Storm Front

Epilogue

Germanica (Moscow), Germany East

25 August 1985

The operation had failed.

Karl Holliston, Reichsführer-SS and Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich – he’d claimed the title in his broadcast to Germany East – cursed under his breath as he read through the final set of reports. The commandos, thrown into action with minimal preparation, had killed dozens of people, but failed to decapitate the provisional government. It had been a desperate throw of the die and it had failed.

And so there will be war, he thought. There was no other alternative, not now his plans had misfired so badly. But perhaps that’s what we need.

The Reich had been forged in fire. The humiliations inflicted on Germany after the Jews and Americans had stabbed the Germans in the back, the suffering of its people, the sneers of the French and British… they’d fuelled a desire for revenge that had created and shaped the Nazi Party. And then the war of conquest had carved the Greater German Reich out of decadent and corrupt Europe, while the Jews and countless other undesirables had been purged from the land. And the endless war against insurgents in the east had turned Germany East into a fortress of true Aryan values, even as Germany Prime slowly collapsed into decadence.

We had a war, he told himself. But it was too far away to be noticed.

No one had cared, he was sure, about the death toll of Hitler’s war. They’d known the Fuhrer was fighting for their future, that the bodies of young German men were all that stood between the Reich and hordes of murdering Untermenschen. Children were prepared, in school, to fight for the Reich or support those who fought for the Reich, while young women were taught to bear children, many children, and older women encouraged to keep the younger ones in line. But they hadn’t been able to see the South African War. No bombers had flown over Berlin…

…And so they had forgotten the truth of human nature. The world was a dark place, red in tooth and claw. Let the Americans prattle, if they wished, about right, wrong and morality; let the British talk endlessly of the white man’s burden. The Reich rejected all such concepts as unspeakably wrong. There was no morality in the world, but what one made of it; there was no reason to assist the Untermenschen, if only because the Untermenschen would take what they were given and use it to slit the giver’s throat. The world was divided into the dominators and the dominated. Those who did not choose to dominate became, in time, the dominated. It was a law as old as humanity itself.

“The war will remind our people of the truth,” he said, out loud. Germany Prime had been a safe place to live. It wouldn’t be safe for much longer. “And they will be purged of their weakness in fire.”