Assignment Gestapo (35 page)

Stever had no particular desire for power. Power brought not only increased prestige but increased personal risk, and Stever could well be doing without it. He was happy with his present position and his present way of life. He was paid regularly, was nowhere near the front line, and had a regular supply of women and clothes
.

The clothes were supplied free by a tailor who lived in the Grosser Burstah and whose son had once been a prisoner in one of Stever’s cells. All Stever’s suits and uniforms were hand-made and the envy of his comrades
.

As for his women, he chose them carefully and had a semipermanent entourage. In Stever’s mind, human beings fell into four categories: men who were soldiers and men who were civilians; women who were married and women who were single. Stever despised civilians and found single women more trouble than they were worth. He always went for the married ones. At the age of fifteen he had made the discovery that most married women were sexually undernourished, and he had taken upon himself the task of easing their lot
.

There was something very satisfying about married women. For a start, they never wanted to become emotionally involved, they never made any demands other than the purely physical, and this suited Stever down to the ground: he found it impossible to imagine existing for anyone but himself and for anything but his own gratification. The idea of being expected to
consider another person’s wishes was terrifying and alien to his nature
.

Secondly, he found that married women were always very anxious to be pleased. In nearly all the marriages he had en-countered the batteries had seemed to run dry after two or three years, and then Don Juans such as Stever were able to step into the breach and make good the deficiencies
.

He found young girls too much of a responsibility, too much of a trial, while virgins were a positive menace
.

‘Shove a hand up their clout before they’re ready for it and they’ll scream the place down and have you arrested,’ he gravely explained to Obergefreiter Braun, who found it difficult to get hold of a woman, though he was far better looking than Stever. ‘Have to spend bleeding hours touching ’em up and whispering at ’em and telling ’em how bleeding lovely it’s going to be and how much you want them, and all that kind of balls . . . and half the time,’ he added, ‘you’re in such a hell of a state when they finally drop their drawers that you bugger the whole thing up anyway. And half the time they don’t like it and keep complaining you’re taking advantage of ’em and go on bleeding moaning all the time you’re on the pissing job . . . game’s not worth the flaming candle,’ said Stever, in disgust. ‘You stick to the married ones, chum. They know what ifs about and there’s no bleeding rigmarole to be gone through before they let you have it
.’

‘1 see,’ said Obergefreiter Braun, puckering up his forehead. I’ll try one of them next time
.’

‘Yes, you do that,’ said Stever, cramming his cap on his head and stepping smartly out of the barracks
.

No one seeing Stever outside the prison, with a pleasant smile on his lips and a helping hand for little old ladies who couldn’t cross the road, would ever have taken him for the same man who casually battered prisoners half to death before throwing them into their cells to rot. And if anyone had asked Stever himself about it, he would have been quite puzzled
.

‘Look, I’m only an Obergefreiter’ he would have said. ‘I’m only carrying out my orders
. . .’

And besides, he had never actually killed a man. He prided
himself on that. He had been through the entire war without firing a shot at anyone. And that was a record to boast of. Stever had no man’s blood on HIS conscience
. . .

CHAPTER SEVEN

Prison Discipline

M
AJOR
R
OTENHAUSEN
turned up once every month to introduce himself to the latest batch of prisoners and to take his leave of those who were departing. He never said farewell to those who had been condemned to death, since as far as he was concerned they no longer existed; only to those who were leaving to serve their sentences in one of the military prisons, Torgau or Glatz or Germersheim.

His favourite visiting hour was eleven o’clock at night, when all the prisoners had settled down and were asleep. He enjoyed the inevitable panic and confusion as guards raced round the cells shaking unwilling men into wakefulness in order that they might be presented to the. prison Governor. It gave him a pleasurable sense of his own position and importance.

