Collision of Evil (8 page)

Uwe and I had noticed the civilians the evening before in the village. There were perhaps a half dozen of them, swathed in expensive cashmere or loden greatcoats. They had been at the bank in Berlin. The clutch of civilians were a quiet lot and they didn’t mingle with the troops or make conversation. Which was fine with me. Years of combat had given me a preference for the company of soldiers.

“I think they’re golden pheasants,” Uwe had pronounced when a trio of the civilians walked taciturnly by near the
gasthof
. Golden pheasants meant Nazi Party functionaries, derided for their handsome brown uniforms with gold insignia on a red field at their collars and on their caps. The Party officials were never popular with the troops; they wore uniforms without having earned the honor by fire.

“They aren’t pheasants,” I chastised Uwe, “they’re wearing suits.”

Uwe snickered and lowered his voice. “How many of the dainty Party boys do you figure are strutting around in uniforms and high boots these days with the Russian bear pawing at the door? They’ve probably burned anything with a swastika on it and have managed to get a ride south where they can fall on their knees to the Amis instead of the Ivans. Worthless louts.”

I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t worth arguing. Still, I doubted that the Waffen-SS would just agree to provide escort to Party hacks trying to dodge the Russians. This wasn’t a delegation at the level of Goebbels or the Bormann brothers. And there was something else. These people looked intelligent in the way that professors and Jews often do. These weren’t politicians.

As our second evening in the village approached and the first strain of darkness insinuated itself, we packed our kits and prepared
to move out. A noncom insisted that we check our weapons and keep a round in the chamber; we would have done it anyway, like breathing. We tossed our sleeping bags into the truck bed and that was when I thought about the crates. Our truck, like all of the others, had three or four large wooden crates tied down with rope. There were numbers stamped in black ink across them, but nothing to betray the nature of the contents. We wedged our belongings in next to the crates, and I began to think about what sort of cargo we were carrying south. It occurred to me that it was the cargo—not us—that was important.

I was curious enough to seek out the weary but decent
Scharrfuehrer
we had encountered the previous evening. I found him smoking a pipe across the rutted lane from the
gasthof
, in the shadows of an old oak. He looked up with cavernous eyes as I approached. I asked what was in the crates and a thin smile traced itself across his lined visage.

“You don’t really think a
Scharrfuehrer
would be privy to that kind of information, do you?”

“Maybe not, but you might have heard something from the officers.”

He pulled the pipe from his mouth and studied it. “I don’t have a clue what’s in those boxes. Not munitions, the boxes aren’t marked that way and it wouldn’t make sense to transport explosives south. Could be documents. Don’t forget we were in Berlin, which is getting the hell blasted out of it. Documents would make sense, from the
Reichskanzlei
or OKW Headquarters. Maybe historical items written by the Fuehrer. Who knows? Get the stuff to safekeeping in Bavaria, in some alpine fortress maybe.”

I nodded and dragged a boot through the viscous, clutching mud. He was right, documents made sense.

The
Scharrfuehrer
replaced the pipe in his mouth, shifted his position and added a few sentences. “There’s another possibility, but I wouldn’t mention it too loudly if I were you. Where did we leave from? The Reichsbank. You know, keepers of the imperial gold among other things. The reichsmark isn’t worth a damn anymore,
but gold is always valuable. And if the war is to continue in some mountain redoubt in the south, money will be needed. Put two and two together. Enough said.”

He looked at me again with an expression that was either indifferent or fatalistic. Then he wandered off toward the column of trucks.

Gold made more sense than documents. Why would we have otherwise gathered at the bank? To protect the transfer of gold bars from the vaults to the convoy. And to send it south to Munich or Upper Bavaria, the first home of the Party and now it’s last bastion. As I walked back to the truck, the implications of the
Scharrfuehrer
’s remarks took root.

This little group of armed, desperate men was sitting on top of the treasure of the entire Third Reich. The gold didn’t alter the fact that the war was irretrievably lost. And who would it be delivered to? Party hacks in Munich who had enough common sense to realize that the ride was over. And who would find a way to vanish with the gold in their own pockets to secure a plush postwar life in Switzerland or South America?

Even more perversely, my comrades and I were supposed to protect this shipment with our lives. It’s funny, I suppose, but men are willing to die for an ideal, a nation, a race, or a leader. They are considerably less willing to have their lifeblood drained out to protect somebody’s economic well-being.

By the time I reached our truck, I had resolved not to say a word about my chat with the Scharrfuehrer, not even to Uwe. Under the circumstances, a rumor that gold was our cargo could be explosively corrosive. And so I kept my mouth shut, but the thought was planted and roiled around in my head.

Minutes later darkness held the terrain, and the gaunt officer with the sling told us to mount our vehicles and move out. A freezing, wind-driven rain had begun, adding to our prevailing depression. Our column of trucks ground through the grasping mire, leaving the village and striking out south. Through the cracked and mud-flecked windshield we saw the local residents observing our departure
through doorways and weakly illuminated kitchen windows. They were our countrymen. And yet not even one of those solemn faces betrayed a look that wished us well.

We made poor headway that night due to the unrelenting downpour. As a result, the officers decided to keep pushing forward even after dawn broke, violating their own
Verbot
on daytime movement. This proved unwise. It was about seven thirty that morning when we spotted the American Mustang fighters, three of them in tight formation, not too high above the tree line. More to the point, the fighters spotted us, and the resonance of their engines turned angry as they banked for a strafing run.

“Deep fliers! Get off the damned road,” someone yelled. The convoy disintegrated, individual trucks slamming hard across the terrain seeking out cover in the treeline edging the rural road.

