He cleared his throat, and stared around, fixing his steady gaze on the assembled men in front of him, their unsmiling eyes boring into the great orator.
“We shall fight in France… we shall fight on the seas and oceans… we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air…”
“With what?”
An incredulous voice cut through the great war leader’s speech, chilling him to the bone. Churchill fought hard, and his body did not betray him. But his old, gnarled fists briefly clenched.
“We don’t have a bloody fighter force left capable of winning,” another, almost despairing voice exclaimed, and the jeers rose. Churchill placed his hands behind his back, and straightened up, sternly casting a wide gaze, staring down the dissenters.
“We shall defend our island… whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight on the landing grounds… we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets… we shall fight in the hills… we shall never surrender… and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle…”
The jeer rose, almost drowning Churchill out and he halted.
“They have quarter of a million hostages, you old drunk,” a frantic voice cried.
“Göring beat the RAF!”
“We have no army left!”
“You want to call their bluff? The SS will flay them alive,” a quieter, but no less insidiously scaremongering voice remarked, an angry edge to its tone.
“Face it you old drunk, it’s all over!”
Churchill was stunned into silence, and the jeers intensified, pouring down from at least a third of the House of Commons. He turned to Neville Chamberlain, the ousted Prime Minister of only two months previous whom he’d insisted remained on the Cabinet as his trusted adviser and a deputy of sorts, but the man for whom appeasement had been the answer less than two years prior. Neville now knew the folly of such a move, but in the face of political debellation, the man who had bragged that he ‘only had to raise a finger and the whole of Europe is changed’ could only shake his head helplessly, shrug wordlessly, as the deafening silence of Churchill’s advocates and the men who had supported resistance at all costs spoke with even more ruthless eloquence than the jeering, braying mob that demanded an end to the bloodshed.
As the erstwhile chief of appeasement shrugged, gazing around powerlessly, Churchill’s head dropped for the first time, and in the midst of loud catcalls, all could sense a silent, haunting moment of defeat.
Allegro
Darkness enveloped the land; England’s green and pleasant countryside that so drew the glowing prose of poets through the years was covered in a black cloud, its fertile colour suppressed. It was perfect for the Einsatzgruppen. Already obscured by the fogs of war, their evil intent was further veiled in the grim nocturnal stratagems; cloaked in mist, masked in blackness.
The only light to be seen in the military trucks was the glow of cigarette tips; pinpricks burning bright red in the endless sea of black. Black, too, were the long, sinister trench coats that were wrapped around the men of the SD; drafted from all the many branches of the SS and German police that Himmler and, more pertinently Heydrich had slowly monopolised under their control; thousands of uniformed thugs of the state, lumped together as a versatile manpower pool from which to enlist personnel to the murderous tasks of the SD. Heydrich’s long, spidery fingers were wrapped around an operational command that the Führer deemed vital, wickedly spinning a continental web of death. Hitler approved; no more would hostile elements attack his Reich. Göring, too, bestowed as much power on Heydrich as was seen fit to allow ‘the Hangman’ to obliterate all in his path, with a shadow army of merciless killers, built up over the course of seven years of National Socialist power.
Unshackled, unleashed, this was their work. It had the cold quality of a medical experiment, the Germ Theory of Disease applied to society with the scientific finality and totality of death.
Remove the bacteria, save the organism.
The trucks rolled on, up the Selby Road from Leeds and onwards to the outskirts, passing through the quiet, leafy suburbs with silent, evil resolve, stealthily tearing out to the mining village of Garforth, which was slumbering in sleepy tranquility.
“Are any of these yids,” murmured one of the SS men hunched in the truck, whose face looked like it had been carved out of honeycomb granite, chiselled out of a mountain.
“Bitte? Yids?”
“Ja?”
“Resistance, is all I know,” the senior non-commissioned officer replied, himself of an obscenely Aryan posterboy quality; the hard, strong-jawed face of a young Saxon more than willing to embrace the comforting worldview that Adolf Hitler’s bible provided, legally enforced by his police. The physical representative of the Party’s ideals, the seeds of which had been planted in the malleable minds of a generation of children, taught the glories of Aryan blood, German supremacy and military conquest.
