Claws of Steel Read online

  ‘I know what I’d like to do, sir – sink a nice foaming litre of beer! My mouth feels like the third-class waiting room at Hamburg Main Station!’ He licked his dry lips mightily to emphasise his thirst and looked cheekily at von Dodenburg.

  The handsome young company Commander laughed. ‘Typical Schulze,’ he said without rancour. ‘Always thinking of his creature comforts. You’re getting soft up here in Westphalia. Too much beer and too much Schnitzel. God knows what’ll happen when we have to fight the Ivans again.’

  ‘The way I feel now, sir,’ Schulze replied, ‘I’ll just open my trap and breathe on ’em. I’m so dry and my breath’s so hot, that it’ll shrivel the Popovs up like a flame-thrower!’

  Sergeant Metzger looked at the other NCO angrily. ‘Just because he’s got the crappy throatache, he thinks he can get away with murder,’ he mumbled.

  Von Dodenburg ignored him. He looked around the sweating red-faced NCOs sitting in the parched grass and then said: ‘All right, you heroes. That’ll be enough for today.’

  Hastily Metzger sprang to his feet. Despite the June heat, he was dressed as if he were about to go on the Führer’s Birthday Parade, his burly chest covered in decorations. He even had his ‘monkey’s swing’3 dangling from his shoulder.

  ‘Group – group attention!’ he bellowed, as if they were a thousand metres away and not ten. He swung the officer a tremendous salute. ‘Permission to dismiss, sir?’ he barked.

  Casually Captain von Dodenburg touched his hand to his cap. ‘Granted, Metzger. Dismiss the men.’

  Slowly von Dodenburg and Schulze walked back towards their billets, situated in the shadow of Paderborn’s ancient Gothic cathedral, while the younger NCOs followed them at a respectful distance, not wishing to infringe on the conversation of these two men who had been fighting together since 1939.

  ‘What do you make of it, sir, then?’ Schulze asked, when he was sure that none of the others were listening.

  ‘Make of what, you rogue?’

  ‘The new tank and everything?’

  Captain von Dodenburg shrugged. ‘We’re getting a new tank, that’s all Schulze.’

  ‘Come on, sir,’ Schulze persisted. ‘Anybody with all his cups in his cupboard knows we’re the Führer’s fire-brigade. Wherever there’s a blaze, off we go to put it out.’

  ‘You’re right – as always, Schulze.’

  Schulze ignored the irony and waited.

  ‘But if you took time to read the papers instead of feeding your face at County Leader Schmeer’s – and undoubtedly doing other disreputable things which I don’t want to know about – you would know that there is no blaze at the moment, especially on the Eastern Front. Marshal Mud’s taken over from Marshal Winter. Not a damned thing is moving at the front at the moment.’

  ‘Then when are we going to start the blaze?’ Schulze persisted.

  ‘Why the urgency, Schulze? I am surprised at you. I didn’t realise you’d become a glory-hunter,’ von Dodenburg joked.

  ‘Me a glory-hunter,’ the Hamburger said dourly. ‘I’ve had a noseful – right up to here.’ He drew a line under his big nose with his forefinger. ‘But you take it from me, sir. Time is running out. I spent my last leave in Hamburg and there wasn’t much of Barmbek where my old man lives left. The Tommies are knocking the shit out of the place and they’re keeping it up in spite of what those glamour boys of the Luftwaffe can—’

  ‘The Führer knows all about that. He’ll fix the shitty Tommies, believe you me.’ It was Metzger, who had caught up with them, the secret sectional plan of the new tank clasped importantly under his arm.

  Captain von Dodenburg, his face suddenly serious at Schulze’s mention of the hammering his hometown was taking, nodded. ‘Yes, Metzger, you’re right,’ he said slowly. ‘We can always rely on the Führer.’

  Schulze said nothing as they began to march across the cobbled Cathedral square, he caught the look of uncertainty on the Captain’s face. ‘Yeah mate,’ he told himself grimly, ‘yer growing up at last, aren’t yer. Yer learning that those crappy Tommies and Amis have got us by the short, black and curlies, Captain von Dodenburg …’

  Captain von Dodenburg walked slowly and thoughtfully towards the evacuated school which had been turned into the Officers’ Casino4 when they had moved into the provincial Catholic town three months before. It was pleasant now in the shade of the twin towers and the bells were ringing melodiously, but he could not quite shake off the mood engendered by Schulze’s remark just before they had parted.

