Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (32 page)

Walther Hoffman remembered the Jewish Action, entrusted to the fledgling SS Totenkopf division of which he’d been part, drafted voluntarily from the
Totenkopfverbände
. He signed up in August 1939, with twelve other SS-TV guards from Dachau.

The wooden houses on the outskirts of Włocławek on the Vistula had already been set ablaze by air raids during the Wehrmacht advance, and the Totenkopf ‘Brandenburg’ outfit had followed in their wake for the clean-up. Hoffman stared at the mirror, seeing only carnage where his own reflection should be.

“This has been long overdue,” Standartenführer Paul Nostitz said grimly beside him. All the suffering of our people, the parasitic infestation of European nations for a millennium…”

Włocławek. Despite himself, Walther sometimes saw it in his dreams.

It had been easy enough to find, simply by following the smoke plumes from the blackened husks of burnt out buildings. The city had not escaped the Luftwaffe – none could. The wrecked debris of human settlement was scattered around in smouldering piles all around, the acrid stench almost suffocating. Frightened civilians were stood here and there, watching the panzer unit pass through the city streets, but by and large the ominous spectacle of a war-ravaged ghost town was more evident.

The Death’s Head had set up shop, billeted comfortably. Hoffman was an Untersturmführer, pending promotion. Nostitz had read his recommendation with cool approval, and Hoffman had known that to become an SS-Lieutenant proper he must perform well in the initial Jewish actions in Poland. He had to marshal men, and take a leading role directing the vengeance. He’d done it coolly.
This is war. They are the enemy. They are Jews. It is them or us.

He had led by example.

The convoy rolled through a street on the outskirts that had been relatively untouched by the chaos. The road was paved smooth, not cobbled, and wide, spacious gardens were separated by wicket fences. Each house was detached. Hoffman had sneered, as had every man in each panzer tank, each armoured car, and the troops’ truck. Of course, the Jews would be out of the way. Safe. Secure. Probably sat back earning money from facilitating arms deals and loans to finance the Polish resistance to the Reich.

Heydrich’s SD had prepared booklets for them. A black list. Names of the doomed. The intellectuals, commissars and Jews of Poland. None were safe. The Jewish elders of the city would be killed as an example. The rest would be ghettoised.

Hoffman stopped the convoy. This was it.

Waffen-SS troops poured out of the trucks. They wore the skull and bones on collar and cap; men of the Totenkopf; The Death’s Head Unit, comprising of combat troops from the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards. Now their cruelty was turned outwards, to the Reich’s external enemies. From jailors to hunters.

Hoffman himself marched down the middle of the street. “Two in there,” he barked, pointing to the houses of the damned. “Two in there! That house! And that house!”

Cradling the sub-machine gun strung around his neck, and drawing his long-nosed Mauser in his left hand for effect, he’d taken one house for himself, feeling the thrill of the chase, the exhilaration of battle. The door being cheap and wooden, inexpensive after all. Kicked through with ease. Bursting in to find a terrified Jewish family. Huddled in the corner, two girls and a women crouching. Crying in terror. A father, protecting his daughters. Hoffman stepped forwards and brought the officer’s Mauser down across the little man’s nose, breaking the bone with a sickening crunch.

“Get out!” He roared at them in Polish. “Get the fuck out!”

Screaming a haiku of German curses, he kicked the old man out, flailing as he sprawled on the gravel; his wife begging and pleading in a hysterical hybrid of Polish and Yiddish. Hoffman seized her in a strong grip, and threw her out bodily onto the path to her front door that cut through the neat square of the garden. Seething, his nerves on fire, he slung the children out onto the grass himself where the huddled to their stricken parents, paralysed in shock.

One house along, ear-splitting child shrieks from a child cowered in the kitchen corner. The little boy stood metres from where a woman was wailing over the prone body of her husband, who had quite clearly been battered senseless. The family had been eating; the evidence of an interrupted dinner lay on the table. Half-eaten, the family meal would never be enjoyed in quiet; it was their last moment of peaceful normality, before a terrible whirlwind from elsewhere sucked their lives, and so many others up into its path.

The Jewish father had been beaten to the brink of death. The sight of a bread knife in the man’s hand had driven the SS men apoplectic with rage. Or something other than rage… a bestial frenzy of wild hatred.

