Einsatzkommando 12 wasn’t supposed to stay in Voroshilovsk, since it had been assigned to the zone that the Russians call the KMV, the Kavkazskie Mineralnye Vodi or “Mineral Waters of the Caucasus,” a string of little towns famous for their curative springs and their spas, scattered among volcanoes; the Kommando would move to Piatigorsk as soon as the region was occupied. Dr. Bierkamp and the Gruppenstab arrived a week after we did; the Wehrmacht had finally assigned us living quarters and offices, in a separate wing of the large complex of buildings housing the OKHG: they had built a wall to separate us from them, but we shared the same mess, which allowed us to celebrate together with the military the ascent, by a PK of the First Alpine Division, of the summit of Mount Elbruz, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. Dr. Müller and his Kommando had gone, leaving a Teilkommando under the command of Werner Kleber to finish cleaning up Voroshilovsk. Bierkamp was still awaiting the arrival of Brigadeführer Gerret Korsemann, the new HSSPF for the Kuban-Caucasus. As for Seibert’s replacement, he still hadn’t arrived, and Hauptsturmführer Prill was filling in for the interim. Prill sent me on a mission to Maikop.

A perpetual summer haze kept you from seeing the mountains of the Caucasus until you were at their feet. I crossed the foothills, passing the towns of Armavir and Labinskaya; as soon as you left Cossack territory, flags, green with a white crescent, burgeoned on the houses, raised by the Muslims to bid us welcome. The town of Maikop, one of the great oil centers of the Caucasus, was nestled right against the mountains, crossed by the Bielaya, a deep river above which rises the old city, perched atop tall chalk cliffs. Before the suburbs, the road ran alongside a railroad cluttered with thousands of cars, loaded with goods that the Soviets had not had time to evacuate. Then you crossed a bridge, still intact, and entered the city, a grid of long, straight streets, all identical, running alongside a Park of Culture where the plaster statues of heroes of labor slowly went on crumbling. Braune, a man with rather equine features, his large moon-face surmounted by a bulbous forehead, welcomed me eagerly: I sensed he was reassured to see again one of the last of “Ohlendorf’s men” still left in the Group, even though he himself was awaiting his replacement from one week to the next. Braune was worried about the oil installations in Neftegorsk: the Abwehr, just before taking the city, had managed to infiltrate a special unit, the Shamil, made up of mountain peoples from the Caucasus and disguised as a special battalion of the NKVD, to try to seize the oil wells intact; but the mission had failed and the Russians had dynamited the installations under the Panzers’ noses. Already, though, our specialists were working to repair them, and the first vultures of Kontinental-Öl were making their appearance. These bureaucrats, all connected to Göring’s Four-Year Plan, benefited from the support of Arno Schickedanz, the Reichskommissar-designate of the Kuban-Caucasus. “You know of course that Schickedanz owes his appointment to government minister Rosenberg, who was his high-school classmate in Riga. But then he had a falling out with his former schoolmate. I’ve heard that it’s Herr Körner, Reichsmarschall Göring’s Staatssekretär, who brought the two together; and Schickedanz has been appointed to the board of directors of KontiÖl, the holding company set up by the Reichsmarschall to exploit the oil fields of the Caucasus and Baku.” In Braune’s opinion, when the Caucasus came under civilian control, we could expect an even more chaotic and unmanageable situation than in the Ukraine, where Gauleiter Koch did as he pleased, refusing to cooperate either with the Wehrmacht and the SS or with his own ministry. “The only positive point for the SS is that Schickedanz appointed SS officers as Generalkommissars for Vladikavkaz and Azerbaijan: in those districts, at least, it will make relations easier.”

