Legion of the Damned

Book 0: Sven Hassel War Classics

by Sven Hassel

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

Convicted of deserting the German army, Sven Hassel is sent to a penal regiment on the Russian Front. He and his comrades are regarded as expendable, cannon fodder in the battle against the implacable Red Army. Outnumbered and outgunned, they fight their way across the frozen steppe....

This iconic anti-war novel is a testament to the atrocities suffered by the lone soldier in the fight for survival. Sven Hassel's unflinching narrative is based on his own experiences in the German Army. He began writing his first novel, Legion of the Damned, in a prisoner of war camp at the end of the Second World War. Read by Rupert Degas.

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘Well, the five minutes are up. You must take the consequences!’

He pressed a bell-push. Two big SS men in black uniforms came in. A brief order – and they dragged Eva across to a table covered with leather.

The previous day the big sapper had been before the court-martial and received a sentence of eight years’ hard labour. Now it was my turn. I was taken to the court, guarded by two ‘watch-dogs’. I was held in a large room, one wall of which was covered with a gigantic painting of Adolf Hitler, while Frederick the Great hung facing him. Behind the president’s chair hung four huge flags – those of the Air Force, Navy, Army and SS. Along the wall were lined the standards of the different arms: white with a black cross for the infantry; red for the artillery; yellow for the cavalry; pink for the armoured troops; black with silver trimmings for the engineers; the Jaeger regiments’ green with a hunting horn, and all the others. The judge’s desk itself was covered with the black-white-red flag of the Wehrmacht.

The court consisted of a legal adviser with the rank of Major; two judges – one a Hauptmann, the other a Feldwebel; and a prosecutor, an SS Sturmbannführer.

A filthy deserter is not entitled to a defending counsel.

The charge was read out. I was examined. The judge ordered the witnesses to be produced. First came the Gestapo man, who had arrested Eva and me when we were bathing out by the mouth of the Weser, and the summery sound of lazily lapping waves suddenly imposed itself upon the proceedings in court. The hot, shimmering white dune-sand … Eva standing there, drying her rounded thighs … her bathing cap … the heat on my back … the heat, heat.

‘Yes, I jumped up on to the desk and from there out through a window.’

In all, five different police officials had interrogated me, and they came now and gave their evidence. ‘Yes, I gave him a false name.’ ‘No, the explanation I gave him was not the truth.’

It was queer seeing the Kriminalsekretär, who had ordered Eva to be whipped. The others were sadists, but he was just correct. You cannot do anything with people who are correct. There are far too many of them. I began a lovely day-dream: Everybody had deserted, we all had. Only the officers were left. And what could they do? All of us. There were hordes on all the roads. Soldiers going home. The officers were there at the front, and behind the front, with their maps and their plans and their natty officers’ caps and polished boots. The others were going home, and they had not forgotten me. In a little while the door would open and in they would come. They would not say anything, and the president, the legal adviser and the two judges would leap to their feet, their faces pale …

‘Bring in the witness. Eva Schadows!’

Eva! You here?

Was it Eva?

Oh yes, it was Eva, just as I was Sven. We could recognise each other by our eyes. Everything else, all the rest that we knew – the little roundings, the intimate living secrets that only we knew, that we had drunk in with eyes and mouth and seeing hands – all that no longer existed; only our eyes remained, they and their fear and their promise that we were still us.

Can so much vanish in so few days?

‘You know this man here, Eva Schadows, don’t you?’

‘Oily grin’ is an expression I hate. It has always seemed coarse, vulgar and exaggerated, but there is no other for the prosecuting counsel’s expression – it was an oily grin.

‘Yes.’ Eva’s voice was almost inaudible. A paper rustled, and the sound of it roused us all.

‘Where did you make his acquaintance?’

‘We met each other in Cologne – during an alert.’

You did that in those days.

‘Did he tell you that he was a deserter?’

‘No.’

The arrogant silence was too much for her and she went on, faltering, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Think well what you are saying, young lady. You know, I hope, that it is a very grave matter to give false evidence in a court of justice.’

