the machine-gun was silent.
The Stuka climbed, wheeled, prepared for another attack. But as it came into a screaming dive the tank had reached the woods.
Inside the Russian tank the two German SS officers, instructed by Sepp Dietrich to put Kurt Wolff’s courage and initiative to the test, nodded at each other before abandoning it for their own armoured car.
When they reached the German machine-gunner he stood up and said: “Excuse me, Gruppenführer, I know I shouldn’t question an order but what was that all about?”
He never found out because one of the officers blew out his brains with a Luger pistol.
* * *
Kurt Wolff’s principal regret in his youth — he was only twenty-two now — was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a fully-fledged member of the SS in those exciting, formative years of the struggle.
But he was old enough to remember the Congress of Victory, the Nazi rally at Nuremberg, in September, 1933. He was twelve years old then and he was wearing a black vest and shorts, marching in the Zeppelinwiese, with sixty thousand members of the Hitler Youth, in intricate formations that spelled out in black, red and white slogans, BLOOD AND HONOUR or GERMANY AWAKE.
In the centre of the formations was a swastika.
Military bands thumped out Lehar and Beethoven, flags fluttered in the late summer breeze. Then the finale: Sixty thousand knives simultaneously drawn like a flash of summer lightning.
Wolff was not an emotional man but he was still deeply moved when he gazed at the photograph of the rally, saw the child-like trust on the faces of the boys. Ten years later, how many of those boys had died for the cause?
He remembered the scene in the Luitpoldhalle after the display. At the back of the stage the German eagle clasping a swastika; at the sides of the hall a hundred or so SS resplendent in the black and silver uniforms.
One day, the twelve year-old Wolff had thought, I will wear that uniform. And I will fight the Führer’s enemies. I will die, if need be, for the man who has made my country great again. I will die for my God!
A fanfare of trumpets had heralded the arrival of Hitler. Beside him were two men whom Kurt hadn’t recognised. (They were Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Central Security Office.) But he was to know them well in the years to come.
Then all the lights had been switched off. Snap. Total darkness. And a single beam of light picking out the figure of Adolf Hitler. And spotlights finding the SS men in silver and black as they lowered their drawn swords.
Kurt didn’t understand a lot of what the Führer said — perhaps he shouldn’t even have been in the hall — but it was more exciting than anything he had heard anywhere else. A super breed of men was emerging; one day he might be one of them. They would dominate the world, they would eradicate weakness and treachery, Bolshevism (whatever that was), and the rich capitalists (whatever that meant) who stole the hard-earned monies of the ordinary German. Forget Versailles (wherever that was). Germany would be great again.
Tears formed in Kurt Wolff’s eyes as he witnessed what was in fact the official recognition of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
From then on it was the only unit to which Kurt Wolff ever wanted to belong.
* * *
The Leibstandarte first came into being on March 17th, 1933 as a personal bodyguard to Hitler before his power was absolute, when the brown-shirted SA and the black-shirted SS — derived from Schutzstaffeln, meaning Protection Squads — were competing, and the Communists and Nationalists were still to be reckoned with.
One of the first duties of the Leibstandarte under the command of Sepp Dietrich was to shoot the leaders of the SA rounded up by the SS, now a unified force under the leadership of Himmler, in the summer of 1934. The purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
The SS became an independent unit within the Nazi Party and the cream of them, the Leibstandarte, were honoured with a special oath of allegiance: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer, and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”
When the German Army reoccupied the Rhineland in March, 1936 — Hitler had announced conscription a year earlier — it was spear-headed by the Leibstandarte. Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich was under way; and he had made it clear that the elite of his dream was the ideological SS, and that the kernel of the elite was the Leibstandarte.
At the time of the Rhineland occupation Kurt Wolff was fifteen. And, like the other boys at his school, he was intoxicated with the deeds of these fair-haired heroes, the embodiment of Himmler’s schemes for racial purity, these supermen in their black overcoats and breeches adorned with silver, their boots as bright as mirrors. Had they not cowered the French Army by their very presence in Saarbrucken?
By the time the Leibstandarte, attached to the 2nd Panzer Division of the 16th Corps, had moved into Austria two years later, and the Czech Sudentenland eight months after that, Kurt was approaching call-up age.
But two factors stood in the way of Kurt’s enrolment into the Leibstandarte. In the first place his father, a Major in the German Cavalry in the First World War, wanted him to join the Fourth Cavalry Regiment. To become a ‘real soldier’ instead of an ‘asphalt soldier’ as the Wehrmacht, the conventional armed forces, termed the SS which was now a fully-fledged force of police troops. ‘Asphalt’ because they spent so much time stamping the parade ground.
Kurt loved his father, a prosperous landowner with extensive vineyards in the Main valley of north-east Bavaria, but he could not understand his father’s attitude towards the SS.
“What do you have against them?” he would ask as they sat at dinner in the great yellow-bricked house overlooking the ranks of vines heavy with fat green grapes. “They’re the best soldiers in the world.”
His father, grey-haired, monocled, a widower, would sip a goblet of white wine and reply: “They’re not soldiers, Kurt, they’re policemen.”
“Then why did Hitler send them into the Sudetenland before the soldiers?”
His father never had much of an answer to that. Instead he would evade the issue by describing the SS as the guinea pigs of Himmler’s racial theories. “Aryan manhood! We were good enough to fight in 1914–18 without such experiments. And we nearly won,” he would say waving his cigar at Kurt. “Never forget that. If the Americans hadn’t come in we would have won.”
But the First World War was merely history to Kurt. “But the Führer has stated that one day the SS will fight on the battlefields.”
Wearily his father asked: “What battlefields? Haven’t there been enough battlefields already?”
“The battlefields in The Struggle,” his son replied. Of course there would be battlefields. They had been told so in their history lessons which encompassed the future as much as the past.
Usually his father left it at that and Kurt was relieved, because one of his friends had once repeated a remark made by his father derogatory to Hitler and next day his friend’s father had been arrested by two civilians in long leather coats. Not, of course, that he would sneak on his own father.
Once
