Read Assignment Gestapo Online
Authors: Sven Hassel
Assignment Gestapo
‘Each to his own,’ said Tiny pompously. ‘We’re here to kill, so I do it the way I like best. Everyone’s got their favourite way of doing it.’
It was true, I suppose. We each had our own preferred methods. The Legionnaire was a devotee of the knife, while Porta was a crack shot with a rifle. Heide liked playing about with flame throwers, while for myself I was accounted pretty hot stuff with a hand grenade. Tiny just happened to enjoy strangling people . . .
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
Ogpu Prison
ASSIGNMENT
GESTAPO
Translated by Jean Ure
CASSELL
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published by in Great Britain in 1971 by Corgi
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Presses de la Cité 1965
Translation copyright Transworld Publishers Ltd. 1971
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 5731 0
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
Orion Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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Contents
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.
From somewhere behind us came the sounds of men shouting and of a general uproar. Tiny and the Legionnaire had stayed to guard the rear, while the rest of us pressed on. They were lying in wait amongst the thick undergrowth of the copse
.
Four Russian soldiers appeared, hurrying through the trees. They wore the green insignia of the NKVD. They were still very young, very keen; still eager to chase and to kill
.
They came charging round the bend in the path. The Legionnaire silently turned down a thumb, and Tiny grinned in anticipation. Their sub-machine guns cracked into the silence almost simultaneously
.
Tiny had jumped to his feet and was firing from a standing position, the gun jammed hard against his hip. The whole of his massive frame shook under the recoil
.
The Legionnaire, calm and collected as always in moments of action, was gently singing one of his interminable songs of death
.
The Russians plunged forward, head first, on the damp earth. Only two of them still showed signs of life by the time the bombardment had ceased, and Tiny stepped forward to put the finishing touches to their handiwork. It was a necessary precaution, in these days of war: never mind about not hitting a man when he was down, even the mortally wounded are capable of picking up a gun and firing it
.
‘
Sorry, chum!’ Tiny looked down dispassionately at the dead soldiers. ‘We just can’t take any chances, however much we love you!
’
‘
Too bloody right’ muttered the Legionnaire. ‘They’d put a bullet through our backsides as soon as look at us
.’
The platoon had been taken by surprise when in the midst of a drunken debauch – celebrating Porta’s birthday in the only way we knew how. We had been in no fit state to welcome the Russian patrol which had burst so unexpectedly upon us. The first we knew about them was when the windows blew in upon our faces and we found ourselves staring into the gaping black mouths of four powerful PMs. Our instinctive reaction was to hurl ourselves to the floor and cover our heads. The Legionnaire and Porta had retained sufficient presence of mind to lob a series of hand grenades through the shattered windows, but how we escaped with our lives was nobody’s business. We were still reeling and weak-kneed from the shock
.
We met up again at the far end of the wood. Eight men were missing
.
‘
I saw two of ’em go down,’ volunteered Porta
.
We wondered, briefly, what had happened to the others
.
When Tiny reappeared, he was dragging with him an unwilling Russian lieutenant. The Old Man said firmly that we should have to take him along as a prisoner
.
Shortly before we reached the mine field, we heard the lieutenant give a cry. We heard Tiny laugh, and the Old Man swore violently. Seconds later, Tiny emerged from the bushes . . . alone
.
‘
Shit tried to get away from me,’ he explained, cheerfully. ‘He asked for it, didn’t he?
’
We remained silent. We could see, hanging from Tiny’s pocket, the length of steel wire that had come in so useful on so many occasions; whenever a quick, silent death was required
. . .
‘
Did you strangle the poor bastard?’ asked the Old Man, disbelievingly
.
Tiny shrugged
.
‘
I told you,’ he muttered, ‘he tried to get away
. . .’
‘
In other words, you murdered him,’ said Stege
.
CHAPTER ONE
The Informer
A
LL
of us that remained of the Fifth Company were stretched out on our bellies beneath the apple trees, watching dispassionately as the reserve troops came up. We had been waiting for those troops for the last four days, and by now we were past caring whether they sent them or not. They arrived in trucks, moving slowly up the road in a double column. Their uniforms and their arms were still brand new, smart and shining and almost unbelievably virginal.
