Yes! It’s a damn disgrace we know. Tumblr terminated the account. We’re currently discussing options for hosting it on dreamwidth or similar.
If there is anyone else out there who was a member of the ficathon or aus-der-traum or who generally enjoys reading/writing/drawing/discussing this fandom, please message me and I can give you a link to our discord! Who knows how long it might be before this blog gets deleted too after all. These are turbulent times, friends!
Yes! It’s a damn disgrace we know. Tumblr terminated the account. We’re currently discussing options for hosting it on dreamwidth or similar.
If there is anyone else who was a member of the ficathon or enjoys reading/writing/drawing/discussing this stuff, please message me and I can give you a link to our discord. Who knows how long it might be before this blog gets deleted too after all.
Yes! It’s a damn disgrace we know. Tumblr terminated the account. We’re currently discussing options for hosting it on dreamwidth or similar.
Under a blazing sun, somewhere between the crushing blue of the sky and the sand of the horizon glimmer the shades of men and trucks and tanks. Tommies. Walter, the more experienced of the two men on patrol, spots them first, but Karlo who follows his every move is quick to notice them too. “A mirage!” he bursts out, clutching his rifle with a big grin on his face. His teeth are very white, his skin tan, the almond hair bleached by the sun. There is a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. He’s not scared at all, that young pup, he’s excited. Anything but the dull routine of that not-quite-war, the waiting and wandering – may it come as a mirage or as battle, in which lies hidden, like a dried flower between the pages of a heavy old book, the promise of glory and death.
His comrade is not that wet behind the ears. Walter quickly jumps to the ground and pulls Karlo with him. Karlo gasps under the weight of the other man coming down on him. There happens to be a small hollow in the sand, the perfect size for the two of them, enough to swallow their silhouettes off the unforgiving line of the horizon and in there they are lying on top of each other, a squirming ball of limbs. The sand is hot and it burns the bare skin of their tangled legs. Hobnails scrape and draw blood. Karlo wiggles helplessly under Walter. His body is lithe. He used to study biology. Walter used to be a butcher.
The nature of the close embrace changes quickly, when friction comes into play, the touch of skin and the smell of sweat. There is no room to hide their arousal. Walter opens his mouth before he can find words to express the question on his mind. Karlo cuts him off with a kiss. Their lips are dry, it’s clumsy and innocent, but it’s as good as they can get in the middle of nowhere, so many miles away from home, and Karlo always did like Walter in some fashion, maybe like an older brother if he had had one, and Walter always did like Karlo much like one likes a vase of freshly plucked flowers on the kitchen table – useless, but pretty to look at.
They press their bodies together, rubbing and groaning for friction. The heat is unbearable. Walter pulls up Karlo’s shirt. He’s still pale under there and he’s blushing down to his chest. In the scramble his shorts ride up. He’s pasty and pink down there too. The make of their underwear is of some advantage as one can easily slip a finger through the open net. Karlo’s skin is soft in the place where his thighs meet.
Sand clings to their sweat and the white of their release. Like starving men devouring their first meal and hardly savouring its taste it’s all over far too quickly and it leaves them with that feeling of regret, which follows excesses of the flesh. The sort of grave soberness that makes one so very determined to never repeat such a despicable act of debauchery again, a feeling so ephemeral that one is destined to forget any such noble intentions as quickly as they came.
