Comrades of War (26 page)

They were drinking vodka and playing cards. The youngest of them, a boy of seventeen, was joking with a peasant girl. They slapped their thighs and laughed deafeningly. None of the panzer-jägers, who had arrived only the day before as a substitute crew, had yet been to the front.

A swell of sound, long and growling like the howl of a wounded wild beast, reverberated through the night.

All in the hut stiffened and looked toward the window. The dirty little window high up on the wall. Then the report from the firing reached them, a muffled roll.

‘
Predsmertny chas!
’ whispered the little Russian girl who’d been playing with the seventeen-year-old soldier.
The death song of the artillery
.

‘God,’ exclaimed one of the soldiers, and at the same moment it struck. A 30 cm shell plowing its way like a hurricane, tearing up the road, knocking down fruit trees, sweeping away the big well, and blowing away the outhouse with the cattle.

But those inside the hut didn’t see all that. They heard only the swelling roar, saw the ceiling collapse and the walls tumble down on them. Poisonous fumes paralyzed their breathing.

Then it was over.

The seventeen-year-old soldier was hurled through the air and impaled on a sharply pointed, half-severed tree. He turned round like a propeller a couple of times, waved and kicked with arms and legs, and let out a long, piercing scream. Then he died.

Former waiter Theo Huber lay on his back across a beam, staring into the darkness with dull, almost glazed eyes. The heavy Russian artillery, which was pounding the German supply lines to bits with strict precision, drowned his scream.

He ran both hands over his belly. Where the pelvis had been he felt a deep hole. A mushy, jelly-like hole where a shapeless piece of steel the size of a saucer had wedged itself.

Again he gave a long moaning scream. The blood gushed over his feverish fingers.

He quieted down. The pain seemed to recede for a moment. He pressed the half torn-off leg up against him and rested his head wearily against the crossbeam. He was lying as if asleep.

‘I’m bleeding to death,’ ran through his mind.

In a naive hope of stemming the blood he pressed his hands deep into the gaping wound.

Again he screamed. The house caved in. He struggled desperately to avoid being buried in the rubble.

The leg fell away from him. It floated around in a pool of clotted blood and shreds of flesh.

He sobbed and moaned in a monotone. A violent shiver tore through him. His arms became heavy. Slowly consciousness oozed out of him.

He died almost insane from pain.

In Hamburg the dance went on below Baumwall.

Sometimes a guest would ask the manager: ‘Tell me, wasn’t there a waiter here named Theo?’

The manager would look thoughtful. ‘Theo? Nah, I can’t recall any.’

And so Theo Huber was forgotten. Thrown on a dunghill east of the river Memel. A cadaver who had had heart disease.

No one missed Theo Huber.

New Theo’s appeared. The ‘hero-hound’ saw to that.

He prowled about in many different guises, trawled through army hospitals, guard battalions, police units, factories, and offices. Invalids, old men and boys were caught in his net.

‘Forward, comrades!’ In training camp they would sing when marching. Grinning, sadistic NCOs always ordered them to sing: ‘
Es ist so schön, Soldat zu sein
.’

‘Long live Greater Germany! Long live Adolf Hitler! And long live a hero’s death!’

Pretty Paul was constantly walking around. He could be seen everywhere. One day he was sitting at Police Station 32 drinking cognac with the chief of the station’s criminal department and looking out on Reeperbahn. After they’d sat around being bored for a while, they ordered two women to be searched. It took a couple of hours.

When he left the station Paul Bielert was a bit warm and somewhat tired. The ‘searched’ women had been released. Everything has its price.

Three days later a new sex murder was committed, this time in Hein Hoyer-Strasse, a few yards from Reeperbahn. Not very far from the hospital.

Kriminalrat
Paul Bielert became frantic. He summoned a dozen experts and let them loose like a pack of bloodhounds with the wildest threats buzzing in their ears.

‘Don’t show up, you dead ducks,’ he roared, ‘till you can show me some results! You have five days, not a second more. Any of you who reports no success by that time will make a long but swift detour to SS
Lehrdivision
, the central sector of the Eastern Front, where he can croak in the swamps according to military regulations.’

Two by two they slipped out of the large gray building on Karl Muck Platz.

The sixth victim was a nurse from our hospital. A young girl of twenty-one. She had been violated in exactly the same manner as the others.

