The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (50 page)

The voice of Mabuse seemingly spoke to me, but the words appeared to be for Kaufmann’s benefit: “It is too bad that you will not be able to work with the new entertainment technology. I was hoping we could transfer your memories of the affair with Lida Barova. As she was your most famous scandal, it would have made for a good show.”

Before I could answer this taunt, Kaufmann’s gruff voice announced: “Don’t keep your son waiting.”

“He should wait for me, not the other way around!”

Kaufmann was oblivious: “He is with his fellows. Come.” Mabuse helped me get off the cot and then we were marching down the corridor again. I was dizzy on my feet, my hand hurt, and my head felt as though it were stuffed full of cotton. So many random thoughts swirling in my mind, easily displaced by immediate concern for my future welfare...

Twilight was fast approaching as we entered the courtyard I had noticed earlier in Kaufmann’s office. The large funeral pyre was still there, unused. Except that now there was a bier next to it. We were too far away to see whose body was on it, but with every step we drew nearer.

A door beside the pyre opened and a line of young men emerged, dressed in black SS regalia. In the lead was my son. They proceeded remorselessly in our direction. Helmuth gave Kaufmann the Nazi salute. He answered with the same. Quite obviously I was in no mood to reciprocate.

“Father,” said Helmuth gravely, “I have been granted the privilege of overseeing this observance. Please approach the body.”

Such was the formality of his tone that I hesitated to intercede with a fatherly appeal. The expression on his face was blank to my humanity. I did as requested.

Not for a moment did I suspect the identity of the body. Yet as I gazed at that familiar, waxen face, I knew that it fit the Burgundian pattern. It had to be his body. Once more I stood before Adolf Hitler!

“It was an outrage,” said Kaufmann, “to preserve his body as though he were Lenin. His soul belongs in Valhalla. We intend to send it there today.” My mouth was open with a question that would not be voiced as I turned to Kaufmann. He bowed solemnly. “Yes, Herr Goebbels. You were one of his most loyal deputies. You will accompany him.”

There are times when no amount of resolve to be honorable and brave will suffice: I made to run, but many strong hands were on me in an instant. Helmuth placed his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t make it worse,” he whispered. “It has to be. Preserve your dignity. I want to be proud of you.”

There was nothing to say. Nothing to do but contemplate a horrible death. I struggled in vain, doing my best to ignore the existence of Helmuth. It was no surprise that he had been selected for this honor. It made perfect sense in the demented scheme of things.

They brought out an aluminum ramp. Two husky SS men began to carry Hitler’s body up the incline, while Helmuth remained behind, no doubt with the intention of escorting me up that unwelcome path.

“The manner of your death will remain a state secret of Burgundy,” said Kaufmann. “We were able to receive good publicity from your Ministry when we executed those two French snoopers for trespassing: Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. This is different.” He paused, then added: “Soon publicity won’t matter anymore.”

My options were being reduced to nothing. Even facing death I could not entirely surrender. The years I had spent perfecting the art of propaganda had taught me that no situation is so hopeless that nothing may be salvaged from it. I reviewed the facts: despite their temporary agreement Kaufmann and the new Mabuse were really working at cross-purposes. If I could only exploit those differences, I could sow dissension in their ranks. Mabuse held the trump card, so I decided to direct the ploy at Kaufmann.

“I suppose I’m free to talk,” I said to Kaufmann’s back as he watched the red ball of the sun setting beyond the castle walls. The sky was streaked with orange and gold—the thin strands of cumulus clouds that seemed so reassuringly distant. There were a million other places I could have been at that moment, but for a vile twist of fate. There had to be some way of escape!

No one answered my query and I continued: “You’re not a geneticist, are you, Kaufmann? How would you know if you can trust Dietrich?” He was Dietrich to them, but to me he would always be Mabuse. “What if he is lying? What if his process can’t be made specific enough to exclude any group from the virus?”

