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His expertise with armoured vehicles kept him in Germany until early in 1941. when he was commissioned. All the time he fretted for action and, after pestering superior officers with requests for a posting, he finally joined the Leibstandarte fighting in Greece.
By June 1941 Obersturmführer Kurt Wolff was in command of a Mark IV poised for the invasion of Russia. The tank was one of 3,580 on the banks of the River Bug, supplemented by 7,184 guns, 600,000 assorted vehicles, 2,000 aircraft and 750,000 horses.
At 3.15 am on June 22nd the guns opened up, the tanks rumbled forward and the bewildered Russians were overwhelmed.
The Leibstandarte captured a key bridgehead over the Dnieper and headed triumphantly towards the Black Sea, slowing down as summer storms turned roads and steppe into glue.
One morning in July, with the armoured column bogged down in black mud, Wolff and a party of six men were sent into a wood of silver birch to smoke out a harrassing detachment of the retreating Red Army.
Most of the men never saw the Russian detachment.
Two grenades hurled them to the ground. Then, as they tried to crawl for cover, the Russians picked them off among the skeletal, dripping trees with rifle and machine-gun fire.
One bullet ricocheted off Wolff’s steel helmet, another hit him in the belly, and a third bared his cheekbone.
At first there was no pain, just a wave of shock. Wolff grabbed a stick-grenade from the outstretched hand of a dead man beside him, pulled out the china pin, counted to three and hurled it in the direction of the gunfire. A sheet of flame. Silence. Then the cries of wounded men.
With one hand pressed to his belly Wolff inspected his comrades. Only two were still alive. He began to pull one of them to the comparative safety of a pile of sawed logs — as the Russian riflemen opened up again.
Wolff, blood pouring down his cheek, dragged the first man behind the logs. Then returned for the second. On the way back he prised a Schmeisser from the fingers of a dead corporal sitting against the trunk of a birch tree as though on a picnic. Then Wolff collapsed, feigning death, which in any case didn’t seem far away.
The shooting stopped.
After a few moments he heard the snap of twigs as the Soviet troops cautiously approached. There were four of them. The leader kicked the first body with his boot and put a bullet through the head just in case.
As the crack of the shot lost itself in the trees, Wolff squeezed the trigger of the Schmeisser and watched with terrible fascination as the four Russians doubled up and died. They were the first men he had killed. They were to be the last for a long time.
He was dragging the body of the other wounded German towards the pile of logs when reinforcements arrived. He collapsed at their feet.
He was transferred to a military hospital in Poland where the doctors shook their heads as they surveyed the wound in his belly. “He will never fight again,” they murmured. “If he lives, that is.”
But they reckoned without the singleness of purpose that had transformed a weakling destined for a desk in Berlin to a member of Hitler’s elite fighting unit.
Slowly, very slowly, he recovered and was awarded the Knight’s Cross ‘for his courage in single-handedly wiping out a unit of enemy troops.’
Then he was posted to a training camp where he worked on the new Tiger tanks fitted with tracks 2½ feet wide, anti-magnetic armour and adaptations to enable their engines to start in sub-zero Russia.
And all the time Wolff, still deemed unfit for active service, fretted to be back with the Leibstandarte proper as he read of the exploits of his heroes, Sepp Dietrich who answered only to Hitler, Jochen Peiper, the hero of Kharkov, and his swashbuckling comrade Kurt Meyer known as Panzermeyer.
By this time the SS Panzer Divisions had been formed under the command of an SS general. They were the most feared troops in Russia and Kurt Wolff yearned to be with them.
Once again he harangued his superiors until he was finally allowed to go before a medical board. By this time the SS were desperate for manpower — they had taken volunteers from Holland, Spain, Sweden, France (even fifty British) and ethnic Germans from the Balkans.
Wolff was pronounced fit.
In the early summer of 1943 he returned to the Russian Front where the Germans were on the defensive after Stalingrad, the biggest defeat inflicted on the Germans since the Napoleonic Wars.
