Röhm’s executioner continued reading, mollified from his brief apprehension. “Transferred to Totenkopfverbände under Gruppenführer Eicke, 1936; began duties at Dachau September of that year. Promoted Untersturmführer September ’38. Of course, superiors and comrades have offered their assessments, for the file. Allow me to read.”
He cleared his throat. Hoffman watched, apprehensive.
“Untersturmführer Hoffman is dedicated National Socialist, boasting excellent recollection of key passages from the Führer’s book, and a readiness to extoll the Party virtues. He is a diligent administrator, an ideal representative of the SS and one of the more reliable of Konzentrationslager personnel. He is hardworking, efficient, capable… sparing with punishment… humane… stern without cruelty.” Eicke’s nose wrinkled with distaste. He reeled off the latter observations like one would identify particularly insidious forms of a disgusting breed of parasitic insect.
Hoffman was quiet. Eicke leaned forwards.
“That all sounds well and good,” he said, with barely concealed disdain, “but only the best of our young generation may represent the Fatherland in the Führer’s personal guard. You want to be a member of the elite order? You have to show it, through loyalty and action. SS man; your honour is loyalty.”
Eicke stood, casting a shadow over Hoffman as his frame blocked the light streaming through an exposed gap in the cheap curtains. He cast a brief look of frustration at the junior officer, and he turned to look out of the single-paned window at pyjama-clad prisoners circling the yard.
“Here behind the barbed-wire lurks the enemy of National Socialism and the German people, Hoffman. He watches everything you do. Your diligence and administrative capabilities are all well and good. But we need men of iron. Words must be supported by actions. Do you follow?”
Hoffman nodded, mute. Eicke turned to look at him, and the Untersturmführer nodded again.
“Your enemy will try to help himself by using all your weaknesses. Don't leave yourself open in any way. Show these 'Enemies of the State' your teeth. Anyone who shows even the smallest sign of compassion for the enemies of the state must disappear from our ranks. I can only use hard men who are determined to do anything to purge the enemies of the Fatherland. We have no use for weaklings."
He leaned in, a fierce look in his eyes. “I hope you see things as I do, Untersturmführer Hoffman.”
“Jawohl, mein Gruppenführer!” the young officer barked back. For the second time, Eicke grinned; this one a little churlish, even menacing.
“Good. Follow me. Let’s see if you can truly serve in the SS order against Germany’s enemies…”
Baring his chest proudly, apeing the body language of an alpha male mountain gorilla, the big officer briskly walked out of the office, Hoffman in hurried pursuit. The young officer’s stomach lurched. He knew that if push came to shove, he would be equal to performing whatever task General Eicke had in mind for him, for Führer and Fatherland, but Hoffman could not entirely suppress the small, internal voice that suggested his conscience may not be completely clean after it.
Hoffman tried in vain to suppress the bourgeois value system that had been instilled in him, and he focused on Germany’s troubled past, the pride of the present and the promise of its future.
They marched through to the prison block, a narrow corridor, poorly lit by flickering yellow light. The cell doors were narrow, with serving slits. Some of them were standing cells – offering only enough room for the unfortunate prisoner to stand, often for weeks on end with a six-hour sleep break on a wooden cot allowed once every three days. They were fed one single piece of bread during the break. Hoffman had witnessed its results. Emaciated skeletons with bloodshot eyes, unable to walk, pulled half-alive out of a pit of their own filth. It was uncommon, but not unheard of, and the broken men duly died ‘of natural causes’ in the course of their return to forced labour. The camp crematorium incinerated all evidence of their existence.
Eicke led down to the end, where a waiting guard opened the rusty steel door of the cell. As they drew level, a middle aged man came into sight that Hoffman had never seen before, clad in an inmates striped pyjama bottoms and grey-white top, stood at the far end of the room under the light streaming in through a tiny arch above his head. Hoffman blanched as he saw the man’s death sentence; a red triangle inverted within a yellow triangle. He was not only a Jew, which was not as yet legally criminal, per se, but he combined the hated race with political subversion. A Jewish political prisoner. Worse still, a pink triangle stood next to the red and yellow makeshift Star of David. The man was homosexual.