I spent three days working with Braune, helping him prepare documents and draw up reports. My only distraction consisted of going out to drink bad local wine in the courtyard of a canteen run by a wrinkled old mountain native. Still I made the acquaintance, not entirely by chance, of a Belgian officer, the Kommandeur of the Wallonia Legion, Lucien Lippert. I had in fact wanted to meet Léon Degrelle, the head of the Rexist movement, who was fighting in the area; Brasillach, in Paris, had spoken to me about him with wild lyricism. But the Hauptmann from the Abwehr whom I asked laughed in my face: “Degrelle? Everyone wants to see him. He’s probably the most famous noncom in our army. But he’s at the front, you know, and it’s pretty hot up there. General Rupp was almost killed last week in a surprise attack. The Belgians have lost a lot of people.” Instead, he introduced me to Lippert, a lanky, smiling young officer wearing worn, patched feldgrau a little too big for him. I took him out to talk about Belgian politics under the apple tree at my canteen. Lippert was a career soldier, an artilleryman; he had agreed to sign up for the Legion out of hostility to Bolshevism, but he remained a true patriot, and complained that despite promises to the contrary, the Legionnaires had been forced to wear a German uniform. “The men were furious. Degrelle had trouble calming things down.” Degrelle, when he had signed up, had thought that his political role would earn him officer’s stripes, but the Wehrmacht had refused outright: no experience. Lippert still laughed about it. “Fine, so he left anyway, as an ordinary rifleman. To tell the truth, he didn’t have much of a choice, things weren’t going so well for him in Belgium.” Since then, despite an initial muddle in Gromovo-Balka, he fought courageously and had been promoted in combat. “The annoying thing is that he takes himself for some sort of political officer, you know? He wants to go himself to discuss the Legion’s engagement, and that’s not right. He’s just a noncom, after all.” Now he was dreaming of transferring the Legion to the Waffen-SS. “He met your General Steiner, last fall, and that completely turned his head. But I say no. If he does that, I’ll ask to be replaced.” His face had become very serious. “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the SS. But I’m a soldier, and in Belgium soldiers don’t mix in politics. That’s not our role. I’m a royalist, I’m a patriot, I’m an anti-Communist, but I’m not a National Socialist. When I signed up, I was assured, at the Palace, that this decision was compatible with my oath of loyalty to the king, and I still don’t consider myself absolved from that oath, no matter what they say. The rest, all the political games with the Flemish, that’s not my problem. But the Waffen-SS is not a regular branch, it’s a Party formation. Degrelle says that only those who have fought alongside Germany will have a right to speak, after the war, and have a place in the new European order. I agree with that. But there are limits.” I smiled: despite his vehemence, I liked this Lippert, he was an upright, honest man. I poured him some more wine and changed the subject: “You must be the first Belgians ever to fight in the Caucasus.”—“Don’t be so sure!” he laughed, and rapidly sketched out the fantastic adventures of Don Juan van Halen, a hero of the Belgian revolution of 1830, a half-Flemish, half-Spanish nobleman, and a former Napoleonic officer, who because of his liberal convictions had landed in the prisons of the Inquisition in Madrid, in the reign of Ferdinand VII. He had escaped and ended up, God knows how, in Tiflis, where General Yermolov, the head of the Russian army in the Caucasus, had offered him a command. “He fought against the Chechens,” Lippert laughed, “imagine that.” I laughed with him, I found him very likeable. But he had to leave; AOK 17 was preparing the offensive on Tuapse, to take control of the pipeline terminals, and the Legion, attached to the Ninety-seventh Alpine Division, would have its role to play. As we parted I wished him good luck. But though Lippert, like his compatriot Van Halen, left the Caucasus alive, luck unfortunately deserted him a little farther on: near the end of the war, I learned that he had been killed in February 1944, during the Cherkasy breakthrough. The Wallonia Legion had been transferred to the Waffen-SS in June 1943, but Lippert hadn’t wanted to leave his men without a Kommandeur, and was still waiting for a replacement eight months later. Degrelle, on the other hand, survived it all; during the final debacle, he abandoned his men on the road to Lübeck and fled to Spain in Speer’s private plane; despite being sentenced to death in absentia, he was never really bothered. Poor Lippert would have been ashamed.