But Wolff, sheltered from reality by his wounds, could not conceive of defeat. He hadn’t been brutalised. Nor, because of the physical defects of his teens, had he witnessed the early massacres and executions in Europe.
He was still an idealist.
He was the stuff heroes are made of.
He was the obvious choice for Grey Fox.
VII
Wolff’s second test took place in a ruined farmhouse 150 miles behind the sagging German front-line.
He had been pulled back from the Viking — to which he had been seconded to patch up broken-down-tanks to an assembly camp prior to rejoining the Leibstandarte.
He was quartered in the farmhouse in one of the few rooms that still had a roof over it. (The farmhouse and the surrounding village had been razed by the Germans during the great advance.)
He shared it with two Wehrmacht officers, a Captain Steiner and a Major Wenck.
As he unpacked they remarked on the Runic flashes of lightning on his steel helmet and the death’s head on his peaked cap.
“So we have a member of one of the famous Panzer divisions as our guest,” remarked Wenck, unshaved, broken-nosed, a little drunk.
“Leibstandarte,” Wolff said briefly, throwing a grey blanket onto the crude wooden bed.
“Ah, the Führer’s bodyguard,” said Steiner, tall and arrogantly handsome except for the bags under his eyes.
Wolff didn’t reply. He lay on the bed, lit a Russian cigarette and stared at the ceiling.
“He’s certainly going to need one soon,” Wenck said. “The way things are going.
Wolff ignored him.
Steiner asked: “Been on the Eastern Front long?”
“Not long,” Wolff replied.
“Still think we’re going to win?”
“Of course,” Wolff told him. “The Russians have overextended themselves.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe in ultimate victory.”
“I’m glad someone does,” Steiner said. He stood up, over six feet tall; he would have made a good SS officer, Wolff noted, except for his mentality. “Hungry?”
Wolff who was starving said: “I could eat something.”
“And drink something,” Wenck remarked. “A little vodka will do you good,” like a doctor prescribing treatment.
They went downstairs to the dining room. One corner of the roof was bared to the grey sky, now darkening. On the pinewood table stood two flasks of vodka, two bottles of Georgian wine, three green-glass tumblers, three tins of corned beef, a bowl of beetroot soup and some hunks of black bread. A log fire burned in the grate.
They were served by two plump-breasted Ukranian girls whom the two Wehrmacht officers eyed lasciviously.
“Mine’s the one with the thick legs,” Steiner said. “He,” pointing at Wenck, “out-ranked me. But she knows a trick or two, that one.” And to Wolff: “You can give her a tumble if you like. Get the dirty water off your chest. But don’t tire her out too much,” he said, sitting down and pouring vodka into the three tumblers.
Steiner stood up and clicked his heels. “To the Führer.”
They tossed back the vodka and Wolff felt it burn its way down his throat and drop like molten lead in his stomach. He poured himself a glass of wine to dilute it and thought: “I’ll probably get drunk but what the hell.”
In Poland he had drunk in moderation and had slept with a couple of girls, one of whom he had loved a little. But he had never abandoned his keep-fit regime, exercising when the hole in his belly had barely healed.
Steiner refilled the glasses while the girls, black-haired and gypsy-faced, hovered in the background.
“But don’t get taken in by them,” Wenck said gesturing at the girls with his glass. “When the Ivans get here they’ll have our balls just like that,” brandishing a carving knife.
Wolff said: “You seem very certain that the Russians will break through.”
“Will break through? Will?” The broken-nosed officer laughed theatrically. “They’re going through us like shit through a goose.” He stood up. “Anyway, my idealistic young friend, another toast. To the Leibstandarte, the elite within the elite.”
Wolff could hardly refuse the toast.
“What about you?” Steiner asked. “Do you have a toast?”
The vodka was slipping down easily now. Wolff stood up and raised his replenished glass. “To victory.”
