by Rex Baron
Helen watched him as he spoke. The glow that she had been accustomed to seeing on his face was gone. She studied the angular planes of his jaw and the refined aquiline straightness of the line of his nose and wondered how she had ever come to be in love with this man. He was still beautiful to her, and had represented everything she had wanted and dreamed of, but now, when the dream had failed, he was nothing more than an angry idealist with few resources of his own. He had been the great Magician of the Reich, the mastermind who stood behind the Fuhrer himself, but where was the magic now?
She pushed the pedal to the floor and sped through a group of tattered, hysterical people who were fleeing the city on foot. Munich loomed up ahead, a wall of flames where a row of classical public buildings once stood. Helen swerved the car to avoid a crumbling wall that collapsed like a pile of sticks as the ground reverberated with the shelling.
The Königsplatz, the center for ritual, with its red marble floors and walls lined with precious paintings, stood in front of her, a black silhouette against a curtain of fire, now nothing more than a phantom reminder of the glory for which it was intended.
Helen stopped the car and stared at the burning building in disbelief. She had come to the Headquarters to regroup and be told what to do, but there was no Headquarters now. The High Command had scattered, on their way to Berlin or wherever they might find safety for themselves and their valuables.
Without warning, Kurt bolted from the car and ran toward the building. Helen abandoned the wheel and ran after him.
“You can't go in there,” she said, catching hold of the hem of his sleeve and pulling him to a stop. “There is nothing left. It's over. Don't you see that?”
Kurt's eyes filled with tears as he turned his face toward hers. But he did not see her. Instead, his frightened eyes looked past her, searching for that other world of myth and beauty that he knew so well and finding only a void. With a trembling hand, he produced a small vial from his pocket and tapped out two dark-colored tablets. He extended his hand, offering one to Helen. In silence, puzzled by the gesture, she took one and watched as he quickly swallowed the other.
In a horrifying instant, his eyes rolled back and his face contorted into the agonized expression of a wooden saint, eyes cast toward Heaven in the desperate hope that redemption was more than a promise. He dropped to his knees and stared up at her open-mouthed before falling backward in death.
Helen stared down in disbelief at the lozenge in her hand and instinctively let it slip through her fingers to the ground. The street was filled with a terrified mass of people, tumbling over themselves to save their belongings and escape the planes and the flames. There were people all around her, but she was truly alone.
She looked down at Kurt, lifeless on the pavement at her feet. He had abandoned her to face the consequences of what they had created alone. She gathered her fur coat around her shoulders and started back to the car. She had outlived Kurt and Claxton, outclassed David and poor pitiful Lucy. And she had come through alive. Even with the terror of the falling bombs all around her, she knew that she would survive and would control her own destiny.
She had been merely mistaken in aligning herself with the Germans and their high-minded immorality. The Americans and the English would be the world leaders now. She was an American, after all, she told herself. There was no reason why she could not make a place for herself on the side of her compatriots, on the side of the victors. It would surely be only a matter of weeks before the blockade fell and the Allies took control.
“I will be liberated,” she said with an odd little smile. “I've been away from home for far to long anyway.”
Her face grimaced and she doubled over in a paroxysm of nausea. She gripped her stomach and took a series of deep breaths through her mouth. What she had sensed for some weeks was indeed true. She was carrying Kurt's child.
She steadied herself against the hood of the auto and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass of the windscreen. Her dark hair framed a face that was still beautiful and inscrutable. She ran her fingers through her hair to tidy a fallen strand and smiled at her own reflection.
“Everything I need will come to me,” she said. “All I need to do is sit tight and wait.”
END OF BOOK FOUR
Author Notes
Rex Baron
November 2019 - Fountain Hills, AZ
NAZI DARK MAGIC... The real thing or just a Mind Game?
Welcome... and thank you for reading HEXE and following the ambitious exploits of Helen Liluth and the other “gifted women” in their quest for power. I wanted to give you a little background on the kind of initiation ritual and dark magic supposedly used by the Nazis in World War II, and try to put it in a perspective that is believable... as spooky as that may sound.
Building the Tribe
Now, I’m no expert on the Second World War, but there is plenty of information out there on the secret organizations and ritualistic practices of the German Third Reich. Even publications as mainstream as “Time Life” put out a coffee table book as part of a series called simply The SS in 1989. It discusses the secret rituals of that branch of the secret police as well as the convoluted struggle for power between rival branches of secret police and Gestapo at city, state and national levels.
In the early 1930s Germany was far from the efficient war machine it came to be nearly a decade later and the country was immersed in political takeovers, riots and financial collapse. This atmosphere of political and social chaos created a situation that made it possible for a charismatic leader like Adolph Hitler to take control. He built highways and grand buildings, created jobs and promised to restore the country to its former glory, based on an ideal of the noble peasant farmer that had his roots in Arthurian Folklore. Creating a single, unified “tribe” of superior beings was the goal of the Third Reich, and they were willing to go to any lengths to make that dream a reality... even witchcraft and death magic.
In volumes three and four of HEXE, we see Hitler depicted as a kind of trance medium, prompted from behind the scenes by Kurt Von Kragen. In my research, I read that Hitler had actually studied metaphysics in the early 1920s and understood the value of a good trance.
