by Unknown
Following Orders
By
Hunter Goforth
Copyright © 2011, by Hunter Goforth. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Realization
May, 1945
The room in the castle was bright despite the thick gray stone walls. Light streamed from the upper windows into a large hall and spilled into an equally spacious dining room. Tapestries covered the walls and a large, thick oak table seemed to fill the dining room, yet only one man was seated eating his meal. Dressed in a black SS uniform, he read a newspaper while quietly sipping his coffee. After a few minutes the hushed sound of padding bare feet echoed through the stones. The man turned his head toward the sounds.
An older man slowly made his way down a hall and into the great hall, walking unsteadily and bracing himself along the far wall before turning toward the dining room. Dressed in a set of ruffled pajamas and a blue terrycloth robe, the figure was slightly slumped and his left hand seemed to shake uncontrollably. He reached out and steadied himself on the furniture along the way. As he got closer, the SS officer began to notice the old man’s face. It had become lined and gray and his mustache was the only spot of color in a sea of pale white. Even the hair, ruffled and in need of a shampoo, was now streaked with gray. The man looked as if he might collapse at any moment.
The officer stood and pulled out a chair, waiting patiently for the old man to sit. As the older man came closer, he stopped and stared vacantly at the younger man. There was a faint trace of recognition in the blue eyes. “Müller, is that you?” he asked.
Heinrich Müller clicked his heals and quickly raised his right hand in a Nazi salute. “Yes, mein Führer. How are you feeling today?”
Adolf Hitler slumped into the chair, exhausted with the effort. After a few breaths he looked again at Müller. “I am feeling a little better today. Is there some food?” he asked.
“Certainly mein Führer. I shall have my assistant prepare you something,” said. He turned and walked through a door at the narrow end of the hall.
Curious, Hitler picked up the newspaper and began to read the first page. The more he read, the more agitated he became. Color began to fill his face again as his anger rose. When Müller returned he was nearly in a rage. “What is going on here? This is talking about a joint Allied force in Berlin! I put Dönitz in charge. What has he done?” he raged at Müller.
Müller had been waiting three weeks for his Führer to come down from his addictions. Since early in the war Hitler’s doctor had been injecting him with so many things his body was a wreck. From the time he arrived, Hitler had been in a delirium often ranting and raving within his padded room as the drugs slowly lost their hold on him. A trusted SS doctor had patiently brought him through it and had been amazed he had even survived. Only two days before, the Führer had finally become quiet, falling into a deep sleep. He had been moved into his bedroom and allowed to sleep as much as he needed. This was the first time Hitler had even recognized anyone there. Müller feared he might have to lock his Führer up again. But instead of cowering away, he stood his ground.
Müller calmly sat in his own chair beside Hitler. “Mein Führer, Germany surrendered to the Allied powers two weeks ago. Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could do to stop the Allied advances. Even you were forced to live in that bunker for weeks on end. We saved you from yourself and the Russians!” he said with a stern forcefulness. Müller pointed around him. “We are in a secluded facility built just for the occasion of getting you out of Berlin. We arrived here exactly three weeks ago when Hanna Reitsch flew us from the bunker to a small field west of here. Since that time, you have been very ill,” he said. “Your physician had been giving you injections of everything from morphine to animal urine and it had severely contaminated your mind and your body. For the last three weeks you have been a raving lunatic. We had to place you in a padded room just to keep you from harming yourself. Now that you have finally quieted down we might get some things done,” Müller said. Even he had calmed some with the explanation.
Hitler became quiet. He could not remember being scolded like that before and he didn’t have the strength to argue. He thought for a moment. His memory was still a little blurry and he was forcing himself to remember. After a minute he got a puzzled look on his face. “But I was preparing to…”
“We could not allow that to happen, mein Führer,” Müller said sternly. “Several of us in the SS made plans as early as 1943 to ensure your continued survival even if all else failed. As a part of those plans a double was put in your place and we escaped to here.”
“What about Eva and the others?
“Führer, Eva died in the bunker along with your double. Their bodies were cremated as you had planned. The others have mostly been captured. You have read what happened since. With you gone, there was no other hope,” Müller said sadly.
Hitler slumped further in his seat. He lifted his eyes towards the ceiling. “Poor Eva. In many ways she was just a child. I only married her to make her happy one last time.” He sighed and shook his head. “No, I believe you are right. It was practically all over anyway. The Russians were already in Berlin, the Americans were coming up from the south and the British from the west. We just didn’t have a way to stop them.” Hitler looked around and shook his head. “All our work and plans, gone. We built a great nation, only to surrender it away.” He looked at Müller. “Why didn’t you let me die? It would have been so much better,” Hitler said in a soft voice, resigning to his fate.
Müller stiffened. He was never one to give up. There were always alternatives and he was a part of a very good one. “No, mein Führer. You are here because your work is not yet complete. Do not forget we were with you from the beginning and we continue to believe in what you were trying to do. We have all read ‘Mein Kampf’ and learned much from it. Your ideals made Germany strong. It was the timing and a few unseen events which changed our destiny,” Müller said strongly. The old zeal he had felt in his youth returned to him and he seemed to swell with pride. He leaned in towards Hitler. “Here in this place General Kammler and I have made our plans and put away the tools to return Germany to greatness. We have loyal men still with us and no matter how long it takes we will make Germany stronger still. Your job, mein Führer, is to plan the Fourth Reich. You will help give us a direction again,” he said firmly.