“Jesus Christ,” murmured Wenck.
They drank.
Wenck snapped his fingers at the two girls. They opened the tins and placed the squares of meat, glistening with jelly, in front of the three officers.
At the same time Steiner slipped his hand up the skirt of one of them and said: “That’s my girl. No pants. Always at the ready like a good soldier.”
They ate hungrily, drinking more vodka washed down with the red wine. “Does Dietrich feed you like this?” Steiner asked, stuffing black bread into his mouth.
“He gets the best there is,” Wolff replied.
“But of course,” Wenck said. “Reichsführer Himmler sees to that.”
“On the contrary,” Wolff replied. “The Führer sees to it.”
“But of course I forgot. The Leibstandarte are very special. They get cake and we get black bread.”
“At least we’re soldiers,” Steiner said, eyeing Wolff speculatively. “Not policemen in fancy dress.”
But Wolff, accustomed like all SS to the jealousy of the Wehrmacht, refused to be drawn. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said equably, “that the policemen are always in action where the fighting is the toughest.”
Steiner and Wenck now appeared to be very drunk and Wolff was far from sober. Frosted air breathed through the gap in the roof but none of them felt it.
Wenck said: “And now for some brandy,” clapping his hands.
One of the girls produced a bottle of straw-coloured-liquor and poured coffee that tasted of cardboard.
Steiner drank some of the brandy, grimaced and leaned across the table. “Have you been to Berlin lately, Kurt?”
Wolff shook his head.
“Karl was there three weeks ago, weren’t you, Karl,” to Wenck.
“I was. A strange city these days.” His voice was slurred. “Full of rumours. And Plots …” He stood up and walked to the fire where he stood warming his back; Steiner and Wolff sat in two easy chairs, holed by cigarette burns, on either side. “Full of plots,” Wenck repeated.
“What sort of plots?” Wolff asked.
Wenck said to Steiner: “Should I tell him?”
“Why not?” Carelessly as though alcohol had dissipated all caution.
“I don’t know …”
“Out with it for God’s sake, man,” Wolff snapped. “We’re not schoolboys.”
“But an SS officer …”
Steiner interruped. “Wenck is talking of plots against the Führer.”
“I don’t believe it,” Wolff said immediately.
Wenck shrugged and drank some more brandy, “Some of the generals are not happy.”
“They never have been,” Wolff said.
“There has already been one attempt,” Steiner remarked.
“Attempt at what?”
“Attempt to finish off the Führer. At Borisov in 1941. There will be others.”
“And they will fail,” Wolff said, standing up and stretching. The girl with the thick legs looked at him expectantly. “I think I’ll turn in. I’ve heard enough idiot talk for one day.”
Wenck said: “It’s not only Wehrmacht officers who are involved.”
“If you’re implying that the SS is involved …” A cold hatred was beginning to replace Wolff’s indulgence. These two men were nothing more than traitors. “I think,” he said to Wenck, “that you’d better take that back.”
Wenck belched. “Not everyone is blind like you, Hauptsturmführer.” He turned and threw his glass into the flames. “I’ll wager that if you knew the end was near you’d change your tune. If you finally realised that a madman was sending men to their deaths when all was lost then you’d throw in your lot with the generals.”
Wolff drove his knee into Wenck’s crotch. And, as he bent forward with a thick cry of pain, raised the blade of his hand for the killer rabbit punch at the base of the neck.
Steiner intercepted the blow. “For Christ’s sake, Wolff, he’s drunk.”
Wolff turned and hit the taller man in the solar plexus, but his fist encountered hard muscle. In the background the two girls twittered anxiously.
While Wolff and Steiner struggled, Wenck painfully straightened up. “All right,” he shouted, “I apologise.”
Wolff relaxed, disengaged himself from Steiner. Then he took his pistol from its holster, pointed it at Wenck who was retching into the fire and said: “I want more than an apology.”
