Pact with the Devil: He fought for the Führer by Jeff Steel

Author:Jeff Steel [Jeff Steel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

‘Devil’s

Island’ and

the ‘Demjansk

Pocket’, November 1941

‘Max, wake up!’ Fauli’s voice had an urgency that said this was important. My first thought was ‘Is it the Russians or is it partisans?’ Did we have to get Magda on her bipod and point her out into the bleak, dismal, hostile backdrop of Devil’s Island?

‘Look,’ he said, in a slightly more relaxed manner.

I looked out the window – or tried to look. I couldn’t see anything but an impenetrable white fog. ‘Hell,’ I said (or something to that effect). It was late November now and the Russian snow had taken command of our little world. It had done so suddenly, drastically – even imperiously. We were all used to winter snow in Lower Saxony, but nothing like this. Our allotted strongpoint didn’t have glass in the windows any more than it had a toilet, gas stove or electric lighting. We’d learned that Russian peasants had not even heard of such luxuries, let alone aspired to them. Holes in the walls were not filled with windows; they had shutters to keep out the cold and keep in whatever warmth there was. The shutters had narrow slits, similar to the ones you’d see in letterboxes in our well-ordered Germany. A person inside the shutters could squint through a slit to see what might be happening outside. The snow could not come in – not much of it – but the biting draught of air coming through those slits had a wicked guillotine-edge; it felt as if it could shear your eyebrows of when you went to look out.

‘Do you want us to go to action stations?’ I asked Sergeant Ackermann.

‘Not much point, lads. If the verdammte Russians were standing right outside they couldn’t see us. He ordered us to stoke up the fire in the main living room. Normally we’d been reluctant to light the fire because the smoke would betray us to our Bolshevik friends. Any such indiscretion would have certainly brought on an immediate and murderous attack. But our Devil’s Island home-away-from-home was now so invisible within that immense white storm that a few wisps of wood smoke here or there were not going to matter. We were to discover one saving grace in that white wilderness: the previous occupants had laid in a hefty pile of wood. They clearly anticipated what was coming weather-wise and had prepared for it prior to running to save their lives. It was a point of much discussion why they hadn’t set fire to the house to deny it to us. Maybe they hadn’t had time – or perhaps they hadn’t the heart to burn their family home.

There was little we could do but wait. During that afternoon Sergeant Ackermann called us all together. ‘Right lads, we’re in the middle of a snowstorm the like of which we’ve never seen, and we don’t know how long we’ll be here. There are a few things we need to do. Firstly, as regards food. We must ration it because we cannot allow ourselves to run out of food.

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