WESTERN WAYS 2
“Good morning, Natalya Ivanova! We have a busy day, and I have arranged a meal for midday. Best get started”
Heinz was almost bouncing on his toes, and as Natasha packed a small shoulder bag with a few things she might need, such as the heel of the salami she had shared with Valentina the evening before, he was chattering happily about the day’s work. Heinz was a true believer in the crusade against Jewish Bolshevism, a soldier in the fight to save civilisation, the precious Aryan blood, and so on. She had her doubts as to whether he had ever actually faced an enemy that wasn’t disarmed and caged, but he looked the part in his grey-green service uniform, collar lace gleaming with the SS rank pips on one tab and a grinning skull and crossbones on the other.
They walked out of the secure compound, four men with assault rifles falling in behind them, and made their way round to the entrance to the prison cage, where the duty guards almost levitated in their effort to throw the smartest salute and loudest heel click possible. Heinz looked insufferably smug getting such deference from much older men, and Natasha asked herself what reputation he had amongst his own troops.
“Little Hitler”, she thought, then had to hide her grin with a forced cough as they entered the wire enclosure.
“You are perhaps unwell, Natalya Ivanova?”
“I am fine, Herr Obersturmführer. A little winter cough; it will pass”
“Try to stay silent, then, when not interpreting. This is important work, work of the highest importance possible. Race survival!”
He strode forward, giving a hand signal to one of the guards, and that man set a bell ringing, bellowing out “Appel! Appel!”. Prisoners surged out of the wooden huts onto the central open space, forming ranks that began raggedly but were rapidly shuffled into decently straight lines. The head guard stepped forward, shouting in passable English.
“You will listen here! This officer, he is like your Leutnant. He has important words to hear. You will listen!”
He turned to Heinz.
“You want me to say it in French as well?”
Heinz looked as if he could spit with disgust.
“No! I want Aryans, not those pansies. Now, Natalya Ivanova, repeat what I say, in English. Exactly as I say it”
He strutted forward to take a wide legged stance in front of the brown-uniformed ranks as his men stepped to either side of him, weapons held down but ready, and Natasha took her place beside him, repeating as clearly and loudly as she could what became a mixture of snivelling plea and bombastic rant.
“Soldiers of the British Empire and the United States. I am Obersturmführer Ehrlich. I am from the Waffen SS and I come with an invitation for all true Aryans who tire of captivity. I offer you not only freedom, but honour!”
He droned on at some length, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet as he detailed the Holy Crusade that the Keepers of True Aryan Culture were engaged on, against the Jew and the Bolshevik and the African and Slavic subhumans; she could hear the capital letters in his intonation and emphasis.
“American friends, why are you here, when the Negro is in your house, defiling your wives and daughters and sisters, when the Jew is sitting on the money he stole from you, from your fathers and grandfathers, safely in his lair in America while you fight for his race? You don’t have to sit uselessly, for you have an opportunity to fight, fight for blood, and honour! The Jew and the Bolshevik must be stopped, and stopped here, so that our race can attain its destiny! We have established a Free Corps, a body for all true Englishmen. We will feed you, train you, arm you, and be your faithful comrades against the Jew and the Bolshevik, until death or victory!”
She was watching the tanks of men as she translated Heinz’s words, and caught a couple of stage whispers but couldn’t spot their sources. The first was a murmured “We’re not all English, you thick fucking kraut bastard”; the second, in what sounded like an American accent, “I’ll hold the rope for you, cunt”
As she scanned the faces, with absolutely no intention of reporting anyone she might spot, she saw her man from the other day, who gave her a very slow wink. Heinz hadn’t finished, though.
“The guards have papers for you, agreements that you will sign to pledge your service to our just course. My honour is called faithfulness! Heil Hitler!”
He turned to Natasha, after his jerky salute.
