The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Three

Wewelsburg Castle, Germany

“Heil Hitler!”

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler returned the salute as he clambered out of his car, looking up at the towering heights of Wewelsburg Castle, a building that he had purchased and developed for the exclusive use of the SS. His elaborate plans had been impeded by the demands of war, but he resumed construction once the Soviet Union had collapsed and no serious enemies remained to threaten the Reich. Himmler had personally organised the establishment of Niederhagen concentration camp, near the Castle, and the thousands of slaves from the east had been used ruthlessly to build Himmler’s dream. Seven years later, it had become one of the most impressive sites in Germany, a fitting tribute to the New Order.

He shook his head as he proceeded up towards his private office. The existence of the Castle, as well as the secrets and rituals at the heart of the SS, had been kept from the remainder of the German people, many of whom would never approve what was being done in their name. Himmler remembered with a flush of embarrassment the German women who had demanded the return of their Jewish husbands; ever since then, he had become determined to keep many secrets to himself, safe from the interfering gaze of many Germans who didn’t want to know what was being done in their name. The Church was a particular problem for Himmler; his program to establish massive SS families and legitimise bastard children faced massive opposition, even though the Pope had been pressured into providing reluctant support. The final battle between Church and State hadn’t been fought yet, Himmler knew; one day, the Waffen-SS would march into the Vatican and put the Pope and his Cardinals to the sword. One day… and, if Himmler became Fuhrer, that day would be very soon.

“Herr Reichsfuhrer,” one of his secretaries called. “I have the latest figures on the use of Untermensch workers for your perusal.”

“Please hold them for the moment,” Himmler said. He made a point to be polite to all of his subordinates, knowing that if they were scared of him, they would start lying to him, rather than face his displeasure. “I will study them later.”

He walked into his private office and smiled to himself. There were literally millions of Untermensch — sub-humans — within the vast territories that the Reich had occupied, and they were all at the disposal of their German masters. The SS had spent the last seven years registering the Untermensch and using them for whatever purpose suited them, from slave labour to working on massive concentrated farms to feed the German people. The East was dotted by plantations now, each one run by the SS to grow food; in time, the serfs would all die, to be replaced by men of good German stock and tractors of good German manufacture.

The East was also rife with insurgency, but as the SS systematically restricted the movements of the population, even the insurgency was dying down. It would be years before it was all gone — Himmler suspected that Beria was supplying them despite the terms of the treaty — but there was no way that the insurgents could defeat the Reich.

There was a single knock on the door and Himmler barked a command, without looking up, until Skorzeny had reported. “Heil Hitler,” he said, and saluted. It made him envious, in a way; no matter how many blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans he surrounded himself with, it wouldn’t change his own appearance one iota. Himmler wasn’t a perfect SS man and never would be, but the man facing him lived up to the legends.

“Heil Hitler,” Gruppenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny said. “You wanted to see me, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”

Himmler took a moment to study Skorzeny. At forty-two years old, the famous commando, who had been involved in raids and attacks on the Soviet Union and the insurgents that had replaced them, still looked like a young man. He had planned and executed a daring raid on the Soviets just before the end of the war, and Hitler had been impressed enough to order Skorzeny promoted and given his own unique unit of soldiers. Skorzeny hadn’t wasted his time, either; the unit of commandos had proven themselves in covert operations against a dozen sensitive targets.

“I need a readiness report on your unit,” Himmler said, allowing Skorzeny to draw his own conclusions. The Reichsfuhrer wouldn’t have summoned him for a report unless there had been a failing so great as to justify him being thrown out of the SS — or if there was a prospect of action. “How ready are you for immediate deployment?”

Skorzeny’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of action. “The unit is in peak condition at the moment,” he said. Himmler had given him a thousand men back at the start; now, with reserves, new recruits, and even hundreds of SS men clamouring to join, Skorzeny could have tens of thousands of men under him. Instead, he had his core group and several thousand reserve soldiers, just in case they were needed. “The men are ready as they’ll ever be to launch an operation against any enemy.”

He stopped and waited. “Within a month, perhaps less, we will launch an attack against Britain,” Himmler said, calmly. Skorzeny looked delighted. “Your unit has a vital role to play in the assault.”

Skorzeny considered it. “The Tommy is a good soldier, but often unprepared for surprise,” he said, after a moment. “There is no one better at holding a piece of ground, but they don’t always react well when they are hit really hard. The best of their commanding officers match our own, but they don’t often have the same grasp of tactics that we do.” His grin grew wider. “And they have a unit to match ours; this should be fun.”

