Rundstedt... Yet if such security was necessary, his thoughts were disloyal. Since von Stauffenberg had placed a bomb under the Führer’s desk in East Prussia, everyone in Germany had become a potential traitor and enemy. Von Stauffenberg was dead, shot without a trial along with hundreds implicated in the plot, with even Field Marshal Rommel, the hero of the African desert campaigns, accepting a pellet of cyanide in return for a hero’s funeral and a pension for his widow.

Hitler was damned by the world because he was absolute, because his character reduced principle to action. If that were cause for damnation, then what of Eamon de Valera and Simon Bolivar and Oliver Cromwell? Sanctified “heroes” now, Jaeger thought, like the American patriot, Abraham Lincoln, because they had all reduced their principles to ruthless action to preserve the strength and union of their countries...

When the search of the generals was completed, they filed through the blackout drapes into the bunker, which was known as Adlerhorst. Eagle’s Aerie. A command car entered the courtyard and stopped with a whine of brakes in front of the Führer’s personal guard.

Jaeger recognized the giant figure stepping from the car, Colonel Otto Skorzeny, presently the Führer’s favorite among the junior officers in the Waffen SS. Skorzeny wore a black leather overcoat that fell in clean lines to his booted calves and against whose rich, dark lapels his Knight’s Cross with diamonds glittered like a star. Accompanying the colonel was one of his senior aides. Captain Walter Brecht, a former Bavarian schoolteacher who savored the nickname he had acquired in Skorzeny’s service — “Der Henker,” “The Hangman.”

There was no nonsense about a body search of Colonel Skorzeny. With Brecht at his side, the colonel greeted Hitler’s personal bodyguard with a broad smile and swept past them into the Führer’s bunker.

From the depths of Adlerhorst, the soldiers in the courtyard could hear the voice of the Führer, not as strong as it once had been, breaking now when he gasped for breath, but still dynamic and compelling when it rose high in the familiar, exalting cadences.

The meeting had gone on for hours; some of the drivers and junior officers were sleeping in the trucks. Others laughed and talked softly in groups, smoking and making late suppers of hot tea and spiced potato sandwiches.

Jaeger sat alone on the cold wooden bench thinking of Operation Greif, which logic dictated would be linked to Christrose if the latter became functional, and examining his dislike of Captain Brecht. He had met Skorzeny briefly on several occasions, but had spent almost three months with Brecht at the Military Academy in Berlin. Brecht was vain and supercilious, but that was hardly reason to be especially critical of him. Jaeger’s thoughts troubled him; he had no right to sit in judgment of his country’s soldiers, or Operation Greif.

He pressed the bit of his pipe into the back of his hand; on occasion physical pain was the only antidote for such disturbing concerns. Lately his mind had been driven constantly to embrace — or attempt to embrace — a variety of opposed concepts. He thought of the sacred and profane, tried to hold in mind at once the concepts of building and destroying, of flourishing and declining, belief and doubt, pleasure and pain... He abruptly realized with alarm that he had begun to breathe rapidly, the moisture on his forehead a mixture of sleeting snow and his own perspiration. His thoughts had involuntarily turned to Rudi Geldman and that had created other contradictions, Rudi in their home at Christmas, amused but envious in the presence of fir trees sparkling with candles and marzipan animals, or studying under the eye of Jaeger’s father, but then later had come the persistent irreverence... “the sleep of reason in Germany, in which the beast in the blood stirs and wakens.” The mocking of the Cornet Rilke... “The pale, romantic men of Germany seeking honor in death? No. The bayonets they sought were the cocks of their fathers and what they yearned for were emasculating wounds to make them one with their mothers...”

Jaeger felt a spasm of anger. He had warned Rudi. Even after they had taken him away, he had made inquiries. Guarded, of necessity, but the clerk at the Weimar camp had been in a gossiping mood: Rudi Geldman was a juicy capon, he had told Jaeger, and a lucky one, sharing rations and bed with a senior officer. Captain Sturmer...

