In the spring of 1944, I realized that I was not going to survive the war...

Shtefan Brandt, adjutant to a colonel of the Waffen SS, has made it through the war so far in spite of his commander’s habit of bringing his staff into combat, and a pair of secrets that are far more dangerous than the battlefield. Shtefan is a Mischling and one of the thousands of German citizens of Jewish descent who have avoided the death camps by concealing themselves in the ranks of the German army. And he is in love with Gabrielle Belmont, the colonel’s French mistress. Either of those facts could soon mean his end, were Colonel Erich Himmel to notice.

Colonel Himmel has other concerns, however. He can see the war’s end on the horizon and recognizes that he is not on the winning side, no matter what the reports from Hitler’s generals may say. So he has taken matters into his own hands, hatching a plot to escape Europe. To fund his new life, he plans to steal a fortune from the encroaching Allies. A fortune that Shtefan, in turn, plans to steal from him...

Atmospheric and intense, The Soul of a Thief captures the turbulent emotional rush of those caught behind the lines of occupied France, where one false step could spell death, and every day brings a new struggle to survive.

STEVEN HARTOV is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller In the Company of Heroes, as well as The Night Stalkers and Afghanistan on the Bounce, and the author of the espionage trilogy The Heat of Ramadan, The Nylon Hand of God and The Devil’s Shepherd. For six years he served as editor-in-chief of Special Operations Report. A former Merchant Marine sailor, Israel Defense Forces paratrooper and special operator, he currently resides in New Jersey.

www.StevenHartov.com

The Soul of a Thief

Steven Hartov

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Steven Hartov 2018

Steven Hartov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9781474083652

Praise for The Soul of a Thief

“An old-fashioned ‘ripping yarn’ from a master writer who knows how to keep the characters vivid, the plot twisting, and the action coming hot and heavy.”

—Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire

“Steven Hartov takes us on an SS commando’s headlong rush across German-occupied Europe from France to the battlefield of Russia and back again just in time for D-day, in the company of a brutally efficient SS colonel and his decidedly non-Aryan adjutant. Hartov tells a story about Nazis and Jews on the same side of the front lines that few could have conceived but the likes of which had to have happened. Between the spring of 1943 and the summer of 1944 The Soul of a Thief packs a lifetime of human experiences into a year of European wartime.”

—Alex Rosenberg, author of The Girl from Krakow

“Hartov offers a novel and human perspective of the German side of the Second World War through the eyes of one young reluctant recruit and the enigmatic colonel whom he admires, fears and, ultimately, plots to outwit.”

—Daniel Kalla, bestselling author of The Far Side of the Sky and Nightfall Over Shanghai

“Steven Hartov’s WWII novel The Soul of a Thief is a literary tour de force on par with Mark Sullivan’s Beneath a Scarlet Sky for three simple reasons: he knows his history, he writes with the beauty of Fitzgerald, and he loves his characters. This is an outstanding historical fiction novel illuminating a little-known aspect of the German war machine: the half- and quarter-Jews known as Mischlinge fighting, sometimes willingly, on behalf of Hitler’s Third Reich.”

—Samuel Marquis, author of Bodyguard of Deception and Altar of Resistance

“The Soul of a Thief is a war drama, a cat-and-mouse thriller and a coming-of-age love story, all wrapped into a terrific and compulsive read.”

—Daniel Kalla, bestselling author of The Far Side of the Sky

For my mother, Trudy, who survived, thrived and told me and Susie the stories. And for Lia, who loves and believes.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Author Note

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Afterword

Historical Notes

About the Publisher

Author Note

I DO NOT KNOW the origin of this story. One autumn night some years ago, I woke up and began to write it, as if compelled to do so. I am generally a practical man, but this tale flowed forth as if commanded by some otherworldly force, and I was just the vessel of its telling. Alarmed at first, I soon looked forward to each night of work, to hear the next part of the tale and honor it as best I could. I also realized then, that this memoir is more than an invention of imagination, as it first came to me in recurring dreams when I was still a child.

There is no one to thank, except perhaps the ghost who told it through my fingers, and all those who indulged me, as I wrote and wondered where it came from.

I

IN THE SPRING of 1944, I realized that I was not going to survive the war.

There was, upon this revelation resisted for so long, a sublime unburdening of tension, a sensation of relief and release I had not enjoyed since being expelled as a boy from a Catholic public school in Vienna. After all, my survival until this point had been predicated upon a carefully executed waltz of luck and deception. But now, rather like a skilled player of Chemin de Fer who wins too long at the table, my good fortunes could not but fade, and my fatigue was draining my abilities to deceive.

I should make it clear that I did not harbor what the famed Viennese psychologists then termed as suicidal tendencies. Quite the contrary, I was a survivor by strength of will and character. However, some factors made it clear that emerging in one piece from this worldwide conflagration, with myself at its epicenter, was highly unlikely.

I was the young adjutant to an SS colonel named Himmel, whose actions reflected exactly the opposite of his heavenly moniker.

I was also, on paper, a Catholic named Brandt, yet in fact the descendant of a great-grandmother named Brandeis.

And finally, I was in love with the Colonel’s fiancée, a magnificent creature of my own age, who had just informed me that in fact my emotions for her were well requited.

No, it was not likely that I was going to survive this war. But inasmuch as the practicalities of shelter, sustenance and personal security can so easily be spurned in exchange for youthful and mad romance, I no longer cared. It had become very clear to me in the early months of that year, that unless I plumbed the depths of my courage and found the well of a reckless swashbuckler, the postwar world would be a morbid and cold planet, unfit for living.

And so, since I was unlikely to survive, I would make my dash for the gates with my love in hand. And, if I could hone every one of my strategic skills and adopt the soul of a thief, I would be very rich, to boot. Yes, in all likelihood, a rush of bullets would bring me to ground long before my escape.

But, so be it...

* * *

Colonel Himmel was a war hero, which made my status as his adjutant an envious position, if one viewed such employ through the eyes of a dedicated Nazi patriot. However, I was merely grateful that I had come to fill my position late in the game, for at barely nineteen years old, until the previous year I had been ineligible for more than cannon fodder on the Russian front or service in the Hitler Youth. This fine, upstanding organization I’d been forbidden to join in Vienna, as my ethnic background was in question. As for the infantry, my number had simply not yet come up.

Upon my expulsion from Gymnasium, I had been employed as a physician’s assistant in a Viennese hospital, which delayed my being swallowed up by the Wehrmacht. Yet it was there, while visiting a trio of his wounded commandos, that Himmel spotted me. He was a pure combat officer, decidedly apolitical, and I believe that what struck him was my appearance. I was a fine youth then, blond and blue-eyed and wiry, genetic gifts owing to the Balkan Semitic lineage of my great-grandmother rather than to any inheritance of an Aryan bent. He whispered a few inquiries to the doctors whom I served, and I was promptly whisked away to a new position and adventures I had not dreamed of, or wanted.

I was thankful, however, for having come to Himmel’s side at this latter stage of his commando career, because throughout the war his résumé had been quickly filled up with daring raids against Allied troops, mountaintop rescues of captured officers, and the long-range executions of enemy generals. The Colonel had a tendency to reward his support staff by insisting they accompany him on most such ventures, and so, a long list of previous adjutants, company clerks and even cooks had been killed in action on a number of fronts. My recruitment to the Colonel’s staff in 1943 somewhat lessened the odds of my falling prey to foreign shellfire while shining the commander’s jackboots, but it was in any event a nerve-racking assignment.

You see, Himmel had been twice awarded the Iron Cross, as well as the Knight’s Cross for exemplary valor, on one occasion by Adolf Hitler himself. I shall briefly digress to say that I am not proud to have been in attendance for that ceremony, but it was most certainly a surreal dinner soirée I shall never forget, for it is seared upon my mind’s eye. The awardees, more than two hundred officers from various branches of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, were invited to the Eagle’s Lair at Berchtesgaden. Of course, I use the term “invited” with tongue in cheek, for these weary men were ordered to appear on the given eve, despite their presently distant locations or battlefield predicaments.

Thus, the towering antechamber of Hitler’s Schloss was awash with men in dress uniforms, yet one must realize that so many of these previously perfectly tailored tunics and jodhpurs had been stowed now for years in Panzer tanks, Heinkel bombers or U-boats. The courageous officers had done their best to shine cracked boots, polish rusted buckles and steam the wrinkles from moth-eaten wools, yet even so, it all appeared much like a costume ball in the tenth level of hell. The submariners’ beards were badly trimmed, the Luftwaffe pilots’ eyes gleamed with fatigue, and some of the infantry heroes actually had caked spots of blood on their cuffs and lapels, as their most recent wounds still oozed. I hardly think now that many of them remained ardent worshippers of their Führer, yet like Roman legionnaires in the presence of Caesar, they managed to effect erect spines and the gunshot clicks of heels.

Hitler was customarily late, by I believe at least two hours, and I shall never forget his demeanor when he finally appeared. He seemed, quite frankly, completely surprised, and subsequently annoyed. He behaved like a man whose wife has invited guests to dinner without his consent, and it was only when Goering whispered a reminder in his ear that he dredged up the manners to stay the course. So quickly did he dispense the medals, with scarcely a complimentary word and absently offering that embarrassingly limp handshake of his, that I imagined his primary motive here was to finish with it and hurry to the toilet.

Of course, had I shared my view with a single soul, including any other young adjutant or even a castle cook, I most certainly would have found myself immediately en route to Smolensk, or worse. However, just after the Führer’s departure, I offered Colonel Himmel a champagne glass from a silver tray and congratulated him for his courage, which I had too often personally witnessed along with an accompanying clutch of my sphincter. The Colonel received his drink, nodded his gratitude, and very briefly rolled his single eye. He then smiled at me for a millisecond and quickly issued me an order of some kind, yet the moment had been shared.

For an assassin, a brigand, a tyrant and a thief, my master did have his good points.

