Swastika

by Michael Slade

  The medieval walled town of Gardelegen sat eighty miles north of Dora-Mittelbau. The death march now coming to an end in this farmer’s field had begun more than a week ago in the V-2 factory, back on the morning that Ernst Streicher and his two sons returned from their meeting with Hitler in Berlin.

  On April 4, the SS had begun shipping out Dora-Mittelbau’s close to thirty thousand slaves, cramming them into transport trains at Nordhausen station and chugging them off to camps like Bergen-Belsen that weren’t as threatened by the American invasion. The same insane logic had earlier brought the Auschwitz deportees to Dora.

  “Fritz, Hans,” Streicher had said, “use these well.”

  The SS general had handed each son a 9 mm machine pistol, along with several thirty-two-round magazines. The automatic weapon was capable of firing 180 rounds per minute.

  “Heil Hitler!” Fritz said, snapping out the flat-palmed salute.

  “Heil Hitler!” echoed Hans.

  With the paratroop guns slung over their shoulders, the two Hitler Youths climbed up into a boxcar.

  Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack …

  For days, the train had evaded bombing and strafing by marauding Allied planes. Inside the cars, the overcrowded passengers—exposed to harsh weather and stifling conditions, famished and parched from lack of food and water, and weakened by the rampant spread of various diseases—thinned as the miles slipped by.

  Finally, at Letzlingen, the train had been forced to stop because of bombed-away rails. The Dora slaves had been off-loaded to travel the final thirty miles on foot.

  The trek to Gardelegen had been grueling. In their striped prison tatters, the doomed slaves had shuffled along the pitted road in an endless line. Stumbling with their bodies hunched over and their heads down, they struggled to put one heavy foot in front of the other. Those who wore Holzschuhe, the wooden shoes of the factory, had damaged and bleeding feet. Others flapped along in unlaced boots, or had nothing except rags wrapped around their soles. Their cheeks were hollow, their eyes extinguished.

  “Singen!” one guard had shouted.

  A taunt.

  “Szkop!” A Pole had insulted him back.

  Bwam!

  He was gone.

  A string of deaths, both natural and not, trailed the walking wounded like the wake of a boat.

  The Luftwaffe maintained an air base and a paratrooper’s training school at Gardelegen. The ancient town also still kept a relic from bygone wars: the Remount School for cavalry officers. There, in the horse stalls, the SS guards confined the marchers who’d made it to Gardelegen until they decided what to do with them.

  The guards were in the same bedraggled shape as the Third Reich. Unshaven and unwashed, in dirty, sweat-stained uniforms that they’d slept in for almost two weeks, all were itching to bring this death march to an end.

  The Kreisleiter of Gardelegen had raised the alarm. As Nazi Party leader in the town, he was tasked with enforcing Himmler’s standing order that all slaves be liquidated in the event of liberation. From the west, the 102nd Infantry Division—the so-called Ozarks—was advancing to take Gardelegen.

  So that was it.

  The death warrant had been signed.

  The only questions remaining were where and how.

  “Let’s kill them in the stables,” suggested the SS commandant.

  “No,” said the Kreisleiter. “That’s in the center of town. If you do it there, the blame will fall on me.”

  “Then where?”

  “Isenschnibbe. That’s just outside of town. There’s an isolated barn on the estate. Shoot them inside.”

  “No.” The commandant vetoed his idea. “That’s too many bullets. We have at least a thousand slaves locked in the stables. Gunning them down will take too long. We need every bullet to kill GIs.”

  The Kreisleiter nodded. “Here’s what I suggest …”

  * * *

  So now they were on the final leg of the death march from Dora. It was late in the afternoon of Friday, April 13. In groups of one hundred, just over a thousand slaves were herded from the cavalry stables in central Gardelegen out to the flat farmer’s field on an estate called Isenschnibbe. The SS guards were bolstered by twenty parachutists from the Luftwaffe base. Machine pistols at the ready, Fritz and Hans helped bring up the rear.

  “It will soon be over,” Fritz whispered, antsy to pull the trigger.

  “They know it too,” replied Hans, nodding ahead.

  “They deserve it,” Fritz said. “For being subhuman.”

