Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
These three words were enough to conquer an empire, so why wouldn't it work with the Finns?Shout it again, but louder, Old Boy. He's foreign, you know
Sounds like The Charge of the Light Brigade 2.0.
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It Ended in Moscow
- Thread starter Barbaria1
- Start date
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
Chapter 05
A temporary reserve Prisoner of War Camp, Alkkia, Karvia, Finland, Monday 1st January 1940, 7 am.
Barbara didn't know how long or how far they had travelled but the muscles in her body screamed of long hours in an uncomfortable position squashed into the back of a lorry, with way too many others like her. Her hands were bound behind her back and her legs, too, a tight cord tying them together at the ankle.
She attempted to sit up and found that she was in a group of survivors from the battle. More than she thought, maybe thirty or forty, but they were either exhausted, dying or dead in the rudimentary pen in which they were all now incarcerated. 'Just this many from the hundreds of poor souls that were sent into battle, my God!' she thought to herself.
But where was Henry? She looked around unable to move and then she saw him, eyes closed, naked, as they all were, propped against the thick wooden pen slats.
Barbara spat a lump of bloody phlegm from her mouth and groaned from the pain in her body.
"Any water?" She shouted to everyone and no-one.
Nobody answered so she asked again louder.
"Bitch, quit your shouting," a voice sounded behind her.
A white snow suited guard stepped into view, and suddenly she realised how cold it was. Naked in the snowy open air, they would survive for only a few hours out here, no more.
"Here.” The guard held the open end of a water bottle in between the wooden planks and grinned.
“Tits first bitch, let me feel how firm they are.”
Fuck you were the first words that came to her mind, but the time for pride had long gone, and so, with her eyes closed and swallowing back the bile, she pushed her breasts through the pen fencing and allowed the guard to fondle, cup and feel to his heart’s content.
“Water now, please?” Barbara begged, and so, laughing, the guard held the bottle high up and poured causing the girl to scramble and crawl in the snow and mud, trying to capture the water flow between her parched lips.
Seconds later the soldier wandered away, having had his fun with the ‘kaunis huora’ – the pretty whore,’ leaving Barbara with a few meagre drips of water to moisten her lips with.
"Hey I’m working for the British,” she shouted after the guard, but of course to no avail, or so she thought.
It was around thirty minutes later that more Finnish soldiers approached the pen. One beckoned her over to the fence and then smiled as she shuffled and wriggled in the sludge to obey him.
When she was close enough, he reached out and put one end of the rope he carried over her head.
“Fuck, no …” she complained, but only half-heartedly, because this could mean that she was being moved somewhere else.
The noose encircled her neck, and he pulled it tight, tight enough to make breathing more than a little difficult. The other end he kept in his hand. Two armed guards entered the pen and dragged her to the gate before shoving her through, causing her naked body to stumble onto the hard ground as they did.
Barbara’s ankles were unbound, before the main guard picked up the leash end, and then without another word he walked away, jerking her after him.
He led her like that across to a wooden structure about four hundred metres from the pen, pulling her along behind him as one would a reluctant donkey. She was ignored, he never looked back at her.
When she tried to protest vocally or stalled her movement a little, the guard walking behind her used the muzzle of his rifle to prod her forward, jabbing it painfully hard into her kidneys. Even more humiliating was the way the same man would grab her ass every time she began to lag behind.
Put off balance by the arms bound behind her back, jerked, groped, and prodded forward, her legs felt weak, but the pace of the lead guard was not slow and so she was almost forced into a painful jog, and soon exhausted by the effort required of her. Her lungs struggled for each breath in the cold air, and all thoughts of escape were put aside as she struggled simply to keep up with her captors.
By the time they reached the wooden building she was too exhausted to want anything other than to lie down and sleep.
But that was not why she was here.
The lead guard pulled her into one of the interior rooms of the surprisingly spacious building, and tied one end of the rope around her neck to the edge of an elevated wooden platform as if she was a dog. He did not speak; he only watched.
Even with her wrists tied and her neck leashed, She was almost asleep, lulled by the relative warmth and comfort, when a hard slap to the face woke her with a start. Completely disoriented, a backhand quickly followed, smacking her hard across the other cheek.
Gasping for breath as she slowly regained some semblance of sense, Barbara looked up from her seated position at the trio of men now standing before her. She gulped.
“Kiinnitä se runkoon,” one man said, and as her hands were unfastened along with her neck, only for her to be dragged onto the wooden platform and retied to a metal frame, she was able to work out exactly what he had said.
The frame consisted of a vertical steel pole and cross bar, which left Barb on her knees, arms pulled over the cross pole and her wrists then cuffed in in place.
“No, please, you don’t have to … I’m working for the British, please contact them for me-owwwwwwww!”