“Führer, we have studied what happened in the Third Reich and we have learned from our mistakes. This time we shall have patience to wait for just the right moment to act. This time we shall not be so eager to pounce or so anxious to expand. We have in our hands the right tools, men and equipment to begin the rise of a new Germany!” Müller said forcefully. “We have the funds to do even more! We will create the Reich you wanted to make for us and we will do it in our own time and our own way. Mein Führer, the Third Reich is dead. Let us build a stronger one to replace it,” he said firmly.
As he listened, Hitler’s face seemed to come back to life. The eyes lost their vacant stare, his chin firmed and his lips firmed up and began to smile. This was the spirit he remembered in the beer halls of the 20s and 30s. This was the look of the faces at the Nuremburg rallies and throughout Germany before the war. The spirit of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was not dead. He would build on that Nazi spirit. He looked into Müller’s eyes. “Tell me what we have available. Then we shall begin work,” he said with a grim resolution.
Chapter 2
Familiar Territory
March, 1962
A squad of four men inched their way through the snow covered trees to the small cabin nestled just below the timber line high in the Alps outside Innsbruck, Austria. It was a small rough hewn wooden structure with a stone fireplace and small win
dows on three sides. There was a sturdy wooden door in the front with one of the windows beside it. Blue smoke rose from the top of the chimney and was blown back into the woods by a slight wind easing down the valley. Except for the wind and the dull crunch of the snow under the men’s feet there wasn’t a sound.
Inspector Rolf Dresner and his men were being careful. They were closing in on a very dangerous man. Dresner had spent the last four weeks tracking down what the Americans called a serial killer who had made his way through Europe and had already killed two young people in the western Austria. The bodies of the two young victims had been found badly mauled with a knife and lying in a remote mountain stream. It was just luck someone had gone to check on a fence and saw them lying in shallow icy water.
For the past year the European press had been covering a string of similar murders ranging from the outskirts of Paris through Belgium and down through Germany. When the slain couple matched the description of the others, Dresner had pounced on the case. He was the lead inspector in the police department in Innsbruck. For the last sixteen years he had made it his mission to keep his community safe and peaceful. As a result, he was well known in law enforcement throughout western Austria and into southern Germany.
After the murdered couple was found, Dresner had begun collecting evidence, bit by bit, to make a case. There wasn’t much for them to go on. They had gotten a lead when caked dirt, blue cotton fibers and automotive grease was found in the mouth of one of the victims.
Without stirring suspicion, his men began checking around several of the garages in Innsbruck. There they heard about a young man who had recently arrived in Innsbruck and had gotten a job as a mechanic. This wasn’t new. With the Olympics coming in two years many young people were migrating there to get in on the boom and excitement. The owner of the shop was pleased with the young man’s work although he said the young man kept to himself. A further check through INTERPOL turned up nothing.
Dresner wasn’t convinced. Taking his own car into the shop for a routine service, Dresner noticed the blue cleaning rags used by the staff. When no one was looking, he grabbed one of the used rags lying on a bench and brought it back to the police station. Only yesterday did the professor at the university confirm the blue colored fibers from the rag matched the ones in the victim’s mouth. The automotive products matched as well. This particular shop was the only one in the area which used those type commercial rags.
This morning Dresner was called in when two young college students turned up missing from a study group. Going to the shop he was told the young man had taken a day off and had borrowed another mechanic’s cabin hideaway for a long weekend. Quickly assembling his men, Dresner led them to the cabin.
Using tactics he had learned as an army officer in the Second World War, Dresner spread the men out to approach the cabin from two different sides. By the time the men reached the two sides of the cabin their feet were nearly frozen from the snow. Using hand signals, Dresner motioned for the two men on the other side to try and see through the window. One of the men waved and began to move.
A muffled scream from inside the cabin startled all of them. Motioning for his men to move in, Dresner sprang towards the door. The officer with him was a large burley man with the agility of a fox. He plunged forward and hit the door with all his might, splintering it into a hundred pieces as he went through followed by Dresner and the others.
There were three people in the main room of the cabin. Two were tied to chairs and the third was between them. The middle man stood quickly and hurled something at the burley officer.
The officer let out a gasp and Dresner saw blood coming from a gash that appeared in the officer’s face as a straight razor sliced through his cheek. As Dresner turned back to the assailant, he saw the man had reached behind a couch and pulled out a shotgun. He was raising it to his shoulder.
Two shots rang out, shattering the quiet of the valley. The first shot of Dresner’s trusty Lugar went through the man’s mouth and out the back of his throat, taking with it one of his vertebrae and a portion of his spinal cord. The second went through his left eye and out the back of his head showering blood and brain matter all over the cabin wall. The young man’s lifeless body slumped to the floor like a sack of sand.