To me, Himmel’s most endearing quality was that he never fully inquired as to my background. During the prewar years and throughout the conflict, it was incumbent upon elite Nazi officers to fully vet each member of their command, despite the assumption that the Gestapo had already done so. Yet Himmel had always been a career combatant, regarding Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes as nothing more than a rallying point around which to galvanize the populace. Having not a bone of fear in his body, he dismissed the regulatory racial codes with a snort, and assembled his company of Waffen Schutzstaffel based upon performance, and nothing else. Thus, his command was peppered with a number of racially questionable men of swarthy complexions and altered family names, and I would not be surprised if it included a gypsy or two.

Of course, having none of this information upon being fairly kidnapped by the Colonel, I spent my first two months quivering in his presence. I was waiting for him to summon me and wave a Gestapo document in my face, some horrendously accurate accusation that there was, in fact, a wizened old Jewess concealed among the many branches of my family tree. That, in itself, would have been enough for any other such officer to have me shot. The full truth, in fact, was worse.

My beloved father and mother were devout Catholics, which one might think a guarantee of my immediate lineage. However, one must also realize that devotion to God, under the Nazi reanalysis of religion, was not viewed kindly by the authorities. Adolf Hitler had become the New God of Germany and its protectorates, with Christ a poor third to the Führer and his pagan symbols, such as Albert Speer’s monolithic architectures and the towering iron statues of eagles, stag horns and the like. If you were a devout Catholic, you were expected to display your crucifix as nothing more than proof of your ethnic purity. In Vienna, the city of my birth and youth, the Anschluss had provided Germany’s Nazis with a pool of deeply fanatical followers. Those who claim that the Austrians were so much worse than the Germans themselves are correct, for there is no one more obsessive than a convert.

My father would not, however, relinquish his religious beliefs. And although he supported the economic and political precepts of Nazism, he refused to rein in his attendance of Mass, regular confessions or charity efforts for the Church. Such behavior greatly frightened my mother, of course, who was edgy enough given our genetic status and the questionable position of her only son. Yet the authorities, recognizing my father to be a man of some age and granted eccentricities, declined to rigorously pursue his conversion to Hitlerism. That is, until he strayed too far.

My father was, by trade, a book seller. Adolf Hitler was, by choice, a book burner. It required no more than one massive, flaming pyre of the classics to set my father’s inner rage alight, and thereafter he was a changed man. He quietly joined “O 5,” the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance movement. On the evening after Kristallnacht, during which every Jewish shop and synagogue in Vienna was burned to the ground by the Brown Shirts, along with approximately twenty thousand copies of both the Old and New Testaments, three members of that thugly gang were found murdered in the Tenth District. My father returned late that evening, exuding an odor of fear and adrenaline, and he packed a single suitcase, hugged myself and my mother to him, and informed us that he would have to leave immediately or endanger our lives.

I never saw him again. But still today, there remains etched into the exterior of the great St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, a white scrawled carving of defiance, the figures “O 5.” I have been told that my father was the very chiseler of that message from the underground.

So, you can well understand why my first few months with Himmel were so fraught with the constant urge to pee, even though he appeared to regard my history as irrelevant.

The second trait which so endeared my master to me, as it were, was his choice of women. I refer not, of course, to the long line of prostitutes and desperately widowed wives we encountered in our travels throughout Italy, the Rhineland or France. Some of these Himmel paid well as he invited them to bed, and some he spontaneously mounted in empty castle keeps and haylofts. These he regarded as the spoils of war and nothing more.

The true measure of his good taste was revealed in the selection of Gabrielle. We had settled temporarily near Le Pontet, a village beside the fabled French town of Avignon, for a spate of rest and recreation. Much of the small ville had suffered from errant Allied bombs, and a large German field hospital had been erected in the meadows as a sort of waypoint and triage center for the wounded from all fronts. The slim bridges of the Rhone were constantly awash in horse-drawn wagons, with the local French girls essentially enslaved as nurses to transport and tend the injured. It was there, above the bloody river waters that would someday be bottled and sold by the shipload to American supermarkets, that Himmel spotted her.

She was virtually a child, barely eighteen years of age, the daughter of Le Pontet’s mayor, who had been executed by the Gestapo. Despite the soiled appearance of all the other females employed by our army, Gabrielle’s skin was pure and translucent, her fingernails unbroken, the flaxen blond hair that framed her diamond blue eyes falling straight and true to her slim waist. As she sat upon the bench of a caisson that contained the writhing forms of three wounded panzer crew, her chin erect and her hands lightly snapping the reins of her horses, it was clear that she had inherited a strand of royal French genes. Himmel ordered the driver of his Kübelwagen to halt, and he immediately fell in love. He was done with whoring.

The rest of how I came to know her, I shall leave for later telling.

And finally, the Colonel’s third trait which I came to temporarily admire was his greed. Perhaps that is unfair, and a more generous description of his calculations might be called practicality. After all, his strategic assessments of any given situation were almost always correct, and his analysis of the war’s progress, despite his own personal victories, was untempered by emotion. By the time I joined him, Himmel knew that Germany was going to lose this war. He also knew that the Allies were about to mount a massive invasion of the continent, the furious tide of which would not be repulsed. Despite the erroneous hunches of Hitler and the endless arguments of the High Command, Himmel would regularly spread a map of Europe across any makeshift dining table or vehicle boot, jab a finger at the coast of Normandy and state, “Here. It will come here.”

Although I shall never be so immodest as to claim that I had become the Colonel’s confidant, practicality dictated that he place his trust in my circumspection. Someone had to safekeep the Colonel’s papers, plans and plots, and inasmuch as I was imprisoned by my Mischling lineage and apparently no threat to him, he chose to trust me implicitly. Of course, before actually doing so, he did remind me that any slip of my tongue would result in an instant and painful death, without benefit of a hearing.

Thus, I came to know that Himmel planned to finish out the war not only as a survivor, but as a very wealthy one. He surmised that there were other high-ranking officers who had made the same calculations, some of whom had access to the whereabouts of Nazi gold stores and caches of jewels and works of art accrued during various occupations. But as my supremely practical commander determined, gold and trinkets were simply too heavy and unwieldy a treasure; difficult to transport, impossible to conceal.

He reasoned that the Allies would storm ashore in France sometime in the summer of the year. He also reasoned that with so many hundreds of thousands of Allied troops on the march, their paymasters would not be far behind. With the end of the war nearly visible on the horizon, all currencies in Europe would become essentially useless, save the American dollar, or the British pound.

The Allied Army’s treasury corps would doubtless be following their troops in heavily armored convoys of some sort. This would be Himmel’s swan song, his epitomal target, his final mission.

He was going to steal it from them.

And I was going to steal it from him...

II

IN APRIL OF 1943, I first faced my death on the second week of my employment.

Lest you think me of a timid nature and overly dramatic, I shall relay to you the first of many such events which sowed the seeds of a conviction that my survival might be in question.

I had just commenced my tasks for Colonel Erich Himmel of the Waffen SS, and at first it appeared that serving as the Colonel’s adjutant was certainly an insurance policy among the many uninsured. Himmel’s Commando was presently hosted in one of the many glorious castles astride the eastern banks of the Rhine, not far from Rüdesheim, a tiny village nestled in a bend of the swollen waters of the river. Early spring had blessed the rolling hills with greenery and flowers, cool morning fogs caressed the church spires, and as we were far from any of the industrial cities, the Allied bombings were no more threatening than, or discernible from, the occasional spates of evening thunderstorms. Surely, no matter the dangerous adventures to be undertaken by the unit, I would remain here in this virtual paradise of tranquility, while the SS did its duty elsewhere.

Inasmuch as I was not a combat soldier, and had never been trained as one, at first I served the commander in the only threadbare suit I owned. It was a loose and comfortable gray tweed, hanging a bit on my scrawny frame, but perhaps it comforted me somewhat, offering the illusion of being nothing more than a civilian secretary. I began by simply serving the commander his coffee and cakes, meals of goat cheese and rough breads, tending to the condition of his uniforms and boots, and making sure that his supply of eye patches was in order. He had lost his left eye early in the war, a wound that he dismissed as a blessing, for it obviated the requirement to squint when he fired his pistol.

At first, the commander barely seemed to notice me, and he hardly spoke to me except to issue terse but polite instructions.

“Shtefan, bring me this. Shtefan, bring me that.”

I responded quickly and efficiently, although it was difficult to click my heels along with my stiff bow at the waist, for I still shuffled along in a pair of church dress shoes, worn down to the soles and beyond.

The commander’s captain and lieutenants rarely gazed in my direction, as if I were a ghost. But soon, a young, dark-eyed lieutenant named Gans approached me in Himmel’s presence, carrying a carelessly folded uniform in his arms.

“You can have it,” the commander stated, not looking up from a sheaf of orders on his desk. “It belonged to Fritz Heidt, but he is dead.”

“That is...most generous,” I stuttered, while cringing at the idea. “But my suit is just fine, Herr Colonel.”

Himmel glanced up from his paperwork, and seeing that narrow squint, I hurried off to don the filthy thing. The trousers fit adequately, aided by the thick braces over my bony shoulders, but in the tunic there was a neat bullet hole just above the heart. I swallowed hard as I buttoned it, then reasoned that the odds of yet another bullet striking the garment in exactly the same place were in my favor. The high boots that were issued me were small and damp, but manageable. As yet, I had no army stockings, and my left heel kept sticking to the leather. It was not until that evening that I realized there was still blood in the boot.

I did not then surmise, until the castle began to bustle, that the issue of my fresh costume was the portent of an upcoming mission.

Until that eve, the men had been relaxed, at least when protected from Himmel’s view. At night they stood the watch or slept within the castle walls, but during daylight they pursued the business of elite combat troops in respite: meticulously cleaning their weapons, shining buckles and boots, replenishing ammunition, and occasionally roughhousing with each other like a pack of wild pups. As their uniforms had all sustained various degrees of damage, they would summon the local Hungarian refugee girls and, assuming that every female possesses the inherent traits of a seamstress, oblige them to cut and sew and repair loose buttons.

If a girl was particularly comely, a younger member of the troop would be posted to alarm if an officer approached, while a trio or so of his comrades raped her in the wine cellar. These assaults were horrific in nature, yet strangely devoid of violence, and once I witnessed a rumpled teen leaving the quarters with tears tracking her face, yet grinning a quivering smile. She carried a pile of breads and cheeses in her arms, along with two bottles of port, the apparent rewards for submission without a scream. The next time I saw her, she appeared in the courtyard and made straight for the cellar, unbuttoning her blouse as she clipped along, eyes cast downward, a happy quintet of SS on her heels. These incidents assailed my sense of honor, gentility and romance, yet I dared not object. It would be some months before I understood that war and the proximity of death could make beasts of even princes.