Mabuse laughed. Kaufmann answered without turning around: “For insurance’s sake he will immunize everyone in Burgundy as well as his assistants. If something goes wrong, it will be a shame to lose all those excellent Aryan specimens elsewhere in the world.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” said Mabuse.

I wouldn’t give up that easily and struck back with: “How do you know he won’t inject you with poison when the time comes? It would be like a repetition of the Black Plague that ravaged Burgundy in 1348.”

“I applaud your inventive suggestion,” said Mabuse.

“We have faith,” was Kaufmann’s astounding reply.

“A faith I will reward,” boomed out Mabuse’s monster voice. “They are not stupid, Goebbels. Some true believers have sufficient medical training to detect an attempt at the stunt you suggest.”

In desperation I spoke again to my son: “Do you trust this?”

“I am here,” came his answer in a low voice. “I have taken the oath.”

“It’s no good,” taunted Mabuse. “Stop trying to save yourself.”

They had Hitler’s body at the top of the ramp. The SS men stood at attention. Everyone was waiting. The setting sun seemed to me at that moment to be pausing in its descent, waiting.

“Father,” said Helmuth, “Germany has become decadent. It has forgotten its ideals. That my sister Hilda is allowed to live is proof enough. Look at you. You’re not the man you were in the grand old days of the genocide.”

“Son,” I said, my voice trembling, “what is happening in Burgundy is not the same thing.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” said Dr. Mabuse.

Kaufmann strolled over to where I was standing and craned his neck to look at the men at the top of the ramp with the worldly remains of Adolf Hitler. He said, “Nazis were good killers during the war. Jews, Gypsies, and many others fell by the sword, even when it exacted a heavy price from other elements of the war program. Speer always wanting his slave labor for industrial requirements. Accountants always counting pennies. The mass murder was for its own sake, a promise of better things to come!

“After the war only Burgundy seemed to care any longer. Rulings that came out of New Berlin were despicable, loosening up the censorship laws and not strictly enforcing the racial standards. Do you know that a taint of Jewishness is considered to be sexually arousing in Germany’s more decadent cabarets of today? Even the euthanasia policy for old and unfit citizens was never more than words on paper, after the Catholics and Lutherans interfered. The Party was corrupted from within. It let the dream die.”

The kind of hatred motivating this Burgundian leader was no stranger to me. Never in my worst nightmares did it occur to me that I could be a victim of this kind of thinking.

Kaufmann gestured to men on the ramp and they placed Hitler’s body on top of the pyre. “It is time,” mourned Helmuth’s voice in my ear. Other young SS men surrounded me, Helmuth holding my arm. We began to walk.

Other SS men had appeared around the dry pyramid of kindling wood and straw. They were holding burning torches. Kaufmann gestured and they set the pyre aflame. The crackling and popping sounds plucked at my nerves as whitish smoke slowly rose. It would take a few minutes before the flame reached the apex to consume Hitler’s body... and whatever else was near. My only consolation was that they had not used lighter fluid—dreadful modern stuff—to hasten the inferno.

Somewhere in that blazing doom Odin and Thor and Freyja were waiting. I was in no hurry to greet them.

I wondered at how the SA must have felt when the SS burst in on them, barking guns ripping out their lives in bloody ruins. Perhaps I should have thought of Magda, but I did not. Instead all my whimsies were directed to miracles and last-minute salvations. How I had preached hope in the final hours of the war before our luck had turned. I had fed Hitler on stories of Frederick the Great’s diplomatic coup in the face of a military debacle. I had compared the atom bomb—when we got it—to the remarkable change in fortunes in the House of Brandenburg. Now I found myself pleading with the cruel fates for a personal victory of the same sort.

I was at the top of the ramp. Helmuth’s hands were set firmly against my back. To him had fallen the task of consigning his father’s living body to the flames. They must have considered him an adept pupil to be trusted with so severe a task.

So completely absorbed was I in thoughts of a sudden reprieve that I barely noticed the distant explosion. Someone behind me said, “What was that?” I heard Kaufmann calling from the ground but his words were lost in a louder explosion that occurred nearby.