A number of years ago, I met an old German woman who had been a librarian in Berlin during the days of the cultural “purification” and the famous book burnings. She told me that she had spent time in prison for trying to obstruct the official order to destroy books. But what was even more fascinating to me was how she described Adolph Hitler, Der Fuhrer, when he appeared in front of the tumult of his rabid followers. She told me that the first time she saw him at a rally, he appeared as a small stooped over man with dark hair and a swarthy complexion. As he made his way up the steps to the podium, he was unimpressive physically and hardly the personification of a German super race. BUT… when he began to speak... after he began to become animated and gathered momentum, he was suddenly TRANSFORMED.
Remember... this was the account of a woman who hated Hitler for what he had done to the intellectuals and the culture of Germany... and yet, she described that, as she watched, the “toady little man” suddenly stood taller and projected his booming voice into the very core of his listener’s bodies. She said that his eyes shone a radiant blue that seemed to stare off into glorious unseen days of a future world, and as he stood there under a thousand glaring stadium lights... you would have sworn that he was the very picture of an Aryan Blonde. Even if this was just a rather confused memory of an old woman ... or merely an indication of the theatrical tricks of staging of the German propaganda machine, it gives some inkling of how the illusion of magical transformation was alive in the receptive minds of the German people at that time.
The Devil in the Silent Movies
For centuries, the German consciousness has been filled with heroic stories of the Arthurian Knights and the search for the Holy Grail. In the nineteenth century German composer Richard Wagner wrote several operas that dealt with these
legendary myths, including, Percival, Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde (which is referred to several times in HEXE as a vocal favourite of the character Lucy). He also wrote the opera Faust, with a storyline that pivots around a bargain with the devil. This story becomes the central theme of the first two books of HEXE since it is the name of the silent picture play in which Lucy, Helen and Claxton act, and the vehicle that allows Helen to wheedle her way into Lucy’s perfect life.
Only a half century before the popularity of moving pictures, king Ludwig of Bavaria, who was fixated on the heroic past of his country and inspired by the music of Wagner, built a number of grand castles, including Neuschwanstein that was filled with paintings and tapestries that depicted the legends in Wagner’s opera. (It was the prototype for Disney’s theme park castle).
This idea of heroism and nobility inherent in the bloodline of the German, Bavarian and Austrian people made it easy to appeal to their sense of national pride and love of their fatherland to manipulate the average German citizen into believing the propaganda of the new National Socialist Party that called them to create a new Germany based on the ideals of the past.
The Thule Legacy
In Volume three of HEXE, when Helen schemes to get her position at the Ministry of Culture, we see her at an art showing that trashes anything modern, calling it decadent and unwholesome. In other words, any painting that wasn’t a landscape, glorifying the German soil, or a pretty nude girl that could be passed off as a goddess of antiquity was considered unacceptable.
When Helen first arrives in Germany, she encounters Kurt Von Kragen, who describes to her his unique view of the future of Germany and the world. He tells her about the myth of the great warlike race of fore-bearers, the Thule, who waited in another dimension, whispering their counsel to the New Germany... telling it when it was time to rise up and rule the world.
This idea of a former superior race being part of Germany’s heritage was taken up after World War I by a guy named Walter Nauhaus. He founded an organizmation in 1918 called the Thule Gesellschaft, which passed itself off as a study group for German antiquity, and studied the myth of the Thule as well as other ancient stories that promoted German pre-eminence. A member of the society could not be Jewish or have any “foreign” blood... thereby promoting the beginnings of racial superiority. The Society was really a front for the DAP, or German Worker’s Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Worker’s Party...THE NAZI PARTY.
One of the other things that Hitler did that promoted the ideas of witchcraft and dark magic was to reinstate certain pagan holidays to replace the holidays sanctioned by the Christian church. Even Christmas became a celebration of the winter solstice, and was celebrated by village bonfires, talismans and wreaths... all unmistakable symbols of the pagan agrarian culture of the German forefathers. The Swastika, itself is a religious symbol over 10,000 years old that means “all things” and has been recognized to signify power and divinity.
In the sequence when Kurt first takes Helen to the Castle of Shadows, she sees soldiers making love to conscripted women on the tombs of 12th Century knights. This practice was said to be part of a ritual to reincarnate the ferociously warlike souls of the fallen knights into the unborn babies conceived there.
The SS, at its highest levels, were steeped in ritual and mystery. In order to make the men who were initiated into the order feel like the knights of old, they were inducted with great ceremony, almost pagan in nature, including nudity, elaborate vows and trappings to reinforce the ideals of masculinity. The new recruits were given flattering uniforms, ceremonial swords and a dagger with the words “Meine Ehre Heist Treue” My Honour is Loyalty.
With all the secret rituals and pagan ceremonies promoted by the Third Reich, it is easy to see how a belief in magic, both illusory and real, might take hold. People came to believe in the magic of the new Germany because in the space of ten years it had been transformed from a crippled country to a world power.
Again, I want to thank you for following HEXE through the years of the story. As we leave the war years behind... there is a quantum leap to another generation in another time... as the saga of good and evil continues. Remember...If you’re messing with magic, keep your intentions clean and NEVER step out of the pentagram... it’s your circle of safety.
S.M.I.B. R B
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