Stauffenberg would then place the primed bomb inside his briefcase, reenter the conference room and set the briefcase beneath the table as close to Hitler as possible. After a few minutes, the colonel would receive a planned telephone call and leave the room once more. As soon as the bomb went off an activation message would go out over the public radio frequencies stating, ‘The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear in order to seize power for themselves.’
This would prompt General Fromm to activate Operation Valkyrie and wrest power away from the Nazis. It was so simple, so elegant, and yet so very dangerous to all those involved. If the bomb was armed incorrectly or misplaced and failed to kill Hitler, the reprisals would be severe and wide sweeping. This is what prompted Gallono to take time away from the western front to visit his family.
Even though Hastelloy himself had married Mosa all those years ago back in the Egyptian desert, the captain had long discouraged the crew from becoming romantically involved with the Sigma species. He felt it would develop complicating attachments that could get in the way of the crew performing their missions on this planet. Plus, Hastelloy assured them all that the pain of outliving a loved one was an excruciating experience to be avoided at all cost.
For the longest time, Gallono found Hastelloy’s discouraging words on the matter unnecessary; there was no attraction whatsoever. Preferences do change over time, particularly with a mate like Lucie. Besides his otherworldly origins, she understood everything that made Gallono the man he was and embraced it all: both the good and bad. She was a once in an entire existence match for him and their son, Manfred, only strengthened their bond. They were a dedicated, inseparable family unit, and he would do whatever it took to provide for their safety short of betraying Hastelloy’s orders.
Gallono passed the time by playing a game of chess with Manfred in the dining room while the radio played classical music at a low volume in the background. The fifteen year old was more or less wiping the board with him, taking unbridled delight in his advantaged position against one of Germany’s most distinguished military strategists.
Manfred was a solid chess player, but the fact that Gallono was losing spoke volumes about his level of distraction. Too much time had passed. He should have heard something by now either confirming the mission’s success or warning him of its failure. The game progressed a few more moves as Manfred managed to back Gallono’s king into a corner, when a gentle knock came at the front door.
Gallono tipped backwards onto the rear legs of his chair and careened his neck around the corner to view Lucie speaking with three uniformed Nazi officers: two generals he recognized from Hitler’s headquarters, and Tomal.
Lucie became visibly despondent and was led away in silent sobs by one of the officers. Gallono watched Tomal’s head slowly rotate to meet his gaze, and the despicable man’s eyes said it all. You. Are. Mine.
Tomal approached the dining room with his lackey in tow while holding his carnivorous stare. Gallono set his chair back on all fours and deflated into the seat cushion; Stauffenberg had failed.
He heard the approaching footsteps come to a stop behind his chair. After releasing a regret filled sigh, he reached out with his right hand and tipped his king onto its side, signaling his resignation of the game. He then extended an open palm across the board toward Manfred, “Well played. Now go keep your mother company out back while I speak with these fine gentlemen.”
Manfred knew nothing of the day’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler, but his fifteen years of age gave him ample experience in reading body language. These men behind his father were not friends, and this might be the last time he ever saw him again. That being the case, he did not celebrate his victory.
Instead, Manfred took Gallono’s outstretched hand. He shook it for a moment, but when tears started forming in the corner of his eyes, he pulled himself in for a crushing embrace. “I love you, father. No matter what, I will always love and be proud of you.”
Gallono breathed deep trying to take in every sensation the moment had to offer: the warmth of Manfred’s touch, the sound of his breathing, the smell of his hair. All too quickly, the moment had to end. Gallono levered his son to his feet and sent him on his way with a reassuring pat on the shoulder then cheek. Once Manfred exited the room, Gallono rose to his feet and turned to face the consequences of his actions at the hands of Tomal.
Behind them, six Gestapo officers armed with submachine guns stepped into the dining room to lend much needed muscle to the arresting general’s words. “Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, you’ve been named as a conspirator in the assassination attempt on the Führer earlier today. We are here to place you under arrest.”
“How much earlier today?” Gallono asked.
“It happened an hour ago.”
Gallono could not help but crack a sideways grin while staring directly at Tomal. “My, my, that certainly is some quick investigative work, gentlemen. Some might say too quick to even be credible.”
“Your opinion on the matter is irrelevant. You are hereby placed under arrest for treason,” Tomal’s companion countered and motioned for his Gestapo horde to execute the order.
“No I’m not, and here’s why,” Gallono stated in a forceful enough tone to halt the armed soldiers mid stride. “First of all, none of you in this room are physically capable of placing me under arrest if I decided to resist. Second, if Hitler brands me as a traitor it will cause too much damage to morale on the home front. Plus, you have no proof. Now with that settled why don’t you scurry on back to Berlin and practice your salutes with each other for when Hitler returns.”
