The city rose up in the distance, spread out on a high plateau surrounded by fields and orchards. The road here was lined with overturned vehicles, wrecked heavy weaponry and tanks; on open stretches of track, in the distance, hundreds of freight cars were still burning brightly. In old times this city was called Stavropol, which in Greek means “the city of the Cross,” or rather “the city of the Crossroads”; it had been established at the junction of the old roads to the north, and at one time, in the nineteenth century, during the campaign to pacify the mountain tribes, it had served as a military base for the Russian forces. Today it was a little provincial town, sleepy and peaceful, which hadn’t grown fast enough to be disfigured, like so many others, by hideous Soviet suburbs. A long two-lane boulevard framing a mall of plane trees climbs up from the train station; toward the bottom, I noticed a fine Art Nouveau pharmacy, with an entryway and bay windows in the shape of circles, their panes blown out by the detonations. The Kommandostab from Ek 12 was also arriving, and they put us up temporarily at the Kavkaz Hotel. Sturmbannführer Dr. Müller, head of the Einsatzkommando, was supposed to have prepared for the Gruppenstab’s arrival, but no arrangement had yet been decided on; everything was still in flux, since the general staff of Army Group A was also expected, and Oberst Hartung, from the Feldkommandantur, was taking his time in assigning quarters: the Einsatzkommando already had its offices in the House of the Red Army, opposite the NKVD, but there was talk about setting up the Gruppenstab with the OKHG. Yet the Vorkommando hadn’t been idle. They had immediately gassed, in a Saurer truck, more than six hundred patients from a psychiatric hospital who might have caused difficulties; they had tried to shoot some of them, but that had caused an incident: one of the lunatics had started running in circles, and the Hauptscharführer who was trying to kill him had finally pulled the trigger when one of his colleagues was in the line of fire; the bullet, passing through the madman’s head, had wounded the noncom in the arm. Some Jewish leaders, summoned to the old offices of the NKVD, had also been gassed. Finally, the Vorkommando had shot a number of Soviet prisoners outside of town, near a hidden storehouse of aircraft fuel; the bodies had been thrown into the underground storage tanks.
Einsatzkommando 12 wasn’t supposed to stay in Voroshilovsk, since it had been assigned to the zone that the Russians call the KMV, the
