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steel’.
    Front commanders begged to be allowed to move under cover of night.
    But no! Stalin ordered attack, and the troops moved forward to their deaths. Easy prey for the Luftwaffe. The remnants of the tank army were sacrificed in a witches’ cauldron stirred by Stalin.
    In the Kiev cauldron, the 5th Tank Army battled desperately to avoid complete destruction, and would have won through but for foolish orders given by Stalin and his sycophants in the Kremlin. Thousands and thousands of brave Russian soldiers were slaughtered because of this stupidity.
    When all was over, and courageous men had brought some semblance of order out of chaos, the responsible leaders busied themselves looking for scapegoats. The officers of the Western Military District went first – all of them! One of the youngest – and best – army commanders, Colonel-General Kirponis, was executed. His Chief-of-Staff, Lieutenant-General Tupikov met the same fate. Throughout the gigantic land the rifles of the firing-squads crashed. Major-General Grigorenko states that 80,000 higher-ranking officers were executed without benefit of trial in the course of a fortnight. The witnesses to Kremlin stupidity had been wiped out. Stalin took the title of Generalissimo!

2 | Herr Niebelspang’s Via Dolorosa
     
    Before we take over the white castle, the GPU has used it as Staff HQ. There are 200 neck-shot bodies in the cellars. The next day the PK 1 people are swarming all over it. When they’ve finished snapping their shutters the dead are buried in the flower-beds. The earth is softest there. We get the feeling that there are a lot of bodies in that park, and that more are on the way; for when we march out SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich’s Special Detachment marches in. We don’t talk about it, but we all know what the job of the SD-units is.
    Most of us are very young but have never enjoyed youth’s light-hearted freedom. They threw us into the war before we even began to live. Something big is cooking. Every second hour we test motors. With the aristocratic Maybach engine this is a necessity. If it stands too long without turning over it won’t start, and Panzer troops never know when they will have to move off. Just when you’re lying there having it good and have almost got to believing the war is over, or that the infantry will do the rest, you get the order: ‘Mount! Start up! Panzer march!’ And then you’re in the thick of it again, and comrades you sat talking to only a short while ago are already turned into burnt mummies. Sometimes it’s quick. If the crew’s been soused with petrol, for example. It’s worst when oil from the flame-throwers boils them slowly to a soup. Sometimes when you get to them they’re still alive. You touch them and the flesh falls away from their bones. They shouldn’t be picked up, really, for they’ll die anyway, and they die easiest when they lie, once they’ve got out of the tank. But Army Medical Regulations say they must be taken to the Medical Aid Centre. And it is wisest for a soldier to obey service regulations blindly.
    ‘In the Forces there must be order,’ says Porta, ‘otherwise going to war at all would be out of the question. Every sooften a great nation
has
to go to war if only so that their next-door neighbours can see they’re
still
a great nation. Where’d we be if any slave could do what he liked? To put it bluntly, the ‘Fatherland’s Moments of Destiny would be shat upon.’ All the bloody footsloggers’d down tools after the first day at war, and neither the generals nor the politicians could put up with that. Think of all the trouble they’ve been at, arranging it all. War’s a serious business! You’ll do well to take note of that,’ Porta ends, and slams the driver’s slot shut.
    It’s pitch-dark the night we break camp. Rain is pouring down and a gut-wrenching stink of diesel oil penetrates everywhere. The Panzer infantry come over to us wet and chilly with groundsheets