Nehmann flew out of Stalingrad on a stormy morning, two days before Christmas, trying hard not to think of Kirile’s ruined face. The Ju-52 was overweight on take-off, packed with walking wounded from the field hospital at Gumrak, and the airframe groaned as the aircraft hit a final rut before getting itself airborne. The pathologist, Dr Gigensohen, was also on board, his work among the city’s many dead complete. He and Nehmann were at the rear of the plane, squashed against a bulkhead.
The weather, thankfully, made any interceptions from Soviet fighters unlikely. One of the Junkers’ engines quickly developed a fault and the pilot was unable to nurse the aircraft into clean air above the turbulence. As a result the Tante-Ju was at the mercy of the storm, tossed around by the violence of the gusting wind. Many of the men, already white-faced from the pain of their injuries, began to be sick and by the time the pilot managed to slam the aircraft onto the airfield at Tatsinskaya, the metal floor of the fuselage was pooled with blood and vomit. For once, Nehmann was glad when ground crew wrestled the door open and let in the icy air. The heavy sweetness of the fug inside the aircraft had become unbearable. After Kirile, he thought, comes this. Life can’t possibly get worse.
Wrong. Messner was on hand with a Kübelwagen. While the pilot conferred with a technician about the engine he’d had to close down, Messner drove Nehmann and the pathologist across to the makeshift building Fliegerkorps VIII were using as a squadron mess. The Tante-Ju, he assured them, would be repaired and cleaned up for the next leg of the flight west. With luck, they’d be back in the air before dusk.
It didn’t happen. From the mess, Nehmann was able to watch engineers working feverishly to replace parts on the malfunctioning engine. After darkness fell, they became half a dozen torches, their fading beams criss-crossing in the darkness. By now, after days of raids by Soviet bombers, the airfield was threatened by a Soviet tank army pushing in from the west. According to Messner, Richthofen had begged permission to pull out and save the aircraft that were still serviceable but High Command had issued Goering with a ‘stand-fast’ order. Only if the airfield came under direct attack from forces on the ground, insisted Hitler, was Tatsinskaya to be abandoned.
This, Nehmann knew, was exactly the fate that awaited Stalingrad itself. Never retreat. Never surrender. Fight to the last man, regardless of the odds.
‘Well?’ He was looking at Messner.
Messner was chewing a crust of black bread smeared with jam. He said he’d talked to Richthofen on the radio only minutes ago. The Generaloberst had ordered every crew of every serviceable aircraft to be at instant readiness to leave. Boxes of precious spares had already been packed into dozens of the Ju-52s. Every available fuel can had been filled to the brim. As for FK VIII’s personnel, each individual had been allotted an onboard allowance of just a hundred kilograms, to include body weight. The news put a smile on Nehmann’s face. Very Georg, he thought.
By midnight, the booming of heavy artillery fire from the west was impossible to ignore. Nehmann braved the cold for a minute or two. He could see the distinctive outline of Messner’s nearby tent in the throw of brilliant light from the bigger explosions, and he wondered what it must be like to make an exit like this after months on the steppe. A movement beside him revealed the abrupt presence of the pathologist. Like Nehmann, he was helpless, a mere spectator as the Soviets tightened their chokehold on the airfield.
‘This is history,’ Gigensohen murmured. ‘Let’s just hope we live to bear witness.’
At half past three in the morning, Soviet artillery batteries opened fire on the airfield and shells began to fall among the parked aircraft. Ground crews abandoned loading and ran for cover. Minutes later, word arrived that Russian tanks had broken through the airfield’s flimsy defences. Messner, it seemed to Nehmann, was enjoying this moment of drama. He moved from group to group, calm, unhurried, issuing a sequence of orders. Visibility on the airfield, he said, was down to five hundred metres. The cloud base was a bare thirty. Both figures would sink lower, making take-offs even more of a hazard. Time to leave.
Air crew and personnel began to run towards their respective aircraft. Nehmann watched them for a moment, aware of the shrill whine of incoming shells. The guns on the tanks had a sharper bark than the big artillery pieces, and he ducked instinctively as the frozen earth erupted just metres away. Then came a push from behind and he turned to see Messner. He was pointing at a nearby aircraft at the end of the line of Tante-Jus.
