The Commissar

  When we reach the next town the Stukas have already visited it, and prepared it for the taking. The dust of pulverized bricks and mortar hangs like a red-grey cloud in the air. Artillery and Cossack horses lie in the shattered streets, stiff-legged and with swollen bodies. Guns lying on their side, wrecked lorries and mountains of tangled equipment, are scattered among the heaps of bodies. Dead and wounded Russian soldiers lie against walls, or hang from gaping window openings.

  Dispassionately we stare at the bloody scene. It has become an everyday sight. In the beginning we puked and felt sick to our stomachs. It is a long time since any of us puked.

  By Sven Hassel

  Wheels of Terror

  Monte Cassino

  SS General

  Legion of the Damned

  Blitzfreeze

  Comrades of War

  Reign of Hell

  Liquidate Paris

  Assignment Gestapo

  March Battalion

  Court Martial

  The Bloody Road to Death

  The Commissar

  O.G.P.U. Prison

  THE

  COMMISSAR

  Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie

  A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK

  First published by in Great Britain in 1985 by Corgi

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Sven Hassel 1985

  Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1985

  Translated from the Danish by Tim Bowie

  The right of Sven Hassel to be identified as the author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means

  electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording

  or any information storage and retrieval system

  without permission in writing

  from the publisher.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 2978 6423 3

  Orion Books

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.

  This book is dedicated to my old friend the Scandinavian film producer Just Betzer who has thrown himelf enthusiastically into the filming of my books.

  Sven Hassel

  Many have suffered in war – from hunger,

  from wounds and from frost

  But they suffered most who bore no arms, who

  died unseen – lost.

  Those who suffered at human hands. Their

  torturers saw each heart,

  And around them the land they sprang from –

  then – tore them slowly apart.

  Nordahl Grieg

  (freely translated)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Panzer Attack

  The Fat Leutnant

  Vera Konstantinovna

  The Burial of Gregor’s General

  Meeting with the Commissar

  The Paritip

  The Mad OGPU

  * Captain

  The Vladimir Prison

  *The Soviet Secret Police, now the KGB

  A soldier’s conscience is as wide as Hell’s gate.

  William Shakespeare

  The Gauleiter was in a hurry. He drove recklessly, taking no heed of the refugees choking the roads. His triple-axled vehicle was heavily loaded. He was the first to have left the city. The vehicle had been loaded for several days. Then, the sound of tank-guns in the distance persuaded the Gauleiter that the time to start on his travels was now. The only member of his large staff whom he took with him was his young secretary. She believed in the Führer, the Party and the Final Victory.

  She pulled her mink coat closer about her. It had once belonged to a rich woman who had died in Auschwitz.

  They were stopped four times by the Field Police, but the Gauleiter’s golden-brown uniform was as good as a password. At the last stop the guards warned them against proceeding further. The next sentries they would meet would be Americans. Their road-block was where the road turned off from Hof to Munich.

  A coarse-faced sergeant of snowballs* stuck a gun-barrel through the vehicle window. The Gauleiter had changed into civilian clothes.

  ‘You ain’t gone hungry, have you, sausage-eater?’

  ‘He is a Gauleiter,’ smiled the secretary, who no longer believed in the Führer, the Party and the Final Victory.

  The snowball sergeant emitted a long, low whistle.

  ‘Hear that boys?’ He turned to his three-man MP guard. ‘This civilian sausage-eater’s a Gauleiter!’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Come on,’ said the MP sergeant, prodding the Gauleiter with his gun-muzzle. ‘Let’s take a stroll into the woods, and see how the spring crocuses are coming along.’ His breath stank of cheap cognac.

  The secretary heard three bursts of automatic fire. White helmets appeared again from the woods. She was halfway across the fields towards the farm, and never heard the next burst of fire which came from behind her. She was dead before her face hit the ground!

  ‘What the hell you shoot her for?’ shouted the sergeant, in an irritated voice.

  ‘Escapin’ wasn’t she?’ said the corporal, cheerfully. He cracked a fresh ammunition clip home with the heel of his hand.

  Soon afterwards the next loaded vehicle arrived.

  *Refers to the while MP helmet

  PANZER ATTACK

  ‘Section, halt!’ The Old Man’s voice comes hoarsely over the radio. He throws up the flap of the turret with a metallic crash, and pulls his battered old silver-lidded pipe from his pocket in one and the same movement. Hard-boiled as our Section Leader is, he is still a carpenter at heart. An aura of sawdust and wood-shavings hangs about him.

  ‘Blast these bloody things!’ he swears, turning round with difficulty in the narrow turret aperture. The new, heavy winter underwear makes a man twice his normal size round the waist. ‘Where’s Barcelona and his lot got to?’

  I open the side hatch and peer tiredly down the long column of tanks rattling along the cobbled road. They are our heavy tanks, mounted with flamethrowers. There must be something very well-defended up in front of us, or the heavies wouldn’t be in the lead.