Eva stood looking at the floor. Not for a moment did she look at me. Her face was grey, like that of a patient just after an operation. Fear was making her hands tremble.

‘Well, which was it? Did he not tell you that he was a deserter?’

‘Yes, I suppose he did.’

‘You must say “yes” or “no”; we must have a clear answer.’

‘Yes.’

‘What else did he tell you? After all, you took him to Bremen and gave him clothes, money and all the rest of it. Didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must tell the court about it. We should not have to drag every word out of you. What did he tell you?’

‘He told me that he had fled from his regiment; he said that I should help him; he said that I should get him papers. And I did so. From a man called Paul.’

‘When you first met him in Cologne was he in uniform?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of uniform?’

‘Black tank uniform with a Gefreiter’s stripe.’

‘In other words, you could not be in any doubt that he was a soldier?’

‘No.’

‘Was it he who asked you to go with him to Bremen?’

‘No, I suggested that. I said that he should. He wanted to give himself up, but I persuaded him not to.’

Eva, Eva, what in all the world are you saying? What are you telling them?

‘In other words, you kept him from doing his duty and giving himself up?’

‘Yes, I kept him from doing his duty.’

I could not listen to this. I leaped up and shouted at the top of my voice, shouted at the president that she was lying to save me, to contrive mitigating circumstances for me, but that she had no idea that I was a soldier, no idea at all. I had taken off my uniform in the train between Paderborn and Cologne. I was in civilian clothes when I met her. You must let her go; she had no idea of it till I was arrested; I swear that.

Perhaps a president of a court-martial can be human; I didn’t know, but I thought that perhaps he might. But his eyes were as cold as slivers of glass, and they drew blood from my shouts.

‘You must remain silent until you are questioned. If you say another word. I shall have to have you removed,’ and he turned his glass slivers back on to Eva.

‘Eva Schadows, will you take an oath that your statement is correct?’

‘I will. It is exactly as I said. If he had not met me he would have given himself up.’

‘You helped him, too, when he escaped from the secret police?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you. That is all … except that … have you been sentenced?’

‘I am serving five years’ penal servitude in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.’

As she was led out she looked across and gave me a long look and pointed her lips in a kiss. Her lips were blue, her eyes both infinitely sorrowful and happy. She had done something to help me. She hoped, she believed that it would save my life. For a fragile hope of being able to make a tiny contribution to my defence she had been willing to sacrifice five years of her life. Five years in Ravensbrück!

I was very far down.

They also brought Trudi in as a witness, but she fainted soon after she had embarked on a crazy statement that was meant to substantiate Eva’s evidence.

It is queer when a witness faints in court and is borne off. Trudi was carried out through a little door, and when it closed on her it was as though the whole of my case had been carried out as well.

They did not take long to make up their minds. While the sentence was being read everybody stood up, and the officers and officials present held their arms out in the Nazi salute.

‘In the name of the Führer.

‘Sven Hassel, Gefreiter in 11th Regiment of Hussars, is hereby sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for desertion. It is further decreed that he is to be dismissed from his regiment, and that he is to be deprived of all civil and military rights for an indefinite period.

‘Heil Hitler!’

Why don’t you faint? Isn’t everything black in front of your eyes, as it was when they stopped beating you? What is it they call it: shame worse than death? That’s it. That’s the cliche. You thought you would never use it. But clichés are there to be used: And now you can go and tell people what it means.

No, you are not going anywhere.

I was so bewildered and bemused that I only heard without grasping what the president then said by way of comment on the sentence.

He said that they had tempered justice with mercy; they had let me off with my life. I had not been sentenced to death. They had taken into account that I was an Auslands-deutscher and had been called up in Denmark, and that irresponsible women, women who did not deserve to be called German women, had enticed me into deserting.

We were chained together, two by two, with handcuffs and fetters, and, lastly, a chain was run round the whole detachment. We were driven to the goods-station, guarded by heavily armed military police.

