A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (49 page)

After his lesson with Barkhorn, Franz talked with Steinhoff, who had his own worries about Luetzow. Steinhoff said that Luetzow kept forgetting his lessons and was not grasping the new jet, as if his mind was screaming over his thoughts, trying to keep him away from the cockpit.

T
HE HAPPY SOUND
of an accordion echoed through the orphanage after dinner, a bouncy tune reminiscent of an airline’s theme song. The song was “Rhapsody in Blue,” by American composer George
Gershwin. Anyone new to the orphanage would have cocked an ear and thought,
Have the Americans arrived?
The song came from a sitting room that the pilots had turned into a bar where they gathered every night. There, Franz sat in the midst of his comrades and played an accordion he had borrowed from his host family.

The Count, Barkhorn, and others tapped their feet. They asked Franz to repeat some songs two or three times. Everyone kept a bottle of spirits close to hand. Franz played songs by Gershwin, his favorite composer, and the German love song “Lili Marlene,” while his comrades sang along. Franz suddenly appreciated that his mother had made him take lessons as a child. Had there been an organ in the orphanage, he could have played that, too.

Franz stopped the music when Steinhoff, Luetzow, and their guest, Colonel Trautloft, entered the room. Franz and the others stood shakily to attention then collapsed into their seats. Trautloft was visiting to discuss JV-44’s aircraft needs with Luetzow, after their recent losses.

Steinhoff encouraged Franz to resume his music. Trautloft asked someone to pass him a bottle. Trautloft had once been a fighter pilot, too. He had fifty-eight victories to his name. The men drank and drank, except for Luetzow, who remained sober and observant. Soon unable to hold a tune, Franz set the accordion down. Trautloft and Steinhoff told loud stories from the Eastern Front. One by one the other pilots excused themselves to quit for the night, until Franz found himself alone with Trautloft, Steinhoff, Luetzow, and one or two others.

“What are you going to do when it’s all over?” Trautloft asked the men. Luetzow shrugged. As a professional military man, he knew his career would be over. He and the others assumed that after two world wars, the Allies would never allow another German Air Force. Steinhoff said he wanted to teach philology, the history of languages, if higher learning was permitted after the war. Franz said if he did not have his mother to care for, he would start over in Spain. The others looked at him with surprise. Franz explained that he had only known good times there.

Steinhoff nodded. Trautloft’s eyes narrowed with seriousness. He said that if they were smart they would all follow Franz there. Lowering his voice to a whisper, Trautloft warned his comrades that every man in Germany would soon be branded for the crimes of a few.

“It’s all true,” Trautloft said. “The whispers.”

Franz looked at Trautloft, confused. Trautloft revealed what he had seen in October 1944. He had been the inspector of the day fighters when a rumor had reached his desk of Allied airmen imprisoned by the SS in a labor camp.

Trautloft knew that the Geneva Convention made captured airmen the responsibility of the German Air Force, not the SS. Trautloft decided to personally investigate. Under the guise of inspecting bomb damage at a nearby factory, he asked the SS to show him and his adjutant around their labor camp called Buchenwald.

Inside the fences, the SS showed Trautloft only the camp’s presentable aspects, the administration offices and the guard’s barracks. The inmates, the SS told him, were all political prisoners who provided the workforce for a munitions factory within the camps’ walls and other factories nearby.

Trautloft was about to leave when a man in a gray uniform with dark gray stripes shouted to him from behind a fence. The man spoke German but said he was an American officer. The SS tried to dissuade Trautloft from talking with him, but Trautloft pointed to his rank and made them stand back.

The American told Trautloft that he was one of more than 160 Allied airmen imprisoned there. He spoke German so perfect he must have learned the language before the war. He said that he and his fellow prisoners had been brought to Buchenwald because they had been captured while hiding with the French Resistance or trying to escape. Instead of treating them as prisoners of war, the Gestapo and SS had labeled them as “terror fliers,” the equivalent of spies, and sent them to Buchenwald instead of an Air Force–run P.O.W. camp.

