Axis of Evil

Chapter Twelve: News from Golgotha

Adolf Hitler Orphanage

Berlin, Germany

20^th April 1941

Kristy Stewart, star of stage, screen and Internet, was bored. The orphanage was the same as a thousand others she’d visited in her life; the only major difference was the big picture of Adolf Hitler in each and every room. The children, boys and girls, were taught a very pro-Nazi version of German history, including the ‘stab in the back’ legend and a tale of a glorious uprising in 1923 in Munich, the infamous Beer Hall Putsch.

Stewart had to smile. She hadn’t learned much about the Beer Hall Putsch in school, but she very much doubted that it had really been the glorious battle between the working class men and the police, backed by a shadowy conspiracy of big bankers, communists and Jews, that the teacher – a ridiculously fat woman with a paddle in one hand – was talking about.

“And then they wounded our noble Reichmarshall,” she said, referring to Goring. The children didn’t smile; there was no derision of Nazi figures in the room, not even the infamous Rudolf Hess. “He kept on marching, and marching, until it was clear that all was lost.” Her voice became sticky-sweet. “And then our Fuhrer, the great man who made Germany strong again, realised that the Jews had become too strong for the brave heroes…”

The children hissed at the mention of the Jews. Stewart shuddered; she’d read one of their textbooks, portraying Jews as evil, vile, stupid and… well, paedophilic. The textbook had avoided that term – perhaps child molesters were all in the SS these days – but the implication had been clear. The story about the Jewish dentist and the young blonde Gudrun had been straight out of one of the horror urban legends that had been making the rounds around Britain.

I wonder if I’ll find Kilroy here, she thought absently, as the teacher brought her paddle down on the behind of one of the boys, who howled and clutched his behind. The teacher whacked him again and he shut up, taking his place again in the classroom.

“And then the Fuhrer offered himself up to the enemy, in order to give the others time to retreat and regain their strength so that Germany could be strong again,” the teacher continued. Stewart racked her brains; hadn’t Hitler been captured the day afterwards? “They put him on trial, but the people were so determined that he would not be killed that they were unable to kill him, and the black-shirted noble warriors laid down their lives to protect him at his most vulnerable.”

The children cheered. Stewart recorded it faithfully, knowing that the images would be sent directly back to Britain. “Heinrich Himmler, the guardian of the Reich, the Fuhrer’s shining sword, faithfully recorded the words of the Fuhrer in the book, Mien Kamph, that we will be studying later today,” the teacher concluded. “Now, who can recite for me the leading words of the Fuhrer’s speech last night?”

“I am General Rommel,” a small boy began, before the teacher was upon him. The German public was forbidden to listen to the Free Germany broadcasts, but the transmissions were so powerful that they blanketed out the Radio Berlin signals. Stewart winced as the teacher pulled down his trousers and blistered his behind with the paddle, leaving terrible marks on his pale rear.

“Now, stand over there and don’t move,” the teacher thundered, with a half-scared look at Stewart’s escort. SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Thierbach, a young blonde man who had been assigned temporarily to her while Roth handled a separate mission, nodded approvingly. Stewart didn’t react, but felt sick; pressed against the wall, the marks on the boy’s rear were all too clear.

“Now, Anna,” the teacher said, speaking to a pretty dark-haired girl, who shrank back. Stewart knew that the teacher would quite happily apply her paddle to the girls as well as to the boys. “What did the Fuhrer say?”

“He commended General… Kessel…” Her voice broke off as she tried to pronounce Kesselring. “He said that he’d done great service and would get an extra iron cross.”

“Close enough,” the teacher said grudgingly. Stewart felt a tug at her sleeve as Thierbach pulled her out of the room. The teacher’s voice continued to speak as Stewart left, her camera already executing its ‘dump’ protocol, transmitting everything back to England.

“Those children were orphaned by your people,” Thierbach informed her, as soon as they were alone. “Not, I should add, the children of soldiers or seamen, but those of common workers who were killed in the factories. This next room is for those children who were caught in the blasts of your weapons.”