His mother, a minister, and Nazi hypocrisy were guilty of his crime.

He murdered to do good. He believed he served the God of the Church.

The thousands of prayers with his selfish mother had become a black curtain shutting out the light.

Everything that imbecile theologian had told him etched itself into his brain and darkened his understanding.

When things went wrong no one wanted to understand him.

Like so many others he was killed by a ruthless police hunting for the sake of hunting.

Tiny killed. The Legionnaire killed. All of us killed. But we did it as the lawful murderers of the State. From the moral angle a small, but nonetheless very great difference – though not for those who were killed.

‘I have never killed anybody,’ a famous man once said, ‘but many death notices have delighted me.’

X

The Sex Killer

It was Heinz Bauer who found the panties.

First we laughed and exchanged coarse jokes. But then Paul Stein pushed the newspaper under our noses. We read in amazement: As in the case of the earlier victims, the murdered woman’s panties had been robbed by the brutal unknown murderer.

‘I’ll be damned!’ Bauer exclaimed and stared perplexed at the rucksack where he had found the undies. We counted them feverishly. Six pairs! Again we counted. Right, six!

The little Legionnaire gave a long whistle. ‘
Saperlotte!
Six pairs of panties! And six corpses! It tallies like hell!’

Tiny craned his neck and peered curiously into the large gray rucksack beside the bed. We could see a couple of packages of rye biscuit and some Air Force underwear, neatly folded with the eagle up as prescribed in the regulations.

‘How did you find them?’ Tiny asked, poking the rucksack with his foot.

Heinz Bauer shook his head. ‘Why the hell did I have to stick my nose into his rucksack? I was only looking for something to write with and then touched something smooth with a familiar smell.’

‘Dirty pig,’ Tiny said, letting on to be annoyed. ‘Nah, the truth is you could smell those ass-cases. That’s why you dived into George’s sack.’

We five were the only ones in the room. All the others were doing fatigue duty or taking physicals.

‘Christ, what should we do?’ Bauer asked, looking around despairingly.

‘You mean, what should
you
do,’ Stein answered. ‘You found the holsters, not us. We don’t put our noses into other guys’ business.’

‘You rotten corpse,’ Bauer burst out angrily. ‘So you want me to sweat out this one alone, huh? Of course, you never stick your nose into anybody else’s traps, right, Judas? I wouldn’t be surprised if white wings sprouted from your back!’ He bent forward and gave Stein a menacing glance. Stein squinted and hunched his shoulders as if expecting trouble.

Bauer grinned venomously and accusingly pointed a dirty finger at him.

‘Who’s the guy who doesn’t pry into another guy’s things, you rat? Maybe it wasn’t you who pinched Tiny’s schnapps that time we were going chasing broads? What do you have to say now, you bum, huh?’

Tiny was outraged. He flew up and bellowed, ‘Holy Moses, Abraham and Jacob, if this isn’t the most low-down bunch I’ve ever been with!’ He grabbed Stein by the chest and screamed with foaming mouth: ‘You hog louse, have you committed sacrilege against Tiny?’

Stein gave out some half-smothered inarticulate sounds.

‘You deny it?’ Tiny cried, giving him a backhand slap. ‘So you want to make me use force? Me who hates using force?’

Stein shook his head in protest.

Tiny spat at him and said gently, but ominously: ‘You have abused my confidence. Given me a terrible disappointment. You’ve hurt my feelings deeply.’

Stein looked completely crushed as he hung limp in Tiny’s fists, feet off the floor.

‘I won’t say anything about pimps and guys who murder whores,’ Tiny roared in indignation, ‘but to have to be together with someone who steals from his comrades, ugh!’ He shook Stein so his head went flying back and forth. With a curse he let go his hold and spat after him. ‘As a punishment you have to steal three bottles of schnapps for me as soon as possible – but fast, fast, you crippled hero! My patience is short, and if it gives out, may Jesus Christ and all his saints show you mercy, because I won’t!’ He picked up a pair of panties from the floor and sniffed at them. ‘They still smell of pig!’

‘Shut your mouth,’ the little Legionnaire dismissed him and turned to Bauer, sitting lost-looking on his bed. ‘What have you figured out? Call the cops?’

‘The cops?’ Bauer jumped up. ‘You must be going crazy. What do you think I am. Do you think I’m a fink playing patsy with dirty cops?’