Jaeger was sweating in the cold winds. Another wrenching thought... how could he be proud of Christrose and ashamed of Operation Greif...?

The heavy air raid curtains parted at the entrance to the bunker, and Brecht — “Der Henker” — came through the doors. When he noticed Jaeger seated alone under the lindens, he crossed the courtyard to join him.

Brecht was in his late thirties, in excellent physical condition; his slender body set off his uniform smartly. His features were usually informed with a pleasantly sardonic smile.

In an American Deep-South accent, he said, “Colonel, they ain’t just whistlin’ ‘Dixie’ in there. And you can play that on your Jew’s harp. It won’t be magnolia and honeysuckle for the Johnny Rebs holding Cemetery Ridge.”

Jaeger’s own English was stiff but functional; he had spent the equivalent of his high school years at a prepatory school in England. He glanced at Brecht now, realizing that this could be one of “Der Henker” ’s patronizing little traps. “Johnny Reb, as you probably know, Captain, wasn’t defending Cemetery Ridge. The Confederate Army of Virginia, commanded by Longstreet and Pickett, was attacking it.”

“It’s good of you to set me straight, colonel, but the metaphor stands. There’ll be no old buttermilk sky for Yanks or Rebs in the Ardennes next week.” He studied Jaeger. “I gather you don’t approve of Operation Greif, colonel. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct, captain. I don’t approve.”

Still there was a troubling ambivalence in his thoughts. Operation Greif was necessary for the success of Christrose. And Operation Christrose would buy time and save German lives and might very possibly put an end to the enemy’s shrill, irrational demands for unconditional surrender. He had been briefed on Greif by General Kroll: it would be commanded by Skorzeny and had been carefully designed to create terror and chaos behind the American lines in the Ardennes. Thousands of elite German troops, fluent in English, at ease with American slang, would infiltrate the fronts held loosely by General Middleton’s VIII Corps. Wearing American uniforms and driving captured American jeeps and trucks, they would disrupt communications and destroy units already smashed or reeling under the striking force of Christrose...

“Colonel,” Brecht was saying, “what disturbs you about it?”

“The fact that German soldiers captured in American uniforms will forfeit their rights as combatants. We can expect them to be shot in open fields after summary courts-martial or no hearings at all.”

“Colonel, American soldiers have escaped from POW camps wearing German uniforms. The maquis have worn our uniforms. They’ve dressed as women to infiltrate our lines. Resistance groups pretend to be farmers or railroad workers to sabotage our transport and trains. It’s deception, a ruse of war, nothing more. With respect, sir, you take the so-called conventions of warfare too seriously. Let me show you something...”

The captain pushed back the sleeve of his greatcoat. On “Der Henker” ’s wrist was tattooed the slender figure of a woman with bright yellow hair, naked except for blue plumed fans positioned in front of her body. Underneath the tiny figure was the legend: “Chicago World’s Fair: Miss Sally Rand.”

Jaeger shrugged; it meant nothing to him. Brecht smiled. “It’s a pleasure to repay the courtesy of your lecture on Johnny Reb, colonel. Sally Rand is an American folk heroine, a striptease artiste, if you understand the term. So imagine a lecherous American soldier, a second-generation Slav, perhaps, who saw and lusted for Sally Rand in Chicago. Think of the stir in his balls when we hail each other in the Ardennes and I show him this tattoo, a living reminder of Chicago with its Drake Hotel and Palmer House, Polish sausage and Al Capone and the stench of the stockyards. You can see, colonel, that while that Polski is leering at Sally Rand’s little red nipples, I’ll have no trouble at all blowing his head off.”

“You may find that personally very amusing, Brecht. But it is not honorable and it is not warfare.”

