by Scott Palter
0900 local time; 0500 CET
3 October 1940
Ashkhabad, Turkmen SSR
To civilized Chinese eyes the city was not impressive. The entire region had little to recommend it. It was an arid wasteland, with agriculture around the few water sources. It was easy to see it as a place of dishonorable exile.
General Lin Biao chose to take a different point of view. His new Soviet masters had plentifully supplied him with weapons. He had some real artillery pieces. He had a few light tanks and a number of armored cars. His four divisions, two each of Chinese infantry and Central Asian cavalry, had more mortars and machine-guns than a Japanese division, more even that a British one. He had seen the documents. He had more than sufficient ammunition, food, fodder, and other stores. He had a good number of trucks, and extremely plentiful horses and mules. His Asian Army of Liberation had more than eighty thousand men. The Afghans he would face in Herat had nothing that could stand against him.
This was a far cry from having to stand up to the massive forces of Chiang and the Japanese. He would march the 700 kilometers to Herat easily enough. All but the last few kilometers were on Soviet territory, making this an administrative exercise instead of combat. Indeed, he had been given to believe that the Afghans had been subverted, been persuaded to switch sides.
This he didn’t believe, as the source was his political officer and former boss, Mao. The man was a nasty political infighter, but never especially useful in the field. Lin’s march began today. He expected to take Herat in two weeks. Lin was determined to make a success of his new Soviet career even if he was yoked to Mao in the process. Let Zhu De deal with the more miserable terrain to the East, slogging over mountains towards Kabul.
1200 hours CET
3 October 1940
SS-HA, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin, Germany
The Waffen SS was a relatively small component of the party-state composite structure that was the SS and the Interior Ministry. The party-state distinction was fading under Reichsführer Heydrich, but it still had some legal and bureaucratic significance. Thus, the Waffen SS was both one of the National Socialist Party’s three militias, and an armed force of Greater Germany.
The SS-HA served as both War Ministry and General Staff of the SS. It didn’t exercise operational authority over Waffen SS units in the field … yet. For now, the only field Division was Hausser’s Reich Division in Egypt. Division? Brigadeführer Gottlob Berger stifled a laugh. The ‘Division’ was an overstrength Corps in size. Berger and Sturmbannbuehrer Franz Riedwig had been keeping the SS-HA going since the removal of Himmler. The new Reichsführer had far greater duties than playing bureaucratic politics within the SS and Interior Ministry. Once Himmler’s loyalists were purged, many offices were running under temporary heads and similar makeshifts. At some point someone would get the SS-HA position officially and formally. Until then, these two had been jointly tasked.
Riedwig concerned himself more with personnel matters, especially recruitment. “Thankfully Hausser’s losses so far have been few, mostly wastage from endemic local diseases. The two former Divisions, the Police Division in Paris and the Deathshead in Warsaw, have only operational wastage in their field security roles. Traffic accidents, mostly, plus the occasional clash with partisans. Dietrich’s LAH had even fewer losses, although new men had to be found to upgrade it from a large Regiment into a small Division.” Riedwig, himself a Swiss German, had long advocated making the Waffen SS a multinational force of Aryans rather than a purely German institution.
“Yes, so you can forward the men you have to Hausser.” Berger paused for a minute to recall something. “Hausser and whoever this Brigadier Strauss is. Why on Earth does he have an SS Battalion that needs rebuilding?”
Now Riedwig had to shuffle some papers on his desk. “LAH sent him a Battalion. The Battalion made a botch out of it, and they are trying to blame us. Schellenberg was quite nasty about it. He’s going to stick us with part of the blame for not catching their errors.”
