THE COMPANIES commanded by Bach and Lenard settled into the cool, spacious basement of a large building. The broken windows let in light and fresh air. The soldiers diligently carried down pieces of furniture from apartments not damaged by fire. The basement looked more like a warehouse than an army bivouac.
Each soldier had his own bed, covered with a quilt or blanket. They also carried down little tables, armchairs with fine, ornately carved legs and even a three-leaved mirror.
In one corner of the basement Stumpfe, a popular figure who was the battalion’s senior soldier, created a kind of model bedroom. He brought down a double bed from a top-floor apartment, spread a pale blue blanket over it and placed two pillows in embroidered pillowcases by the headboard. He stood bedside tables, covered with small towels, on each side of the bed, and laid a carpet on the stone floor. Then he found two chamber pots and two pairs of old-people’s fur-trimmed slippers. And he hung ten framed family photographs, taken from different apartments, on the walls.
The photographs he chose were all rather comic. One was of an old man and an old woman, probably working class, dressed up for some important occasion. The old man wore a jacket and tie; he looked uncomfortable and was frowning severely. The old woman wore a black dress with large white buttons. She had a knitted shawl draped over her shoulders and she was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, looking meekly down at the ground.
Another, much older photograph was of the same couple (the experts were all in agreement) on the day of their wedding. She was wearing a white veil, with small bunches of wax orange blossom; pretty but sad, she looked as if she were preparing for difficult years to come. The groom stood beside her, resting one elbow on the back of a tall black chair; he was wearing patent-leather boots and a black three-piece suit, with a watch chain attached to the waistcoat.
The third photograph showed a wooden coffin lined with lace paper. Inside the coffin lay a little girl in a white dress; standing around it, their hands on the coffin’s sides, were various strange-looking people: an old man in a long calico shirt with no belt; a boy with his mouth hanging open; a man with a beard and several old women in kerchiefs, their faces fixed and solemn.
Without taking his boots off or removing the sub-machine gun hanging from his neck, Stumpfe collapsed onto the bed. His legs trembling, he called out in a high-pitched, affected voice, as if imitating a Russian woman, “Lieber Ivan, komm zu mir!”30 The entire company roared with laughter.
Then he and Corporal Ledeke sat down on the chamber pots and began to improvise comic dialogues: first, “Ivan and His Mother”; then, “Rabbi Israel and His Wife, Sarah.”
Very soon, soldiers from other regiments were coming to attend repeat performances. Preifi appeared too, somewhat tipsy, along with Bach and Lenard.
Stumpfe and Ledeke went through the whole programme again from beginning to end. Preifi laughed more loudly than anyone, helplessly rubbing his hands against his huge chest and saying, “Stop, stop! You’re killing me!”
In the evening the soldiers hung blankets and shawls over the windows, lit the large pink- and green-shaded oil lamps, filled with a mixture of petrol and salt, and sat down around a large table.
Only six of them had served throughout the Russian campaign. The others were from divisions previously stationed in Germany, Poland and France. Two had been in Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
The company had its aristocrats and its pariahs. The Germans made fun of the Austrians, but they also often made vicious fun of one another. Those born in East Prussia were considered ignorant hawbucks. The Bavarians laughed at the Berliners, saying that Berlin was a Jewish city, a melting pot for riff-raff from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Brazil and any number of other countries, and that it was impossible to find a single true German there. The Prussians, the Bavarians and the Berliners all despised the Alsatians, calling them foreign swine. Men repatriated from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were referred to as “quarter-German”; all the miserable weaknesses of the Slav East were thought to have entered their blood. As for Volksdeutsche from central and eastern Europe, they were not considered German at all. There were official instructions to keep an eye on them and not to entrust them with important tasks.
The company’s aristocrats were Stumpfe and Vogel, both former SS. They were among the many thousands of SS who, on the Führer’s orders, had been transferred to the Wehrmacht to boost morale.
Stumpfe was generally seen as the company’s life and soul, as its moral backbone. He was tall and—unlike most corporals and rank-and-file soldiers—round and plump in the face. He was bold, smart and lucky, and he had an unrivalled ability to go round a half-destroyed Russian village and conjure up enough good foodstuffs for a parcel to send back home. He only had to look at an “Easterner” for honey and fatback to appear. All this, naturally, impressed and delighted his fellow soldiers.
He loved his wife, his children and his brother. He wrote to them regularly and his food parcels were as rich and nutritious as those sent by officers. His wallet was full of photographs, which he had shown more than once to everyone in the company.