We were in the train for three days and nights …

‘Before I welcome you to our delightful little spa you had best know who and what you are.

‘You are a pack of dirty sluts and scroundrels, a swinish rabble; you are the dregs of humanity. That you have always been, and that you will remain until you die. And in order that you may enjoy your revolting selves, we shall see to it that you die slowly, very slowly, so that you have time for everything. I give you my personal assurance that nobody will be cheated out of anything. Your cure will be properly adhered to. I should be most dreadfully sorry if any of you should miss any of it.

‘So now I bid you welcome to the SS and Wehrmacht’s Penal Concentration Camp, Lengries.

‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Lengries extermination camp.’

He gave his glossy knee-boot a light tap with his switch and let his monocle drop from his eye. Why do people of this type always have monocles? There must be some psychological explanation.

An SS Hauptscharführer read out the rules, which amounted to this: that everything was forbidden and the punishment for all transgressions was starvation, beating, death.

The prison was a five-storeyed erection of cages, there being no walls dividing the cells, just bars. We were searched and bathed, and had one side of our heads shaved. Then all the hairy places on our bodies were smeared with a stinking, searing fluid that burned worse than fire. Then we were all put into a cell, where we remained stark naked for almost four hours while some SS men searched us. They syringed our ears, stuck their fingers into our mouths, and neither nostrils nor armpits were overlooked. Finally, we were given a large enema, that sent us rushing to the WCs, with which one wall was lined. It was worse for the two young women, who had to suffer the guards’ indecent witticisms and endure a ‘special examination’.

The clothes we were given – striped jacket and trousers – were made of a horrible scratchy material like sackcloth, so that it felt all the time as though you were covered with vermin or ants.

An Oberscharführer ordered us out into the passage, where we lined up in front of an Untersturmführer. He pointed to the right-hand man.

‘Come here!’

The man received a shove from an SS man behind him that sent him staggering towards the little, conceited officer, in front of whom he stood stiffly to attention.

‘What’s your name? How old are you? What have you done? Answer quickly.’

‘John Schreiber. Twenty-five. Sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour for high treason.’

‘Tell me, haven’t you been a soldier?’

‘Yes, sir, I was Feldwebel, in the 123rd Infantry Regiment.’

‘So, in other words, it is sheer insubordination that you don’t bother to report correctly. Added to which, you have the impertinence to omit to address me, as you have been taught. Stand to attention, you skunk. Now we’ll try to cure you of your bad habits. If this doesn’t help, you’ve only to let us know, and we’ll find something else.’

The Untersturmführer looked fixedly at the air and said in a screechy voice:

‘Bastinado.’

A few seconds later the man lay on his back with his bare feet in a pillory.

‘How many, Herr Untersturmführer?’

‘Give him twenty.’

The man was unconscious by the time they had finished. But they had ways of dealing with that, indescribable ways, and it was only a moment before he was again standing in his place in the ranks.

The next one, profiting by the other’s experience, answered as he should.

‘Herr Untersturmführer, former Unteroffizier Victor Giese of 7th Pioneer Regiment begs to report that I am twenty-two and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour for theft.’

‘You steal! Filthy trick! Don’t you know that a soldier mustn’t steal?’

‘Herr Unterstumführer, I beg to report that I know a soldier must not.’

‘But you did it, all the same?’

‘Yes, Herr Untersturmführer.’

‘So you find it difficult to learn?’

‘Yes, Herr Untersturmführer, I beg to report that I find it difficult to learn.’

‘Well, we’ll be generous and give you a special course. We have one unusually good teacher here.’

The Untersturmführer stared fixedly at the air and said in a screechy voice:

‘Cat-o’-nine-tails.’

The man’s toes could just touch the floor when they had strung him up by his wrists.

None of us escaped, not even the women. We quickly learned that in Lengries we were not men and women, only swine, dung-beetles, harlots.