“Now, you will stay here and attend to any questions. My men will see to your safety; Bauer here can answer simpler questions, but does not speak English. BAUER! Come here and do as I told you”
“Jawohl, Herr Obersturmführer”
“Till later, Natalya Ivanova. You will dine with Valentina and myself tonight, a thank you for your excellent work”
He turned on his heel, two of his men flanking him as far as the gate before turning back to her, and as he left, the gate guards were setting up a small table in a hut entrance, some chairs placed around it. ‘Bauer’ gave her a formal bow.
“Please, take a seat. This normally starts slowly”
She settled into one of the chairs, as a guard brought her a cup of hot ersatz ‘coffee’, and waited to see if any of the prisoners would approach her. It was nearly half an hour before the first came, one who had a strange round hat on with a ball on top. He nodded, and Bauer pointed to one of the other chairs before offering the little man a mug of the hot brown liquid. Natasha looked him over, and he grinned, showing really bad teeth, before saying something she could almost understand.
“Sorry?”
Another grin, and he spoke again, clearly trying to make his words clearer.
“I said, that little prick of a boss of yours needs to know that we’re not all English here, Miss. What are you getting out of all this palaver? That your boyfriend?”
Bauer rose, looking for a refill of the ‘coffee’, and she took her chance, the first of many that day.
“No. I am also a prisoner. I come from Moscow. I was a language student”
“Well, save the recruiting shite. I wouldn’t pish on those cunts if they were on fire”
He rose, grinning once more.
“But I got a hot drink out of it! Good luck, hen”
As he walked away, she followed his rolling walk for a while, until she realised that another soldier had taken his place. This time, it was the young man from the other day, the one who had winked at her from the ranks.
“You got Jock smiling, pet. Takes a bit to do that. Why are you here?”
Once again, that question, and she gave him the same answer, just as Bauer returned with his fresh mug. The Mann smirked.
“That funny-looking dwarf not enthusiastic, then? Tough”
She gave him a searching look, and then decided to risk a little probe.
“You aren’t sounding that hopeful, Herr Bauer”
“Gerd, Miss. At least while MEHT isn’t about”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Meine Ehre heisst Treue. Our motto. What with his name and everything. Anyway, that dwarf, he’s a poison one, I think”
“Please?”
“Poison dwarves, we call them. Scotlanders. Nasty little bastards to go up against. What’s this one?”
“Don’t know yet”
“I’ll do duty with drinks, then. The other boys are within reach. And I heard what that Americaner said, by the way. About holding the rope for MEHT. If you can sign that lad up, that would be good, Just as long as he isn’t a Yid or a wop or a Polack, of course. Hey, English? Coffee?”
He made an obvious drinking gesture, and the Englishman nodded, turning to Natasha as the SS Mann walked off.
“Hi. I’m Jim Allen. What do they call you?”
“I am Natalya Ivanova Lebed”
“Long name”
“My middle name is my father’s… Jim. It is normal in Russia to put that in between the personal name and the family one”
“Ah. My middle name, well, where I come from we have our Christian name, and our surname, and one in between, which is normally the name our mother had before she married. My mother was a Robson, which is a riding surname, one of the reiver graynes”
She realised with a shock that while she understood most of the words as words, their sense had flown straight past her. Gerd was back then, with another mug, which he handed to ‘Jim Allen’.
“This one talking more sense, Miss?”
“I think so, Gerd. Do you have a form?”
“Here”
She looked across the table at the English soldier, noticing odd things about him, such as a small mole on his left cheek, hazel eyes, reddish-blonde hair… It had been a long, long time since she had been able to see a man as a man, rather than a uniform, or simply a thing that screamed, and she had to admit that Jim wasn’t that difficult to look at. She dragged herself back to reality, and pushed the form across the little table.
“I am supposed to be explaining this to you, about the crusade against the Yids and the Bolsheviks…”
From the corner of her eye, she caught Gerd’s smirk as he picked up on the key words, as she had intended. Jim was nodding.
“But you don’t actually believe in it, do you?”
She nodded.
“I am unconvinced as to the veracity of the scheme, with particular reference to our eavesdropper, and my name is normally… I am Natasha to friends”
“Hello, Natasha. Nice to meet you properly at last”
“It is a mutual thing. Now, what is a grayne?”