“Resistance…”
A low, growling chortle rumbled elsewhere in the truck. “It will be a fun time, then.”
Grunts of affirmation, from men colder than the northern English night.
The biting chill of the trucks was not felt by the vehicle’s driver and his brooding passenger, insulated as they were from the outside. The driver cleared his throat quietly, stealing a glance at the officer sat upright beside him, noting obvious signs of tension. The man sensed his attention, and turned cold eyes to face him, two black pinpricks boring into the young man’s own… dark brown meeting pale blue in an unequal contest.
“The Wehrmacht used this route, yes?” The question was quiet and rhetorical; his smooth, Viennese tone almost melodic.
“Yes, Herr Untersturmführer,” the driver affirmed, using the army-style prefix formality to address his senior.
“How long did it take from the landing to get here?”
“Not long at all, Unter–”
“How fucking long?” he hissed animatedly. The driver answered in a low voice, cowed, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Four weeks, sir.”
Newly promoted SS-Untersturmführer Amon Goeth had been assigned to Dr Rudolf Lange’s Einsatzgruppe Leeds from the notoriously eager Austrian 11th Standarte. As junior officer, he carried himself with zeal, though his mood swung pendulum-like from a restless, nervous energy to quiet menace. The erratic behaviour combined with his cruelty, and Goeth was soon known known and feared. As an Einsatzkommando leader he was keen to shine in his new role. Watchful eyes in Berlin, he knew, were fixed on England.
The disconcerted driver sensed Goeth’s lingering gaze, and elaborated. “Pockets of resistance pushed from Leeds here to the east, as well as west and south. Mining villages such as these remained stubborn. Many fled for the hills to join the resistance.”
Goeth snorted. “To freeze in winter, hiding in rat-holes with dwindling supplies. What do they think this is, the fucking Winter War? It will take more than Molotov cocktails to beat the Wehrmacht. And the SS,” he added, as an afterthought.
His brief moment of contempt over, Goeth became inexpressive, and relapsed back into his own unspoken thoughts.
The driver knew as well as Goeth that the organised resistance were equipped with far more than homemade incendiary bombs, having been arranged in situ long before the invasion. The Leeds gruppe under Lange had followed in the wake of Army Group Centre’s ‘Group B’ on its journey northwards, smashing through Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire and up through Yorkshire into Leeds. And the men of the Einsatzkommandos attached to Gruppe Leeds all knew that Goeth was a capricious and cruel man; it had been proven in every theatre of operations they had engaged in on the back of a rapidfire advance. Even amongst the hardened killers who had served to destroy Poland’s intelligentsia so effectively, Goeth was respected and, when possible, avoided. The lieutenant w
as one of the new breed of Austrian National Socialists, anxious to prove their worth to the Germans following the Anschluss reabsorption of their country with unwavering, unyielding fanaticism.
As such, the driver kept his contradictory thoughts to himself.
“The group we are after tonight, Herr Untersturmführer… they are all resistance members?” he ventured to ask his Austrian passenger, after a lengthening silence began to hang heavy in the air.
“Yes.”
The reply was short. Thus, the conversation ended.
Goeth wrinkled his nose in disgust as the smell of manure wafted in, thick in the air, clinging to the insides of their nostrils. Quietly seething, he cursed, fumbling in his tunic to produce a packet of Turkish cigarettes, and with the flash of a match, lit one to overpower the nauseating stench. Immune to the chemical, industrial pollutions of the human habitat, the Austrian could not bear the uninvited intrusion of a natural, if repellent odour. As they rode on grimly through the night, the starry sky helped illuminate a natural vista, but it did not appeal to the sentiment of the Viennese city boy, with his haughty disdain for the provinces deeply ingrained; almost customary for those born and raised in the old Austro-Hungarian capital. The pleasant scenery barely registered in his cold eyes, even as the stars lit its distant horizon across sloping fields and rolling hills from the road’s high vantage.
