Armageddon (30 page)

Dietrich looked into the kennel of furry balls, lifted a puppy, and smiled as its wet nose and tongue drenched him with affection.

“Aha. The only bitch in the litter. What will you call her, Kadett Rascher?”

“I will call her Ernestine. She will be my girl until I can return to another Ernestine.”

Even the cruel taskmasters were pleased at the way Kadett Rascher trained his bitch, Ernestine. There was the magnificent communication between man and beast strived for but seldom reached. No getting away from it, Rascher had a way with animals. He could get more from his bitch whispering in her ear than all the other cadets with their leashes, straps, choke collars, and throw chains. For that first year the young cadet and his dog were together day and night, the patrols of Schwabenwald, the hunts for escapees, guard duty. The hard discipline, the ugliness of the camp were all forgotten in the evening when he sat on his cot and read and reached down and was able to run his hand through the dog’s fur.

A few days before the graduation ceremony, the permanent awarding of the black uniform, the death’s head insignia, and the SS dagger, Kadett Dietrich Rascher and his dog were called into a blank, stone room in the kennel. His Hauptsturmfuehrer was there.

“I am pleased with your progress, Rascher,” the captain said. “You have learned your lessons well. You will be a credit to the master race. Before receiving your SS dagger there is, however, a final obedience test that all SS men must take.”

“Jawohl,” Rascher snapped from his position to attention.

“You will, at this instant, choke your dog to death.”

SS Kadett Dietrich Rascher passed his final test of obedience. With neither qualm, hesitation, nor visible show of personal emotion, he reached down, grabbed the trusting animal, put a choke hold on her, and pressured quickly to snap her neck. He then came back to attention.

“With men like you,” the captain congratulated, “we are undefeatable.”

A sudden wind beat a tattoo of water on the window. Dietrich continued to stare at his hand.

“What is it, darling?” she pleaded, “what is it?”

“How long can this go on?” Bruno Falkenstein moaned. “Maybe it would be better if a bomb fell on us and killed us all.”

“Please don’t speak like that before the girls,” Herta pleaded.

“Yesterday, six hours of raids and the day before that all day. Today, it may never end. What have we done to deserve this?”

Ernestine looked at her father quizzically. Perhaps the people of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London wondered the same thing, she thought. Strange, father didn’t seem unhappy about it then.

“Turn that damn music box off, it drives me crazy!” he commanded.

“Yes, Father.”

Ernestine was shocked when she saw Dietrich on his furlough from the Eastern Front. She knew that the war would do something to him, but he was still not much more than a boy. Dietrich was twenty-two now, but all that was gentle was gone.

Furloughs were created to bring a soldier happiness and renew his vigor to fight. Ernestine had kept a belief that Dietrich Rascher would never slip beyond the power of her love. She had lost him.

Every night of his leave he was stinking from schnaps and beer. He lolled on the bed too drunk to make love ... he babbled ... was given to sudden wild rages and weeping incoherent confessions about unknown crimes.

Corpses ... Jew corpses ... tens of thousands of naked Jews ... burning barns ... burning villages ... men with beards praying ... naked mothers ... sisters ... grandmothers ... pits filled with burning corpses ... his machine gun rattled into the corpses ... dogs ripped the Jew throats ... the wild eyes of the cheering Ukrainians while the SS gunned the Jews into the pits ... the nightmare, again and again ... he drowned in blood, Jew blood ... his hands and mouth and hair dripping and sticky with blood ....

“Drink! I must have a drink!”

“Dietrich! Wake up, darling! Wake up!”

“Drink! Give me a drink!”

“Oh, my darling. Please let me help you. Please don’t shut me out.”

“Help me tomorrow, woman. I need a drink now.”

“Darling, let me love you. Please! Please! Let us marry ... tomorrow ... now.”

“Marry you? How humorous! I am married to the SS. I have no room for another wife.”

“Oh God, dear God.”

“Stop your bloody weeping and get me schnaps!”

“Now you listen to me, Dietrich Rascher. This war will end one day. I don’t know what you have seen or how it has hurt you, but you will need to forget. I will be waiting here to help you. I will wait until time runs out ... until my heart stops ... I will never stop waiting and I will help you forget.”