Occasionally, the troops would test their weapons immediately after repair. I admit that it took quite some time for me to acclimate myself to this practice. The violent activity would be barely prefaced with a warning shout of “Ich schiesse!” and then the racket of a machine pistol would echo much too close. On the first time this occurred, I hurled myself to the ground, sending the Colonel’s tea tray spinning as I flopped into a miasma of mud. The group of commandos who witnessed my squirming shock regaled themselves with laughter for many minutes, and I, red-faced and smirking like a fool, was instantly baptized with the nickname “Fish.”

In any event, it was late in the eve after acquiring my uniform when Himmel suddenly stomped into the small maid’s chamber in which I’d fashioned my quarters. I lay upon a straw mattress, wearing my trousers, braces, a rough undershirt, and reading a Hans Christian Andersen Märchenbuch by the light of a candle.

“Up, Shtefan! Up! Up! Up!”

The Colonel had an unusual spring to his step and a strangely euphoric glint in his eye, traits I would come to recognize and fear as the harbingers of action with the enemy.

He disappeared and I dressed quickly, still buttoning my tunic and working my tender feet into my boots as I hurried to his makeshift office, the grand salon of the castle. A fire was crackling in the hearth, and a wooden door had been laid upon a pair of sawhorses, making for a plotting table. A large map had been laid out, with hand grenades serving as paperweights to stay the corners. Officers surrounded the table, including Captain Friedrich, a nearly white blond and frightening creature of extreme height, and three lieutenants. The company armorer, a husky, gap-toothed sergeant named Heinz, was in attendance as well. I would also come to learn that his presence at any briefing boded ill for the faint of heart.

“That is all,” Himmel was saying. “Have the men ready in ten minutes.”

The officers responded with heel clicks and those robotic bows, and they rushed off to their assignments. Himmel quickly turned to a wooden footlocker at the base of his desk and, without looking to confirm that I was actually present, spoke to me.

“Fold up the map,” he ordered.

I carefully removed the potato-masher grenades, lifting them with the timidity of a novice butcher extracting his first entrails, and I folded the map along its creases. I noted that it was a detailed terrain of a section of the northern Italian border, which was far away to the south.

“Put it in my rear pouch.”

He meant the leather satchel that was affixed to his combat webbing, that heavy harness that contained his pistol ammunition, grenades, a water bottle and his SS commando blade, engraved with a swastika and the words Meine Ehre Heibt Treue—My Honor’s Name Is Loyalty.

“Come here.”

I turned to him then. He was standing next to the footlocker with a strangely mischievous grin on his face, as if he was attempting to suppress a private joke. In his hands was a leather pistol belt. I walked to him.

“Hold out your arms.”

I extended them, expecting him to lay the belt across my wrists.

“Not like that, you little idiot! Out to the sides.”

I blushed, and then the embarrassment quickly turned to another sort of flush as I began to understand. Somewhat like a proud father fitting his son with his first pair of soccer shorts, he flicked the belt around my waist and fastened it. In the next moment, he had a heavy pistol in his hand.

“The Walther P-38,” he stated crisply. “Usually reserved for officers, but you will only knock yourself silly with a rifle.” He held the pistol up for me to view it laterally, and I can only imagine how my eyes must have bugged terribly wide. “You pull back the slide here,” he instructed, “release it and a bullet enters the chamber.” The spring-loaded steel made me wince as it struck home. “This is the safety catch,” he said, then wagged a callused finger at me. “Never put it on. You will only forget and wonder why you cannot fire.”

I am sure that I gulped at that point, screaming inside my head, Why? Why do I need to know this?!

Himmel continued. “The magazine goes in here.” He rammed it home, then came up with another long rectangle of steel. “Here is an extra one. Put it in your pocket, not in a pouch. You are not a soldier yet, and you will forget where it is.”

Yet? I wanted to shout. Yet? I’m not a soldier now, nor do I ever wish to be!

At this juncture, I began to perspire profusely. It was clear that the troop was about to embark on some disastrous adventure of which I wanted no part. I searched madly for a way out, the one turn of phrase that might free me from this avalanche.

“Herr Colonel,” I stuttered. “I doubt that... I mean, Sir... I think that I might be more a danger to your venture than an asset...”

“Nonsense!” Himmel boomed, and it was then that I understood his view of the world, the war, and the rites of passage. He was offering me an honor which could not be declined. “I do not expect you to contribute anything worthwhile, Shtefan, but I do expect you to keep yourself intact. And this as well...”

He reached into the footlocker and brought out a small leather case, slapping it into my palm.

“It is a Leica and two extra rolls of film. Take photos, and stay close behind me.”

I must have been regarding him with the same expression of a child who first witnesses his parents’ fornication. He actually grinned at me.

“British commandos have captured a staff officer of the 1st Panzer. We are going to free him. Just before dawn. Get yourself a helmet.”

With that, he strode from the room, shouting orders to Captain Friedrich. With a trembling hand, I managed to slide the pistol into my holster and snap it shut, and as instructed, I slipped the extra magazine into my trouser pocket. Then, for a moment, I considered running straight for my chamber and the servants’ entrance and not stopping until I had swum the Rhine and walked all the way to France. Unfortunately, we still occupied all that part of Europe, and what might befall me in the embrace of some other Nazi officer could make this impending fate seem attractive by comparison.

There was an open bottle of wine on the commander’s desk. I drank a quarter of it quickly, and followed after him...

* * *

The castle was nestled upon a small soft meadow, in the cleavage of a pair of high peaks, and we wound away from it in utter darkness. The company cook’s fires danced dimly from a lower window, and I never had thought to regard that cold, bleak stone edifice as a home from which to regret departure.

I sat stiffly in the rear of Colonel Himmel’s staff car. The winter months were still fresh memories, and a harsh chill made the black air brittle, yet the Kübelwagen’s folding roof was not deployed, and I had to set my jaw against my chattering teeth. Behind us, two medium troop trucks with canvas roofs followed close, and despite the rutted road and trundling engines, I could hear the raiding complement of twenty-one men chattering and laughing from within. I had no doubt that I was the object of their mirth, for they had passed me by en route to debarkation, as I stood behind the Colonel clutching the camera and his map case. I no doubt served up the image of a martial jester, wearing a coal scuttle helmet too large for even an average man. Its rim fell well below my earlobes, and the commandos, sporting leopard camouflage smocks, hauling their machine pistols and light machine guns and even an anti-armor Panzerfaust, had unabashedly jerked their thumbs at me and howled as they boarded their trucks.

Himmel’s driver, an older, mustached corporal named Edward, deftly maneuvered the car along the winding mountain roads, without benefit of headlights. Beside him the Colonel sat, erect and silent, puffing a short cigar whose smoke wafted directly back into my face. Himmel was not wearing a helmet, but only a Feldmütze, the SS field cap angled smartly over his bristle of gray-blond hair, and every other member of the troop was similarly cavalier. But I was grateful for my steel hat, and certainly unconcerned with being out of fashion.

After two hours of a spine-numbing drive to the south, we rose from between the copses of mountainside trees and onto a higher road bordered by gently waving grass. A sliver of moon then peaked a distant crest, and Himmel turned his head to stare at it in disgust, as if his expression might convince the orb to retreat. Yet it only rose higher, throwing some small farmhouses and cattle fences into sharp relief. Soon, we were traversing a large flat meadow, and I realized we had climbed upon a lip overlooking the winding silver waters of the Rhine so far below. On any other night, in any other life, I would have noted the beauty of such a stunning vision. Yet something else caught my attention.

Sitting at the very top of the meadow were three large forms, silhouettes the likes of which I had never seen. They appeared to be enormous iron wasps, with faces of curving glass, ugly fat tires for feet, and above, double umbrellas of long glinting sword blades. I leaned forward in my seat, my mouth certainly agape, and Himmel turned his face to me and grinned.

“Hubschrauber,” he yelled above the car’s engine roar. “Helicopters. Have you never seen one?”

I believe that I slowly shook my head in disbelief. I had, of course, heard that someday there would be such an airplane, one that could lift straight up into the sky without benefit of wings. But as yet, I was certain that such things existed only in the ancient notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

“Skorzeny prefers a Storch,” Himmel continued. He meant the light aircraft favored by the infamous commando leader, Colonel Otto Skorzeny. “Scarface Skorzeny,” as he was often called, was a personal favorite of Hitler and clearly a competitor for Himmel’s glories. “But I managed to elicit these from the Luftwaffe. They’re Dragons, experimental.”

I did not know why Himmel seemed to be informing, or rather, confiding in me. Perhaps he expected me to someday write his memoirs? I had not long to consider this, as the staff car raced toward the first of the iron monsters. There are historians who swear that no such functional machines existed until years later, but I bear witness to the contrary. A low-pitched whine began to emanate from its massive engines, and its drooping blades began to slowly twirl. From that moment on, I was gripped by an icy fist of fear that set me to a sort of paralysis. The staff car slammed to a halt, and I sat in the back, staring and immobilized.

“Raus!” Himmel snatched at my tunic shoulder and fairly dragged me from the vehicle. I slipped and fell into the mud, and then he was pulling me along as he shouted orders to his men and to the pilots. I vaguely recall the trundle of many boots as the raiding complement ran and leaped into their respective helicopters, while Himmel pushed me to the wide open doorway of the first machine and kneed my buttocks as if I were a cow. I climbed in clumsily, already hyperventilating, gripping the Leica case as if it might save my life. Himmel stepped directly over my quivering form and squatted in the iron cavern just behind the pair of Luftwaffe pilots, and immediately the space was filled with the first seven SS of his forward element. They jockeyed for positions, falling hard on their rumps and tucking up their legs. Someone’s binoculars swung and struck my helmet with a resounding ping, and I saw Himmel twirling his finger in the air between the pilots and I felt my stomach leap for my throat as the horrible device left earth for heaven.

