Collision of Evil (7 page)

The color gray, sullen and suffocating, seemed the predominant, reigning hue of that season and year. It was mid-March by the calendar, but the wet, sickly wind, perpetually low sky, and chilling temperatures rendered it more like deep winter than the onset of spring. I do not recall seeing a single crocus or emerging blade of grass to add color and life to the world; it was as if any signal of joy or optimism or renewal had been banned by wartime decree. There was no promise in the air, unless it was the promise of hardships yet to come. Our temperament was hugely gray as well, as deeply impregnated with that color as our field uniforms. It was 1945, and bleakly clear where the fortunes of the German Reich were headed.

Berlin had once been vibrant, imperiously proud, a true world city. I had reveled in the monumentality and hubris of the place during treasured weeks of leave from the insanity of the Eastern Front in 1942, and again in 1943. Now, an extraordinary conspiracy of fate and ironic circumstance had transformed Berlin
into
the Eastern Front, or more accurately, was about to. Who would have believed it even a year earlier, even six months earlier? Berlin had wholly lost its worldly and charmingly haughty look, like a terminal cancer patient whose wasted shell has little in common with the healthy being who inhabited the same skin before the disease took its final, implacable hold.

The city was a ruin; whole sections gutted and uninhabited wrecks due to the cumulative, daily attentions of the Allied air forces. Hours after the raids, you could still smell phosphorous in the air. The Reich chancellery was a discolored shell, most of the other ministries abandoned. By 1945, it was a novelty to discover a building that had not been damaged in the air raids. Concrete dust mixed with ash was everywhere; this was the brutalized soil from which a New Germany would have to emerge after the war, but that is another story for another time.

We were gathered at the
Reichsbank
on that raw morning just after dawn, the first light of day an anemic yellow against our
rumpled and abused field uniforms. We were “swine of the front” as we used to say, and we looked it. My comrades and I had been stripped of any parade-ground finery long ago, save perhaps the runic double
S
flash on our tunic collars. Some of us had a heavy
Stahlhelm
jammed over our heads, but most favored gray rough wool foraging caps. Every boot was thick with mud and dirt; it didn’t seem worth the effort to clean them anymore.

You might think from this remark that our morale was kaput, but it wasn’t, not really. We were in no mood to surrender to the first Ivan who appeared. There was an unspoken communal understanding that the war had been lost with finality many months ago somewhere in the Slavic east, and a sure sense that any chance of victory had slipped through our fingers forever. We were still sitting at the poker table but with an irredeemably losing hand.

We didn’t think much about the war ending; it was a theme best left unreflected upon. We had our orders, which were to assemble in front of the Berlin Reichsbank at daybreak, take breakfast standing up from a mobile field kitchen, and await instructions. There were about fifty of us, a detachment from our father unit the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, the fuehrer’s own name division. Our longtime commander Sepp Dietrich was no longer leading us by this chapter of the war; he was in Hungary with the remnants of the Sixth Panzer Army, preparing for a hopeless offensive there to stop the Russian advance against Vienna.

As we stood before the National Socialist bulk of the Reichsbank in that penetrating cold, a young
Hauptsturmfuehrer
new to the unit gave permission to smoke and most of us shoved into our maws that garbage that passed for cigarettes back then. Uwe Dering stood next to me on the street in front of the massive Reichsbank building, its once impressive edifice streaked black with soot, windows missing from the concussion of bombs. The British had conducted an air raid the night before in Berlin North, and the Americans would doubtless appear later in the morning. That was the routine: Brits at night, Amis by day. Our big eighty-eights roared back at the fleets of
planes and brought some down, but nothing could stop this relentless assault from the air.

Uwe and I had served together for years in the East, sharing long stretches of boredom, minor skirmishes, and major battles. We had both been slightly wounded by a Russian mortar shell that exploded near our trench in the Ukraine. There were others who had been part of our circle but they had fallen victim to time, transfers, or casualty lists.

In this Berlin detachment, only Uwe and I were “Old Fighters,” although we were hardly old. We were physical opposites, the two of us. I was tall and lanky, while Uwe was squat and powerfully built. Uwe was from a Hamburg family of minor Protestant Hanseatic merchants and I was from the rural Catholic Bavarian south, but the war and the designation
SS
had long ago transcended any differences of outlook between us.

Uwe stamped his feet against the cobblestones and rubbed his hands together in a vain ritual to offset the biting cold. “Shit weather:
Scheiss Wetter
. I’d rather be back in the Crimea, at least the air is drier there.”

“You wouldn’t want to be in the Crimea now, Uwe,” I told him. “It’s full of Ivans. They tossed us out smartly the other year if you recall.”

“You know what I mean. If we stay around here, we’ll all end up in the tubercular ward. But from what I hear, we aren’t staying. We move out today.”

There were always rumors that made the rounds, about moving out, changes of commanders, new conscripts, who had been put in for the Iron Cross. In my experience, rumors were true about half the time. Still, I hadn’t heard this one and had presumed that our detachment would be told to dig in to protect the Reichsbank during what was shaping up to be the pending battle of Berlin.

“We aren’t moving out, Uwe,” I said, “there’s no transport here. Anyway, most of our vehicles have been sent off with Dietrich to Hungary.”

Uwe sniffled and rubbed a coated sleeve across his nose and broad red cheeks. “Transport’s in the courtyard behind the bank. It’s not SS, the trucks are Wehrmacht. I heard two officers talking when I went to take a piss in the bank.”