The all-clear sounded.

They trudged up to the demolished street. All of them stood in the dusk’s fading light and stared at their broken house. Once it had stood two stories, square and solid. Most of the top floor was gone. The rest was riddled with holes, gouges, smashed and broken windows. The pretty little flower garden, so meticulously nursed by Frau Falkenstein, was destroyed. Falkenstein’s auto was in flames, gutted beyond use.

The neighbors crawled from their cellars one by one and began to dig through the rubble. Reimer’s house down the street, which had taken a direct hit, was flattened to the foundation. The rest of the street was a shambles. Once it was a nice street, lined with shade trees and neatly cut shrubs.

“I had better go to the store and see if there is anything left,” a voice said.

“Don’t bother. The store took direct hits.”

“Frau Winkelmann and both her children are dead.” Perhaps it was better for them, Falkenstein thought. Frau Winkelmann had been crippled in a raid a half year earlier and the children had become a burden to all the neighbors. Her husband had been killed long before in Tunis.

“Someone get over to the defense command and find out about the water main. There is no water coming into my house.”

The air was grimy with unsettled dust, fires burned, and the sirens screeched all around them, hauling off the wounded, digging for the dead. There was little time for either sympathy or contemplation or to mourn dead children, broken homes, or look for bread or fill the water buckets. They knew that the American fires from the day would light a path for the British bombers by night, and when darkness came the raid would go on. Nights were somewhat better. The Americans picked an area to precision-bomb. If you were caught in the American target, like today, it could be ghastly. The Lancaster Bombers of the British tried to saturate the entire city with incendiaries so their target was spread and the chances of survival better.

The value of survival was becoming questionable, anyhow. If you lived through the British raid at night the Americans would come tomorrow and continue their checkerboard destruction ... Dahlem ... Wilmersdorf ... Charlottenburg ... Köpenick.

People were fleeing Berlin by the tens of thousands, but where to go? Perhaps, Bruno Falkenstein thought, find a nice large cathedral and stay there. The Americans were sentimental about bombing churches. Perhaps they would get a rest tomorrow. Perhaps another part of the city would get it. Lord! The Americans had come for a solid month with three hundred bombers or more and the British had come in behind them.

Their beautiful beautiful street had become a rubbish pile, like the rest of Berlin. What the hell is the use of hoping, any more.

Frau Falkenstein’s mind was geared to more practical things. She sent the girls to the reservoir with buckets while she searched for something to eat. She was wily to the ways of survival, knew the short cuts around rationing, played the black market, knew how to hoard and barter.

Ironically, the postman delivered Falkenstein the latest issue of the
Berliner Illustrated
during the respite. They returned to the cellar for a meal of stale brockwurst and ersatz coffee. Falkenstein read the magazine by candlelight to soothe his frayed nerves. There was not a single mention of the destruction of the German cities. It continued to picture German victories, and, like the radio, promised that secret weapons would reverse the course of the war overnight.

Falkenstein grunted. Some fools at his bureau believed fervently in the secret weapons Goebbels had promised. He had believed in them once also. His mind ran back to the speech of Goebbels in the Sportspalast ...
“Do you want total war?”
And the masses answered with “heils.” Well, we are getting it now all right. After the V rockets failed in their promise to crush Britain, Falkenstein stopped believing in secret weapons. He longed to listen to the BBC; he knew many neighbors were daring it these days. He flipped the page. It showed the new skiing costumes expected at Garmisch in the coming winter. He threw the magazine on the floor and downed the last lead-like chunk of meat.

The air-raid sirens shrieked outside. The four of them undressed in total darkness and lay in their cots, their eyes opening with each blast. It was a big raid.

“I wish it were all over ... I wish it were all over,” he moaned to himself.

Ernestine grimaced at the irony of her father’s statement. Yes, everyone wished it was over. Father never wished it was over in the early days. She remembered his cries of delight, his boasts after Dunkirk and when Greece was conquered. He was proud to bursting when Gerd sent him letters from Paris.