Sergeant Johnson had missed the prisoner’s arrival. Usually he liked to watch the new prisoners being unloaded from the truck. They would have a sack over their heads and their hands bound behind their backs and there would be a lot of shoving and kicking and insults involved in the process. To observe a prisoner’s behaviour under these circumstances, could be very educational, invaluable even, if one didn’t plan to repeat that sort of spectacle another time. He knew the man had signed away the lives of thousands, that he was a fervent nazi and a man who had just been following orders and merely a cog in that wheel rushing downhill towards total annihilation at an unstoppable speed. It was time to get personally acquainted. Johnson opened the door to the prisoner’s cell. It was dimly lit by a fading light bulb, and it was bare of any furniture, a bed, a sink, not even windows. Despite this Johnson almost did not see the prisoner at first. He sat curled up in a corner, only a little dark spot in the recess of the room, that black round thing. He was not wearing a uniform, his suit was black and clung to his skinny frame. He sat with his legs drawn to his body, his arms wrapped around them, his own head cradled, his face hidden behind his knees. As Johnson entered, the man looked up, flashing the sickening white of his face and two deep dark eyes. Johnson froze in place. It was a sudden primal reaction beyond any reason. Fear tingled on the back of his neck like the graze of a thin thread. The prisoner uncurled his long limbs one by one and very slowly rose to his feet. It seemed as if time slowed down and at moments, fleeting like flickering frames of film, it seemed as if there was an arm too many, a leg too long or a joint where it did not belong. Only when the prisoner stood before Johnson, the sly smile of a salesman on his lips and with the smoothest voice asked what he was being charged with, could Johnson free himself of that terrible grasp and with equal strength was overcome by an urge to crush that despicable monster under his boots. It was not his style, but he did beat the man and he kicked him. When he came to his senses the prisoner was lying on his side in the fetal position, the quivering limbs tucked to his body, rolling his eyes and spitting dark, dark red blood.
“Got a light?” the officer asks. There is a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand, and a distinct lack of lighter in the other, which is holding instead rather gently a pair of fine leather gloves. The tall guard, leaning up against the wall of the building and staring ahead at the dull alpine vista, had not taken notice of the young man’s approach. Mustering him dismissively he seems to have no intention to answer the soft spoken request. Slow curls of smoke from a cigarette stuck at a careless angle between his lips get trapped under the visor of his cap. His mouth twitches as if to smile. The lips don’t fit his face right, they are too lush and full for the hard cut of his jaw. He takes a deep drag. Now the officer can clearly see the scars running across the guard’s face. He looks older than he is, but his eyes are those of a boy on the playground, the sparkle and daring, so eager to pounce and play. It must be very dull being up here all the time, loitering around, doing nothing but looking to seem important, the officer thinks. Taking another drag the guard blows smoke in the officer’s direction. “Rauchen verboten”, he says. The officer smiles coldly and tugging the cigarette between his lips he takes a step closer. Now he too disappears from the sight of the chattering guests on the balcony above. He leans forward on tiptoes, as far as the tall riding boots allow it, and lights his own cigarette using the tip of the one hanging lazily from the guard’s lips. Before the officer can retreat again the guard grabs him by the belt, sliding one hand under the leather that is so tightly wrapped around the slim waist. He pulls him closer. For a moment the officer manages to stay in this position, balancing on the tip of his boots, stretched out, striking a figure as graceful as a dancer, before he loses his balance. The officer’s hands shoot forward to brace for the impending fall onto the guard. He drops his gloves. Stopping his fall his hands come down hard on the guard’s shoulders, pinning the heavier man up against the wall. The sudden onslaught of circumstantial violence pleases the guard. He grunts. He grins holding the cigarette between his teeth. His hand is still stuck under the officer’s belt, now at an uncomfortable angle. He slides it out from under the belt, twisting it, his fingertips brush over the buttons on the officer’s tunic (fine fabric, fashionably short), his palm comes to rest on the fly of his trousers (wide breeches, small hips). The touch is too heavy to have been accidental. The officer feels a sudden urge to flee. He does not and the guard remains trapped and the hand remains where it was, shamelessly fondling a hardening bulge. They don’t break eye contact. The guard’s cigarette burns down to a stub. The officer can’t stand the guard’s brazen stare. Arousal makes him avert his eyes. Mindlessly tracing through the fabric the hard outline of the officer’s cock, the guard says: “It’s a shame I won’t get to suck your dick.” Then he motions towards the hands that keep him pinned to the wall. “Now if you don’t mind, duty calls.” On his way back to the party he doesn’t turn to look at the officer again. Pleased with himself he’s humming a tune. Come nightfall they meet again like drifters in the same spot and under the cover of darkness the guard kneeling reverently receives the officer’s cock and the officer in turns offers his splendid equestrian thighs for release. When years later they meet again at the front, neither is willing to recall what had happened at Berghof.