The American begged Trautloft to rescue him and his comrades.
He said that several men had already died of pneumonia and worse, that they suspected the SS had plans to kill them. The American said the SS were working people to death in the camp and killing others outright—children, Jews, priests, Soviet P.O.W.s, and more. The American pointed to the crematorium that he said burned their bodies.

Trautloft returned to Berlin deeply disturbed and worked quickly to arrange a transfer of the Allied airmen out of Buchenwald.
^*

Trautloft would later learn that he had rescued the Allied airmen seven days before their scheduled execution by the SS.
^†
But his authority as an Air Force colonel only went so far. Trautloft was powerless to free the scores of other prisoners from Buchenwald, the camp where the SS would eventually work to death or outright murder fifty-six thousand people.

Franz and the others remained silent. Trautloft’s testimony stunned them. Franz had been exposed to the idea of a “concentration camp” during the pre-war years. That’s when The Party had advertised Dachau to the world and dangled the threat of imprisonment there over all of Germany. But not until hearing Trautloft’s eyewitness account had Franz ever imagined that the camps had become like Buchenwald.

Shocked and dismayed, Franz did not doubt Trautloft. He had seen The Party turn Germany into a place where a person could be killed for telling a joke. Had The Party gone from incarcerating its opponents in 1934 to slaughtering them in 1944? The idea no longer
seemed far-fetched. Franz knew he could have ended up in a camp as punishment for his brother’s actions. Steinhoff, Luetzow, and Trautloft could have been thrown into a camp after their mutiny’s failure. Every man and woman in Germany had reason to fear the camps, where some 3.5 million Germans would eventually be incarcerated as “political enemies” of The Party. But never before had Franz heard what was actually happening in the camps and what could have happened
to
him
.

Luetzow and Steinhoff seemed especially troubled by Trautloft’s account. They had served on the Eastern Front, where they had heard whispers of a new type of camp that only SS eyes had seen. The camps were rumored to exist to exterminate The Party’s enemies. As they did with most wartime rumors, they found the notion of “death camps” difficult to believe.
^*
But now Trautloft’s testimonial confirmed that the whispers of a greater evil could be true.
^†
After the war, the evil would have a name, when the Allies opened the camps and lifted the SS’s veil of secrecy. What the Allies revealed was a systematic slaughter of Jews and other innocent people called the Holocaust.

TWO DAYS LATER, APRIL 18, 1945, AROUND 1:00 P.M.

Inside the alert shack, where the pilots hung their parachutes, Franz suited up to fly. He slid his gloves over his hands. He zipped the cuffs
of his baggy leather pants over his heavy black boots. During the days prior, Franz had flown in combat against B-26 medium bombers. Now he was preparing for a different mission. Franz had agreed to test fly a jet that had had its engine changed, because he had the most familiarity with the 262’s engines. Mechanics had started up the jet and were warming the motors. They and the machine waited not far from the alert shack.

The shack rattled. Franz glanced out and saw three jets launching, led by Galland. Steinhoff followed, leading another flight of three jets into takeoff position on the worn grass strip. They carried experimental rockets, a dozen under each wing. Steinhoff’s jet stopped and idled, its engines throbbing. The Count pulled up behind Steinhoff’s left wing and another pilot behind Steinhoff’s right wing. Nearly three years prior, on one of his nine-hundred-plus missions, Steinhoff had destroyed the burning Soviet plane to spare its pilot from a painful death. The Count had been on his wing then and was again now.

The field was rough, with white patches where ground crewmen had filled in craters. They called the struggle “the battle between shovel and bomb.” Steinhoff’s jet lurched then rolled forward, gaining speed by the second. The others followed him. About three-fourths of the way along the runway he had nearly reached the required 120 miles per hour to liftoff, when his left tire exploded. His jet veered violently left into the Count’s lane. The Count was lifting into the air as Steinhoff’s left landing gear collapsed. Steinhoff’s left engine and wing slapped the earth. His plane bounced into the air from the impact, flying momentarily on borrowed time.

