Wheels of Terror Read online

  The Old Un looked quickly round, taking stock, and began to attack vigorously something that looked like cellar steps.

  With feverish anxiousness we hacked, shovelled and dug through the rubble, but for every shovelful we shifted a shovelful of debris poured down. Soon we had to stop to draw breath. Möller said that the most sensible thing would be to make contact with those in the cellar, if any were still alive.

  The policeman was sitting with dead eyes rocking himself to and fro.

  ‘Listen, Schupo! Is this the right place,’ cried Porta, ‘or are you fooling us? And, damn you, stop playing rocking-horse! Give us some help. What do you think you are paid for?’

  ‘Leave him be. He can’t help it,’ Lieutenant Harder said wearily. ‘This is a Children’s Home. Or it has been. It says so on that notice-board over there.’

  Following Möller’s advice, we knocked at what had been a doorpost and after what seemed eternity we got an answer, very faintly as it came through to us: knock! knock! knock! Hitting the post again with a hammer, we listened with our ear to it. There was no doubt: knock! knock! knock! We worked like madmen with our pickaxes and crowbars to smash through to the cellar. Sweat made furrows on smoke-blackened faces. Skin was torn off hands. Nails broke and palms blistered as we man-handled the hot, sharp mortar and brick.

  Pluto swung round at the policeman who was rocking on his haunches as he mumbled incomprehensibly.

  ‘Come here, you stupid old flatfoot. Help us with this shaft,’ he shouted.

  As there was no response the giant crossed to Schupo, grabbed him and carried him without effort to the shaft, where we worked on indifferently. The old man bumped down to us. When he got to his feet, somebody thrust a spade into his hand and said:

  ‘Get weaving, chum!’

  He started digging, and as the work brought him to his senses we didn’t worry any more about him. The Old Un was the first to break through. It was only a tiny crack, but through it we could just see a child’s hand scratching desperately at the cemented wall.

  The Old Un spoke soothingly into the darkness. But instantly a chorus of children’s screams drowned him. It was impossible to calm them. The hole was now bigger, and the little hand was thrust through, but we had to hit it in order to make it withdraw. As we got one hand to shrink away another fought to take its place.

  Stege turned and burst out: ‘It drives me mad! We’ll break their hands if we have a real bash at this.’

  From the other side of the wall we heard a woman’s voice screaming for air, and another shouting: ‘Water, water, for God’s sake bring water!’

  The Old Un still on his knees, spoke soothingly to them. His patience was enormous. Without him we would all have thrown down our tools and run away with our fingers jabbed in our ears to stifle the mad voices.

  Dawn hardly penetrated the thick suffocating carpet of smoke over the burning city. We worked with gasmasks but were nearly choked. Our voices sounded hollow and far away.

  We had managed to make a new hole. Desperately we tried to quieten the unhappy people in the collapsed cellar. The atmosphere of horror during the raid can be imagined, but only those who have experienced bombs know that they are not the worst. The human spirit’s reaction to them is worst of all.

  ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ a trembling voice rose. The pickaxes and shovels clattered on. ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ – a shrieking bang, splashing, and fire poured everywhere. New, ear-splitting bangs. Another raid? Another stray drop? No, incendiaries!

  We pressed our bodies hard against the very foundations of what had once been the Children’s Home.

  ‘Thine is the Kingdom …’

  ‘By God, it isn’t,’ Porta’s excited voice answered. ‘It belongs to Adolf – that swine!’

  ‘Help, O God in Heaven, help us and our children,’ cried a praying woman in the cellar. A child sobbed: ‘Mummy, Mummy, what are they doing? I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Oh, God, get us out,’ another woman cried hysterically, as a white, well-groomed hand clawed at the hole and broke its polished nails on the cement.

  ‘Take your hand away, my girl, or we’ll never get you out,’ Pluto bellowed.

  But the long slim fingers still clawed desperately. As Porta hit them with his buckled belt the skin broke and blood oozed out. With another smack they lost their grip and slid like dying worms away from the crack.