One of these days, an hour into the fifth interrogation of this kind, I ask that bastard Peiper: “How much do you think you can take?”
He raises his eyebrows ever so slightly. We have spent a couple hours with each other already, we have grown accustomed to each other, almost fond, and I’ve gotten very good at reading his subtle little mood swings.
“How much pain do you think you can take?” I ask again.
He has his arms crossed in front of his body, hands tucked in. The uniform he is wearing is evidently not his own, it’s too tight. He wouldn’t be so poorly dressed if he had the choice. The posture isn’t helping, the fabric is pulling on the shoulders and straining at the seams. He reminds me of a little boy who wants his toys back. I have your toys now. I have your home, I have your family and I have you. And I’ll do with you what I want. I smile.
“You keep playing the tough one,” I say, “but you’re not tough, you’re just acting under the misconception that you are untouchable. You think I’m bluffing. You think you’re important. You think I care about your nazi ranks. I don’t give a shit. You’re all the same scum to me. If I want to I’ll have you beat to a pulp. If I want to I’ll beat you to a pulp with my own hands.”
He looks at me with enough loathing for three of those nazi bastards. He’s not even ashamed of the endless immensity of his ego. It’s like a medal, his very own cross of iron. Or a thick steel collar pushing up his chin to an ever arrogant expression. Some men are asking for it. I take a sip of my coffee. It’s cold. I push my papers into a neat little pile and place my pen on top at a thirty degree angle. I get up from my chair and circle around the table. On the way I wink at the dimwitted guard standing by the door. He winks back at me. I’m standing behind Peiper and Peiper still keeps looking at the same spot, two inches above the place where my eyes used to be. I put my hands on his shoulders. He almost doesn’t flinch. His shoulders are so small and bony, like a bird’s. They disappear almost completely under my hands. Maybe I could crush them. In 1918 they used to call me the Butcher. They thought it was funny that hands like mine held pens more often than guns and clubs. Some words need physical presence to back them up.
“Hands on the table,” I say and he obeys. His shoulder blades flutter up under the weight of my hands. I gently press his shoulders forward until his forehead meets the table. He doesn’t resist. The position exposes the appetising white of the skin that he hides under the high collar of his uniform. I could probably choke him with one hand. I put my right on his neck to test the feeling of it. It feels just right. His pulse is under my fingers. He can’t fool me.
“How much pain do you think you can take before you scream? How much until you cry? How much until you piss yourself? How much until you beg me to stop?” I enjoy the way the words sound, I enjoy the way they feel on my tongue, I enjoy the way they feel under my fingers in the rhythm of his blood. I let go of him. He exhales audibly and is embarrassed to do so. Following the mishap his breathing is of unnatural, forced regularity. Although his demeanour suggests he thinks himself cut above the ranks he is still a soldier and as a soldier he is well behaved, without verbal or physical corrections he knows not to move and until told otherwise to remain in the position I bent him into. I circle around the table, once, twice, and look at him, the torso almost touching the table, forehead resting on it, the slick hair dishevelled and next to it the delicate hands, palms pressed flat, a stiff kind of prayer. I light a cigarette, smoke it and watch him silently. In the end I stub the cigarette out on the back of his hand. His fingers dance over the smooth surface of the table. The pain would be easier to take if he could hold on to something or if it made any sense at all that. If there was any reason for it but my personal entertainment. When I make him look up his lips are bloodless and his eyes wet. For today I’ve made my point. He’s taken back to his cell. And I need a moment for myself to calm down and pull myself together.
