Operation Swallow by Mark Felton

Author:Mark Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

On another muddy parade square 125 miles from Bad Orb, Colonel Sieber’s younger cousin had stood watching the latest batch of prisoners formed up in ranks for counting. It was early January 1945 and he was a man in a very bad mood. This was, unlike Stalag IX-B, no prisoner of war camp. The innocuous wooden sign above the main gate read: ARBEITSLAGER 650.

Willi Hack, Sieber’s cousin, was a slim, good-looking thirty-two-year-old with dark brown hair. But on this day, his face was far from pleasant. His lips curled in disgust as he watched his guards form the prisoners up for inspection.

“My God,” Hack said, turning to a colleague, “look at this garbage.”

He was referring to the prisoners, emaciated and sickly looking, with gray skin and sunken cheeks and eyes, who stood shivering in thin blue-and-white-striped uniforms, their heads shaved and their feet inside wooden clogs or battered old boots.

“What am I supposed to accomplish with this?” Hack asked, casting one immaculately gloved hand in the prisoners’ general direction. “Do those fools at Buchenwald not realize the importance of my work?”

It was a rhetorical question, and the two other officers standing with Hack said nothing.

“Well, let us begin,” Hack sighed, smoothing out his uniform before striding toward the prisoners.

They all stiffened and visibly blanched at Hack’s approach—he looked like the very angel of death descending upon them. He wore an expensively tailored field-gray leather greatcoat open at the collar to reveal his service tunic collar beneath. On Hack’s right collar tab was a silver death’s-head skull and crossbones set on a black background, the symbol of the Third SS Totenkopf Division. These were worn in place of the usual SS sig runes. On his left collar tab he wore the three diagonal rank pips and one silver bar of an Obersturmführer, or first lieutenant. His arm of service color, black for construction engineers, underlined his silver shoulder straps. He wore a black belt around his waist, with a round silver buckle adorned with a Nazi eagle and swastika, a motto beneath reading “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” (My Honor Is Loyalty). A Luger pistol sat in a black leather holster. His field-gray visor cap, displaying another death’s head beneath an SS eagle, was worn at a slight angle, giving Hack an arrogant, devil-may-care appearance. He knew full well the effect he had on prisoners; he had been in charge of slave labor on several previous projects for the Reich.

Hack moved slowly down the first rank of prisoners, whose eyes were downcast at the ground, many shivering uncontrollably from the biting cold and fear. Hack’s other officers followed close behind. Five hundred fresh slave laborers had arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp to join the several hundred others already hard at work on Operation Schwalbe, Hack’s top secret project near the town of Berga on the White Elster River. These new arrivals were to replace “natural wastage,” as Hack euphemistically termed death from overwork, exhaustion, disease, beatings, or execution. The fresh draft had

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