The Saint Peter’s Plot. Derek Lambert

passed with flying colours,” the Captain said. “One more test now. The worst. Poor bastard.”

      “What I want to know,” Wenck said, “is why I get a knee in the crotch and you only get a punch in the gut.”

      “A matter of rank, Sturmbannführer,” Steiner told him. “A mere Captain is only worth a blow in the belly whereas a Major deserves a kick in the balls.”

      * * *

      Snow was falling when Wolff’s third and last test took place in the winter of ’43.

      Winter was the Russians’ ally, the Germans’ enemy. The Russians revelled in it, their white-clad troops covering phenomenal distances on skis. And they were always on the attack, Cossack cavalry suddenly materialising from behind veils of falling snow, Stalin tanks splintering the ice beneath the snow, guns lighting the dusk as shadows filled shell-holes on the desolate steppe.

      One morning in late November Wolff was fed with information about a minor counter-attack aimed at rescuing a pocket of German troops cut off by the Russians.

      That night, while Wolff lay sleeping in a cottage, a three-man raiding party entered the village where the Germans were camped, took him prisoner — helpless in his sleeping bag — tied him to a sled, and took him through the snow-flying night to a deserted mill ten miles from the village.

      The interrogation was conducted by candlelight.

      “We know there is going to be a counter attack. From what direction will it come? At what time?” All in broken German.

      Wolff quoted regulations about interrogation of prisoners, gave his name and number and nothing more.

      At first they roughed him up a bit. Knocking him down as, hands tied behind his back, he stood rigidly to attention as he had once stood on the parade ground of the Lichterfelde Barracks in Berlin.

      When he was on the ground they kicked him.

      Wolff stared up at his captors but saw only eyes gleaming in the candlelight in their woollen snow-masks.

      “At what time? Where?”

      Then they stripped off his outer clothing, bound his feet and dumped him outside in the snow where the temperature was —5, even lower with the Chill Factor created by the wind whining over the steppe.

      It had stopped snowing and the moon shone through wounds in the clouds. Wolff struggled with the rope binding his wrists and ankles but soon the cold froze his limbs.

      Then they carried him back into the mill and dumped him into a bath of hot water where he experienced the agony that only those who have immersed frost-bitten limbs in hot water can appreciate.

      “Where? When?”

      Name and number.

      They shrugged. “You are being very foolish. Tell us what we want to know and we will let you go. If you don’t …”

      Wolff who knew about Russian atrocities — they had once decapitated some Germans and paraded their heads on spikes — prepared himself to die.

      He thought of his father. Of the ranks of vines with their fat grapes. Of Munich. Of a girl in Poland. Of the ageing athlete, Muller, who had made a man of him. Thank God for Muller who had given him the stamina to resist.

      They then removed two fingernails from one hand with a pair of pliers.

      “Where? When?”

      Name and number. Fighting the cold blackness that threatened to envelop him.

      They stood back and considered him, weighing the problem of all torturers: not to go too far: not to defeat the object of the interrogation.

      Only two of them did the talking. The third, whose name was Wenck, stood in the background, arms folded across his chest.