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One day, the twelve year-old Wolff had thought, I will wear that uniform. And I will fight the Führer’s enemies. I will die, if need be, for the man who has made my country great again. I will die for my God!
A fanfare of trumpets had heralded the arrival of Hitler. Beside him were two men whom Kurt hadn’t recognised. (They were Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Central Security Office.) But he was to know them well in the years to come.
Then all the lights had been switched off. Snap. Total darkness. And a single beam of light picking out the figure of Adolf Hitler. And spotlights finding the SS men in silver and black as they lowered their drawn swords.
Kurt didn’t understand a lot of what the Führer said — perhaps he shouldn’t even have been in the hall — but it was more exciting than anything he had heard anywhere else. A super breed of men was emerging; one day he might be one of them. They would dominate the world, they would eradicate weakness and treachery, Bolshevism (whatever that was), and the rich capitalists (whatever that meant) who stole the hard-earned monies of the ordinary German. Forget Versailles (wherever that was). Germany would be great again.
Tears formed in Kurt Wolff’s eyes as he witnessed what was in fact the official recognition of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
From then on it was the only unit to which Kurt Wolff ever wanted to belong.
* * *
The Leibstandarte first came into being on March 17th, 1933 as a personal bodyguard to Hitler before his power was absolute, when the brown-shirted SA and the black-shirted SS — derived from Schutzstaffeln, meaning Protection Squads — were competing, and the Communists and Nationalists were still to be reckoned with.
One of the first duties of the Leibstandarte under the command of Sepp Dietrich was to shoot the leaders of the SA rounded up by the SS, now a unified force under the leadership of Himmler, in the summer of 1934. The purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
The SS became an independent unit within the Nazi Party and the cream of them, the Leibstandarte, were honoured with a special oath of allegiance: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer, and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”
When the German Army reoccupied the Rhineland in March, 1936 — Hitler had announced conscription a year earlier — it was spear-headed by the Leibstandarte. Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich was under way; and he had made it clear that the elite of his dream was the ideological SS, and that the kernel of the elite was the Leibstandarte.
At the time of the Rhineland occupation Kurt Wolff was fifteen. And, like the other boys at his school, he was intoxicated with the deeds of these fair-haired heroes, the embodiment of Himmler’s schemes for racial purity, these supermen in their black overcoats and breeches adorned with silver, their boots as bright as mirrors. Had they not cowered the French Army by their very presence in Saarbrucken?
By the time the Leibstandarte, attached to the 2nd Panzer Division of the 16th Corps, had moved into Austria two years later, and the Czech Sudentenland eight months after that, Kurt was approaching call-up age.
But two factors stood in the way of Kurt’s enrolment into the Leibstandarte. In the first place his father, a Major in the German Cavalry in the First World War, wanted him to join the Fourth Cavalry Regiment. To become a ‘real soldier’ instead of an ‘asphalt soldier’ as the Wehrmacht, the conventional armed forces, termed the SS which was now a fully-fledged force of police troops. ‘Asphalt’ because they spent so much time stamping the parade ground.
Kurt loved his father, a prosperous landowner with extensive vineyards in the Main valley of north-east Bavaria, but he could not understand his father’s attitude towards the SS.
“What do you have against them?” he would ask as they sat at dinner in the great yellow-bricked house overlooking the ranks of vines heavy with fat green grapes. “They’re the best soldiers in the world.”
His father, grey-haired, monocled, a widower, would sip a goblet of white wine and reply: “They’re not soldiers, Kurt, they’re policemen.”
“Then why did Hitler send them into the Sudetenland before the soldiers?”
His father never had much of an answer to that. Instead he would evade the issue by describing the SS as the guinea pigs of Himmler’s racial theories. “Aryan manhood! We were good enough to fight in 1914–18 without such experiments. And we nearly won,” he would say waving his cigar at Kurt. “Never forget that. If the Americans hadn’t come in we would have won.”
But the First World War was merely history to Kurt. “But the Führer has stated that one day the SS will fight on the battlefields.”
Wearily his father asked: “What battlefields? Haven’t there been enough battlefields already?”
“The battlefields in The Struggle,” his son replied. Of course there would be battlefields. They had been told so in their history lessons which encompassed the future as much as the past.
Usually his father left it at that and Kurt was relieved, because one of his friends had once repeated a remark made by his father derogatory to Hitler and next day his friend’s father had been arrested by two civilians in long leather coats. Not, of course, that he would sneak on his own father.
Once in their town house in Munich, the seat of the Nazi party, his father said: “I want you to be a soldier, Kurt. But in an army committed to peace.”
“The Führer has said that armies for the preparation of peace do not exist — they exist for triumphant exertion in war,” his son quoted.
And there Kurt Wolff senior left it. But he didn’t abandon his plans for his son to enter the Cavalry. Although the second factor standing between Kurt and the Leibstandarte also affected his father’s ambitions for him.
Kurt was nearly six feet tall. But he was also physically weak and the knowledge embittered him.