Five minutes later, and she was enthralled, as he spoke about border raiders, the Riding Surnames and their sections, the graynes, and the sweep of the wild lands he came from.
“Ah, Jim, not for me, not anywhere so wild. I am a girl from the big city. My friend Valentina, you saw her with me, I think, her family were farmers”
Natasha had a wave of inspiration; she could talk openly about that Georgian bastard, and whatever Gerd understood would be fully in keeping with what she was actually supposed to be doing.
“They were kulaks, farmers, here in the Ukraine. Mostly dead now. Stalin wanted them on bigger farms, so they simply went on strike, didn’t grow any more than they needed. Stalin…”
Once more, she felt Gerd’s attention and focus on her words. She needed a few words close to German.
“So Stalin, the swine, he just came down, he and his Bolshevik bastards, and he took everything they had grown, everything they needed for themselves and their families. And left them to starve. Bolshevik bastards”
Jim looked puzzled.
“Don’t remember hearing about that. Just here, this area?”
“Ukraine, yes, mostly. If the Germans had used that, they would have had an extra Army, an extra Freikorps”
Gerd was leaning over the table now, clearly approving of the apparent course of their conversation. She pushed it a bit more, just in case.
“But the Germans, they didn’t care, because there were Yids here as well as Bolsheviks, and they could both be wiped out”
She drew a finger across her throat in an obvious gesture, as Jim nodded in agreement, and Gerd rose with a beaming grin.
“This one is listening well, Miss! I think we have some stew on the stove. Does the English man want some?”
She nodded her thanks and agreed that yes, a couple of blows of stew might just hit the spot, and Gerd was almost swaggering as he left them. Jim leant in a little closer.
“Natasha, I have been in their camps long enough to have a bit of German, but, well--- are they all such complete bastards?”
She thought for a few seconds only before nodding in agreement.
“All the ones I have met, yes. Complete bastards, And worse, much, much worse”
Jim smiled, and it was a beautiful one.
“Want to come with me when we leave this shithole?”
Comments
*
You are a good story teller.
More please.
T
Politics
They are a bit prominent in stories set in this period, and that is something that cannot be avoided. They are far more complex than is usually portrayed in films. I am, as usual, writing largely from the viewpoint of the characters. Thus:
Valentina, the remaining member of an extended family wiped out by Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine, sees the Germans as liberators and the Soviets as unutterably evil.
Natasha, a privileged Moscow girl that the Soviet system has given study opportunities to, witnesses the worst of German behaviour.
Jim, who has been through the German camp system, is a little more relaxed, as he has seen the other side of them
Ehrlich, Ganz and all the other Germans met so far are all members of an SS Totenkopfverband, the volunteer branch that ran the extermination industry--of course they are all ardent Nazis. I am showing Gerd, I hope, as a 'human' who just happens to be a violent bigot, Ganz and Messner as psychopaths, and Ehrlich as a young True believer.
Yes, there are many other Germans, but the ones you have met so far are Nazis; they wouldn't be anything else. It should also be remembered that antisemitism was a default in Europe and the USA at the time, not an aberration.
The Soviets I have introduced so far are utterly unbending in their hatred of Germans, and for very obvious reasons I don't need to go into. At the same time, I have tried to show their realism about their own vile regime, and what happens to those who don't bend the knee enough.
As usual, I am trying to write people as real as I can, with flaws and virtues of their time and place. The people in the story are not my mouthpieces.
As I have intimated, these events are based on a real story, involving a 'Jim and Natasha' I was related to through marriage. My 'Natasha' rarely spoke about the war, but there was one afternoon, after a meal, having tea from an actual samovar, where she said the following:
"You know they used me to interpret, when they... when they asked questions. Well, sometimes, I hear people say about the camps, that there were no camps. They are lying. I saw them. I was in one"
Another relative through marriage was a Belsen survivor.