Only since Stalingrad did they begin wishing it was over; then he began to think of Gerd’s safety. Yes, since Stalingrad the war became tiresome and only then did she hear the very first words that there had been a betrayal by Hitler.

... Stalingrad. That was the last time she had heard from Dietrich Rascher. More than a year had passed since then. Ernestine remembered the last letter from Dietrich, carried out by a flyer friend when they attempted to air-lift supplies to Stalingrad.

My Beloved Ernestine,

More than likely this is the last you shall ever hear from me. I am relieved to be able to write you this one time speaking freely. A comrade in the Air Force has promised to deliver this to you. But even if the letter is found it shall not matter much, for by the time anyone reads it, I shall be dead.

We are beaten. I do not have the “privilege” to surrender as does the regular army. As an SS officer I must take my own life. In the long run, I may be far better off than those poor devils around me. God only knows what will happen to them when they become prisoners of the Russians.

We are freezing cold. My boots become wet, then solid. The ends of my fingers have no feeling in them and I am half blind from the glare of the snow. We are starving. I am dizzy from the lack of food. It becomes a supreme effort to move for a few meters. Our ammunition is almost gone. We are outnumbered by hordes, and now we are being outfought.

No miracle can save us here at Stalingrad. Hitler exhorts us to perform in a superhuman effort, but we cannot respond. Furthermore, we have no great desire to respond any longer. So you see, we were not supermen all along ... only mortals.

Men here at Stalingrad speak openly about the betrayal by Hitler and the Nazis in a manner I have never heard from German lips before. In the last moments of life perhaps it is a good thing to protest. I have been a dedicated Nazi. I have loved Hitler, worshiped him. Yet, at this moment, I cannot find it in my heart to die gloriously. All I want is to sleep.

On the other hand, I cannot condone those around me now who berate Hitler. We all followed him with devotion. We all believed in the Nazis so long as Germany was winning. Only part of the fault belongs to Hitler and the Nazis. The rest of it belongs to the entire German people.

I cannot think of inspiring messages to leave you and Germany. I am just cold, hungry, and quite frightened. Now that I know that I am a mere mortal and Hitler is not my Maker, I have great fears as I go to meet my true Maker. I think He will Judge me harshly for some of the things I did in the SS.

What I really wish, Ernestine, is that I was nineteen again and you and I were sailing on the Wannsee and I could have turned our boat toward a canal and sailed to the North Sea and over the oceans to the South Seas ... forever and ever and ever.

My respects to your father and mother. My affection to Hilde, and my hopes that your brother, Gerd, returns safely from the war.

What little love I have given or received in this life has been yours. I fear it is not worth much.

Always,

Dietrich

Chapter Two

April 21, 1945

T
HE LITTLE STONE BRIDGE
fording the Oder River was damaged by gunfire during the German retreat. It now strained under a burden for which it had never been built.

An endless parade of Stalin tanks and other treaded monsters from the bottomless Russian arsenal buckled the bridge down to its foundations. Mammoth units of self-propelled artillery, antitank pieces, the new rocket launchers, and iron-wheeled horse-drawn gondola wagons and trucks bearing the name Studebaker and Chevrolet all joined the line waiting to cross. Horses, men, iron moved toward the final day in Berlin.

Colonel Igor Karlovy, chief of engineers of the Third White Russian Front, dived below the surface of the river to study the effects on the strained underpinnings of the bridge. He surfaced and swam for shore, where a waiting party of helping hands pulled him up the bank. He was surrounded by impatient consultants as he wiped himself dry and lit a cigarette. He dressed. Igor Karlovy was a powerful, muscled man though a bit below average in height. Blond hair, a trace of high cheekbones, and ice-blue eyes gave testament to a Tartar element in his ancestry centuries before. His naked torso revealed shrapnel wounds from another battle. Once his tunic was buttoned about his neck his appearance seemed more aged than thirty-six years. It was a face that had known much, felt much, suffered much. He carried obvious authority.

“The bridge will collapse. There is no possible way to reinforce it. Erosion has set in in the foundation.”

Field Marshal Popov’s personal aide, a nervous major, inquired, “How long will the bridge hold up?”

“Ask the bridge,” Karlovy answered.