The Kindly Ones Page 28

  Voss had left too, suddenly transferred to the AOK of Generaloberst von Kleist, whose Panzers had already passed the Ukrainian border and were charging toward Millerovo. I felt a little lonely. Bierkamp was absorbed in the reorganization of the Kommandos, some of which were to be dissolved in order to form the permanent structures of the SP and the SD in the Crimea; Seibert was getting ready for his own departure. With summer, the interior of the Crimea had become stifling, and I continued to take advantage of the beaches as much as possible. I went to visit Sebastopol, where one of our Kommandos had set to work: around the long harbor of the southern bay stretched a field of still-smoking ruins, haunted by exhausted and shocked civilians who were already being evacuated. Haggard, filthy kids ran between the soldier’s legs begging for bread; the Romanians especially responded by cuffing them or kicking their backsides. I went down to visit the underground bunkers of the harbor, where the Red Army had set up weapons and ammunition factories; most of them had been looted, or burned out by flame-throwers; sometimes too, during the final battle, Commissars, entrenched there or in caves under the cliffs, had blown themselves up with their men and the civilians they were sheltering, along with German soldiers who had advanced too far. But all the Soviet officers and high-ranking functionaries had been evacuated by submarine before the city fell; we had captured only soldiers and underlings. The bare mountaintops overlooking the immense northern bay, around the city, were covered with ruined fortifications; the steel housings of their 30.5-centimeter artillery had been crushed by our 80-centimeter shells, fired from giant howitzers mounted on rails; and their long twisted gun barrels lay on their sides, or else stood aimed straight at the sky. In Simferopol, AOK 11 was packing up; von Manstein, promoted to Generalfeldmarschall, was leaving with his army to finish off Leningrad. Of Stalingrad, of course, no one spoke at that time: it was still a secondary objective.

  In the beginning of August, the Einsatzgruppe went on the march. Our forces, reorganized into two Army Groups B and A, had just retaken Rostov after bitter street fighting, and the Panzers, having crossed the Don, were advancing into the Kuban Steppe. Bierkamp appointed me to the Vorkommando of the Gruppenstab and sent us, by Melitopol and then Rostov, to catch up with the First Panzer Army. Our little convoy quickly crossed the isthmus and the immense Trench of the Tatars, transformed by the Soviets into an antitank ditch, then veered off after Perekop to begin crossing the Nogai Steppe. The heat was terrible, I sweated profusely, the dust stuck to my face like a gray mask; but at dawn, soon after we left, subtle and magnificent colors altered the sky, slowly turning to blue, and I wasn’t unhappy. Our guide, a Tatar, regularly made the vehicles stop so he could pray; I let the other officers grumble and got out to stretch my legs and smoke. On both sides of the road, the rivers and streams were dry, and traced a network of ravined balki, carved deep into the steppe. We could see neither trees nor hills around; only the regularly spaced poles of the Anglo-Iranian telegraph line, built at the beginning of the century by Siemens, punctuated this dismal expanse. The well water was salty, the coffee tasted salty, the soup seemed to be full of salt; several officers, who had gorged on unripe melons, suffered bouts of diarrhea, which slowed down our march even more. After Mariupol we followed a bad coastal road to Taganrog and then Rostov. Hauptsturmführer Remmer, an officer from the Staatspolizei who was in charge of the Vorkommando, twice gave the order to stop the convoy, near immense beaches of pebbles and yellowing grass, so the men could rush into the water; sprawled on the burning pebbles, we dried in a few minutes; already it was time to get dressed and leave. In Rostov, our column was welcomed by Sturmbannführer Dr. Christmann, who was replacing Seetzen as the head of Sonderkommando 10a. He had just finished executing the Jewish population, in a ravine known as the Snakes, on the other side of the Don; he had also sent a Vorkommando to Krasnodar, which had fallen two days before, and where the Fifth Army Corps had seized a mountain of Soviet documents. I asked him to have them analyzed as quickly as possible and to send me any information concerning the functionaries and members of the Party, to complete the little confidential handbook that Seibert, in Simferopol, had entrusted to me for his replacement; it contained, printed in tiny typeface on extra-thin paper, the names, addresses, and often the telephone numbers of active Communists or of non-Party intellectuals, of scholars, teachers, writers, and well-known journalists, of functionaries, directors of State companies and kolkhozes or sovkhozes, for the entire region of Kuban-Caucasus; there were even lists of friends and family relations, physical descriptions, and some photographs. Christmann also informed us of the advance of the Kommandos: Sk 