Comrades of War (43 page)

‘You said you loved me, Inge, and then we had Gunni.’

She smoked feverishly. Emptied her cognac glass. A vein stood out sharply on her forehead.

‘One says so many things. How many couples, do you think, really love each other? It becomes a habit. If you had been magnanimous instead of picking at trifles, we could have lived nicely together and this whole stupid scene could have been avoided.’ She looked at him. Her eyes became mean. Her mouth jeered. ‘I could have gone to bed with whomever I wanted and you with anyone you liked. We could have been friends. Friends with a wedding ring.’

‘But that just can’t be done, Inge!’

‘No?’ she laughed hoarsely. ‘As if you had the foggiest idea of what can be done!’

Again he felt a lump in his throat. What had happened? His Inge couldn’t talk like that. He adjusted his belt, noticed the pistol and rested his hand pensively on it.

She noticed it and curled up her mouth in a wry smile.

‘For God’s sake don’t turn this into a classical drama, where the unfaithful wife gets shot. It would make both of us look awfully ridiculous.’

He dropped his hand and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Would you like me to go, Inge?’

She nodded.

‘It’s the best thing to do. In any case, you are too old-fashioned to go on the way I’d like to. If you want a divorce, Bernt, you can always write to me about it.’

Her kimono had come apart. He saw her long legs, slender pretty legs. Those legs he had so often caressed. He couldn’t grasp it was all over. It was too absurd. Too unreal. Almost ridiculous. She stood there smiling prettily. Though alive, she was still dead. At any rate to him.

Again he felt for his pistol. He opened the holster and passed his fingers quickly over the cold steel. Then he thought of the boy. He could see the Legionnaire’s mocking glance. He dropped his hand.

‘Won’t you have a drink before you go?’ she asked.

He nodded. Imagine her asking me, her husband whom she has just thrown out, if I would like a drink before I go.

He wanted to ask her about something, but they had already become strangers to each other.

They drank together. She said something about his dusty boots and soiled uniform. Mentioned something about a hotel where he could sleep. Then he suddenly burst out with:

‘Are you in love with Willy?’

‘I told you so, didn’t I? I love him.’

‘Have you slept together?’

She flung back her head and laughed. Her laughter was provocative. He felt a desire to strike her. Once more his hand strayed down to his pistol. Once more the boy’s face popped up before him. Tomorrow he would go to the Nazi camp where Gunni was.

When he left she raised her hand to wave good-bye. He noticed she wore a bracelet he had given her long ago. The one with the blue stone he had bought in Rumania. She had kissed him savagely and lifted her legs from the floor. Afterward they had had a wild and reckless night of love. That was five years ago.

When she closed the door he was on the verge of tears.

He slept in the guardmen’s barracks in Potsdam.

Next day he went to Bergen to see his boy.

The camp, a camp of huts, was situated far out on the moor, remote from inquisitive glances. One had, after all, enough sense of shame not to want everyone to know how the boys’ minds were being systematically destroyed and perverted.

An SS
Obersturmführer
who had lost an arm in 1941 took him out to the camp in his car. Every time this officer, who wore the emblem of murder in his black-edged cap, called him ‘
Herr Kollege
,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen startled. He told Lieutenant Ohlsen that he was responsible for the boys’ military education.

Lieutenant Ohlsen pumped him about life in the camp.

‘They’re slackers when they get here,’ the SS officer shouted to make himself heard above the roar of the Kübel car. ‘But before we’ve had them for very long they’re real demons.’ He waved his half-empty sleeve in rapture. ‘They would even slit the throats of their own mothers.’

They halted about a mile from camp. The SS officer pointed at a unit of brown-clad boys worming themselves ahead across the field.

‘There’s our sabotage detail,
Herr Kollege
. This puts the finishing touch to our education.’ He laughed as he said ‘education.’ ‘Once in a while we also give them a Jew to play with. Watching the boys knock off a Jew like that is better fun than either dog races or cockfights. Afterwards they’ll learn to do it to real people.’

Real people! Lieutenant Ohlsen looked with revulsion at the face of the officer, handsome in picture postcard fashion.

The camp commandant, Hitler Youth
Bannerführer
Grau, had a surprise in store for him.

With a smile he was informed that he no longer had a son. His son belonged to the Führer. There could be no question of his seeing or talking to Gunni. He could send him a package, which the boy would receive as if sent by the Movement.

