Robert Fish - The Fugitive

Von Roesler silenced him with a look, but for the first time he felt a twinge of uneasiness. It was quite unusual, this. It was the first time that inmates had been removed so far from camp as a work party. Usually they either left as part of the daily working units that went into Weimar to the factories or they left the camp for their last trip to some mass grave beyond the walls. This was very unusual.

The sight of Hamburg, while the train was still fifteen miles away, was incredible. A wall of flame tapering upward into a twisting tower that reached higher than the eye could see, past the sky, farther than the mind could encompass; columns of smoke shot through with fiery red flares that appeared and disappeared, winding about fiercely through the black pillars, all and everything fighting madly to climb into that holocaust that raged higher and higher, wider and wider, over the city. As their train inched forward, they could hear the hungry roar of the firestorm; a rain of tiny debris pattered against the coach roof; through the window the wind could be heard, rushing insanely into that unbelievable vacuum. The train ground to a shuddering halt; von Roesler dropped to the ground and ran panting past the now silent cattle cars to stand by the engine, frozen with disbelief and horror.

There, to the left, where the docks had stood, nothing but a solid wall of searing flame! And Hohelft, Barsbeck, Elmsbüttel, one gigantic and growing pyre! Harburg and the Borstelmannsweg section shooting howling fire to the skies! This could not be Hamburg! This mass of crackling, snarling, howling fire crazily twisting into the sky could not be Hamburg! It was impossible; one could not encompass the disaster. What had happened to the Luftwaffe? What had gone wrong with the vaunted radar guns? Hamburg, best-protected city in the Reich, in the world; Hamburg, whose civil defense was so developed, so famed, as to serve as the model for all cities of the Reich facing air attacks! It was impossible! Impossible! Who had failed? Fear, for the first time, came to Colonel Erick von Roesler.

They worked in the smoking skeleton of what had once been Hamburg for one month. They damped down still-smoldering ash-choked blocks; they cleared rubble from streets that still smoked beneath their feet. Burned trucks and cars were pulled away and thrown into the growing rubbish piles that took the place of the once famed factories of Hamburg. The network of canals and waterways that spanned the city were dragged and cleared of the twisted bodies that choked them; shelters were opened and the ghastly melted things that had once been human bodies were shoveled into carts and taken to the long shallow mass graves dug by the inmates of Buchenwald. And through all the work and the horror and the sleepless nights, von Roesler’s hatred grew, satisfied by the gruesome sights that presented themselves daily for his inspection; but the fear grew, also, and the doubts.

In the latter part of September they were replaced by groups from other camps; they returned to Buchenwald. Seven inmates had died on the trip to Hamburg; forty-three from the fumes of opened shelters, or the gases trapped in the shambles of flooded basements and torn pipes. Eight had been shot while attempting to take advantage of the situation and escape; four had been shot when burns suffered in their duties prevented them from joining their working parties. Ten had died in the Hamburg barracks, reason unknown. One had fallen into a mass grave and stayed there. Twelve bodies had remained in the cattle cars upon their return. Erick von Roesler wrote up his report mechanically, his mind far away.

The famous Luftwaffe had failed; the impenetrable defense of Hamburg had failed. He sat that night in his quarters, unconsciously listening for the terrifying soft roar of approaching airplanes, numbed. The map of Brazil remained folded in its usual place on his desk, his fingers stroking it absently. A word born of his need to escape the horror he had seen, to explain the fear that crowded him, grew in his mind: Betrayal! His mind studied the word and found it good; it satisfied his doubts and fed his hatred. Germany had been betrayed! He turned off his desk lamp and sat staring in the darkness, his ears pitched for the whisper of propellers in the distance; his delicate fingers stroking his warm pipe, his mind savoring the marvelous escape of that wonderful word. Betrayal!

On June 6, 1944, at five P.M. London time, Allied planes and gliders sweeping low over Normandy dropped the first contingent of paratroopers on Contentin Peninsula, and the invasion of the German stronghold of Europe had begun. On June 7 the British took Bayeux; Carentan fell on June 13. United States troops captured Cherbourg on June 27. British-Canadians took Caen July 9; Falaise fell to the Canadians August 17. On August 25 French troops, supported by the American forces, entered Paris.

With the breaching of the coast, and the recapture of Paris, the war was forever lost for Germany. The most fanatical could no longer dream of the invasion as being only an enlarged Commando landing force which might possibly be pushed back into the sea. Each day saw a greater number of Allied troops landed on the beaches and rushed to the ever-widening front. Everywhere the forces of the Reich were being pushed back, leaving behind valuable stores and further diminishing the dwindling stocks of ammunition, arms, and foodstuffs needed for successful defense. In the East, the fury of the Russian bear was being unleashed. The ring was slowly closing about the heart of the Reich.

There were, in those curtain-dropping days, many responsible Nazi officials and Wehrmacht officers of high rank who felt that an immediate petition for peace was necessary; surrender on any terms in order to at least salvage a possible base for future growth. Their requests were denied; the suicidal intent of the Führer permitted no deviation. Those who persisted in arguing died a few months before their time. Their coadjutors maintained intelligent silence. Those who fell back toward Berlin were resigned to die for their beliefs, or were merely postponing the inevitable, for the talk of War Crimes trials had already been heard in both London and Washington.

Erick von Roesler belonged to neither camp. After the shocking experience of the Hamburg holocaust, he had withdrawn into himself, living alone with his hate, which had widened to include both the betrayers and the betrayed. When Paris fell, he coldly accepted the fact of defeat and put into practice a plan that had been maturing since the latter days of 1943. The passports and identity cards were not merely correct in every detail; they were authentic. He had obtained them in Paris on leave in February of 1944. On August 26, 1944, he requisitioned a car from the motor pool at Weimar, stationed his own taciturn chauffeur at the wheel, and left Buchenwald for the last time. His sister Monica, laden with the other accounterment necessary for the plan, was met by arrangement in Frankfort, and they sped westward across Germany. Her presence was due less to family loyalty than to the feeling that she might be useful both to his escape and to his future plans.

The highways were crowded with troop carriers and trucks, but despite this they made fair time. The presence of a woman in an official car seemed to excite no undue notice. There were many official cars on the roads those nights, traveling in both directions, and no one was of a mood to question or pay particular attention to their occupants.

They crossed the border at Mulhouse and drove south through Besançon toward Creuzot. Monica had provided sandwiches and wine, and they ate as they drove, throwing their litter carelessly out of the window, as being almost symbolic of their nonreturn. At Montceaules-Mines they stopped to fill the tank with gasoline from cans they had carried in the luggage compartment, and immediately resumed their journey. Just beyond the outskirts of the little town they left the main highway and bumped over a winding road that twisted through the low hills leading toward the Loire. They had been driving eighteen hours when they finally pulled up at their destination.