While he was being trained and crammed with Nazi doctrinaire, the Leibstandarte were blazing trails across Holland and France as the demoralised Allies fell back to the final withdrawal at Dunkirk.
At college Kurt had always shown a flare for engineering and he knew more about armoured vehicles than many a Wehrmacht general. After his initial training, the toughest in Germany, he went on a tank course and astonished his instructors with his knowledge of the Mark IV.
His expertise with armoured vehicles kept him in Germany until early in 1941. when he was commissioned. All the time he fretted for action and, after pestering superior officers with requests for a posting, he finally joined the Leibstandarte fighting in Greece.
By June 1941 Obersturmführer Kurt Wolff was in command of a Mark IV poised for the invasion of Russia. The tank was one of 3,580 on the banks of the River Bug, supplemented by 7,184 guns, 600,000 assorted vehicles, 2,000 aircraft and 750,000 horses.
At 3.15 am on June 22nd the guns opened up, the tanks rumbled forward and the bewildered Russians were overwhelmed.
The Leibstandarte captured a key bridgehead over the Dnieper and headed triumphantly towards the Black Sea, slowing down as summer storms turned roads and steppe into glue.
One morning in July, with the armoured column bogged down in black mud, Wolff and a party of six men were sent into a wood of silver birch to smoke out a harrassing detachment of the retreating Red Army.
Most of the men never saw the Russian detachment.
Two grenades hurled them to the ground. Then, as they tried to crawl for cover, the Russians picked them off among the skeletal, dripping trees with rifle and machine-gun fire.
One bullet ricocheted off Wolff’s steel helmet, another hit him in the belly, and a third bared his cheekbone.
At first there was no pain, just a wave of shock. Wolff grabbed a stick-grenade from the outstretched hand of a dead man beside him, pulled out the china pin, counted to three and hurled it in the direction of the gunfire. A sheet of flame. Silence. Then the cries of wounded men.
With one hand pressed to his belly Wolff inspected his comrades. Only two were still alive. He began to pull one of them to the comparative safety of a pile of sawed logs — as the Russian riflemen opened up again.
Wolff, blood pouring down his cheek, dragged the first man behind the logs. Then returned for the second. On the way back he prised a Schmeisser from the fingers of a dead corporal sitting against the trunk of a birch tree as though on a picnic. Then Wolff collapsed, feigning death, which in any case didn’t seem far away.
The shooting stopped.
After a few moments he heard the snap of twigs as the Soviet troops cautiously approached. There were four of them. The leader kicked the first body with his boot and put a bullet through the head just in case.
As the crack of the shot lost itself in the trees, Wolff squeezed the trigger of the Schmeisser and watched with terrible fascination as the four Russians doubled up and died. They were the first men he had killed. They were to be the last for a long time.
He was dragging the body of the other wounded German towards the pile of logs when reinforcements arrived. He collapsed at their feet.
He was transferred to a military hospital in Poland where the doctors shook their heads as they surveyed the wound in his belly. “He will never fight again,” they murmured. “If he lives, that is.”
But they reckoned without the singleness of purpose that had transformed a weakling destined for a desk in Berlin to a member of Hitler’s elite fighting unit.
Slowly, very slowly, he recovered and was awarded the Knight’s Cross ‘for his courage in single-handedly wiping out a unit of enemy troops.’
Then he was posted to a training camp where he worked on the new Tiger tanks fitted with tracks 2½ feet wide, anti-magnetic armour and adaptations to enable their engines to start in sub-zero Russia.
And all the time Wolff, still deemed unfit for active service, fretted to be back with the Leibstandarte proper as he read of the exploits of his heroes, Sepp Dietrich who answered only to Hitler, Jochen Peiper, the hero of Kharkov, and his swashbuckling comrade Kurt Meyer known as Panzermeyer.
By this time the SS Panzer Divisions had been formed under the command of an SS general. They were the most feared troops in Russia and Kurt Wolff yearned to be with them.
Once again he harangued his superiors until he was finally allowed to go before a medical board. By this time the SS were desperate for manpower — they had taken volunteers from Holland, Spain, Sweden, France (even fifty British) and ethnic Germans from the Balkans.
Wolff was pronounced fit.
In the early summer of 1943 he returned to the Russian Front where the Germans were on the defensive after Stalingrad, the biggest defeat inflicted on the Germans since the Napoleonic Wars.
But Wolff, sheltered from reality by his wounds, could not conceive of defeat. He hadn’t been brutalised. Nor, because of the physical defects of his teens, had he witnessed the early massacres and executions in Europe.
He was still an idealist.
He was the stuff heroes are made of.
He was the obvious choice for Grey Fox.
Wolff’s second test took place in a ruined farmhouse 150 miles behind the sagging German front-line.
He had been pulled back from the Viking — to which he had been seconded to patch up broken-down-tanks to an assembly camp prior to rejoining the Leibstandarte.
He was quartered in the farmhouse in one of the few rooms that still had a roof over it. (The farmhouse and the surrounding village had been razed by the Germans during the great advance.)
He shared it with two Wehrmacht officers, a Captain Steiner and a Major Wenck.
As he unpacked they remarked on the Runic flashes of lightning on his steel helmet and the death’s head on his peaked cap.
“So we have a member of one of the famous Panzer divisions as our guest,” remarked Wenck, unshaved, broken-nosed, a little drunk.
“Leibstandarte,” Wolff said briefly, throwing a grey blanket onto the crude wooden bed.
“Ah, the Führer’s bodyguard,” said Steiner, tall and arrogantly handsome except for the bags under his eyes.
Wolff didn’t reply. He lay on the bed, lit a Russian cigarette and stared at the ceiling.
“He’s certainly going to need one soon,” Wenck said. “The way things are going.
Wolff ignored him.
Steiner asked: “Been on the Eastern Front long?”
“Not long,” Wolff replied.
“Still think we’re going to win?”
“Of course,” Wolff told him. “The Russians have overextended themselves.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe in ultimate victory.”
“I’m glad someone does,” Steiner said. He stood up, over six feet tall; he would have made a good SS officer, Wolff noted, except for his mentality. “Hungry?”
Wolff who was starving said: “I could eat something.”
“And drink something,” Wenck remarked. “A little vodka will do you good,” like a doctor prescribing treatment.
They went downstairs to the dining room. One corner of the roof was bared to the grey sky, now darkening. On the pinewood table stood two flasks of vodka, two bottles of Georgian