  ‘Noisy lot o’ bleeders ain’t they?’ growls Tiny, showing his sooty face cautiously at the loader’s hatch. ‘Jesus’n Mary!’ he shouts, ducking quickly inside again as the muzzle flames of a pair of degtrareva* spit from the windows of some business premises further down the street. Our machineguns begin to chatter back immediately. The clatter of running feet is heard on all sides, mixed with shouted orders and scr
eams. It sounds as if the gates of hell had suddenly been thrown open.

  A figure in an earth-coloured uniform, carrying a T-mine, comes scrambling up over our front apron. Tiny sweeps him away, with a burst from his machine-pistol, before he can place the T-mine under our turret ring.

  Suddenly the street is swarming with Russians. They come flooding out from every door and window.

  I catch sight of a Russian helmet on our open side. Reflexively I empty my pistol into a twisted face. It shatters like an egg.

  ‘Grenades,’ shouts the Old Man, ripping a stick-grenade from its clip.

  I pull personnel grenades from my pockets, and throw them through the hatch. The little eggs explode, cracking sharply in our ears. Human screams split the darkness.

  A 20 mm coughs angrily from an attic window. The small, dangerous shells ricochet between the house walls. It is as if devils were playing ping-pong with exploding balls of fire.

  Without awaiting the Old Man’s order I swing the turret, and aim our gun at the building from which the 20 mm and the degtrareva are spitting their pearly rows of deadly light.

  Our long gun roars, violently.

  With a certain feeling of pleasure I see two uniformed figures whirl down from the third-floor windows. They catch for a moment on the overhead wires of the tramlines, then fall to the cobblestones, landing with a soggy thump.

  I send three more rounds of HE into the building. Flames commence to roar up from the roof. Tiles fall in the street like enormous hailstones. They splinter on the cobblestones.

  The fire runs quickly along the houses. In the twinkling of an eye the whole row becomes a sea of roaring flame. Terrified men spring from the windows, preferring death on the cobblestones to burning alive.

  ‘Who ordered you to open fire?’ rages the Old Man, hitting out at me with a stick-grenade. ‘Fire when you’re ordered to, an’ not before, you powder-mad sod, you!’

  ‘They’d have done us up for sure, if I hadn’t fired,’ I defend myself, hurt. ‘The gun’s to shoot with, isn’t it?’

  ‘That building you’ve just disposed of so thoroughly was I Battalion’s billet. Get that through your thick skull! You just shot it all to hell!’ shouts the Old Man, despairingly.

  ‘Sabotage, that’s what it is,’ says Heide, triumphantly, ’or I don’t know what sabotage is! Kick him in front of a court-martial so we won’t have to look at him any more!’

  ‘Must ’ave rotten eggs where ’is brains ought to be,’ barks Tiny, jeeringly. ‘Shit on ’is own doorstep when’e could’ve done it in the snow’n only shit icicles. Let’s blow’is’ead off!’

  ‘Shut up!’ snarls the Old Man. He puffs fiercely on his pipe.

  ‘See that sky-pilot over there,’ grins Porta. ‘Runnin’ like mad with a bible under his arm, and a crucifix banging on his navel. The speed he’s going you’d think the devil had his pitchfork up his arse!’

  ‘I cannot ever understand why chaplains is just as scared of gettin’ knocked off as all us ordinary shits,’ Tiny wonders. ‘Them lot’as got connections to the’igher regions!’

  ‘The holy and righteous are just as scared of blowin’ their last fart as we heathens are, my son,’ philosophizes Porta. ‘In reality only very good people indeed can permit themselves to become religious.’

  ‘Panzer, Marsch.’ orders the Old Man, pulling his headphones down over his ears, and settling his throat microphone in place. ‘2 Section follow me!’ From old habit he lifts his clenched fist over his head. The signal to move forward. Maybach engines howl up into whining upper registers. Broad tracks churn forward over the dead and wounded lying in the street.

  A Panther tank stops over a foxhole, where two Russian soldiers have taken cover with an LMG. The tank waggles on its axis, like a hen settling on to her eggs. There are screams, sharply cut off. The Russians have been crushed to a bloody pulp.

  The noise of the tanks is deafening. The guns and automatic weapons drown out every other noise.

  ‘Anna here! Here Anna,’ the Old Man says to the radio. ‘Bertha and Caesar make safe on flanks. Fire only at clear targets! I repeat: fire only at clear targets. And I’ll want an exact ammo’ count from all of you. Now, fingers out, an’ get moving, you sad sacks!’

  Flames lick at the houses. Bullets rattle and clang on the sides of the tanks. Machine-gunners fire at them, in the wasteful hope that they can do the steel giants some damage. Poisonous yellow smoke penetrates the tanks, making the crewmen’s tired eyes burn and sting!

  A burning roof crashes down on top of a P-III. Flames shoot up, and in a few seconds it becomes an exploding ball of fire. Reserve petrol drums lashed to its rear shield turn the tank into a travelling bomb.