‘After all the Movement is all of us,’ Grau said, smiling.

There was a smile here for everything. Even for pronouncing a death sentence.

Lieutenant Ohlsen protested against the State having adopted his son. He hadn’t signed the papers.

‘It’s of no consequence,’ the
Bannerführer
smiled, ‘Your wife and your father-in-law are warrant enough, and you can hardly have any objections to your son being educated as a true disciple of the Movement. The home is not the right place for our youth. With us, on the other hand, they become tempered, tempered like Krupp steel.’

They drove him in to Bergen, not to do him a courtesy, but to prevent him from communicating with his little boy through illegal channels.

In front of the villa sat a man without legs, without arms. He sat on the undercarriage of a perambulator.

He was in plainclothes and on his jacket gleamed the Iron Cross, First Class.

SS
Obergruppenführer
Berger stepped out of his Horch, wrinkled his forehead and looked disapprovingly at the invalid.

‘Get that thing away from here,’ he mumbled to his adjutant.

The man tried to resist. He screamed loudly as they lifted him up and drove off with him.

They threw him into an oven together with some Jews and gypsies.

The frame of the baby carriage rolled slowly across the street, where a boy began playing with it.

The unpleasant sight no longer annoyed the arriving guests.

XVII

An Evening Party at the SS

One evening Lieutenant Ohlsen drove with his friend Heinrich and an SS
Obersturmführer
out to a large villa in Wannsee.

Before the gate, which was ornamented with SS runes and a majestic eagle peculiar to this corps, stood two guards in the full-dress uniform of the SS.

There was a crush in the large hall, where zealous SS men in white jackets too the guests’ things.

From the hall one walked into a large room splendidly illuminated by numerous crystal chandeliers, whose lights were reflected by large wall mirrors decorating the room from floor to ceiling.

In the middle of the room stood a horseshoe table, covered with damask cloths and Sèvres china. Twelve-branched candelabra of beaten gold were placed one after another on the table. Each place setting had several crystal glasses, wreathed with artfully woven flower festoons. The silverware was sterling, heavy and old.

At the lower end of the room stood half a score of SS officers. They stared hungrily at the entering ladies in their extremely low-necked gowns.

Heinrich pulled Lieutenant Ohlsen over to this group and introduced him to a tall powerful man wearing the brown uniform of the Party. He had the coldest eyes Lieutenant Ohlsen had ever seen, a human being without a trace of human feelings. A living robot in the Party apparatus.

He held out his hand to Lieutenant Ohlsen and gave him a handshake reminiscent of old dough. He mumbled something about it being an honor for him to greet a combat officer and advised Lieutenant Ohlsen to do justice to the food. Then he walked up to a lady in a lilac sheath dress. Lieutenant Ohlsen was forgotten.

The company sat down to dinner.

A long line of SS men in white jackets marched in with the food. The whole affair went off in parade-ground style. They immediately began serving and filling the glasses.

It was a menu to which rationing was unknown. Even the most jaded palate could find everything it wished for.

‘This is what I call a menu,’ grinned SS
Obersturmführer
Rudolph Busch sitting across from Lieutenant Ohlsen. He was already a little drunk. ‘That’s something,’ he said, smacking his lips and taking a bite from a pheasant leg which he held with both hands. He had convinced himself he looked like an old Teutonic hero when he ate in that way.

Heinrich had told Lieutenant Ohlsen that Busch had hanged his own sister in Gross Rosen two years ago. And judging by his looks he seemed very capable of doing a thing like that.

‘An internationally composed dinner,’ he growled contentedly, indicating the splendid table with the gnawed pheasant leg. Then he chucked it over his shoulder. It was picked up by one of the SS men in attendance.

No one took offence at this, because here SS Teutons feasted in the style of old Valhalla.

‘Here are artichokes from Yugoslavia,’ he yelled in a rapture of conquest, ‘Belgian truffles, French mushrooms, Russian caviar, Danish butter and ham, Norwegian salmon, Finnish grouse. Dutch shrimps, Bulgarian pheasants, Hungarian mutton, Rumanian fruit, Italian chicken, Austrian saddle of venison, and Polish potatoes – grown in sandy soil! Actually, the only item missing is a delicious English beefsteak.’ Again he flipped a bone over his shoulder. ‘But what isn’t here now may still come—’ he licked his greasy lips – ‘just wait, Lieutenant, till we jump across the creek! I’m looking forward like hell to setting up concentration camps in Scotland and making the English lords vault over the buck.’