“Don’t worry, the kike is still alive,” Hoffman sneered, on witnessing the scene.

The Jewish woman wailed, which intensified as she was hit flush in the face by a stream of urine from one of the Death’s Head troops. He made sure the prone Jew was covered too, and mocking laughter rang out, joining the cacophony of misery echoing around the small, stone-floored kitchen with its meagre collection of trinkets and ornaments.

The larger houses on the street were being ransacked. Loot was piled into vehicles, for the war effort; each man careful to show that he was not in breach of the Himmler order forbidding loot taken for personal profit.
The SS must remain decent
. No, this was simply a pragmatic policy; the Jews must pay for the cost of security police work.

“Get them in the trucks,” Hoffman called out. He patrolled the street, observing, directing, flushed with his responsibility. All the months of diplomatic hardball with Poland, and now, as the Führer of the Greater German Reich himself said, they were taking no more provocations, their peoples were being freed, and
bomb was met by bomb
.

After the Jewish elders and their families were in the trucks – some ninety of them – the destruction order came. Flamethrowers and grenades lit the sky with an incendiary offering to the Gods. Houses crumbled, melting like max. Some still had their occupants inside them; one Jew had been nailed to his front door by one overzealous trooper, and the body burned like an effigy as the lapping flames engulfed the building. The whole street, even the houses not occupied by blacklisted ‘Jewish elders’, was a raging inferno. The inferno heated their skin, the stench of its smoke clinging to them. Hoffman had smiled at the street aflame, as they drove away, haunted screams echoing across the devastation. It looked like Hell. No more than they deserved.

Two further large-scale raids took place that day alone. More arrests, beatings, and burnings.

They took one hundred and seventy blacklisted Jews who had been seized from their homes to the nearest ready-made, large anti-tank ditch, and riddled them with bullets. Blood flew through the air and spattered the ground around the ditches, creating a charnel-house of mud, awful, thick red blood and slaughter.

A handful of others, they lined up against walls in the town and filled them full of lead. Bullets cracked through the cold air, and people fell. Some of the Totenkopf troops had been laughing as they did it, swigging from pilfered vodka or the standard-issue schnapps. Onlookers were silent and soon quietly slunk away, keeping their downcast eyes to the ground. The most prominent of the captured elders were hanged with piano wire in the central square of Włocławek, and left there as a warning. The city’s surviving Jews were silent. Nostitz ordered the burning of all the synagogues, and they tortured five Jews into claiming responsibility for the arson. Payment to the Reich was fixed at 100,000 zloty, and the Jewish community collectively paid it. The SS Death’s Head war machine rolled on.

~

Hoffman struggled with himself, looking into the spotless mirror in his little private bathroom in the staff building of St. George no.5. Such conduct was wrong… barbaric, even. Not fit for the Germany of Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, even Nietzsche. It was extreme cruelty. Hoffman knew that, and the hard reflection in the mirror seemed to know it too.

Hoffman remembered the little girl in the black parka. How old was she; 8, 9?

A tiny figure, still unable to walk without betraying a lack of basic equilibrium in her fledgling little legs; the girl had turned her back to the SS men levelling guns at her family, who were part of a larger group of blacklisted pro-Bolshevik Jews who’d been lined up against a wall in the town. She just held her father’s hand; her sobbing mother embraced the little ones, whispering words of comfort, but the father had been completely undemonstrative. Silent, as though in shock. Uncomprehending of his family’s fate. The little girl, ludicrously small in her big parka coat, reached out and held her father’s adult sausage fingers between her own tiny hands, before a volley of gunshots cut them all down.

How could Goethe and Bismarck approve of this? Even the arch-anti-Semite Wagner couldn’t condone such coldblooded
slaughter
… but, Hoffman reasoned, clenched in combat with himself – this is
war
. A fight for survival. For the SS officer to show remorse, even
pity
for the enemy, was also wrong. The Jew had corrupted and weakened Germany in the days before National Socialism. The freemasonry of the Jewish financiers, merchants and petit bourgeois had undermined the Fatherland; their politicking had caused defeat in the Great War. The decadence of the Weimar Republic and its filth, its sex shows and debauchery and drugs and negro music… and the depression. Hoffman’s memory of the Jewish girl subsided into reminiscence of the deprivations and frustrations of Weimar years, and his eyes narrowed. The Jew had continued poisoning Germany until Hitler’s rise, and even now they continued their provocations abroad. He
could not
show pity. He
could
not. He
must
not.