  He was right, of course. The Homeland was hard pressed by the enemy air gangsters. His own Berlin had suffered badly over these last months and his aged father, the General, had been forced to retire, much against his will, to his country estate in East Prussia, where he had set about raising a local defence immediately ‘in case the Popovs come’. Though there was very little possibility of that. But it wasn’t the bombing that worried von Dodenburg. It was the mood of the Homeland. It had changed considerably since the Battalion had marched off so proudly to attack Russia two summers before.

  There was something desperate, hectic about it, with the civilians grabbing wildly for their pathetic pleasures, as if death were waiting for them round the very next corner.

  He thought suddenly of the woman he had met at a party during his leave in Berlin. At first in her dark, sober clothes, which (though it was forbidden to wear black) indicated she was a war widow. she had seemed like so many German women, living only for the final victory. But after the drink had begun to flow, he had felt an exploratory hand crawl spiderlike up his leg. Twice he pushed it away, thinking that the woman was perhaps unused to drink. But when she began boldly to attempt to undo his flies while the others sang and danced all around them, he knew that he was faced with a determined and experienced woman, eager to have her pleasure. Half an hour later, he was back in her flat, lying naked on the matrimonial bed while she attempted drunkenly to pull off her pants. Sometime during the night she had giggled.

  ‘First one killed in Poland in 39 – Iron Cross Second Class. Second blown to bits in the Ruhr – War Service Cross, First Class. Everything getting bigger and better – whoops, just like this delightful decoration in my hand, eh!’

  And the unknown war widow had not been the only one in the two weeks’ leave he had spent in Berlin. But it wasn’t only the women; it was the black marketeers, the profiteers, the base stallions, hanging on to their safe rear echelon jobs, turning pale at the mere mention of the ‘Eastern Front’.

  ‘Hello, Captain von Dodenburg,’ a girlish voice broke into his reverie, ‘how are you today?’

  He turned, startled. It was Karin Schmeer, the only daughter of the local County Leader, staring across at him in her black and white German Maiden uniform.5 She had eager, bright blue shining eyes, and despite the briefcase full of schoolbooks she was carrying, there were none of the half-promises of the usual schoolgirl about her body. She was tall and well-developed, with good brown muscular legs and full breasts, which threatened to burst out of the thin material of her white silk blouse at any moment.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Karin,’ he commented unnecessarily. ‘On your way back from school?’

  ‘No. We got out at one. I’ve been to a meeting of the Maidens. We had a talk by that Lesbian – the Area Leader – contraception and the German Woman.’ She sniffed prettily. ‘Not that she’d know anything about that, would she?’

  Von Dodenburg shook his head. ‘Where did you hear such talk, Karin, at your age?’

  ‘I’m nearly sixteen. In India I would be a mother now – twice over,’ she said firmly and thrust out her big breasts. ‘You’d be surprised at what I know, Captain von Dodenburg.’ Momentarily she lowered her long eye-lashes and looked up at him through them in what she probably thought was a seductive manner.

  Captain von Dodenburg laughed shortly in spite of his mood. ‘I’m sure I would, Karin.’ He touched his hand casually to the brim of his cap. ‘My regards to your father, t
he County Leader.’

  She curtsied gracefully, giving him a quick glimpse of the dark cave of her ample breasts; then she was on her way, swinging her hips from side to side provocatively in a very un-Maidenly manner.

  The Commanding Officer of the Wotan Battalion was sitting on a cavalry saddle in the centre of the Casino, swinging his immaculately booted legs angrily and slapping his riding cane against the right one at regular intervals, as von Dodenburg walked in.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, von Dodenburg,’ he rasped in his unmistakably Prussian voice and screwed his monocle more firmly in his eye above the monstrous beak of a nose which had given him his nickname of ‘Vulture’.6 ‘Will you just look at this?’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘This.’ With the grace of the regular cavalry officer as he had once been, before he had joined Himmler’s Armed SS in order to gain more rapid promotion he swung his leg over the saddle and walked over to von Dodenburg. ‘This report from that damn fool of a young spurter who became Lieutenant Schwarz’s second-in-command in the Second Company last month. Not only did the craphead take his men to visit the damned cultural anthropological museum in Berlin – without my permission, mark you – but he also had the audacity to send me a full report on the visit.’ He slapped the paper with his cane in irritation. ‘All about the difference between Jewish and Aryan tibias and similar tommyrot. For all I know they spent their time there in Berlin measuring the length of Yiddish foreskins or some other idiotic rubbish—’ he broke off, beside himself with rage.

