The Führer Must Die

Home > Other > The Führer Must Die > Page 23
The Führer Must Die Page 23

by Victoria Andre King


  “Are you sorry?” asked the child as he extinguished the match. That wasn’t funny at all, but Nebe found himself smiling. A sign of tension he observed clinically. He had been in the Rommel plot against the Führer and, in retrospect, he was surely sorry. “It wouldn’t have changed anything even had we succeeded. We were dreaming of a separate peace with the West that would enable us to continue the war against Russia, but we waited too long. We couldn’t have achieved it because they had no reason to make a deal with anyone, the war was already over, the dust just hadn’t settled yet.”

  His regrets actually ran deeper than that, yet there seemed to be no point in analysis so late in the game. The entire Wehrmacht hadn’t been able to come up with a bomb that could kill one man. There wasn’t one man among them willing to sacrifice his life in order to guarantee the Führer’s demise. That was pathetic and humiliating. Not even that three-fingered twit von Stauffenberg who thought he was a Renaissance man with a profile like the Bamberg Rider. Rank offered no protection against incompetence. Then that other idiot, Canaris, who had kept a list of all the conspirators in his diary so that when he was finally caught, all of the others followed in quick succession. The man suffered from such an unbelievable lack of imagination that he had even kept the diary in his wall safe. He should have just given it to the Gestapo; that at least would have been original madness. Schweinerei!

  Nebe wondered what history would make of this mess. They couldn’t possibly be remembered as heroes because, above all, heroes were supposed to be competent. Just to be affiliated with such people was humiliating. Why couldn’t he have been sensible enough to get killed by the Russians? Some naïve historian out there would have considered him a hero.

  The child with the soulful eyes pulled him out of his reverie. “You were rats deserting a sinking ship.”

  Nebe thought that was true enough but what he said was, “A man uses a cliché like that when he’s afraid of the experience he is having and is trying to attain distance from it. Are you afraid, Obersturmbannführer?”

  The soulful eyes flashed. “No! Clichés are dismissive.” Then the lieutenant dropped his eyes and looked even more childlike than before. The brat was educated and suddenly Nebe felt ashamed. He was bullying children, and failing even at that.

  The door was then flung open with a mind shattering screech of bolts and the humming clang of iron on stone. They were finally ready for him. Nebe stepped out into the yard walking between his two adopted children. It was dawn and the artillery had abated, replaced by the sound of birds singing in jubilant ignorance. He scanned the perimeter of the prison yard, but there were no trees. Suddenly, he could hear the beating of his heart. He could feel the blood wriggling in his veins, the air going in and out of the little prickly things on the inside of his lungs. He smiled again; his body just didn’t want to die.

  “There was one attempt on the Führer, only one that might have made a difference.” Nebe actually chuckled. “The only attempt that had been competently planned, even if by an amateur assassin.”

  The Heydrich look-alike turned in annoyance. “By whom?”

  “The Übermensch of course!” Superman. Irony when facing death was in bad taste, it gave the appearance of having lost control, but Nebe simply no longer cared what anybody thought. “That holy fool who blew up the beer hall in 1939. But for a few minutes there wouldn’t have been a war.” It all seemed so dim now.

  The children glared at him contemptuously; Heydrich junior practically spat. “We thought we were going to win. It was an honest mistake.”

  They suddenly stopped walking and Nebe’s eyes widened as he realized that there was no firing squad, no gallows or chopping block. It was a most perplexing relief. There was, in fact, nothing but a wooden chair against the wall near the gate with a neatly folded pile of workman’s clothes on it. They couldn’t have belonged to the man taken out before him, he had been naked too, and Nebe had watched him go. A small object lay on top of the clothes, an obnoxious artificial red.

  The children weren’t moving, Nebe considered kicking one in the shin but that would have been undignified. He stood there stiffly erect, hoping the lads knew their job. Nothing happened and finally little Heydrich snapped at him, “Do get dressed. …” He was clearly disgusted at having to escort naked traitors. Nebe knew better than to turn around and got down to business.

  As he stepped up to the chair he discovered that the orange-vermillion thing was actually a Vatican passport, beneath it a worker’s identity card.

  “I’m being allowed to escape?” Even as Nebe uttered the words he knew he shouldn’t have, yet his responses had now become totally spontaneous. Hope was unendurable and thus had to be exorcised in no uncertain terms.

  The soulful child shook his head. “Actually you are being kicked out, but it will be said that you were killed in an air raid to avoid pursuit.”

  Nebe proceeded to dress, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with the rest of his life. “That is most gracious of you; after all there really is no greater insurance policy than death.”

  The children were unimpressed by his philosophic banter; they simply waved him on to dress more quickly.

  As Nebe dressed he suddenly found himself wondering whatever had become of the savant cabinet maker. It then became brutally obvious that all of the finest love affairs are always totally one-sided.

 

 

 


‹ Prev