Another slap to the face silenced her as a collar of the same steel was secured around her neck, with another band of the shining alloy fastened around her middle, constricting her ability to take a full breath. Her legs were kept free but she could barely move them because of the other restraints.
“Please, she looked up at her new captors, you have to help me.”
One of the men, the one who had hit her, knelt in front of her and placed his hand on her left breast, nipping the teat between finger and thumb. Without a word he began to twist, hard, watching her expression intently as her features became contorted by the pain, yet he didn’t stop, and eventually she screamed. Having achieved his goal, the man smiled and released her tortured nipple.
“You say you are working for the British?”
“God, at last. Y-yes, yes, I am. Please, please believe me I am Barbara Mohr, and my colleague, the man I was captured with is Captain Henry Underwood of the British secret service …”
“Spell your name.”
“B-A-R-B …”
A smack to the jaw silenced her.
“Not that name.”
Fuck! She thought.
“M-O-H-R”
He frowned at her, and suddenly the fact that she spoke English with an accent became a major issue.
“You’re a Nazi whore! As bad as the Red Army bastards!” Another slap, then another and soon fists and feet rained in on her until she was bruised, battered and bleeding.”
Barbara’s head hung, curtained by her hair when they stopped. She spat a long, thick glob of red tinted spit onto the wooden floor.
“Pl-please contact a Major Grand in London, and … and please, please take Henry out of that pen before he freezes to death, I beg you.”
“Gag her, bag her head and let her stay here. I will go and make some calls.”
She lost track of how long she was left in the dark, but it seemed an age, every one of her limbs numb, by the time she saw the light of the room again.
Without a word she was being released. She could hardly believe it. She was free!
Unable to stand and walk without aid, Barbara was given a long shirt and led away.
“You come with us we have telephone.”
In a small ante room, the same three men stood, and on the table was a telephone with the large shiny handset laying beside the main phone unit.
With a nod from one of the Finnish men, she picked the phone up. “H-hello?” She said quietly and cautiously.
“Mohr, bloody hell girl, you’re alive! Is Henry with you?”
Mainila, on the Finnish-Soviet border, Monday 1st January 1940, 2 pm.
Was it New Year’s day? Barbara had heard a man, a journalist she thought, making reference to it, but her mind was reeling. The Finns had brought a number of Journalists in to witness the exchange and seeing these men, suited, clean and well fed, just highlighted her plight and that of the other prisoners even more.
The call with Grand had resulted in him making plans to have her and Henry repatriated, but …
After she and her lover had been reunited, and Henry clothed in the same meagre fashion that Barbara was, they had both been taken to yet another building in the same camp, to recover in preparation for their return to London. Or so they thought.
They were too exhausted to be excited, but neither she nor Henry could hardly believe it. Then …
“We’re to be handed back to the Soviets in an exchange? No, no we’re not, we have agreements …” As Barbara remonstrated in a tone of ever-increasing volume, and Henry looked on aghast, the Finnish Field Commander announced to the gathered throngs of wretched Soviet souls that an exchange had been agreed by the Commander-In-Chief, none other than Field Marshall Carl Gustav Mannerheim himself, and so we would all be returned to Russia.
“No, you can’t,” she yelled again. But no one was listening. It wasn’t just the fact that their craving for repatriation had disappeared, but also the fact that returning prisoners into the Soviet Union were likely to be shot!
“Britain and its allies will not be happy with … oooof!” Barbara was silenced with a fist to the solar plexus, doubling her over. And so it was without further dissent that both she and Henry were loaded back into a lorry just like the one that had brought her here.
Woodland in the Karelian Isthmus, ten miles South of the Finnish-Russian border, 6 pm
"Na kaleni, suka" A chop to the backs of her knees sent Barbara tumbling to the ground. The rag tag group of Soviet exchange prisoners had been route-marched for ten miles, heading South of the exchange point before being brought to a halt, gasping and panting. Barb had been ordered to her knees, but would gladly have fallen to them anyway.
Lifting her head she saw the miserable group gathered around her, and for the first time she realised that she was the only woman. The headlights from several lorries, vehicles that the prisoners had only been allowed to watch roll by, now lit her up for all to see.
“Strip bitch,” the same man issued the order.
She was going to be raped for everyone to watch.
“Please, no.”
“Strip,” and not for the first time today, Barbara was slapped hard across the face. Stripping her clothes off was hardly a long job, and as the long, tattered shirt lay in a pile next to her, Barbara began to shiver in the cold.
For the first time since arriving in this dusky clearing, Barbara looked around and much to her terror, saw a line of five wooden posts in a line, and it was obvious what they were for.
“What? No, God no please.”
“Leave her alone …” Henry, exhausted and suffering from malnutrition, raised a weak arm but was battered around the head with a rifle butt, and fell to the ground.