  Captain von Dodenburg bit back his smile just in time. ‘Orders from the Reichsführer,’ he snapped in his best military fashion, ‘the troops are to be instructed in the basic details of Germanic racial superiority.’

  ‘Racial superiority,’ the Vulture spluttered. ‘What the devil does Himmler think we’re running here – a school for students still wet behind the spoons – or a military establishment, training soldiers to dodge bullets which make no distiction between a man whose got a damned foreskin a metre long or has had it docked off by some Yid priest armed with a blunt razor blade, eh?’

  Captain von Dodenburg thought it wiser to remain silent. The Vulture was unpredictable when he was angry; which was always when the reputation or efficiency of his beloved Wotan was threatened.

  The Vulture slapped his cane hard against his boot and strode towards the big French window. He swung round abruptly and levelled the cane at the other officer.

  ‘It all fits in, von Dodenburg. The Battalion’s getting soft. No lice, no hunger, no Popovs shooting at them – and the men go to pieces. Last year at this time they were grubbing in the trenches like a lot of cur dogs for what they could find, and last winter there were some of them who were substituting other kinds of meat for the Old Man ration stuff we got.7 He looked at von Dodenburg darkly.

  The younger officer knew what the CO meant. Last winter when they had been starving in the miserable Kuban marches, there had been three reported cases of cannibalism in the Division when supplies had failed to come up, and Schulze had joked grimly they’d put a couple of kitchen bulls in the ‘giddiup soup’ now that the horses were running out.8

  ‘They’re getting soft, von Dodenburg, and I’m not going to have it. By the time this war is over I am going to be a general like my father was before, and those greenbeaks out there are going to get me those stars, whether they like it or not.’

  ‘They’re tired, sir,’ he said gently.

  ‘Of course they are,’ Vulture snapped. ‘The whole of Germany’s tired. God almighty, we’re fighting half the world after all!’ He pointed his riding cane at von Dodenburg almost accusingly. ‘And that’s exactly why we must be hard. The German soldier has to be so hard that he is the match for any two Tommies, Amis or Ivans – and the SS man has to be twice as hard as the ordinary Wehrmacht stubble-hopper. We’re the nation’s elite, aren’t we?’ He twisted his ugly face into a cynical grin, and von Dodenburg guessed what he was thinking.

  The Armed SS was only a convenient means for him to mount more rapidly up the ladder of promotion; he had no feeling for the sacredness of the National Socialist cause. As Major Geier often boasted in the Casino: ‘Never voted in an election in my life; never read anything since I left school save army reports; and I’m not interested in a thing except those damned general’s stars!’

  ‘Do you think then that we’ll be sent to the front again soon, sir?’ von Dodenburg asked a little hesitantly, not wanting to bring another Geier tirade down upon himself.

  ‘Yes. I got the alert notice from Division this morning. We’re on alert stage three.’

  ‘For where?’

  The Vulture shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I can guess. Eastwards – the bloody Popovs again.’ He walked thoughtfully back from the window, his head bent. ‘But the men aren’t ready for that yet, von Dodenburg. They are not the same men we took to Russia with us the first time. They’ve not got the same spirit.’ Suddenly he looked up and stared at von Dodenburg challengingly. ‘But by God, I’m going to give them that same spirit, even if I have to beat it into their hides!’ He brought his cane down with a whack on the nearest table. ‘Great crap on the Christmas tree, von Dodenburg, when this Battalion marches eastwards again, it’s going to be the finest unit in the Army. Now listen, this is what I plan to do when the Tigers arrive …’

  Notes

  1. SS Assault Battalion Wotan, commanded by Major Geier, commonly known as the ‘Vulture’, formed in 1938, with active service in Poland, Belgium, the Channel and Russia. See Leo Kessler SS Panzer Battalion and Death’s Head for further details.