11, still under the command of Dr. Braune, a close friend of Ohlendorf’s, had just entered Maikop with the Thirteenth Panzer Division; Persterer, with his Sk 10b, was still waiting in Taman, but a Vorkommando from Ek 12 was already in Voroshilovsk, where the Gruppenstab was supposed to be based until Groznyi was taken; Christmann himself was getting ready, according to our preestablished plan, to move his Hauptkommando to Krasnodar. I saw almost nothing of Rostov; Remmer wanted to advance, and gave the order for departure as soon as the meal was over. After the Don, immense, spanned by one of the Engineer Corps’ floating pontoons, stretched kilometers of fields of ripe corn, which little by little died out in the vast desert steppe of the Kuban; farther on, to the east, ran the long irregular line of lakes and swamps, interrupted by reservoirs maintained by colossal dams of the Manych River, which for some geographers marks the borderline between Europe and Asia. The leading columns of the First Panzer Army, which were advancing in motorized squares with the tanks surrounding the trucks and artillery, could be seen fifty kilometers away: immense pillars of dust in the blue sky, followed by the lazy curtain of black smoke coming from the burned villages. In their wake, we met only the odd Rollbahn convoy or some reinforcements. In Rostov, Christmann had shown us a copy of von Kleist’s now-famous dispatch: In front of me, no enemies; behind me, no reserves. And the emptiness of this endless steppe was quite enough to terrify anyone. We progressed with difficulty: the tanks had transformed the roads into seas of fine sand; our vehicles often got stuck in it and, when we set foot outside, we sometimes sank up to our knees, as if it were mud. Finally, before Tikhoretsk, appeared the first fields of sunflowers, yellow expanses turned toward the sky, presaging water. Then began the paradise of the Kuban Cossacks. The road now passed through fields of corn, wheat, millet, barley, tobacco, and melons; there were also stretches of thistles tall as horses, crowned with pink and purple; and beyond all that a vast sky, pale and soft, cloudless. The Cossack villages were rich; each isba had its plum trees, its grape vines, a farmyard, a few pigs. When we stopped to eat we were warmly welcomed, we were brought fresh bread, omelettes, grilled pork chops, green onions, and cold water from the wells. Then came Krasnodar, where we found Lothar Heimbach, the Vorkommandoführer. Remmer ordered a three-day halt, to discuss and rapidly review the captured documents, which Christmann would have translated after he arrived. Dr. Braune also came up from Maikop for our meetings. After that our Vorkommando headed for Voroshilovsk.

  The city rose up in the distance, spread out on a high plateau surrounded by fields and orchards. The road here was lined with overturned vehicles, wrecked heavy weaponry and tanks; on open stretches of track, in the distance, hundreds of freight cars were still burning brightly. In old times this city was called Stavropol, which in Greek means “the city of the Cross,” or rather “the city of the Crossroads”; it had been established at the junction of the old roads to the north, and at one time, in the nineteenth century, during the campaign to pacify the mountain tribes, it had served as a military base for the Russian forces. Today it was a little provincial town, sleepy and peaceful, which hadn’t grown fast enough to be disfigured, like so many others, by hideous Soviet suburbs. A long two-lane boulevard framing a mall of plane trees climbs up from the train station; toward the bottom, I noticed a fine Art Nouveau pharmacy, with an entryway and bay windows in the shape of circles, their panes bl
own out by the detonations. The Kommandostab from Ek 12 was also arriving, and they put us up temporarily at the Kavkaz Hotel. Sturmbannführer Dr. Müller, head of the Einsatzkommando, was supposed to have prepared for the Gruppenstab’s arrival, but no arrangement had yet been decided on; everything was still in flux, since the general staff of Army Group A was also expected, and Oberst Hartung, from the Feldkommandantur, was taking his time in assigning quarters: the Einsatzkommando already had its offices in the House of the Red Army, opposite the NKVD, but there was talk about setting up the Gruppenstab with the OKHG. Yet the Vorkommando hadn’t been idle. They had immediately gassed, in a Saurer truck, more than six hundred patients from a psychiatric hospital who might have caused difficulties; they had tried to shoot some of them, but that had caused an incident: one of the lunatics had started running in circles, and the Hauptscharführer who was trying to kill him had finally pulled the trigger when one of his colleagues was in the line of fire; the bullet, passing through the madman’s head, had wounded the noncom in the arm. Some Jewish leaders, summoned to the old offices of the NKVD, had also been gassed. Finally, the Vorkommando had shot a number of Soviet prisoners outside of town, near a hidden storehouse of aircraft fuel; the bodies had been thrown into the underground storage tanks.

