Ragnarok

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Berlin, Germany Prime

27 November 1985

“The treaty will make everyone mad,” Gauleiter Emil Forster predicted, cheerfully. “That is the mark of a good compromise.”

Volker nodded in agreement. It had taken nearly two weeks — after Karl Holliston had been confirmed dead — for the Gauleiters to secure control of Germany East and then start the work of hashing out a peace treaty. Negotiations had been relatively simple — it helped that both sides wanted pretty much the same things — but there had been more than a few hiccups along the way. And yet, the urgent need to end the war as quickly as possible had helped paper over the cracks. The Berlin Treaty — the first Berlin Treaty — wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.

“You and your Reich Council will have Germany East all to yourselves,” he said. “How many people do you think will desert you?”

Forster smirked. “How many people do you think will desert you?”

Volker shrugged. One of the provisions — perhaps the most controversial — had been a general amnesty for everyone involved in the pre-war regime and the war itself. It galled him to think that Karl Holliston would have gotten away with it, if he’d survived, but he had to admit that a general amnesty was the only way to end the war. Countless thousands would probably head east — or west — to escape their crimes, yet there would be no official prosecution. The stormtroopers who had slaughtered their way across Germany Prime would never face justice.

And they won’t be the only ones, he thought, grimly. Far too many people were taking advantage of the chaos to settle old scores. How many citizens have good reason to flee?

“We will see,” he said, briskly.

He shook his head as they left the office and walked down to the ballroom. Countless dignitaries had gathered in the Reichstag, from civil servants and military officers to ambassadors from a dozen different nations. The French and Italian representatives would be signing the second Berlin Treaty in a day or two, once the final provisions were checked and approved by their governments. And after that, the British and Americans would sign a treaty intended to put an end to the cold war.

Not that we’re in any state to continue the confrontation, he thought, grimly. Rebuilding the damage caused by the civil war will take decades.

It was a frustrating thought. He’d already given orders to pull the remaining troops out of South Africa — the Waffen-SS would be headed directly to Germany East — but it would take time and money to disentangle the Reich from the rest of the world. South Africa was already screaming about a betrayal, even though Germany East had offered settlement rights and citizenship to any Afrikaner who wanted to move to the Reich. Volker couldn’t help feeling guilty about abandoning Pretoria, but there was no choice. The Reich simply couldn’t afford to maintain its commitment to South Africa.

He sighed as he caught sight of Gudrun, standing next to her husband and brother on the far side of the room. She wore a long green dress, her blonde hair falling down around her shoulders, but there was a grim… vulnerability in her eyes he couldn’t recall seeing from her before. A month in captivity wouldn’t have done her any good at all, even if she had shot Karl Holliston personally. Volker just hoped she’d be able to cope with her demons and remain on the Provisional Government. She’d be needed in the months to come.

“Winning the war was easy,” he mused. “But winning the peace… that will be hard.”

“Quite so,” Forster agreed, equally quietly. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

Volker nodded. The Economic Intelligence Service had quietly concluded that Germany East was in deep trouble. Their industrial base had always been tiny, meaning it would take decades to replace everything lost during the civil war. And they’d taken hideous losses during the fighting… holding the territories they’d already settled against a resurgent insurgency would be difficult, perhaps impossible. But the Easterners were tough. They might just hold on long enough to rebuild their lands.

And they have nuclear weapons, he thought, sourly. They can defend themselves.

He wasn’t surprised that Germany East had refused to give up its atomic bombs, even though the Americans had put immense pressure on them to do just that. They had no other way to guarantee that the other powers would leave them alone. But it was worrying. If relations between Germany Prime and Germany East collapsed, it might mean another war, one that might destroy the Reich for good. And then…

“Thank you for your assistance,” Forster said, bringing him out of his thoughts. “If you hadn’t helped us…”

“We were helping ourselves,” Volker said. “Holliston had to be stopped.”

He looked across the ballroom, his gaze passing over Admiral Wilhelm Riess. The head of the Abwehr had confessed the moment he was confronted, admitting that he’d sided with Holliston because it was the only way to protect the Reich. Volker had wanted to hang him for his crimes, but the treaty had made it clear that Riess needed to be sent into exile in France instead. Germany East didn’t want him.

And he could tell our enemies too much, Volker thought. Perhaps he should never be allowed to leave Germany.

“Too many people have died,” he added, after a moment. “Let’s put an end to it, shall we?”

But he knew it wouldn’t end. No one knew for sure how many people had died in the fighting, but hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced, their homes destroyed by one side or the other. The economy was a mess, crime was on the rise, and discontent was spreading rapidly. Volker honestly had no idea when they’d be able to hold elections, nor of what would happen when they finally did. How long would it be, he asked himself, before new political parties started to form?