Berger wearily shook his head. Another Dietrich fuckup. The man was brave and loyal, but a dunce on organizational issues. What’s worse, he refused to surround himself with competent staff. He wanted old comrades from the early days. “So we steal the men for the new unit from the HJ and the Camp Guards?” The Army rationed the SS on both recruits and equipment. It was easy to subvert the recruiting limits. The SS simply took HJ’s under the Army’s recruitment age, Volksdeutsche and Aryans wishing to Germanize themselves. The equipment was the real problem. There was not enough allocated to see to Hausser’s needs, much less to properly outfit Dietrich’s new showcase Führer Guards unit. And now he’d been handed this Spanish volunteer unit the Army didn’t want. “Where do we steal the equipment? Skoda?”
“Let me handle that. This Eichmann’s Palestine Camp Complex is making a lot of people rich and solving a lot of production issues for different cartels. One hand washes the other. I can do small-quantity deals. Everyone and his cousin wants a new SS workshop to ease their production backlogs. I can jump people on the queue.”
“So what do we do with this oversize Spanish Division? How did it become Waffen SS?” Berger had no problem with the Waffen SS taking non-Aryans. He was not an advocate of this in the manner of Riedwig. He was just someone who focused on the tasks that needed doing, rather than a twisted knot of ideological humbug.
“Army rejected them for sending an extra Regiment and passing it off as a square Division. Army wants cookie-cutter Divisions … ”
Berger couldn’t help laughing. “Look at their mobilization waves. They have dozens of special organizational models, and then modify almost ad hoc. What would the problem have been of one more?”
“Beck allows himself and his class to have dozens of weird variants on Division structure. They insist the foreign units they deal with all follow an ideal, rulebook pattern. It’s a matter of class prerogative. They make unbreakable rules, and then allot themselves leave to make exceptions. Only gentlemen of the proper class with the proper staff stripe can be organizationally creative.” Riegwig paused for a moment, weighing whether to utter an impolitic truth out loud, “Plus they would be against free beer if it came from the Reichsführer. I’m married into the class, and the older ones cannot get past his being run out of the Navy over personal impropriety.”
“But your father-in-law … ” Berger mentally answered his own question. Generals could do things that a cashiered Leutnant could not. Riedwig’s father-in-law, ex-Defense Minister General von Blomberg, was allowed to keep his wife with a tainted past of pornography and perhaps prostitution. He had merely been forcibly retired. Only the now-dead Admiral Raeder had tried to demand more, pushing the man to kill himself. Perhaps that was the key with the generals. They knew Raeder was a fanatic on these issues, and just hated Heydrich for his low rank of Leutnant.
Berger allowed himself a small sigh. Back to business. “I have no problem with Spanish as SS. They may be Latins, but at least they are white Christians. Franco claims that their better classes are German-descended, from Visigoths and Vandals. An amusing fable, but no more fantasy than many of the Volksdeutsche who are only German by culture and language. It’s not as if the Spanish are polluting us with Arabs or Colored. These are white men, many of good family and many others combat veterans. My problem is basing them in Germany proper. Soldiers spend their off duty time trying to bed bar maids and shopgirls. This is a law of the universe. The Spanish are a mix of combat veterans and eager university Fascists from the Falange’s youth movement. Virile young men from these backgrounds would screw anything with a pulse. In reverse, these young Latins would seem exotic and enticing to enough silly German girls to make trouble. The Race Laws did not expressly forbid this, but local opinion would demand the Party do something.”
Riedwig thought of a quick solution. “There’s an SS force in Romania. We don’t bring the Spanish to Germany in the first place. Ploiesti could always use more guards. The Romanians wou
ld appreciate more protectors from the Soviets. The Romanian theory is that they were Latins, not Slavs. So virile Latin young men could chase Latin bar maids. Problem solved.”
