Chapter 14.
First set - The Failure of a Revolution.
London, August 15th, 1944
It was nine in the evening, and the city was hardly lighted by the streetlights. Marion Hewitt, sitting in the room alone, looked at the heavy suitcase, one of the last bits of the life she had once known. Through the window a column of Home Guards could be seen marching by, some with some rifles over their shoulders but most of them carrying only shovels. They were old men, tired and ridiculous.
The building had been once a bakery. Most of the roof had been blown away. The old men's footfalls faded. She raised from the old chair and went to the window again, to look at her wristwatch. Still ten minutes to go. She wore a gabardine coat with the collars pulled up against the wind, and "Mosley shoes", flats with pressed-cardboard soles, sodden with rainwater. She looked like a Vivien Leigh in disgrace.
She surveyed the dark street and then she returned to the chair. The bomb lay somehwere, down the corridor, under the wreckage. She looked again at the barrel chair where she had placed her suitcase on it. Inside was her radio, a pack wireless once used by an Army infantry squad for unit messages, improved with a powerful amplifier and frequency multiplier. She brought up her wristwatch. Still five minutes to go. Through the gaping holes in the ceiling, she could see the night sky.
Marion had not visited London since her husband died, seven months ago. In 1919 her grandmother had been one of the Ladies of the Palace. When the king had to run away from the country after the revolution, her gradmother left London for the family estate in the Warwickshire area. Now her grandmother was dead and then Marion ventured to the great city. In London she had met his husband, then a captain in the army, the most gallant officer in the world. With him she had found her fulfillment, but now he was dead. Her grief had made her a traitor to the Fatherland.
She waited until the dial on her watch clicked onto the hour and then she tapped her call sign, TIB, and repeated it three times. Her next letters were WR, meaning she had no message to send that night. From her headset came some random dits and dats: Germany was acknowledging her signal. The Morse ended. That was all she ever received. She was about to remove her headset when the receiver went to life again. An actual message, brief, so she decoded it as she sat there.
"Follow Homer's instructions"
She knew of no one named Homer.
A black truck stopped two blocks away. The car had been traveling back and forth along the roads, but always closer and closer to her, its radio direction finder moving left and right. But when Marion ended her broadcast, the car slowed, then stopped, having failed again to find her in time.
Third set - The Brown Bolshevik.
Berlin, 18th July, 1929
[
Taken from "Hitler's traitor: The Rise and Fall of the Red Reich", by Ludwig Kilzer, Kalpurna University Press (2000)]
Who was betraying Hitler? It might surprise many to know that at times it seemed as if everybody in power in the KPD had a try at it. The upper crust of the party distrusted him, as he saw hem as an upstart untrained for politics, just another reactionary dressed in dress. Within his new founded party, there were those who, even acknowledging that he had done something similar to a miracle by crating a new party from the ashes of defeat, they considered themselves better suited to step into the mustachioed little man's shoes.
However, even with this atmosphere of betrayal around him, Hitler's final defeat would be caused by himself. He betrated himself. It began with the split with the KPD. He did so in such a manner that he embarrassed the leaders of the KPD, while frozing any hope of collaboration and showing to the masses that his bid was for unrestrained power. Even after this, he kept the illusion that he had an understanding with the German workers. He began to plan his next move, as if trying to prove that naked will could prevail by itself. To his friends this was folly incarnate.
During the next four years (1925-29) he struggled and fought to make his way to power, winning the masses's heart and isolating the KPD from its bases. Knowing that still a good deal of workers did not follow him, he was preparing himself for the big step.
Then a new man appeared on the political ground of Germany.
Otto-Ernst Remer was born in Neubrandenburg on 18 August 1912. He volunteered for military service in 1932 at the age of 20. His rising was fast but, it seems, his pride created him a few enemies on the way. Due to unknown reasons, he was charged with "conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman", called before a court of honor, cashiered for "conduct unbecoming an officer" and "dismissed for impropriety in 1934.
Unknwon, too young and disgraced, no one noticed when he created a new party, the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP).
No one, but Hitler, of course.