  “Forward! Forward!” the commandant yelled, lashing his swagger stick across the nearest back. Having been weighed down for days by these outcasts among outcasts, he hankered to dispose of his human freight.

  The guards beneath him followed his lead.

  Stuck in the middle of nowhere, with flat mud all around, the barn was a shallow-peaked rectangle of brick and stucco. On both longer sides hung two wooden doors suspended from horizontal bars. The doors were about three times as tall as a man and could be rolled back and forth across the opening. Within, the stone-floored storage vault was piled knee-deep with gas-soaked straw.

  One whiff of the petrol fumes and several slaves bolted. Machine-gun bursts—

  Brrrrrrrrrrrrt! Brrrrrrrrrrrrt!

  —mowed them down.

  Prisoners who balked at entering the barn were shot through the head. It was seven o’clock, and the sky had darkened by the time the thousand-plus were all crowded in. To drive them back, a gunman fired randomly into their midst, then the doors were rumbled shut and wedged fast with stone blocks. All that remained was an opening just wide enough to admit an incendiary bomb, and one of the SS guards tossed in several phosphorous grenades.

  Phooom!

  The screams of a thousand innocents who’d been plunged into the fires of hell erupted from the torched interior. The blazing fire within could be glimpsed through cracks around the doors. Outside, the SS guards and their Luftwaffe cohorts stood ready to shoot any escapers. Snarling dogs on leashes backed them up.

  Shrieks of pain wailed from those being roasted alive in the shed. The heavy doors bulged as the trapped slaves came at them like a battering ram. Spreading flames licked out between the door planks as gray smoke billowed into the black sky. Fritz reveled in the gibbering pleas for mercy and help. He imagined those who had survived the first moments of the conflagration seeking shelter under the charred bodies of those who had perished in the shock wave. How many were being trampled and crushed in the mad panic to find an escape route? How high was the heap of subhuman waste piling up against the doors? He wished he could see them clawing frantically at the stone floor, tearing away the flesh and bones of their fingers in a desperate bid to dig their way out. The sickening stench of burning flesh thrilled Fritz to his core.

  There, under the bottom edge of the blackened door. Was that the head of a slave trying to claw his way out? Yes, there was the torso! And there were the legs! And now he was staggering to his feet and weaving this way to escape. Let him come! Let him come! These Untermenschen are mine!

  The machine gun in his grip erupted with a burst of firepower. The muzzle flashes glinted off the Death’s Head badges of the soldiers nearby. As cartridge casings spat out from the ejection port, the slugs ripped through the chest of the fleeing man, throwing him back with arms outstretched like Christ’s on the cross. The crucifixion scene was silhouetted against the burning barn.

  Clutched by the hand of power, Fritz got an erection.

  * * *

  The blaze within had raged for seven hours. While Fritz and Hans strolled around the blackened barn, surveying the stinking aftermath of their first taste of combat, civilians from Gardelegen began to arrive to help cover up the massacre. There were bullet-riddled escapees with third-degree burns and peeled skin bleeding in the yard. There were calcified heads and arms poking out beneath the doors, which, remarkably, hadn’t been incinerated. Inside, mountains of still-smoldering cadav
ers blocked the exits.

  Those who’d been shanghaied from town—mostly Hitler Youths and Volkssturm irregulars—were in the process of digging long, deep trenches behind the barn when news arrived that the Ozarks were attacking from the north. That was the sign for Fritz and Hans to slip away. Reloading their machine pistols and stocking up on clips—and a pair of Panzerfausts, the Nazis’ crude but effective anti-tank rockets—Ernst Streicher’s Über-Aryan sons morphed from two Hitler Youths into two Werewolf commandos.

  Back in November 1944, the SS had established a Werewolf Staff at Hulchrath Castle in the small town of Erkelenz, close to the Rhine. The castle was low profile and out of the way, the perfect spot for a secret demolition school. The first two hundred Hitler Youths to undergo Werewolf training were already proficient in the use of revolvers, machine pistols, and the deadly Panzerfaust. At Hulchrath, they learned how to detonate explosives behind enemy lines, contaminate food and water with arsenic, and disrupt and sabotage the efforts of Allied invaders.