I do not know how long we flew, yet it certainly seemed forever. And I did not see very much, as for most of the journey my eyes were clamped shut. The engines roared like a carpenter’s lathe and a freezing wind sliced through the rattling compartment, and I remembered as a child being forced by my father to ride the great carnival wheel in Vienna’s Prater, and how I had peed in my trousers, an urge I barely contained at this moment. At one point, long into the horrible flight, someone slapped the top of my helmet, and I opened my eyes to see the grinning face of Captain Friedrich, his steel blue eyes merry and his flaxen eyebrows arched in utter thrill. He suddenly pinched my cheek with what one might suppose a gesture of comradely affection, yet it hurt so much I nearly yelled. But it was then I looked to the fuselage’s windows, and realized we were in fact skimming at breakneck speed through a deep and winding valley, and we were well below the peaks of its sides. I groaned and squeezed my eyes shut once more, and it required every muscle of my stomach not to regurgitate its contents.

We flew on into a breaking dawn; I could feel the growing light upon my eyelids. I heard someone bellow, “Stukas!” and I managed to take a peek. We were flying much higher now, and astride the helicopter was a pair of the Luftwaffe’s ugly fighter-bombers. I managed to twist my head a bit, achieving a glimpse of our other two transports bobbing in the cold blue air not far behind, and then the Stukas flipped over and dived away from us. Understanding nothing of such raiding tactics, I did not know that they were there to first bomb the perimeter of the target, with the intent to shock the British commandos and force them to take shelter. Nor did I realize that in order to maintain this tactical advantage, we would immediately assault into the still-raining debris of the bombing.

I yelled then, for the helicopter suddenly tilted nose downward, and I believed we were crashing. I flung my arms out and actually hugged myself to Himmel’s back, like a girl gripping a reckless horseman, and I cared not what the men would think of me or call me later on. Then all at once the horrible machine swooped up again, seemed to stop in midforward motion, and settled to the hard ground with a resounding thud of steel.

Still gripping the Colonel, my cringing face pressed against his battle harness, I was dragged from the compartment as he leaped out. I smashed to the ground, a rag doll of flopping arms and legs, and then someone yanked me up, and I saw that Himmel was already running away at full tilt and I chased after him. Following that madman into battle was not an hour before the very last intent I had, but now I wanted nothing more than to see his back filling my field of vision, and absolutely nothing else.

I do not really know what happened on that peak that morning. I was the poorest witness to history, for I saw little more than my master’s form, his waving arms, the spent brass shells spinning from the chamber of his pistol. I heard nothing of distinction to remember, save the gunfire that began almost immediately upon our birthing from the helicopters, muffled and unrecognizable shouts, punctuations of screams and thudding explosions that filled my quickly deafened ears with a sensation of cotton fiber. The stench of ordnance scorched my nostrils and throat, but my hammering heart pumped my lungs to take in every breath of oxygen that would surely be my last.

All around us the men were sprinting forward in concert with Himmel’s incredible pace, firing their machine pistols and hurling their grenades. It struck me at once that he ran with the utter arrogance of a man in his own backyard, though he certainly had never set foot in this place before. At one point, he suddenly stopped before a huge concrete bunker, and of course I smashed right into him and bounced off his pelvis. When I gained my footing again, I saw through the heavy smoke a wide entrance to the redoubt. I bent over to try and catch my breath, and just then a figure wearing a Tommy helmet suddenly appeared from around the corner of the edifice and Himmel reached out his arm and shot the man point-blank. I did not see the victim fall, for my eyes instinctively shuttered, but when I opened them again Captain Friedrich was emerging from the bunker. He was grinning from ear to ear, his face spidered with streaks of blood that flowed from his now hatless blond hair, and his hand gripped the elbow of a Wehrmacht Panzer general.

The man was clearly in shock. He was middle-aged and gray all over, from his hair and through to the pallor of his skin, with his tanker’s tunic torn and blood spattered. I saw his jackboots angle forward as he began to crumple, and then Himmel gracefully stepped in, bent and slung the officer over his shoulders like a bear rug.

“Nach Hause!” the Colonel yelled, and then he was running back toward the helicopters, the entire complement of men close behind, spinning and firing their weapons madly as cover. I thought I had nary a breath left in me, but my legs instructed that now was not the time to quit, and I managed to shadow my master as he ran, the general’s form bouncing upon his shoulders like the fallen victim of a house fire.

The men hurled themselves into the helicopters, whose blades had never ceased to whirl, and some of them took to a knee and fired their machine pistols without end at the enraged survivors of the British hideaway. My teeth were set like those in a naked skull and my back compressed with every shot, my heart pounding in its anticipation of a bullet from behind.

Himmel suddenly stopped just at the lip of the helicopter compartment. Then he turned quite casually, the general limp upon his back.

“Did you get a photo?” he yelled at me.

Only then did I realize that the Leica had never left its pouch. I stared at it, amazed that it was still in the death grip of my fingers, and I looked up and wagged my head from side to side. The helicopter pilots were shouting, something was banging repeatedly off the iron sides of the machine, and I knew it was the impact of British bullets.

“Well?” the Colonel shouted again. “Take one!”

My mouth fell open. He could not possibly be serious! But I quickly saw that indeed we would not leave this hell unless the master had his souvenir. Somehow, my fingers managed to open the pouch and I extracted the camera. Something kicked at the mud next to my boot and I leaped a bit, while my quaking hands lifted the Leica; yet I could not even see through the viewfinder, as my eyes had filled with the tears of the absolute conviction of my death. More bullets rang off the helicopter, the blades were churning up a thunderous wind, the pilots were shrieking, and I saw Himmel grin like some ungodly and calm white hunter in the African veldt as I clicked the shutter.

And then I fainted.

III

IN JUNE OF 1943, I became a corporal in the Waffen SS.

I shall not insult the reader with a host of limp excuses, or in any way deny that I coveted the rank and title which only months before would surely have repulsed me. However, I do beg patience in the hearing of my explanation.

Had I remained in all technicalities a civilian in the employ of the army, I would have continued to receive the concomitant pay, which amounted to essentially nothing. On the other hand, as a field draftee, and instantly granted a rank suited to my tasks as Colonel Himmel’s adjutant, I would be rewarded the monthly stipend stipulated by Wehrmacht rules and regulations. Most of that pay would be recorded in my Soldbuch, yet issued directly to my mother in Vienna, while I retained some pocket money for the occasional purchase of a black-market treat. One might say that my motive here was purely mercenary, although the benefits to my mother, especially were I to fall in battle, assuaged my discomfort upon being issued the Rottenführer collar tabs.

Thus were the rewards of becoming an official member of Himmel’s Commando. The drawback, at least so far as I considered it at the time, was Himmel’s stipulation, which he informed me of prior to my promotion.

You see, I was still a virgin.

And the Colonel refused to have a virgin serving in his order of battle.

He was not, as far as I could assess, a sexual deviant of any sort. He simply believed that a sexually naive soldier was an incomplete man, spending too much time engaged in fantasy and wonder, carrying a needless mental burden that could prove a dangerous distraction.

“A man who has not bedded a woman spins in circles,” he explained. “The hormones remain unreleased and his potential bottlenecked. Take care of this, Shtefan, and you shall receive your rank.”

He was ever surprising me with some unexpected and outlandish task. But this one surpassed all other previous orders. I had by then survived three additional combat adventures with the unit, admittedly all of them barely witnessed as I crouched in the lee of the Colonel’s charging silhouette, yet the prospect of my deflowering summoned a fear beyond that of physical wounding.

On that glorious summer weekend, the troop, under temporary command of Captain Friedrich, was enjoying a brief rest and recreation in Munich. It was only the Colonel, myself and his driver, Edward, who traveled the bomb-pocked Autobahn down to Salzburg. I had never been to this magnificent city of medieval castles, classical concerts and springtime carnivals, and initially I felt blessed at having been selected for the venture. The Colonel was to attend a conference of high-ranking SS officers, hosted by Heinrich Himmler himself, and he had even invited his wife to join him at the Schloss Reichenhall Hotel.

Have I failed to mention that Himmel had a wife? Oh yes, the Colonel was married, and had three young daughters as well, all of whom lived on the outskirts of Munich. I had foolishly anticipated a rather relaxed episode, full of high-born officers and their gowned wives, all dancing Viennese waltzes and sharing feasts excavated from some secret privileged stores. Yet now, the summer excursion filled me with foreboding.

Arriving in the city, which did not at first glance appear to be suffering the later stages of the war, Edward and I escorted the Colonel into his hotel. We remained some paces behind, carrying his modest valises and map cases as Himmel strode into the wide lobby, stamped to a stop and threw his arms wide to the sides. A trio of small blonde girls in white frilled dresses ran to him and leaped into his arms, and as he laughed and kissed and tickled them, his wife approached as well. She was extremely small and trim, wearing a prim gray suit, with her dark blond hair pulled tightly into a bun, and she placed a white-gloved hand upon my master’s shoulder and offered him a taut cheek. In turn, he slipped a hand behind her head, angled his chin and kissed her hard upon the mouth, and then he roared with laughter as she stepped back, blushing and smoothing her suit coat as if it had been soiled.

A pair of bellmen quickly recovered the Colonel’s valises from our hands, and Himmel turned and strode to us.

“You will stay at the SS barracks on Wandersee,” he said. Then he looked at me with a harsh squint. “Execute your assignment, Shtefan, and report to me in the morning.”

I saluted and clicked my heels, Edward mimicked me, and we departed as I blew out a long, trembling sigh...

* * *

I sat stiffly beside the aging corporal in Himmel’s staff car as a cool night breeze wafted from between the dignified edifices of Salzburg and the wheels trundled over rain-polished cobblestones. I released the stay of my collar and pushed my field cap back onto my head, scratching my brow and trying to imagine just how to go about this. Edward was silent, though he smiled a bit and smoked as he drove, and initially I thought him not to be privy to the true nature of Himmel’s order. But then, he spoke.

“So, Shtefan. I assume you’ve been ordered to fuck.”

I looked at him. “You know?”

“Of course. It happens to every virgin in the troop, though there aren’t a lot of them by the time they get to us.”

He was clearly enjoying this and speaking loudly above the engine rumble, and I wanted to shush him, even though certainly none of the pedestrians we passed could possibly overhear.

