The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [114]
CHAPTER 16
Time: The Present
Horst pulled a manila file from a fat briefcase that stood by his knee, and tossed it with casual pride onto the table beside the champagne and the roses.
“I am honored to meet you, Major Manners. Your father is the unsung hero of this fruit of my researches. This is the war diary of the Kampfgruppe Brehmer, a specialist anti-Resistance unit, stationed in the Dordogne during April and May of 1944. It comes fresh from the Kriegsarchiv, the German military archives, where it seems I was the first visiting scholar ever to bother to study it. It was filed under the unit records for HeeresgruppeOst, the section that dealt with the Eastern Front, where the Brehmer Division was formed. By chance, I came across a reference to it in the Order of Battle for Army Group G, the command for southern France. So I put in a trace request and the librarians found it for me. And I think it points to the area where our lost cave may be rediscovered.”
He bent forward to offer his hand to Manners, while Clothilde tried to embrace him on both cheeks, and Lydia hovered, her hand half-outstretched. Manners opened the file.
“You read German, and German script, my dear Major?”
“I can make a stab at it. NATO courses, you know,” said Manners vaguely, skimming through the sheaf of photocopied pages and stopping at a passage where the margin had been lined in red ink.
“There are several references to Resistance actions,” said Horst. “The first one came even as they were first deploying by train, just outside the village of la Farde, about fifteen kilometers north of Périgueux, just after the track crossed the small river Beauronne. The usual reprisals were inflicted, and the unit intelligence report claimed that they were a Communist band led by an American Red Indian and a mysterious Englishman—that would seem to point to your father, Captain Manners. There is a cross-reference to Gestapo records, which have not survived for this region in the archives. But I think that means the information was obtained by torture.”
“Two dead, four wounded, one truck destroyed and one armored car damaged. Not much of an ambush,” said Manners, skimming the casualty report.
“That was because the Brehmer Division had not yet taken formally under command some battalions of auxiliary troops, Russian refugees. They report only their own casualties from the armored car unit. There’s an appendix on the auxiliary casualties—forty-two dead and over a hundred wounded. It was quite an ambush, and the Red Indians, as the Brehmer Division called them, then became the unit’s top priority. The unit intelligence officer was a Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Geissler, a former panzer officer who had been badly wounded in the Kursk salient in the summer of 1943, and after convalescence, was transferred to antipartisan duties. That’s where he joined Brehmer. He was obviously a clever man and kept good records. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
“The really interesting reference comes on the sweep operation the Brehmer unit staged after Geissler brought some brains to bear on the problem. He backtracked over all the most recent guerrilla actions and arrested and interrogated a large number of villagers from le Buisson, where there had been a demolition of the railroads and a couple of associated ambushes. They found three villagers with relatives who had joined the local Maquis. Geissler, using the routine developed on the Eastern Front, systematically arrested all the other family members, starting with those who lived on farms, on the assumption that they would be providing food to the Resistance. One from each family was shot in front of the others,