Himmler stood up and paced over to the map. It didn’t show unit positions; instead, it showed SS locations and personnel throughout Europe. He also knew that there was plenty it didn’t show, such as the fatality rates from Skorzeny’s unit; the parachute-testing program had claimed over a hundred lives since Skorzeny had demanded that a new parachute design be put into production. It also didn’t show the exact details of their target…

He turned back to face Skorzeny. Skorzeny was Hitler’s man, through and through; he didn’t have much time for the mystique that Himmler was trying to create around the SS, his Knights of the Black Cross. Where Himmler was fussy and precise, Skorzeny was impetuous and random. Skorzeny might be an excellent soldier — he was an excellent soldier — but he wouldn’t fit into the Order of the SS, or at least as Himmler envisioned it.

“You launched an attack on General Zhukov’s headquarters,” Himmler said, remembering that incident with some private amusement. The USSR had never really recovered from the loss of Moscow; by the time Beria had succeeded in bringing the Red Army back into a fighting force, their long-term advantages had been reduced sharply and, whatever else he was, Beria was no Stalin. He had no choice but to trust Zhukov to hold together the Red Army and the defence line… and, one day, Skorzeny and a hundred of his men had landed in a Red Army aircraft, slaughtered the General’s defenders, and kidnapped the General himself. It had been the turning point in the 1942 campaign against the remaining body of the Red Army and Stalingrad itself.

Skorzeny smiled lazily. “I remember,” he said. “Do we know where the commanding officer of the British Army is currently based?”

“Your target is a little higher up the scale than that,” Himmler said. “Your orders are to land in London, seize or kill the Prime Minister of Britain and his Cabinet - and then escape.”

Skorzeny shook his head. “London isn’t an isolated airbase in the middle of nowhere,” he said, remembering his mission against Zhukov. “It’s a colossal city. Unless there is a gaping hole in the British defences, we won’t be able to land aircraft and hold the area long enough to snatch the targets and escape. The minute there’s a threat, they’ll bring up reinforcements and trap us.”

Himmler frowned. “What does that mean for your mission?”

“We can’t take them alive,” Skorzeny said, with as much dispassion as if he were ordering dinner. “They will have to be killed, and then we will have to extract ourselves from the scene as quickly as possible.” He paused. “What sort of information do you have on the British defences?”

“Not as much as I would like,” Himmler admitted, wondering if he should let Skorzeny in on the secret. “I have been working to collect information, but there are… limits to what my source can gather and transmit to us without giving away his existence, and the minute the British suspect that they have a leak, they will start tearing their departments apart to find it.”

He watched as Skorzeny went through the information that one of his secretaries had prepared. The big man’s face twitched and twisted as he studied line after line, peering down at the map of London and mentally comparing it to the maps that he had studied, back in 1940. Skorzeny had been one of the finest soldiers in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler back then, and he would have seen plans of Britain, but the information that Himmler had gathered was updated to 1950.

He looked up finally. “What sort of assets do we have on the ground?”

“A handful of agents, several of whom may be under surveillance,” Himmler said. “They still have Sillitoe in command of their counter-espionage service and he’d a determined man, always pushing the limits of what he can do with his people. We have some links with the British fascists, but they’re definitely being watched and have almost no military capability…”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking about,” Skorzeny said. “They have three barracks in London, four counting the one for the Palace Guards; that gives them, at most, several thousand soldiers who could react to us landing. They’re going to react, which means…”

He broke off. “I have been training people for possible operations against Britain,” he said. “If we had some support from the air, we might be able to hit the barracks first, just enough to confuse them and let us land, launch the attack, and then beat it before the British catch us.”

Himmler nodded. “So it can be done?”

“The cost will be very heavy,” Skorzeny said, flatly. He didn’t flinch, but Himmler did; he rarely visited the camps where the slaves were held, just because he hated the sight of blood. “We can get around five hundred commandos into the area, but the British will still have time to react and counter-attack; I estimate that we will have twenty minutes before they start organising a response. Once we have completed the mission, we can fall back and escape, but it won’t be easy.”

Himmler looked at him. “Could your people go to ground until our soldiers get there?”

“Possibility,” Skorzeny said. “We would need some contacts on the far side and… we’ll need British uniforms. The British would shoot us at once if they caught us like that, but it might just allow us a chance to escape in the confusion. Once that’s completed, we will have a chance to escape, particularly in the wake of an invasion. They’re going to be moving units around like crazy and we’ll just blend in with the crowd.”

Himmler nodded. “I take it that I can trust you to handle the mission and brief a commander?”

“I’m going myself,” Skorzeny said, shortly. Himmler lifted an eyebrow. “I said I wouldn’t send anyone on a mission I refused to do myself, so I have to go, and I have the best training and grasp of the situation. The information will have to be shared around the team — if my aircraft gets shot down, Hans or Johan will have to take over — but I think they can be trusted to keep it to themselves.”