“The rest of you, strip!” Came the order and to ensure compliance a young zeke was battered around the head. He fell to the ground and his meagre covering torn away for him.
“Strip you fucking cowards!”
And so slowly but very surely the rag tag bunch of defeated wretches took away their clothing to stand, much like Barbara, shivering in the cold.
“Begin,” came the order from the Officer in Charge.
The five unfortunates that were dragged from the group did not even put up a fight, so exhausted and resigned to their fate were they.
Wrists tied behind the post, the hastily assembled firing squad took aim …
“Fire!”
The first five fell dead. Barbara felt sick.
“Continue came the order,” and when Barbara’s arm was taken into a firm grip by the selecting soldiers, she knew that her time was finally up.
TBC
A temporary reserve Prisoner of War Camp, Alkkia, Karvia, Finland, Monday 1st January 1940, 7 am.
Barbara didn't know how long or how far they had travelled but the muscles in her body screamed of long hours in an uncomfortable position squashed into the back of a lorry, with way too many others like her. Her hands were bound behind her back and her legs, too, a tight cord tying them together at the ankle.
She attempted to sit up and found that she was in a group of survivors from the battle. More than she thought, maybe thirty or forty, but they were either exhausted, dying or dead in the rudimentary pen in which they were all now incarcerated. 'Just this many from the hundreds of poor souls that were sent into battle, my God!' she thought to herself.
But where was Henry? She looked around unable to move and then she saw him, eyes closed, naked, as they all were, propped against the thick wooden pen slats.
Barbara spat a lump of bloody phlegm from her mouth and groaned from the pain in her body.
"Any water?" She shouted to everyone and no-one.
Nobody answered so she asked again louder.
"Bitch, quit your shouting," a voice sounded behind her.
A white snow suited guard stepped into view, and suddenly she realised how cold it was. Naked in the snowy open air, they would survive for only a few hours out here, no more.
"Here.” The guard held the open end of a water bottle in between the wooden planks and grinned.
“Tits first bitch, let me feel how firm they are.”
Fuck you were the first words that came to her mind, but the time for pride had long gone, and so, with her eyes closed and swallowing back the bile, she pushed her breasts through the pen fencing and allowed the guard to fondle, cup and feel to his heart’s content.
“Water now, please?” Barbara begged, and so, laughing, the guard held the bottle high up and poured causing the girl to scramble and crawl in the snow and mud, trying to capture the water flow between her parched lips.
Seconds later the soldier wandered away, having had his fun with the ‘kaunis huora’ – the pretty whore,’ leaving Barbara with a few meagre drips of water to moisten her lips with.
"Hey I’m working for the British,” she shouted after the guard, but of course to no avail, or so she thought.
It was around thirty minutes later that more Finnish soldiers approached the pen. One beckoned her over to the fence and then smiled as she shuffled and wriggled in the sludge to obey him.
When she was close enough, he reached out and put one end of the rope he carried over her head.
“Fuck, no …” she complained, but only half-heartedly, because this could mean that she was being moved somewhere else.
The noose encircled her neck, and he pulled it tight, tight enough to make breathing more than a little difficult. The other end he kept in his hand. Two armed guards entered the pen and dragged her to the gate before shoving her through, causing her naked body to stumble onto the hard ground as they did.
Barbara’s ankles were unbound, before the main guard picked up the leash end, and then without another word he walked away, jerking her after him.
He led her like that across to a wooden structure about four hundred metres from the pen, pulling her along behind him as one would a reluctant donkey. She was ignored, he never looked back at her.
When she tried to protest vocally or stalled her movement a little, the guard walking behind her used the muzzle of his rifle to prod her forward, jabbing it painfully hard into her kidneys. Even more humiliating was the way the same man would grab her ass every time she began to lag behind.
Put off balance by the arms bound behind her back, jerked, groped, and prodded forward, her legs felt weak, but the pace of the lead guard was not slow and so she was almost forced into a painful jog, and soon exhausted by the effort required of her. Her lungs struggled for each breath in the cold air, and all thoughts of escape were put aside as she struggled simply to keep up with her captors.
By the time they reached the wooden building she was too exhausted to want anything other than to lie down and sleep.
But that was not why she was here.
The lead guard pulled her into one of the interior rooms of the surprisingly spacious building, and tied one end of the rope around her neck to the edge of an elevated wooden platform as if she was a dog. He did not speak; he only watched.
Even with her wrists tied and her neck leashed, She was almost asleep, lulled by the relative warmth and comfort, when a hard slap to the face woke her with a start. Completely disoriented, a backhand quickly followed, smacking her hard across the other cheek.
Gasping for breath as she slowly regained some semblance of sense, Barbara looked up from her seated position at the trio of men now standing before her. She gulped.
