Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

flag up there on the very top. Can you picture that? Das Hakenkreuz? Up there among the ice fields?’

Das Hakenkreuz.The swastika flag. Scarlet and white and black against the surrounding peaks. Irresistible, Nehmann thought. A perfect coda after all that spilled Soviet blood.

‘And this?’ He was looking at the tiny triplane.

‘I’ll give it to the Oberst.He’s agreed to find a place for it on top of the mountain.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this was the Red Baron’s plane.’ That strange rictus smile again. ‘And his cousin is winning the war in the south.’

4

BERLIN, 22 MAY 1942

Nehmann was back at the Promi an hour ahead of his deadline for the edit. He’d delivered Messner to his Me-110, helping him stow the collection of model aircraft below the spare seat in the cockpit. A final handshake, a gruff farewell and Oberstleutnant Messner was gone. Watching the tiny black speck climbing away towards a line of distant clouds in the east, Nehmann wondered what lay in store for this solitary man. Rarely had he met anyone so damaged, both inside and out.

At the Promi, the film Nehmann had delivered earlier had already been developed. The Ministry’s three editing suites were in the basement of the building, dark, cell-like rooms perfectly suited for the editors to work their magic on the footage from the Kerch Peninsula.

In charge this afternoon was a youngish Rhinelander called Erich, who’d learned his trade at the Ufa newsreel studios across town. He knew instinctively how to tell a story onscreen, weaving that subtle mix of interview and action shots, telling close-ups and lingering pans across the ravaged landscapes of Hitler’s wars, and his work had caught Goebbels’ eye within weeks of his arrival at Ufa.

Now, he was running yet another roll of rushes on the editing table, pausing to mark up a series of cutaways with his yellow chinagraph pencil. Already a line of these telling little vignettes hung over the big green bin beside the editing table, glimpses of yet another Wehrmacht triumph that would find their way into cinema after cinema across the Reich.

‘Here, Werner. Look at this.’ Erich rolled the spare chair in front of the editing table. ‘Thank fuck we’re not Russian, eh?’

Werner took the proffered seat and found himself gazing at a line of Soviet tanks, two of which were ablaze. Crewmen were scrambling out of the closest turret, their hands already raised, only to be scythed down by German bullets. More corpses ringed a neighbouring tank.

Nehmann shook his head. He knew that none of this material would ever bother German domestic audiences who preferred to think of their kinsmen as gallant, fearless, and – above all – sternly compassionate. The Minister, on the other hand, liked nothing better than a taste of the war’s darker side. Victory, he often said, would in the end go to the side which showed the least mercy. Which was presumably why Erich was saving these little treats for a personal viewing.

Goebbels turned up nearly an hour later. He favoured Nehmann with a brief nod, clapped Erich on the shoulder and demanded a look at progress to date. Erich had just completed an overlength rough cut, a provisional assembly of shots which would end the half-hour newsreel covering the entire Kerch campaign. As yet there was no soundtrack, but the moment the grainy black and white images appeared on the tiny screen Goebbels bent forward, eager, excited, Hitler’s favourite alchemist when it came to transforming the base metal of live combat into an experience cinema audiences would never forget.

The rough cut began with cockpit footage from a diving Stuka, the grey steppe resolving itself into columns of Soviet armour and the hunched infantry that followed every tank. This tableau was filling the screen before the pilot hauled back on the controls, and the steppe was suddenly flattened at an alarming angle as the Stuka banked and pulled out of the dive. At this point, Erich had cut to footage shot from ground level, the aircraft climbing again and one of its two bombs exploding in a fountain of earth among the luckless Soviet troops. Then, in the blink of an eye, came a third angle, and yet another explosion, a direct hit this time on the tank itself.

Nehmann had seen enough of Erich’s editing to know that this was sleight of hand, a conjuring trick, three separate incidents artfully compressed into one, but what really fascinated him was Goebbels. He, too, understood the dark arts of newsreel compilation yet he was like a child watching his favourite magician. He’d suspended disbelief. He had total faith in every frame. And in his bones he knew that what worked for him would work for millions of fellow Germans.

Recently, in a fawning article in Völkischer Beobachter,a once-honest Berlin journalist had described Goebbels as ‘the Heinz Guderian of mass propaganda’. Guderian was the architect of blitzkrieg, the battlefield genius who’d perfected the lightning uppercuts that had knocked out nation after nation across Western Europe. Even Nehmann had to admit that there was some merit in the comparison and, watching Goebbels now, as Erich’s next sequence pictured a wave of Heinkels, wingtip to wingtip, it was impossible not to share the raw power of these images. After a close-up of the pilot, lantern-jawed, a camera inside the belly of the plane caught the slow, lazy descent of yet another stick of bombs. Then came the wide shot, ground level, seconds later as each of these parcels of high explosive erupted in a storm of torn metal and warm enemy flesh.

At the end of the rough cut the screen went blank and there was a moment of total silence before the Minister sat back and clapped his hands in a gesture of both delight and approval. On these occasions he never made notes, but his recall was perfect. He’d prefer a more brutal cut between this sequence and that. Erich was to be careful about the sheer length of a particular pan. But, overall, once he’d laid the