The Legionnaire nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. But something has to be done. Any suggestion?’

Bauer shook his head helplessly.

‘In that case, maybe you won’t mind me telling you what to do?’ the Legionnaire asked, and without waiting for an answer he pulled his long Russian battle knife out of his boot leg and pitched it to Bauer. ‘Use it right so we can get this over with as soon as possible.’

Bauer held the long broad knife in his hand. His eyes wandered from the knife to the Legionnaire, who sat cross-legged on his bed smoking.

‘Do you want me to kill George? You can’t expect me to do a thing like that.’

The Legionnaire looked at him in surprise. ‘Are you stupid or nuts,
mon camarade
? Do you want me to do it? Or Sven? Or Stein? Or maybe Tiny? You discovered the holsters. It’s your business. But because you told us about it, it’s partly our business, too. Therefore we insist that something must be done. You’re right, you can’t go to the cops. That’s out of the question. The Police long ago violated their solidarity with us. We have to get along by ourselves. George must be made harmless. He shouldn’t be loose. But we can’t lock him up because we’ve no police. He has killed six women. Now, you might give an excuse and say that a lot of people get killed. True, but this is something different, and we knew the little nurse. She was a sort of comrade. When he killed her, George did something that can’t be forgiven, because she was also his comrade. I’m sure you see we’ve got to do something.’

Bauer closed his eyes. He had turned deathly pale. ‘I just can’t kill George! He hasn’t harmed me, after all. What you expect me to do to him is murder. I may get caught and executed – by the man with the axe.’ He shivered at the thought.

The Legionnaire got up and slowly walked up to Bauer’s bed, tore the knife out of Bauer’s hand and slid it back into his boot. He snarled: ‘Cowardly bastard! If we did what was right you would be butchered!’

Bauer rocked from side to side. He was miserable. He shrank with shame before the utter contempt of the Legionnaire.

Tiny magnanimously offered to cut George’s throat.

The Legionnaire turned his face toward him and looked at him for a long while in silence. Then he sat down on his bed again, looking probingly from Bauer to Tiny.

‘
Milles diables!
Do you want to cut him down just for the pleasure of it, or why?’

Tiny simply laughed. ‘That filthy whore-killer is going to knock off anyway. So I think I might as well pack him off to heaven as someone else. What the hell is the difference?’

‘Don’t you think there’s anything wrong at all in killing him?’ the Legionnaire asked, glancing sideways up at Tiny, who stood in the middle of the room. He was assiduously trying to balance a glass of water on his forehead, as he had seen a juggler do it.

Tiny answered, the glass wobbling ominously on his forehead. ‘Nah, what wrong could there be in it? George is a shit. You said that yourself, Desert Rambler.’

The Legionnaire rocked with laughter.

‘
Monte la-dessus!
By Allah, you’re a fine one!’ Roaring with laughter he fell back on the bed again. ‘Because George is a shit you quite coolly cut his throat.’ He slowly raised himself. With scarlet face he looked at Tiny. ‘For the sake of future society I dearly hope you’ll die a hero’s death before this war is over.’

He pulled a bottle of rotgut from under his mattress and guzzled down nearly half of it. He looked around him briefly before handing it to me, and I passed it on further. He said, as if talking to himself: ‘
Bon
, so you’d like to lay George out?’

‘I have as good as told you so twice,’ Tiny bawled sullenly, hitting his glass. It wasn’t responding as it should. He threatened Stein: ‘When are you going out to pinch some schnapps for Tiny, you rat?’ He kicked at a pair of light-blue panties lying on the floor and jumped at Bauer: ‘How long will those ass holsters be lying around here, egging people on to whoring?’

Bauer began collecting the undies and stuffing them into George’s rucksack. Then he meticulously laced it up and pushed it under the bed.

He glanced at the Legionnaire, who sat on his bed playing with three dice. He was continuously tossing them in the air and catching them again in his hand, now with the back of his hand, now with the palm.

‘In God’s name,’ Bauer whispered hoarsely, holding out his hand. ‘Give me that knife and I’ll cut up George so bad that not even his own mother will recognize him!’

The Legionnaire looked up. A subtle smiled played around the narrow, brutal mouth in the scarred face. Without a word he pulled the Siberian knife, sharp-edged on both sides, out of his boot and handed it to Bauer. Bauer’s face was deathly pale as he took it and hid it under his pillow.