Last Citadel

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The SS colonel eased shut the high, heavy door. The portal closed with a hiss and a soft tap. How many trees went into this, he wondered, lives sacrificed out of the forest to make one of Hitler’s castle gates? The black eagle emblem of wartime hung at eye level against the carved wood. Colonel Abram Breit imagined this symbol of the Reich to be a spread-winged vulture. That’s what he left behind in the briefing room – a death scene, a picking apart, sinew by vessel, of Germany.

Breit walked several steps into the hall, striding across the same black eagle laid in mosaic in the floor. Blood-red banners trickled down the walls. He buttressed his back against one of them and lit a cigarette.

He exhaled smoke and stared into it, tired and sad. He replayed the voices of the briefing room, Hitler with his generals and advisers. Citadel – the looming, titanic battle for Kursk on the Eastern Front – consumed the hours. Since morning Breit had watched the little wars between the generals, battling over Hitler as if the Führer were a spot of high ground; candor fell in combat with flattery, reason was mauled by pride. Around and above the grand table, more banners festooned the room, great ebony swastikas circled like the buzzards of Breit’s imagination. Everywhere Hitler’s minions had hung the images of Hitler’s belief, to let no eye wander to another way of thinking, to any other allegiance, certainly to no thoughts of Germany’s welfare, only the Nazis’.

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