David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

He walked into the hall carrying the Mauser and a box of shells. He passed Ostarhild’s office, looking in for a moment to find the lieutenant away. He noted that the brazier and the coffeepot were also gone. The lieutenant’s desk was a mess.

Outside, the first charcoal stains of dawn colored the sky. It’s going to be a heavily overcast day, he thought. Good. They tend to be warmer. The clouds keep the heat in.

He counted only ten soldiers walking in the square across from the department store and in the streets around him. No cars or motorcycles broke the early silence. He wondered that there was not more activity, though he knew he was for the most part a stranger to the administration of war. In fact, he did not know how it worked on the large scale, outside the narrow range of his crosshairs.

Heinz Thorvald had never played more than a very specific role in the German military. He’d been a prized sniper, a gifted Scharfschütze, from the first day he donned the black and silver of the Wehrmacht as a twenty-seven-year-old captain in 1933.

Before his fifteenth birthday, Heinz had been a champion youth marksman in his native Berlin. His father, Baron Dieter von Zandt Thorvald, was a renowned sportsman in the southern forests. The old man had once hunted duck and quail with Field Marshal von Hindenburg himself. Heinz grew up a member of the wealthy industrialist Krupp family, his mother’s clan, who held license to hunting grounds throughout Bavaria, and Heinz had been recognized early as a phenom with a shotgun.

But the boy’s passion was not in the fields alongside his father. The baying of the hunting dogs, the wet dawns in the marshes, and the gritty, bloody meat of the wild kill were not to his liking. Instead, his heart beat for the time he could spend on the shooting range. He preferred the camaraderie and comfort of the clubhouse, the applause of admirers, and the competition with his peers. His favorite afternoons came with the matches against those elder marksmen who wished to teach the talented pup a lesson and rarely did. Heinz won most of the competitions he entered from the ages of sixteen through twenty. The matches he lost did more to improve his shooting than his victories. He analyzed every errant shot down to painful detail and did not repeat those mistakes next time out.

As a young man, he turned his talents to trap shooting. His rifle of choice was the unpopular .410 small-bore rather than the more widely used 12 gauge. The shot pattern of the .410 was smaller. This rifle required more meticulous aim than the larger-bore guns. Heinz accepted this voluntarily as his handicap. In his mind, it evened the contests. It helped him focus his will. The 12 gauge destroyed the clay targets, turning them into sprinkles of dust. Heinz enjoyed using the .410 to simply break the clays, then watch them fall. He sometimes practiced by shattering with a second shot a falling piece of an already stricken target. No one in Germany could best Heinz. His movement from high to low targets was as smooth as the flights of the spinning clays themselves. His balance was remarkable, and his reflexes were like a mousetrap. The clays were flung into the air at the call of “pull” for a high target and “mark” for a low one. Heinz moved the barrel of the gun in behind, then ahead, of the “pigeons” sailing twenty meters away from him in the first second, fifty meters away after three seconds. He knocked them down as surely as if the disks had been flung against a wall.

In 1928, when he was twenty-two, a wave of strikes shuddered through Germany. From his family’s estate outside Berlin, Heinz sensed the unrest growing in the nation. His father, a veteran of the First World War, was a strong supporter of the military. Many times he told his son that the German army was the last lamp that could light the country’s path back to its former glories.

The baron joined a militant group of veterans, the Stahlhelme, or “Steel Helmets,” and marched with them in the Berlin streets against the encroachments of unemployment, the declining mark, the Weimar republican system, and the rising tide of Communism. He preached that the German people’s most valuable traits were their industriousness and the skill of the labor force. Because of what he saw as the Weimar politicians’ mishandling of the postwar peace, German workers were being laid off by the thousands. The nation was depressed. Its anchor of hard labor and daily production had been ripped from the shoal beneath, sending Germany adrift, the baron intoned often at dinner. Only a strong army could sink the anchor back into a firm purchase.

Heinz accompanied his father on a few of the Stahlhelme’s raucous, confrontational demonstrations. The rancor of the crowd scared him, and he quickly retired to the sanctuary of his library and the rifle range.

Five years later, in 1933, the Austrian Adolf Hitler came to power. The year before, Hitler had been at the forefront in the Nazi party’s election sweep. Hitler was now chancellor. His brown-shirted storm troopers, the Sturmabteilung, lock-stepped across the nation, which embraced the new nationalism. Hitler labeled both the Communists and the “Jewish terror” as the genesis of Germany’s woes.

In the first year under Hitler, Germany’s economy began to lurch forward like an engine that had sat idle for years and was suddenly oiled and cranked into action. The voices of dissent slowly disappeared when the Schutzstaffel, the SS, opened the first internment camps for political opponents. The nation began to shout as one, howling first at itself, then to the startled ears of the world. The voices in the streets were young with the renewed power of Germany rising again.

Heinz was enlisted by his father into the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. He was immediately scooped up by friends into the storm troopers. Hitler called this paramilitary organization, over half a million strong, his “political soldiers in the fight to take back the streets from the Marxists.” Heinz was subjected, through meetings and retreats, to an armylike discipline. He was ushered into the labyrinths of Hitler’s political aims and social suspicion of any thing or person termed “non-Aryan.”

Heinz became upset by the fervor of his mates. The storm troopers fought in the streets with fists and bottles against Communist sympathizers. They marched in rigid goose step in support of Hitler’s mad dashes through the halls of government. They were arrested for fighting, then smashed benches and threw telephones through the windows at the police stations. Heinz could not join in the violence. He was stalled by a fear he did not know he owned until the first time his mates rushed into a crowd of Reds. He’d stood on the edge of the melee, frozen on the sidewalk, pressed against a building by his sudden dread. He quit the brownshirts two months after joining and was branded a coward.

The baron was not willing to accept this label for his son and insisted that the error had been his. The storm troopers, he said, were simply too proletarian. Heinz was refined beyond the ken of those goons. The place for Heinz was the Jungdeutsche Orden, the German Youth Order, known as the Jungdo.

Here, young Heinz found an ideological home for the sons of the bourgeoisie. The Jungdo marched in goose step, but only because it was the fashion and they didn’t want to appear less committed to the National Socialist cause than the other groups. But unlike the Hitler Youth or the storm troopers, the Jungdo did not break ranks to run down a group of men and women carrying Communist slogans or throw rocks and bottles at Bolshevik speakers. Their uniforms carried no insignia or rank to deemphasize age and status. Instead of the storm troopers’ beer-sotted revelry, his group held brotherly and patriotic meetings. The members of the Jungdo carried themselves with the air of those bred to lead rather than skirmish. Heinz spent weekends on camping trips, engaged in sports and hikes. The Jungdo had a required reading list that closely tracked Hitler’s preferred authors. Heinz was introduced to the great philosopher Nietzsche’s belief that a self-willed, heroic superrace would emerge above conventional morality to sweep away worldly decadence. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Free Will, one of Hitler’s favorite bits of reading during World War I, Heinz encountered the idea of will as force. He marveled at the lessons of Darwinian selection and the unexpected parallels between math, physics, culture, and history set forth by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.