The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

“I believe you said ‘Stauffer, Luther’?”

“That’s the name we have, Commandant,” Hessinger said.

“I thought it rang a bell,” Fortin said. “Very interesting man. You’re not the only one, Herr Cronley, who’d like to talk to him.”

“You want him?” Cronley asked.

“That’s why he’s interesting,” Fortin said. “We’ve been looking for him, but so, I’ve come to believe, was the Schutzstaffel.”

He offered the file to Cronley, who overcame his curiosity and handed it to Hessinger with the explanation, “Mr. Hessinger is my expert in reading dossiers.”

“I mentioned before,” Fortin went on, “that when the Germans came in 1940, some of our fellow Strasbourgers, Herr Cronley, were not unhappy to see them. Some of them, in fact, were so convinced that Hitler was the savior of Europe, and National Socialism the wave of the future, that they joined the Légion des Volontaires Français.

“Luther Stauffer was one of them. He joined the LVF as a feldwebel—sergeant—and went off to Germany for training.”

“So he was a collaborator?”

“So it would appear,” Fortin said. “The LVF, after training, was sent to what the Boche called ‘the East,’ as the Wehrmacht approached Moscow. They fought the Russians there, and whether through bravery or ineptitude, suffered severe losses and were returned to Germany.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about this volunteer legion,” Cronley said.

“Keeping up with them became sort of a hobby with me while we were in England. And as I had been assigned to military intelligence, it wasn’t difficult.”

“How’d you get to England?”

“I was with Général de Brigade de Gaulle at Montcornet, and I was one of the officers he selected to accompany him to England when he flew there on June seventeenth, 1940.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Cronley confessed.

“There are those, including me,” Hessinger chimed in, “who believe the only battle the Germans lost in France in 1940 was Montcornet.”

“You know about it?”

“De Gaulle attacked with two hundred tanks and drove the Germans back to Caumont,” Hessinger replied.

“Where most of our tanks were destroyed by Stukas,” Fortin said. “Who attacked us at their leisure because our fighter aircraft were deployed elsewhere,” Fortin said. “Anyway, to answer Herr Cronley’s question, a month to the day after Montcornet, I flew to England with Général de Gaulle.”

If de Gaulle flew you to England with him, and you were with Leclerc when he liberated Strasbourg, and then became the Strasbourg chief of police, how come you’re still a major?

Answer: You’re not. You just want people to think you’re not as important as you really are.

Colonel Sergei Likharev of the NKGB didn’t want people to think he was as important as he is, so he called himself Major Konstantin Orlovsky.

I wonder if your real name is Fortin, Commandant—probably Colonel—Fortin?

“What was left of the Légion des Volontaires Français,” Fortin went on, “was assigned relatively unimportant duties in Germany—guarding supply depots, that sort of thing.”

“And Stauffer was among them?” Cronley asked.

“Oh, yes. The Boche liked him. He’d been awarded the Iron Cross and promoted to leutnant for his service in the East. Then, in September 1944, a month after Général Leclerc and the French Second Armored Division liberated Paris, the Germans merged all French military collaborators into what they called the ‘Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS Charlemagne.’”

“‘All French military collaborators’?” Cronley parroted.

“The Boche had also formed the Horst Wessel brigade of young Frenchmen. Other collaborators had had a quasi-military role in Organisation Todt, which built the defenses in Normandy and elsewhere—the defenses that had failed to stop the Allied invasion. Then there was the collaborationist version of the Secret State Police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, which was known as the Milice. And there were others who fled as the Allies marched across France.

“The Germans didn’t trust many of them, but they apparently did trust Leutnant Stauffer. He was taken into the SS as a sturmführer—a captain—and put to work training the newcomers.”

“And here is Sturmführer Stauffer,” Hessinger said, as he handed Cronley the dossier.