And what will happen, he asked himself, when they start promising the voters everything, in exchange for being voted into power?

He didn’t regret what he’d done. He’d served the state loyally — first as a stormtrooper and then as a factory foreman — but the state had betrayed him. The state had betrayed everyone, from the highest to the lowest. There had been no choice but to rise up and fight. And yet, now the fighting was done, he couldn’t help feeling a little unsure of himself. The war had been bad, but the peace was going to be terrible.

But you have no choice, he told himself sternly. Get to work.

“I heard the French are insistent on recovering their lost territory,” Ambassador Turtledove said, as he leaned over the balcony and peered down at the crowd. “Do you think they have a chance?”

Andrew shrugged. The last few months had exposed more cracks in the Reich’s towering edifice than he’d ever thought possible. Entire swathes of the German system had weakened, or shattered, or simply vanished into nothingness. The Kriegsmarine was largely intact — naval brigades had done excellent work shipping food and supplies through Germany — but both the Heer and the Luftwaffe were badly weakened. It was possible, perhaps, that France would have a chance to recover her territories.

But the Germans still have nukes, he thought. And they’ve proven themselves willing to use them.

He scowled. The Provisional Government hadn’t warned anyone, least of all the United States, before authorising and carrying out a second nuclear strike. Andrew understood the logic — the SS base had needed to be destroyed before it was too late — but it still set a worrying precedent. God alone knew what would happen if Berlin threatened Paris or Rome if either of the two nations tried to assert themselves. Somehow, he doubted Washington would risk nuclear war for the French.

“There’s too much at risk, right now,” he said. “They might be better served building up their economies instead.”

It would be possible too, he knew. His sources in the Provisional Government had slipped him a draft copy of the second Berlin Treaty. The French — and the other subject nations — were forbidden from developing nuclear weapons or signing any form of military treaty with outside powers, but otherwise they had free rein. Given time — and the mess the Reich Council had made of the German economy — Andrew wouldn’t be surprised if the French managed to rapidly outpace the Reich. Of course, the French would have their own problems — they had an empire to support — but they might well overcome them faster than the Germans.

“Let us hope so,” Ambassador Turtledove said.

Andrew felt a flicker of sympathy for the older man. There were too many dissatisfied factions in Washington who blamed the ambassador for their feelings, even though no one would have been able to do a better job. Turtledove would be lucky to see out the rest of the President’s term in office, let alone remain in his job after the 1988 election. Hell, the midterm elections of 1986 would probably serve as a judgement on Turtledove — and President Anderson — for their work.

And neither of them had much power to steer events in the Reich, he thought, grimly. All they could do was try to influence developments.

“We’ll find out,” he said.

If there was one advantage to the war, it was that the Reich wasn’t going to be threatening the North Atlantic Alliance any longer. America and her allies could plough resources into space-based technology and other fields that promised massive returns. There would be no need to maintain a giant standing army, although he hoped that Washington would have the sense not to make any major cuts until they knew the Reich was going to stay peaceful. And then… who knew? Statehood for Japan? A closer union with the rest of the Anglo world?

But he couldn’t imagine America simply turning its back on the world.

Turtledove nodded, grimly. “Time will tell, I suppose,” he said. He nodded towards the people on the dance floor. “Do you think those people know their world is built on a giant mass grave?”

Andrew gave him a sidelong look. Turtledove was of Jewish descent, a fact that the Reich had chosen to ignore — if, indeed, it had known. The Ambassador certainly didn’t fit the horrific depictions of subhuman creatures shown in elementary school textbooks all over the Reich. But he had had family who’d lived in the Reich, before Hitler had taken power. He’d never heard anything from them since the Nazis had clamped down on emigration.

“I suspect some of them know,” he said, finally. “But the others…”

He shook his head. The Reich had always seemed oddly divided on its crimes. There were times when it seemed to glory in the horrors it had committed to safeguard its power and times when it seemed intent on covering them up. Schoolchildren had been arrested and sent east — their parents shipped to the camps — for possessing illicit copies of The Diary of a Young Girl, yet those same schoolchildren had been given textbooks that gloated over the devastation the Reich had wreaked on the pre-war world. And on everyone it considered subhuman.

“They may never come to terms with it,” he said. “And we probably shouldn’t push them either.”

Turtledove cocked an eyebrow. “Like the Indians?”

Andrew sighed. The American Indians — Native Americans, as they wanted to be called these days — had been pushed aside and largely eliminated by the Europeans when they started to settle America. But everyone involved in the whole affair was dead and buried, their descendants innocent of their crimes. The Reich… he wondered, looking down at the men below him, just how many of them had committed horrific crimes to preserve the Reich. It would not be easy to bring them to justice.