A manic voice called out: “We must finish the rite!” It was Helmuth. He pushed me into empty space. I fell on Hitler’s corpse, and grabbed at the torso to keep from falling into an opening, beneath which raged the personal executioner.

“Too soon,” one of my son’s comrades was saying. “The fire isn’t high enough. You’ll have to shoot him or...”

Already I was rolling onto the other side of Hitler’s body as I heard a gunshot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Helmuth clutching his stomach as he fell into the red flames.

Shouts. Gunfire. More explosions. An army was climbing over the wall of the courtyard. A helicopter was zooming in overhead. My first thought was that it must be the German army come to save me. I was too delighted to care how that was possible.

The conflagration below was growing hotly near. Smoke filling my eyes and lungs was about to choke me to death. I was contemplating a jump from the top—a risky proposition at best—when I was given a better chance by a break in the billowing fumes. The men had cleared the ramp for being ill protected against artillery.

Once again I threw myself over Hitler’s body and hit the metal ramp with a thud. What kept me from falling off was the body of a dead SS man, whose leg I was able to grasp as I started to bounce back. Then I lifted myself and ran as swiftly as I could, tripping a quarter of the way from the ground and rolling bruisedly the rest of the way. The whizzing bullets missed me. I lay hugging the dirt, for fear of being shot if I rose.

Even from that limited position I could evaluate certain aspects of the encounter. The Burgundians had temporarily given up their penchant for fighting with swords and were making do with machine guns instead. (The one exception was Thor, who ran forward in a berserker rage, wielding an ax. The bullets tore him to ribbons.) The battle seemed to be going badly for them.

Then I heard the greatest explosion of my life. It was as if the castle had been converted into one of Von Braun’s rockets as a sheet of flame erupted from underneath it and the whole building quaked with the vibrations. The laboratory must have been destroyed instantly.

“It’s Goebbels,” a voice sang out. “Is he alive?”

“If he is, we’ll soon remedy that.”

“No,” said the first voice. “Let’s find out.”

Rough hands turned me over... and I expected to look once more into faces of SS men. These were young men, all right, but there was something disturbingly familiar about them. I realized that they might be Jews! The thought, even then, that my life had been saved by Jews was too much to bear. But those faces, like the faces that I’ve thought about too many times to count.

“Blindfold him,” one said. It was done, and I was being pushed through the courtyard blind, the noises of battle echoing all around. Once we stopped and crouched behind something. There was an exchange of shots. Then we were running and I was pulled into a conveyance of some sort. The whirring sound identified it instantly as a helicopter revving up; and we were off the ground, and we were flying away from that damned castle. A thin, high whistling sound went by—someone must have still been firing at us. And then the fight faded away in the distance.

An hour later we had landed. I was still blindfolded. Low voices were speaking in German. Suddenly I heard a scrap of Russian. This in turn was followed by a comment in Yiddish; and there was a sentence in what I took to be Hebrew. The different conversations were interrupted by a deep voice speaking in French announcing the arrival of an important person. After a few more whisperings—in German again—my blindfold was removed.

Standing in front of me was Hilda, dressed in battle fatigues. “Tell me what has happened,” I said, adding as an afterthought—“if you will.”

“Father, you have been rescued from Burgundy by a military operation of combined forces.”

“You were only incidental,” added a lean, dark-haired man by her side.

“Allow me to introduce this officer,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. “We won’t use names, but this man is with the Zionist Liberation Army. My involvement was sponsored by the guerrilla arm of the German Freedom League. Since your abduction the rest of the organization has gone underground. We are also receiving an influx of Russians into our ranks.”

If everything else that had happened seemed improbable, this was sufficient to convince me that I had finally lost my sanity and was enmeshed in the impossible. “There is no Zionist Liberation Army,” I said. “I would have heard of it.”

“You’re not the only one privy to secrets,” was her smug reply.

“Are you a Zionist now?” I asked my daughter, thinking that nothing else would astound me. I was wrong again.