‘Yours,’ he shouted. ‘Go.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ll be with you.’
Nehmann bent for his kitbag and began to run, collecting the pathologist on the way. The aircraft was already half full, a blur of faces desperate for the engines to start. Nehmann helped Gigensohen up the metal ladder, then hung back waiting for Messner. He could see the tall Oberst directing the last of FKVIII’s ground crews to another aircraft. Then he began to hurry towards Nehmann. Moments later, in mid-stride, he paused, changed direction, made for his tent, tore open the flap, disappeared inside. The pilot of the Tante-Ju had begun to fire up the engines. Then came the shriek of an incoming shell and Messner’s tent seemed to physically levitate, hanging in the air, shredded by the blast.
Nehmann didn’t hesitate. He ran towards the smoke of the explosion, shouting Messner’s name. Where the tent had been there was nothing but torn strips of canvas and the sour sweetness of expended cordite. Nehmann found Messner sprawled on the freezing turf. His throat was torn open and half his head had gone.
Nehmann crouched over him a moment, aware of more explosions, some of them close, and the roar of aircraft engines. There was a face he recognised at the door of the Tante-Ju. It was Gigensohen.
‘Run,’ he was yelling. ‘We’re off.’
Nehmann knew he was cutting it fine. He took a final look at Messner, then he noticed the object in his hand. It was the egg slicer. That’s what he’d come back for. That’s what had killed him.
Nehmann bent quickly, easing the fierce grip of Messner’s fingers. Then he began to run.
*
Nehmann’s memories of leaving the stricken airfield at Tatsinskaya were, he thought later, cinematic. In the crush of bodies as the aircraft lurched drunkenly into the air he could see nothing but occasional glimpses of the Soviet onslaught through the Ju’s big square windows: the sudden yellow blossom of an explosion, a deep scarlet at its core; the aircraft’s own shadow, briefly visible, racing over the shell-pocked outer airfield as the pilot fought for altitude; then the relief as shreds of cloud closed around the aircraft and everything went grey. The atmosphere in the cabin was sombre. People avoided eye contact. They’d tasted defeat and they knew that worse was probably to come.
They landed first at Rostov, which had mercifully been spared the attentions of the Soviets. Then, after a brief pause for refuelling, they were on their way again, still standing shoulder to shoulder as they droned west. Cinematic, Nehmann thought. Goebbels would doubtless be proud of him.
They arrived in Berlin nearly ten hours later after another refuelling stop. By some miracle, the Promi had anticipated his arrival and sent a car out to Tempelhof. The driver met Nehmann at the aircraft steps. It was Christmas Day, already late afternoon. The driver was under orders to whisk him out to the villa at Bodensee where the Minister and his family were celebrating together. Nehmann insisted that Gigensohen be dropped off first but the pathologist declined the lift. He said he was grateful for the offer but, in all truth, he needed an hour or so on his own before he could face the real world.
Nehmann knew exactly what he meant. The big Mercedes had been, according to the driver, a recent present from the Chancellery, a mark of the Führer’s gratitude. It was heavily armoured and could survive any attack. Hitler, it seemed, had also presented his Minister with no fewer than four bodyguards, a tribute to his importance. Nehmann sat in the back as the car purred away, aware of the smell of new leather, wondering whether centimetres of armour plate and a huge engine was meant to offer him reassurance.
Nightmare, he’d already decided, was too small a word. First Stalingrad, just the word itself, a tocsin for the soul, a synonym for everything hateful about the world. Then Stalingrad’s weather, the bitter cold that stole into your very core, and the frozen parcels of flesh and blood, some animal, some not, that littered every ruined street, every pile of roadside debris, every next line of footsteps that might once have been a road.
These images, Nehmann knew, would stay with him forever but what was far, far worse was the journey he’d made at the priest’s invitation, the descent into hell, the moment of purest horror when the image he’d kept in his head of Kirile melted in front of his eyes and became a child’s papier-mâché apology for a face, scarlet daubs, obscene hollows, eyeless, broken, the work of someone deeply evil. Kalb, he thought. Kalb had done that. And whatever else happened in this bitch of a war, Kalb would pay.