скачать книгу бесплатно
Rastenburg
5th January 1943
Dear Julius,
The officer who will give you this letter will be able to get you out of your predicament, fly you out of the Kessel and eventually into hospital back in Berlin. You have a stark and terrible decision to make. If you stay, our mother and, you know this to be true, more especially our father will be heartbroken. You, his eldest son, have always been his lodestone, the one to whom he is naturally drawn, from whom he derives his energy and now, since his retirement, in who he has invested all his hope. He would be a broken man without you in his life.
If you leave, your men will not despise you but you will despise yourself. You will bear the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the chosen one. This is possibly, and only you can answer this question, reparable damage. Whatever happens in our father’s mind will not be.
I cannot believe I am having to deliver the burden of this choice to you in your desperate circumstances. In earlier attempts I tried to dress it up nicely, a temptation for Julius, but it refused to be pretty. It is an ugly choice. For my part, all I can say is that, whatever you decide, you are always my brother and I have never felt that there’s any better man living.
Karl
Voss buttoned his tunic, put on his coat and went out under the icicle fringes of his hut into the frozen air. His boots rang on the hard, snow-packed ground. He entered Restricted Area I and went straight to the Security Command post from where he knew SS Colonel Weiss would be running his brutal régime. The other soldiers looked at him as he entered. Nobody came willingly into the Security Command post. Nobody ever wanted to talk to SS Colonel Weiss. He was shown straight in. Weiss sat behind his desk in a state of livid surprise, his white skin even whiter against the deep black of his uniform, his crimson stepped scar from his eye to cheek redder. Voss’s nerve ricocheted around his stomach looking for a way out.
‘What can I do for you, Captain Voss?’
‘A personal matter, sir.’
‘Personal?’ Weiss asked himself; he didn’t normally deal with the personal.
‘I believe we reached a very special understanding between each other last February and that is why I have come to you with this personal matter.’
‘Sit,’ said Weiss, as if he was a dog. ‘You look ill, Captain.’
‘Lost my appetite, sir,’ said Voss, lowering himself into a chair on shaky thighs. ‘You know…the situation with the Sixth Army…is traumatic for everybody.’
‘The Führer will resolve the problem. We will win the day, Captain. You will see,’ said Weiss, giving him a wary look, already at work on the subtext of the words.
‘My brother is in the Kessel, sir. He is extremely sick.’
‘Haven’t his men taken him to the hospital for treatment?’
‘They have, but his condition did not respond to the treatment they have available in the field hospital there. He asked to be taken back to his division. I believe his condition is only treatable outside the Kessel.’
Weiss said nothing. The fingers he ran over his scarred cheek had well-cared for nails, glossy, packed with protein but tinged blue from underneath.
‘Where are you quartered, Captain?’ asked Weiss after a long pause.
It caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure where he was quartered any more. Numbers tinkered in his brain.
‘Area III, C4,’ he said.
‘Ah yes, you’re next to Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, so quickly that it was clear that his question hadn’t been necessary.
The chair back cut into Voss’s newly exposed ribs. You didn’t build up any credit in Weiss’s world, you always had to pay.
‘Captain Weber is not a careful individual, is he, Captain Voss?’
‘In what respect, sir?’
‘Drunken, loose-tongued, curious.’
‘Curious?’
‘Inquisitive,’ said Weiss. ‘And I notice you don’t disagree with my first two observations.’
‘Forgive me for saying so, sir, but in my opinion Weber is the least inquisitive man I know, very concentrated on his task,’ said Voss. ‘And as for drinking…who doesn’t?’
‘Loose-tongued?’ asked Weiss.
‘Who’s there to be loose-tongued with?’
‘Have you been with Captain Weber on any of his trips to town?’
Voss blinked. He didn’t know anything about Weber’s trips to town.
Weiss played the edge of his desk one-handed, a tremolo finished with a rapped flourish.
‘He has a very sensitive position right in the heart of the matter,’ said Weiss. ‘What do you two talk about when you’re drinking together?’
Voss shouldn’t have been shocked, but he was, at Weiss’s apparent omniscience. A squirt of adrenalin slithered through his veins, panic tightened his neck glands.
‘Nothing of importance.’
‘Tell me.’
‘He’s asked me to explain things to him.’