“I...but I...really know nothing about this.” I fidgeted in my seat. “How to go about it...”

“Well, you’ve stroked your own cock, haven’t you?” he posed as he finger-brushed the tips of his graying mustache.

I must have blushed a deep purple crimson, for the corporal glanced at me and nearly choked on his own laughter. I had meant that I had no idea how to go about locating a willing volunteer, rather than the exact physical logistics of sex. Of course, that knowledge evaded me as well, but he went right on before I could explain.

“It’s pretty much the same,” he said with a shrug. “But here, once you get hard, you just stick it in and pump until you squirt. If she isn’t wet, you can slap some hair oil on her. But believe me, as soon as you see your first pair of tits you’ll come to attention right quick!”

I began to perspire, my heart palpitating. I wiped my palms on my trousers. We passed a pair of pretty young women in long dresses and high shoes, and I imagined in my panic that even if both of them stood naked before me in the most luxurious and inviting of bedroom suites, my body would simply freeze and refuse to do my bidding. What would happen if I were, somehow, somewhere, able to find a cooperative woman, and then be unable to perform? Would Himmel have me summarily shot? Would my war record file read, in summation after so many life-threatening combat excursions, “Executed for refusal to perform his duties”?

“The very first time can be hard, though,” Edward continued. “No joke. If you’ve never had your hand up a girl’s dress before, you can panic and shut down, and your cock’ll just hang there like an earthworm.” He paused. “Have you?”

“What?”

“Stuck your hand up a girl’s dress?”

“No.” I swallowed.

“Outside? Ever felt one’s tits?”

“No.” I was growing sullen at this point.

“Well, then, you might have to drink some schnapps and loosen up. Of course, sometimes drinking too much can make you soft as pudding.”

“Edward.” I was gritting my teeth. “This isn’t helping. And where shall I supposedly find this sort of woman anyway? At this hour? In a strange city?”

“Listen, boy. All cities have whores, and I know where the whores are in every city. I can smell them from ten kilometers out.”

“Whores?” My nose bunched up in disgust.

“Yes, whores! Of course, whores. What’d you think, that you’re going to fall in love in one hour, buy her a ring, marry her and fuck her by dawn?”

“Gott im Himmel,” I groaned, and I reached up for my cap brim and pulled it down over my face, folding my arms and pouting.

We did not speak for a while. Edward smoked and hummed an annoying ditty as he drove, and although he issued no lyrics to accompany the melody, I was rather certain it to be some lewd rhyme which made him merry in his head. His gay mood depressed me even further. My mission seemed utterly impossible, no less than being ordered to steal a ring from the Kaiser’s finger while he bathed in a tower of his palace, surrounded by armed footmen. Yet I was determined, in my stubborn adherence to the slim precepts of romance, to at the very least seduce some young, lonely, comely, and desperately charitable female of my own age, or thereabouts.

“So?” Edward finally said. “No whorehouse?”

“No.” I pouted. “Never.”

“Fine, then.” He shrugged. “You can try here.”

The Kübelwagen broke out into a large cobblestoned square. In its center was a towering statue of Beethoven, and as the night was pleasant and devoid of the threatening drum of aircraft engines from high above, the Salzburgers had come out to stroll and chat. Small groups of various ages milled about, and surrounding the square were a number of brightly lit taverns, their music and the laughter of their patrons echoing between the edifices.

I fastened my collar, set my cap smartly on my head and disembarked from the staff car. Edward fixed the hand brake and exited himself, brushing cigarette ashes from his tunic.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“With you, of course.”

I frowned. The odds of my finding this night’s love dropped like a brick from a Bavarian steeple, as I imagined his crude and portly form accompanying me.

“I think I can manage alone, Edward,” I said as sternly as I could.

“Maybe.” He arched his brows in doubt. “But if you make a pass at some officer’s daughter and wind up in the clink, it’ll be my ass as well as yours. So, I’m coming along, for my own safety.”

I placed my hands on my hips, mimicking one of Colonel Himmel’s most infamous postures.

“And how am I to succeed with you shadowing my every effort?”

He smirked at me then, shaking his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay in the shadows and just watch your back. At any rate, in two hours you’ll be begging me to help you find a nice, clean little whorehouse and get it over with.”

“Humph.” I straightened my shoulders and strode away toward the first tavern that presented itself, hearing Edward’s boots clicking on the stones close behind. I would certainly show him. Yes, I would. I would march into one of these merry little enclaves and have a drink at the bar and strike up a conversation with one beautiful young miss. And I would charm her with my Viennese gentility and regale her with jokes and compliment her person and her scents and her magnetism, and soon she would be batting her eyelashes at me and blushing and whispering hints of a private room nearby in the servants’ quarters of a town councilman. And long before dawn we would be making mad and passionate love, for perhaps the third or fourth time, upon all manners of furniture and with utterly ecstatic abandon!

Two hours later, I emerged from the fourth such establishment. I was utterly defeated, and hoping that the sheets of brothel beds were at the very least turned over after every ghastly visit.

“I told you,” Edward said without genuine reproach, but rather a melancholy tone in concert with my defeat. After all, he knew that the Colonel expected him to guide me in my quest, and to assure its success.

We stood in the square just outside this latest tavern of disaster. Edward was smoking, and as always he instinctively offered me the cigarette tin. Though I had always declined before, in this instance I succumbed, and he nodded and lit my smoke with an army lighter. I coughed terribly, waiting for the rancid substance to somehow calm my nerves.

There had certainly been an abundance of suitable women in all the establishments. Of all sorts of ages, shapes and sizes, they laughed and danced and drank from deep steins of watery wartime beer. They leaned upon the shoulders of rough-looking army officers, and they pressed their cleavaged bosoms against coarse uniforms and lifted their legs to show their calves. And although in the course of two long hours I managed to elicit a dance from one matronly, middle-aged, half-drunken farm woman, essentially I felt like a boy on his first deer hunt, staring wide-eyed at the potential prey and clutching a weapon I had no idea how to use correctly. Utter disaster.

Simultaneously, Edward and I crushed out our cigarettes, sighed, and remounted the staff car. He did indeed seem able to follow the scents emanating from some distant house of ill repute, though in fact he was simply observing the direction taken by wandering army troops of the lower ranks. A quartet of half-inebriated panzer drivers sang “Ach du lieber Augustin” as they staggered along a narrow road, elbows locked and joking about the deleterious effects of alcohol on proper erections, and Edward knew to simply tag along with the car.

He stopped as we approached a row of tall, narrow, three-story apartment buildings. Their faces were of broken brickwork, and they were squeezed together like gravestones in an overcrowded cemetery. Two of the buildings had large street-front windows, with heavy brocade curtains and a reddish lamp glow bleeding through the frays. Apparently, this was a signal which clearly spoke to the corporal, though it was unrecognized by me.

“Come, boy,” he said, and I steeled myself and followed him into the first such building. He passed through the heavy front door without so much as flipping the iron knocker, and immediately we found ourselves in a dark and decrepit sitting room, occupied by an elderly matron cocooned in a threadbare housecoat and woolen slippers. She sat upon a worn purple divan, reading a pfennig novel by candlelight, and I prayed that this gray-haired matron was not the only prospect in the house. She looked up and grinned, her mouth a garden of broken teeth.

“Guten Abend!” she croaked. “Your pleasure, gentlemen?”

“Yes, that,” Edward snapped. “If there’s anything here to please us.”

“Einen Moment.” The old woman struggled to her feet and hobbled away somewhere, while I jammed my hands into my pockets, looking about at the fading portraits of German composers and Alpine apple orchards, and attempted to summon my most casual whistle. It was nowhere within me.

A pair of women sauntered into the room. The first of them was black-haired, middle-aged, and powerful in the appearance of her musculature beneath a heavy emerald dress. The thick makeup upon her face looked almost clownish, her lips heavy and blood red, her eyes outlined in inky borders, and the upper portion of her dress was unlaced, revealing a bosom that appeared to me to be as large as the rump of a pig. The second woman was somewhat more youthful and substantially smaller of stature. Her dark blond hair was braided into “strudel” coils astride her ears, and her attire resembled that of a beer-garden waitress, replete with its white bodice and billowing short sleeves. Upon her feet she wore high black boots, laced up the center to her shins, and her face was also overly masked with paint. I tried to blur the image of her mouth, for its lipstick was somewhat askew and I dared not imagine the cause.

“You take Sylvia?” The old woman, who now peeked from behind her prostitutes, gestured at the larger of the two women and winked at Edward.

“All right,” he said, and I was immediately grateful, as he was clearly volunteering to mount this creature in deference to the better choice for me.

“And you want Heidi, ja?” The old woman lightly slapped the rump of the blonde “waitress” as she jutted her trembling chin in my direction. Heidi smiled, showing a chipped front tooth and the tip of her tongue.

I managed a nod, even as I experienced an icy chill throughout my spine.

“Twenty reichsmarks apiece,” said the madame, very curtly.

“Ten.” Edward snapped a reply.

“Fifteen!” The old woman raised a gnarled finger.

I was then engaged in turning my trouser pocket inside out, and counting some rumpled bills and coins.

“I am afraid I have no more than ten,” I stuttered.

“Ten it’ll be, then,” Edward said to the old one. “Or nothing.”

“All right.” The madame stuck her thumbs in the belt of her housecoat. “But you can fuck them for fifteen minutes. No more.”

“Half an hour,” Edward shot back.

“Twenty minutes!” She returned his serve.

I was certain I would require no more than a paltry minute myself, and only that if my already rebelling penis would suddenly take flight in an Olympian miracle.

Edward took the black-haired wench by her wrist and immediately moved toward a creaking stairway, and as he passed me by he whispered, “Just think of Ava Gardner.”

I stared after him. I did not know who that was, and was lost for a substitute image. I found myself temporarily immobilized, while Heidi lifted the hem of her dress and too mounted the stairway. She stopped after a meter’s progress, turned to me and beckoned with a finger, and I swallowed hard and followed.

Within a minute, I found myself standing before her in a small and dimly lit room, rather like the cabin of a steamship. There may have been a washstand, a small desk and a single chair, but I do not really recall, for my eyes were locked on the narrow bed covered with rumpled and graying sheets.