He opened a door into a darkened room. Stewart stared ahead of her; the room was filled with children playing, watched over by three jolly nurses. She felt a tidal wave of vomit rising up and forced it down desperately; all of the children were mutilated in some way. One had no arms; another was missing a leg. A third…

With a muffled cry, Stewart stumbled from the room. Cold logic suggested that the children were Jews or Poles or even candidates for the eradication programs that tried to exterminate people with birth defects, but cold logic wasn’t much against the sheer horror of the room.

“That was your work,” Thierbach said, almost regretfully. Stewart forced her mind to work; was he telling the truth or was he lying, deliberately or otherwise? She knew that the BBC research teams would be studying the footage and attempting to determine the truth, but it would be difficult.

“I never did anything like that,” she said desperately, trying to hold down her gorge. He passed her a glass of water; only afterwards did she realise that the entire manoeuvre must have been planned. Thierbach squeezed her arm gently; she shook him off angrily.

“That’s what your people did to us,” Thierbach said. “If you like, you can meet with their mothers, those who survived when the factory was destroyed. Their fathers are away at the fronts, being killed trying to keep your people away from these people here.”

Stewart recognised the glint of fanaticism in his eyes and said nothing. “Your own history books claim that the Russians are going to rape, loot and pillage across Berlin – and we won’t let them. Whatever it takes, we’ll do it, just to prevent that from happening again.”

Stewart scowled as Thierbach led her out of the orphanage. She’d been to camps for orphaned children in Syria, where rewriting history was the rule, or would have been the rule before the Germans entered and crushed the country. She didn’t know as much as she should, but she knew that it had been Hess, not Himmler, who’d transcribed Hitler’s tedious book.

They’re rewriting history, she said, and saw clearly for once in her life. Her hand danced over her PDA, recording comments in Urdu, a skill she’d picked up from a former boyfriend. The transliteration would be confusing even to a native speaker, and she was confident that Germany had no Urdu speakers. If Himmler was rewriting history to make him seem more of a hero, what did that mean for Germany? Was it an attempt to build grassroots support… or was it something more sinister?

“In that carriage there,” Thierbach said, “our Fuhrer forced the French to sign the treaty that created Vichy France, and later bound General Petain to the service of the Reich after you people broke the agreement to leave the French Empire alone.”

Stewart allowed him to lead her into the carriage. It seemed older than a year; the sign on the front claimed 1910. The plaque was of interest, she decided, written in French, German… and English.

ON THIS SPOT THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE FRENCH PEOPLE WAS BURIED FOREVER AND THEY ACCEPTED THEIR PLACE IN THE NEW ORDER UNDER THE FUHRER.

“Very… certain,” she said finally. The message rang a bell somewhere in her mind. “There’s no question that you’ll win, right?”

Thierbach smiled condescendingly at her. “Of course we’ll win,” he said. “The Fuhrer has decreed it himself.”

Not too far away, in one of the honeycomb of bunkers under the city, a troika met; Field Marshal Kesselring, General Galland, and Obergruppenfuehrer Herman Roth. It was a curious meeting; the men had little in common. Kesselring was there as one of the foremost strategists in the Reich and the author of the current war that was being fought in the Middle East. Galland was there as the fighter pilot turned Luffwaffe general and designer. Roth was there as the de facto Head of Future Technology Research, a task that called for an administrator, rather than a scientist.

“Thank you for coming,” Kesselring said. He’d explained the concept previously; even with Speer’s reforms there were still too many layers between the various departments within the Reich. By holding individual meetings, between people who really understood what was happening, they would be able to share information without too much delay.

“The ME-300 project has been proceeding slower than we anticipated,” Galland said. “Unfortunately, the plans we were provided with, I suspect, assumed a higher level of manufacturing technology than we possess. There have been accidents…”

Roth nodded. “As far as we can tell, the plans we were provided with were made by hobbyists; there was no government effort and apparently only a handful of production models. The designers… had no concept of the requirements of a real air force, or the resources needed to transform their visions into reality.”