‘Like what? Chess?’
‘He hates chess.’
‘Then what?’
‘Physics. He knew I went to Heidelberg before I was called up.’
‘Physics?’ repeated Weiss, eyes glazing.
Voss thought he sensed a nonchalance that made him think that this was perhaps dangerous ground, mine-sown.
‘The evenings are long here in Rastenburg,’ said Voss to cover himself. ‘He teases me. He says I should be thinking of things more physical. You know, women.’
‘Women,’ said Weiss, laughing with so little mirth it became something else.
‘He’s more frustrated than he is inquisitive,’ said Voss, aware that Weiss wasn’t listening any more.
‘So you would like to get your brother out of the Kessel,’ said Weiss, opting for an alarming change of direction which left Voss thinking he’d said things he hadn’t. ‘Yes, in view of our earlier understanding I think that could be arranged. Do you have his details?’
Voss handed over his letter, wondering if the tiny morsel about Weber he’d offered was as good as a whole carcass to Weiss’s paranoia.
‘Rest assured,’ said Weiss, ‘we will get him out. I look forward to continuing our special understanding, Captain Voss.’
Voss heard nothing more from Weiss and he didn’t put himself in the man’s way. He wrote a note to his father saying that he’d put the process of getting Julius away from Stalingrad in motion, he was waiting for news and it might take a little time because of the shambolic state inside the Kessel. He avoided Weber and began to play against himself at chess without, curiously, ever being able to win.
A week later there was a conference in the situation room with all the senior officers in the Wolfsschanze present. It was a meeting that would change Karl Voss. A captain had flown in from the front and Voss had heard that he had been primed to deliver a speech on the real situation on the ground. Voss slipped into the meeting in time to hear the captain deliver his vision of horror. Lice-ridden men living off water and shreds of horse meat, others jaundiced with their limbs swollen to twice the size, hundreds of men a day dying of starvation in the brutal cold, the wounded at the airstrip left out in the open, their blood congealed to ice, the dead stacked on the impenetrable ground. The Führer took it, shoulders rounded, lids weighed down.
And then the moment.
The captain moved on to a complete rundown of the decimated fighting strength of every unit within the Kessel and without. Hitler nodded. Slowly he turned to the map and squeezed his chin. As the Führer’s slightly shaking hand moved out from his side the captain faltered. Hitler stood a flag up which had fallen over and began to talk about an SS panzer division, which was three weeks from the action. The captain’s words still came out as he’d no doubt rehearsed again and again, but they had no meaning. It was as if all the conjunctions and prepositions had been stripped out, all the verbs had become their opposites, all nouns incomprehensible.
Silence, as the captain’s boot squeak retreated. Hitler surveyed all his officers, his eyes beseeching, the terrible violence of red on the map below him flooding his face. Field Marshal Keitel, face trembling with emotion, stepped forward with a thunderous crack from his boot heel and roared over the deadly silence:
‘Mein Führer, we will hold Stalingrad.’
At breakfast the next day Voss ate properly for the first time in weeks. Afterwards, as he headed to the situation room, he was called to the Security Command post. He sat down in Weiss’s hard chair. Weiss leaned over and gave him an envelope. It contained his own letter to Julius unopened and with it a note.
The Kessel
12th January 1943
Dear Captain Voss,
An officer arrived today saying that he had come to pick up your brother. It is my sad duty to inform you that Major Julius Voss died on 10th January. We are his men and we would like you to know that he left this life with the same courage with which he endured it. His thoughts were never for himself but only ever for the men under his command…
Voss couldn’t read on. He put the note and letter back in their envelope, saluted SS Colonel Weiss and went back to the main building where he found the toilets and emptied his first solid breakfast in weeks into the bowl.
The news that afternoon, of the final assault on the abandoned Sixth Army, reached Voss from a strange distance, like words penetrating a sick child’s mind. Did it happen or not?
There was nothing to be done and he finished work early. The sense of doom in the situation room was unbearable. The generals crowded the maps as if coffin-side at a vigil. He went back to his quarters and knocked on Weber’s door. A strange person answered it. Voss asked after Weber. The man didn’t know him. He went to the next door, found another captain sitting on his bed smoking.
‘Where’s Weber?’ he asked.