“Kiinnitä se runkoon,” one man said, and as her hands were unfastened along with her neck, only for her to be dragged onto the wooden platform and retied to a metal frame, she was able to work out exactly what he had said.
The frame consisted of a vertical steel pole and cross bar, which left Barb on her knees, arms pulled over the cross pole and her wrists then cuffed in in place.
“No, please, you don’t have to … I’m working for the British, please contact them for me-owwwwwwww!”
Another slap to the face silenced her as a collar of the same steel was secured around her neck, with another band of the shining alloy fastened around her middle, constricting her ability to take a full breath. Her legs were kept free but she could barely move them because of the other restraints.
“Please, she looked up at her new captors, you have to help me.”
One of the men, the one who had hit her, knelt in front of her and placed his hand on her left breast, nipping the teat between finger and thumb. Without a word he began to twist, hard, watching her expression intently as her features became contorted by the pain, yet he didn’t stop, and eventually she screamed. Having achieved his goal, the man smiled and released her tortured nipple.
“You say you are working for the British?”
“God, at last. Y-yes, yes, I am. Please, please believe me I am Barbara Mohr, and my colleague, the man I was captured with is Captain Henry Underwood of the British secret service …”
“Spell your name.”
“B-A-R-B …”
A smack to the jaw silenced her.
“Not that name.”
Fuck! She thought.
“M-O-H-R”
He frowned at her, and suddenly the fact that she spoke English with an accent became a major issue.
“You’re a Nazi whore! As bad as the Red Army bastards!” Another slap, then another and soon fists and feet rained in on her until she was bruised, battered and bleeding.”
Barbara’s head hung, curtained by her hair when they stopped. She spat a long, thick glob of red tinted spit onto the wooden floor.
“Pl-please contact a Major Grand in London, and … and please, please take Henry out of that pen before he freezes to death, I beg you.”
“Gag her, bag her head and let her stay here. I will go and make some calls.”
She lost track of how long she was left in the dark, but it seemed an age, every one of her limbs numb, by the time she saw the light of the room again.
Without a word she was being released. She could hardly believe it. She was free!
Unable to stand and walk without aid, Barbara was given a long shirt and led away.
“You come with us we have telephone.”
In a small ante room, the same three men stood, and on the table was a telephone with the large shiny handset laying beside the main phone unit.
With a nod from one of the Finnish men, she picked the phone up. “H-hello?” She said quietly and cautiously.
“Mohr, bloody hell girl, you’re alive! Is Henry with you?”
Mainila, on the Finnish-Soviet border, Monday 1st January 1940, 2 pm.
Was it New Year’s day? Barbara had heard a man, a journalist she thought, making reference to it, but her mind was reeling. The Finns had brought a number of Journalists in to witness the exchange and seeing these men, suited, clean and well fed, just highlighted her plight and that of the other prisoners even more.
The call with Grand had resulted in him making plans to have her and Henry repatriated, but …
After she and her lover had been reunited, and Henry clothed in the same meagre fashion that Barbara was, they had both been taken to yet another building in the same camp, to recover in preparation for their return to London. Or so they thought.
They were too exhausted to be excited, but neither she nor Henry could hardly believe it. Then …
“We’re to be handed back to the Soviets in an exchange? No, no we’re not, we have agreements …” As Barbara remonstrated in a tone of ever-increasing volume, and Henry looked on aghast, the Finnish Field Commander announced to the gathered throngs of wretched Soviet souls that an exchange had been agreed by the Commander-In-Chief, none other than Field Marshall Carl Gustav Mannerheim himself, and so we would all be returned to Russia.
“No, you can’t,” she yelled again. But no one was listening. It wasn’t just the fact that their craving for repatriation had disappeared, but also the fact that returning prisoners into the Soviet Union were likely to be shot!
“Britain and its allies will not be happy with … oooof!” Barbara was silenced with a fist to the solar plexus, doubling her over. And so it was without further dissent that both she and Henry were loaded back into a lorry just like the one that had brought her here.
Woodland in the Karelian Isthmus, ten miles South of the Finnish-Russian border, 6 pm
"Na kaleni, suka" A chop to the backs of her knees sent Barbara tumbling to the ground. The rag tag group of Soviet exchange prisoners had been route-marched for ten miles, heading South of the exchange point before being brought to a halt, gasping and panting. Barb had been ordered to her knees, but would gladly have fallen to them anyway.
Lifting her head she saw the miserable group gathered around her, and for the first time she realised that she was the only woman. The headlights from several lorries, vehicles that the prisoners had only been allowed to watch roll by, now lit her up for all to see.
“Strip bitch,” the same man issued the order.
She was going to be raped for everyone to watch.
“Please, no.”
“Strip,” and not for the first time today, Barbara was slapped hard across the face. Stripping her clothes off was hardly a long job, and as the long, tattered shirt lay in a pile next to her, Barbara began to shiver in the cold.