  New explosions. Cries and swearing. Timber hurtled down with stone and gravel into the sparkling phosphorrain. We were trapped on all sides. The policeman lay inert on his back, beaten by exhaustion. Pluto casually rubbed the toe of his boot on his face and said: ‘He’s had it. The Tommies have dished out more than the old bastard could take.’

  ‘To hell with him,’ Lieutenant Harder retorted impatiently. ‘Germany is full of tough-guy policemen. How many poor devils has he put in gaol? Forget him.’

  We got on with our work.

  Then one big explosion, the biggest we had ever experienced, shook the ground under us. Then another and another and another. We flung ourselves headlong into cover and pressed ourselves flat. Those were no stray drops.

  It was the start of a new raid.

  The phosphorus streamed on to the asphalt. Petrol bombs spurted fire-fountains twenty yards into the air. Flaming phosphorus poured down over the ruins like a cloudburst. It whistled and whirled in a tornado of fire and explosives. The biggest air-mines literally lifted whole houses into the air.

  Porta lay beside me. He blinked encouragingly through the gas-mask’s large screen. I felt as if my mask was full of boiling water and steam. It pressed against my temples. A choking terror gripped my throat. ‘In a moment you’ll get shell-shock,’ the words shot through my head. I half sat up. I had to get away, no matter where, anywhere, only away.

  Porta was over me like a hawk. A kick, and I was in the hole again. He hit me again and again. His eyes gleamed through the screen of the gas-mask. I shouted:

  ‘I want to go, let me go!’

  Then it was over. How long did it last? One hour? One day? No, ten to fifteen minutes. And hundreds had been killed. I, a panzer soldier, had shell-shock. My friend had damaged my jaw. One tooth was broken. One eye was swollen. Every nerve screamed in wild revolt.

  The city had turned into a furnace of foaming fire where people ran shrieking from the ruins which flamed like a gas-stove’s blue burners. Living torches, they tottered, whizzed round and fell, stood up and went faster and faster. They kicked, shouted and screamed only as people can scream in death agony. In a flash a deep bomb-crater was filled with burning people: children, women, men, all in a danse macabre supernaturally lighted.

  Some of them burned with a white, others with a crimson flame. Some were consumed in a dull yellow-blue glow. Some died quickly and mercifully, but others ran around in circles, or reeled backwards rolling head over heels and twisting like snakes before they shrank into small charred dummies. Yet some still lived.

  The Old Un, always so calm, broke down for the first time in our experience. He shouted in a thin high-pitched scream:

  ‘Shoot them. For Christ’s sake, shoot them!’

  He put his arms across his face to shut out the sight. Lieutenant Harder tore his pistol out of its holster, slung it at The Old Un and shouted hysterically:

  ‘Shoot them yourself! I can’t.’

  Without a word Porta and Pluto drew their pistols. Taking careful aim, they opened fire.

  We saw people hit by bullets aimed with deadly precision, fall, kick a little, scratch a few times with their fingers, and then lie still to be immolted in the flames. It sounds brutal. It was brutal. But better a quick death from a heavy-calibre bullet than a slow one in a monstrous grill. Not one of them had a chance of rescue.

  From the cellar of that devastated Children’s Home rose cries to heaven from hundreds of children’s throats, the cries of suffering, trembling children, innocent victims in an infamous war such as no one had ever
imagined before.

  Time after time, Pluto, Möller and Stege crept down into the gloom and pulled them out. When the cellar at last collapsed, we had managed to get a quarter of them out. Most of them died shortly afterwards. Pluto was trapped between two granite blocks and only sheer luck saved him from being crushed. We had to prise him loose with crowbars and pickaxes.

  Exhausted, we threw ourselves on the trembling ground. We tore off our gas-masks, but the stench was so nauseating that it was intolerable without them. A sweetish, all-pervading smell of corpses was mixed with the sour, choking stench of charred flesh and the odour of hot blood. Our tongues stuck to our palates. Our eyes stung and burned.

  Glowing roof tiles whirled through the air. Smoke-blackened flaming joists sailed through the streets like leaves driven on an autumn evening.

