had prepared over Vlasov’s signature. The only part he’d objected to was an anti-Semitic passage. Strik-Strikfeldt, who’d begun to worry about his own postwar career, refused to interpret Vlasov’s remarks at the triumphal banquet, but it seemed that this odd tall Russian didn’t hold it against him, for just after midnight he staggered over to say: Wilfried Karlovich, Washington and Franklin were traitors in the eyes of the British crown. As for me…
You need to lie down, my dear fellow. Go back to your table. Where’s your wife? She must be very proud of you…
God give me strength! But you’re a god, aren’t you, Wilfried Karlovich?
I beg your pardon? (Excuse me, gentlemen. They get like this when they drink, you know. It’s a racial characteristic.)
Wilfried Karlovich, you’ll escape with the Führer and help him, because you’re a god. You’re Loki. And one day you’ll tell everybody at Valhalla that I wasn’t a traitor…
This man led the Fourth Mechanized against us at Lvov! Strik-Strikfeldt said hastily. He also…
I’ll explain how we Russians do it, said Vlasov, and as he said we Russians he could not forbear his own pride. It’s not only rational; it’s as smooth as an execution of Jews! First, we break through the enemy’s defenses—
That insect is talking about our defenses, said an -man in disgust.
In at least one sector, more if possible. (Kroeger keeps filling up my glass. I suppose he thinks that’s funny.) Second, we launch offensives into the breakthrough areas. Third, we continue these offensives to the enemy flanks. Fourth, we encircle the enemy’s units which have been isolated by the previous measures—
It’s true; he really is the Houdini of breakouts, interrupted Strik-Strikfeldt, looking at the ceiling.
And if you want an example of what I’m talking about, continued Vlasov with a defiant smile, I refer you to the Byelorussian operation of this year, whereby the Soviet army successfully—
This is too much!
Shoot that Slav in the back of the head!
But in the end they decided that “when the time was right” Vlasov would be permitted to fight on Czech soil.
Why not now? The front line was approaching like a tidal wave. All our Russian conquests had long since been submerged. As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains, in this long and bitter struggle, the USSR armed forces proved to be mightier than the mightiest war machine in the capitalist world. Now the wave curled over the dismembered corpse of Poland: In the former Reichskommissariat Ostland, the former Reichskommissariat Ukraine and even the eastern regions of our General Government, artillery barrages, infantry beachheads and hordes of T-34 tanks roiled, comprising discrete aspects of a sentient metallic liquid. The defenders fell back. When Vlasov read that the Red Army had recaptured Lvov, he could not forbear to think of his own long lost battle there, and he remembered something else, too—namely, that on the day before Lvov fell to the Germans, the NKVD had butchered Ukrainian political prisoners by the hundreds, shooting them right there in their cells… And now Russians in their Studebaker trucks came to run over the carcasses of horses in the burnt streets, looted the last stale bread from shops, then passed on, vanishing in the smoky air. Warsaw wouldn’t detain them long, it seemed. Soon the General Government would be completely un-Germanized. Then they’d drown the last territories of what had once been Poland—Katowice, Zichenau, Reichsgau Wartheland and Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia—under a sea of steel which would mask itself as Poland-renewed. (It wouldn’t be Poland at all. It would be a Soviet vassal state.)
Vlasov understood this much better than Himmler, who has been characterized by Guderian as an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority. Whenever they hid his schnapps, Vlasov sat poring over maps, with sullen destiny circling overhead like an enemy bomber. There he was, condemned to positional warfare again! (Well, even a non-German like you would be eligible for the War Merit Cross, they said, slapping his shoulder encouragingly.)
His men were digging antitank ditches. When he asked them how they were holding up, they said with weary smiles: Never mind, General. It’s not much worse than working on the collective farm…
On 20.1.45, the Russians crossed the borders of the Old Reich and entered our heartland. On 25.1.45, the despairing, raging Führer appointed Himmler to take command of Army Group Vistula. On 27.1.45, General Guderian (long since in bad odor for having told too many truths about the military situation) was saying at the briefing conference: Vlasov wanted to make some statement.
Vlasov doesn’t mean a thing, snapped Hitler.
And the idea is that they should go around in German uniform! Göring put in, as if to himself. That only annoys people. If you want to lay hands on them, you find they’re Vlasov’s people…
I was always against putting them into our uniform, said Hitler, scratching at the red spots on his cheeks. But who was for it? It was our beloved Army which always has its own ideas—
The very next day, Vlasov was at last given command of two divisions. Once again he found himself on the front line of a lost war, in possession of a low density of artillery and tanks. At best he could achieve some localized breakthrough into death.
And now, when it was once again too late for anything, his troops became ever more various, even fabulous: Great Russians, Ukrainians, Mensheviks, monarchists, murderers, martyrs, lunatics, perverts, democrats, escaped slaves from the underground chemical factories, racists, dreamers, patriots, Italians, Serbian Chetniks, turncoat Partisans who’d realized that Comrade Stalin might not reward them after all, peasants who’d naively welcomed the German troops in 1941, and now rightly feared that the returning Communists might remember this against them, dispossessed Tartars, Hiwis from Stalingrad, pickpockets from Kiev, brigands from the Caucasus who raped every woman they could catch, militant monks, groping skeletons, Polish Army men whose cousins had been murdered by the NKVD in 1940, NKVD infiltrators recording names in preparation for the postwar reckoning (they themselves would get arrested first), men from Smolensk who’d never read the Smolensk Declaration and accordingly believed that Vlasov was fighting especially for them, men who knew nothing of Vlasov except his name, and used that name as an excuse—a primal horde, in short, gathered concentrically like trembling distorted ripples around its ostensible leader, breaking outward in expanding, disintegrating circles across the map of war. When the British Thirty-sixth Infantry Brigade entered Forni Avoltri at the Austro-Italian border, they accepted the surrender of a flock of Georgian officers, no less than ten of whom were hereditary princes “in glittering uniforms,” runs the brigade’s war diary. Suddenly pistol-shots were heard. The Englishmen suspected ambush, but it turned out to be two of the princes duelling over an affair of honor. The victors’ bemusement was increased by the arrival of the commander, a beautiful, high-cheeked lady in buckskin leggings who came galloping up to berate her men for having yielded to the enemy without permission. Leaping from the saddle, she introduced herself as the daughter of the King of Georgia. (Needless to say, no kings remain in our Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, which happens to be the birthplace of Comrade Stalin.) All these worthies considered themselves to be members in good standing of Vlasov’s army. Vlasov, the Princess explained, had guaranteed the independence of Georgia…