Heidi immediately plopped herself down on the edge of this newlyweds’ paradise, sitting quite erect and spreading her boots. She regarded me with what she might have supposed to be doe’s eyes, and placed a flirtatious finger in her mouth. With her other hand, she quickly lifted her dress and gathered its hem about her waist, revealing short, puffy white bloomers encasing her bare thighs. Then, with the practiced grace of a magician’s assistant, she quickly dragged them off, down over her knees, and allowed them to hang about one ankle, while I stood there and stared at her in utter shock, as if the furry mouth that now presented itself to me was the maw of a dragon.

I could not move. My hands were clenched into tight fists, angled straight down astride my trouser legs, as if I might be at attention on parade. My breaths came in short rasps of panic through my nostrils, and although I tried with every muscle to summon some sensation in my groin, in truth I seemed to be utterly paralyzed from the neck down.

The woman giggled then, which quickly shot my face through with a roaring blush. She seemed to believe that my paralysis was simply a temporary lack of ardor, perhaps akin to a stubborn auto engine requiring coaxing on a winter morn. And so, she quickly unlaced her bosom bodice, slid her hands inside her upper dress, and scooped her breasts out into the air, where they settled upon her torso like a pair of cycloptic jellyfish. This attempt had no effect whatsoever, other than to further widen my eyes and tremble my knees.

For a moment, Heidi cocked her head at me, then quickly leaned forward and reached out for my tunic. I watched her hands as they deftly flashed the flaps aside, unbuttoned my braces, and within an instant I was standing there with my trousers and shorts about my boots. As she gripped me in her hand and opened her mouth, I confess that I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed. But it was all to no avail, as her enthusiastic tongue and lips managed only to soak me in a warm sort of slime, through which nothing worthwhile of me emerged.

“No, my dear?” She finally spoke, perhaps thinking that some romantic lingual engagement might encourage me. “Then let’s try it this way, Schatzi!”

She suddenly fell back upon the bed, raising and separating her legs as she dragged me down, my body stiff as bone in every place but where it mattered. And I fell upon her, bumping hair muff to hair muff, flesh to flesh, and she twisted and bucked and ground her hips and gripped my buttocks and bit down onto my earlobe. But we remained unjoined, and I felt nothing more than sublime humiliation.

At last, she ceased her futile efforts and turned her head to regard a cuckoo clock on the wall. “So, that’s it, poor boy!” she exclaimed as she jumped up.

Within a minute, I was fully dressed and outside on the street, waiting for Edward as I cursed Himmel and Hitler and the entire Reich, not to mention God, who was equally the culprit...

* * *

“You didn’t?” Edward was driving once more and regarding me, post-confession, as if I had failed to feed my own starving child. “What do you mean, you didn’t?!”

Silence for a moment.

“I couldn’t.”

“You didn’t even try?”

“I tried. She tried. All of the angels in Himmel’s version of hell tried.”

“Was there something wrong with her?”

“I have nothing with which to compare.”

“Well...did she have some hideous scar or something?”

“I believe she was biologically normal.”

“Then what the hell was wrong?”

“Nothing happened. I couldn’t... It wouldn’t...”

He paused for a moment, shaking his head slowly and sadly. “And you paid her as well.”

“Yes.”

“Ten reichsmarks. And now you’re broke, to boot.”

“My poverty is hardly of great concern at the moment.”

We drove in silence, like a disenchanted couple, both pairs of eyes forward yet seeing little more than images of our Colonel’s express disappointment, which was bound to rise along with the morning’s sun. We found ourselves headed back to the Beethoven Square, which seemed as appropriate as Napoleon’s return to kick the corpses at Waterloo.

“Ohhh.” I finally blew out a sigh. “I want to get drunk.”

“That’s certainly not going to help.”

“At this point, Edward, it does not matter. I am hardly going to attempt this again.” I fished in my pocket and found a few remaining pfennig.

“All right, then. What the hell.”

We soon found ourselves once again in one of the taverns on the square. At this juncture, Edward seemed quite spent, and I was not surprised given the physically hardy appearance of his recent paramour. He wandered over to a table in one corner, collapsed into a chair and waved at someone for a large beer.

The establishment was full of Wehrmacht officers, all laughing and drinking and hurling jokes across the room at their compatriots. Many of them were crowded about large round tables, some with local women pulled onto their laps, and more than one enthusiastic game of cards was being played out. Crackling music was loudly expressed from a gramophone atop the tavern bar, and the open floor between the bar and tables was full with quickly prancing couples, some swaying and clutching enormous beer steins. All in all I must have saluted twenty times as I carefully shouldered my way between these men, the long oak bar eventually appeared through the crowd, and I swam to it like a drowning sailor spotting a bobbing timber.

Exhausted in spirit and body, I climbed up onto an empty stool at the very farthest corner of the bar, placed one elbow on the polished and puddled wood, and rested my forehead in my hand. I had arrived at a very dark place in this stage of my life. It seemed that, until this night, my adventures in the army had been, although life-threatening, also exhilarating in some sense. Yet now I wanted none of it, and the reality of my predicament had come tumbling down, the realization triggered by the failure of my most basic libidinous necessity. I was hardly a man, and what made me think myself capable of surviving in the world I now inhabited? If I could not meet this most simple challenge, what might my master next present? Some task that would surely mean my death, instead of my humiliation. I began to plan my escape, knowing full well that desertion would also mean certain execution if I were ever caught. I nearly sobbed.

“And what can I do for you, handsome boy?”

I lifted my head. The barmaid, whom I had not heretofore noticed, stood directly in my vision. I noted first her smile, for it was warm and very wide and replete with fine teeth, without a hint of decay or breakage. Her long brown hair was pulled behind her neck, and her matching eyes were wide and friendly. She wore a very modest dark blue dress, buttoned tastefully to her throat.

I grimaced more than smiled, and I touched the brim of my cap and then removed it. “Is the beer expensive?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Her smile warmed further. “Five pfennig.”

I frowned and shrugged. “I am afraid I have only three.”

“As I said, three pfennig.” She winked.

She turned away for a moment, and her movement appeared to be nearly a pirouette, for in an instant she faced me once more, a high glass mug with a snowcap of foam in her hand. She plunked it down on the bar before me, and I pushed my last scraps of pay across the wood.

“Danke,” I said as I pulled the heavy glass closer.

“Bitte.” She nodded. Then she glanced up at a clock on the wall behind the bar, and she smoothly removed a white apron, folded it and tucked it away somewhere. “I think I’ll have one as well.” She poured herself a similar helping of beer from a huge keg, then pulled up a stool from her side of the oak and perched upon it. She raised her glass in my direction.

“I do not want to make trouble for you,” I said, glancing about for her employer.

“I’m off now. A girl deserves a rest, don’t you think?”

She clicked her glass against mine and sipped her foam, and I watched her as I did the same. She grinned as she swept a slim white line from her upper lip with her finger.

“I’m Francie,” she said.

“I am pleased to meet you. I’m Shtefan.”

She looked at me then, slightly tilting her head. One must realize that we were forced to speak very loudly above the din.

“You are wearing SS tabs, Shtefan.”

“Yes.” It was curious to feel that I was unworthy of such a dastardly coterie of warriors.

“I always think of them as older, and larger. And killers. You don’t seem to fit the image.”

“I’m just the commander’s adjutant.” I was desperately uneasy with this young woman. She was pretty and very open, and I was the world’s most pathetic fraud on every front.

“Ahhh.” She nodded and sipped some more, and I did the same, and we watched the room and were silent for a moment. Then, “And how old are you, Shtefan?”

“Nineteen.”

“I am twenty-three.”

“I wish I was twenty-three already.”

Naturally she did not understand my wish, being unable to connect it to my sexual status.

“And what are your tasks, for your commander?” she inquired, then suddenly touched her finger to her lips. “I should not ask you that. It might be a military secret.”

She was not joking, but I suddenly began to laugh. It came from somewhere deep and melancholy, a well of irony in my groin, and I had no control over the bitter mirth that racked my body as I threw my head back and tears actually sprang to my eyes.

“Why is that so funny?”

“My tasks...” I could not breathe, I was laughing so hard. “I...I must...”

“You must what, Shtefan?”

“I must lose my virginity!” At this point I was holding my chest, and I had to replace the mug upon the bar or spill its entire contents. “That’s the horrendous secret that must not be divulged! That is the shame for which my Colonel will not stand!”

I do not know why I vented my pain thusly to a stranger, but perhaps I could no longer contain my frustration, and she seemed a likely creature to sympathize. Eventually I calmed myself and settled back into silence. I held the mug with one hand, and with the other I rubbed my brow, and as I dared to look up at her again, I found her regarding me with the empathy of a kind nurse.

“Yes.” I nodded. “So foolish, isn’t it? That’s what’s important in the military social scale. To be one of the men, to be undistracted by adolescent fantasy. And it’s an order, not a request. Isn’t that so cruel?” I paused and sipped, then raised a finger. “Believe me, I’ve tried to obey. I have tried all night this very night, but it seems the pathetic, romantic images of my youth have enslaved me with an inability to execute this task on command. I wish I were such an animal, but I am not.” I restrained myself then, my voice falling to a murmur. “I apologize. I should not be so crude.”

Another long moment of silence passed between us, such as it was among the raucous music and laughter. Francie seemed to be thinking, looking off into nothing, and slightly nodding her head as if a rush of warm memories passed before her eyes.

“And, so?” She regarded me again. “What shall happen to you now?”

“Who knows?” I shrugged. There was no point in humiliating myself further.

“Did you try a prostitute?” she asked plainly.

I blushed so deeply then, a wave of shame washing from my neck and up to the roots of my hair. “Yes... But it was no good.”

“I did not expect so.” She nodded once again. “Young men want to be gentle, although they will never admit so. Young men must pretend to be virile and uncaring and always prepared to take such a reward, paid for or not, but we know it is all a lie.” She placed her fingers lightly on my sleeve as she drank a long pull with her other hand. “The truth is, young men just want to be kissed.”

I nodded in agreement, although I was utterly mortified at this juncture. Her words comforted me little, as I did not need a psychologist, but rather a miracle.