For the first time since arriving in this dusky clearing, Barbara looked around and much to her terror, saw a line of five wooden posts in a line, and it was obvious what they were for.
“What? No, God no please.”
“Leave her alone …” Henry, exhausted and suffering from malnutrition, raised a weak arm but was battered around the head with a rifle butt, and fell to the ground.
“The rest of you, strip!” Came the order and to ensure compliance a young zeke was battered around the head. He fell to the ground and his meagre covering torn away for him.
“Strip you fucking cowards!”
And so slowly but very surely the rag tag bunch of defeated wretches took away their clothing to stand, much like Barbara, shivering in the cold.
“Begin,” came the order from the Officer in Charge.
The five unfortunates that were dragged from the group did not even put up a fight, so exhausted and resigned to their fate were they.
Wrists tied behind the post, the hastily assembled firing squad took aim …
“Fire!”
The first five fell dead. Barbara felt sick.
“Continue came the order,” and when Barbara’s arm was taken into a firm grip by the selecting soldiers, she knew that her time was finally up.
TBC
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
Clever tactics from these Finns! Send the POW's back,, knowing that the Soviets will shoot them! Let your enemy kill their soldiers himself and spend his own ammo to it!
Who'd have thought it?
Finns triggering the loathometer?
But they have!
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
Loathometer, that's "inhomitari' in Finnish!Finns triggering the loathometer?
Chapter 06
Somewhere on a road approaching the war zone on the Finnish-Russian border, 5 pm Tuesday, 2nd January, 1940.
Comrade Dimitri Pavlovich Popov, Major of State Security, NKVD, sat muttering impatiently to himself in the back of an immobilized GAZ M1 NKVD staff car. He and his driver had been stopped behind two Red Army lorries for nearly a quarter of an hour while, for some unknown reason, the men manning the checkpoint on the road leading to the front near Mainila harassed the drivers and occupants of the lorries.
Popov had been on the road coming up from Leningrad since early that morning. This infuriating delay was just one of many. He wished the army could somehow fight as well as it could engage in petty harassments of this kind. But, then again, he imagined that all armies were probably like that.
Nearly a month had passed, he reflected, since he’d returned to Moscow from his embassy posting in Berlin. And it had been nearly two weeks since he’d begun questioning NKVD officials at the Lubyanka, and various Moscow offices, as to what happened to the two British agents he had apprehended in a forest outside of Berlin back in October and shipped off to Moscow for questioning.
Everywhere he’d gone to ask about them, he’d found himself stonewalled. Eventually, and only through persistence, he’d learned that Henry Underwood and Barbara Mohr had indeed been held for a time at the Lubyanka, where they’d been tortured and questioned to no avail. But no one seemed to know, or think it necessary to divulge, what had happened to them after that. NKVD officialdom, he knew, could be like that. No one wants to admit responsibility for decisions made for fear that decisions deemed later to have been incorrectly made were not conducive to living a long life.
Frustrated, he’d pursued his quest to ever higher levels, only to be passed up the chain of command at every turn until, to his astonishment, he found himself in the Kremlin, on New Year’s Day no less, standing before ‘the Vozhd’ himself.
Seated at his desk, Stalin careful set aside the report he’d been studying to look up appraisingly at Popov.
“So all this is true?” He’d grunted, waving his hand over Popov’s written accounting of his quest.
“Yes, regrettably so.”
“You say that you shipped off a pair of captured British spies from Berlin, back in October, whom you believed to possess potentially valuable information on Germany’s most advanced weaponry developments as well as possible plans for military action against us, and nothing came of it?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin, it appears so.”
He’d frowned irritably and drummed his fingers on the desk top, and then abruptly ordered Popov to take his leave but return at the end of the day.
Popov did as directed, wandering aimlessly about the city for hours. And on returning to the Kremlin late that afternoon learned that Stalin was gone, but had left him a large sealed envelope.
Retreating to his room at the Hotel Moskva, he opened the envelope to find flimsy copies of NKVD orders, the first condemning prisoners Barbara Mohr and Henry Underwood to a presumably short life at slave labor at the Kondopoga Corrective Labour Camp in Karelia. A second flimsy, reported the decision on 28 December to ship the entire prisoner population of the Kondopoga camp off to the Finnish front, constituted as the 493rd Penal Battalion. A third reported that the battalion had been sent into action on the morning of 31st December near Niirala and was very nearly wiped out. A fourth, that the survivors of that battle, captured by the Finns, were expected to be returned to the Russian lines in a negotiated prisoner exchange scheduled for the afternoon of 2nd January. The fifth document was an official priority pass, signed by Stalin himself, placing Popov on the next available flight to Leningrad, where a car and driver would be waiting to transport him to the point of prisoner exchange.