“That is your Führer!” the enraged officer declared while taking a threatening step toward Gallono. Tomal placed a halting hand on the man’s chest before he could make much progress.
“Handcuff him to his chair, then leave us and wait outside,” Tomal ordered. Once done and only the two of them remained in the room, Gallono was the first to speak.
“Do your little lap dogs outside also hump your leg when you order them to?” Gallono snickered, and continued in a relaxed manner. “What are you doing, Tomal? Hitler can’t afford to kill me, so this must be coming from you. Do I need to remind you that we are, for all intents and purposes, immortal? What do you gain here? More importantly, you’re going against Hastelloy’s orders; how does all of this benefit our mission?”
“I’m protecting our mission from Hastelloy and his Jew followers,” Tomal insisted in a level tone. “Don’t you see it? His dirty Jews have their hands in everything: business, banking, and government the world over. He is trying to covertly take over this planet for his own personal gain.”
Gallono pursed his lips upon hearing the unexpected justification for Tomal’s actions. “That’s insane. If that were truly the captain’s end goal, why wouldn’t he just open up the Nexus and arm them all with advanced weaponry?”
“Because none of us would follow him,” Tomal countered and continued with a look of desperation in his eyes. “To accomplish his goal, Hastelloy has to use the people he enslaved to his will back in Egypt. It has taken me until now to establish a position where I can finally strike at his secret army of followers.
“All of Germany now hates the Jews to the point I can carry out the final solution. It is all because of Hitler and our Nazi party’s hold over Germany, so I can’t have you blowing him up and ruining my plans. Therefore, I need to either bring you away from Hastelloy and over to my side, or get you out of the way. Which is it going to be?”
“Tomal, it’s happening again,” Gallono cautioned with genuine concern in his eyes. “Your mind is seeing conspiracies where none exist.”
“It does exist,” Tomal shouted with his emotional state coming unhinged. “He spent a lifetime with them in the desert. That is more than enough time to set himself up as a living God to them.”
“Why did he encour
age the spread of Christianity then?” Gallono countered. “By your logic, that order deprived Hastelloy from billions of potential followers.”
“To throw me off his trail,” Tomal countered with a wild glow about his face and eyes.
Gallono shook his head out of both pity and anger. “This ‘Final Solution’ you speak of, is that related to the camps I keep hearing about in Poland?”
Upon mention of the camps, Tomal began cackling with delight. “Yes. Hastelloy’s followers are being exterminated day and night in the cleansing fires of my furnace houses. I am wiping his secret army out by the millions.”
“My God, Tomal, you’re talking about women and children; innocent civilians all of them.”
“Innocents?” Tomal bellowed angrily, but soon returned to his cackling lunacy. “I think not. Now, what is your answer, Commander Gallono? Will you join me in my noble quest to overthrow Hastelloy and restore order to our mission on this planet?”
“Never,” Gallono hissed. “I will never turn against Captain Hastelloy, least of all to follow a vile creation like you. Arrest me and let the public spectacle begin.”
Having his offer so thoroughly rejected snapped Tomal out of his laughter. “I don’t think you want me to do that. Hitler has already set up his People’s Court, which will of course be a kangaroo court that always decides in favor of the prosecution to arrive at the presubscribed verdict of death.”
“To quote your words back at the Eagle’s Nest, ‘so what’? Death is nothing to us.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard of you taking a family during our time on this planet. I can only imagine how precious they are to you, especially that fine young man I saw leave this dining room earlier.”
Upon hearing the thinly veiled threat, Gallono, for the first time in his existence, felt the ice-cold gush of real fear fill his veins. His own death would mean he could never see or spend time with Lucie or Manfred again. He could only just bear that thought, but the notion of them being killed along with him was unbearable; unthinkable.
“Oh yes. They both would stand trial, face public disgrace, and then execution right along with you,” Tomal confirmed. “So you have a very important choice to make. You can be selfish and put them through the People’s Court, or choose to commit suicide quietly. That way they can live out the rest of their days off your military pension payment.”
“Suicide?” Gallono gasped. “No, here’s how it will work. If you leave them be, I’ll let you shoot me right here. You can tell the rest of Germany I died in combat or something.”
“No, not for you,” Tomal said sharply. “During our time on this planet you’ve taken every opportunity to insult me, hit me, or generally humiliate me. Now I get to return the favor. I am going to watch the ‘oh so honorable’ Gallono commit the ultimate act of dishonor for a Novi by ending his own life.”
“I won’t do it. Never.”