There were photos of his rather thin wife—clearing a dining table piled with dishes; leaning against the fireplace, wearing pyjamas; sitting in a boat, her hands on the oars; holding a doll and smiling; and going for a walk round the village. There were also photographs of his two children: a tall boy and a pretty little six-year-old girl with blonde hair down to her shoulders.
The other soldiers sighed as they looked at these photographs. And before returning a photograph to his wallet, Stumpfe would gaze at it long and devotedly; he could have been contemplating an icon.
He had a gift for telling stories about his children; Lenard once said to him that, with his talents, he should be performing on stage. One of his best stories, about preparing the family Christmas tree, was full of sweet, funny invented words, sudden cries and gestures, childish hypocrisy, childish cunning and childish envy of other children’s presents. The story’s effect on its audience was often unexpected. While Stumpfe was speaking, people would be laughing out loud, but when he came to the end they often found themselves moved to tears.
But it was not only Stumpfe’s stories that were paradoxical. He embodied in his own being qualities one might have thought irreconcilable. This lover of his wife and children was capable of extraordinary, devil-may-care violence. On the rampage, he truly did become a devil; it was impossible to restrain him.
In Kharkov, dead drunk, he once climbed out of a fourth-floor window and walked right round the building on a narrow ledge, pistol in hand, firing at anything that caught his attention.
On another occasion, he set fire to a house, got up onto the roof and, as if in charge of an orchestra, began to conduct the flames and smoke and the wails of the women and children.
Stumpfe ran amok a third time on a moonlit May night in a Ukrainian village. He threw a hand grenade into the middle of some trees in full blossom. The grenade got caught in the branches and exploded only four metres away. Leaves and white petals rained down on him, while one piece of shrapnel punctured an epaulette and a second ripped open the top of one of his boots. Stumpfe suffered only mild concussion, but it was two days before he recovered his hearing.
There was something about his face, about the sudden glassy glitter in the depths of his large, calm eyes, that terrified the “Easterners” he so despised. When he entered a hut, sniffed disdainfully as he looked slowly around him, pointed to a stool and ordered an astonished child or dazed old woman to wipe it clean with a white towel, they understood that it was best to do as he said.
Stumpfe’s grasp of the psychology of Russian peasants was remarkable. After observing a woman for five minutes, he could win bets as to the quantity of honey, eggs and butter in the hut and whether or not there were treasures hidden beneath the floorboards: new boots, cloth or woollen dresses.
He was quicker than any of his comrades to learn words of Russian and was soon able to organize all his requirements without recourse to a phrase book or dictionary. “I’ve simplified the Russian language,” he liked to say. “In my grammar there is only one mood: the imperative.”
His fellow soldiers loved hearing him talk about his past; he had witnessed a great deal.
As a young man, he had worked in a sports shop. After losing his job, he spent two summers working on farms, in charge of a threshing machine. In 1926 he worked for three months in the Ruhr, in the Kronprinz coal mine. Then, after obtaining his licence, he became a professional driver. He began by delivering truckloads of milk and then worked as a chauffeur for a well-known dentist in Gelsenkirchen. A year later he became a taxi driver in Berlin. After that, he worked for a year as an assistant concierge in the Hotel Europa, and then as a kitchen supervisor in a small restaurant frequented by lawyers and industrialists.
He was happy to see his hands becoming soft and white and he took good care of them, wanting to erase any last trace of the harm done to his skin by some of his former jobs.
In the restaurant Stumpfe had his first real encounter with a world that had always intrigued him. On one occasion he calculated that a single deal—buying a portfolio of shares just before they shot up in value after a long slump—enabled a customer to make a profit equivalent to what he himself, in his previous job, would have earned over a period of 120 years—or 1,440 months, or 40,000 days, or 300,000 working hours, or 18 million working minutes. The customer had made this deal between two sips of coffee, using the restaurant telephone; it had taken him less than two minutes.
Some miraculous power was at work here—and this power intrigued Stumpfe.
Breathing the atmosphere of wealth, hearing omniscient waiters talk about which of their customers had bought a new Hispano-Suiza,31 which had just built a villa and which had bought a pendant for a well-known actress—all this was a source of both pain and pleasure.
Stumpfe’s younger brother, Heinrich, had the same round face and was equally tall. In 1936 he joined the political police. He often said to Stumpfe, “Soon things will change. The two of us will see real life.”