A sudden jolt, as his driver put the GAZ in gear and drove forwards broke Popov’s reverie. A wave of the order bearing Stalin’s signature saved them from further delay and they soon found themselves nearing the front, with dusk nigh upon them. The wreckage of war was everywhere to be seen there … shell-shattered trees, burned out tanks and lorries, areas of hummocky ground where the fallen had been buried, dazed looking, possibly half-drunken soldiers wandering or loitering about.
His driver stopped to enquire of an officer about the exact location of the prisoner exchange, and was duly pointed in the right direction.
Shortly thereafter the GAZ rounded a bend and came to a halt in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by snow-laden conifers.
Popov opened the door and stepped from the car even as it was coming to a halt. For there, in the dusky twilight, at the far side of the clearing, he’d spotted five naked figures, one female and four males, in the process of being bound to wooden posts that had been sunk into the ground. Standing before them, a firing squad stood at the ready … waiting.
Nearby, a number of other prisoners, perhaps thirty or forty, mostly male, but a few women too, sat huddled together on the ground. Barely dressed, in bits of torn and tattered uniforms, they seemed totally resigned to their fates, dutifully waiting their turn to go before the firing squad. They’d all but given up.
But it was the young woman being bound to the first post on the left that had her captured Popov’s attention.
Her head and upper torso leaned forward as they tied a cord around her wrists behind the post. So that her hair partially covered her face. But her naked body … bruised and bloodied as it was … was easily recognizable to him as one he’d seen and admired before. He knew in an instant that it was her … Barbara Mohr!
Popov quickened his pace. But before he’d gotten very far, his progress was blocked by a heavy set man, uniform badge indicating he was a Commissar, stepping forward to bar his way.
“Out of my way’” growled Popov.
But the man held his ground, declaring “you can’t go there. Those people are cowards, cowards who allowed themselves to be captured by the Finns. I’ve ordered them shot!”
“I’m NKVD!” Retorted Popov. Get out of my way!”
Looking over the man’s shoulder, he could see the five prisoners had been bound in place and the firing squad had raised their guns in readiness to shoot. Barbara had raised her head to look defiantly forward, and he thought she might have seen him, possibly even recognized him … but knew the latter was probably just his imagination.
In any case, knowing he had to move fast, he kneed the Commisar in the groin, swept past the man’s doubled over bulk, and shouted “Stop! On Comrade Stalin’s orders, don’t shoot!”
Confused but obedient, the members of the firing squad slowly lowered their weapons.
“Listen to me!” he continued, stepping between the firing squad and its surprised and mystified victims. “I am Major Dimitri Pavlovich Popov, NKVD, and I am here to stop these executions on the express order of Comrade Stalin himself. Put down your guns and free these people!”
Barbara stared at him in disbelief.
And amidst the prisoners awaiting execution, Henry Underwood rose suddenly to his feet and said, “just in the nick.”
SIS Headquarters. Section D, Century House, 54 Broadway, Westminster, London, Monday morning, 2nd January, 1940
Major Laurence Grand prided himself on never .. well almost never … losing his temper before a subordinate. But this day was an exception.
“You tell me how the fuck this was allowed to happen!” He screamed, crimson-faced, at the unfortunate standing before him. “How the fuck did Underwood and Mohr get turned back over to the Russians? We had a deal! It was all signed and sealed. The Finns were supposed to ship them back to us in London!”
“Yessir, that was the deal. But it was countermanded by Marshall Mannerheim himself, who chose to repatriate Underwood and Mohr back to the Russians, as he felt he was obligated to do under a prisoner exchange deal.”
“Fuck! …. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Office of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Hotel Prinz Albrecht, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 9, Berlin, Monday morning, 7th October, 1939.
“Heydrich wants you to see this immediately, Herr Reichsführer-SS,” announced a young adjutant.
He was holding out a Manila envelope while trying rather unsuccessfully to ignore the fact that the tail-end of the pretty SS-Helferin assigned that day to Himmler was visible under the SS-Chief’s desk, or that her uniform shirt and tie, as well as her bra, lay draped over a nearby chair.
“Yes, yes, what’s in it,” a crimson-faced Himmler gasped.
“It’s a photo, Herr Reichsführer-SS,” the adjutant replied, daring to advance and lay the envelope and its contents on the Chief’s desktop.
“I can see that. What about it?”
“It was taken in Finland by o German journalist, Herr Reichsführer-SS. He was there reporting on a prisoner exchange between the Finns and the Soviets. It’s a picture of some Russian POW’s being loaded onto a lorry. Please take note of the young woman among them whose face has been circled in ink.
“Is it?
“Yes, Herr Reichsführer-SS. It is. We now know the exact whereabouts of Fräulein Barbara Mohr!”