The driver noted Goeth’s irritation, as the officer fidgeted in his seat, sucking crossly on the cigarette with each deep inhalation.
“Disgusting, isn’t it sir,” he remarked agreeably. Goeth gave no sign that he heard him.
The cross-coated convoy banked a sharp left, cutting through the heart of Garforth, a sleepy far-eastern village in Greater Leeds whose remaining inhabitants were sullenly observing the curfew in place, blissfully unaware of the intent of German men now encroaching on their soil. Onwards they rolled, the low sound of their motors the only noise audible in the quiet countryside town, beyond the incessant chirping of crickets.
Hurtling past the train station and eastwards, the trucks finally reached the last turn-off point at the edge of the town’s boundary, just before the road re-joined the main motorway for eastward thoroughfare. They turned right into the small estate; silently dozing in the thick of night, in deep, unsuspecting sleep; the low rumble of tyres a deadly lullaby that proved fatal. The Germans maintained pace, until finally, they were there.
Cedar Ridge. The convoy slowly filtered in to the leafy neighbourhood, as the tree-lined lane curved gently right and then left. The road ended three hundred metres further along in a field, but the SS had no call to drive even that far. The first left turn was fifty metres in, and upon reaching its impasse and the cluster of houses, the SS vehicles slowly ground to a halt. Black-clad figures disembarked, marshalled by Goeth. The trucks backed up, in preparation of exiting the estate. The stealthily moving men approached four separate houses in the silent cul-de-sac; scurrying predators, like pack animals preparing an ambush from the shadows at night.
Goeth’s hastily scribbled list, memorised, had read 2, 5, 6, 7.
As quietly as was possible, the Einsatzkommando men congregated by the homes of the doomed, and with the awful, sudden noise of threat and violence breaking the silence of the night, four doors were kicked off their hinges, the sacred sanctuary irreversibly violated. The black coats swarmed in like an unstoppable virus, pistols drawn as they raced upstairs in each home, jackboots clobbering on the carpeted stairs.
The surprise of the ambush, perfectly timed to strike at a moment of optimal vulnerability, combined with the instant panic of fear made the ensnarement complete. So unsuspecting were the targets that no weapons for self-defence were found to hand, as the foreign intrusion neared its ugly inevitability. Two terrified married couples were dragged out of bed, their bodies betrayed by shock; frozen from action and still wrapped in bedclothes, the groggy Garforth targets offered only a token, weak resistance to the nocturnal assault. Other adults, resistance members seeking refuge with sympathetic friends or co-conspirators in their continuing struggles against the Germans were hauled from the settees and guest bedrooms of the four detached houses; those capable of attempting to repel their arrest were promptly beaten to a bloody pulp. The cruel blows of the cosh were punctuated by scornful jibes and foul obscenities spat at them in the fearful, harsh tones of a guttural tongue they could not understand, yet feared and loathed with an overwhelming force.
Cries of pain rang out through the sleeping suburb, quickly smothered.
In the fourth house, implacable malice was manifesting in equally odious fashion, as the basest of human instincts surfaced with sinister speed and an indecent urgency. Two stormtroopers roughly held a dazed woman back from her helpless husband as he was hauled away, tearing the nightdress from her back. Utterly impotent, the apoplectic husband was dragged out of sight, his stifled screams receding with every step until being silenced by a final, vicious blow. His wife was stranded; helpless game for the animalistic, predatory men who had shelved a vital part of their humanity. Alone in her own room, helpless in the face of their violent depravity, the shocked young lady made one final, impotent effort to wriggle free. But with her arms pinioned, naked breasts bouncing as she thrashed wildly in a frenzied panic, the unfortunate young woman had her right leg seized with an unbreakable grip. Now held in place by two others, the man facing her grimly clamped her leg as though in a vice, and with horrified certainty, she knew with a terrible shock that their brutal intentions were inescapable. Fear rose up her spine like an electric current; paralysed, she was wracked by overwhelming dread and terror. The two troopers tightly held her spasming body in place as the enlisted Gestapo brute forcibly penetrated her with his swollen flesh.