Our driver kept muttering “shit” beneath his breath like some mystical incantation, and careened the old vehicle into a maze of scrub pines and brush. A sapling whipped by on my side and decapitated the rearview mirror. Uwe and I were half-under the heavy dashboard, trying to ready our rifles, but they were unwieldy in the confined space of the cab.

I heard the first, long baritone burst of machine gun fire behind us; the fighter planes had found a target and opened up. A few Mauser rifle shots rang out ineffectively in reply. There was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal and the chaotic, high-pitched scream of a vehicle crashing on its side and sliding.

Our driver cajoled the truck deeper into the undergrowth and we banged roughly along, rocks and brush slamming the belly of our transport. Still, the driver was good and had found a deer trace and moved along this path of least resistance. We were all breathing hard. Then the truck jolted to a stop, and I noticed that Ruediger, the driver, had pushed down on the foot brake.

“Here is okay,” he mumbled. I looked through the side window and saw only high, yellow reeds and thin birch trunks, like the Pripet
marshes we had encountered in Russia during that first exhilarating advance in 1941.

We heard the fighters swoop away overhead, engines singing. The sound faded and then seconds later intensified as the machines approached again for a second attack. There were panicked shouts and then the thudding impact of more airborne machine-gun rounds. Return fire sounded less ragged this time. And then the aircraft were gone. I caught a fleeting glimpse of them gaining altitude and soaring over a brown ridgeline in the distance, the burnished metal of their wings dully reflecting the muddy sunlight. It was as if they had lost interest in us and had decided to hunt for more worthy game. More likely, they had hit the limit of their fuel capacity and had to return to their airfield, somewhere along the Rhine.

We spilled out of the truck and, as one, stretched like cats after an extended nap. Behind us we could hear the voices of our comrades, plaintive requests for medical attention, orders bellowed out by the officers. There was a thick plume of oily black smoke issuing from the trees near the road and the crackle of flames from brush that had caught fire. After taking enough time to empty our bladders, Uwe, Ruediger, and I picked our way through the undergrowth back to the rest of the column.

Things were not as bad as they could have been. A line of SS men stood sentinel around the chaos, scanning the sky for any return of the American planes. One truck was on its side nestled among some austere-looking saplings. Two bodies had been pulled from the vehicle and lay alongside it.

I noted that both corpses had been spared disfigurement. Internal injuries, I concluded.

A second truck was burning madly still; its paint already devoured. A sort of charred sweet scent in the air, like a whore’s cheap perfume gone bad, instructed us that the passengers of this vehicle were part of the pyre. Not a good death, I thought, hoping that, if my time came on this trip, it would be a bullet to the back of the head. One second you’re here, the next second you’re not.

“You there, help those fellows move the crates into the other trucks.” It was the officer with the sling, clearly in command, two noncoms at his side. He gestured to the overturned vehicle where four or five solders were grunting and wrestling the heavy wooden containers from the canvas-covered bed.

“
Jawohl,”
Uwe said and we added ourselves without complaint to the little troop. As we maneuvered the first container to the ground, we heard the unmistakable tinkle of broken glass issue from inside.

“You need to be careful,” a voice intoned from behind us.

Uwe and I turned and saw that it was one of the civilians, a thin, dour-looking man with a crushed hat and long, cadaverous face. He was wearing pince-nez glasses, which gave him a professorial cast.

“We’re doing what we can,” I said, evenly. “Whatever’s broken in here broke when the truck slid over, not because we’re manhandling it.”

The civilian nodded and adjusted his glasses with a finicky motion. “I know, I know. It’s just that we want as little damage as possible.”

I was about to ask the fellow what sort of breakable stuff there was inside the crate, but before I could get the words out, he had touched the brim of his hat in a salute and turned away. It occurred to me that gold does not break or tinkle like glass. Was there also precious crystal or Dresden porcelain among the cargo? I returned to the ancient human task of lifting and pulling.

Within the hour we were underway again, leaving the wreckage behind. We buried the two comrades from the overturned truck in a gully by the road and an officer had recited a prayer and we had given the National Socialist salute. Their stahlhelm were placed atop crude crosses fashioned of branches from nearby trees and we inscribed their names on scraps of cardboard. It was the same ceremony I had witnessed a hundred times during the years in Russia. But now this feral, rushed ceremony preceding another retreat was being conducted on the soil of the Fatherland. What could speak more clearly of defeat?

We had to leave the charred and twisted remains of the four soldiers inside the burning truck. The truck was still too hot to approach, and we had to get moving, the little Scharrfuehrer said, before the Americans returned. We moved to a small farm a few kilometers away, concealing our trucks in the barns and flush along the sides of the outbuildings. We waited for the return of dusk, the time that had now become our friend and steadfast protector.

So it went. Uneventful days huddled in villages, eating hardtack and thin soup from the field kitchen and radishes and last year’s potatoes or whatever could be scrounged from the local inhabitants. Underway by night, south, southwest. On a few occasions we heard a radio broadcast of the latest war news in a gasthof. Even with the best efforts of Goebbel’s Reich Propaganda Ministry, the news was bad.

Fronts collapsing east and west, entire Wehrmacht divisions erased or overwhelmed by force majeure, the Rhine breached by the Americans, panicked refugees from the east clogging the autobahn network, massive air raids incinerating Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg.

Of course, the commentary was peppered with references to Final Victory, secret miracle weapons that would turn the tide, and odes to the heroic individuals who were forcing the foe to “pay a heavy price.” But it didn’t take a genius to know where things were going, and Dante had described those surroundings rather well.