Empty corridors. White walls. Grey faces. Shaved heads. Hard beds. And always his foot aches and his eyes burn from all the light, day and night, day or night, all the same. Release is only one word away: love. Reject the false prophet, love your new father. Confess, profess and your sins will be absolved and you will be welcomed with open arms and the light won’t be quite so bright and the soup thicker and there will comrades too and you will be allowed to speak to your heart’s desire. If you heart is in the right place.
In the interrogation room the painting of Stalin looks down at Goebbels like a fat cat looking at a little mouse. Goebbels nods and puts his signature on the last page of a thick stack of paper, his confession. It was all his fault, everything, this whole terrible war and every wife left widow, every theatre in flames and every home turned to rubble. His hands are shaking. They make him sign it again with calmer hands. It must look right. And he is glad. All will be forgiven, every word and deed and every aching flaw.
In the washing room he slips one last time out of the prison overall that’s two sizes too big on him. In comes a wardress roughly the age his wife would have been now. She’s heavyset and wears no makeup. Her face is flat like a Mongol’s, her hair tied back in a strict bun. Her hands are big and brutal. She pays no attention to his shame, the trembling of his hands, or that terrible foot, as she rubs him clean like a kitchen tabletop. He puts on the khaki uniform that she brought him. It doesn’t fit. Neither do the shoes. She smiles. “Follow me, comrade”, she says. Oh, how kind they are. He will make a fine preacher once again. Shed the hate and onward into a brighter, better future. Every war needs soldiers of the tongue.
The pervitin boys are good to screw up the ass. They don’t eat much, you see, so no nasty surprises. Their bodies are slight, their faces gaunt. Gaping white eyes and tight little holes, pink pussies, virgin guts. Pristine boys in dirty uniforms. And they won’t raise a complaint. They moan in staccatos. What good are their bodies but to be used and abused? It’s their duty to serve. Bend them over a table, fuck them up against a wall, push their faces into filth, throw them, kick them, beat them. Breach and pierce and split and rip. They don’t mind. Man sized killing machines. Industrial, electrified men. Make them bleed (I fucked one once until his bowels came loose and the good lieutenant didn’t even notice). Put on the right uniform, order them down on their knees, kiss my boots, present that ass. And the bitch obeys and doesn’t suspect a thing. Aren’t they innocent, those precious young men? Germany’s finest. Noble features, bright eyes, light hair, tan lines, peach asses and pink hairy holes. If only I could destroy them. Fuck them to death. But they twitch like insects in their death throes, only to get back up again, uncurling the shiny chitin limbs. There is liquid steel in their veins. Vacant stares from crystalline eyes and venomous drool dripping from bared fangs. And I’m the one left feeling dead, oozing my last spoon of spunk and falling asleep slumped over their backs. You, there, yes you, with the locks. Names are ephemeral. My office, now. Kneel. Revere thine superior. Praise order. Pray to authority. I shove three magic pills down his throat and make him down them with rum and the poor boy is all mine and I have him. Sore cock up his arse and down his throat, in that order, make him choke, fill him, spoil him, soil him, he won’t mind. And once you have served me well go back to your comrades. Cut your hair according to regulations and each morning shave your face and trim your nails and wipe that ass clean, outside and inside, scrape out the cum, pretty boy, before it festers. Ah, those good men, so many to choose from, an endless supply. Until they run out of boys to make into men or until one day one of those yank boys in their terrific planes drops a bomb right down on me while I’m balls deep in some lad and we both blow up into one majestic cloud of meat and bones and shit and piss and cum. And they’ll have to scrape us from the walls and put us in a bag and bury it in a grave that says on it: two unknown German soldiers.
This a rotten, evil land. Wind blows harsh over barren fields. The sky is grey, the forest blind, the birch trees stand quiet. 100 years ago Napoleon sent 600.000 men into Russia of which only 20.000 were to return.The rest are strewn along the way, under our feet. The beautiful young sons of Europe lie here sick, starved and frozen, burned and beaten and buried alive. This soil demands blood. Red blood, white blood, Russian blood, Baltic blood, German blood. The harvest is ripe.