As bright as that day in London was, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch stormed into the meeting of
Oberkommando des Heeres
High Command and brought only rainstorms, cloud and thunder with him, lined in the contours of his face.

None present needed to ask why.

“Heil Hitler!” The Field Marshal brayed.

“Heil Hitler!” returned twelve unenthusiastic voices of the high command. Quickly dropping the salute, they all dropped into the great wooden chairs with studded leather armrests, and settled themselves at the great mahogany table that dominated the wide room.

Every officer present was a general; the lowest ranked being a brace of Generalmajors, to several Generalleutnants, a group ranked at Generaloberst, and lastly two Field Marshals present, both of whom were promoted in the great wave of Hitler awards following the rapid collapse of France. All generals present bore the gold epaulettes, and wore trousers striped with red to distinguish them in their rank.
General Halder looked around the room, thrilled in the show of military might in the heart of London, great capital of the world’s foremost Empire.

“Greetings, Generals,” von Brauchitsch said, settling himself into his seat.

This was a meeting of the Oberkommando des Heeres, High Command of the German Army; today marking the second great conference of its kind since the invasion, and once more held in the former British ‘War Rooms’ of Churchill’s War Cabinet in Whitehall. The man whom Hitler appointed Military Commander of Britain formally opened the dialogue, though it was not with the confident air of authority that he had previously possessed. That was due largely to his title becoming a pyrrhic victory, if not altogether obsolete. But where his confidence lagged, the commander countered with volume.

“Herr Generals & Officers, the next phase in the incorporation of England into the Greater German Reich is about to begin,” von Brauchitsch barked. “New directives from Berlin and the Party suggest that while our important public relations work must continue, contemporaneously with the continued crushing of organised armed resistance in the northern theatres.”

He sighed, and some of the men nodded in solidarity. They knew what his next point would address.

“As some of you are already aware, along with the SD & Gestapo units operating as Security Police here already, the latest development is that the SS-Reich Security Main Office leadership itself will be arriving in Great Britain tomorrow.” He winced, visibly, and while those already aware of the recent Führer Order merely grimaced, the other officers blanched in open shock.

Field Marshal von Brauchitsch continued, in a pained voice.

“SS-
Ober
gruppenführer und
General der Polizei
Reinhard Heydrich, our beloved hangman in Berlin will not only spearhead intensified
Sicherheitspolizei
operations, but the Führer has bestowed significantly more jurisdiction on him than was previously granted in Poland.”

There were murmurings of unease, and looks were exchanged around the table.

“Military command remains with me and Army High Command, but as Oberkommando des Wehrmacht chief Keitel–”

“
Lakeitel
,” one of the other generals muttered, which inspired several agreements and sneering remarks. The pun on Wilhelm Keitel’s name meant ‘poodle’, or ‘lackey’, which is how many within the German Army viewed his attitude towards the Führer.

Britain’s nominal military commander smiled, and continued. “Keitel signed an order with the SS-RSHA that no impediment is to be given to Herr
Reichsprotektor
Heydrich’s work by decree…” he drew on the title for effect, noting that the generals present were as uncomfortable as he himself was with it. They’d all witnessed the horrors wrought by the Einsatzgruppen of SiPo and SD that Heydrich had set up in Poland. Mass-executions, villages and whole towns left in flames, anti-tank ditches filled with bullet-strewn corpses, blood, shell casings and broken vodka bottles had followed the Heydrich death squads like an incriminating and particularly sinister trail in the wake of their almost wanton destruction.

It had chilled even some of the Wehrmacht High Command, all of whom had served in the charnel-house of the Great War and its bloody trenches. Yet this was new horror; the Einsatzgruppen defied description. Thankfully, thus far in England they had been restrained, for the most part. The insane burnings – villages and towns razed in the style of Genghis Khan’s savage Mongol armies, with all the inhabitants butchered heedless of sex or age – were, thankfully, not standard SS practise in a land of ‘racial brothers.’