The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Thirty-Four

Felixstowe, England

Brigadefuhrer Franz Deininger ignored the acid-like disapproving look of his driver, not quite concealed enough for the perfection the SS demanded of its newer recruits, and helped the French girl out of the car. Janine — such a lovely name — had been a surprising discovery in Felixstowe; he’d sampled almost all of the whores in the brothel and most of them, like most English girls, were ugly. The girls who had attached themselves to members of the invasion force weren’t that bad, but they required care and attention on their terms, and Deininger just wasn’t the sort of man to give it. He wanted much more from his girls and none of them would be suitable. It was much easier to go with a suitable whore.

He relaxed as his driver departed, taking the car with him, and smiled. He’d done everything he could to ensure that the SS’s part in the forthcoming operation would succeed, and now it was time for a little rest and relaxation. The driver might disapprove, but then, he had been a child during the last war and a person who had grown up never knowing anything but Hitler and the Brotherhood of the Death’s Head. The SS was his mother, his father, his brothers… and like all of his kind, he had little tolerance or understanding for those who had been born in the dark years before Hitler. He was a good soldier in an organisation where strict adherence to orders, however insane, was commendable, but his very lack of imagination would condemn him to remain at a low rank for the rest of his life.

Deininger suspected that that was an inevitable effect of SS training. Deininger himself had joined because he’d liked Himmler’s young confidante and had heard that the SS was a quick route to promotion, assuming that one survived the early years. He had no real liking for fighting, nor did he have the eternal hatred for the Jew, the Communist and the Slav that Himmler demanded, but he had a talent for organisation and creative thinking that had earned him his rank and position within the SS. He’d organised the slave labour camps, the creation of an entire private SS economy, and much more besides, all without really believing in Himmler. The little schoolmaster, as some of the older men called him behind his back, could have his dream of an Aryan elite, but there was no need for them to share it. They were too important and they knew it.

“So, what do you think?” He asked as the whore looked around. “I had it secured for my person and it is my pleasure to share it with you.”

Janine looked doubtful. “But it doesn’t belong to you,” she protested, after a moment. Deininger almost smiled at the thought of a whore having any concept of property rights, not when she belonged to any man who could make her price, but felt the urge to indulge her. “It belongs to the person who owns it.”

Deininger laughed as he opened the door. “That person fled and left it here, and to the victors go the spoils,” he boomed cheerfully. It was almost night, but under the blackout curtains, the cottage glowed with light. The British had withdrawn too quickly to sabotage most of the area’s infrastructure, much to his private relief, but he had limited most of it for the citizens. He hadn’t done anything of the sort with his people. “Shall we have dinner?”

Her face lit up as she saw the table. His cook, who knew his tastes, had set it up well with a small cold salad and a pile of bread, which smelt wonderful. Janine wouldn’t have eaten so well in her life, certainly not since the invasion had begun. The English population were on low rations for a reason. He’d ensured that the brothel got a small amount of additional food — they would need to keep their strength up for the soldiers, sailors and dockyard workers — but the madam had sold most of it onwards on the black market. If she had been anyone else, she would have been enjoying life in a penal camp, but for the moment, Deininger could only watch her. She was performing an essential service, after all.

She ate carefully, her puzzlement showing on her face as she ate; her mind was conceiving all kinds of nightmarish scenarios for her weekend with him. She didn’t know why he was in the mood to celebrate, or why he had even been allowed a weekend’s leave; she didn’t understand what he had in mind. Deininger could guess at her thoughts and was tempted to reassure her; if he had had the darker tastes of many SS men, they could have been satisfied in one of the secured camps. He wanted a weekend with a pretty girl, almost a wife, something that he had never really been able to obtain on his own. He had never married — despite an SS rule that all senior officers were to be married and have at least four children — and he wanted to enjoy the good parts of married life, without the bad parts. How could he have explained that to her?

He kept up a constant stream of chatter about nothing as they ate, telling her about some places in Berlin and Albert Speer’s latest project for a city built on the ruins of a Russian city. The slave labourers had already been assembled to clear the remains of the city; all that mattered now was finalising the plans and starting work before the dreaded Russian winter interfered with the construction. Hitler had added his own touch to the city — Deininger allowed himself the private thought that Hitler wasn’t a designer any more than he was a painter — and so it would be built exactly as he had specified, working millions of Russians to death in the process.

