Potsdam Station by David Downing

Author:David Downing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781906964511
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2010-01-18T23:00:00+00:00

We killed them all

April 20 – 21

Paul let himself out of the temporary barracks just before seven, and took a deep breath of fresh air – most of the Hitlerjugend still sleeping inside had probably forgotten what soap and water were for. The sound of aircraft lifted his eyes – high in the sky above Erkner the sun glinted on the silver bellies of Allied bombers. All through the night he had listened to the dull thud of distant explosions, and day it seemed would bring no mercy. To the west, Erkner’s Rathaus was silhouetted against a sky laced with the colour of fire. It was, he realised, Hitler’s birthday.

He walked across to the railway station and down the short street to the town centre, intent on finding someone from his own division, or at least news of its whereabouts. How else was he going to get away from a bunch of deluded children with a collective death-wish?

But he was out of luck. The traffic clogging the main road west was mostly civilian; the only uniforms in motion were black, and they belonged to embarrassed-looking Waffen-SS soldiers clinging to a farm tractor. At the crossroads an unusually cheerful MP had no idea where the 20th might be, but more than enough information about the Russians, whose advance was apparently gathering speed.

‘How far away are they?’ Paul wanted to know.

The man shrugged. ‘Two days? Maybe only one. But we’ll all be pulled back into the city before they get here.’

He made Berlin sound like a real barrier, but Paul had seen French prisoners-of-war hard at work on the so-called ‘obstacle belt’ on his last trip to the city. A few trenches and gun emplacements weren’t going to hold up the Red Army for long, even when manned by soldiers too young to know fear.

Returning to the canteen, he saw Werner across the road, happily chatting to the woman from the day before. ‘Frau Kempka’s husband was in Italy with the same division as my father,’ the boy announced happily, as if that was some consolation for them both being dead.

‘Was he really?’ Paul said. ‘Good morning, Frau Kempka,’ he added. She had a coat on, and a suitcase sat by the front door.

‘I’m going to try and reach Potsdam,’ she said, noticing his glance. ‘My brother lives there, although I expect he’s serving in the Volkssturm now. It seems safer than staying here, don’t you think?’ She looked at Paul, as if confident he would know the answer.

I’m only eighteen, Paul felt like saying. ‘You’re probably right,’ was what he said. Potsdam, about twenty-five kilometres south-west of Berlin, seemed as good a place as any.

‘We’re moving out,’ Werner told him. ‘They told us fifteen minutes ago – you might have been left behind.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘A few kilometres east. There’s a gap between two lakes, and we’re supposed to plug it. Us and a police battalion. And the local Volkssturm.’

Paul groaned inwardly – police battalions were notoriously prone to disappearing without warning, and the Volkssturm would probably just get in the way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.