Wolf held his gaze, searching for any semblance of fear or disingenuity and then, as though satisfied, the SS officer smiled, beckoning the British soldier over to the front, to stand before the row of the thirteen would-be escapees. The Sergeant obliged and marched as proudly as he had spoken, betraying not a quiver of fear. He nodded to the captives before turning to face the rest of the company; his boys, and a combined seven hundred other British soldiers of the empire.
“Be calm, men,” he called out, his voice steady. “Rather one life than twelve, of course. I will go out with a smile on my face, doing my duty. For King and Country. Godspeed, lads.”
Hitchman clicked his heels, and the men saluted him, some with tears streaming down their cheeks. James Wilkinson’s face was bunched up. Tommy and Brian wept quietly. They all put three fingers to their temples, to a man.
Stanley saluted them back.
Major Wolf, still smiling, raised his Mauser to the spot between the Sergeant’s eyes. Stanley tried to smile, his trembling lips pinching together, and he looked up to the glowing sun as the major pulled the trigger.
Click.
A spontaneous yell erupted from the men, and then silence. The only sound came from Stanley, whose brave façade had been destroyed by the trigger click, his power instantly gone, as though an electric light switch had been flicked. The greying Norfolk soldier’s face had bunched together and his whole body seized up entirely as the Mauser mechanism noise echoed through the silence. The gun was empty.
Major Wolf nodded approvingly to the British sergeant, whose face was turning red from not breathing. Finally he gasped, and sucked in some fresh, clean air, sinking to his knees, wheezing, at last betrayed by his body, having maintained control of it to the point of an expected death that never came. The men looked at him in horror, totally shocked by the scene, before relief flooded through them like a warm electric current. He was alive. James, though, felt a rush of hatred towards the smug, intolerable officer that held command of the camp. Looking at Major Wolf, James imagined sending a bullet of his own through the icy, chiselled features; smashing through the angular, strong jaw, tearing through flesh and coming to rest in the pulsing grey matter of a brain that lacked something human.
Wolf was gazing at Hitchman with a mixture of admiration and amusement. Some sense alerted him to the hatred he elicited, and he turned to meet James’ gaze instantly, without so much as seeking him out. The Yorkshireman detected a slight wink, before Wolf turned sharply and surveyed the stricken Hitchman again. Never before had he hated a man with such intensity as he did Wolf; as Stanley gasped on the dusty ground, James envisioned cold-blooded murder with relish. Stanley had lived through two years in the trenches as an enlisted man. Shell shock had ended as many lives as sniper’s bullets for Stanley’s generation. And here he was, all these years later, hyperventilating after the cruellest shock imaginable.
Major Wolf turned to the ranks, spinning the pistol around his right index finger like the parody of a western cowboy. The movie star face and those piercing eyes betrayed nothing. He holstered the impotent weapon, thoroughly unruffled, his composure astonishing. Through drying tears that had given way to enormous relief, Tommy could not help but retain a grudging admiration for the SS Sturmbannführer. His was an unchallengeable power, and a rare forcefulness. Major Jochen Wolf’s gravitas was undeniable.
“You are lucky to have such a brave platoon leader,” Wolf began pleasantly. “He’s worth much, much more than Sergeant-Major, or some other NCO rank. More like Stanley Hitchman, and you gentlemen would have undoubtedly lasted more than four weeks against us, even with our Ardennes surprise.” His eyes twinkled. Most seemed too relieved to fully take on board his speech.
He resumed it less congenially; a trace of steel unmistakeable in his tone. “The next time there is a breach of the rules, I will personally shoot everyone involved, him, and anyone else in the platoon in question. There will be no speeches, no gestures, no warnings and noo empty guns; no chance for the bravest and best of you to show your honour like the sergeant just did, in such admirable style, like a true British gentleman. I hope that is fully understood; crystal clear, as you English say. Do like the other companies in similar camps, and follow the rules here. I am mortified that in camp no.5 alone there has been a breach of this severity. There will not be again. In time, all will become clear and bullets will not be wasted on brothers of Aryan blood – as the Reichsführer-SS Himmler and SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich are so fond of telling us, our bullets are better served elsewhere. Please don’t make me regretfully waste them on you, and the brave Sergeant Hitchman.”