  We ran crouching between the banks of flame. In one place a huge unexploded air-mine, evil messenger of death, stood darkly against the sky. Several times we were blown along the streets by the gale which had developed. It resembled a gigantic vacuum-cleaner. We scrambled and waded through a morass of skinned bodies, our boots slipping in jellied, bloody flesh. A man in a brown uniform staggered towards us. The red and black of the swastika on his armband was like a mocking challenge, and our grip tightened on our implements.

  Lieutenant Harder said hoarsely:

  ‘No! Cut that out …’

  A trembling hand tried to restrain Porta, but the motion was half-hearted. With an oath, Porta swung his pickaxe and sank the point into the party member’s chest as Bauer swung his spade and split the man’s skull.

  ‘By Christ, well done!’ Porta shouted, and laughed savagely.

  People were twisting in agony on the ground. The tram rails were red-hot and curled into grotesque patterns which thrust out of the hot asphalt. People who had been trapped in their houses jumped in madness from what had once been windows and hit the ground with soggy thuds. Some shuffled along on their hands dragging maimed legs behind them. Men thrust away wives and children who clung to them. People had become animals. Away, away, only away. The only thing that mattered was to save oneself.

  We met other soldiers from the barracks who were out like us to do whatever rescue work was possible. Many of these parties had senior officers with them, but leadership had often been taken by an old front-line sergeant or corporal. Only experience and nerves of steel mattered here, not rank. As we dug and heaved to free people from the collapsed cellars terrible scenes met us in the hot, stinking rooms which had been shelters.

  In one place five hundred people were crowded into a concrete shelter. They were side by side with their knees comfortably drawn up, or on the floor with their heads pillowed on their arms. Asphyxiated by carbon monoxide they had suffered no apparent injury.

  In another cellar were scores of people lying on top of each other, burnt to a solid mass.

  Screaming, sobbing, childish cries for help:

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, where are you? Oh, Mummy, my feet hurt!’

  Women’s voices calling in anguish for their children – children who were crushed or burned or swept away by the gale of fire or who were tottering aimlessly down the streets stupefied with terror. Some found their loved ones, but hundreds never saw them again. God knows how many were sucked up in the hot breath of the giant vacuum-cleaner, or carried away in the river of refugees pouring from the stricken city into the dark fields, into the unknown.

  2

  Dead, dead, only the dead. Parents, children, enemies, friends, piled in one long row, shrunken and charred into fossils.

  Hour after hour, day after day shovelling, scraping, pushing and lifting corpse upon corpse. That was the job of the burial commandos.

  At the shout of ‘Air-raid warning!’ the children had run their last steps into the cellar. They had sat there, paralysed by fright until the hellish river of phosphorus reached them and ate the life out of their small twisting bodies. First quickly, then more slowly, until silence lay mercifully over them.

  Such is war.

  Those who have forgotten to weep, would have been taught anew had they stood beside the Ghouls’ Squad, the panzer soldiers, and watched them at their work.

  Furioso

  The men from the penal units always got the dirty jobs both at the depot and the front.

  We had newly come back from the Eastern Front to train with our new tanks and to make up our numbers. We were a penal regiment. All of us came from concentration camps, gaols, reform-camps or some of the other torture institutions flourishing during the German Millenium. Of our platoon, only Pluto and Bauer were convicted criminals.

  Pluto, the huge docker from Hamburg whose civilian name was Gustav Eicken, had landed in clink because he had stolen a lorry-load of flour. He always insisted it had been a frame-up, but we were convinced he had pinched the flour. Bauer had been condemned to six years’ hard labour because he had sold a pig and a few eggs on the black market.

  The Old Un, our troop sergeant, was the oldest of us. He was married, with two children, and a carpenter. His political convictions had brought him a year-and-a-half in a concentration camp. Afterwards as a PU (‘Political Unstable’) he had landed in the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment.

  Corporal Joseph Porta, tall, thin and unbelievably ugly, never forgot to say he was a Red. A red banner, planted on the top of St Michael’s church in Berlin had sent him to a concentration camp and then the penal regiment. He was a native Berliner with a fantastic store of humour and cheek.

