Storm Front

Chapter Sixteen

Reichstag, Berlin

28 July 1985

It was not, Hans Krueger decided, going to be a particularly pleasant meeting.

He’d been expecting a vote on the deployment of additional troops to South Africa – his sources had told him that the SS was trying to strike a deal with the military – and had been preparing for a long argument when the news about the protest leaflets reached the Ministry of Finance, followed by an urgent demand for an immediate meeting. He’d obtained one of the leaflets from the security office, read it while walking to the Reichstag and made his way up to the central meeting room. The others had already arrived and were seated around the table.

“This is a crisis,” Karl Holliston said. The Reichsführer-SS had one of the leaflets unfolded in front of him and was glowering down at it. “Someone spread seditious propaganda in Berlin itself and escaped!”

Hans took a seat, forcing himself to remain calm. The SS – and the other security forces – would be embarrassed, if not humiliated, by the whole affair. He didn’t blame them. It was physically impossible for them to patrol the entire Reich, let alone maintain a level of omnipresence second only to God’s. Their control rested on fear, rested on the population believing that they might be under surveillance at any moment, that anything they said might be recorded and used in evidence against them at a later date. To have someone – or a small group of traitors – pull off such a coup in the centre of Berlin would call their capabilities into doubt.

“Let us not turn this molehill into a mountain,” he said, as he dropped his own copy of the leaflet on the table. “Annoying as this is, it is a very minor issue.”

“Any defiance of the Reich is a major issue,” Holliston snapped. “By now, copies of this damnable tissue of lies are spreading through the city!”

Hans frowned. “They are?”

“Yes,” Holliston said. “Apparently, a number of copies were dropped into letterboxes all over Berlin. We’ve had at least a dozen handed in to the local police. This is not an isolated act of protest, but a calculated strike against the authority of the Reich!”

“So we track down the people responsible and eliminate them,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said. “That should not be too difficult.”

“It may not be that easy,” Hans said. He hadn’t had long to think about the implications, but he was a veteran of countless political wars. “We need to treat this very carefully.”

“We need to stamp on these traitors as hard as we can,” Holliston insisted.

“It isn’t that simple,” Hans said. “How many leaflets were not handed in to the police?”

He pressed on before anyone could try to answer an unanswerable question. “This leaflet urges people to ask questions about other soldiers who have dropped out of contact, neither writing to their families nor returning home on leave,” he said. “How many civilians in Berlin have relatives in South Africa, relatives who have seemingly vanished because we have not told their families about their conditions? It will not be long before people start putting together the full story.”

“They are not encouraged to ask questions,” Holliston said.

Hans gave him a sharp look. “You plan to keep two mothers from talking about their children? Or two housewives from worrying about their husbands? Right now, I imagine, word is spreading, no matter what we do about it. There is no way we can deny everything and expect to be believed.”

“Radio Berlin can tell the Reich that the leaflets are talking nonsense,” Holliston insisted.

“But they’re not talking nonsense,” Hans snapped back. “And the population will know they’re not talking nonsense.”

“Then we tell the population that the soldiers died in a good cause,” Holliston said. “We shift our policy to honouring the dead and tending to the wounded!”

“That would add credence to the leaflet’s claims,” Field Marshal Gunter Voss said. “It would also make it look like we were allowing these… these rebels to dictate our actions.”

Holliston scowled at him, angrily. “And they also want free elections to the Reichstag,” he said. “Are we going to tamely surrender power?”

“We could give them what they want,” Hans pointed out. “The Reichstag hasn’t had any real power since 1944.”

“The Nazi Party has governed this country since 1931,” Holliston said. “In fifty-four years, we have risen to a position of global dominance our forefathers couldn’t possibly have imagined. Our armies are the strongest in the world; our settlers are turning the wastelands of Russia and the Middle East into new civilisations. There is no reason to give power to a bunch of whining civilians who have done nothing to earn it.”

Hans frowned, inwardly. There was a certain degree of social mobility in the Reich, either through the military, the SS or the Nazi Party bureaucracy. He’d started out as a young bureaucrat, after all, and Holliston – to give the devil his due – had been a brave stormtrooper who’d seen genuine action. But the odds of anyone reaching the Reich Council were staggeringly low and, by the time they actually reached high office, they would be so thoroughly ingrained with the ideals of their particular branch that they’d have trouble seeing anyone else’s point of view. There were far too many bureaucrats, after all, who couldn’t understand why small businesses were complaining about the tax burden.

“I think we have to admit,” he said slowly, “that everything has just changed.”

He tapped the leaflet with one finger. “We have been using trickery to hide the fact that the death rate in South Africa is alarmingly high – and that isn’t the only thing we’ve been trying to hide. The state of our economy…”

“To hell with the economy,” Holliston thundered.