Turning one final time to the kneeling, dazed Hitchman, Wolf offered his hand. Stanley had stopped gasping, and magnanimously took the proffered arm of the man he’d fully expected to end his life not fifty seconds before, recovering his poise and rising to his feet. The older German clapped him warmly on either shoulder, grasping him in brotherhood, as though holding him upright.
“You are worth more than an NCO, Sarge. Much more. If you were an SS man I’d promote you to junior officer rank on the spot. Sturm…bannführer… Volf will hereby refer to you as Untersturmführer Hitchman. When Britain is truly threatened by external enemies, real enemies, alien civilisations that long for her demise, and you are compelled to defend her, I assure you it will be as a Lieutenant at the least.”
At this, Wolf reached over with his right arm, thrice patting the discombobulated soldier on his shoulder before turning to walk away; his trademark brisk march taking him out of the barracks area, followed by the aide that was still holding the major’s great leather coat, hurrying in his wake.
“Naomi? Are you decent?”
The young Jewess chuckled at the falsity of his affected tone, and responded in kind.
“One is quite very well decent, wouldn’t you know dear.”
“Jolly good, jolly good,” he cried, clunking down the wooden steps to his room.
Paul marched straight over to the sofas, and deposited himself into the most comfortable place with gusto. He went to pick up his weathered paperback copy of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and then thought better of it; caught between decisions he dithered, hands fidgeting as he settled restlessly in the seat. Finally looking over at Naomi, he saw she wore a weary, if amused look on tired, puffy features that betrayed that she was freshly awoken from sleep.
“Hello, Paul.”
“Aye, afternoon. Some sleeping pattern you’re keepin’.”
“Don’t nag,” she implored.
“All right. Anyway…” Paul picked up Dumas absentmindedly, lightly tapping the book against his knees. “I’ve ’ad an idea. Instead of being a half-hearted bloody night-scribe, with half a mind on eighteen unfinished novels stuck in desk drawers… I’m writing something now. A serious one.”
She held his gaze, encouraging him to elaborate.
“I’m g’na write about how we beat the Nazis.”
“How’s that work, then?” She asked, confused. Lighting up a cigarette, he tossed her the packet, and grinned.
“I make it bloody up. Anyway, I’ll tell you more in the pub. Hold that fag for now; get up, do what you need to do and then come for a pint before they close for dinner.”
Pubs in England shut for several hours mid-afternoon, for a lunch break of sorts, before reopening three hours later in time for those who were finishing work shifts. It was an unquestioned system.
“Give me five,” she told him, leaping out of bed.
He waited upstairs for her to get ready. She quickly washed with a wet flannel, hurriedly dried with a towel, tied a headscarf around her thick, flowing dark locks of hair and threw on her favourite long, red dress. Sliding into her green coat, fastened with buttons and a belt, she was upstairs in four minutes flat; a figure of gravitas, utterly transformed. Paul looked up from his book and whistled, softly.
“Bloody hell, Naomi.”
“Fast, eh?” She winked at him.
�
�I don’t mean that…” he nodded at her dress, and looked her up and down.
“What?”
Paul chuckled. “Nothing, lass. You just… well, you scrub up well for a pint at dinnertime.”
She grinned at him. “That’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever said to me. What a gentleman.”
Smirking, he opened the door with a mock-gesture for her to go through it.
“Opens doors, helps old ladies across the street – the works, dear girl,” he told her solemnly, feigning a pompous air. She curtseyed.
“Mon cher, thou art indeed a gentleman and a scholar.”
That made him snort, almost without mirth. “Don’t speak that frog language. That’s the same mouth you kiss your mother with.”
