CHAPTER NINETEEN

Magadan, Yakutia, Siberia, late April 1954

The “regiment” proved to be mutually beneficial for all of its six members. They worked together to improve their living quarters, their small vegetable gardens, and when they carried out foraging raids. They saw themselves as being invincible and having the effective power of a small SS independent fighting unit living off the land.

“Wir sind Gebirgsjäger [We are light infantry alpine-mountain troops],” Antoine told his men, harking back to the 6^th Waffen SS Mountain Division Nord, an elite unit all of the former POWs admired, holding the unit in almost mythical respect.

That division held the distinction of being the only Waffen SS unit to fight in the Arctic Circle. Their successes and sacrifices in Finland and northern Russia between June and November 1941 were trumpeted by Hitler and became perhaps overrated as Aryan giants to be emulated by all SS troops.

“Ja, es ist wahr, Mein General,” Michaele echoed. “Wir sind die letzten Totenkopfverbände. Es ist unsere pflicht als speerspitze für die neue Vierte Reich!” [Yes, my general, we are the last SS Deaths Head Unit. It is our duty to be the spearhead for the new Fourth Reich].

His enthusiasm was shared by the other members of this increasingly arrogant band of brothers; now they were elite soldiers with a purpose that transcended their current meager status. It mattered little to any of them that the original Gebirgsjägers were drawn from the most brutal and thuggish concentration camp guard troops. The new Gebirgsjägers were also realists about their own situation and recognized that they would fight as a cohesive unit, or they would be imprisoned or killed. There could be no flinching at what had to be done. Every man knew that it was imperative that they leave no witnesses.

Each of them had experienced the terrors of becoming the subject of arrest for crimes against the Soviet Union. They were determined never to fall into the clutches of the only government more brutal and less compassionate than their own SS regiment. Murder of nearly defenseless men, women, and children became a necessary modus operandi as they began to accumulate more resources, including food, weapons, and warm clothing. The six men were fascinated by the fact that many of the former Kulaks had considerable treasures in gold, jewelry, and rubles which they had been able to hoard when they were transported to the northeastern Siberian region of Yakutia—which included Magadan—and had undoubtedly increased by dint of their extremely hard work and frugality.

The six former POWs enjoyed their good life to the maximum. They had good food, even a few luxuries like chocolate. They had all the vodka they wanted, good quality boots, fur caps, parkas, and sturdy woolen clothing. Things went so well that Antoine relaxed his iron grip on his men and began to allow daytime raids and to permit the men to neglect their gardens. One problem that was likely to come to endanger them was the woeful lack of even the most rudimentary intelligence about the area beyond their small isolated rural part of Yakutia. Michaele pointed that fact out a number of times before Antoine allowed two of the men—Hugues Beauchamp and Jean Luc Latendresse—to check out the situation in Magadan.

Hugues and Jean Luc meandered carefully through the muddy streets of Magadan frequently looking over their shoulders or into reflective store windows to see if they were being observed or followed. At noon, they entered a small café and took seats near the rear exit. Both men sat on the same side of the table facing the front door and the main front windows. Hugues ordered reindeer steak, and Jean Luc had a salad and borscht with beef strips. They had a Celta-Pils ale and a large glass of red wine that was not very good. The black rye bread was delicious and still hot from the oven. They smothered their pieces with heavy cream butter and consumed half a loaf each. The salad and the ale were the first they had enjoyed since 1945.

“Don’t be obvious,” Hugues said, “but there are KGB troops in the street. They’re getting out of a troop truck. That can’t be a good thing.”

Jean Luc nodded his head.

“Let’s watch and shovel the food in, leave some rubles, and get out by the back door. Seeing them before they saw us is the kind of intelligence we came for. Antoine will have to decide what our plan will be.”

“Think they’re after us?”

“I doubt it. We aren’t worth the trip from Moscow or Vladivostok or wherever they came from. This must have something to do with the city—maybe some dissidents or suspected counterrevolutionaries. There’s a small army out there, and I see one officer we both know.”

“Which one?”

“There by the Zil. That’s Lieutenant General of Cavalry Grigory Yegorivich Lagounov—the head commissar—or I’ll eat my hat,” Hugues said.

“Is he back to run the SVITL [Russian: Sevvostlag: severo-vostochnye lagerya. English: Directorate of North-Eastern Camps]?” Jean Luc asked quietly, feeling like someone had just walked on his grave.

“Who knows? I thought the Sovs had shut them all down and had repatriated all of the Kriegsverurteilte [German-POWs],” Hugues whispered, his voice also subdued by the presence of the infamous director of the camp system who was reputed to have participated in the shooting contests from the guard towers using random prisoners as targets.

“The man pushed my head into a kanalizatsiya vedro [sewage bucket] and almost drowned me because I ran too slow carrying logs to the stockpile.”

“He killed men for less than that,” Hugues said with a gravely growl, his eyes blazing with hatred.

“He killed men for nothing. Let’s get out of here before he sees us.”

Hugues and Jean Luc set out at a steady lope for the “Gebirgsjäger” camp, leaving all of their purchases behind to freeze in the snow.

They were too late. A Red Army unit surrounded the encampment and had rounded up all of the former POWs, placing them in shackles when the two men got close enough to understand what was going on. Jean Luc shrugged and whispered that they had to get away from there before they were recaptured and joined their fellow Frenchmen/former SS elite comrades in what was obviously a round up to force them back to the gulag. They had been living in a dream, and now it was a nightmare.

They bent low and moved as silently as they could through the snow and into the increasingly dense forest.

