The Saint Peter’s Plot

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“But don’t get taken in by them,” Wenck said gesturing at the girls with his glass. “When the Ivans get here they’ll have our balls just like that,” brandishing a carving knife.

Wolff said: “You seem very certain that the Russians will break through.”

“Will break through? Will?” The broken-nosed officer laughed theatrically. “They’re going through us like shit through a goose.” He stood up. “Anyway, my idealistic young friend, another toast. To the Leibstandarte, the elite within the elite.”

Wolff could hardly refuse the toast.

“What about you?” Steiner asked. “Do you have a toast?”

The vodka was slipping down easily now. Wolff stood up and raised his replenished glass. “To victory.”

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Wenck.

They drank.

Wenck snapped his fingers at the two girls. They opened the tins and placed the squares of meat, glistening with jelly, in front of the three officers.

At the same time Steiner slipped his hand up the skirt of one of them and said: “That’s my girl. No pants. Always at the ready like a good soldier.”

They ate hungrily, drinking more vodka washed down with the red wine. “Does Dietrich feed you like this?” Steiner asked, stuffing black bread into his mouth.

“He gets the best there is,” Wolff replied.

“But of course,” Wenck said. “Reichsführer Himmler sees to that.”

“On the contrary,” Wolff replied. “The Führer sees to it.”

“But of course I forgot. The Leibstandarte are very special. They get cake and we get black bread.”

“At least we’re soldiers,” Steiner said, eyeing Wolff speculatively. “Not policemen in fancy dress.”

But Wolff, accustomed like all SS to the jealousy of the Wehrmacht, refused to be drawn. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said equably, “that the policemen are always in action where the fighting is the toughest.”

Steiner and Wenck now appeared to be very drunk and Wolff was far from sober. Frosted air breathed through the gap in the roof but none of them felt it.

Wenck said: “And now for some brandy,” clapping his hands.

One of the girls produced a bottle of straw-coloured-liquor and poured coffee that tasted of cardboard.

Steiner drank some of the brandy, grimaced and leaned across the table. “Have you been to Berlin lately, Kurt?”

Wolff shook his head.

“Karl was there three weeks ago, weren’t you, Karl,” to Wenck.

“I was. A strange city these days.” His voice was slurred. “Full of rumours. And Plots …” He stood up and walked to the fire where he stood warming his back; Steiner and Wolff sat in two easy chairs, holed by cigarette burns, on either side. “Full of plots,” Wenck repeated.

“What sort of plots?” Wolff asked.

Wenck said to Steiner: “Should I tell him?”

“Why not?” Carelessly as though alcohol had dissipated all caution.

“I don’t know …”

“Out with it for God’s sake, man,” Wolff snapped. “We’re not schoolboys.”

“But an SS officer …”

Steiner interruped. “Wenck is talking of plots against the Führer.”

“I don’t believe it,” Wolff said immediately.

Wenck shrugged and drank some more brandy, “Some of the generals are not happy.”

“They never have been,” Wolff said.

“There has already been one attempt,” Steiner remarked.

“Attempt at what?”

“Attempt to finish off the Führer. At Borisov in 1941. There will be others.”

“And they will fail,” Wolff said, standing up and stretching. The girl with the thick legs looked at him expectantly. “I think I’ll turn in. I’ve heard enough idiot talk for one day.”

Wenck said: “It’s not only Wehrmacht officers who are involved.”

“If you’re implying that the SS is involved …” A cold hatred was beginning to replace Wolff’s indulgence. These two men were nothing more than traitors. “I think,” he said to Wenck, “that you’d better take that back.”

Wenck belched. “Not everyone is blind like you, Hauptsturmführer.” He turned and threw his glass into the flames. “I’ll wager that if you knew the end was near you’d change your tune. If you finally realised that a madman was sending men to their deaths when all was lost then you’d throw in your lot with the generals.”

Wolff drove his knee into Wenck’s crotch. And, as he bent forward with a thick cry of pain, raised the blade of his hand for the killer rabbit punch at the base of the neck.

Steiner intercepted the blow. “For Christ’s sake, Wolff, he’s drunk.”

Wolff turned and hit the taller man in the solar plexus, but his fist encountered hard muscle. In the background the two girls twittered anxiously.