“That’s precisely where it’s going,” Hans said, mildly. “We have been robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last decade, using the loot from our conquests and our captive markets to paper over the cracks in the system. Now, we are running out of time; now, people are going to be asking questions; now, our reaction to those questions will only give the charges against us” – he tapped the leaflet again – “more credence. You know as well as I do that people talk, that word is going to spread through the Reich…”

He forced himself to calm down with an effort. “And you ordered the BDM girls to be corralled in the square,” he added. “Just how many mothers do you think you panicked when they heard that their little girls were under arrest?”

“Those girls were helping to spread these damnable leaflets,” Holliston said.

“There isn’t a shred of evidence that the official BDM girls were doing anything other than handing out the standard propaganda leaflets,” Hans said. That might have been a lucky break; he’d long suspected that no one actually bothered to read the leaflets, no matter what they might have been told at school. “They’re not Jews, Karl. You can’t arrest – even for a couple of hours – fifty-seven schoolgirls and expect no one to comment on it.”

“I suggest,” Voss said, “that we focus on the issue at hand. Do we have any leads at all?”

“We’re working on it,” Holliston said. “There have been some… clashes between the different organisations involved in securing Berlin. The SS should take the lead, but the Gestapo and the Order Police think differently. I propose that the SS should formally take command of the counter-rebel operation.”

Hans frowned. The SS had lost control of the Order Police in the fifties, after Himmler had overreached himself. No one outside the SS – and quite a few factions within the SS – had been keen to see Himmler in sole control of the security services. And he wasn’t blind to the implications of handing Karl Holliston so much power. He’d take what he could and then make it permanent, perhaps even using it to boost himself into supreme power. Had he even started handing out the leaflets in the first place? Hans wouldn’t have put the thought past him.

And he may think I started it, he thought, morbidly. But neither of us really wants to undermine the Reich itself.

“We can discuss that later,” he said. “What do we know?”

“The leaflets were distributed by at least three girls, all wearing BDM uniforms,” Holliston said. “Only a couple of the witnesses were paying close attention; one reported a girl with long dark hair, another insisted he’d seen a blonde with a very large chest.”

“The witness was a teenage boy, I assume,” Voss said.

Hans fought to hide his smile. “It could easily have been a middle-aged man,” he pointed out. “Was it?”

“It was a soldier, home from the wars,” Holliston said, curtly. “As far as we can tell, all of the BDM girls who were trapped within the square were linked to matrons, so we believe that the fakes left the square before the alert was sounded and made their escape into the city. So far, we do not have any leads on just who spread the rest of the leaflets, but we are working on it. There aren’t, however, many places the leaflets could have been printed.”

Voss took the leaflet from the table and inspected it. “The paper is softer,” he said. “Not absorbent enough to be useful, unfortunately, but it isn’t a perfect copy.”

Holliston gave him a sharp look. “A small printing shop could have done it,” he said, “and we will follow them. However, the most likely place where the leaflets were produced is the university.”

Hans swore under his breath. Holliston had always hated the university, hated how it brought American ideals into even a relatively small population of students. And yet it was necessary. No one knew better than Hans just how badly the Reich was falling apart, just how desperately they needed to reinvigorate their technological base. The students might be the only thing capable of saving the Reich from itself.

“We shut the university down,” Holliston continued, “and investigate all the students for seditious leanings.”

“That would do a great deal of damage to our already weakened economy,” Hans pointed out, tartly. “The computer network alone would be badly hampered if we refused to allow university-taught experts to work on it. And without that…”

“Our forefathers didn’t have a computer network,” Holliston snapped.

“They weren’t facing anyone who did, either,” Hans countered. “The Americans have been leveraging their computer network and using it as the base for a whole new series of technological developments. If we shut our network down, as sparse as it is compared to the American design, we might as well shoot ourselves in the head and save time!”

“And yet we have to buy computers off the Americans,” Holliston said. “How do we know we can even trust them?”

“The university will give us better computers in time,” Hans said. It was an old argument, but the truth was that the United States had moved far ahead. Reverse-engineering some of the more advanced machines the Reich had… obtained from the US had proved impossible, while what computers the Reich could produce were unsellable outside the Reich’s captive market. “We just need to give it time to flourish.”

“You’ve been saying that for five years,” Holliston reminded him.

“And what use,” Hans asked, “could one get out of a five-year-old child?”

“I think we’re moving away from the point,” Voss said. “We don’t have time to bicker when we need to come up with a response to these leaflets.”

“That is correct,” Field Marshal Stoffregen said. “Allow me to suggest a compromise.”

