Opening Moves

He was thirty-three years old and his time soldiering had not sat too heavily on him, apart from the occasional stiffness of an old wound, of which he had received more than his fair share. Particularly, an unusual thigh wound would often trouble him but the story of how he had sustained it earned Rolf many a drink, so he endured it with good humour.

In his younger days his 1.88m frame, blonde hair and blue eyes would have put him on any Waffen-SS recruitment poster and, in truth, he still cut a dashing figure.

Being Waffen-SS meant he got special treatment from the guards. Because he could speak Russian and therefore valuable also meant he didn’t get that special treatment as badly as some other SS officers, although rarely a day went by without some new insult or injury being visited upon him by the Bulgarians who policed the camp at Edelbach. There had been some two hundred and fifty-six officers at its peak but a combination of execution, disease, abuse and escapes had reduced that number to two hundred and seventeen. Exactly two hundred and seventeen Rolf knew, for it was his job to know these things, and the Germans have never been accused of being inefficient.

It had been two hundred and nineteen at breakfast time but Maior Nester had succumbed to his devastating infection mid-morning and Leutnant Lindemann had been shot at 1136 hrs. The memory of that was too fresh. Murdered was more the truth, for no reason other than he was the closest prisoner to that damned NKVD officer who just wanted to show his girl how powerful he really was.

They all knew Kapitan Skryabin was a psychopath and an asshole but to do that? His absence on home leave had been a period of relative calm for the inmates but now he was back. No rhyme or reason, just pistol out, trigger pulled and handsome young Lindemann, former art student of Leipzig, was no more. Another senseless death in a decade of senseless deaths.

The trouble with Skryabin, one camp guard had previously confided in a comrade and was overheard by Rolf, was that he was connected in Moscow and was pretty much fireproof. Uhlmann had no idea who or how highly connected as it was not the sort of thing you would just up and ask a guard, certainly not the guards in this camp anyway.

He had discussed Skryabin with a few of his fellow officers but there was a general feeling of apathy and depression about many comrades, which excluded in-depth thought and conversation unless it was talk of escape, home and family. Perhaps understandable, given what had happened over the last six years.

Edelbach was a former German POW camp for the incarceration of Allied officer prisoners, mainly French with a smattering of Poles, previously known as OFLAG XVIIa. In 1943 it was the site of the largest mass escape of allied prisoners in World War Two when one hundred and thirty-two men made a bid for freedom through a tunnel on the nights of the 17th and 18th September, escaping in two groups a day apart, with only two men making the full escape to their native France.

Now the sole occupants of this miserable place were its former proprietors and their new custodians. The previous inmates of Edelbach had been marched away to Linz before the Red Army captured the site, with many failing the harsh physical test and dying right at the end of the war. Most of the barracks were damaged and unoccupied, and solely the five blocks that housed Rolf and his fellows remained inhabited from the thirty or so that had been home to thousands of unfortunates.

There were all sorts in Edelbach now, from Nazi political animals through to frontline regulars like Rolf who cared little for politics and who had fought for country when called, regardless of the regime in charge. Most were from the regular army, the Wehrmacht, with a considerable number of Waffen-SS, some Luftwaffe, and even one Kriegsmarine Officer. As was the case with a number of SS officers, Rolf was, or rather, had been a Nazi party member until Germany’s collapse, but would confess his membership derived from him being caught up in the euphoria of the early years rather than any fanaticism or dedication to the cause.