Claws of Steel by Leo Kessler

Author:Leo Kessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752488868
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Thirty minutes later they took Pokrovka and the prisoners started to roll in, driven into the village by Schwarz’s second Company coming from the left flank and von Dodenburg’s First from the right. But this time Wotan’s enraged troopers were not content with their usual mechanical execution of their Ivan POWs. They wanted the Popovs to suffer a long time just like the two men on the telegraph poles had suffered.

A group of shaken, filthy young eighteen-year-olds from a Moscow Guards Battalion were driven into the village’s shabby onion-towered wooden church, whose peeling blue- and gold baroque ornaments looked as if they had not been painted since the days of the Czar. Then the place was set alight. As soon as the flame-throwing tank, which did the job, had backed off, the 2nd Company under Schwarz hurried forward to watch for any attempt to break out and gloat over the piteous cries for mercy and aid which came from the church as soon as the flames really began to take hold.

While the 2nd Company was thus occupied, a group from the 3rd drove a group of Siberians into the dusty white village square and set about them with their entrenching tools, cleaving their shaven skulls as if they were prime Soviet melons.

But worse was still to come. A party under Metzger was searching the wrecked village for diesel to replenish their half-empty tanks. As always in such cases they checked the place’s collective farm first and it was there that they found the ‘chain dog’.

His mutilated body had been tossed on a manure heap after they had finished with him. The hands had been hacked off, the eyes had gone too, but that was nothing to what the unknown torturers had done to the military policeman’s anus. They had thrust the silver plate – which the ‘chain dogs’ wore round their necks and gave them their army nickname – up the orifice sideways, leaving the silver chain dangling purposelessly from it.

‘Oh my God!’ a young blond soldier next to Metzger gasped and before he could cover his mouth, the vomit started to shoot from between his lips in hot grunts and gasps.

The news flashed from soldier to soldier. Despite the Vulture’s frantic attempt to maintain discipline, the men of the Wotan Battalion went wild. Running from cellar to cellar, they drove the civilians out screaming at them like crazy men, the froth bubbling at their lips. Who gave the order, no one ever discovered later. But the lime-caked boards covering the great cess-pool had been torn off and they were thrusting the civilians into the evil green-yellow mess. Men, women and children – they kicked them into it, whacking them across their slimy heads when they refused to drown straight away. One old man with a great white Cossack moustache simply would not go under and half a dozen of them, screaming and cursing, beat his tough old wrinkled face into pulp before he finally sank below the stinking mess of faeces.

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