  2. The most common Soviet tank used on on the Eastern Front between 1941-1945 (transl.)

  3. SS slang for the sharpshooter’s lanyard, awarded to first-class shots (transl.)

  4. German Officers Mess (transl.)

  5. The equivalent of the Hitler Youth organisation for girls. (transl.)

  6. Geier, his name means ‘vulture’ in German (transl.)

  7. Old man=tinned ration meat (transl.)

  8. Giddiup soup=horse-meat soup (transl.)

  THREE

  There were others among the veterans of SS Assault Battalion Wotan who, like the Vulture and Captain von Dodenburg, were dissatisfied with the state of the Reich. Sergeant Metzger was one. For Lore, his blonde, voluptuous wife, had not received him in the manner he had expected after a year’s absence in Russia. On the long three day train trip back to Germany, he had boasted to his cronies of the NCO Corps:

  ‘The second thing I’ll do is take my pack off and then I’ll tell her she’d better have a good shitty look at the floor because she’ll only be seeing the ceiling for the next couple of weeks. Christ, I’m so randy, I can’t get up without knocking the mess tins off the table!’

  But it hadn’t turned out that way. Lore had been obedient enough and they spent his first forty hours in the rented flat’s big old-fashioned brass bed with Jesus and his Apostles looking down at their sweaty covorting with saintly, disapproving eyes. Yet somehow she lacked the fiery passion he would have expected from a woman who hadn’t had a link slipped to her for twelve months or more, and once when he had reached under the bed for a fresh Parisian1 and another swig of the good Westphalian beer from the crate he kept there, he had actually caught her yawning, as if with boredom at the whole business.

  ‘There I was,’ as he remarked, more than once, to his cronies in the Ratskeller cellar bar to which he repaired every afternoon after training, ‘pushing my meat into her, the juice pouring off me and my arse going like a Jewish fiddler’s elbow – and she was yawning, as if all I was doing was scratching her flaming back!’

  Sergeant Metzger was not a very intelligent man. Indeed the ‘Butcher’,2 as he liked to call himself, was generally regarded as a dumb horned-ox by his comrades of the NCO Corps; but all the same a certain unpleasant suspicion was beginning to grow slowly but surely in his thick, muddled head that all was not well with his blonde plump Lore. As he told hi
s cronies at the Ratskeller skat-table in a moment of drunken confidence a couple of weeks after they had returned from Russia.

  ‘There’s something shitting well wrong there, lads. A big healthy woman like that should be wanting it every night, shouldn’t she, especially as she’s been so long without a bit. But if I find out that there’s been somebody else up her drawers, I’ll … I’ll …’ He left his threat unuttered, but the quick gesture of his trained butcher’s hand, as if he were cutting off something lying very low on the male anatomy, left his red-faced, drunken fellow NCOs in no doubt as to what would happen to the unfortunate man in question, if the Butcher ever caught him.

  A couple of times Sergeant Metzger had sneaked home at midday, but he had found Lore alone, pottering around the dusty flat in sleepy boredom. Once he had dropped off the Volkswagen jeep, which came to pick him up every morning, as it had gone round the first corner, doubled back and spent the next couple of hours watching their flat from Hackenschmidt’s cigar store across the road. But no one suspicious had entered.

  In the end he had been forced to bribe the little sixteen year old Macaroni Mario – all gleaming black greasy hair and shining white teeth – who looked after the apartment house while his parents, both ‘volunteer workers’ in Paderborn’s war factories, were out at work, to keep an eye on Lore and report to him if any men went up to her place.

  But although the little spaghetti-eater carried out his task with surprising loyalty and thoroughness for a wop, he had nothing to report, save for once when one of the younger chaplains from the cathedral had come to call in the mistaken belief that Lore was still Catholic.

  ‘You know – a priest,’ he had exclaimed excitedly at the bottom of the dark stairs that night when Metzger had come staggering in from the Ratskeller. ‘They are all for this, signor.’ He made a crude gesture of thrusting his dirty forefinger through a circle made by the thumb and forefinger of the other hand. ‘They no have girls. Always think this.’ He had made the obscene gesture once more, looking up at the big German, his dark liquid Italian eyes gleaming fervently.