Steven Hartov - The Soul Of A Thief

And finally, I was in love with the Colonel’s fiancée, a magnificent creature of my own age, who had just informed me that in fact my emotions for her were well requited.

No, it was not likely that I was going to survive this war. But inasmuch as the practicalities of shelter, sustenance and personal security can so easily be spurned in exchange for youthful and mad romance, I no longer cared. It had become very clear to me in the early months of that year, that unless I plumbed the depths of my courage and found the well of a reckless swashbuckler, the postwar world would be a morbid and cold planet, unfit for living.

And so, since I was unlikely to survive, I would make my dash for the gates with my love in hand. And, if I could hone every one of my strategic skills and adopt the soul of a thief, I would be very rich, to boot. Yes, in all likelihood, a rush of bullets would bring me to ground long before my escape.

But, so be it...

* * *

Colonel Himmel was a war hero, which made my status as his adjutant an envious position, if one viewed such employ through the eyes of a dedicated Nazi patriot. However, I was merely grateful that I had come to fill my position late in the game, for at barely nineteen years old, until the previous year I had been ineligible for more than cannon fodder on the Russian front or service in the Hitler Youth. This fine, upstanding organization I’d been forbidden to join in Vienna, as my ethnic background was in question. As for the infantry, my number had simply not yet come up.

Upon my expulsion from Gymnasium, I had been employed as a physician’s assistant in a Viennese hospital, which delayed my being swallowed up by the Wehrmacht. Yet it was there, while visiting a trio of his wounded commandos, that Himmel spotted me. He was a pure combat officer, decidedly apolitical, and I believe that what struck him was my appearance. I was a fine youth then, blond and blue-eyed and wiry, genetic gifts owing to the Balkan Semitic lineage of my great-grandmother rather than to any inheritance of an Aryan bent. He whispered a few inquiries to the doctors whom I served, and I was promptly whisked away to a new position and adventures I had not dreamed of, or wanted.

I was thankful, however, for having come to Himmel’s side at this latter stage of his commando career, because throughout the war his résumé had been quickly filled up with daring raids against Allied troops, mountaintop rescues of captured officers, and the long-range executions of enemy generals. The Colonel had a tendency to reward his support staff by insisting they accompany him on most such ventures, and so, a long list of previous adjutants, company clerks and even cooks had been killed in action on a number of fronts. My recruitment to the Colonel’s staff in 1943 somewhat lessened the odds of my falling prey to foreign shellfire while shining the commander’s jackboots, but it was in any event a nerve-racking assignment.

You see, Himmel had been twice awarded the Iron Cross, as well as the Knight’s Cross for exemplary valor, on one occasion by Adolf Hitler himself. I shall briefly digress to say that I am not proud to have been in attendance for that ceremony, but it was most certainly a surreal dinner soirée I shall never forget, for it is seared upon my mind’s eye. The awardees, more than two hundred officers from various branches of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, were invited to the Eagle’s Lair at Berchtesgaden. Of course, I use the term “invited” with tongue in cheek, for these weary men were ordered to appear on the given eve, despite their presently distant locations or battlefield predicaments.

Thus, the towering antechamber of Hitler’s Schloss was awash with men in dress uniforms, yet one must realize that so many of these previously perfectly tailored tunics and jodhpurs had been stowed now for years in Panzer tanks, Heinkel bombers or U-boats. The courageous officers had done their best to shine cracked boots, polish rusted buckles and steam the wrinkles from moth-eaten wools, yet even so, it all appeared much like a costume ball in the tenth level of hell. The submariners’ beards were badly trimmed, the Luftwaffe pilots’ eyes gleamed with fatigue, and some of the infantry heroes actually had caked spots of blood on their cuffs and lapels, as their most recent wounds still oozed. I hardly think now that many of them remained ardent worshippers of their Führer, yet like Roman legionnaires in the presence of Caesar, they managed to effect erect spines and the gunshot clicks of heels.

Hitler was customarily late, by I believe at least two hours, and I shall never forget his demeanor when he finally appeared. He seemed, quite frankly, completely surprised, and subsequently annoyed. He behaved like a man whose wife has invited guests to dinner without his consent, and it was only when Goering whispered a reminder in his ear that he dredged up the manners to stay the course. So quickly did he dispense the medals, with scarcely a complimentary word and absently offering that embarrassingly limp handshake of his, that I imagined his primary motive here was to finish with it and hurry to the toilet.

Of course, had I shared my view with a single soul, including any other young adjutant or even a castle cook, I most certainly would have found myself immediately en route to Smolensk, or worse. However, just after the Führer’s departure, I offered Colonel Himmel a champagne glass from a silver tray and congratulated him for his courage, which I had too often personally witnessed along with an accompanying clutch of my sphincter. The Colonel received his drink, nodded his gratitude, and very briefly rolled his single eye. He then smiled at me for a millisecond and quickly issued me an order of some kind, yet the moment had been shared.

For an assassin, a brigand, a tyrant and a thief, my master did have his good points.

To me, Himmel’s most endearing quality was that he never fully inquired as to my background. During the prewar years and throughout the conflict, it was incumbent upon elite Nazi officers to fully vet each member of their command, despite the assumption that the Gestapo had already done so. Yet Himmel had always been a career combatant, regarding Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes as nothing more than a rallying point around which to galvanize the populace. Having not a bone of fear in his body, he dismissed the regulatory racial codes with a snort, and assembled his company of Waffen Schutzstaffel based upon performance, and nothing else. Thus, his command was peppered with a number of racially questionable men of swarthy complexions and altered family names, and I would not be surprised if it included a gypsy or two.

Of course, having none of this information upon being fairly kidnapped by the Colonel, I spent my first two months quivering in his presence. I was waiting for him to summon me and wave a Gestapo document in my face, some horrendously accurate accusation that there was, in fact, a wizened old Jewess concealed among the many branches of my family tree. That, in itself, would have been enough for any other such officer to have me shot. The full truth, in fact, was worse.

My beloved father and mother were devout Catholics, which one might think a guarantee of my immediate lineage. However, one must also realize that devotion to God, under the Nazi reanalysis of religion, was not viewed kindly by the authorities. Adolf Hitler had become the New God of Germany and its protectorates, with Christ a poor third to the Führer and his pagan symbols, such as Albert Speer’s monolithic architectures and the towering iron statues of eagles, stag horns and the like. If you were a devout Catholic, you were expected to display your crucifix as nothing more than proof of your ethnic purity. In Vienna, the city of my birth and youth, the Anschluss had provided Germany’s Nazis with a pool of deeply fanatical followers. Those who claim that the Austrians were so much worse than the Germans themselves are correct, for there is no one more obsessive than a convert.