The captain turned his mouth down, shook his head.
‘Security breach or something. He was taken away yesterday. I don’t know, don’t ask. Not in this…climate, anyway. If you know what I mean,’ said the captain, and Voss didn’t move, stared at him so that the man felt the need to say more. ‘Something about…well, it’s only rumour…don’t hold with it myself. You wouldn’t if you knew Weber.’
Voss still said nothing and the captain was sufficiently uncomfortable to get off his chair and come to the door.
‘I know Weber,’ said Voss, with the certainty of someone who was about to be proven wrong.
‘They found him in bed with a butcher’s delivery boy in town.’
Voss went to his room and wrote to his mother and father. It was a letter which left him exhausted, drained of everything so that his arms hung hopeless and unliftable at his sides. He went to bed early and slept, waking twice in the night to find tears on his face. In the morning he was woken up by an orderly and told to report to General Zeitzler’s office.
Zeitzler sat him down and didn’t stand behind his desk but leaned against the front of it. He looked avuncular, not his usual military self. He gave Voss permission to smoke.
‘I have some bad news,’ he said, his fingers pattering his thigh. ‘Your father died last night…’
Voss fixed his eyes on Zeitzler’s left epaulette. The only words to reach him were ‘compassionate leave’. By lunchtime he found himself in the half-dead light, standing away from the edge of the dark pine trees alongside the railway track, a grey sack of clothes on one side and a small brown suitcase on the other. The Berlin train left at 1.00 p.m. and although he was heading into his mother’s grief he could only feel that this was a new beginning and that greater possibilities existed away from this place, this hidden kingdom – the Wolfsschanze.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_d6558993-f40e-5324-a1ee-4f6c271c389d)
17th January 1943, Voss family home, Berlin-Schlachtensee.
‘No, no, they sent somebody to see us,’ said Frau Voss. ‘They sent Colonel Linge, you remember him, an old friend of your father’s, retired, a good man, not too stiff like the rest of them, he has something, a sensitivity, he’s not a man that assumes everybody’s the same as himself, he can differentiate, a rare trait in military circles. Of course, as soon as your father saw him he knew what it was about. But you see…’ She blinked but the tears fattened too quickly and rolled down her cheeks before she could get the clutched, lace-edged handkerchief to her face.
Karl Voss leaned over and took his mother’s free hand, a hand that he remembered differently, not so bony, frail and blue-veined. How fast grief sucks out the marrow – some days off food, three nights without sleep, the mind spiralling its dark gyre, in and out, but always around and around the same terrible, hard point. It was a force more destructive than a ravaging illness where the body’s instinct is to fight. Grief provides all the symptoms but no fight. There’s nothing to fight for. It’s already gone. Stripped of purpose the mind turns on the body and reduces it. He squeezed her hand, trying to inject some of his youth into her, his sense of a future.
‘It was wrong,’ she said, careful not to say ‘he’. ‘He shouldn’t have placed so much hope in your letter. I didn’t to start with, but he infected me with his…Having him around the house all the time, he worked on me until we became these two candles in the window, waiting.’
She blew her nose, took a deep, trembling breath.
‘Still, Colonel Linge came. They went into his study. They talked for quite some time and then your father showed the colonel to the door. He came in here to see me and he was calm. He told me that Julius had died and all the wonderful things that Colonel Linge had said about him. And then he went back to his study and locked himself in. I was worried but not so worried, although now I see what his calmness was. His mind was made up. After some hours sitting alone here I went to bed, knocking on his door on the way. He told me to go up, he’d join me, which he did, hours later, maybe two or three o’clock in the morning. He slept, or maybe he didn’t, at least he lay on his side and didn’t move. He was up before I was awake. In the kitchen he said he was going to see Dr Schulz. I spoke to Dr Schulz afterwards and he did go to see him. He asked him for something to keep him calm and Dr Schulz, he’s very good, he gave him some herbal teas, took his blood pressure, which was high but to be expected. Dr Schulz even asked him, “You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you, General?” and your father replied “What? Me? No, no, why do you think I’m here?” and he left. He drove to the Havel, into Wannsee and out again, parked the car, walked along the waterfront and shot himself.’