Heinrich told his elder brother in whispers about a game still bolder and grander than anything talked about in his restaurant. With the backing of fortune, a single audacious move could raise you to dizzying heights.
There was a three-leaved mirror in the dimly lit restaurant lobby. Sometimes Stumpfe would stop in front of it, adopting the look of fastidious ennui he sometimes saw on customers’ faces. He was in good shape: 177 centimetres tall, 80 kilos in weight, soft hair and smooth, pale skin. He had no doubt that he deserved something better than the life he was leading.
Meanwhile Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher, Reichsmarschall Göring, Joseph Goebbels and the Führer himself were all proclaiming that the wisdom of the world’s greatest sages and the labour of its greatest labourers meant nothing in comparison with the greatest treasure of all—the blood that flowed in the veins of every true German. Countless lecturers, journalists and radio presenters repeated the same intoxicating message. Stumpfe’s head, planted on top of a huge, lazy, greedy torso, began to spin.
During the Eastern campaign Stumpfe came to believe more strongly than ever in his racial superiority—but this afforded him no joy. The nearer they got to the end of the war, the clearer it became that he was not in any real way benefiting from this superiority; he was still only a private soldier and he could fit all his belongings into a small knapsack. He wanted more than the opportunity to send regular food parcels back home.
Stumpfe was widely respected. The non-commissioned officers were well aware that the other soldiers listened to what he had to say, and that he often played the role of arbiter in their disputes. He was brave and was often chosen for reconnaissance missions; men liked to go with him, saying they felt safer with him than with Corporal Munk, who was a trained scout. He fearlessly entered villages occupied by Russian troops. One night he even set fire to a command post guarded by a Red Army sentry.
Stumpfe’s comrades enjoyed his sense of humour. He had nicknames for almost everyone in the company; he was quick to notice people’s peculiarities and could mimic them to perfection. He had a whole repertoire of campaign sketches and anecdotes: “Sommer Four-Eyes receives a dressing-down from the battalion commander,” “Vogel puts together a modest breakfast—twenty fried eggs and a small chicken,” “In front of her small children Ledeke the determined womanizer wins the love of a Russian peasant woman,” “Meierhof enables a Jew to understand that it is in his interests to leave this world sooner than the god of the Jews had decreed.”
Among the most fully developed of these sketches was an entire cycle devoted to a certain Schmidt: “Schmidt marries but, working for a whole year on the night shift, is unable to sleep with his wife,” “Schmidt receives a badge from his factory in recognition of his twenty years as a metalworker and tries to exchange this badge for a kilogram of potatoes,” “Schmidt stands solemnly before the ranks to listen to the order demoting him from corporal to private soldier.”
Thanks to Stumpfe, Schmidt had become a butt of ridicule for the whole regiment, but there was nothing obviously comic about this unfortunate, middle-aged private. He was stout, as tall as Stumpfe, and slightly stooped. Much of the time he was silent and somewhat glum. But Stumpfe managed to capture even the least obvious of his quirks and mannerisms: his slight shuffle; his habit of half opening his mouth as he darned his clothes; the way he puffed and sniffed when he fell into thought.
Schmidt was the oldest soldier in the company and had fought in the First World War. It was rumoured that in 1918 he had joined the deserter movement organized by some scoundrel with a name like Labiknecht or Leibnecht. The younger soldiers were unsure of the name, but they knew from school that he was an agent of the Jewish Sanhedrin.32
Schmidt’s gloomy obtuseness was deeply irritating and Stumpfe was unable to look at him without feeling angry. Too old to be a private soldier, he had joined the Wehrmacht as a non-commissioned officer. After his demotion, his work qualifications should have led him to be demobilized, but for some reason he remained in the company. He was a born loser. His constant misfortunes won him only contempt and he was always chosen for the most unpleasant tasks. He had a gift for showing up just when someone was needed to clean the officers’ latrines or to clear up some other filth. He carried out such tasks with his usual quiet conscientiousness, with a kind of brainless indefatigability.
The sketch about Schmidt’s demotion was based on a real event from the first weeks of the Russian campaign. Before being moved to the front line, the company had been guarding a prison and a prisoner-of-war camp. Schmidt had tried to avoid his guard duty by pretending to be ill and had been caught out by the regimental doctor—he was, it appeared, an inveterate deserter.
As a private soldier, however, Schmidt did his duty, was a good shot and showed no signs of cowardice. When the company was withdrawn to regroup and refit, he diligently sent food parcels back home. Yet he remained ridiculous—a blockhead, as Stumpfe never tired of repeating.