Angelus Thomsen and Boris Eltz's brother-like bond and wartime trust

Angelus Thomsen and Boris Eltz share a brother-like bond in which irreverent intimacy sits beside political trust and personal obligation. Boris leaves for the eastern front with a promise to protect Thomsen’s attractiveness to Aryan women and a request that Thomsen protect a woman he calls Theres; after Boris is killed at Kursk, the promise becomes a measure of what Thomsen can no longer do for Esther Kubis. Their friendship is both close and exposed to the machinery of war: it gives each man someone to trust, but cannot shield either from the consequences of the world they inhabit.

Familiarity and Emotional Restraint

Thomsen’s account of his conduct in Berlin distinguishes his current restraint from his earlier sexual history. Although he had what he calls “understandings” with three or four local women, he let those relationships be. He felt he had acquired emotional or moral capital and did not want to spend it. That self-description carries an important qualification: he remembers having had sex with Ilse Grese, whom he calls a murderess. His restraint is therefore not presented as innocence, but as a deliberate change in how he chooses to act.

Boris, Thomsen says, would have ridiculed this earnestness. The contrast establishes their different temperaments without making the friendship depend on agreement: Thomsen can anticipate Boris’s mockery and still value the moral seriousness he has chosen. Elsewhere, Boris’s teasing is more openly crude. When Thomsen comments on a mouth, Boris replies, “if you’ve got your cock in it,” then tells him to take care. The bluntness makes their intimacy sound practiced rather than ceremonious; affection between them does not require solemn language.

Departure and Reciprocal Trust

Boris’s letter reports that he has been released from his Austrian assignment six weeks early and is beginning his journey east “with a full heart.” He addresses Thomsen as “brother,” and turns their familiarity into a promise: he will fight to the death to ensure that Thomsen goes on being attractive to Aryan women. The joke is flamboyant, but the pledge is not merely decorative. Boris is going to war, and he frames his departure as a commitment to his friend even as he faces mortal danger himself.

In the same letter, Boris asks Thomsen to do everything in his power to protect the blue-eyed, golden-haired “Theres,” whom he describes as their contrarian from the High Tatras. The request extends the bond beyond private amusement: Boris entrusts Thomsen with someone whose safety matters to him. The language is affectionate and teasing, but the practical instruction is direct. Thomsen is expected to act on Boris’s behalf while Boris is away.

Thomsen later recalls that Boris went to war with a full heart and says that he, too, was “gravid with emotion” as he prepared to set out for his own front line in the east. The parallel wording joins their departures without pretending they are identical. Each man leaves carrying feeling for the other; each also moves into a war whose dangers neither friendship nor eloquence can control.

The Promise and Esther Kubis

The promise becomes concrete in Thomsen’s account of Esther Kubis. He remembers Boris often insisting that Esther would not let her captors defeat her, and repeating the first thing she had said to him: “I don’t like it here and I’m not going to die here.” The words make Esther’s defiance the center of Boris’s hope for her. Thomsen preserves that hope after Boris is gone, even while acknowledging that he does not know Esther’s fate.

Thomsen last saw Esther on May 1, 1943, in a sealed Block where the two were alone. He was about to be transferred to another camp; Esther was finishing a three-day confinement without food or water, imposed because she had not made her bed properly. Thomsen told her about the promise Boris had extracted from him to do everything in his power for her. By then, he says, he could no longer keep it: he had nothing to offer, not even his wristwatch.

The scene reveals the cost of Boris’s trust without claiming that Thomsen could have changed Esther’s fate. Thomsen believes she listened to his urgings because he was plainly on the wrong side of the Reich. He also leaves uncorrected her silent inference that Boris, too, might not have been all he seemed. Their bond is thus present in the conversation even when Boris is absent: Thomsen speaks in the space opened by Boris’s promise, but cannot supply the protection the promise implied. He urges Esther to live long enough to see Germany lose, turning the friendship’s inherited obligation into a fragile act of witness and encouragement.

Death at Kursk and the Meaning of the Bond

Boris is killed on July 12, six weeks after his letter, on the climactic day of the German defeat at Kursk. The battle’s scale is rendered through the account of thirteen thousand tanks across a battlefield the size of Wales, while Boris’s death is made specific through his Panther. It becomes a ball of fire before he rams it sideways into two charging Russian T-34s. He is posthumously awarded the Pour le Mérite.

The award cannot undo the death or complete the promise he left with Thomsen. Boris’s final action is described in the language of a battlefield engagement, but the earlier scenes give it a personal counterpoint: the man who joked about women and called his friend brother had also entrusted him with another person’s safety. After Boris’s death, Thomsen can carry the request and repeat Esther’s words, but admits that he could not provide even a wristwatch. The relationship’s significance lies in that distance between loyalty and capacity. Their trust survives in memory and testimony, while the war makes its practical fulfillment increasingly impossible.