My God, thought Lieutenant Ohlsen, here apparently no one knows that we are losing the war. Here they are still winning victories and storming forward.

‘What do you think will become of Germany,
Herr Kollege
?’ Busch grumbled, tearing into a haunch of venison with his teeth. He resembled a gorgeously uniformed cannibal.

Lieutenant Ohlsen shrugged his shoulders, saying he was sorry he didn’t know. At any rate he would make sure not to say what he was thinking: pigs, born of pigs, to die like pigs on a military dunghill. He saw the mocking face of the Legionnaire before him and shivered.

‘Germany will become the mightiest empire in history,’ maintained the SS officer – he had gradually become quite drunk – ‘and we’ve appetite in plenty,’ he added reflectively. ‘A scorching appetite. Just take a look at our guests here this evening!’ Grinning, he snarled, ‘Today eating is more important for these gentlemen than culture and combat. Look how they jump at the trough. I’m speaking about the men.’

‘Certainly,’ nodded Lieutenant Ohlsen. He couldn’t keep himself from asking: ‘And what about the ladies?’

‘Just wait, Herr Lieutenant, and you’ll see!’ He laughed omnisciently and slurped from his glass. ‘Here everything goes by SS regulations. Here it’s not as deadly dull as in your club, Lieutenant. When we’ve filled our bellies we proceed to Act Two.’ He took a bite from a peach. The juice flowed over the breast of his light gray uniform jacket. He tried to wipe it off with his hand. ‘Act Two: alcoholic introduction.’ He belched, then nodded apology to his dinner partner. ‘Next follows furioso grandioso.’ He pursed his lips and smacked his tongue like a glutted sow. ‘And finally, Herr Lieutenant, pastorale amoroso. We are always sticklers for etiquette in the SS! The fact is, Herr Lieutenant, that in the SS we are what the English call gentlemen.’

He stopped speaking and sucked lightly on his finger, on which some horseradish sauce had got stuck. He glanced sideways at Lieutenant Ohlsen and said, while he kept sucking his finger: ‘Horseradish sauce always makes me think of whores, but class-A whores,’ he added, contracting his brows.

He scrutinized Lieutenant Ohlsen and decided to say something he’d long wanted to say to an army officer. ‘You angel-hair fellows in the Army don’t have the slightest notion of good form. You are common peasants, the whole lot of you.’ He grinned and waited eagerly for Lieutenant Ohlsen to object.

But the Lieutenant wasn’t listening. He sat there thinking of all he would do to get even with Inge and his father-in-law.

‘My father-in-law is a stupid pig,’ he confided to Busch.

‘Give me his name and I’ll pass it on to my friend in Prinz Albrecht-Strasse,’ Busch offered. ‘All stupid pigs are to be liquidated.
Lebensraum
, that’s what matters,’ he imparted confidentially.

Further down the table an SS
Obersturmbannführer
shouted: ‘Shut up, Busch, you drunken sot, or you’ll get grilled!’

‘Certainly,
Obersturm
,’ Busch cackled and flushed down his cognac. He glowered about him and muttered, ‘They are to be liquidated. Throw them to the bears.’ He looked across at Lieutenant Ohlsen. ‘One should be kind to animals,’ he explained.

Lieutenant Ohlsen looked at him but didn’t see him. He saw Inge, his wife, before him in a Japanese kimono which brought out her slender legs. He drank and only half heard what Busch was saying.

‘The ladies here are eminent ladies, rich ladies. They have an itch in their shafts, the tide is running strong.’ He grinned with delight at his own wit. Suddenly he became philosophical. ‘
Herr Kollege
, life is strange. You’re an officer of hussars, lieutenant in a combat regiment, and what am I? A lousy prison guard in a camp.’ He wrinkled his forehead in concern and swept a heap of gnawed bones off his plate. Then he glanced briefly at the empty plate and flung that down, too.

‘I’m a very unhappy person. A profoundly unhappy person.’ He looked about him frantically as if he were drowning and was looking for a lifebuoy. He bent across to Lieutenant Ohlsen to entrust him with a great secret: ‘My life has been a disappointment
Herr Kollege
, would anyone believe my greatest desire was to become a pastor?’