Franz ran to the shack’s doorway. He and the others saw Steinhoff’s plane pitch into the air. They saw the nose of the Count’s plane about to fly into the tail of Steinhoff’s. But just before they could collide, Steinhoff’s jet fell heavily downward. The wheels of the Count’s jet skimmed just past Steinhoff’s tail.

In the split second as his plane dropped, Steinhoff prepared to crash. He pulled hard on his shoulder straps, drawing his body into
his seat. He knew that if he was knocked unconscious, he would burn to death. In front of the cockpit lay a fuel tank holding 198 sloshing gallons of kerosene. Behind him sat another 330 gallons. Below his feet rested a third tank of 37 gallons.

Steinhoff’s jet slammed to earth. The impact stripped both of the jet’s engines as the machine slid, leaving the engines behind. Steinhoff heard a
pop
as the craft ignited. It kept sliding, trailing a trough of fire, until grinding to a stop.

Around Steinhoff, the world turned red. In slow motion he saw a tire and parts of his plane tumble through the air, past his canopy. In all directions he saw fire and heard the flames’ angry hiss.

The fuel tank beneath Steinhoff’s feet burst, shooting flames up through the holes in the cockpit floor. Steinhoff’s wrists began burning at the gaps between his gloves and jacket. With his gloves, pants, and feet on fire, he flung his straps from his shoulders.

The oxygen tanks behind him ruptured, blowing the flames like a blowtorch. The inferno swirled around the cockpit. Steinhoff could no longer see his plane’s wingtips through the flames. It looked like he had been dropped into a burner barrel. The metal walls of the cockpit began to melt and drip.

Steinhoff flipped open the canopy and jumped onto the wing. The fire hit his exposed face, his eyes instantly swelling shut. Any other man would have dropped and died. But Steinhoff clawed at his burning face and ran along the wing, his screams drowned out by the blast furnace around him. The rockets ignited beneath his feet and launched, skipping along the earth before exploding. Steinhoff jumped blindly off the wing.

High above, Galland had heard the Count’s frantic radio calls. He turned his jet and saw Steinhoff burst from the blaze, “a human torch.” Galland wept, because he knew he was watching his friend die. Franz saw Steinhoff staggering, a “flaming figure.”
⁶
Cannon shells ruptured behind him. Steinhoff fell to the ground and into a pool of burning jet fuel. He rolled through the flames in agony.

Franz frantically searched for a fire extinguisher but found none. He sprinted toward Steinhoff on the heels of two mechanics. The mechanics reached Steinhoff first and pulled him from the fire, their hands burning when they clung to his liquefied jacket. When they pulled him to safety, they gasped. Steinhoff’s once lean and striking face had melted.

Franz stopped just yards from Steinhoff and pulled his hair in horror. Two other ground crewmen raced up in a
kettenkrad
used to tow the jets. Returning to his senses, Franz helped the mechanics lift Steinhoff into the bed of the vehicle. Franz hopped onto the ledge of the
kettenkrad
with the mechanics and together they held Steinhoff down, smoke rising from his body, as the driver sped away.

Franz told the driver to stop at the alert shack. He knew JV-44 had no ambulance or doctors, but he knew they had to do something quickly. Franz screamed for the men to bring cold water and dump it on Steinhoff. He ran to the phone and called Oberfoehring Military Hospital in Munich, just six miles away. The hospital operator said they would dispatch their ambulance.

When the water came, Franz had the others put Steinhoff on the ground. They poured bucket after bucket on him, and each time he moaned.

Franz and the others tried to strip Steinhoff of his clothes so water could reach his skin, but when they did they found his skin stuck to his uniform. They removed his flight helmet and found his helmet and scalp had become one. Steinhoff’s fingers had fused into claws. The men needed to cut off his boots. They retched when they saw the muscles of Steinhoff’s feet.
⁷