Almost everything connected with Lengries is indescribable, revolting, monotonous. The imagination of the sadist is remarkably limited, for all his ghastly inventiveness, while you yourself become blunted; there is even a monotony about seeing people suffer and die in ways that, before, you would have considered inconceivable. Our tormentors had been given a free hand to indulge their lust of power and cruelty, and they made full use of the opportunity. They had the time of their lives. Their souls stank worse than their prisoners’ sick, tortured bodies.

I do not wish to reproach our guards in any way. They were victims of a situation others had created, and to a certain extent they came worse out of it than we did. They acquired stinking souls.

There was a time when I thought that I should only need to tell about Lengries and people would be filled with the disgust that I felt and set about improving the world, begin building a life in which there was no room for torture. Yet you cannot get people to understand what you mean unless they have themselves experienced what you have experienced, and to those you do not need to tell anything. The others, those who went free, look at me as if they would like to tell me that I must be exaggerating, although they know that I am not, for they have lapped up the reports of the Nuremberg trials. But they shrink from looking the whole thing square in the face, prefer to nail another layer of flooring over the rottenness in the foundations, to burn more incense, to sprinkle more scent around.

Yet perhaps there is one courageous soul who will dare to hear and see without shuddering. I need such a person, for it is so lonely without. I need, too, to tell my tale, to unburden myself; perhaps it is only to do that that I write; perhaps I am just imagining it when I say that I want to give warning lest history repeat itself over this. Perhaps I am just deceiving myself, when I wish to cry out from the house-tops what I have experienced; that all I want thereby is to attract attention and shuddering admiration, to be the hero who has been through things that not everyone has been allowed to experience.

No, not everybody has had that granted them, but there are enough of them for me to have more sense than to consider myself a phenomenon. Thus, in describing Lengries in the following sketch I cannot say definitely why I do so. Each may attribute to me the motive he or she prefers.

I know, too, that it is those who like to imagine that they cannot believe what I tell who must bear the main burden of guilt that will fall upon every one of us if all Lengries are not done away with, wherever they are still to be found.

There is no need to mention places, countries, names – that would merely distract and lead to squabbling and mutual recrimination between opposing sides, between nations, ideas, blocs, each of which is too busy taking offence at what others do to do anything about their own conduct.

This was Lengries:

A youngish Feldwebel, sentenced to thirty years’ hard labour for sabotaging the Reich, was caught one day trying to give a neighbouring female prisoner a piece of soap. The guard called the section leader, Obersturmführer Stein, a man with a ghastly imagination.

‘What the devil is this I hear about you two turtle-doves? Have you got engaged? Well, well, this must be celebrated.’

The whole floor was ordered down into one of the yards. The two young people were ordered to strip. It was Christmas Eve and snowflakes were swirling round us.

‘Now we would like to see a little copulation!’ said Stein.

The pickled herrings we were served on rare occasions were unfit for human consumption, but we ate them – head, bones, scales and all. In the cell we were chained with our hands tied behind our backs. We lay on our bellies and licked up our food like swine. We had three minutes in which to eat it, and often it was scalding hot.

And when prisoners were to be executed:

Such days began with the shrilling of a whistle, while the big bell rang different numbers of times to indicate which floors were to go down. The first time the whistle sounded you stood to attention facing the cell door. At the second whistle you began to mark time: thump, thump, thump. Then a mechanism worked by an SS man flung all the cell doors open at the same time, but you still went on marking time in the cell, till a fresh, piercing whistle rang out.

On one such day there were eighteen to be hanged. Down in the yard we formed a semicircle round the scaffold, a staging ten feet high with eighteen gallows on it. Eighteen ropes with nooses hung dangling from them. The sight of a dangling rope with a noose has become part of my life. In front of the scaffold stood eighteen coffins of unplaned deal.

The male condemned wore their striped trousers, the women their striped skirts, but nothing else. The adjutant read out the sentences of death, then the eighteen were ordered up the narrow steps on to the scaffold and lined up, each standing by his rope. Two SS men acted as hangmen, their shirt-sleeves rolled up well above their elbows.

