Chapter 19.
First set - The Failure of a Revolution.
In a castle, 90 miles south of Berlin, August 25th, 1944
Lieutenant Hubert Gruber detested paperwork, but loved the long parades of the prisoners. The Geneva Convention was behind all that fuss of sending back home all that prisoners (so virile and musculate), but he was over with the paperwork and had managed to run away from his desk. Gruber bit his lips and paced along the wall near the chapel, waiting for it to end. From time to time, outside the walls of the castle, the POWs would march in brisk formation, flaunting about their recovered freedom and to the train that would begin to long way back home. On his part, Colonel Kurt Von Strohm had vanished, after seeing his last chance for having some profit from the war turning into naught. "Ve have von ze var. And look vat I got! I am a German officer and I am as poor as a rat!"
The British and American POWs had become expert in tight about-faces. Today the last POWs were marching away and Gruber was bored to sobs. RAF Flight Lieutenants Fairfax and Carstairs were marching right now in front of him. Gone with the war was the last chance for
official fun: Gruber knew the POWs had a radio hidden in the castle because the entire POW population learned the BBC news on the same day they were broadcasted. Despite searches that had entirely removed the castle upside down, Gruber had been unable to find the radio. And even that hobby was gone...
The POWs were using an American marching chant: "
She left. She left. She left, right, she left. You had a good home. You had a good job. You had a good life, but she left, right, she left." Gruber walked away to chew a Hershey bar. It had been found among the American airmen's emergency rations found in the downed Mitchell bomber, which had crashed in a pear orchard a kilometer from the castle. Colonel von Strohm had divided them evenly among the guards. His first chocolate in three months.
None of the American crew had survived. Their bodies had been pulled from the wreckage and buried in the military cemetery near the river. Their dogtags would be given to the Red Cross. Shouts came from the marching formation. Gruber turned to the sound. A fight had erupted among the prisoners. Two prisoners fell to the ground, flailing at each other with the other POWs roaring and quickly choosing sides. Gruber rushed toward the fray then hesitated, quickly swinging his gaze the length of the yard. Fistfights were classic POW ruses, designed to draw attention away from an escape, but he saw nothing unusual. There was no reason now, when they were going home at last. Thus, he turned his attention to the two brawlers. "Break it up!" he bellowed in English. He waded into the crowd.
Thus, he was to busy to see a POW vanishing into the nearest trees. He missed also the chance to see the senior Syndicalist officer smiling thinly.
"Good flight to Berlin, Jack", he thought.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for
modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No
country can be really well repared for modern war unless it is governed
by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient
bureaucracy (Aldous Huxley)
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)]
...In the end, it was a close run. The election took place shortly after the Geli Raubal scandal. A journalist, Fritz Gerlich, had discovered that Geli, Adolf Hitler's half-niece, and, according to some rumours, Adolf Hitler's lover, was having an affair with Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler's closest confidant. Hardly had been time for the news to spread all around the country than Geli and Ernst made their way to Switzerland and from there to England, leaving behind Hanfstaengl's wife and family and a bewildered Hitler (1).
This event had the effect of lowering a bit the popularity of Hitler, who used his Brownshirst in a desperate (and violent) attempt to supress the news. It goes without saying that the vicious beating of Gerlich didn't help, either, the cause of herr Hitler. Even then it was a close thing among him, Otto Wels (SPD) and Otto-Ernst Remer (SRP). Remer adn ths SRP had made just a quite normal start, going up quite slowly in the polls, winning ground, but not at an impressive rate. Then fate wanted to have the last word of the electoral campaign being said by a non-political who disliked with all his heart democracy: Wilhelm II. The ancient warlord, still at odds with the SPD and not willing to even recognize the existence of the "Red Bohemian corporal" (2), had to say aloud that Remer was nothing buts an upstart and wanted someone else but the "upstart", that is, Remer, to won. Was the Kaiser trying to have Kaas or Hugenberg to win? No one knows it for sure. Fate wanted, too, that all the Germans newspapers printer in their first page the Imperial words. And the German volk, that loved so much his Kaiser, took at heart his words, but with a twist of irony, so to speak.
Perhaps it was the clouded heavens of Northern Germany, as those days were quite rainy and sad ones. Perhaps it was some quite of madness caused by the drinking stupor that came out of some Oktoberfest held too much in advance in Southern Germany. Perhaps it was the idea of "what the fuss? Those Northern and Southern madmen are going to spoil it after all" that seemed to pervade in Central Germany. Or perhaps it was just an unconscious mood that wanted to make a trick on the Kaiser. The fact was that, suddenly, Remer began to rise on the polls like a comet.
However, even then it was a close run. With Hitler's rising schizophrenia about the culture of betrayal around him among the ranks of his part, and with Wels being loyal to himself and his strong belief in freedom and honour, they forgot to look back. And Remer was there, with a powerful but, sometimes, contradicting series of speeches, calling for the return of the national pride forgotten by the long years of victory and peace and his hatred to the Syndicalists and all the foreign influence. And the Germans, who care not a jot about anything but his daily needs, tired of so many governments that, since 1918, had just been a continious rehearsal of the same, decided to try. And this tempation, that was folly incarnate, made Ernst Otto Remer Chancellor of Germany, even if he did not do as well as he had hoped, polling 34.7%, rather than the 50+% that he had expected.
Berlin, January 2th, 2004
Meanwhile...
Käthe (with a short skirt and showing her lovely belly to the world): I have bad news for you, Duckie...
Duckie (trying not to get wild and being killed in the process): I have worse news for you, Käthe...
Käthe (surprised): Uh?
Duckie (looking at the legs that endless): You first.
Käthe (moving to the side and allowing a charming brunette to be seen by Duckie): I want to introduce you to my new girlfriend.
Duckie (raising his hands and looking defeated): Bugger... you win.
Käthe (grinning): And your "worse news"?
Duckie (as if awakening): Oh, that... nothing really. I've won a seat in the Reichstag, you know.
Käthe (stopping grinning): What?
Duckie (hidding behind a tree): It isn't my fault! Who could have guessed that so many people would go AWOL?!?!?!
Käthe (afraid for Germany): I hope you won't get elected for a high post...
Duckie (turning red and still behind the tree): Those are the worse news...
To be continued...
(1) As Hanfstaengl had called Geli an "
empty-headed little slut, with the coarse sort of bloom of a servant girl with no brains or character", I couldn't resist the idea of the two lovers running away together. The most unlikely couple ever, perhaps.
(2) Our good old Adolf, who else?