Easily matching his snort in volume, she scoffed at him as they exited the house, strolling out into a day pricked by stabs of that quintessential northern English sunlight that, while occasionally bright, lacks warmth and can be entirely redundant with regards to clothing requirements. It illuminated the parklands, an open area ringed with trees that served as a dividing line between the city centre and the northern districts of Leeds; aesthetic in the aftermath of autumn’s effect on the trees. It was the final period in which most British people actually enjoyed their homeland for some months to come, barring Christmas. As he glanced around, taking in the visual scope of their environment, Paul mused that many months down the line, the onset of spring was unlikely to stir the soul, optimism facing extinction as it was.
An absence of hope was a minor death in life. Paul had the vague sense that he was superficially keeping it together, balancing his emotions with his responsibilities with difficulty while merely smiling through the disturbing days. Individual occurrences, too many to name, had privately disquieted the humorous Paul and he suspected that beyond the superficial, he was barely hanging on to his control and poise, an underlying rising sensation of suppressed tension building to fever pitch.
Sarcasm, the Yorkshireman’s great ally and weapon, helped him and countless others to mask the gamut of concurrent feelings that as-yet, he could not properly label or name.
He did not share with Naomi the savage beating he’d witnessed that day. Three soldiers, filing out of a restaurant in a manner that suggested to Paul that obnoxiousness combined with a refusal to pay was most likely their modus operandi – the arrogance of a conqueror – had momentarily paused for thought as they passed an older black man.
No Jew, perhaps, but somehow Paul doubted the streets of Berlin and Hamburg were awash with too many dark-skinned faces. Or arms, legs, torsos, heads, feet and hands either, for that matter. This man looked like one of the hell-enduring slaves of the 19th century, and it was not hard to imagine his great or great-great-grandfather’s arrival in the west being the conclusion of a forced and torturous journey.
“You insult Deutschland?” Paul remembered a red-faced army soldier screaming at the man, using his country’s endonymic name in the tentative dual-communication style that was already nicknamed ‘Krautglish’.
Utterly exposed, and unable to avoid their attention, it was clear the black man had known that once the initial surprise wore off, the Germans would react to his appearance with hostility; the pack mentality of wild animals. Quicker to regain his wits, the local man preempted their introduction, but it was not placatory. “Shalom,” Paul heard him say, barely able to register it himself. That’s when the gigantic Jerry began to bawl.
Was it black humour? Paul wondered, before further registering the double entendre. Why would the man aggravate them; a nationalistic people ruled and governed by institutional racism. Did he hope to shock them into non-action? Or does he simply not care about the consequences of provocation anymore?
Either way, the man’s choice of words had a very distinct effect. The soldiers were snapped back to life, reanimated by the Jewish greeting. And they crowded him, visibly bristling. Shock and composed disdain transfigured instantly into naked aggression and loathing.
“Answer me! Did you just insult the Fatherland!”
“You insult us? You insult the Führer?” this voice came from a smaller, calmer soldier, with the dangerous air of a clinical sadist. Such men deliver persecution and punishment with a lethal precision, protracted; club-wielding thugs had given way to the new breed of Nazi. Those who as adolescents or adults had no experience of a world not run by Hitler. Those unaware of the crimes committed for his system. And those who thrilled in creating it.
Paul knew the man was in trouble. Invoking the name of Hitler justified any and all actions in the eyes of his believers – just like God. A religious devotion to either celestial dictators or living, breathing men was a warrant for wickedness; claiming attack on the unchallengeable was the common denominator for all.
“I greeted you,” the man said calmly, a hint of West African patois in his leodensian voice. “That’s no insult.”
Yelling in German, the large, blond man brought the back of his hand up from his bulging waist with considerable force, smacking across the face of the black unfortunate and sending him reeling back into the smaller, wiry soldier. That man wasted no time in redirecting their victim’s momentum, using the loss of equilibrium to hip-toss the unresisting figure, using the man’s own shirt lapels to twist and slam the back of his head into the concrete cobbles.