  Hugo Stege, our only university man, had been mixed up in some student demonstrations. He had spent three years in Oranienburg and Torgau before being popped into the mincing machine of the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment.

  Möller had been unwilling to write off his religious convictions which had cost him four years in Grosse Rosen. Later he had been reprieved with the right to die in a penal regiment.

  As for myself, an Auslander German of Danish and Austrian stock; I had been condemned for desertion in the beginning of the war. My stay in Lengries and Fagen had been short but stormy. Afterwards I was branded a PU and sent to the penal regiment.

  After the air-raid we were divided into rescue and burial parties. In five days we had shifted load after load of bodies from cellars and bomb craters. Now we paraded in a churchyard and put the corpses to rest in the big mass graves. Attempts at identification were hopeless in nearly all cases. The fire had done its work well, and most documents had disappeared. If the fire had not destroyed them, they had been stolen by corpse marauders who, like predatory fish, poured forth everywhere. When these human sharks were caught rifle shots quickly exterminated them. Curiously enough, they came from all classes.

  Late one evening we caught two women. The Old Un had noticed them. As we wanted to make sure, we hid and took stock of their movements. They sneaked around the fallen walls and bent over corpses whose stench must have turned even their stomachs. With vulture-like avidness and clearly following an established routine, they searched pockets and handbags for valuables. When we grabbed them we found thirty watches and fifty rings and other jewellery on them. A wad of banknotes they protested belonged to them. They had a knife to cut off the fingers of the corpses to get the rings. Proof was as clear as daylight. After a few hysterical shouts they both confessed.

  With our rifle-butts we forced them to a smoke-blackened wall and made them turn their backs. It was the quiet Möller who shot them in the neck. When the magazine was empty Bauer pushed them with his foot to make sure they were dead.

  ‘Bloody hell, what cows!’ said Porta. ‘I bet they belonged to the party. Those are the boys for letting nothing go to waste. I wouldn’t wonder if we were ordered to cut the hair off the corpses – those that have any left.’

  Porta and Pluto stood in the open grave. We heaved the corpses to them from refuse-carts. Arms and legs hung over the sides. A head over the back wheel of one dangled to and fro. The mouth was wide open and the teeth bared like those of a snarling anim
al.

  The Old Un and Lieutenant Harder kept yellow and red record cards on those we managed to identify. Otherwise we just counted like grocers’ boys counting sacks in the storeroom. The two of them made out list upon list: so many sacks – so many women and men.

  Grain liquor had been issued to enable us to stand up to the job of handling the liquescing corpses. Every few minutes we drank deeply from the huge communal bottles which stood by an old gravestone. We were not sober one moment during that spell of work. Without the hooch we would have broken down.

  Some Prussian pedant had decreed that bodies found in the same cellar should be kept together. That was why sometimes we got a water-trough or bathtub filled with a blackened, congealed porridge which had once been people. They had been shovelled and ladled into the same bathtub. On top lay a notice giving the number contained in the tub. Fifty people who had been in the phosphor bath hardly filled an ordinary bathtub.

  A giant Russian prisoner-of-war who worked with our party wept the whole time. What filled him with such anguish was the number of children. As with utmost gentleness he laid them in their graves he prayed:

  ‘Shallkij prasstaludina, malenkj prasstaludina!’

  If we tried to put a few adults with the children he became distracted, so in the end we let him do as he pleased. Although he drank copiously he seemed completely sober. Gently he smoothed out the small limbs, and where any hair was left he patted it in place. From early morning till late at night all alone he tended his gruesome charges, and we did not envy him … The Old Un maintained that his apparently sober condition proved he was on his way to insanity.

  It was a blessing to have Porta with us. His robust humour made us forget the human degradation we went through. As the arm of a big fat man came away from the body, Porta guffawed drunkenly and cried to Pluto who stood open mouthed with the arm in his hand:

  ‘What a grip! Good thing the gentleman will never know how hard you shook his hand.’ He took a large swig from the schnapps bottle and went on: ‘Now put his arm nicely beside him, so that he’ll be able to shake hands in heaven or hell, wherever he’s going.’