“Hold her, hold her still!” the senior squad member demanded in their native tongue; lust and excitement adding strain to his eager cry.
Screams died in her throat, as the awful indignity of her attack overwhelmed the unfortunate young quarry of a merciless predator; prey to his pitiless passion. The noise of his animal instincts echoed through the house, with sneering, guttural invectives in German directed at its victim; thrusting mercilessly into a body made compliant by shock and fear. Pain and revulsion throbbed through her as her assailant writhed and grunted, inserted in her, inside her, in violation of the most primitive intimacy of her being. Her jerky, pitiful yelps and pleas were stifled against the hand of another SS man, clasped tight in her savage defilement until the cruel display was halted upon Amon Goeth’s entry into the room.
The Austrian lieutenant strode in with fire burning in the dark globes of his eyes. Unhesitant, he struck the enlisted man hard across his angular jaw, flooring him, and the thump shuddered through the silence that had descended on the house as suddenly as the noise of violence had defiled it. The other men partially dropped the woman, who was now shaking in a state of fugue, whimpering pitifully with a wordless noise.
“Unterscharführer Beckenbauer, what the fuck do you think you are doing?” Goeth began, with dangerous calm.
“It’s Scharfü…” the trooper began, tenderly checking his injured jaw as he rose unsteadily to his feet.
Beckenbaur stopped himself, and stood up straight, withdrawing his still-exposed erection and wiping away the woman’s fluid as he did so with sullen contempt, as though her body’s unwanted evidence of his crime had been something insulting, disgusting and deliberate. Goeth cut in.
“I don’t care what it is. Is this Poland? Are we in Warsaw, or Leeds, England?”
“Leeds, sir.”
“Why would you have the men waiting outside, as I’m sure the other arrests have been made, while you commit a crime against Reich policy?” Goeth snarled at him, abandoning the superficial calm of his silky tone and unruffled air.
“Sir?” Beckenbauer asked, confused.
Kriminalassistent in a provincial Gestapo, Beckenbauer had been drafted in to the fold with the Einsatzgruppen Britain on the strong recommendations
of his chief. Chosen by Heydrich and his Reich Security Office as an enlisted EGB stormtrooper, he had been assigned to the gruppe of Dr Rudolf Lange. In his platoon’s Austrian Einsatzkommando leader Goeth, however, Beckenbauer suddenly saw an imminent return to the province was at hand if he was lucky; perhaps there was even a court martial on the cards. With a predator’s instinct, he sensed danger.
Goeth’s evil stare continued to bore through the rapist.
“You stupid swine.”
“Sir?”
“This is house no. 7, is it not, Kriminalassistent whatever-your-fucking-SS-rank-is in your shithole province, you Gestapo clown?”
“Yes, sir,” Beckenbauer replied, resentfully.
Such a derogatory comment could have been used against an enlisted man and reported, but for Goeth to have been drafted as a chief lieutenant of SD Major Lange meant he was likely protected. The SD, after all, was under the wing of the same man as the Gestapo; complaints from one agency of the other at such a junior level would only serve to aggravate Heydrich the Hangman.
“Well…” Goeth said, jutting his brutal face into the smooth features of the younger man. “The woman of no.7 is a Mischling. You just fucked a Hebrew, a full-on half-breed, and in SS uniform. Bearing the badge of Heydrich’s own security service…” and he tapped the small ‘SD’ diamond on the sleeve, with gleeful malice underlying his rage.
Goeth’s eyes were terrible; the junior officer could only stand rooted to the spot, mortified, hardly believing his ears. The final words had been hissed with ferocity.
“What would the General say, I wonder,” Goeth mused sneeringly, his eyes bulging, “or indeed, Reichsführer Himmler? You fucked a Jew in uniform. I could have you shot.”
Beckenbauer was horrified. Neither he, nor the others present spoke, and the awkward tension grew, hanging palpably between them in the air.
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 2