A sickening beating had taken place; Paul had to turn and leave, nauseated, by the sight of the martial artist-cum-sadist methodically breaking the now-stricken African fellow’s fingers, snapping them like brittle biscuits covered in chocolate, and attacking with the insatiable hunger of a fat child; malevolent in their violence. The third German, a large pudding of a man but less in size and stature than the huge pig that was his kameraden, had his gun trained on Paul and the other bystanders who, by chance, happened to be in that particular part of Headingley at the time. The message was clear; interfere, and you die.
Only after leaving did Paul realise that such moments demonstrated exactly why fascism had triumphed. ‘Enemies of The State’ are obscenely punished, yet everyone else walks free; the classic case of divide and rule. Self-preservation. Even as one individual instance of capricious, callous behaviour and abuse-of-power from a gang of possibly uneducated, socially inept soldiers, Paul knew the awful battering that was meted out to the ethnically-exposed unfortunate represented the new world whole. The idea snowballed, until Paul began to contemplate if he now bore some of the collective guilt, and it was with some difficulty that he finally repressed it.
If we all resisted, totalitarianism would never succeed.
In the present, that cruel beating seemed like a distant dream as he strolled in the open air with Naomi. They used the parkside road that ran alongside Woodhouse Moor to reach the pub. As they stepped in, Naomi attracted the same stares as ever from the pub’s patrons. Paul wondered if she genuinely did not notice, or if she simply didn’t care.
They took a seat in the far corner, and clinked glasses.
“Cheers!”
“Cheers, Paul.”
Both enjoyed the taste of the Tetley’s ale, smacking their lips, exaggerating a little in the style that both their grandparents’ did. It amused them that both of their families seemed to share the same silly quirks.
“Right, Paul. You didn’t come yesterday. I’m kicking my heels. I want to know what’s going on. School, everything. What’s up with thee?” she began, sweetening it by mocking the ultra-Yorkshireism he sometimes used.
He looked away, sipping his Tetley’s, but as his gaze drifted back her eyes were still firmly boring into him. Paul sighed.
“Well…”
Almost one week prior, it had been announced – on notices, billboards, and on radio by both Goebbels and William Joyce, in their usual sensitive manner – that all Jews must register with the authorities, and bring their passports to get stamped. That was a quarter of a million people in Britain. Naomi had felt weak with the news. All non-registered Jews would be subject to sever
e penalties, they were warned. An unregistered Jew is an enemy alien, parasite, partisan of assimilation.
Trips out had therefore been limited to the local pub. Naomi found herself longing for these moments of normality, and her heart burst with love for Paul every time they stepped out together into the fresh, clean air.
“Please.”
“You sure you want to hear it?” he asked her, scratching his chin.
“A minute, Paul. Christ. Then neither of us have to mention the Boche and the Quislings again today.”
“Christ? There you are now, see…” Paul sat forwards, wagging his finger at her. “That’s it. If you lot hadn’t bloody killed ’im, we wouldn’t be in this predicament would we?”
He cast her a look of deep disapproval, and sipped his pint again, snorting some of it back out as they both erupted in laughter.
“That, and stabbing Germany in the back during the Great War,” she reminded him primly, turning her nose up in the air as though superior. “We planned it all.”
“Oh, aye. Forgot about that. You pissed off the Spanish, too. And it’s not like the Catholics to pursue violent crusades against other peoples. Your lot must be wicked.”
“You’re awful, you are,” she laughed.
“I know.”
“We also control your banks, press and Parliament too, why do you think Hitler had invaded all these countries? Liberation, Paul.”
“I knew I liked ’im, deep down.” He took a deep swig of his pint. “To ’itler!”
“At least I can rely on you for some gallows humour when they finally make it illegal for me to be alive.”
At that, he sobered. “Well, that’s it. Since this registration business… now they’re enforcing the teaching of the Protocols in schools.”
She gave in to her genuine horror, momentarily, and then shrugged, unnecessarily rearranging her hair, which was more-than effectively wrapped, while trying to disguise how deeply shook she was.
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 32