Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

‘In here’ – Nehmann took her open hand and placed it over his heart – ‘where it matters.’

Maria nodded. She seemed to understand.

‘So where is it?’ she said at last. ‘This letter?’

Nehmann looked at her for a long moment, and then smiled.

‘There’s a water tank on the roof,’ he murmured. ‘If anything happens to me, look underneath.’

They made love. In the middle of the night, Nehmann awoke. Maria’s face hung over him, concerned, even fretful.

‘And the East?’ she said. ‘Stalingrad?’

Still groggy, Nehmann thought about the question.

‘Horrible,’ he managed at last, closing his eyes again.

26

BERLIN SPORTPALAST, WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 1942

Nehmann had never liked the Sportpalast. Recently, talking to Schultz in Stalingrad, he’d likened it to something you’d find in Goebbels’ kitchen. It was a cooking pot, he said. It was a favourite utensil you’d fetch out for those special occasions when you wanted to whip up something irresistible to keep everyone happy. You put together the recipe from what you knew and trusted. A little of that intimate frenzy from the Bürgerbräukeller days in Munich. Plus a huge helping of spectacle and mass adoration from the Zeppelinfeld at Nuremberg: hanging banners, roving spotlights and a sound system that would put Hitler’s rasp and Goebbels’ chest-thumping roar into every German heart. When the national pulse showed signs of faltering, a couple of deafening hours in the Sportpalast always did the trick.

The trick.

Nehmann had spent the best part of an entire morning with Goebbels in the ministerial office, going through the first draft of the speech line by line. It was about the war in the east. At first, foolishly, he’d assumed he was there as an act of reconciliation. For the sake of the Promi’s credibility, he told himself, Goebbels needed to find a compromise between the usual torrent of visionary drivel and the smaller truths about what was really happening in Stalingrad.

Wrong. The Minister’s starting point turned out to be the way the British had consistently managed to turn defeats into victories. First at Dunkirk, and more recently after the botched attempt to land a force of Canadians to create mayhem at Dieppe, London had refused to be humiliated. On both occasions, as Goebbels knew only too well, German forces had chased the Allied troops back into the sea, and yet London had somehow managed to repackage both events as magnificent examples of pluck and resilience against impossible odds. Nehmann was already aware of Hitler’s quiet admiration for the British. What came as a surprise was Goebbels’ envy of their propaganda talents.

‘Stalingrad’s a mess,’ he’d told Nehmann yesterday. ‘So far this war has been too kind to us. We need to take a lesson from the British.’

And so the draft was written, and rewritten, and Goebbels prevailed upon Nehmann to add a little of his trademark lustre to lift the speech where it was in danger of sagging. Nehmann did his best to retain a cautionary note or two about the unexpected depth of Soviet resources but was ignored. In late afternoon, the most senior of the secretaries in the outer office typed up the final version which was hand-delivered to the Chancellery. Would the Leader take the slightest notice of any of this? Probably not but – as Goebbels was the first to point out – it paid to keep a finger in the Führer-pie. If the demanded note of triumph was misplaced, so be it. No one prospered in this regime by telling the truth.

Hitler, to Goebbels’ considerable relief, appeared to be on form. A week or so ago he’d received a personal note from the Führer’s operational headquarters in East Prussia. The handwriting, he told Nehmann, was that of an old man: scratchy, wayward, senescent. Now though, back in Berlin, he seemed buoyant and newly energised. The weather out at Rastenburg, Goebbels’ concluded, was bleak enough to put years on any man. Why should the Führer be exempt?

The Sportpalast was packed, an audience of thousands, all of them devotees of their adored Leader. Hitler stood at the rostrum, flanked left and right by Party chieftains, and beat the drum for the Fatherland’s military prowess, each savage chop of his hand tallying yet another triumph. German troops occupying the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. German troops on the French Channel coast tossing the Canadians back into the sea. And now a German U-boat dropping mines in the busy sea lanes leading into Charleston, North Carolina, taking the war to the very edge of the vast American continent. Nowhere on earth, the Führer seemed to be saying, was safe from the reach of the Greater Reich.

Nehmann knew that much of this was old news. The winter, in reality, had been full of disappointments and the campaign in North Africa was going badly wrong but the vast audience didn’t care. They’d come to hear the Führer exultant, the Führer all-powerful, the Führer mocking the drunks and warmongers among the nation’s enemies, and he didn’t let them down. Churchill was a buffoon. Roosevelt sat in the lap of the Jews. The British lived on a thin diet of defeat after defeat, fooling themselves that a disaster like Dunkirk was somehow the path to victory. This was a line that had survived from the final Promi draft and Nehmann sat back, wondering whether Goebbels’ hunger for recognition, for some tiny crumb from the Führer’s table, had been satisfied.

But then Hitler turned his attention to the east where, he assured the doting multitudes, only time stood between the Fatherland and the untold riches of the Caspian basin. Army Group ‘A’, he promised, would thrust down through the Caucasus and cut the Soviets off from their precious oil. In the meantime, he roared, the battle for Stalingrad was virtually over. The city on the Volga, the diamond in Stalin’s crown, lay in German hands. He paused, mopping his face with a handkerchief, his body slightly bent as if he, too, had been part of this monumental feat of arms. Then he stiffened and looked out