Suddenly everything was still. All that was heard were the sobs of a young girl tied to the right hand chair. The young man in the other chair didn’t move. Both were naked. The smoke from the two shots hung in the air creating a surreal scene.
Dresner turned to the injured officer who was holding a handkerchief to his bleeding face. “Are you alright?” he asked. The other man nodded. Dresner turned to the others. “Get back to the car and radio in for an ambulance and more help. Secure this place so we can gather what we need,” he said.
As one of the men went out the door Sergeant Betz began to tend the cheek of the wounded officer. Dresner stepped over the dead form and made his way to the young girl. He could tell by her eyes she was in shock. They seemed to dart in a panic between Dresner, the boy in the chair across from her, and the body on the floor. She cringed as he approached.
“Inspector Dresner, Innsbruck Police. Just relax, it is all over now,” he said quietly to her as he removed the blue gag from her mouth. Although she did relax slightly the harrowing experience remained. After finally removing the ropes around her arms, she began crying and reached around Dresner, hugging him closely. Dresner held her for a moment, whispering softly to her and patting her on the back.
The girl finally eased back in her seat. “Danny! He was hurting Danny,” she said looking toward the young man.
Danny was unconscious and tied tightly to his own chair. The chairs the two were tied to had been modified so that there was no bracing in the front. The man used that to have easy access to their bodies. As Dresner turned he noticed the blood dripping from the boy onto the floor. The young man’s genitals had been roughly shaved. But as the officers had entered, the garage mechanic had been slowly slicing into the young man’s scrotum to methodically castrate him. Grabbing a clean towel, Dresner stemmed the flow of blood. The others untied him and lay him on a sofa beside one wall. The young woman kneeled beside the young man trying to wake him until the officers found her clothes. They waited nearly half an hour before the ambulance and additional officers arrived. Betz continued to comfort the girl while gathering information.
“He was so nice,” she said. “He wanted us to see his valley yesterday afternoon. Then we stayed for dinner. I don’t remember much after that until I woke up in that chair,” she cried. The tears had almost stopped flowing by now.
“So he was going to take you back after dinner?” asked Betz as he wrote down every word.
The woman nodded. “Danny and I love hiking. He took us around this whole valley,” she said. “We had thought we would come back later on and hike some more. We had no idea…” she began to sob again.
Betz patted her arm. “There was no way for you to know. Most of our young men are very proud of their country and love to show it to others. Even I have taken visitors around to places I know. Now,” he said gently easing her back to talking, “what happened when you woke up?”
The young lady told him everything. She remembered waking to find her boyfriend tied naked to a chair in front of her. Their assailant had walked around in his underwear wielding the razor - not really making sense, but getting pleasure at seeing their suffering. When Danny resisted and told the man what he thought, he was struck with some sort of pummel and had remained unconscious ever since.
The ambulance came and took the young man and woman to the hospital. As it arrived, Danny woke to find himself in his girl’s arms, not really remembering what had happened. Dresner spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon making sure every scrap of evidence was collected, tagged and sorted. There would be a mountain of paperwork to do, and according to the dispatcher, word was already spreading how Innsbruck’s Inspector Dresner had done it again.
Dresner could have cared less. The adrenaline had sloughed off hours ago and he felt exhausted. As Betz finished things up turning in the evidence, Dresner returned to his office to have just a few minutes alone to catch his thoughts. He wasn’t there thirty seconds before an American major came thumping through his door. He stood straight as an arrow in front of Dresner’s desk.
“This is quite unacceptable. It has been three weeks and your people haven’t been able to turn up a shred of evidence on that truck or its contents. I want more done!” Major Tony Brewster demanded. He stood in the office, resplendent in his uniform, with the arrogance of a conqueror and glared at his victim with unhidden contempt. A US Army truck carrying specialized equipment had disappeared and the Army was searching all of southern Germany and Austria find it. Nothing had turned up so far and the major was determined to turn up the heat. “I suggest you get off your duff and get things going!” the Brewster demanded.
Rolf Dresner glared back at the Major. He didn’t need any of this. Dresner was dead tired, and his patience was becoming a little frayed. Just who did this major think he was? Dresner had an unsurpassed reputation for getting to the bottom of any case and didn’t need this guy poking his face into it. But what upset him more was that the American was right. No one could find a trace of the truck or its contents. Everyone was tired and frustrated. As a former German Army officer, Dresner could understand Brewster’s feelings and understood well the kinds of pressure an officer could get from the top, but no one spoke to him in that manner. He slowly rose from his desk.
“Herr Major, for the past three weeks I have had half my force out combing the trees to find your truck. They are still out there, searching on foot and in the air. I have expended a good deal of our budget in an effort to assist you in your efforts, but I must remind you that those are your efforts. The truck was lost under your supervision, your security, and I believe they say, on your watch. You haven’t even had the courtesy of letting us know what equipment we are looking for. So don’t come into this office making demands just so you are out of your troubles. I shall remind you that the occupation was over years ago. Austria is a sovereign nation. So when you ask, ask politely!” Dresner said slowly but very firmly.