He paused. “What is the source of this information?”

Himmler’s lips wanted to twitch into a smile. “Classified,” he said, flatly. “The information is, however, totally reliable.”

Skorzeny held his gaze. “I need to know how to verify it,” he said. “Who is supplying us with information?”

Himmler answered, reluctantly. “A very strange Englishman,” he said, wishing that he could tell Skorzeny the full story. They’d only stumbled upon the connection by accident and — as far as the SS knew — their target knew nothing of who was reading his reports. He thought that he was still filing reports to Beria and his agents. “His name is Philby, Kim Philby.”

SS Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl marched into the room, snapped a perfect Hitler salute, and waited for the Reichsführer-SS to give him leave to relax — slightly. Stahl had been surprised by the urgent summons back to the Castle from his previous post as SS Commander in what remained of Norway but he expected that the Reichsführer-SS had a task for him personally. He had committed no major blunders and, indeed, had been commended for his work in Norway, separating out the Aryans from the undesirables that had infested the ancient homeland. His command was charged with hunting down resistance fighters in the mountains, although, as he ruefully acknowledged, it was likely to take years to kill them all.

“Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he barked, as Himmler acknowledged him finally. “SS Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl, reporting as ordered!”

“Heil Hitler,” Himmler said, shortly. “Your successes in Norway have been noted.”

Stahl allowed himself a slight smile. His force had worked hard to ensure that Aryan Norwegians were brought up to believe in their own supremacy over everyone else, which meant — naturally — separating them from their inferiors. The large number of German servicemen stationed in Norway had actually resulted in hundreds of marriages, which would strengthen the quality of blood in the area and ensure that Norway would be permanently bound to the Reich. He’d also used thousands of slave labourers to build new ports, roads, and facilities in the country; the Reich intended to use the country as a permanent naval base.

“Thank you, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he said. “I believe that my men, also, deserve some credit.”

Himmler nodded. “We have a new task for you,” he said, simply. “The Fuhrer has commanded that Great Britain be brought into the Reich, which represents a new opportunity for us and particularly for you. We have four priorities; we must secure the country, prevent any insurgency, eliminate all the undesirables from the country, and bring the British into the Reich as Aryans.”

Stahl nodded. The Reich regarded France and Italy as degenerate and their inhabitants as subhumans, but Norway, Denmark and other ‘Aryans’ were regarded as potential equals. The Führer’s ruling would mean that the British wouldn’t be enslaved as a nation, unlike the Slavs, but they would have to be broken to the concept of being part of a greater Aryan community. Their independence would come to an end, they would be expected to inter-marry with the Germans who would settle in their land and they would be expected to fight for the Fuhrer. First, however, they would have to be cleared of Jews; Stahl remembered hunting down Jews in Norway and felt nothing but loathing for them.

“The day-to-day occupation of the country will be in your hands,” Himmler said, and Stahl felt a moment of pure excitement. “The Fuhrer will select a Governor-General, but under the right circumstances, you will be able to act without referring to him, all towards the overall aim of winning the peace and ensuring that Britain becomes part of the Greater German Reich. Your men — an experienced unit from Denmark or France is being prepared for you — will have the task of carrying out your orders.”

Stahl nodded. The Reich had created the world’s largest and most precise bureaucracy to ensure that the Führer’s orders were carried out, one that included a list of everyone within the Reich, from the youngest child to the oldest and most useless slave worker. The citizens of Britain would all be registered as well, the first part of a well practised scheme that would bring them all into the Reich as obedient servants, and eventually willing allies for the long-term task of controlling the world. The English had an Empire; that Empire, too, would become part of the Reich.

“I will not fail you, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he said, standing up in salute.

“I trust that you won’t,” Himmler said, in his maddeningly calm voice. Stahl remembered some of the acts that Himmler had ordered carried out, including the near-complete destruction of several Soviet cities to prevent them from being used to foster the insurgency, and shuddered inside. Himmler had offered him a chance to prove himself on a much larger scale, something that would catapult him to higher rank, but if he failed… the blame would be his and his alone. “The British have had ample opportunity to create a stay-behind movement, so remember; rooting that force out and destroying it, will be the first priority.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” Stahl said. He had had experience in hunting down the handful of insurgency-supporting networks in Norway; without those networks, the insurgents might as well be bandits, robbing their own people as much as they raided German outpost. “They won’t last long enough to be a problem.”

“Good,” Himmler said. His eyes narrowed slightly in warning. “Remember, you represent the SS and we will all be judged by your performance. Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler,” Stahl echoed.

He snapped to attention and marched out of the room.