Brecht laughed softly. “You criticize us for not playing fair? Let me give you some advice. If we lose this war, the verdict returned against us will be monstrous. So, as soldiers and patriots, I think we should do everything in our power to deserve that verdict. I find it unfortunate that so many German soldiers are now beginning to pretend that this or that event did not take place. For one example, the reprisals by your own division at Oradour-sur-Glane this year. Already the quasi-official line is blaming that on a few overly zealous hotheads.”

Jaeger shrugged. “My battalion wasn’t at Oradour, we were under forced march to the Normandy beachheads.”

“But thank God there were other soldiers ready and willing to put a torch to the village. I know, I know” — he made a dismissing gesture with his hand — “there’s pious talk of women and children, but do you seriously believe, colonel, that Allied airmen are concerned about the age or sex of the Germans they are killing by the thousands with their bombs? Do you honestly think those pilots distinguish between schools and hospitals and marshaling areas? Well, I suppose those are the facts of war. And the fact is that the maquis attacked the flanks of Das Reich and the village of Oradour paid for it. The only medals the Resistance can expect are the tears of their women. Do you think that’s a callous attitude?”

“No, I think it’s sentimental and cheap.” Jaeger saw he had scored a point; a quick anger strained the captain’s face.

“You disapprove of me, which I find strange at this stage of the game. If we aren’t all sinners by now, we haven’t been trying.” His voice sharpened a bit. “You knew Rudi Geldman, I believe?”

The talk of Oradour had stirred Jaeger’s anxiety. The mention of Rudi intensified it.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“You know then that he’s dead.”

“Yes, someone mentioned it to me.”

“He had an impressive mind.” Brecht’s tone became more casual. “Quite sinuous. I read a few of his articles when such activity was permissible. You know, it might have been all for the best if we’d bombed the concentration camps into the dust when they were first filled, the guards as well as the inmates.” He studied Jaeger thoughtfully. “You understand, colonel, I’m being whimsical, not heretical. Still, there must be a symbiotic relationship between the jailer and his prisoner. I taught history, you know, and such matters interest me. After the war I would like to produce the plays of Lope de Vega and Lorca in German. I was at Guernica. There is something fascinating and paradoxical in the Spanish character, a merciless cruelty rooted in a fierce intolerance of spiritual error. But that’s not my point. Who was it attracted whom in our camps, I wonder? Did the inmates act as magnets to a certain type of guard? Or did our death-head commandants with their whips and pederasty have an irresistible lure for a certain type of victim?”

A soft ridge of snow was dislodged from a tree limb by a gusting wind. It fell on the collar of Jaeger’s greatcoat, and when he brushed it off his fingers touched the frozen metal of his SS runes.

“It was odious and reprehensible what they did to young Geldman,” the captain said. “But considering his name, there was a certain irony to it.” Taking a silver flask from the inner pocket of his greatcoat, Brecht turned the cap back with his thumb. “Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thank you.” Jaeger glanced at his watch. “You obviously want to tell me something, Brecht. So you’d better get on with it.”

“Do you know how Geldman died, colonel?”

“There was no reason for anyone to make a report of the matter to me.”

“Didn’t you try to find out what happened? I understood you were friends.”

“For a time we were students together in Dresden.”

“Ah, that lovely city. It was at your father’s school that you were classmates, I’ve been told.”

“That’s quite true.” Jaeger stood and walked under the lindens, pressing the stem of his pipe into the back of his hand and remembering in shifting images the prize books in his father’s classroom at graduation, the look of the river and wooded parks in Dresden, and some words from The Death of Comet Rilke... “Mother, be proud, I carry the flag, I carry the flag.”

The captain strolled beside him, the reflections from the snowy limbs of the trees touching the braid on their uniforms. As if sensing Jaeger’s thoughts he said, “A pity there is no longer time for such loyalties, colonel.”

It was obvious he intended to say more, but Jaeger heard a stir in the dark courtyard and saw with relief that the meeting at Adlerhorst was over, the generals filing through the bunker’s blackout curtains.

“Another time, Brecht,” Jaeger said, and walked quickly to join General Kroll, feeling the wind searing the sweat on the backs of his hands.