“Where are your comrades, Shtefan?” She looked over my shoulder and around the establishment, and I confess that my heart sank a bit. I did not expect this pretty young woman to volunteer herself on my behalf, but her question clearly indicated a wish to change the subject.

“I am only here with Edward, the commander’s driver,” I answered, as I glanced over my shoulder and jutted my chin in his direction. He was yet perched in his comfortable corner, downing his third stein of beer.

“Is that him?” Francie pointed. “The gray one with the belly?”

“Yes.”

Francie dismounted her stool and smoothed her dress, and without saying another word to me, she made off from behind the bar. I watched her with a frown, having not a clue as to her intentions. Yet, as she made her way through the crowd toward Edward’s table, I could only imagine some sort of horror. Was she a Gestapo agent? Was she determined to relay my dismay at the unfair commandments of my master? Did she have some sort of ticket book in which she had to maintain a recorded quota of inebriated betrayals?

The facts, which I did not know until much later, were thus. Francie marched right up to Himmel’s driver, smiled and offered a small curtsy.

“Edward, where does Shtefan have to be tonight?”

He was apparently quite drunk, his eyes shot through with crimson spiders and his lips drooling. “Shtefan? He has to be buried in something...or wind up really buried in something!”

“Where is the commander headquartered, Edward?” Francie was a patient girl, having dealt with thousands of drunkards.

“At the Reichenhall,” he slurred.

“Shtefan shall be there in the morning.”

And with that she walked away from him and returned to the bar. Somewhere en route, she had recovered a white shawl, and she hooked her fingers in my elbow and stood still for a moment and smiled at me.

“Come, Shtefan,” she said firmly, though with her gentle smile. “Apparently, someone has sent you a gift...”

* * *

Francie lived in a single room, at the rear of a large house that had once been a luxurious private home, but was divided up into apartments for the course of the war. She had her own entrance, and it revealed a small hallway, a small bath and a cozy salon in which her perfectly made-up bed was the overbearing feature. Absolutely everything was neat and in place, from her books to her framed family photographs to her rack of pressed clothes and a small dresser of her private things. I confess that at the time I did not really take much of this in, as en route to her abode along the silent cobblestone streets my heart was keeping up a drumbeat. We had hardly spoken at all, while she held my hand and seemed as light-footed as I was light-headed.

When we entered her room, we stood for a moment, very still. Next to me, she held my fingers lightly, and we faced the bed. It was very silent here, save for the occasional vehicle swishing by outside, and at last she nearly whispered, “This is a safe place for you.”

And I believed her. She turned to me then and reached up her hands to touch my face. She was shorter than I, and she came to her tiptoes and lightly brushed her lips over my furrowed brow. And then, her hand removed my cap, while the other held my chin, and she touched her mouth to mine. I closed my eyes. Her lips were like warm silk, and my own lips seemed to melt slowly into hers, like bars of cold pewter surrendering to a blacksmith’s fire.

She kissed me deeply on the mouth, for a very long time, and at last I allowed my fists to open, and my hands to venture up to her waist. She pulled me somehow closer, and I felt her hand reach for mine, and when she placed it, gently upon her breast, I felt a shudder flash from my knees to my neck.

Somehow, she never really stopped kissing me, as she managed to pull her dress up and over her head, and as she deftly helped me to lose my uniform. She was young, but precociously wise as I view her now, for she knew that my attention would be focused on her mouth, while by way of sweet deception she revealed the secrets I had heretofore so feared. It was not long before we stood there without any clothes at all, and the very first true caress of my body to a woman’s, that incredible softness of her full breasts pressed against my chest, is a sensation that comes only once, no matter how often it be repeated in life.

She did not touch me below the waist, until we lay together upon the bed for a long, long time. She helped my fingers explore her body, moving with each new moment of my learning, and if her quickened breathing was a practiced strategy I did not care, and all of it soon had its effect. And when at last she reached down for me, the touch of her cool fingertips caused me to fairly leap to her attentions, and before I knew what was happening I was inside her, and I groaned as if my last breath was being expelled from my lungs.

She hugged me then with all of her strength, and she swayed beneath me and used her folded legs to help me, and she kissed my mouth and my cheeks and my ears, and as I lost control and the room swayed and a profound joy and dizziness overtook my body, she whispered hoarsely, “Yes, Shtefan. Yes.”

And it seemed that the explosive release that then coursed through my entire being was matched only by her happiness that, somehow, she had managed to find one good thing about this war...

IV

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1943, my master became a hero.

It was in the autumn of that year that we made our pilgrimage to Berchtesgaden, during which my commander was dubiously blessed by the personal, though quite absentminded, bestowment of the Knight’s Cross by the Führer himself. The summer months had been deceptively languid, while interspersed with four more lightning raids into Pantelleria, Palermo, the Italian Alps and Corfu, where Himmel’s reckless courage seemed only to blossom further. The men of the Commando whispered that he would surely be rewarded very soon.

Yet given the dismissive and disappointing nature of this coronation of the nation’s bravest men, I felt a certain sorrow for Colonel Himmel, that he should give so much of himself and receive barely a nod in return, despite the medal itself. Yet in viewing the graceful manner in which the commander absorbed this reality of state, I realized that he, most certainly like all the officers present, had long ago accepted the fact that his courage was simply an integral part of his makeup. He most probably knew, already as a child, that he would accomplish great deeds of daring, and the trappings that would someday result were to be thought of as no more than diplomas. Medals were merely signatures upon the histories of dutiful deeds, which would have transpired with or without them.

And so, with the black Maltese medal and ribbon draped about his collar, Himmel withdrew from this elaborate and melancholy ceremony as quickly as protocol would allow. Edward and I had to fairly chase after him as he fled the Schloss and quick-marched down along the curving entrance drive, slapping his leather gloves into his palm and smacking his jackboots on the cracked concrete. He reached the staff car, hopped into the compartment without opening the door, turned and raised his arms high.

“Schnell! Back to work!” he yelled, and I thought that his grin was twisted up at its edges by force of will. It was difficult even for a man such as Himmel to accept the clay feet of his mentors.

We drove now to Bad Tölz, that quaint Bavarian town astride the Isar, where the Waffen SS held its headquarters and central barracks. In preparation for some special assignments, the unit had been relocated to this hub of commando activity, awaiting further glories. The trip from Berchtesgaden, while less than 150 kilometers, began after midnight and required considerable maneuvering over pocked peasant roads. I sat next to Edward, with the commander perched in his proper place behind me, and after an hour I began to nod off despite the trundling of the wheels over deep ruts. Himmel swatted me on the back of my cap.

“You shall not sleep, my corporal, while your commander plots!”

I snapped my head up, rubbed my eyes and saluted smartly without turning. I was also grinning, as was Edward, and I knew my master was doing the same. This had become rather a joke between us, for our strange trio had traveled thousands of kilometers together, and our humors had found a way to intersect despite the ranks.

Our quarters in Bad Tölz were not inside the SS buildings nearby the ancient spa, for our unit’s tasks were considered exceptionally secret even within this environment. Unfortunately, this meant that the Commando temporarily resided in a row of giant field tents, and although these were outfitted with iron woodstoves and sufficient bedding upon our canvas cots, the now constant rains chilled us from our boots to our bones. To a man, myself included, we were anxious to receive a new assignment and an improved residential position, even if that meant a shattered bunker at some remote and thunderous front.

As we finally approached the encampment this night, it was clear that something strange was afoot. Rising from the eastern valleys along the curving cattle road, there was a strange glow in the sky above the camp, and as we neared it an enormous bonfire appeared amid the horseshoe arrangement of tents. Torches had been fired up and staked about the perimeter, and all three of us sat up in our seats as we squinted at an honor guard comprised of the men.

They embraced the final roadway entrance to the camp, standing stiffly at attention in two long rows, face-to-face. Their jackboots and black helmets were polished, their buckles sparkling and bayonets held high to form a nuptial canopy. I could see the corpse of a fat wild boar being turned on a spit above a crackling fire, and a large plotting table had been laid out with bowls of fruits, piles of cakes and kegs of beer.

If Hitler himself had casually dismissed the courageous exploits of my master, Himmel’s men had not. The Colonel raised a fist and whispered something, and Edward stopped the car. The commander slowly disembarked, smoothing his tunic and setting his SS officer’s Death’s Head cap as he would hardly do for any officer of the General Staff. He carefully pulled his gloves onto his hands, and I swear I saw him swallow hard as he began to march toward his men, and they began to sing the Horst Wessel song with enormous and fervent power, their voices echoing off the surrounding hills.

Edward and I slid out from the staff car, looked at each other, and fell into pace behind our master, though at a respectful distance. He marched crisply up along the access road, approaching his roaring honor guard, and the sight of these warriors under a black sky tinged with fire would have imbued even Leni Riefenstahl with a chill. Before Himmel reached the mouth of this canopy of bayonets, a ginger-haired lieutenant named Schneller stamped up to his side, saluted smartly and spun to escort the Colonel through the steel cordon. Simultaneously, at the far side of the tunnel of troops, Captain Friedrich mounted an ammunition crate. In one hand he clutched a large SS banner mounted on a makeshift flagpole. With the other, he snapped and unfurled a small scroll.

The men finished their chorus. Himmel stopped before Friedrich, clasped his gloved hands behind his back and looked up at the captain. Friedrich began his recitation, and from my position well back of the ceremony, the scene was reminiscent of a wedding, contrived by Dante.

“A Colonel by rank, a King by courage,

A Shepherd to wolves, an Angel of warriors,

Lead us forth into temptations, of blood and fire,

Have no doubts of our duty, sacrifice or desire,

Be there medals or none, until death’s final knell,

We shall follow you, Commander, to the bowels of Hell.”

I raised an eyebrow. Clearly, the captain was a crude poet, yet the men thrice shouted, “To hell!” in thunderous unison as Friedrich stepped off his perch and presented Himmel with a perfectly polished Prussian cavalry sword. He also handed him the scrolled recitation, signed by each of the unit and now bound by Schneller with a crimson ribbon, and all three men saluted each other and clicked their boot heels.