Eicke beckoned Hoffman to enter the cell. He did so, staring at the prisoner, and taking care to stay inexpressive as he took in the Jew’s haggard appearance; burn marks and cuts evident, a haunted, knowing look in his eyes. Hoffman hid his emotions behind The Cold Face. The general leaned in to his ear, and hissed:
“This degenerate piece of dog shit is a pink triangle, a Jew and a fucking Kozi. Doesn’t it boil your blood just to look at him, SS-Untersturmführer Hoffman? Or does it provoke humane feelings? Are you a National Socialist, and a true son of the Fatherland? You must decide, as you look at the Führer’s enemy; a Jew, and a communist pervert. Deutschland Erwache!”
Germany Awake.
The last line was all that was needed. Though the SA style Jew beatings and public persecutions held no appeal for the relatively mild-mannered Hoffman – despite his dislike of the parasitic people who had profited from the misery of honest, decent Germans – the sight of one such Jew stood before him as a sodomite, and a political criminal against the Führer assailed his senses. It was sickening to be around such vermin. Sickening.
‘Germany Awake’, the Führer had proclaimed, and piece by piece, it was reclaiming its own land and people from the scum like the one before him in this dingy, dank little cell. And now Hoffman, and people like him, could fight back, and contribute to the awakening. No longer would swinish filth like this disgusting man be free to persecute and mock them. To extort them, and corrupt their systems. No longer would degenerates like this piece of garbage be allowed to poison the Fatherland with such sick disease. They could purge their enemies together, led by the Führer, bound by their blood and destiny.
Hoffman unsheathed his truncheon, and slowly approached the trembling captive. Knowing that Eicke expected punishment as well as justice, he brought the club down in a vicious, curving arc into the side of the prisoner’s knee. Cries rang out, and he spat in response, releasing a contemptuous gobbet of mucus that spattered the stricken man’s neck. The young man circled his helpless prey. It was not the savagery of the natural world, but beyond animalistic; a lingering, spiteful pleasure in the act. Lightly tapping the doomed Jew’s head with the baton for a sadist’s touch, Hoffman heard an approving chuckle behind him, and even before the methodical blows reigned down, he knew he was going to Poland.
The silver cigarette holder gratefully accepted its seventeenth Dunhill of the day, and was quickly clamped between the teeth of its beleaguered owner.
Simon sat ill-at-ease, trying to relax, as he reclined in his smoking gown of burgundy velvet and silk; a favourite item, not inherited from his father, but one that he himself had procured at considerable expense, along with a large, curved wooden calabash. It was a favourite little eccentricity of his, and though he rejected high society almost as a whole, this was one private quirk of the well-to-do that he relished. Enjoying the leisurely smoke, the journalist considered switching the holder fastened-Dunhill for his calabash; an act that never failed to give him a thrilling sense of kinship with Arthur Conan Doyle as he wrote. He quickly abandoned the idea. Not yet. The calabash drew his attention, and sat heavy, cumbersome. Sherlock merely pondered with it. The beautiful, marvellous thing was utterly incompatible with writing.
It was evening; his appointed time of reflection. Having completed all professional work, and private dissidence for the public eye alike, he set about reco
rding his private thoughts in the leather journal for posterity, hoping that this work would be seen by future eyes; those seeking to understand.
Dear Diary,
Is it narcissistic madness to aspire to become the Samuel Pepys of this age? It is not entirely self-serving, I assure you – assuming ‘you’, whoever you may be, will one day read this work, should it survive, and that your heart is pure.
Future generations need to understand the madness of this time.
Yesterday, I strolled through Hyde Park, and it was truly joyous to see some of my leaflets scattered about. Some from Eric, some from myself. German soldiers were making manacled prisoners collect them. From the averted eyes and occasional glances, even smirks, I know that many of the people I passed in the park have been reading my materials. I was thrilled, and it would be dishonest and unbecoming to pretend otherwise.