“There is also the possibility that your source was lying to you,” Kesselring said.

“I don’t believe so,” Galland said, before Roth could reply. “The plans… should work, it’s just that we lack the ability to transform them into reality at once.”

Roth smiled thoughtfully. Germany had – and would have had in the years until the Reich fell the first time around – its fair share of people who had big dreams… and lack the ability to turn them into reality. With some of the future documents, it was possible to streamline the slender resources that Germany possessed into areas they knew would work, but not all of the workable ideas were worth developing.

“We do understand most of the principles involved,” Galland said. “The scientific information will keep the… scientists not directly involved in Project Kern busy for years, but they seem to assume that the people involved are stupid. There was even a warning about accidentally brining the hammer down on your thumb.”

Kesselring chuckled and Roth joined them. His… lover had once attempted to explain the legal culture to him, but he had to admit that it sounded crazy. If someone was stupid enough to hurt themselves, why should the company that had made the product – and in many cases given them what they asked for – make them independently wealthy for life?

“It’s the disparity between science and engineering,” he said, knowing that Galland understood, at least. “We know how to build a Eurofighter, one of the craft that waged war against us last summer, but we don’t have anything like the ability to build one. We lack, in many cases, the basis for understanding the construction methods involved; we lack the machines to make the machines… and so on ad infinitum.”

“I would be delighted to have a Eurofighter,” Kesselring said. “I suppose that the crashed planes were useless?”

Galland nodded. “They rigged small charges inside the plane’s systems,” he said. “Their pilots are brave men; I don’t think that anyone in the Luffwaffe would be happy to be flying in a bomb. We can’t learn anything from charred remains, and, of course, you know what happened to the pilots.”

Kesselring scowled. One Eurofighter – at least they thought it was a Eurofighter – had come down in France. Before the local commandant had realised what he had on his hands, the British had sent three helicopters in to rescue the pilot. A second craft had crashed in Germany… and the citizens had lynched the pilot.

“I suppose that we’ll have some more success with the new radar-guided guns,” he said. Speer had worked wonders producing more and more radar sets… and linking them to guns had taken only a week once the idea had been suggested. It was crude and difficult, but it worked, roughly. Even shooting at an approximate location could be fatal for the pilot of the British craft, flying through a stream of shells armed with proximity fuses.

Galland nodded. “The handful of ME-269s we have are quite useful,” he said. “They’re not matches for the British jets, not by any measure, but they have some advantages of their own. Of course, once we proceed to the ME-300, we should have planes that will be only slightly inferior to the British jets at close quarters, and they should still be more manoeuvrable than the Eurofighters. The downside is that they will still lack guided rockets of their own.”

“The ground-attack rockets cannot be adapted for the task?” Kesselring asked.

“No… seeker heads,” Galland said. He spoke in English; there were technical terms that German hadn’t yet developed. “Their rockets are guided by radar, or by heat sources,” he said. “We’re giving a lot of thought to a plane that can’t be detected by radar, but that’s years away at best. One… ah, problem with the ME-300 is that its hotter than a ME-109 by far, so…”

“It will be a better target,” Roth said, just to show that he understood.

Galland smiled wryly. “I fear so,” he said. “Of course, we also have some idea of how they counter their own weapons, and some of the methods we can install ourselves. We had some successes with flares during the battles over England, and we can now track their radar stations.”

Roth smiled. One of his successes, one of the reasons that Himmler thought highly of him, was that he had managed to smuggle some advanced technology from America to Mexico to Portugal to Germany. Not enough to tip the balance in their favour, but one of the commercial-grade sensor arrays, designed for a fishing boat, could track enemy radars.

“We have stockpiled a lot of V1s,” he said. “I assume that they’ll be deployed as part of the operations in the Middle East?”