“They say that once this invasion is over, the panzers will roll east and put an end to Beria,” he said, cheerfully. She showed little reaction. If he believed her story, she was the daughter of a wealthy French family that was pushed to escape France and sell her into prostitution. He didn’t believe her, but as that was part of the magic, he hadn’t poked at it too closely. “What do you think of that?”

She considered. “Doesn’t the Fuhrer have enough land?”

“That’s not the point,” Deininger explained dryly. He took another sip of his wine; Janine had barely touched hers at all. That was understandable; she didn’t really understand what he wanted and didn’t want to render herself helpless, although she was in no real danger. “National Socialism is a jealous god and demands that all rivals are to be crushed. In the next few years, the new lands in the east, already almost completely free of churches, will become the breeding ground for a new religion, designed by the Reichsfuhrer himself. The Panzers will roll into Italy and burn the Vatican to the ground, taking it and building a new temple to the superman on the rubble. There will be many more changes in the face of Europe in the years to come.”

He smiled. Perhaps the wine was going to his head, but it hardly mattered; he wanted a chance to boast to his ‘wife.’ “And much of that will be organised by me,” he said, shaking his head. “In forty years, perhaps, no one will remember that there was such a man as Jesus Christ or that the Vatican stood at all. Himmler’s religion will dominate the world.”

It made him wink at her. He’d seen enough of Himmler’s religion to know that it hearkened back to the old days, before Christianity had appeared in Europe or Islam in the Middle East; it called upon the old gods and the concept of the superman in a haze that bemused anyone who had the background knowledge to understand what was actually happening. That kind of knowledge would be sparse in Himmler’s Europe; the SS would be the new Knights Templar, with their own rituals, sacrifices, holidays as well as punishments for infidels. He’d seen them sacrifice a Jewess once, deep below the ground on a spot that a charlatan had claimed was an ancient place of power, but then… Himmler had always been credulous when such tales came to his ears. He had even dispatched entire missions to Tibet looking for ancient lore…

“And everything will be very different,” he said and stood up, pulling her to him. Her clothes came off at his touch and he gazed on her beauty. Someone had marked her and that man would be flogged when he found out his name, but she probably wouldn’t know; whores rarely knew the names of the men they serviced. His hands ran down her back and stroked her gently. “I think that…”

He saw the shadow and froze just before a man stepped into the room, a pistol pointed directly at Deininger’s head. He opened his mouth as Janine turned and stiffened in his arms, her mouth going very wide as she was motioned away from him and over to the sofa where she crossed her legs, covered her breasts with her arms, and looked terrified. Deininger watched the newcomer carefully, noting the mask and the black clothes, almost German in their design, and wondered; who was he, really? Three other men arrived and one of them went over to Janine, pointing a gun at her. He forced her to turn over, before tying her hands and legs, gagging her, and carrying her off into the bedroom. It was all-too-easy to imagine her fate.

Deininger’s mind raced as the other men secured him to a chair. They carried German pistols, but the more he looked at them, the more certain he was that they weren’t actually Himmler’s Purifiers. They’d all heard rumours of a secret group charged with enforcing proper decorum for an SS officer, one of the many secrets within the secretive SS, but the four men didn’t seem to hold themselves like any SS man. Their weapons were older, as well, dating from 1940… and that suggested that someone merely wanted him to believe that they were Germans. That meant that they were British…

“Listen carefully,” the leader hissed in accented German. “We know you’re a powerful German and we don’t care. Shout for help, scream… make any noise at all, and we will kill you, understand?”

Deininger nodded. “Good,” the leader said. Deininger struggled to place his accent, but couldn’t, which added to the theory that they were British. “When we ask you questions, answer them quietly and completely, or we will hurt you, understand?”

“Yes,” Deininger said softly. Terror was making it harder to speak, but as he started to understand what was going on, it became easier to focus his mind and concentrate on limiting what he told them. “I understand.”

“Good,” the leader said. He held a knife to Deininger’s throat. “What time is your driver due back here?”

Deininger wanted to lie, but knew that if they had been watching the house, they would have a good idea of his routine. They didn’t look sloppy, and so they might have asked the question, just so they could find out if he was lying or not. If he lied, they would hurt him and… Deininger had watched enough torture to doubt that he could hold out when — if — they went to work on him.

“He’s due back at eight tomorrow morning,” he said, in English. The leader didn’t seem surprised by the sudden switch in language. “What are you going to do with Janine?”

“Your wife will be fine as long as you cooperate,” the leader said. Deininger almost laughed; only the certainty that laughing at the wrong time could get him killed kept the smile from his face. Janine had been hired to play the role of his wife for the weekend, not to actually be his wife… and if that got out, he would be a laughingstock. “How many SS men have you moved into Britain?”

