“We have no white flags, Herr Oberst,” Captain Ruell remarked with sarcasm. “White flags were never standard equipment in the Wehrmacht.”
The colonel nodded understandingly. “I know it is painful, Herr Hauptmann, but if we refuse to surrender, the Russians may treat us like we treated their guerrillas.”
“Are you expecting anything else from the Soviet, Herr Oberst?” Eisner asked.
“The war is over. There is no reason for more brutalities,” said the colonel. He turned toward me. “What do you intend to do?” I suggested that we should try to reach Bavaria, two hundred miles away, but the colonel only smiled at my idea. “By now, the Russian divisions are probably streaming toward the line of demarcation,” he said. “All the roads and bridges will be occupied by the Russians and precisely opposite the American lines you will find most of their troops. Stalin does not trust either Churchill or Truman. He has exterminated his own general staff. Do you think he would trust Eisenhower or Montgomery? The days of “our heroic Western Allies” are over for Stalin. In a few weeks” time the Western Allies will be called bourgeois, decadent, imperialist, and Stalin will deploy a million troops on the western frontiers of his conquest. Besides,” he added after a pause, “you should not expect much from the Americans, Herr Obersturmfuhrer. I have heard many of their broadcasts.”
“So have we,” Eisner remarked.
“Then you should know about their intentions. A prisoner is always a prisoner. The conqueror is always right and the vanquished is always wrong!”
“We have no intention of surrendering, Herr Oberst, neither here nor in Bavaria,” I said softly.
“Are you planning to go on fighting?”
“If necessary… and until we arrive at some safe place.”
“Where, for instance?”
“Spain, South America… the devil knows.”
“You should not count on Franco. Franco is all alone now and they might put pressure on him soon. With Hitler and Mussolini dead, Stalin will never tolerate the existence of Franco, the last strong leader in western Europe. Stalin knows that he will be able to push around everyone but Franco. He will regard Spain as a potential birthplace, or rather a place of resurrection, for the Nazi phoenix. And to reach South America you will need good papers and plenty of money. But, to speak of more immediate problems, do you have enough food to reach Bavaria? I know you have enough weapons but your trip might take two months over the mountains, and I presume that is the way you intend to go. Man cannot live on bullets.”
“We have enough food for two weeks. One can always find something to eat. It is getting on to summer now,” I said. “There are villages and farms even in the mountains.”
He shook his head disapprovingly. “Are you planning to raid the farms and villages? Will you shoot people if they refuse to accommodate you?”
“If it is a matter of survival, Colonel Steinmetz…”
Eisner said before I could answer. He left the sentence unfinished for a moment, then added, “Have you ever seen a humane war?”
“It will no longer be an act of war but common banditry,” the colonel stated frankly. “Of course you still have the power to do it but you won’t be able to do it in silence. The Czechs will know about you. The Russians will know about you and your destination. The news of your coming might reach Bavaria before you do.”
“And we might have an American reception committee waiting for us at the frontier. This is what you wanted to say, Herr Oberst?” I interposed.
“Precisely!” said he. “And if up ’til now you haven’t committed something the Allies may call a war crime, you had better not furnish them with any evidence now!”
“Herr Oberst,” I spoke to him softly but firmly, “if we do reach Bavaria, nothing will stop us from getting further. Neither the Americans, nor the devil himself. We have given up many things a man would never willingly part with, and we are ready to give up more, even our lives. But not our right to return home. On that single item we will never compromise.”
“I wish I was as young as you are,” Colonel Steinmetz spoke resignedly. “But I am tired, Herr Obersturmfuhrer… so very tired.”
Despite the old soldier’s pessimism I felt that somehow we had a fair chance of getting through, saving at least our bare lives. The prospect of being hanged by the guerrillas, or at best carted off to a Siberian death camp, did not appeal to me at all. The colonel might survive. He might even return home one day. The SS could entertain no illusions about the future. No Soviet commander would lift a finger to protect us. Should their Czech allies decide to get even with us, the Russians would quickly forget about their Geneva Convention pledge for humane treatment. For seven years the Czechs had been waiting for this day, and I could not blame them either. In 1944 alone we had killed over three thousand of their guerrillas.
“We should travel high up in the mountains, avoiding contact with the enemy. We have excellent maps of the areas involved, and if necessary we can fight our way through a Soviet brigade.”
“With a few hundred men?” the colonel asked skeptically.
“We have at least a hundred light machine guns, Colonel Steinmetz,” Eisner interposed. “We can put out so much fire that the Ivans will think a division is coming.”
“For how long?”
“Hell, we can play hide-and-seek in the woods until the Day of Judgment, Herr Oberst!” Schulze exulted. “We should at least try! To surrender here is sheer suicide. What have we got to lose? One may commit suicide at any time.”
Bernard Eisner and Captain Ruell were of the same opinion.
“We have mountains and woods all the way to Bavaria,” Ruell said. “I am quite sure that every one of us has been through similar trips a dozen times in the past.”
The colonel shook his head slowly. “Hiding in the forest? Sneaking in the night like a pack of wolves… stealing or robbing food at gunpoint, shooting people if they resist? No, gentlemen, I have been a soldier all my life and I shall finish it all like a soldier, obeying the orders of those who are entitled to give them.”
“The Soviet commander down in the valley, for instance?” Eisner remarked bitterly. The colonel frowned. “I am talking of General Field Marshal Keitel and Grand Admiral Doenitz,” he said.
“Keitel and Doenitz have no idea what a dreck we are in, Herr Oberst.”
“I guess not,” he agreed. “They have eighty million other Germans to worry about now. We are only a few hundred. We are not so important, gentlemen. We are neither heroes nor martyrs. We are only a part of the statistics. The death of a single individual may be very sad. When a hundred die they call it a tragedy, but when ten million perish, it is only statistics. I still believe in discipline, even in defeat. And we are defeated.”
“The only trouble is that I still cannot feel that I am licked,” Schulze remarked with a grin, tapping the stock of his machine gun. “Not while I still have this thing. But I would like to see the Ivan who comes to tell me all about it.”
“Shut up, Erich!” I snapped curtly and he froze with a brisk “Jawohl.”
“This isn’t the right time for wisecracking!” I turned to the colonel. “Herr Oberst, I am convinced that you will have a better chance if you surrender to the Americans.”
“I have already advised you not to expect too much from the Americans, Herr Obersturmfuhrer. All that is going to happen from now on was agreed upon by the victors a long time ago. But I concede,” he added with a smile, “That an American jail might be somewhat more civilized than those of Stalin’s. Stalin would kill a million Germans cheerfully. The Americans will meticulously prove that they are doing the just and legal thing. On doomsday morning they will give you a nice breakfast, a shave, a bath, and should it be your last wish, they might give you a perfumed pink rope to hang on. But the end will be the same.”
I spoke to the rest of the troopers, telling the men frankly that Colonel Steinmetz’s decision was the only correct one, as far as the military code goes. But the German Army had ceased to exist and therefore I no longer considered them my subordinates but only my comrades in peril who had the right to speak for themselves. As for myself, I stated, I would leave for Bavaria! The artillery platoons, the panzer crew, the Alpenjaegers decided to follow the SS rather than surrender. “You might be a bunch of sons of bitches,” Captain Ruell said smiling, “but you seldom fail. I am with you!” The motorized infantry and the supply group were for Colonel Steinmetz.
The colonel shook hands with us and I saw anguish in his face as he spoke in a choked voice. “I can understand you. It is going to be hard on the SS. The victors have already decided that you are nothing but killers, including your truck drivers and mess cooks. I wish you a safe arrival, but be prudent and do not make it harder on