We watched them come with jaded eyes. No comments had been passed, and none was necessary: the approaching troops spoke for themselves. It was obvious to us that we could have nothing in common. We were soldiers, while they were only dilettantes. It showed in the careful way they carried their equipment; it showed in their stiff and shining boots. So beautifully polished and so utterly useless! No one could march very far in boots of such uncompromising newness. They had yet to be rubbed with their baptismal urine, which was the best treatment we knew for softening up and at the same time preserving the leather. Take Porta’s boots, for an ideal example of a soldier’s footwear: so supple that you could see every movement of his toes inside them. And if they gave off an almost overpowering stench of urine, that seemed a small price to pay for comfort.
‘You stink like a thousand pisshouses!’ Porta was once told, rather sharply, during the course of a parade.
That was our Colonel, sometimes irreverently known as Wall Eye, on account of the black patch he wore over one empty socket. It seemed to me significant that in spite of his testy observation on the subject of urine, he never put a stop to our habit of pissing on our boots. He’d been in the Army long enough to know that it’s the feet that make the soldier. You got bad feet and you’re worse than useless.
Tiny, still watching the arrival of the reserve force, suddenly nudged the Legionnaire in the ribs.
‘Where.d’you reckon they dug that lot up from? Jesus Christ, it’s enough to make a cat laugh! The Ruskies’ll mop them up before they’ve even found out what they’re supposed to be doing here . . .’ He nodded importantly at the Legionnaire. ‘If it weren’t for people like you and me, mate, we’d have lost this perishing war years ago.’
The Old Man laughed. He was trying to shelter from the pouring rain beneath a rather pathetic bush.
‘High time they gave you the Knight’s Cross . . . a hero like you!’
Tiny turned and spat.
‘Knight’s Cross! You know where they can stick that, don’t you? Right up their bleeding arses . . . I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it!’
There were sounds of cries and curses from the officers at the front of the approaching column. One of the privates, a little frail creature who looked older than God, had lost his tin helmet. It had rolled to the side of the road with a noise like a hundred tin cans collapsing, and the old chap had instinctively scrambled off the truck and gone toddling after it.
‘Get back into line!’ roared an Oberfeldwebel, outraged. ‘What the bleeding hell do you think you’re bleeding playing at?’
The old boy hesitated, looking from his precious helmet to the apoplectic Oberfeldwebel. He scuttled back into the ranks and marched on, and the Oberfeldwebel nodded grimly and remained where he was, blowing his whistle and every so often shouting his lungs out, intent on hustling these raw amateurs on their way to certain death.
As I watched the column advancing, I could see that the little old man was already near to breaking point; both physically and mentally, I guessed. The loss of his tin helmet had probably been the final straw.
Lt. Ohlsen, our Company Commander, was standing to one side chatting to his counterpart, the lieutenant who had led the reserve troops up here. Neither of them had noticed the incident, neither of them had noticed that one of their men was on the point of cracking. And even if they did, what could they do about it? At this stage of the war, it was a commonplace occurrence.
The old chap suddenly fell to his knees, began crawling down the hill on all fours. His fellow soldiers looked at him nervously. The Oberfeldwebel came running up, bellowing.
‘Stand up, that man there! What do you think this is, a bleeding tea party?’
But the old man never moved. Just lay on the ground, sobbing fit to break your heart. He wouldn’t have moved if he’d been threatened with a court martial; he couldn’t have. He didn’t have the strength left, and he didn’t have the will any more, either. The Oberfeldwebel walked up to him, stood over him chewing at his lower lip.
‘All right . . . all right, if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll go along with you . . . You’ve got to learn a thing or two, I can see that . . . You think you’re exhausted, eh? Well, just you wait till you’ve got a load of screaming Ruskies coming at you, you’ll move fast enough!’ He suddenly stepped back and rapped out an order. ‘Pick up that spade and get digging! At the double, if you don’t want to get mown down!’