No tears this time. She just sat back and breathed evenly, looking at nothing beyond the short horizon of her own thoughts which were: he didn’t do it in his study, nor in the car, always a considerate man. He went out on the cold, hard ground and pointed the gun at the offending organ, his heart, not his head, and fired off two bullets into it. He froze out there. He was set solid by the time he was found, no walkers at this time of year, and short, bitter afternoons. She’d gone a little crazy that night he didn’t come home. She woke up in the morning to find all the gardening tools laid out in the kitchen. What had she been thinking? She came to, her son’s pulse thudding into her.
‘On his desk are the letters he wrote,’ she said. ‘There’s one there for you. Read it and we’ll talk again. And put some coal on the fire. I know it’s valuable but I’m just too cold today…you know how it gets into the marrow some days.’
Karl threw some pieces on the fire, put his hands in there for a second until the heat nipped them. He went to his father’s study, his boots loud on the wooden floor of the corridor the way his father’s were, so that Julius and he could hear them from the top of the house. Louder as he got heavier with the years.
He found the letter and sat in a leather armchair by the window, which still offered dim, late afternoon light.
Berlin-Schlachtensee
14th January 1943
Dear Karl,
This action I have taken is as a result of my unique perception of a series of events in my life. It has nothing to do with you. I know you did everything possible to get Julius out and it was typical of him to make light of the seriousness of his physical condition so that none of us could have known how close to death he was. Your mother, too, is blameless in this. She has given of her strength constantly and in the last two years I have been an even more difficult man to live with than I was before.
I have been overwhelmed by despair, not just because of the sudden termination of my career, but also because of my helplessness in the face of what I fear will be the direst consequences for Germany as a result of our aggression and the extent of our aggression over the past three years.
Don’t misunderstand me. I, as you know, approved of Hitler in those early years. He returned to the nation the belief in ourselves which we had lost in that first terrible war. I encouraged Julius into the Party as well as the army. I, like everybody else, was inspired. But the Commissar Order, which I vehemently opposed, was for a very important reason. Certain things have happened and will continue to happen in Germany and the rest of Europe while the National Socialists are in power. You have heard of these things. They are truly terrible. Too terrible, in so many ways, to believe. My stand against the Commissar Order was an attempt to prevent the army from acquiescing to these other, darker, politically motivated and utterly dishonourable actions. I failed and paid the penalty, a small one compared to the eternal damnation of the German Army for conspiring in these appalling deeds. If we lose this war, and it is possible, given the extent to which we have stretched ourselves over so many fronts, that the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad is the beginning, then our army officers will face the same retribution as the brutes and thugs in the SS. We have all been tarred by obeying the Commissar Order.
This was the beginning of my despair and my removal from the battlefield compounded it in helplessness. When this abandonment of principle was combined with the leadership’s utter failure to respond to the predicament of a far-flung army I realized that we were lost, that fundamental military logic no longer applied, that more than honour had been handed over with the acquiescence to the Commissar Order. Our generals have been emasculated, we will be run by the Corporal from now on. That this abysmal state of affairs should have resulted in the death of my first-born son was more than I could bear. I am no longer young. The future looks bleak amidst the wasteland of my shattered beliefs. Everything I stood for, believed in and cherished has fallen.
Two more things. At my funeral there will be a man called Major Manfred Giesler. He is an officer with the Abwehr. You will either talk to him if you believe in what I have said in the early part of this letter or you will not. That is your decision.
My body will be cremated and I would like you to scatter my ashes on a grave in the Wannsee church cemetery belonging to Rosemarie Hausser 1888–1905.
I wish you a happy and successful life and hope that you will once again be able to pursue your aptitude in physics in more peaceful times.
Your ever loving father
PS It is absolutely imperative that this letter be destroyed after you have read it. Failure to do so could result in danger for yourself, your mother and Major Giesler. If my predictions as to the course of this war prove to be correct you will see that letters containing such sentiments will carry heavy consequences.
Voss reread the letter and burnt it in the grate, watching the slow, greenish flames consume and blacken the paper. He sat by the window again in a state of shock at this, his first intimate sight of the workings of his father’s mind. He gathered himself for a few moments; the conflicting emotions needed to be reined in before he went to speak to his mother. Anger and grief didn’t seem to be able to sit in the same room for very long.