Deininger considered the question for a long moment. If he knew for sure how much his opponent knew, he would have risked trying to provide them with false information, but it would be too dangerous without any clear idea of where he would be caught. Torture worked, he knew, when the information could be verified… and the SS were masters of torture. He’d seen nightmarish tricks used to make Russians and even Frenchmen talk against their will, from a combination of powerful drugs, beatings and precisely modulated pain. He had no illusions as to how long he could hold out under such pressure; unlike the men of the Waffen-SS, he couldn’t embrace pain or tolerate it for a long period.

“We shipped in ten thousand,” he risked, finally. It wasn’t entirely truthful, but it wasn’t that inaccurate. It would have to do. “They’ll find you and take you prisoner, and you will suffer.”

“If they come here, you’ll be killed as well,” the leader said flatly. Deininger smiled inwardly as he realised another truth about his captor. He didn’t have quite the right mindset for torture. The SS torturers were men who gave Deininger the creeps. They cared nothing for the pain and humiliation they heaped their victims, they didn’t even take a sick pleasure in it. They had no feelings at all… and his captor had them in spades. “What happened to the Davidson girls?”

Deininger nodded inwardly. The leader would come from nearby, either in Felixstowe or somewhere close, maybe one of the farms. If he cared about a family that had been swept up in a sweep, then maybe he was even related to the family, or even just friendly to the family. That was information the SS could use to track him down.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t…”

One hand covered his mouth while the other broke three of his fingers. Deininger felt pain welling through his body and wanted to scream. Only the pressure on his mouth kept the scream inside, where it could never be heard. His entire body shook in desperation, but the bonds refused to break and the leader held him down without much effort.

“You have five fingers and two thumbs left,” the leader said, his voice cold, but not perfectly dispassionate. Somewhere in there, there was a man who cared and was shocked at what he was doing. “I can break them all, and then we can get started on your other bones, or…”

He leaned closer. “Is it really such a state secret?”

“They took them to the continent,” Deininger said, through his gasps. Tears were streaming down his face. He was ashamed of himself for his weakness, but knew that the information wasn’t that important, really wasn’t worth fighting to hide… the self-justification kept rolling through his mind, reminding him that he had broken. “They took them… good Aryan stock… they weren’t going to waste them just because of their parents.”

The leader squeezed his hand around Deininger’s jaw. “What’s going to happen to them?”

Deininger fought for breath. “They’re going to become Germans,” he gasped. “They’ll be found a new family, taught German and raised German, to the point where their origins will be forgotten, even by them. They’ll marry Germans, have German children; their foster parents won’t even know the truth.”

“How can they not know when all the girls speak is English?”

Deininger shook his head. “It’s been done before, time and time again,” he said. “The foster parents don’t really know much and are generally told that the children were orphaned or that their parents sent them into the Reich in search of a better life and…”

“Well, they got that part right, didn’t they?” The leader asked. “You orphaned them.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that decision,” Deininger said. He forced himself to relax, despite the growing pain from his hand. “What are you going to do now?”

The leader asked a question. “How many soldiers have been landed on British soil?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” Deininger said. “I handled over two hundred thousand soldiers myself, but Felixstowe is no longer the only port and I don’t have any authority at Harwich or…”

“I don’t believe you,” the leader said. His voice darkened, suggesting violence and mortal danger. “You’re a high-ranking SS officer, and you don’t know?”

“I could find out for you if you let me go,” Deininger suggested. “I would swear on the honour of an SS officer…”

The leader belted him across the face. “Do you think we’re stupid?”

Deininger was careful to keep his face blank. As long as the British insurgents were being distracted, there would be a chance to prevent himself from giving away any really important secrets, or… a distant rumble of thunder in the air caught his ears. The leader glanced around, one hand reaching down to clutch his gun, but he didn’t know what the noise was. It certainly wasn’t a group of armed SS men creeping up to free Deininger from his clutches.

“I need the answer to one final question,” the leader said, as a second rumble of thunder echoed through the air. Deininger looked up, into the blue eyes and black mask, and silently promised himself that there would be a reckoning. They certainly wouldn’t be too kind to Janine. “When does the attack against the British lines begin?”

Deininger couldn’t help himself; he burst out laughing. “You don’t understand,” he said, fully expecting the leader to shoot him at any moment. It was worth it; he only wished that he could see the look on the man’s face. “Do you hear that noise in the distance, carried by the wind? The attack has already begun!”