  Among those first recruits were Fritz and Hans, and at Hulchrath they had learned how to live a double life. Before embarking from Dora on this SS death march, both youths had been handed passes forged by the Gestapo. These were proof of their “innocent identities” as two ordinary German boys, and had been disguised to help them blend in with other civilians in any town. Safe during the day, they would transform themselves by the light of the moon in outlying woods, retrieving their uniforms and weapons from secret forest caches.

  “Bring the radio,” Fritz said.

  “What about the bodies?”

  “They’re dead, Hans. Let the Gardelegens bury them and incur the invaders’ wrath. We have others to kill.”

  That night, hidden in the woods, they tuned their portable receiver to Radio Werewolf, the frequency that egged on the Hitler Youth commandos. That’s how they heard about the assassinations committed by their brothers in arms.

  “Cologne-Deutz!” the radio extolled. “A Werewolf shot dead a Ukrainian as he was taking a piss!”

  “Hanover! A mayor who ridiculed Werewolf resistance was shot at point-blank range!”

  Day after day, as Streicher’s sons prowled south, Radio Werewolf brought more heroic news.

  “Rothenburg! Three local cowards were executed in the streets for trying to disarm Werewolves who were on the hunt!”

  “Quedlinburg! A Werewolf killed a doctor who betrayed his town and hung his blood-soaked coat in the woods as a trophy!”

  “Let’s do that,” Hans suggested. “With GI uniforms!”

  “Yes!” Fritz said. “One for every tree!”

  “Hundreds of them!”

  “And all dripping blood!”

  Exhausted from their trek south, the youths bedded down for some much-needed rest. The woods where they hid were just to the north of Dora-Mittelbau.

  “Tomorrow we strike,” said Fritz.

  Weird Science

  The Cariboo

  May 26, Now

  After parting ways with Mr. Clean at Vancouver’s airport, Ajax and Lysol had flown north to Quesnel, where they’d rented a car and driven east along the Cariboo Highway toward historic Barkerville. Short of that tourist-infested ghost town, they’d hidden the car in a thicket and hoofed it into the wilderness with their athletic bags.

  Thanks to some yellowing 1947 maps, the killers had found the ideal eagle’s nest from which to stake out the valley. Except for a V-cleft with the dirt road in from the highway, the Cariboo Mountains encircled the Skunk Mine to cut its secrets off from the rest of the world. From up here on the ridge beside the V-cleft, they had passed the day spying on a pig farmer through a fancy camera that bounced the image off a satellite directly to Big Bad Bill at his Pentagon desk.

  “Whatever he’s feeding those pigs, they sure do like it,” Ajax said mutedly. You couldn’t be too careful with your voice on the ridge. The peaks around the Phantom Valley carried sound like a whispering gallery.

  The farmer lugged a bucket of feed out of the hillside hole.

  Oink, oink.

  In and out, in and out, the farmer trucked back and forth from the mine shaft. At one point, he carried out a bulging bag and slung it onto the flatbed of his farm truck, along with a gas-driven grinder. Trailing a pair of ruts in the overgrown grass, he drove across the bumpy range of the Phantom Valley to what appeared to be a bone pile in the distance. There, he revved the grinder to pollute the silence with noise and emptied the bag into a hopper that shot out chipped-up splinters.

  “Get me a close-up of his face,” Big Bad Bill’s voice said through earplugs.

  Ajax zoomed the camera in on the farmer’s profile. He seemed more like a Eurotrash punk than he did a man of the land, what with his close-cropped Über-blond hair and his icy blue eyes. You don’t find hicks wearing ear studs like his.

  “That’s our boy!” rejoiced Bill.

  “Yep,” Ajax whispered into the little tubular mike that extended to his mouth from the earplug.

  The farmer’s ear stud bore a swastika.

  * * *

  The moon was rising over the Phantom Valley Ranch when the spooks abandoned their perch in the spruce and alpine fir trees. They wended their way down the mountainside to the Skunk Mine. Except for the pigpen between the mouth of the shaft and the decrepit ranch house, the moonlit valley looked natural and untouched. The topographical maps that guided Ajax and Lysol tonight dated back to 1947, yet but for minor alterations caused by passing time, the terrain was the same as it had been half a century earlier.

  The deep black enforcers kept to the shadows all the way down to the hole in the face of Skunk Mountain.

  “Going in,” Ajax reported.