The larger problem was equipment. The oversize division had already been converted into a Corps by edict from Heydrich. It was all well and good to proclaim that these would be Panzergrenadier Divisions. Berger had no vehicles to spare to make another Panzergrenadier Brigade, much less a Corps … yet. What he did have was German infantry kit, ‘borrowed’ from two of the demobilized Army divisions. For now these would be Jäger divisions. The men would need proper German training in storm tactics, mission orders, and the rest. When trucks became available they could be upgraded to motorized infantry. When the new cartels reached full production in a year or so, he would find the armored vehicles for the final transformation to Panzergrenadier status. Now all that remained was to meet with this Spanish general Yagüe to explain matters. Hopefully the man would be sensible. He certainly came with a fine combat record.
The two SS generals managed to waste an hour on the Spanish, who were an enjoyable problem with reasonable solutions. They then got back to the real problem, which involved yet again shorting Dietrich’s new Guards unit for the needs of the combat theater. Dietrich would complain to Nebe, who would call another conference with Heydrich, and they would lose two days finding some face-saving compromise. The implied threat would be Führer Göring’s displeasure. The two Waffen SS generals were fairly certain that Göring neither noticed nor cared. Bureaucratic infighting was the bane of every large organization.
1800 hours local; 1700 hours CET
3 October 1940
Former Senior Officer’s Mess, former British base at Mersa Matruh
The field officers meeting for Hausser’s oversize division was catered by staff from Strauss’s brigade. As various command staffs discovered that the NL brigade had professional chefs, their services were made use of. The spread was a mix of hot rolls with a variety of eastern flavors, and quite traditional central European pastries. The nominal cost of this was some swaps between the various supply officers. The SS Fast Regiment had liberated the camp, including vast quantities of what in Europe were luxuries, such as coffee, tea, and sugar.
Gruppenführer Hausser had near a Corps’s worth of troops, but far less than that of people with field-officer rank. At this stage of the war his officers were mostly both young for their command level as compared to the Army, and held ranks less than would be normal for Battalion and higher posts. The service as a whole was young, hungry, and eager. It fit the Party, which was in many ways somewhat of a youth movement.
“Kameraden, for the next stage of the war in this theater, we have been allocated the main mission for the Panzer Army. How we conduct ourselves will in large measure determine the fate of our service. The Waffen SS has one combat force left, ourselves. The Reichsführer is testing whether we are worthy of his patronage. If we prove ourselves to be the Aryan warriors we believe ourselves to be, I have his promise that this Division will be expanded to Army size, to be a full Panzer Army. The last battle was the Army’s chance to shine. Rommel had the lead. Now it is our turn to outdo him, to show the Army what a true elite force can accomplish. Who is with me on this? For our race, our party, our Führer, VICTORY!”
The room came to its feet cheering. It was not just careerism. The men here saw themselves as a true warrior elite, with the Party’s ideology giving them a faith to fight for, as the Teutonic Knights had had before them.
……….
Mary Collins let the men strut. Her job was to provide a bit of food and plentiful beverages. She’d brought two bartenders, but this wasn’t a hard-drinking crowd the way a British officers’ mess would have been. These Nazis took war more seriously than the British officers her man had served under. So it was coffee and tea mostly.
She’d been more concerned with a dustup involving a newly-arrived pastry chef. He’d come to camp in a draft from Bari, with airs of having been second pastry chef at what he asserted had been the third-best hotel in Bucharest. Mary wouldn’t have know the best hotel in Bucharest from the fourth-worst. Indeed, she couldn’t have found Bucharest on a map or told you what country it was in. She knew nations by where the British had garrisons, which did not include the Balkans.
None of that mattered. She was head cook because of her connection to Frau Steiner. The middle-aged fool of a Bucharest cook refused to understand the logic. He ignored her orders, did as he wished, and tried to assert his superior status with command. He was a man with credentials. She was a mere woman, and an Asiatic to boot.
That had lasted under twenty minutes. She sent her son for Frau Greta. Greta heard the fool out, laughed in his face, and told him that, as he refused to be a cook, she had other work for him. The man had a problem accepting that a teenage girl was an important officer. He had that ancient male disease of ‘don’t you know who I am?’ Greta had stuck a pistol in his ribs and frog-marched the fool to Hauptsturmführer Peiper.