  Einsatzkommando 12 wasn’t supposed to stay in Voroshilovsk, since it had been assigned to the zone that the Russians call the KMV, the Kavkazskie Mineralnye Vodi or “Mineral Waters of the Caucasus,” a string of little towns famous for their curative springs and their spas, scattered among volcanoes; the Kommando would move to Piatigorsk as soon as the region was occupied. Dr. Bierkamp and the Gruppenstab arrived a week after we did; the Wehrmacht had finally assigned us living quarters and offices, in a separate wing of the large complex of buildings housing the OKHG: they had built a wall to separate us from them, but we shared the same mess, which allowed us to celebrate together with the military the ascent, by a PK of the First Alpine Division, of the summit of Mount Elbruz, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. Dr. Müller and his Kommando had gone, leaving a Teilkommando under the command of Werner Kleber to finish cleaning up Voroshilovsk. Bierkamp was still awaiting the arrival of Brigadeführer Gerret Korsemann, the new HSSPF for the Kuban-Caucasus. As for Seibert’s replacement, he still hadn’t arrived, and Hauptsturmführer Prill was filling in for the interim. Prill sent me on a mission to Maikop.

  A perpetual summer haze kept you from seeing the mountains of the Caucasus until you were at their feet. I crossed the foothills, passing the towns of Armavir and Labinskaya; as soon as you left Cossack territory, flags, green with a white crescent, burgeoned on the houses, raised by the Muslims to bid us welcome. The town of Maikop, one of the great oil centers of the Caucasus, was nestled right against the mountains, crossed by the Bielaya, a deep river above which rises the old city, perched atop tall chalk cliffs. Before the suburbs, the road ran alongside a railroad cluttered with thousands of cars, loaded with goods that the Soviets had not had time to evacuate. Then you crossed a bridge, still intact, and entered the city, a grid of long, straight streets, all identical, running alongside a Park of Culture where the plaster statues of heroes of labor slowly went on crumbling. Braune, a man with rather equine features, his large moon-face surmounted by a bulbous forehead, welcomed me eagerly: I sensed he was reassured to see again one of the last of “Ohlendorf’s men” still left in the Group, even though he himself was awaiting his replacement from one week to the next. Braune was worried about the oil installations in Neftegorsk: the Abwehr, just before taking the city, had managed to infiltrate a special unit, the Shamil, made up of mountain peoples from the Caucasus and disguised as a special battalion of the NKVD, to try to seize the oil wells intact; but the mission had failed and the Russians had dynamited the installations under the Panzers’ noses. Already, though, our specialists were working to repair them, and the first vultures of Kontinental-Öl were making their appearance. These bureaucrats, all connected to Göring’s Four-Year Plan, benefited from the support of Arno Schickedanz, the Reichskommissar-designate of the Kuban-Caucasus. “You know of course that Schickedanz owes his appointment to government minister Rosenberg, who was his high-school classmate in Riga. But then he had a falling out with his former schoolmate. I’ve heard that it’s Herr Körner, Reichsmarschall Göring’s Staatssekretär, who brought the two together; and Schickedanz has been appointed to the board of directors of KontiÖl, the holding company set up by the Reichsmarschall to exploit the oil fields of the Caucasus and Baku.” In Braune’s opinion, when the Caucasus came under civilian control, we could expect an even more chaotic and unmanageable situation than in the Ukraine, where Gauleiter Koch did as he pleased, refusing to cooperate either with the Wehrmacht and the SS or with his own ministry. “The only positive point for the SS is that Schickedanz appointed SS officers as Generalkommissars for Vladikavkaz and Azerbaijan: in those districts, at least, it will make relations easier.”