His ribs protruded from his chest like the ridges of a washing board, his limbs lacked muscle and his lungs wheezed with asthma. However, he was never set upon because the bullies respected his flinty character. Even at seventeen Kurt Wolff had presence.
But sometimes, standing in front of the mirror in his room adorned with Nazi insignia, and gazing at his thin body, he felt like weeping. Although, of course, he never did.
When the Germans launched their Blitzkreig on Poland in the autumn of 1939, Kurt made a determined effort to improve his physique and his health. He took up weight-lifting, he tried to barrel out his rib-cage with chest-expanders, he devoured enormous steaks and went climbing in the mountains south of his home.
Then secretly he tried to enlist in the Leibstandarte. Because his credentials were impressive, because he was tall enough — minimum height five feet and eleven inches — he got as far as a medical. But the elite of the SS required supermen — a filling in a tooth could disqualify a candidate. And when the doctors saw his scrawny body they shook their heads.
But the ultimate humiliation was rejection by the Cavalry. Not because of his physique but because of his asthma.
The possibility of a desk job within the Wehrmacht remained.
Kurt fled to a health clinic in the Bavarian Alps.
There for six gruelling months, under the supervision of an ageing athlete named Muller, he punished himself.
He hung from wall-bars until it seemed as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets; he ran hundreds of miles along mountain paths; he exercised with the chest-expanders until the springs broke; he swam thirty lengths a day in an ice-cold pool; he boxed with professional pugilists so that his eyes were permanently blacked for the entire six months; he lifted weights so heavy that Muller warned him about the dangers of a hernia; every morning at dawn he stood on the balcony of the health centre and breathed deeply of the frosted mountain air; he climbed ropes and vaulted leather-topped boxes and he performed press-ups until he collapsed on the floor gasping with pain.
He ate steak and fish, cheese and eggs, and fresh vegetables and slept precisely eight hours a night. He walked always with his chest thrust forward and his belly pulled in. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t touch liquor, and he didn’t visit the whores in the nearby town like some of the young men who left the health clinic with new diseases instead of cures.
And he won.
When he returned to war-time Munich — Germany was now at war with Britain and France — he was hardly recognisable as the weakling who had left six months earlier.
The bellows of his chest no longer wheezed: his back was straight, his ribs were finely muscled, his biceps bulged the arms of his old suits, his face was still pale but there was health in his lips and eyes.
He immediately reapplied to join the Leibstandarte, and kept out of his father’s way for a week.
When he was accepted he went to a bar and drank a beer and a Schnapps, and angrily brushed at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket as joy expanded inside him.
While he was being trained and crammed with Nazi doctrinaire, the Leibstandarte were blazing trails across Holland and France as the demoralised Allies fell back to the final withdrawal at Dunkirk.
At college Kurt had always shown a flare for engineering and he knew more about armoured vehicles than many a Wehrmacht general. After his initial training, the toughest in Germany, he went on a tank course and astonished his instructors with his knowledge of the Mark IV.
His expertise with armoured vehicles kept him in Germany until early in 1941. when he was commissioned. All the time he fretted for action and, after pestering superior officers with requests for a posting, he finally joined the Leibstandarte fighting in Greece.
By June 1941 Obersturmführer Kurt Wolff was in command of a Mark IV poised for the invasion of Russia. The tank was one of 3,580 on the banks of the River Bug, supplemented by 7,184 guns, 600,000 assorted vehicles, 2,000 aircraft and 750,000 horses.
At 3.15 am on June 22nd the guns opened up, the tanks rumbled forward and the bewildered Russians were overwhelmed.
The Leibstandarte captured a key bridgehead over the Dnieper and headed triumphantly towards the Black Sea, slowing down as summer storms turned roads and steppe into glue.
One morning in July, with the armoured column bogged down in black mud, Wolff and a party of six men were sent into a wood of silver birch to smoke out a harrassing detachment of the retreating Red Army.
Most of the men never saw the Russian detachment.
Two grenades hurled them to the ground. Then, as they tried to crawl for cover, the Russians picked them off among the skeletal, dripping trees with rifle and machine-gun fire.
One bullet ricocheted off Wolff’s steel helmet, another hit him in the belly, and a third bared his cheekbone.
At first there was no pain, just a wave of shock. Wolff grabbed a stick-grenade from the outstretched hand of a dead man beside him, pulled out the china pin, counted to three and hurled it in the direction of the gunfire. A sheet of flame. Silence. Then the cries of wounded men.
With one hand pressed to his belly Wolff inspected his comrades. Only two were still alive. He began to pull one of them to the comparative safety of a pile of sawed logs — as the Russian riflemen opened up again.
Wolff, blood pouring down his cheek, dragged the first man behind the logs. Then returned for the second. On the way back he prised a Schmeisser from the fingers of a dead corporal sitting against the trunk of a birch tree as though on a picnic. Then Wolff collapsed, feigning death, which in any case didn’t seem far away.
The shooting stopped.
After a few moments he heard the snap of twigs as the Soviet troops cautiously approached. There were four of them. The leader kicked the first body with his boot and put a bullet through the head just in case.