  The cold, damp jiight air stinks of explosion fumes, blood and dead bodies.

  ‘Here Hinka, here Hinka,’ comes from the scratchy loudspeaker. The steely voice of the regimental commander cuts through the racket in the tank. ‘5 Company will do clean-up. Prisoners will be sent back to grenadier battalion. I warn you! No looting of any kind! Breach of this order will be punished most severely!’

  ‘Always us,’ grumbles Porta sourly, speeding up his motor. ‘It’s bloody wonderful! They chase us poor bloody coolies, till even our soddin’ socks are sick of it. Why am I so rotten healthy, and why do all them lovely Commie bullets go round me? I’m never, ever goin’ to get away from this shitty war, and into a lovely, clean hospital with lovely clean, antiseptic nurse’s cunt all round me just longin’ to get across a wounded, bloody Ayrab like me!’

  ‘’Ot shit!’ growls Tiny, bitterly. ‘Risk your bleedin’ life, every day in every way, for a fucked-up mark a day.’

  ‘It’s the rotten German army,’ snarls Porta, angrily. ‘Why, oh why, was I ever born in a war-crazy country like Germany!’

  I feel dog-tired, but a rage of energy still courses through my weary body. They’ve filled us up with benzedrine. For the last six days we have been unable to snatch more than a few minutes of sleep at a time, and we walk around in a queer sort of haze. The worst of all is that every time we have almost fallen asleep we wake up with a start, and the bitter taste of fear is in our mouths.

  Tiny hangs over the guard rails. His eyes are wide open, but see nothing. From one loosely hanging hand dangles a P-38. He’s like the rest of us. He dare not fall asleep. Now we are close to the danger point. The point where we can no longer be bothered to keep a watch for approaching death. It’s waiting out there for us somewhere; perhaps in the form of an explosion; perhaps in a hysterical hail of machine-gun bullets.

  Shells come whistling over the town in great arcs, despatched from invisible batteries to strike at distant targets far behind us.

  Tiny jerks awake and cracks his head against the roof of the tank. He swears bitterly and long. Dark blood runs down beside his left ear. He dabs at it, irritably, with an oily cloth.

  ‘’Oly Mother of Kazan, what a bleedin’ dream,’ he mumbles. ‘I was walkin’ around in a wood tryin’ to find the Red bleedin’ Army. Up comes a commissar an’ shoots the shit out o’ me.’ He looks around at us, quite out of touch. ‘Stone the crows,’ he says, feebly, ‘now I know I don’t like gettin’ shot up.’

  The tank stops. Mud and remnants of bodies drip from the tracks Its white camouflage paintwork is a dirty grey from powdermarks and filth.

  We stretch ourselves in our steel seats, and throw open the shutters to let in some fresh air. But all we get is poison-yellow smoke and the stink of death.

  Tank grenadiers sneak along the house walls. They have the dirtiest job of all. Not a bit of glory. Their reward is more often than not a bellyfull of machine-gun bullets. They start in cleaning out the cellars for fanatics, crazy fools who fight to the last man and the last bullet. Their reward is a throat slashed open. Brainwashed idiots filled with Ilya Ehrenburg propaganda. The same kind of people as ours. The ones who die whispering ‘Heil Hitler’ from between crushed lips.

  From where we are lying in ambush, we can see a long way
out over the steppe. It is like a whitish-grey sea, fading away into the distant horizon. Far, far behind us, towns and villages, set on fire by shell-fire during our savage attack, burn fiercely.

  Wherever we look, fiery red and yellow flashes split the darkness of the night, marking clearly the deadly path of the armoured attack.

  Halfway down some cellar steps hangs a US Willy’s jeep with five headless bodies in it. They sit to attention as if on parade. It seems as if a huge knife has slashed the heads from the four Russian officers and their driver in one enormous sweep. There is something strange about the headless bodies. They are not wearing battle khaki but dark green dress uniforms, with broad shoulder distinctions which glitter in the flames from a burning distillery nearby.

  ‘See now. Sights like that,’ says Porta, spitting accurately out of an observation slit, ‘make a man glad to be alive, even when life is monotonous and weary.’

  ‘Where you think that lot was off to, togged up in them uniforms an’ all the cunt magnets they c’d get their ’ands on?’ asks Tiny, interestedly. He leans out of the turret opening. ‘They must’ve lost their way to end up’ere where there’s a war goin’ on.’

  ‘My guess is they were on their way to a party with some field mattresses,’ says Porta. He licks his lips at the thought.

  ‘Let’s give ’em a goin’ over,’ suggests Tiny, jumping down from the tank. ‘They’re goin’ to a ’ores’ party, they’ll ’ave some pretties on ’em. Count on it!’

  Porta inches up through the turret opening, eagerly, and bends over a headless first lieutenant with a row of ribbons on his chest.

  ‘A hero,’ he laughs, putting the ribbons in his pocket. Buyers for them are easy to find behind the lines. His quick fingers go through the officer’s pockets, regardless of congealed blood and crushed bones.