While Wolff and Steiner struggled, Wenck painfully straightened up. “All right,” he shouted, “I apologise.”

Wolff relaxed, disengaged himself from Steiner. Then he took his pistol from its holster, pointed it at Wenck who was retching into the fire and said: “I want more than an apology.”

Steiner said: “For Christ’s sake put that thing away.”

Wolff turned the gun on Steiner. “Shut your filthy mouth.” And to Wenck: “Stand up straight or you’ll choke on your own vomit.”

Steiner said: “You’ll be court-martialled for this.”

“A dead man can’t give evidence.”

“But I will.”

“You’ll be dead as well.”

Wenck, his face white, sweat beading his forehead said: “What do you want?”

“I would like,” Wolff said, “to hear you repeat the Leibstandarte oath of allegiance to Hitler,” and turning to Steiner: “You too.”

Steiner shrugged. “Very well if it pleases you.”

“It does,” Wolff said. “Very much.”

Together the two officers intoned the oath after Wolff.

Wolff raised his arm in the Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler.”

“Heil Hitler,” they said.

* * *

When he had gone up to the bedroom Steiner said the Wenck: “He did well.”

“Too well,” Wenck said, putting a hand to his aching crotch.

“He passed with flying colours,” the Captain said. “One more test now. The worst. Poor bastard.”

“What I want to know,” Wenck said, “is why I get a knee in the crotch and you only get a punch in the gut.”

“A matter of rank, Sturmbannführer,” Steiner told him. “A mere Captain is only worth a blow in the belly whereas a Major deserves a kick in the balls.”

* * *

Snow was falling when Wolff’s third and last test took place in the winter of ’43.

Winter was the Russians’ ally, the Germans’ enemy. The Russians revelled in it, their white-clad troops covering phenomenal distances on skis. And they were always on the attack, Cossack cavalry suddenly materialising from behind veils of falling snow, Stalin tanks splintering the ice beneath the snow, guns lighting the dusk as shadows filled shell-holes on the desolate steppe.

One morning in late November Wolff was fed with information about a minor counter-attack aimed at rescuing a pocket of German troops cut off by the Russians.

That night, while Wolff lay sleeping in a cottage, a three-man raiding party entered the village where the Germans were camped, took him prisoner — helpless in his sleeping bag — tied him to a sled, and took him through the snow-flying night to a deserted mill ten miles from the village.

The interrogation was conducted by candlelight.

“We know there is going to be a counter attack. From what direction will it come? At what time?” All in broken German.

Wolff quoted regulations about interrogation of prisoners, gave his name and number and nothing more.

At first they roughed him up a bit. Knocking him down as, hands tied behind his back, he stood rigidly to attention as he had once stood on the parade ground of the Lichterfelde Barracks in Berlin.

When he was on the ground they kicked him.

Wolff stared up at his captors but saw only eyes gleaming in the candlelight in their woollen snow-masks.

“At what time? Where?”

Then they stripped off his outer clothing, bound his feet and dumped him outside in the snow where the temperature was —5, even lower with the Chill Factor created by the wind whining over the steppe.

It had stopped snowing and the moon shone through wounds in the clouds. Wolff struggled with the rope binding his wrists and ankles but soon the cold froze his limbs.

Then they carried him back into the mill and dumped him into a bath of hot water where he experienced the agony that only those who have immersed frost-bitten limbs in hot water can appreciate.

“Where? When?”

Name and number.

They shrugged. “You are being very foolish. Tell us what we want to know and we will let you go. If you don’t …”

Wolff who knew about Russian atrocities — they had once decapitated some Germans and paraded their heads on spikes — prepared himself to die.

He thought of his father. Of the ranks of vines with their fat grapes. Of Munich. Of a girl in Poland. Of the ageing athlete, Muller, who had made a man of him. Thank God for Muller who had given him the stamina to resist.

They then removed two fingernails from one hand with a pair of pliers.

“Where? When?”

Name and number. Fighting the cold blackness that threatened to envelop him.

They stood back and considered him, weighing the problem of all torturers: not to go too far: not to defeat the object of the interrogation.

Only two of them did the talking. The third, whose name was Wenck, stood in the background, arms folded across his chest.