Steiner said: “For Christ’s sake put that thing away.”
Wolff turned the gun on Steiner. “Shut your filthy mouth.” And to Wenck: “Stand up straight or you’ll choke on your own vomit.”
Steiner said: “You’ll be court-martialled for this.”
“A dead man can’t give evidence.”
“But I will.”
“You’ll be dead as well.”
Wenck, his face white, sweat beading his forehead said: “What do you want?”
“I would like,” Wolff said, “to hear you repeat the Leibstandarte oath of allegiance to Hitler,” and turning to Steiner: “You too.”
Steiner shrugged. “Very well if it pleases you.”
“It does,” Wolff said. “Very much.”
Together the two officers intoned the oath after Wolff.
Wolff raised his arm in the Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” they said.
* * *
When he had gone up to the bedroom Steiner said the Wenck: “He did well.”
“Too well,” Wenck said, putting a hand to his aching crotch.
“He passed with flying colours,” the Captain said. “One more test now. The worst. Poor bastard.”
“What I want to know,” Wenck said, “is why I get a knee in the crotch and you only get a punch in the gut.”
“A matter of rank, Sturmbannführer,” Steiner told him. “A mere Captain is only worth a blow in the belly whereas a Major deserves a kick in the balls.”
* * *
Snow was falling when Wolff’s third and last test took place in the winter of ’43.
Winter was the Russians’ ally, the Germans’ enemy. The Russians revelled in it, their white-clad troops covering phenomenal distances on skis. And they were always on the attack, Cossack cavalry suddenly materialising from behind veils of falling snow, Stalin tanks splintering the ice beneath the snow, guns lighting the dusk as shadows filled shell-holes on the desolate steppe.
One morning in late November Wolff was fed with information about a minor counter-attack aimed at rescuing a pocket of German troops cut off by the Russians.
That night, while Wolff lay sleeping in a cottage, a three-man raiding party entered the village where the Germans were camped, took him prisoner — helpless in his sleeping bag — tied him to a sled, and took him through the snow-flying night to a deserted mill ten miles from the village.
The interrogation was conducted by candlelight.
“We know there is going to be a counter attack. From what direction will it come? At what time?” All in broken German.
Wolff quoted regulations about interrogation of prisoners, gave his name and number and nothing more.
At first they roughed him up a bit. Knocking him down as, hands tied behind his back, he stood rigidly to attention as he had once stood on the parade ground of the Lichterfelde Barracks in Berlin.
When he was on the ground they kicked him.
Wolff stared up at his captors but saw only eyes gleaming in the candlelight in their woollen snow-masks.
“At what time? Where?”
Then they stripped off his outer clothing, bound his feet and dumped him outside in the snow where the temperature was —5, even lower with the Chill Factor created by the wind whining over the steppe.
It had stopped snowing and the moon shone through wounds in the clouds. Wolff struggled with the rope binding his wrists and ankles but soon the cold froze his limbs.
Then they carried him back into the mill and dumped him into a bath of hot water where he experienced the agony that only those who have immersed frost-bitten limbs in hot water can appreciate.
“Where? When?”
Name and number.
They shrugged. “You are being very foolish. Tell us what we want to know and we will let you go. If you don’t …”
Wolff who knew about Russian atrocities — they had once decapitated some Germans and paraded their heads on spikes — prepared himself to die.
He thought of his father. Of the ranks of vines with their fat grapes. Of Munich. Of a girl in Poland. Of the ageing athlete, Muller, who had made a man of him. Thank God for Muller who had given him the stamina to resist.
They then removed two fingernails from one hand with a pair of pliers.
“Where? When?”
Name and number. Fighting the cold blackness that threatened to envelop him.
They stood back and considered him, weighing the problem of all torturers: not to go too far: not to defeat the object of the interrogation.
Only two of them did the talking. The third, whose name was Wenck, stood in the background, arms folded across his chest.
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