The cook had discovered that instead of a disobedient cook, he was now a flamethrower operator. A small consignment of these had arrived. The current thought was to use them from the sidecars of motorcycles. So someone would have to strap a tank of easily-ignited flamespray on his back, and ride out on a motorcycle to battle while the British hurled hot metal at him.
Two days of field exercises and labor details had in turn produced a most contrite pastry chef. He got on his knees before Mary, begging for his old posting back. She let him sweat the night before grudgingly saying yes. She’d neglected to mention that Peiper regarded the fool as useless as a combat fighter. He’d also soured on the entire concept. Now he had Joey and Paul trying to find a way to fire the flame liquid from inside his French cavalry tanks. Meanwhile the chef’s pastries were being gobbled up by the SS officers, so maybe he was at least half as good as his brags and boasts.
0200 hours CET
4 October 1940
Ravensbrück KL, Germany
She was stuck on an overnight shift again. The corrupt bitches who were her superiors could find nothing wrong with her work, so they punished her via undesirable shifts and duties. Frauke Peters had joined the female guards corps, the Aufseherinnen, as a means to do her patriotic duty to Party and Reich. She had been an avid Party member all through her time in the BDM. The Reich was at war. As a woman she couldn’t pick up a rifle, but by serving as a guard, she could free a man to do so.
Frauke had excelled in her training at the camp. She had also earned a bad reputation among the supervisors who trained her. They called her a 110% girl. In theory that meant someone so dedicated to the Party that they did 110% of what was required. What they really meant was that she was a fanatic and a prude. The staff running Ravensbrück were mostly motivated by sensual pleasures and petty corruption. There were two special attached facilities where luxuries and money seemed to effortlessly flow. Exactly how was some sort of state secret, but a section of the male staff and some special prisoners were allowed girlfriends among the female guards and the more willing prisoners. There were parties every night. They also had servants among the Bible Girls in the Camp. Those weren’t available for sex, but were docile house staff, seeing to cleaning, cooking, and the rest.
The new girls such as Frauke were expected to go along with the libertine behavior. The camp joke was that BDM wasn’t the League of German Girls, but rather the League of SS Mattresses. The trainees who refused to take part were at least expected to walk small, keep silent, and endure the scorn of the well-connected clique. Frauke refused to bend the neck. Hitler had been her God and Mein Kampf her Bible. The Führer had not been a libertine. She saw the Movement as a pure and chaste crusading order. Fraternization and loose behavior was wrong, regardless of what the rules said. She complained. She wrote letters of denunciation to higher SS command, the Kreisleiter, to anyone she could think of. This got her reprimanded by her camp superiors, and warned verbally by the corrupt to shut
her mouth and avert her eyes. As if. There had to be a way out of this degenerate shit hole, and Frauke was determined to find it. Perhaps she could get herself assigned as a transport guard. Every few weeks, there was a prisoner transport by rail to someplace in Italy. Most of those being sent were loose-living girls from the special facilities, almost as if this was some sort of a reward. Perhaps if she could get more information, someone in the Party or SS hierarchy would pay her some attention.
1700 hours Eastern Daylight Time; 2300 hours CET
4 October 1940
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ
The train ride from Manhattan had made New Jersey seem to be a set of layers. The initial belt clustered near New York harbor was mostly gritty industrial towns, with a few leafy commuter suburbs. Then came the estates of the Manhattan-centered wealthy, often with horse barns and elaborate gardens. By the time Enrico Fermi debarked from the train in the college town of Princeton, he had spent most of an hour looking at little market towns surrounded by small, green, productive farms. New Jersey’s official motto was the ‘Garden State’. The big grain and meat producing areas were to the west beyond the mountains. Jersey grew vegetables and similar truck garden produce, for fresh delivery to the huge markets of New York and Philadelphia.