Red Inferno: 1945 by Robert Conroy

watching your soldiers dig trenches. Wouldn’t you like to have some of my people digging for you and earning their food?”
    Von Schumann was offering a trade, and it was an easy decision to make. Food for labor while his men did the important work of preparing for battle. “Okay,” said Miller, surprising himself by holding out his hand to von Schumann. It just seemed the right thing to do. “You’re on.”
    Miller hopped in the front seat of the jeep and gestured for von Schumann to get in behind him. “Von Schumann, when you were a Nazi up at Stalingrad, just what did you do there?”
    “I commanded a Panzer unit. A brigade of tanks.”
    “Against the Russians?” It was a foolish question, Miller realized. Who else would have been there?
    “Certainly.”
    “Von Schumann, I think we should have a long talk fairly shortly.”
    E LISABETH HAD GOOD days and bad days. Until earlier, she thought her life was getting better. Her body no longer ached very much and she was able to think clearly at least most of the time. Survival no longer seemed laughably impossible.
    Lis had been fortunate. She had been spared much of the horrors of the siege of Berlin. She had lived in her late parents’ apartment on the outskirts and had to endure only a little of the bombing and, more recently, the incessant shelling from Red Army artillery had passed her by. Of course she’d gone to the air-raid shelter on many occasions, but most of the bombs had not fallen near her home. Several times, she’d looked skyward and seen the shapes of the hosts of bombers flying overhead. She understood the routine—the Americans bombed during the day and the British at night. Like everyone in Berlin, it was clearly evident that the city was defenseless. The Luftwaffe was nonexistent. She’d known some young men who’d been pilots and wondered if they still lived. Likely not, she thought.
    On the radio, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels told his shrinking world that the Allied bombers weren’t enough to frighten the German people. Well, Lis thought, they were certainly enough to frighten her. Even at a distance, the shock waves could be felt and the clouds and fire and smoke were clearly visible. Berlin was a city in agony and she could feel the pain.
    She recalled seeing a painting of what an artist thought was Hell and concluded that the people in the center of Berlin were living there.
    When an occasional bomb did land near her home, she immediately went to the site to help as much as she could. She was far from alone in that effort as her neighbors all pitched in to help out. Sometimes, however, it was futile, as the mangled bodies of the dead were pulled from the debris, or the screaming maimed and injured were loaded into improvised ambulances and driven to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals that also lacked even rudimentary supplies.
    She’d considered herself lucky until the food began to run out. She’d joined others in picking through garbage and in the ruins of bombed-out buildings looking for something to put in her stomach. She’d eaten things that were half-rotten and sometimes defied identification. But first, she knew her responsibility was to feed Pauli. He got the best parts of what she scrounged.
    To the best of her knowledge, he was the only living relative that she had in Germany. She’d seen women of all ages, from the very young to the very old, prostituting themselves for food. There were hoarders in Berlin who took advantage of them and there were some soldiers who always seemed to have rations to trade. She thought she would rather die than stoop to that. A quiet voice told her that she might rather do anything than die.
    Von Schumann had saved her and she felt she was on the way to recovery. When he said he’d seen American tanks approaching them, everyone had been elated. But the Russians and the Americans had fought and the Yanks had been driven off. All her hopes had been dashed. The barbarians, the