  In his office at the Pentagon, Big Bad Bill smiled.

  The field operatives skulked through the shadows that had gathered at the foot of Skunk Mountain.

  Trusting rube.

  He’d left the door unlocked.

  No need for one of the gizmos they had brought along.

  The mouth of the mine could still be sealed by a crosshatched gate with a new punch-in combo lock, but tonight the barrier stood ajar. As Lysol eased it open, the hinges squealed. Luckily for the pig farmer, no lights came on in the ranch house. Both killers had screwed silencers onto the threaded barrels of their Heckler & Kochs, and they were prepared to shoot, if need be.

  Hopefully, not to kill.

  Ideally, to maim.

  They wouldn’t kill the Nazi until they had squeezed every drop of intel out of his balls.

  They had a gizmo in their survival kits for that.

  Both men had donned night-vision goggles that adapted to any light. With inch-thick lenses that fitted onto the eyes like jewelers’ loupes, they made the bug-eyed killers look like jaunty old jalopy men.

  The static in their earpieces began as soon as they stepped into the mine, cutting the lines of communication to Big Bad Bill and from mission control to both operatives. The first thing they caught sight of through the eerie green lenses was a bank of generators just inside the gate. Were the generators causing this fzzzzing in their ears? Before the answer to that question could form in their minds, Ajax and Lysol stopped dead in their tracks.

  A butcher’s table ran along the concave wall to the left. That was to be expected on a farm that slaughtered pigs. But it wasn’t a dressed hog that hung upside down on a stand-up, X-shaped frame. The arms of the X were crooked at the tips to form a Nazi swastika, and the carcass that hung from those arms was that of a gutted youth in his teens.

  “Look at his ass,” mumbled Ajax, circling the frame.

  The buttocks of the carcass had been run through repeatedly with something sharp and pointed. On one of the skewered cheeks was a branding mark in the shape of a swastika.

  “He could be a canoe.”

  Indeed, he could. For the guts from the chest and the abdominal cavity filled a bucket labeled “Rendering Plant.”

  “There’s the brand.”

  Ly
sol indicated an iron that was hanging from a hook among various tools for butchery.

  “What’s in the case?”

  On the seven-foot-long chopping block sat a blood-splattered box inset with a silver plaque. When he saw the name engraved into the metal, Ajax turned and retraced his steps to the cave’s entrance to get away from the static.

  “Bill,” he said, covering his mouth to mute his voice. “We found a saber box labeled ‘SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.’ There’s static in the mine. I’ll report once we’re out.”

  “The moment you find the cache, let me know. Then squeeze that Nazi asshole till he squeals like a pig.”

  Ajax and Lysol were conversant enough in post-war scientific gadgets to be able to identify components of the equipment they found as they entered a cavern deeper in the mine. The Van de Graaf generator able to blast 250,000 volts DC. The double-headed dumbbell of a Tesla coil on the cave wall around the hole to the inner shaft. Everywhere they glanced, they saw relics from a long-forgotten electromagnetic era. Tuning capacitors, RF coils, magnetrons, high-voltage transmission caps, aerials and dishes aimed at kooky angles, an old rotary spark-plug system to fire off microwaves, big radios and radar screens with dials, valves and analog readouts fit for a scrap heap—all incestuously connected by coils of wire and cabling joining male and female sockets.

  “Holy fuck,” said Ajax.

  His lenses were locked on a workbench at the center of the subterranean wonderland.

  A framed photo of Nikola Tesla, the lab’s patron saint, was propped up on one corner. In it, the nineteenth-century master of lightning was alive with sparks, a bolt of generated electricity zapping from his fingertip to illuminate the filament of a lamp. Sparks were active within these machines as well: the banks of receivers and monitors around the workbench chair hummed and pulsed with the electronic rhythms onscreen.

  No wonder there was static.

  At first, the killers thought the book on the bench was a leather-bound volume of genealogy with a detailed heraldic crest on its cover. The etched crest seemed to represent the architecture of a medieval room. The room’s massive fireplace filled one entire wall. Its leaded-glass windows offered no view of the landscape outside, so it was impossible to tell what the building around it was or where it might be located. That the structure was Germanic could be deduced from the Iron Cross—a Maltese cross with splayed arms—engraved over the room-wide mantel.