Hans exchanged a look with Holliston, then nodded.

“Finding these rebels and rooting them out is a priority,” Stoffregen continued, smoothly. Military officer or not, he wouldn’t have reached high office without being a skilled politician. “At the same time, we have no proof that the university is involved in the affair – and we do need the university. Therefore, I propose that we do not act overtly against the university, but we also place control of the affair in the hands of the SS. This would, of course, be a short-term measure.”

“That would be acceptable,” Holliston said, after a moment. “But we do need to tighten up security, both on the university campus itself and the streets.”

And you’ll do your level best to make it a long-term measure, Hans thought, coldly. The hell of it was that he doubted he could argue against the suggestion. They would leave the university in peace, at least for the moment, in exchange for a short-term surrender of power to the SS. And you can use that to take over the university or shut it down, given time.

“Putting additional policemen on the streets might be a good idea,” he said, carefully. “I would insist, however, that your people within the university be carefully trained in recognising the difference between student chatter and actual sedition.”

“There’s no time to train up additional agents,” Holliston said. He leaned forward. “A strong and visible presence may deter students from joining the movement, even if it doesn’t lead to any of the ringleaders.”

“Who may not even be students at all,” Hans snapped. He didn’t fault Holliston for jumping to such a conclusion, but there was no proof. A cell within the Nazi Party itself could have produced the leaflets, then arranged to have them handed out. It wasn’t beyond belief that some of his subordinates had actually decided to take matters into their own hands. “It was hard enough to build the university, Karl. We don’t want it wrecked overnight.”

“There is no need to import Americanisms,” Holliston sneered. “We have always been at our strongest when we go back to basics.”

“There’s nothing basic about a Panzer tank,” Hans snapped. “There’s nothing basic about a radio, or vaccinations, or man-portable antiaircraft missiles. And the Americans are already ahead of us! How long will it be before they come up with something that gives them an unbeatable advantage?”

“You don’t know that will happen,” Holliston said.

“I doubt Fredrick the Great could have predicted the arrival of panzers,” Hans pointed out, sharply. “And even if he had, could he have stopped a dozen panzers from ripping his army into little pieces?”

“We need to vote,” Field Marshal Stoffregen said, before Holliston could come up with a biting retort. “All those in favour?”

It was, Karl Holliston conceded afterwards, a bitter victory.

He was not fool enough to believe, despite the prospects for winning the endless struggle for power in the Reich, that Hans Krueger was responsible for the leaflets, or for aiding and abetting their producers. Krueger, whatever his faults, wouldn’t risk the fundamental balance of power that controlled the Reich. And that, Karl was sure, was true of everyone else who had a seat on the Reich Council. They simply had far too much to lose if social upheaval swept through the Reich.

But they were soft. And that softness was going to get them killed.

It had to be the university, he was sure. The SS, the military, even the party bureaucracy… none of them would tolerate the kind of free-thinkers it would take to gather the evidence, produce the leaflets and then distribute them to the masses. They’d have problems even recognising that the masses could be politically important. Hell, they weren’t politically important. What did it matter if some workers wanted to form an independent union, or some housewives started demanding more rights, or schoolchildren wanted an end to the harsh discipline and relentless tutoring? There was nothing they could do about it, was there?

Karl had studied universities in America, back when he’d been mustering his objections to the whole concept. Yes, they did encourage the development of new technological ideas – he’d never tried to deny that – but they also encouraged the spread of political ideas. And some of those ideas could be very dangerous. The current racial melange that made up the United States was partly the work of American students, who’d fought to embrace Untermenschen to their bosom. Good German girls wouldn’t even think of allowing themselves to be sullied by an Untermensch; American girls didn’t think twice about dating and even marrying Untermenschen men. The Americans didn’t even seem to realise just how badly they were damaging their own society…

And Japan is the worst of America, Karl thought. It still made him shudder, every time he thought about just how deeply the races had blended together, just how the once-proud white stock that had tamed America had been diluted by the intrusion of Japanese blood. They will not be allowed to spread their perversions over here.

But it had to be the university students, he told himself. No other group in Germany could combine an awareness of their surroundings with a political naivety that would urge them to try to spread the word. There was simply no one else so foolish, so free of the ever-present listening ears – and besides, if students could cause long-term political damage in America, perhaps they would think they could do the same in the Third Reich.

He kept his face expressionless as the meeting finally came to an end, giving him the chance to hurry back to his office. The Gestapo and the Order Police, for once, would have to take orders from the SS, orders that would lead them right to the rebels. And if the rebels proved harder to find than he expected…

It might be time to start coming up with some contingency plans, he thought. Silently, he started drawing up some possible concepts. Plans that will stamp on the rebels once and for all.