It was a futile try. The Red Army sergeants had anticipated that stragglers would try and slip away into the cover of the trees and deadfall. They were waiting and took Hugues and Jean Luc by complete surprise. There was no use putting up a fight; they knew they would be dead before they could raise their weapons; so, they meekly put their Kalashnikovs down and set their faces towards a distant day when they might possibly be free. For the time being, it was enough to be alive. That had been the unspoken motto of all of the surviving POWs while they languished, froze, and starved in the tin mine. At least they were starting out in better condition than they had been in when they first entered the brutal gulag in 1945.

The six totally dispirited prisoners marched through the snow and darkness all the way back to Magadan, arriving there just before midnight. In the Yakutsk, winter lasts from early October into May with temperatures sinking to as low as negative fifty-five degrees. Even in summer, temperatures in the range of thirty degrees Fahrenheit were so frequent as to be the rule. The men were shackled to each other and to steel spikes driven into the frozen ground at intervals. The Soviet soldiers never spoke to them. They shivered and stomped the ground to prevent frost bite and succumbing to hypothermia. Sleep was out of the question. They were famished and exhausted by the time the sun came up in the morning.

They were kicked awake by Soviet enlisted men and forced to their feet—a slow and awkward process owing to their stiffness.

A lieutenant marched stiffly and stood in front of the former POWs.

“Vnimaniye sobaki [attention dogs]! I am Lieutenant Sobrieski. It is my honor to present Lieutenant General Lagounov.”

The general stepped in front of his lieutenant flanked by two powerful-looking military policemen. He was slender with a hawk’s face and skeletally slender long fingers. He wore a new and perfectly pressed uniform. His eyes were close set and cruel. He had a carefully practiced efficiency of movement. He did not tolerate the least hint of insubordination as he perceived it. His aide-de-camp, Dimitri Sobrieski, was a short man who justified his manhood by the level of his cruelty. He exercised steely discipline never to smile and never to allow a prisoner to look him in the eyes. He was obsequiously deferential to Gen.

Lagounov and anyone else who outranked him or could give him an advantage in the rank-conscious KGB. He was as clean shaven and neat as his superior officer, and a trifle less Slavic and more handsome in appearance, although he would never have hinted at that fact. He had wideset eyes—his only facial flaw, a perfect Roman nose, thick lips, and unlike almost any other Russian, his teeth were straight, free of cavities and all present. He kept his uniform and boots as near perfectly cared for as the privates he dominated could manage in the mud and filth of the Siberian streets.

Gen. Lagounov spoke up again, “This is a happy day for you miserable sobaki,” he said, “You are to be repatriated back to Germany today. You will have the opportunity to report on the fair and decent treatment you have received while POWs. You will find that the Soviet Union does not take kindly to complainers and those who would criticize or try to undermine the great peoples’ government. We will travel by truck to the railhead, and then you will have the luxury—the undeserved luxury, I might add—of transportation by train the rest of the way west.”

The general said it with not a hint of irony or smile.

Every man standing in the cold waiting for transportation west remembered in vivid detail the painful journey to slavery in the “Valley of Death.” After being captured, they had traveled from Berlin by cattle train to Siberia. That trip prepared them for the horrors to come. The trains were unbearably cramped and stifling. Only death of prisoners afforded a little more leg room. On the trains in the west, the heat was terrible. There was serious lack of fresh air, and the dreadful overcrowded conditions exhausted the semi-starved men. Many of the elderly prisoners—weak and emaciated—died along the way, and their corpses were left abandoned alongside the railroad tracks. The worst was yet to come. The survivors of the grueling Trans-Siberian Railway train ride—the longest in the USSR—were disembarked at the Nakhodka transit camp. There, they encountered the bitter unrelenting cold. After three days, they were moved to Khabarovosk, which was part of the gulag archipelago. They then were forced onto decrepit ships and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan’s natural harbor. Conditions aboard the ships were even harsher than what they had endured on the train. The Soviet prison ships were sewage-ridden hellholes. Of the original three train loads of POWs, thousands died during the crossing.

The general had aged considerably since any of the still surviving German POWs had seen him. He remained ramrod stiff, but his frame was no longer lithe and wiry—just thin and stringy. His face still had the chiseled-in-granite frown of authority, but now his skin was sagging and grayish—the hallmarks of a sick man or at least an old one. Even when he spoke, his lips were nothing more than a line in the lower part of his face. Presumably, those lips had never lost control and smiled. Lagounov had never been an even remotely handsome man. Now his very bushy eyebrows and tufts of hair on his ears had become salt-and-pepper gray which—added to his sharp aquiline nose—gave him a cruel hawklike face. His eyes were still the same harsh blue-gray—the color of gun metal—and gave one the impression that he could see deep into that last box hidden in a tortured man’s brain where his final secrets were kept.

He was dressed in the KGB version of the Zhukov-style officer parade uniform complete with battle medals—not just the ribbons. In keeping with the cold, the uniform was gray napped wool and closely fitted to his lean body, unlike the poorly fitted clothing of his junior officers and enlisted men. He had a spotlessly clean field officer’s cap with a cornflower blue band and gold piping. The cap’s band mounted a two-piece M55 parade cockade and emblem. He wore thick leather gloves of fine custom construction. Despite the muddy conditions, his knee-high cavalry boots gleamed with a just finished spit-shine.

The emblems, medals, and insignias conveyed the desired effect—awesome power. Gen. Lagounov’s body and face were diminished into a death’s head appearance, which only added to the fear his gaze struck in a prisoner who had to face the mass murderer.

None of the Kriegsverurteilte expected breakfast, and they were not disappointed. Gen. Lagounov gave an order to his lieutenant with a mere nod of his head, and the repatriates were shoved aboard the cramped troop trucks and sat in maximum discomfort on uncushioned steel benches. The trucks lurched forward.