They were hanged one after the other. When all eighteen were hanging there, with urine and excrement running down their legs, an SS doctor came, threw them an indifferent look and gave the hangmen the sign that all was in order. The bodies were then taken down from the gallows and flung into the coffins.

I suppose I ought to say a word or two about life and death at this point, but I do not know what I should say. Of hanging, I only know that it is quite unromantic.

But if anyone is interested in hearing more about death, there was Sturmbannführer Schendrich. He was quite young, handsome, elegant, always friendly and polite and subdued, but feared even by the SS men under him.

‘Now let’s see,’ said he at roll-call one Saturday, ‘If you have understood what I have told you. I will now try giving some of you an easy little order, and the rest of us will see if it is carried out properly.’

He called five out of the ranks. They were ordered to stand facing the wall that ran around the whole prison. Prisoners were strictly forbidden to approach within five yards of this wall.

‘Forward – march!’

Staring straight in front of them, the five marched towards the wall, till the guards in the watch-towers shot them down. Schendrich turned to the rest of us.

‘That was nice. That’s the way to obey an order. Now go down on your knees when I tell you, and repeat after me what I am going to say. On your – knees!’

We dropped to our knees.

‘And now say after me, but loudly and distinctly: We are swine and traitors.’

‘We are swine and traitors!’

‘Who are to be destroyed.’

‘Who are to be destroyed!’

‘And that’s what we deserve.’

‘And that’s what we deserve!’

‘Tomorrow, Sunday, we will go without our food.’

‘Tomorrow, Sunday, we will go without our food!’

‘For when we do not work.’

‘For when we do not work!’

‘We do not deserve food.’

‘We do not deserve food!’

Those crazy shouts rang out across the yard every Saturday afternoon, and on Sundays we got no food.

In the cell next to mine was Käthe Ragner. She looked dreadful. Her hair was chalky white. Almost all her teeth had fallen out as a result of vitamin deficiency. Her arms and legs were like long, thin bones. On her body were large suppurating sores from which matter trickled.

‘You’re looking at me so,’ she said to me one evening. ‘How old do you think I am?’ And she gave a dry, mirthless laugh.

I did not reply.

‘A good fifty, I expect you would reply. Next month I shall be twenty-four. Twenty months ago a man guessed that I was eighteen.’

Käthe had been secretary to a high Staff officer in Berlin. She got to know a young captain in the same office, and they became engaged. The date for their wedding was fixed, but there was no wedding. Her fiancé was arrested, and four days later they came and fetched her as well. The Gestapo had her under treatment for three months, accused of having made copies of certain documents. She did not understand much of any of it. She and another young girl were each sentenced to ten years. Her fiancé and two other officers were condemned to death. A fourth was sentenced to hard labour for life. She was made to witness her fiancé’s execution and was then sent to Lengries.

One morning Käthe and three other women were ordered to crawl down the steep, long flight of stairs that connected all the storeys. It was a form of exercise with which the guards liked to treat us. You were put in handcuffs and fetters and thus had to crawl down the stairs head first, and you had to keep going.

I do not know whether Kāthe fell, or let herself fall, from the fifth storey. She was utterly broken, so it might have been either. I just heard the shriek and then the smack, followed by a few seconds of deathly silence, after which a shrill voice cried from down below:

‘The harlot’s broken her neck!’

A few days after Käthe’s death I and a number of others were transferred to Fagen Concentration Camp near Bremen. They told us that we were detailed for ‘special work of extraordinary importance’.

What this work was did not interest us. None of us believed it would be more pleasant than that to which we were accustomed. We were used to working as draught animals in front of a plough, harrow, roller or wagon, pulling till you dropped dead of it. We were used to working in the quarry, till you dropped dead of that. We also worked in the jute mill, where you dropped dead with haemorrhage of the lungs.

All work was the same: you dropped dead of it.

Fagen worked on two fronts, as it were; it was really a camp for experimental medicine, but there were also the bombs. . . .