He made one of his surprise visits four days after the affair of the forged pass. It was a few minutes before midnight and he went to the prison straight from an evening’s play at the casino. He was in particularly good humour. He had dined well, he had drunk a little too much and he had passed an entertaining evening. He was the picture of sartorial elegance, and he knew it. His grey cape, lined with white silk, billowed gently in the breeze. His leather boots creaked energetically as he walked across the courtyard. His long legs looked superb in their sleek grey trousers, and his epaulettes gleamed golden in the darkness. Major Rotenhausen was one of the garrison’s best-dressed men: three years earlier he had made a marriage of money, and he was now president of the casino. Men looked at him and envied him, and Rotenhausen held his head high and felt himself to be the pride of the German Army.

Most people who came to the garrison accepted Rotenhausen at his own value, assuming automatically that he was a man of influence and a power to be reckoned with. There had been only one occasion, that the garrison could recall, when some stranger, some upstart officer from God knows where, had walked into the place and upset all the accepted rules of etiquette, had ignored Rotenhausen and set all the other officers by the heels.

He was a young colonel, no older than thirty at the very most. He had lost an arm at Minsk and was stationed temporarily in Hamburg, a half-way halt between hospital and a return to the front line. He had received virtually every decoration that was available, and his chest was a blaze of medals. His uniform itself caused several disdainfully raised eyebrows. Apart from the tunic, which was tailor made, the rest had all very obviously come straight from the stores. Men looked at his boots, his trousers, his kepi, even his leather belt and holster, and silently sneered. His pistol was a P.38. All the other officers carried the Walther, a neat little job which they felt to be more becoming to their status, but the unknown colonel was apparently indifferent to such niceties.

He belonged to an Alpine Regiment, the edelweis flash stood out boldly on his left sleeve, and although at first the garrison had no idea who he was or why he was there, this fact in itself was enough to put them on their guard.

Only half an hour after his arrival, the Colonel called a meeting and informed the startled company that he had provisionally taken over the command of the garrison.

‘I am Colonel Greif of the 9th Alpine Regiment,’ he announced, into the horrified silence. ‘I am here for, a temporary period.’

He shook hands with no one; merely fixed them all with his bright unblinking gaze and continued with his introductory lecture.

‘I’ve always got on well with the men under my command, and I expect to do the same with you. Just pull your weight as I pull mine and we shall all do fine together. Only one thing I cannot stand and will not tolerate, and that’s a shirker.’ The steady brown eyes flickered back and forth across the ranks of the assembled officers. ‘I suppose you must be aware, gentlemen, that the units at the front are crying out for replacements? I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but if for some reason you haven’t been out there for a while you might not be quite aware how desperate the situation has become: there are men in my regiment, for instance, who have had no leave for the last three years . . .’

He asked every officer present how long he had been in the garrison, and his eyebrows rose ever higher and his lips turned down at the corners as he heard the replies. The number who had ever been anywhere near the front was but a minute percentage of the total.

‘I can see, gentlemen,’ said Greif, ‘that things are going to have to change round here . . .’

And change they did; and abruptly. Within three days of the Colonel’s arrival all the fantasy uniforms, the capes and the cloaks and the stylish kepis, the highly polished boots and the neat little pistols, had been reluctantly packed away and exchanged for more regulation attire. The garrison became a place of hard work, filled with sweating hurrying men and drab uniforms, instead of presenting its more usual aspect of a fancy dress ball in full swing.

‘We’re at war, for God’s sake!’ was Greif’s constant cry. ‘This is a military establishment not a toy-soldier fort!’

Even the officer commanding the 76th Infantry Regiment, old Colonel Brandt, had to bend before the storm and abandon his lorgnette.

‘If your sight is defective, then go and get yourself some spectacles,’ said Greif, curtly. ‘But don’t ever let me see any more of this affectation.’

And Brandt had to stand there and take it. Had to stand to attention and suffer insults from this strip of piss, this one-armed ribbon-bedecked jumped-up colonel from nowhere who was young enough to be his son . . .

The garrison suffered not in silence but in a continuous state of low dissatisfied muttering. Men gathered together in small secretive groups and spoke in veiled tones of various accidents that might possibly befall the Colonel. One lieutenant even had the brilliant idea of denouncing him – anonymously, of course – to the Gestapo. While they were still trying to work out what to denounce him for, the garrison as a whole received a shock from which it never quite recovered: Colonel Greif had a social call from no less a person than Heydrich.