I mumbled some noncommittal response and looked around.

The troops loitered in small clusters, and every now and then someone eyed the sky nervously in what had come to be called the “German glance.” But the skies remained mercifully empty. Just then the oversized bronze doors of the Reichsbank burst open and a phalanx of leather-coated officers issued onto the granite steps. They moved smartly and with purpose, the nature of which we could not divine. This procession of peaked caps adorned with the Death’s Head insignia was set off here and there by a wide-brimmed fedora or Borsalino, a sprinkling of civilians with silk cravats and worried expressions.

“Something’s up,” I muttered to Uwe.

“I told you,” he said. The other SS men had taken notice too and, as if answering to some primeval instinct, assumed more military postures.

One of the officers emerging from the bank wore the insignia of a
Stuermbannfuehrer
, and had one arm in a white sling, the hand of which was heavily bandaged, with a dried blood stain showing through like a badge of honor. He clutched a black leather attaché case with his good hand and had what appeared to be a map rolled up under his arm. I had never seen this officer before. He was thin-lipped, chiseled in an athletic way, and looked like a front soldier who had left his sense of humor in another jacket.

The wounded officer moved toward Uwe and me and said, “Line up for the trucks. You two up front with the driver. You there,” he gestured to three soldiers just behind us, “get in the back with the cargo.”

He marched down the sidewalk waving at the scattered soldiers, directing them where to stand. This done, he pulled himself into a camouflaged Volkswagen tactical car. Sitting next to a silent driver,
he unrolled the map, pushed his cap far up on his forehead, and fixed his vision on the parchment. From the end of the block came a wheezing rumble of engines, announcing the arrival of a caravan of old military trucks with Wehrmacht registration plates.

“Only the best transportation for the Fatherland’s elite,” I said to Uwe.

“Right. Something to ease our journey to the site of the final victory.” He snorted again, spit into the air and looked for a moment like a great dray horse incongruous against the ruined urban landscape.

The trucks coughed their way to the front of the bank, avoiding the potholes filled with fetid water and the enormous hills of debris, the detritus of destroyed apartment blocks. Noncommissioned officers busied themselves up and down the line once the trucks pulled to a stop.

“Mach Schnell, Mach Schnell,”
they intoned, directing the enlisted men to their vehicles. It was clear that they wanted to get underway quickly to avoid any allied air raid.

Uwe followed me into the cab of the truck, our rifles banging into the dented door emblazoned with a painted Iron Cross. I moved in next to the grimacing, hatless driver. Uwe slammed in next to me. “Morning,” we both uttered to the driver, who looked straight ahead out the windshield. He told us that his name was Ruediger, he was SS from the
Das Reich
division, had been in a hospital near Spandau recovering from shrapnel wounds until two days ago. The trucks had been picked up last night at an assembly area near Wilhelmstrasse and driven to the Reichsbank in darkness.

Organizing a unit of troops, even experienced ones, can take longer than you think, and I estimate it was fifteen minutes before our convoy groaned to life and began its plodding trajectory down the ruined street, past sentinel rows of silent, yawning facades framing spilled slagheaps of rubble and plumbing. The field car bearing the officer with the sling pulled ahead and led the column. I noticed that a large wooden crate lay heavy in the backseat, another SS
officer beside it armed with a machine pistol and a
Panzer Faust
against tanks. The cabin of our truck was warm and full of fuel fumes and for a while no one spoke.

Our herd of metal beasts headed west, avoiding the network of autobahn. There were two reasons for this, even though the autobahn should have provided the quickest egress from the city. First, months of intense bombing had rendered the highways treacherous, removing their advantage as high-speed avenues of travel. Second, the bombings were increasingly frequent. Any convoy spotted from the air along these wide ribbons of asphalt would fall prey to enemy machines. Accordingly, the officer with the sling directed us through a maze of back streets until we left the Berlin suburbs and then took a series of country roads with the overall direction of southwest. After leaving Berlin by midday, we continued through the flat countryside without pause until evening.

We garrisoned in a small farming village. It was a spectral and boarded-up place, the menfolk off to war and the women doing their best to raise the children and work the land. It was a losing proposition and the faces we encountered were bitter. There was a
gasthof
, which we commandeered, and we enjoined the owner, a woman in her seventies, to break out some bottles of potato schnapps. We paid, of course, but she knew that the currency of the Reich wouldn’t be worth a toss in a month or two.

There was a parish hall in the village and we slept there, our threadbare, coarse military blankets spread on the pinewood floors. It was infinitely better than those times of retreat in Russia when there was no sleep for days. In the morning the noncoms came round and told us where the field kitchen had been set up. Ersatz coffee was provided and we shoved down great gouts of the stuff to release our heads from the final, grasping talons of the previous night’s schnapps.

As we drank our artificial coffee, a gray-haired
Scharrfuehrer
made the rounds and advised us that we could go back to bed or wander around the village as long as we stayed nearby. We would move out at dusk, he said, and added that from now on we would travel only
during the hours of darkness until we reached our destination.

“Which is where?” Uwe asked.

“I don’t know where we’re headed anymore than you do,” the
Scharrfuehrer
replied. “My bet is Munich to join with other
Waffen-SS
units to form a Southern Front. But who knows?” He contemplated the ground at his feet for an instant and wandered off.