I am likely a doomed man. How long can this be maintained? Perhaps, more so than Pepys, I am more likely to become… the Chartist printer they hung in the mid-1800s… or William Carter. Or perhaps even a William Tyndale, if I actually achieve anyway significant with this malarkey, beyond a two-finger salute and a few raspberries blown at the krauts.
I should not call them krauts. The term is almost fond. It thoroughly – and unfairly – diminishes the overwhelming menace and evil of their actions. Theirs is an apotheosis I struggle to contemplate; a tyrannical idea of the supremacy of blood and race over people and individual lives, which may yet choke the world with its own innards. Such scientific racism is so malevolently wicked, the old postwar German concept of ‘life unworthy of life’ has been allowed to re-enter the public consciousness, immunised and dulled as Europe has become to the awful brutality of National Socialist theory, and the violence of putting it into practice.
The leaders of this movement are almost godlike. Human lives are a shabby irrelevance in contrast with their great Movement of Blood and Race, which shall shape history, or so they tell us, while destroying the past. Immortality beckons, to them; a standard empathy for human suffering is beneath their wild thinking from on high. Hitler is a psychotic; his paladins soothe and stir the passions of his soul, and the more coldly rational amongst them manage to transform his visions into actions that provide them with enormous power over life and death.
It makes sense that Nietzsche is held aloft as one of their philosophical masters. Why would he not be; the breaker from Schopenhauer, the man to whom life was a Darwinian struggle within oneself as well as externally; true victory being to conquer oneself and abandon the abstract; the concept of God, and the quixotic notions of morality and justice… it is their own path. They have used blood and race as the conduit to bind their mindless masses as a people, while they themselves broke from traditional values to become Gods.
To some extent, these people represent the Napoleon, or the Emperor or the Pharaohs of human history dating back as far as was recorded. Their sense of right and true ends with the threat of an equal, or one of similar power, and then destruction or assimilation supercedes any notion of decency. Their benevolence can only stretch as far as kindness to underlings, and at that, only those of acceptable, similar blood. To rise against them was our crime; the mere suggestion that an opposing sentiment or way of life could be as worthy or more worthy than theirs was our ultimate sin in their eyes. But now, to us, the implication is clear; the Gods have spared us. They have shown mercy, and history will record their greatness.
But this is not theirs alone. This Nietzschean value is the same of all great men throughout history. The human herd is destined to be led by psychotic dreamers and morally questionable shysters; evidently, this breed of superman is the only type of person capable of seizing power, driven as they are by insatiable hunger; alas, our contemporary times further prove it. The age of the omnipotent ruler is far from over; Emperor, Pharaoh, Führer.
Simon paused. The cigarette had burned out, and on seeing its ash, he was grateful for the smoking jacket. He replaced it, choosing what looked like a Turkish cigarette from the wooden box – those poor people, reliant on black market smokes of tea and God knows what else – and, vaguely pondering how unfair was his position in comparison, continued to write.
You cannot imagine the disgust with which the prior paragraph was written.
Here is an insight into the machine minds of such a system, and its marshals:
Out of sheer curiosity, I went to Speakers Corner, to see if any still dared use its privilege afforded as per the civil rights of an Englishman; that to speak, and speak freely. To my disbelief, it was. A small crowd of good-natured hecklers were gathered around a scruffy cockney lad of about 19. The young man was giving mock-Hitler speeches, twisting them for comedy; two fingers pointing in the air, screaming, frothing at the mouth. He was really good, truth be told.
“English… English people… listen up…” he cried.
“…Only when the people of England and Germany rise up, and unshackle themselves from the rationing, will unlimited sausage and sauerkraut be available to the Aryan peoples… the Jews have destroyed our sausage making capabilities, but only a people with cultural creativity maintain true cultural performance. We will rise up, and a new order of sausage making will emerge triumphant from the ruins of the old world – any person or group opposing our people and the historic making of sausage can do so quite calmly, for they have never even for one single hour been on the battlefield! But our sausages will prevail! England Awake!”