Heydrich of all people! The devil’s adjutant! The idea of denouncing Greif to the Gestapo was tacitly abandoned and men began to grow suddenly restless and to seek after change. Requests for transfer began to pour in. No man in his right senses would wish to stay on in Hamburg under someone who was a friend of Heydrich. Even the front line was preferable to the Gestapo . . .

Rotenhausen was not amongst those who joined in the first mad scramble to get out. He stayed his hand a while – not through any low cunning but simply because his reactions were slow. And God protected him, thus confirming his own exalted view of himself. Only a few days after Heydrich’s visit to the Colonel, Greif was advised by telegram of a new posting. He packed his bags and set off within hours for the Russian front. He was never to see Germany again. He died in a snowdrift just outside Stalingrad, and when the Russians discovered him, on 3rd February, 1943, he was stiff and cold and had been dead for some time.

The garrison celebrated his departure for four days and nights non-stop. The champagne flowed and the old carnival uniforms were pulled out of their hiding places. Men strutted and peacocked to their hearts’ content and Colonel Brandt bought himself a new lorgnette.

Greif’s replacement was a Brigadier General of doubtful intelligence and possibly suffering from a premature onset of senility. The garrison were charmed by him. A most delightful old fool, even if he would insist on slobbering over their wives’ hands and whinnying like a horse whenever he presented himself to them.

‘General von der Oost, Madame . . . of the Infantry, of course!’ And then he would straighten himself up, creaking and grunting, tug at his jacket, heave at his collar, clear his throat and trot out one of his standard jokes. ‘I’ll venture to guess you don’t know why I’m in the Infantry, eh?’

Obviously no one ever did, and no one ever cared, but the answer came just the same.

‘Well, I’ll tell you . . . I’m in the Infantry for the simple reason that I’m not in the Artillery, d’you see . . . never could stand the Artillery, matter of fact . . . dreadful business, all that noise all the time, gives me a shocking bad head . . .’

One day he staggered into the casino and stopped the whole proceedings with a great roar of delighted laughter.

‘Gentlemen, I’m happy tonight! Do you know why I’m happy?’

By this time his officers had grown accustomed to his simple turn of wit. They did know why, but he was a brigadier general and he suited them very well, so they shook their heads and humoured him.

‘I’ll tell you why!’ The General held out his arms, delighted. ‘I’m happy because I’m not sad!’

Even when they had all politely fallen about in deferential amusement, von der Oost was not satisfied. Beaming, he advanced upon them and cracked another witticism.

‘Yesterday I was damnably sad . . . simply because I wasn’t happy, d’you see . . .’

Better an old fool like van der Oost than an objectionable young hothead like Greif. The garrison and their new commander were on excellent terms. Von der Oost asked no more than that he be allowed to keep them in a state of constant amusement. Men quickly found that if they laughed at his jokes he would blindly sign any piece of paper that was set before him, whether it be an illegal requisition for a crate of margarine or an execution order. There was even a rumour in the garrison that the Brigadier General was unable to read.

‘Well, well,’ he always remarked, after scrawling his signature across a document. ‘Well, well, well, there you are, d’you see. Always up to date, eh?’ And he would lean back in his chair and wave a hand at his empty trays. ‘In tray, out tray, pending . . . nothing in any of ’em, d’you see . . . That’s the way to do it, gentlemen. Keep up with the work and it never gets on top of you.’

‘They executed three infantry soldiers at Fuhlsbüttel yesterday,’ said his Adjutant one morning, by way of making conversation.

‘Ah, yes,’ said van der Oost. ‘They have to, don’t you see . . . each war demands its sacrifices. Without sacrifices there wouldn’t be any war, you know. Wouldn’t be any war . . .’

He always slept during the Kriegspiel
¹⁵
. He would drop off at the beginning and wake up half-way through with loud cries of encouragement and advice.