And they might trigger another civil war if they tried, he thought, numbly. They wouldn’t want to risk tearing themselves apart.

“I think it will be a long time before they try to come to terms with what was done in their name,” he said. Even now, there were Americans who believed that the Native Americans had deserved to die. The strong dominated or destroyed the weak, they said; it was the way of the world. They would have made good Nazis. “And they’ll have to do it in their own time.”

He sighed, again. “And we escaped the danger of a nuclear holocaust,” he added. “That’s something to celebrate, Mr. Ambassador.”

“It doesn’t end,” Turtledove said. “History is an endlessly repetitive story. It never has a happy ending.”

“No,” Andrew agreed. “But if history teaches us one thing, it teaches us to take what you can get.”

“Horst,” Uncle Emil said. He looked surprisingly cheerful for a man who knew he was walking on thin ice. “Can I borrow you?”

Horst glanced at Gudrun, who nodded. He wondered, suddenly, if he should leave her, even if she was with her brother. She’d been oddly depressed over the last two weeks, ever since their reunion. Being a prisoner had left its scars.

“Of course, uncle,” he said.

He followed his uncle through a side door and into a small conference room. It would have been swept for bugs repeatedly, but there were so many people — and so many factions — within the building that security couldn’t be guaranteed. He shrugged, then sat down on the nearest chair and motioned for his uncle to take the other one. Uncle Emil closed and bolted the door before taking his seat.

“Horst,” he said. “How are you coping with Germany Prime?”

“It has its moments,” Horst said. Not everyone had taken the fact that he had powerful relations on the other side very well. If he hadn’t been married to Gudrun — and taken the lead in a desperate rescue mission that had ended the war — he had a feeling it would have been a great deal worse. “And it can be very exciting.”

His uncle nodded. “Have you thought about returning?”

Horst hesitated. There was — or there had been — a beautiful simplicity about life in Germany East. Buying a farm and raising a family would be easy, particularly now. But Gudrun wouldn’t want to live there and, really, how could he blame her? Her memories of Germany East were far from pleasant.

“No,” he said, finally. It wasn’t entirely truthful, but it would have to do. “I’m staying here.”

His uncle smiled. “I would urge you to reconsider,” he said. “Germany East needs good men.”

“Men who are related to you,” Horst pointed out. “How stable is your Reich Council?”

“Unstable,” his uncle admitted. “Not all of the Gauleiters are in agreement over how we should proceed.”

“And they’re planning a civil war,” Horst finished.

“They might be planning a civil war,” his uncle corrected. “There are plenty of other problems for us to tackle.”

Horst snorted. He’d met a couple of the Gauleiters after the war, during the early scramble to put together a working government. Neither of them had struck him as being out for anything other than their own power, although that was true of his uncle too. The well-being of the Reich could go hang, he was sure, as long as the Gauleiters had their power. His uncle might be planning a civil war too.

Another civil war, he thought.

“I’m a married man,” he said, flatly. “I need to stay with my wife.”

“Bring her with you,” his uncle suggested.

“I don’t think you know Gudrun very well,” Horst said. His uncle had admitted he’d spoken to Gudrun in private, but they hadn’t had a chance to really get to know one another. “She wouldn’t let me drag her off to the east.”

He wondered, absently, if his uncle would suggest that he simply drag Gudrun eastwards with him. Last year, it would have been perfectly legal. But now… he shook his head, dismissing the thought. Gudrun would slit his throat while he slept if he tried to force her to accompany him. And he certainly didn’t want to go alone.

His uncle lifted his eyebrows. Horst felt an odd shiver of remembered guilt — it was the same expression his uncle showed whenever Horst had tried to lie to him in the past.

“I intend to stay with her,” he said, flatly. “And if she wants to stay here, I want to stay here too.”

“It isn’t normal for a husband to follow the wife,” his uncle observed.

Horst smiled. “Ah, but my wife is special,” he said. “And besides, protecting her is a challenge.”

His uncle nodded, ruefully. “There will be times when I will contact you with messages that you can pass on to others,” he said. “A private line of communications, perhaps. I trust that will be acceptable?”

“I can pass messages,” Horst said. “But nothing else.”

“You’re a good man, Horst,” his uncle said. “I’m proud I had a hand in raising you.”

Horst shrugged. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be particularly welcome in Germany East, whatever his uncle said. He’d betrayed the SS, after all. And while Holliston’s particular branch of the SS was in disarray, the Waffen-SS was still strong. God alone knew what would happen in the future.

“Thank you,” he said, instead. “And if you hadn’t helped us, we would be dead now.”

“And so would countless others,” his uncle said. “But now they have a future.”

He rose and left the room. Horst watched him go, pensively. So much had changed in the past few months that he no longer knew where he belonged…

No, he thought, as he rose himself. I belong with her.