“Scheiße!”
TBC
Somewhere on a road approaching the war zone on the Finnish-Russian border, 5 pm Tuesday, 2nd January, 1940.
Comrade Dimitri Pavlovich Popov, Major of State Security, NKVD, sat muttering impatiently to himself in the back of an immobilized GAZ M1 NKVD staff car. He and his driver had been stopped behind two Red Army lorries for nearly a quarter of an hour while, for some unknown reason, the men manning the checkpoint on the road leading to the front near Mainila harassed the drivers and occupants of the lorries.
Popov had been on the road coming up from Leningrad since early that morning. This infuriating delay was just one of many. He wished the army could somehow fight as well as it could engage in petty harassments of this kind. But, then again, he imagined that all armies were probably like that.
Nearly a month had passed, he reflected, since he’d returned to Moscow from his embassy posting in Berlin. And it had been nearly two weeks since he’d begun questioning NKVD officials at the Lubyanka, and various Moscow offices, as to what happened to the two British agents he had apprehended in a forest outside of Berlin back in October and shipped off to Moscow for questioning.
Everywhere he’d gone to ask about them, he’d found himself stonewalled. Eventually, and only through persistence, he’d learned that Henry Underwood and Barbara Mohr had indeed been held for a time at the Lubyanka, where they’d been tortured and questioned to no avail. But no one seemed to know, or think it necessary to divulge, what had happened to them after that. NKVD officialdom, he knew, could be like that. No one wants to admit responsibility for decisions made for fear that decisions deemed later to have been incorrectly made were not conducive to living a long life.
Frustrated, he’d pursued his quest to ever higher levels, only to be passed up the chain of command at every turn until, to his astonishment, he found himself in the Kremlin, on New Year’s Day no less, standing before ‘the Vozhd’ himself.
Seated at his desk, Stalin careful set aside the report he’d been studying to look up appraisingly at Popov.
“So all this is true?” He’d grunted, waving his hand over Popov’s written accounting of his quest.
“Yes, regrettably so.”
“You say that you shipped off a pair of captured British spies from Berlin, back in October, whom you believed to possess potentially valuable information on Germany’s most advanced weaponry developments as well as possible plans for military action against us, and nothing came of it?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin, it appears so.”
He’d frowned irritably and drummed his fingers on the desk top, and then abruptly ordered Popov to take his leave but return at the end of the day.
Popov did as directed, wandering aimlessly about the city for hours. And on returning to the Kremlin late that afternoon learned that Stalin was gone, but had left him a large sealed envelope.
Retreating to his room at the Hotel Moskva, he opened the envelope to find flimsy copies of NKVD orders, the first condemning prisoners Barbara Mohr and Henry Underwood to a presumably short life at slave labor at the Kondopoga Corrective Labour Camp in Karelia. A second flimsy, reported the decision on 28 December to ship the entire prisoner population of the Kondopoga camp off to the Finnish front, constituted as the 493rd Penal Battalion. A third reported that the battalion had been sent into action on the morning of 31st December near Niirala and was very nearly wiped out. A fourth, that the survivors of that battle, captured by the Finns, were expected to be returned to the Russian lines in a negotiated prisoner exchange scheduled for the afternoon of 2nd January. The fifth document was an official priority pass, signed by Stalin himself, placing Popov on the next available flight to Leningrad, where a car and driver would be waiting to transport him to the point of prisoner exchange.
A sudden jolt, as his driver put the GAZ in gear and drove forwards broke Popov’s reverie. A wave of the order bearing Stalin’s signature saved them from further delay and they soon found themselves nearing the front, with dusk nigh upon them. The wreckage of war was everywhere to be seen there … shell-shattered trees, burned out tanks and lorries, areas of hummocky ground where the fallen had been buried, dazed looking, possibly half-drunken soldiers wandering or loitering about.
His driver stopped to enquire of an officer about the exact location of the prisoner exchange, and was duly pointed in the right direction.
Shortly thereafter the GAZ rounded a bend and came to a halt in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by snow-laden conifers.
Popov opened the door and stepped from the car even as it was coming to a halt. For there, in the dusky twilight, at the far side of the clearing, he’d spotted five naked figures, one female and four males, in the process of being bound to wooden posts that had been sunk into the ground. Standing before them, a firing squad stood at the ready … waiting.
Nearby, a number of other prisoners, perhaps thirty or forty, mostly male, but a few women too, sat huddled together on the ground. Barely dressed, in bits of torn and tattered uniforms, they seemed totally resigned to their fates, dutifully waiting their turn to go before the firing squad. They’d all but given up.
But it was the young woman being bound to the first post on the left that had her captured Popov’s attention.