Kesselring nodded. It had taken nearly a month to get everything set up – and thank god for the warning about enigma. Using landlines through Russia was a security nightmare – and likely to become worse if Hitler actually launched an invasion of Russia – but if they’d transmitted the signals it would have been known to the British within minutes. As it was, conveying plans for a coordinated offensive had been difficult beyond belief.

“They’re going to be mass-fired at the radar and RAF bases,” Kesselring said. He shook his head. “Who would have thought that the British would have only a handful of genuine fast-jet bases?”

“Certainly not the Luffwaffe,” Roth teased dryly. The Luffwaffe had flung away resources on attacking airfields that no longer existed.

“Meanwhile, we hit them everywhere again,” Kesselring said. “Their weapons are superb, but we have to destroy their army before they manage to create a bigger army.”

Roth nodded grimly. One thing his source couldn’t tell him was how well the British were doing at rebuilding their army. American production was rising, despite all the labour unrest in the country, but exact British figures were hazy. Of course, if the British chose to raise regiments from India, they could do it by the bucket load.

“I don’t like this,” he admitted. “I’m not a strategist, but aren’t we spreading ourselves too thin, particularly with…”

His voice trailed off. “Not at all,” Kesselring said. “The majority of the effort in the Middle East will be conducted by our noble allies the workers and peasants of Russia,” he said. “In the Far East, of course, all of the burden will be on the Japanese. By contrast, our own efforts in that theatre will be modest, and concentrated on Suez. The only real gamble is the… special operation, and we can afford to write that off if necessary.”

Roth nodded. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

Deeper within the bunker complex, Heinrich Himmler met with one of his most trusted officers. SS Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Krueger, a short bespectacled officer, wasn’t the iron-skinned officer of Himmler’s dreams, but his skill at organising the SS departments was second to none. He possessed the rare gift of convincing everyone to work together for a greater good – without force or threats. It was necessary for dealing with nuclear scientists, who were temperamental and immune to threats. Genius, even Jewish genius, had to be nurtured, not crushed under a jackboot.

“Heil Hitler,” Krueger snapped, saluting. Himmler returned the salute with a genuine smile; Krueger was someone he respected as well as trusted. “I come as ordered!”

Himmler smiled. Krueger’s only flaw was a tendency to overact. “Heil,” he snapped back. “Have a seat,” he continued in a more normal voice. “I need a full report on the project for the Fuhrer.”

Krueger bowed, and then took his seat. “It proceeds,” he said. “The new source of information is a wonder, Herr Reichsführer, but we have to make almost all of the equipment for the Kern project from new. Fortunately, we have some sources of uranium, and we hope to have a prototype reactor in six months. That reactor will be built at Plosti.”

Himmler nodded. One incidental effect of the British nuclear strike, which had confirmed even to Hitler that the weapon worked, was that the former oil refinery was contaminated with radiation. The SS’s researchers had been delighted to have a chance to examine the effects of the radiation on the workers who were slowly, carefully, clearing away the radioactive topsoil and dumping it into the Black Sea.

“If we have a leak, hopefully the British will mistake it for a leak from their own bomb,” Krueger said. “We lack enough data to be certain, and of course we’re breaking the project into a series of steps to avoid exposing the scientists, the Aryan ones at least, to radiation.”

Himmler steepled his fingers. “Excellent,” he said. “Tell me; when is the earliest that we’d have a bomb for ourselves?”

Krueger hesitated. “It depends,” he said honestly. “Now that we have a very good idea of what we’re doing, the problem becomes one of engineering and refining the material. We might be able to have one as early as next year, and then we can ramp up production. However, there is a possible interim solution.”

He told Himmler. Himmler smiled. “This is possible?” He asked. “It can be done?”

“Yes,” Krueger assured him. “We can make one of those weapons without a serious problem.”

Himmler nodded. “Then I want you to have one of them ready as soon as possible,” he said. His mind raced ahead, considering the history of the future. “Yes,” he said. “It might just be helpful, I think.”