“No,” she answered. “I don’t support statism of any kind. I’m an anarchist.”

What next? Her admission stunned me to the core. A large Negro with a beard spoke: “There is only one requirement to be in this army, Nazi. You must oppose National Socialism, German or Burgundian.”

“We have communists as well, Father,” my daughter went on. “The small wars Hitler kept waging well into the 1950s, always pushing deeper into Russia, made more converts to Marx than you realize.”

“But you hate communism, daughter. You’ve told me so over and over.” In retrospect it was not prudent for me to say this in such a company, but I no longer cared. I was emotionally exhausted, numb, empty.

She took the bait. “I hate all dictatorships. In the battle of the moment I must take what comrades I can get. You taught me that.”

I could not stop myself talking, despite the risk. I sensed that this was the last chance I would have to reach my daughter. “The Bolsheviks were worse statists than we ever were. Surely the War Crimes Trials we held at the end of hostilities taught you that, even if you wouldn’t learn it from your own father.”

She raised her voice: “I know the evil that was done. What else would you expect from your darling straight-A princess than I can still recite the names of the Russian death camps: Vorkuta, Karaganda, Dal-stroi, Magadan, Norilsk, Bamlag, and Solovki. But it has only lately dawned on me that there is something hypocritical about the victors trying the vanquished. You didn’t even try to find judges from neutral countries.”

“What do you expect from Nazis?” added the Negro.

My daughter reminded me of myself, as she continued to lecture all of us, captors and captives alike: “The first step on the road to anarchy is to realize that all war is a crime; and that the cause is statism.” Before I could get in a word edgewise, other members of the group began arguing among themselves; and I knew that I was in the hands of real radicals. The early days of the Party were like this. And whether Hilda was an anarchist or not, it was clear that the leader of this ad-hoc army—enough of a state for me—was the thin, dark-haired Jew.

He leaned into my face, and vomited up the following: “Your daughter’s personal loyalty prevents her from accepting the evidence we have gathered about your involvement in the mass murder of Jews. You’re as bad as Stalin.”

My dear, sweet daughter. Reaching out to embrace her, I not only caused several guns to be leveled on my person, but received a rebuff from her. She slapped me! Her words were acid as she said, “Fealty only goes so far. Whatever your part in the killing of innocent civilians, the rest of your career is an open book. You are an evil man. I can’t lie to myself about it any longer.”

There was no room for anger. No room left for anything but a hunger for security. I was ready to happily consign my entire family to Hitler’s funeral pyre, if by so doing I could return home to New Berlin. The demeanor of these freelance soldiers told me that they bore me no will that was good.

Hilda must have read my thoughts. “They are going to let you go, this time, as a favor to me. We agreed in advance that Burgundy was the priority. Everything else had to take a back seat, including waking up about my... parents.”

“When may I leave?”

“We’re near the Burgundian border. My friends will disappear, until a later date when you
may
see them again. As for me, I’m leaving Europe for good.”

“Where will you go?” I didn’t expect an answer to that.

“To the American Republic. My radical credentials are an asset over there.”

“America,” I said listlessly. “Why?”

“Just make believe you are concocting another of your ideological speeches. Do this one about individual rights and you’ll have your answer. They may not be an anarchist utopia, but they are paradise compared with your Europe. Goodbye, Father. And farewell to Hitler’s ghost.”

I was blindfolded again. Despite mixed feelings I was grateful to be alive. They released me at the great oak tree I had observed when flying into Burgundy. As I removed the blindfold, I heard the helicopter take off behind me. My eyes focused on the plaque nailed to the tree that showed how SS men had ripped up the railway and transplanted this tremendous oak to block that evidence of the modern world. It had taken a lot of manpower.

How easily manpower can be reduced to dead flesh.

Turning around, I saw the flowing green hills of a world I had never fully understood stretched out to the horizon. With a shudder I looked away, walked around the tree, and began following the rusty track on the other side. It would lead me to the old station where I would put in a call to home... to what I thought was home.