Her head and upper torso leaned forward as they tied a cord around her wrists behind the post. So that her hair partially covered her face. But her naked body … bruised and bloodied as it was … was easily recognizable to him as one he’d seen and admired before. He knew in an instant that it was her … Barbara Mohr!
Popov quickened his pace. But before he’d gotten very far, his progress was blocked by a heavy set man, uniform badge indicating he was a Commissar, stepping forward to bar his way.
“Out of my way’” growled Popov.
But the man held his ground, declaring “you can’t go there. Those people are cowards, cowards who allowed themselves to be captured by the Finns. I’ve ordered them shot!”
“I’m NKVD!” Retorted Popov. Get out of my way!”
Looking over the man’s shoulder, he could see the five prisoners had been bound in place and the firing squad had raised their guns in readiness to shoot. Barbara had raised her head to look defiantly forward, and he thought she might have seen him, possibly even recognized him … but knew the latter was probably just his imagination.
In any case, knowing he had to move fast, he kneed the Commisar in the groin, swept past the man’s doubled over bulk, and shouted “Stop! On Comrade Stalin’s orders, don’t shoot!”
Confused but obedient, the members of the firing squad slowly lowered their weapons.
“Listen to me!” he continued, stepping between the firing squad and its surprised and mystified victims. “I am Major Dimitri Pavlovich Popov, NKVD, and I am here to stop these executions on the express order of Comrade Stalin himself. Put down your guns and free these people!”
Barbara stared at him in disbelief.
And amidst the prisoners awaiting execution, Henry Underwood rose suddenly to his feet and said, “just in the nick.”
SIS Headquarters. Section D, Century House, 54 Broadway, Westminster, London, Monday morning, 2nd January, 1940
Major Laurence Grand prided himself on never .. well almost never … losing his temper before a subordinate. But this day was an exception.
“You tell me how the fuck this was allowed to happen!” He screamed, crimson-faced, at the unfortunate standing before him. “How the fuck did Underwood and Mohr get turned back over to the Russians? We had a deal! It was all signed and sealed. The Finns were supposed to ship them back to us in London!”
“Yessir, that was the deal. But it was countermanded by Marshall Mannerheim himself, who chose to repatriate Underwood and Mohr back to the Russians, as he felt he was obligated to do under a prisoner exchange deal.”
“Fuck! …. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Office of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Hotel Prinz Albrecht, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 9, Berlin, Monday morning, 7th October, 1939.
“Heydrich wants you to see this immediately, Herr Reichsführer-SS,” announced a young adjutant.
He was holding out a Manila envelope while trying rather unsuccessfully to ignore the fact that the tail-end of the pretty SS-Helferin assigned that day to Himmler was visible under the SS-Chief’s desk, or that her uniform shirt and tie, as well as her bra, lay draped over a nearby chair.
“Yes, yes, what’s in it,” a crimson-faced Himmler gasped.
“It’s a photo, Herr Reichsführer-SS,” the adjutant replied, daring to advance and lay the envelope and its contents on the Chief’s desktop.
“I can see that. What about it?”
“It was taken in Finland by o German journalist, Herr Reichsführer-SS. He was there reporting on a prisoner exchange between the Finns and the Soviets. It’s a picture of some Russian POW’s being loaded onto a lorry. Please take note of the young woman among them whose face has been circled in ink.
“Is it?
“Yes, Herr Reichsführer-SS. It is. We now know the exact whereabouts of Fräulein Barbara Mohr!”
“Scheiße!”
TBC
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
I am sorry to say, but this scene is rather unrealistic. A British army officer would NEVER lose his temper! One would merely observe a brief appearance of a stiff upper lip on his mouth! That's all!
The same here! A British officer would simply say :
"This is rather embarassing, by jove!"
Here inaccurracy again! An educated high ranked German official would say "Donnerwetter verdammt noch mal!" or "Zum Teufel"!
Tree would have still shot her for all the trouble she has caused!!!
Loxuru
Graf von Kreuzigung
No avail! She would respawn elsewhere within ten seconds, to cause Moore trouble there!
Churchill was an interesting fellow. Made a very amusing escape from the Afrikaners during the Boer War. The story of how Barb helped him escape would be excellent.
Hmmm … the Boer War (and Winston too) … sounds like an interesting writing project.Churchill was an interesting fellow. Made a very amusing escape from the Afrikaners during the Boer War. The story of how Barb helped him escape would be excellent.
A notable lack of mercy is one of Tree’s character flaws.
No avail! She would respawn elsewhere within ten seconds, to cause Moore trouble there!
You know me too well.
twonines
LIMERICUS
Hung her, surely!
settantuno
MUTUS PICTOR
sketch and free interpretation by A.I.
Attachments
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
@settantuno - Great work as always my friend. Here is a version of your AI plus a little photo manip ...
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Eloquently put, Meinherr. I was thinking much the same thing.