As the crack of the shot lost itself in the trees, Wolff squeezed the trigger of the Schmeisser and watched with terrible fascination as the four Russians doubled up and died. They were the first men he had killed. They were to be the last for a long time.
He was dragging the body of the other wounded German towards the pile of logs when reinforcements arrived. He collapsed at their feet.
He was transferred to a military hospital in Poland where the doctors shook their heads as they surveyed the wound in his belly. “He will never fight again,” they murmured. “If he lives, that is.”
But they reckoned without the singleness of purpose that had transformed a weakling destined for a desk in Berlin to a member of Hitler’s elite fighting unit.
Slowly, very slowly, he recovered and was awarded the Knight’s Cross ‘for his courage in single-handedly wiping out a unit of enemy troops.’
Then he was posted to a training camp where he worked on the new Tiger tanks fitted with tracks 2½ feet wide, anti-magnetic armour and adaptations to enable their engines to start in sub-zero Russia.
And all the time Wolff, still deemed unfit for active service, fretted to be back with the Leibstandarte proper as he read of the exploits of his heroes, Sepp Dietrich who answered only to Hitler, Jochen Peiper, the hero of Kharkov, and his swashbuckling comrade Kurt Meyer known as Panzermeyer.
By this time the SS Panzer Divisions had been formed under the command of an SS general. They were the most feared troops in Russia and Kurt Wolff yearned to be with them.
Once again he harangued his superiors until he was finally allowed to go before a medical board. By this time the SS were desperate for manpower — they had taken volunteers from Holland, Spain, Sweden, France (even fifty British) and ethnic Germans from the Balkans.
Wolff was pronounced fit.
In the early summer of 1943 he returned to the Russian Front where the Germans were on the defensive after Stalingrad, the biggest defeat inflicted on the Germans since the Napoleonic Wars.
But Wolff, sheltered from reality by his wounds, could not conceive of defeat. He hadn’t been brutalised. Nor, because of the physical defects of his teens, had he witnessed the early massacres and executions in Europe.
He was still an idealist.
He was the stuff heroes are made of.
He was the obvious choice for Grey Fox.
VII (#ulink_bdae6473-3cd3-5bce-9ad3-babc7a31fa53)
Wolff’s second test took place in a ruined farmhouse 150 miles behind the sagging German front-line.
He had been pulled back from the Viking — to which he had been seconded to patch up broken-down-tanks to an assembly camp prior to rejoining the Leibstandarte.
He was quartered in the farmhouse in one of the few rooms that still had a roof over it. (The farmhouse and the surrounding village had been razed by the Germans during the great advance.)
He shared it with two Wehrmacht officers, a Captain Steiner and a Major Wenck.
As he unpacked they remarked on the Runic flashes of lightning on his steel helmet and the death’s head on his peaked cap.
“So we have a member of one of the famous Panzer divisions as our guest,” remarked Wenck, unshaved, broken-nosed, a little drunk.
“Leibstandarte,” Wolff said briefly, throwing a grey blanket onto the crude wooden bed.
“Ah, the Führer’s bodyguard,” said Steiner, tall and arrogantly handsome except for the bags under his eyes.
Wolff didn’t reply. He lay on the bed, lit a Russian cigarette and stared at the ceiling.
“He’s certainly going to need one soon,” Wenck said. “The way things are going.
Wolff ignored him.
Steiner asked: “Been on the Eastern Front long?”
“Not long,” Wolff replied.
“Still think we’re going to win?”
“Of course,” Wolff told him. “The Russians have overextended themselves.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe in ultimate victory.”
“I’m glad someone does,” Steiner said. He stood up, over six feet tall; he would have made a good SS officer, Wolff noted, except for his mentality. “Hungry?”
Wolff who was starving said: “I could eat something.”
“And drink something,” Wenck remarked. “A little vodka will do you good,” like a doctor prescribing treatment.
They went downstairs to the dining room. One corner of the roof was bared to the grey sky, now darkening. On the pinewood table stood two flasks of vodka, two bottles of Georgian wine, three green-glass tumblers, three tins of corned beef, a bowl of beetroot soup and some hunks of black bread. A log fire burned in the grate.
They were served by two plump-breasted Ukranian girls whom the two Wehrmacht officers eyed lasciviously.
“Mine’s the one with the thick legs,” Steiner said. “He,” pointing at Wenck, “out-ranked me. But she knows a trick or two, that one.” And to Wolff: “You can give her a tumble if you like. Get the dirty water off your chest. But don’t tire her out too much,” he said, sitting down and pouring vodka into the three tumblers.
Steiner stood up and clicked his heels. “To the Führer.”
They tossed back the vodka and Wolff felt it burn its way down his throat and drop like molten lead in his stomach. He poured himself a glass of wine to dilute it and thought: “I’ll probably get drunk but what the hell.”
In Poland he had drunk in moderation and had slept with a couple of girls, one of whom he had loved a little. But he had never abandoned his keep-fit regime, exercising when the hole in his belly had barely healed.
Steiner refilled the glasses while the girls, black-haired and gypsy-faced, hovered in the background.