Himmel turned to his complement of commandos. I could see, even at a distance, that his smile quivered a bit, and his one eye shone as if he had imbibed a liter of alcohol. It seemed that he wished to speak, but he could not manage it, and so instead he thrust the cavalry sword high into the air and the men shouted and cheered and surrounded him, each clasping his hand and gesturing at his Knight’s Cross. Lieutenant Gans, who had a scar across his full lips that foiled every smile, grinned as I’d never seen, and the giant Sergeant Meyer’s soft brown eyes and baby face glowed with admiration. They then raised the Colonel upon their shoulders, like the captain of a champion soccer team, and carried him to the table of food and drink.

From somewhere a hand-cranked gramophone began to crackle Bavarian folk bands into the chilled air, and the party carried on for over two hours. There was considerable taking of beer and wine, and the men joked and danced and even held an impromptu wrestling match between a pair of light machine gunners, and wagers were made and lost and I was certainly pleased to be well included as a member of the troop. “Drink, Fish!” became a constant rallying cry as so many in turn forced a steel cup of beer into my hand, and before long I was laughing and celebrating as if I had been born into this brood of unpredictable panthers.

At 3:00 a.m., a dispatcher on motorcycle interrupted the festivities. The roar of his BMW approaching the fires quelled the laughing and shouting, and he dismounted, raised his goggles, marched straight to Himmel and offered a stiff-armed “Heil Hitler.” The Colonel, who was now sweating and red-faced from spinning out a Bavarian jig, immediately stilled himself, scowling as he tore open the envelope.

He stepped closer to a torch and squinted for some time at the missive. Then, he folded it and placed it into his tunic pocket. The men watched him, quietly drinking their beers, and he shrugged and smiled wanly as he dismissed the messenger.

“Well, my comrades,” he said at last. “There is a time to laugh, and a time to kill...”

* * *

The Commando traveled from the onset of dawn, and all throughout the following day and well into the evening. With our staff car in the lead, we first set out northeast for Regensburg, then made northwest for Erlangen, and Himmel hardly spoke at all but to issue short directional orders. Save the cook, Heinz the armorer and a single private, the entire complement was along, yet none of us but the master knew our destination. This in itself was unusual, for once a mission was afoot, the Colonel customarily shared each detail that might aid success in martial tactics. Yet on this terribly long day, Edward and I suffered in his silence, left to ponder only the bomb-ravaged countryside and count the horses drawing caissons and supply carts toward the distant fates of other men.

I had, by this juncture, enough experience to assess a task by virtue of its preparation. When the Colonel ordered lightweight loads of personal battle harnesses, weapons and field caps, it was likely to be a lightning effort and mercilessly short. And by counterpoint, should he insist on satchel explosives, support mortars and helmets, my bowels cringed with the certainty of artillery and heavy resistance. However, on this day the unit was posting far from its headquarters, and it might well be tasked additionally while en route, so everything but the kitchen trough was aboard our trucks, making an educated guess quite impossible.

However, what chilled my spine and set my mind to racing over every imaginable fantasy on this excursion was the order Himmel had snapped at me just prior to embarkation.

“Leave your pistol, Shtefan.”

I had looked at him then, touching the butt of my holstered weapon possessively. The sidearm that I had so initially despised had become something of an amulet.

“Might I not need it, Herr Colonel?” I asked.

“Leave it. I do not want you to have it today.”

I obeyed, of course, and had reluctantly relegated the tool to my footlocker. And based upon some instinct, I did not even attempt to carry the Leica that had made itself a necessity heretofore.

With dusk, we were on the road to Schweinfurt, carrying on deeply into the heart of Germany. With each kilometer, we extended the range from any possible front, a fact that further stirred my curiosity into a whirlpool of discomfort. At last, and sometime close to midnight, the moon rose above the hills and hued the high, frothy clouds with fringes of silver, and we turned from the main road and wound our way up into the deep forests of the Hassberger. There, thousands of pines stabbed at the pale night sky with black and spiny spears, and it seemed that there was nowhere left to go but the looming cap of a windswept mountain.

A pair of dim headlights flashed then, a signal that briefly illuminated a broken road among the forest. Edward slowed the staff car and picked his way along this rising passageway, its shoulders eerily shadowed by the towering trunks and needled branches of the enormous trees. Our headlights then fell upon the flanks of a similar car, yet unlike our own field Kübelwagen, this one was enameled in a deep and polished black, its swastika emblem perfect and unmarred, its chrome fixtures buffed to a gleam. Four officers sat like expressionless mummies inside the car, their heavy leather coats and black peaked caps the calling cards of Gestapo. One of them raised a gloved finger and crooked it, and their car turned and made up the slope, and we followed.

We broke into a large grassy clearing at the crest of this height. A cold wind ruffled the wild meadow, and the moon made its greenery into a ghostly pale blue, and in the distances far below the dim lights of townships flickered like star clusters in undiscovered galaxies.

The Gestapo vehicle halted at the fringe of this clearing. Edward parked a bit to its rear and flank, as if avoiding some sort of infection by contact. Our lorries slowly gathered to the left, and I could hear the canvas flaps snapping up and the men mumbling and stretching their cramped limbs as they hopped to the wet ground. For some unexplained reason, there were no shouts of command, only whispers as if in a rectory.

Edward and I stayed in place as Himmel got out of the car, meeting his Gestapo counterpart halfway between the vehicles. My master pulled his orders from his pocket, and the conversation that was carried to me on the wind I shall not forget.

“What is this exactly about?” Himmel asked without so much as a greeting.

“You have your orders.” The Gestapo officer looked not at my commander, but simply gazed out over the night’s panorama.

“And I shall follow them, as always,” Himmel growled. “And as always, I will know the intent of my mission before its commencement.”

The Gestapo officer did not turn his head nor change his expression. He merely placed his hands behind his back, and lifted his nose as if sensing something foul on the wind.

“These men are British and Canadian flying officers,” he said. “They have escaped from Stalag Luft Six.”

“Then why not simply return them to Stalag Six?”

“They have escaped four times. The rest are to be furnished a lesson.”

Himmel lifted his chin a bit, then nodded once in understanding, if not heartfelt compliance. He snapped open the order sheet and pulled a pen from his pocket.

“Sign the orders, Hauptmeister,” he said.

The Gestapo officer turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “They have already been signed by the Führer.”

“Then you should have no issue with signing them as well.” Himmel’s tone left no quarter for quarrel. He extended the papers and the pen. The Gestapo officer snatched them up, signed them with a scrawl and handed them back. He then marched to his staff car, leaned inside and placed a radio handset to his head. I watched my Colonel as he turned and strode off to Captain Friedrich, who had now formed our men into the ranks, where they waited with their weapons slung, stamping their boots a bit to ward off the bitter chill.

It was not long before the strain of heavy engines reached us. More headlights appeared from the far side of the wood, and a pair of unmarked trucks made their way into the clearing. As they stopped, a small unit of Luftwaffe field security guards hopped from the trucks, opened the tailgates, and began helping the passengers down onto the grass. These men, perhaps thirty in all, were dressed in all manner of civilian coats and sweaters, some with torn woolen trousers and more than a few missing a shoe here and there. A pair of the prisoners had apparently been wounded somehow, as white soiled bandages were tied about their arms and thighs. None of them had shaved or washed in at least a week. All of them were blindfolded.

It was then that my heart began to hammer in my chest. Until that point, I had not truly fathomed the conversation between my master and this arrogant secret policeman, and now my mind could not accept what my intestines began to grasp. This was not possibly the mission that had been thrust upon us at the climax of our merriment. It could not be that a hero such as Himmel would be rewarded for his gallantry and glories by this horrible staining of his honor. This Germany that I had come to know within a cocoon of dedicated patriots could not in any way acquiesce or participate in cold-blooded murder!

The scene before me began to blur then, like a half-remembered nightmare on the edge of waking. My eyes began to fill and I could not breathe, and my hand gripped the ledge of the vehicle door, my knuckles white and my nose snorting steam into the air. I watched as Himmel issued an order to Friedrich, and the Commando moved silently forward, taking up a long position in line abreast. Across from them, atop the rounded summit of the clearing, the Luftwaffe troops almost gently formed the prisoners into a similar line. Himmel then strode to the Gestapo officer, who frowned at him, and then the two were engaged in some sort of row. Yet at last, the leather-frocked policeman hissed at his own adjutant, and this young man hurried to the Luftwaffe guards.

He returned leading a tall Allied pilot by the elbow. This man was clearly the ranking officer of the prisoners, and he stepped carefully and with the lanky North American grace I’d observed in films, until at last being left off to one side, alone.

Himmel approached him. The blindfolded airman lifted his head as my master spoke, so quietly that none of us could hear the exchange, nor whether it was in English or German. Though transfixed by the scene, I realized that in the background the Luftwaffe guards had quickly withdrawn, leaving nothing between the prisoners and our troops, who were now silently unslinging their weapons. I saw the flash of a cigarette as Himmel offered it to the tall Canadian pilot. He touched the man on his forearm, and my throat constricted as I was swept with the vision of my father once treating our mortally ill German shepherd just so. And I remember something of a small smile appearing on the pilot’s lips as he declined the smoke and said something, and then Himmel suddenly drew his pistol, cranked back the slide and shot the man directly in his forehead.

I believe that I yelled. I do not really remember. But I do recall that Edward’s hand smacked down onto my leg and gripped me so hard that I bit my lip. Yet my exclamations were irrelevant, nor were they heard, for in concert with the Colonel’s gunshot our commandos cocked their own weapons and opened fire. I squinted and groaned, and my entire body shook as if I in fact was the recipient of every bullet, and the entire meadow exploded with hundreds of horrible flashes, and I wept as the silhouettes of those men danced macabre pirouettes and smashed to the earth.

It was over in less than ten seconds. The wind quickly snatched away the echoes of gunfire and the stifling smoke, and all that was left were our troops; erect, silently lowering their weapons, clearing and checking their breeches. Himmel stepped forward toward the ragged line of corpses, and Friedrich made to join him but the Colonel waved his captain back into place. My master strode carefully; I could see his back bend a bit here and there. Something moved then among the tangle of bodies, and he walked to that slim evidence of life and quickly snuffed it out with another pistol shot, and I jumped and gripped the door ledge once again.

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