  I spent three days working with Braune, helping him prepare documents and draw up reports. My only distraction consisted of going out to drink bad local wine in the courtyard of a canteen run by a wrinkled old mountain native. Still I made the acquaintance, not entirely by chance, of a Belgian officer, the Kommandeur of the Wallonia Legion, Lucien Lippert. I had in fact wanted to meet Léon Degrelle, the head of the Rexist movement, who was fighting in the area; Brasillach, in Paris, had spoken to me about him with wild lyricism. But the Hauptmann from the Abwehr whom I asked laughed in my face: “Degrelle? Everyone wants to see him. He’s probably the most famous noncom in our army. But he’s at the front, you know, and it’s pretty hot up there. General Rupp was almost killed last week in a surprise attack. The Belgians have lost a lot of people.” Instead, he introduced me to Lippert, a lanky, smiling young officer wearing worn, patched feldgrau a little too big for him. I took him out to talk about Belgian politics under the apple tree at my canteen. Lippert was a career soldier, an artilleryman; he had agreed to sign up for the Legion out of hostility to Bolshevism, but he remained a true patriot, and complained that despite promises to the contrary, the Legionnaires had been forced to wear a German uniform. “The men were furious. Degrelle had trouble calming things down.” Degrelle, when he had signed up, had thought that his political role would earn him officer’s stripes, but the Wehrmacht had refused outright: no experience. Lippert still laughed about it. “Fine, so he left anyway, as an ordinary rifleman. To tell the truth, he didn’t have much of a choice, things weren’t going so well for him in Belgium.” Since then, despite an initial muddle in Gromovo-Balka, he fought courageously and had been promoted in combat. “The annoying thing is that he takes himself for some sort of political officer, you know? He wants to go himself to discuss the Legion’s engagement, and that’s not right. He’s just a noncom, after all.” Now he was dreaming of transferring the Legion to the Waffen-SS. “He met your General Steiner, last fall, and that completely turned his head. But I say no. If he does that, I’ll ask to be replaced.” His face had become very serious. “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the SS. But I’m a soldier, and in Belgium soldiers don’t mix in politics. That’s not our role. I’m a royalist, I’m a patriot, I’m an anti-Communist, but I’m not a National Socialist. When I signed up, I was assured, at the Palace, that this decision was compatible with my oath of loyalty to the king, and I still don’t consider myself absolved from that oath, no matter what they say. The rest, all the political games with the Flemish, that’s not my problem. But the Waffen-SS is not a regular branch, it’s a Party formation. Degrelle says that only those who have fought alongside Germany will have a right to speak, after the war, and have a place in the new European order. I agree with that. But there are limits.” I smiled: despite his vehemence, I liked this Lippert, he was an upright, honest man. I poured him some more wine and changed the subject: “You must be the first Belgians ever to fight in the Caucasus.”—“Don’t be so sure!” he laughed, and rapidly sketched out the fantastic adventures o
f Don Juan van Halen, a hero of the Belgian revolution of 1830, a half-Flemish, half-Spanish nobleman, and a former Napoleonic officer, who because of his liberal convictions had landed in the prisons of the Inquisition in Madrid, in the reign of Ferdinand VII. He had escaped and ended up, God knows how, in Tiflis, where General Yermolov, the head of the Russian army in the Caucasus, had offered him a command. “He fought against the Chechens,” Lippert laughed, “imagine that.” I laughed with him, I found him very likeable. But he had to leave; AOK 17 was preparing the offensive on Tuapse, to take control of the pipeline terminals, and the Legion, attached to the Ninety-seventh Alpine Division, would have its role to play. As we parted I wished him good luck. But though Lippert, like his compatriot Van Halen, left the Caucasus alive, luck unfortunately deserted him a little farther on: near the end of the war, I learned that he had been killed in February 1944, during the Cherkasy breakthrough. The Wallonia Legion had been transferred to the Waffen-SS in June 1943, but Lippert hadn’t wanted to leave his men without a Kommandeur, and was still waiting for a replacement eight months later. Degrelle, on the other hand, survived it all; during the final debacle, he abandoned his men on the road to Lübeck and fled to Spain in Speer’s private plane; despite being sentenced to death in absentia, he was never really bothered. Poor Lippert would have been ashamed.