No, this is not Russia, not yet, not if it can be helped. We must defend Riga, that pearl in the muck, white walls and red roofs and beautiful women with blond hair and brown skin and eyes the colour of the sea. The Teutons built Riga on blood and with blood we will defend it to the last man. Germany called and the democrats in Weimar grasped their laws by the handful and they cried their paragraphs from the rooftops to drown out her anguish but her call was louder than their screeching for those who still had ears to hear it and eyes not blinded by paper and gold. And we came for Silesia. And we came for Riga.
I was born and raised in Dortmund, son of a miner and a washerwoman. My mother’s hands were always red and dry. She was ashamed to touch me. My father could not scrub the coal from under his nails and sometimes when he coughed his spit was black. When I was young I used to think that he spat out dark spirits. When I grew older and spoke of the war and how I hoped to serve soon he raised his voice and cursed the Kaiser and sometimes he beat me and sometimes I hated him for it and thought of the black devils in his lungs, how one day he wouldn’t be able to disgorge off them anymore.
The armistice was signed on the day of my 18th birthday. When mother told me I felt close to tears. Making some excuse I ran into the cellar to cry, but the tears would not come so I just stood there in the damp darkness looking at a pile of potatoes and feeling very silly.
The first corpse I saw was a nude man staked on a tree. His guts were bursting from his pierced belly, hanging down to his feet, bloated and swinging in the wind like Chinese lampions. His hair was the same colour as mine and in his mouth they had stuffed his iron cross first class. The crows had already eaten his eyes and his face was twisted into such a grotesque mask of torment that it looked barely human anymore. That’s Friedrich, they said, the one that was captured, the one who had not taken his life in time, and their faces became hard. They pulled him down from the tree, pushed his guts back in and buried him in this bitter soil. Their eyes wept without tears. I had not known Friedrich but I knew many men like him and I knew it could be me hanging from that tree or Hans who sang the sailor songs or Willy who carried the ammunition boxes when I tired or Hermann who showed me how to hold a rifle steady, or Johann who read the Bible at night when no one was looking, or anyone of us. The warning was received and we came prepared. No prisoners.
Oh how wonderful it would be to cleanse this land. How beautiful it could be. A farm of your own and a woman with brown skin and blonde hair at your side. Clear lakes and blue skies and roaring seas of green as far as the eye can see. To stand with virgin grass under your feet, hurl yourself into the sun and dissolve into eternity.
Nichts blieb ihm auf Erden
Als Verzweiflungsstreich’ Und Soldat zu werden
Für ein neues Reich.
Let’s play Räuber und Gendarm. You’ll be the robbers and when we get you we’ll beat you black and blue. We’ll smash your idols. We’ll burn your houses and poison your wells and hang you from the trees. For Friedrich and for Max and Karl and Hermann and for all of them, for Riga, for Germany.
Now they caught me stuck in a muddy ditch with a machine-gun, no ammunition and Johann, struck by their bullets, lying and dying on me. He won’t stop bleeding and I can’t get him off me. His blood seeps through my clothing, layer by layer. I’m drenched in blood and it won’t stop, it soaks my trousers, it runs down my legs and it collects as a hot puddle in my boots. And the Reds come closer, slowly, carefully, rifles brandished. I can’t reach my pistol. I try to pull Johann’s Walther from his belt. He groans and stutters my name. Quiet, quiet. I put the pistol to his head and pull the trigger. His brain is everywhere. My ears ring. I put the pistol to my temple and pull the trigger again. It jams. Deutsche Wertarbeit. I try to get the bullet out of the barrel but my hands are shaking, I’m deaf and dizzy and sick. It’s too late. There they are, twenty of them, big strong working men with shabby clothing and fur hats and Russian rifles. Now it’s their turn to play.
Bunker Archives 