‘Perfect. I’ll see you soon.’
As the call ended, Tayte checked his watch, remembering that he had an appointment with Trudi Scheffler in what was now less than two hours. He hoped Jean wasn’t going to mind it being a quick something to eat because he didn’t want to jeopardise his interview with Trudi now that he had one. He went back to Jan.
‘I’m really sorry about this,’ he said. ‘Something’s come up and I have to go. Can I leave this with you and come back in the morning? It could be too late to carry on today, unless you can keep the offices open and don’t mind working late.’
‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind working late at all, but I’ve got band practice after work today. I play bassoon in a wind band, you see. I’ll keep at it for as long as I can, though.’
Tayte smiled. ‘Tomorrow morning then,’ he said, collecting his briefcase, his flowers, and the notes he’d made. He shook Jan’s hand. ‘Thanks for all your help today. I’ll try to be here first thing.’
Tayte left the offices of the Munich Standesamt hoping that Jean would understand that he had to come back to the record office and finish what he’d started. Although she’d already told him she needed to pay another visit to the hospital in the morning, so he figured he’d have some time on his hands again. As he arrived back in the reception area, heading for the desk to ask if someone could call him a taxi, he began to wonder what information on Ava Bauer Jan might find, and whether or not it would prove useful to his search.
Since learning that Ava Bauer and Johann Langner had married, it had puzzled Tayte that Langner had never mentioned it while he and Jean were talking with him at the hospital. Or perhaps he would have got around to it if they had been with him long enough to hear the full story he had begun to tell them. He wondered how Langner’s story would have played out, and whether he would have talked about Ava and what became of her. Tayte could only guess for now. Whatever the answer, he thought the last years of the war must have been very difficult for Johann, both on and off the battlefield.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Near Vienna, Austria. 17 April 1945.
As night fell, exhausted and in need of sleep, elements of the fragmented Leibstandarte set up defensive positions along the Vienna-Linz road. Johann Langner knew none of the soldiers he now found himself keeping company with, all acquaintances formed through war having also been destroyed by it. As the senior ranking officer amidst the small unit he now found himself a part of, he was in command of a handful of machine-gun squads and twenty or so riflemen, in part made up of boys whose uniforms barely fitted them, and whose heads had not yet grown sufficiently to fit the helmets they wore. How these young and inexperienced soldiers had made it out of Vienna at all, Johann could not imagine.
The advance of Germany’s Seventh Army in Normandy during Operation Lüttich the previous year had quickly been brought to a juddering halt. Bombed into retreat by superior Allied air power, Johann and what was left of the Leibstandarte soon found themselves outflanked and encircled near Falaise, but managed to break through in a hard-fought retreat that forced them to leave their armament and artillery pieces behind. With the loss of around 5000 men of the elite Leibstandarte, Johann knew he was lucky to have made it out of France alive.
By the end of 1944, in what the Allies would call ‘The Battle of the Bulge’, the Leibstandarte were back on the Western Front in the forested Ardennes mountains, spearheading Operation Wacht am Rhein under the command of Wilhelm Mohnke. But, low on fuel and with their ranks bolstered by many inexperienced replacements, by the end of January 1945 the Leibstandarte was once again forced into retreat, and Johann soon found himself in Hungary, returned to the Eastern Front as part of Operation Spring Awakening—Frühlingserwachen.
Germany saw early gains as they tried to secure some of the last oil reserves still open to them, but the offensive proved too ambitious, and so the Leibstandarte, with the 6th SS Panzer Army under Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, withdrew to Vienna to hold defensive positions against the fast approaching Soviet Army. By the beginning of April the Soviets had arrived. After a week of intense street fighting they had breached the city centre, and Johann and his Kameraden had fought to hold Vienna against overwhelming odds. The city he had once visited as a wounded soldier, and the Prater parkland area through which he had walked with Ava, had become a battleground. Even the Ferris wheel beneath which he had proposed to her was now, like much of this once beautiful city, all but destroyed.