Two Wehrmacht soldiers were laughing at him openly from a distance. Almost hysterically, in fact, which certainly added to the moment. And then the car pulled up; armed SS got out, with the blank collar tab. Everyone knows what that means now. Heydrich’s shadow army – SD/Gestapo. The boy tried to run, and was brought down with coshes and hauled away, still yelling. I doubt the man will see Christmas.
Despite incidents of this nature, the Germans are playing a clever game. Most of this seems to be from the army. It’s a sort of velvet fascism.
Simon paused. Velvet fascism. That is a good one. He made note of it, for the next leaflets and pamphlets. A good warning for the people only too inclined to believe the best, to harbour optimism for this future.
The Jerries staged public talking shops. Junior officers and enlisted men took up the brunt of it. I expected political language, euphemisms and veiled threats. Instead, we got reassurances and a promise that rationing is not long for this world. They boxed clever. Some beastly, abhorrent, smug little snake oil salesman called Sebastian was speaking at the one I saw, in Hyde Park; by all accounts he carried on for hours. There was no end to him, the man went on like blood gushing from an opened vein, an air raid couldn’t have stopped him… the man was a protégé of Goebbels himself; wasted in a Wehrmacht tunic.
Curfew; also soon-to-end, or so they say. Rationing to be entirely lifted; equal as in Berlin, and indeed, slightly better than was in Britain.
But meanwhile, they have killed democracy, executed dissidents and conducted shadowy, clandestine police operations in the thick of night; obscured by the fogs of war and the mindless optimism of the masses. If this diary survives; let the menace of the time be remembered.
Sinking back into his chair, Simon sighed. Optimism was something he begrudged in every living soul he saw. Placing the silver holder in the right-breast pocket of the smoking jacket, he pulled out the calabash, and having emptied tobacco into it, began to puff away, thoughtfully, basking in his private sanctuary of comfort.
Bormann’s quiet rise had interested Heydrich. While Hess remained Deputy to the Führer, his Chief of Staff Bormann was the power leading the Party brownshirts and bureaucrats, as well as partly living in a house above the Berghof in the Obersalzburg complex that he’d designed, and more recently, sliding effortlessly from de facto Party leader into the simultaneous role of Hitler’s secretary. Bormann built the mountaintop complex; Bormann made the Führer rich from stamp royalties; Bormann, not Hess, never left the Führer’s side, during l
ong, idle days on the mountain. While Goebbels ran Berlin and the national propaganda, Göring’s legendary energy waned as his waist widened and morphine addiction increased; Bormann, meanwhile, was by the Führer’s side. With Göring and Goebbels long established in their roles, only Himmler and Heydrich had seized as much tangible power since Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor as had the sly, fleshy, brutal Bormann. Heydrich had recognised his machinations for what they were, almost admiringly. It amazed him that the Göring who’d once been so politically ruthless was now content to sit idly by at Karinhall, wildly enjoying the trappings of power while a Bormann existed in the shadows – or rather, in the glaring spotlight, in Heydrich’s eyes – quietly manoeuvring himself into position by virtue of never leaving the Führer’s side. Göring the recluse; Prime Minister, Reichsmarschall and all his other titles and accolades aside, even beyond being the chosen successor; Heydrich still couldn’t understand the fat man’s withdrawal. That sort of inactivity at the heart of power was an anathema to the Reich Security Chief.
So he’d put his SD to work. On the outbreak of war, Heydrich switched jurisdiction of Codename “Brown” to Gestapo agents; incredibly, as luck would have it, one of whom was conducting an affair with a close confidant of Martin Bormann’s wife. Gerda Bormann visited this friend, often in tears, showing visible signs of abuse and outpouring her marital misery. The Reich’s Security Police chief was delighted. By the spring of 1940, when he had collected sufficient material to strike, Heydrich made his move. Unannounced, he payed Herr Bormann a visit at the Party Chancellery in Munich, also known as the Brown House; heart of the National Socialist movement and home to its hardliners. Bormann, ‘The Brown Eminence’, had stayed on alone an extra day on urgent business before joining his Führer at Obersalzburg, a rare separation. Heydrich, tipped off and as calculating as ever, had quickly seized his chance.
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 29