Finally, on a language-based cycle tour, as I rode from Holland (South Holland; Hoek) to Norway, stopping to visit Swedish cousins in Bohuslan, and following the language changes as I went, I met a lovely old man called Werner near Wilhelmshaven. He had been taken prisoner in North Africa, and spent years as a POW in Yorkshire. He spoke excellent English, with a really strong Yorkshire accent, happen as like, and was a delight to speak to, damning the Nazis and the Wehrmacht officers in comparison with British respect and decency.
Right up to the point where he said "You know, I'm not a Nazi, but t'biggest warmonger back then were that Winston Churchill. If he had lust left things alone, there'd have been bone of these problems"
So there you have my position here. No racism, except from those who would have been racist at the time.
WW2
I grew up after the war (I was three when it ended) so my knowledge of it came from my parents and from the constant stream of movies from the 1940s-1950s that depicted "our" side as heroes and the others as fiends. This was somewhat tempered by my father who was a communist and hated Churchill, not because of Gallipoli but because he set the British Army on the strikers in the 1924 General Strike. He always reckoned that nobody should ever use troops against their own people if they had any sense of moral decency.
While he had opposed the Fascists from the mid-1930s, first in the Spanish Civil War and then in WW2 he told me that there were a lot of ordinary people on both sides who had no choice but to fight for their country. Years later I ended up working with quite a number of Germans and found that in general terms he was right. They were people whose parents had fought and were happy to go home when hostilities were over. Many of them had never known a Jew (not that there were many left in Germany by then). Yes, a few were unrepentant Nazis but nearly all of them just wanted a quiet life with a home, food coming in and a regular paycheck and their kids attending school in peace. In other words they were just like us.
Exactly.
That us why it is important to understand why the characters in my story are so extreme.
This is terrific. So well
This is terrific. So well written that you can taste the air and the atmosphere. It crackles. And it focuses on an aspect of the war that’s little known: attempted POW recruitment from supposedly fellow Aryans by the Nazis. It worked amongst civilians in some occupied countries like the Netherlands where there had been a faux Nazi party before the war, and they did their best to recruit Muslim soldiers from the British Empire, but I have to say I was completely unaware of efforts to recruit from allied POWs or even that there were allied camps as far to the east as Ukraine.
Thanks Steph for filling in those gaps! x
☠️
Camps
Ah, I haven't said EXACTLY where they are! An awful lot of the POW camps were in Silesia, and as the Germans moved east, they moved their camps with them. When the Soviets and the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they carved up the country between them. South East Poland was administered by the Ukrainian SSR, while Belarus got the north-eastern part. In common with a lot of other nationalists, many people saw it as "recovery of our lost holy motherland's soil!", etc. Rather like the huge sweep of Finland also annexed by the Soviets, which a Russian from Karelia once told me had never been part of any other country.
Thus, when Barbarossa was underway, that part of former Poland was sort of Ukrainian. Borders are messy, and national memories poor. Look at the USA-Mexico border, or Hawaii, for some examples.
Another story often overlooked is what happened to Allied POWs as the Eastern Front collapsed, who ended up on forced marches to teh West ahead of the advancing Soviets.
As for Nazi 'foreign legions'. they were widespread. Dutch and French SS divisions were particularly hardline, as were those from Lithuania. In fact. almost the last of the "German" troops to surrender in the Battle of Berlin were several hundred SS men from the French 'Charlemagne' SS Grenadier division (34th SS). The SS even recruited Bosniak muslims for 13th SS 'Handschar'. although they were officially called 'Croatian'. General Andrey Vlasov ran a Cossack army for the Germans. None of that makes much sense, given the Nazi attitude to Slavs and other 'lesser races' I did say it was all drivel, didn't I?
The British 'Free Corps was set up by John Amery, the fascist son of politician Leo Amery, who defected to Berlin in 1942. It got zero traction, and while 52 people have been identified as having been members, the maximum number at any one time was 27.They did serve with the SS on the Eastern Front, but the impact of 27 men would have been minute.
Unsurprisingly, John Amery was introduced to Albert Pierrepoint in December 1945.