“Then say goodbye to little Manfred and Lucie. Dying the long, drawn out death of a traitor will not be pleasant for them,” Tomal cautioned, almost causing Gallono to lose his lunch.
“Of course there is always an easier way,” Tomal added with an outstretched palm containing a capsule of cyanide. “Take it, its painless I hear.”
Gallono could barely think straight with his adrenaline pumping with such violence through his body. He could not kill Tomal, they would still execute his family. Breaking free and running would net the same result. The only option available to him was to swallow Tomal’s capsule and accept his dishonor. If Hastelloy could find a way to live with it, Gallono was certain he could as well. He may have been rationalizing things in his mind, but at the moment, he saw an undeniable nobility in accepting suicide to safeguard his family.
“Fine,” Gallono heard himself say. “You win. I’ll do it, but not here. Not where they will see the end result.”
At that moment a sickening smile grew broad and bright across Tomal’s face. “Have it your way. Come with me and we’ll take you outside the village so that you may disgrace yourself in private.”
Tomal unfastened Gallono’s shackles and led him by the arm toward the front door of the house. He looked toward the kitchen and locked eyes with his beloved Lucie. Their connection ran deep enough that no words needed saying. There was a hallway and two rooms between them, but Gallono felt her loving embrace one last time through her eyes. They held strong and gave him strength to walk out the front door without regret. He was doing it for her and that was more than enough.
Gallono rode in silence through the village until the car came to a stop near a grove of trees outside of town. He felt a capsule pressed into his hand. Next, he heard the other occupants vacate the vehicle and close the doors behind them, leaving Gallono to his own devices.
Once again, the urge to run or at least die fighting, wormed its way into Gallono’s mind. The impulse was beaten back by the indelible memory of that final embrace from Manfred and that last look of strength and gratitude from Lucie. With that in mind, he swallowed the pill and five minutes later watched his world grow dark. He slumped forward in the seat unable to control his body any longer and felt his hat fall from his head. Then there was nothing: no thought, no pain, nor shame.
Chapter 36: The Final Solution
At last, Tomal thought to himself on his way to a private meeting with the upper echelons of the Nazi political party and their paramilitary arms of the Gestapo and SS. He had rid himself of the proverbial shackles around his wrists that Commander Gallono represented. Now he was free to do things his way, and with the Red Army making impressive gains in the eastern territories, there was no time to waste.
Up to this point, the death squads and forced labor camps had eradicated only a million Jews. The cleansing was going too slowly; it was now time to implement the Final Solution of the Jewish question.
After introduction to the gathering of nearly three hundred party elites, Tomal took to the podium and got to the point by using Hitler’s own words.
“Twenty years ago our Führer authored a book you may have heard of, Mein Kampf.” Tomal paused for the light laughter to die down before continuing. “In this text he openly spoke of his hatred for the Jewish people and their conspiracies to provoke another world war. In his first draft, the Führer proposed a solution to the Jewish question, but our nation was not yet ready to hear it. I now read to you these words which fell onto the editor’s floor back in those early days.”
‘Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.’
“None of the Führer's prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction.”
“To this end, eight extermination camps have been outfitted with gas chambers and furnace houses to industrialize the extermination of the vile and treacherous creatures all of us in this room know the Jews to be.”
The hatred of the Jews ran deep in this room. Tomal was forced to pause in delivering his speech for the emphatic applause to abate once more before continuing.
“All of us in this room support the Führer’s final solution to the Jewish question, so we all must turn our efforts to its implementation and the effects it may have on those
less knowledgeable of the Jew treachery than those of us in this room.”
“Extermination of the Jewish people. It’s one of those things that is easily said: ‘The Jewish people are being exterminated’, says every party member in this room, ‘this is very obvious, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, we’re doing it and it’s a small matter.’ But of all those who talk this way, none has observed it, none has endured it.”
“To see one hundred corpses lie next to each other, when five hundred lie there or when a thousand are lined up. To have endured this it is no small matter to remain a decent person.”
“Our soldiers in these extermination camps are serving a glorious cause, but it is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. These men must be educated and come to know without a shadow of a doubt that they had a moral right, they had the duty to our people to do it, to kill those Jews who wanted to kill us.”
“As part of this, we are faced with the question: what about the women and children? The Führer has a clear solution to this problem too. Exterminating the men is not enough. To kill them or have them killed and allow their children to grow up as avengers - no. The difficult decision had to be made to have these people disappear from the earth; entirely. For the men who will execute this portion of the solution, it will be the most difficult which we have ever encountered.”
“I feel obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary in this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left. This must be accomplished before the Red Army, or their sympathizers can hazard upon these extermination camps.”
Origins: The Reich Page 23