Hans-Ulrich started to deny that he thought lying was sinful. As Dieselhorst had before him, he caught himself. He couldn’t deny it unless he felt like lying himself-which would indeed be a sin. You could put a preacher’s son in the cockpit of a warplane. You could even turn a preacher’s son into a good National Socialist. What you couldn’t do was make him forget who his father was, and what his father stood for.
All he did say, then, was, “I guess I wouldn’t make such a great politician, either, then.”
That got a laugh out of Sergeant Dieselhorst. “Maybe not. Each cat his own rat, or that’s what they say.”
“Is it?” Hans-Ulrich hadn’t heard it before, but he’d long since decided that Dieselhorst had done and heard all kinds of things he hadn’t.
He realized Germans wouldn’t be the only ones listening to this speech. It would go all over the world by shortwave. It would be history in the making. That made him want the sun to speed across the sky and set so he could find out what was on the Führer’s mind.
It gave Dieselhorst different ideas. “What do you want to bet every Luftwaffe pilot who flies anything faster than a Stuka will be over Münster and its approaches while Hitler’s talking to make sure the RAF doesn’t drop any bombs on him?”
Hans-Ulrich hadn’t thought of that, but he nodded. “Makes sense to me.”
He ate supper without paying much attention to what went into his mess tin. Considering the stews the field kitchen turned out, that might have been just as well. After he cleaned up the kit, he joined the crowd of Luftwaffe men gathered in front of a radio hooked up to a truck battery. At the moment, someone was playing Bach on a piano. Some of the flyers and groundcrew men looked bored. Rudel enjoyed the music; he’d been listening to it since he was a baby. That was another souvenir from his father.
Then the Bach program ended. The radio played “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied”: national anthem and Party anthem. That was what they always did before they broadcast anything important.
“Here is the beloved Führer of the Grossdeutsches Reich, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German Volk and to the world from the city of Münster,” gabbled an announcer with an excited voice.
“People of Germany, I have come to Münster to tear up treason by the roots,” Hitler declared. “It is because of treason that our war against the Jew Bolsheviks of Moscow and the Jew capitalists of London and Paris and New York City has not gone as well as we should have hoped. They are not content with corrupting the peasant Untermenschen and mongrel factory workers they exploit. No! Instead, they whisper their filthy venom into German ears as well.”
He had an Austrian accent and an Austrian habit of peppering everything he said with particles: little words that added emphasis but that many, maybe even most, German-speakers would have left out. But his voice was such a splendid instrument that even such tics seemed not to matter-no, seemed to disappear-after a sentence or two.
“When Germans seek to rise against the German state and seek to hinder the struggle against Bolshevist barbarism, they cannot be doing this on their own. No, they must be incited by outside agitators, and by the filthy, wicked Jews still resident in the Reich. And they must be punished for their betrayal of Volkisch ideals. They must be, and they shall be!” Hitler’s voice rose and grew more urgent. “We will make them bend the knee! We will make them tremble in fear. We will-”
The speech abruptly broke off. There was a noise that might have been a shot or might have been an explosion. Then only the soft, staticky hiss of the carrier wave came out of the radio.
Theo Hossbach sprawled on the grass with the other crewmen from his panzer and the rest of the regiment, listening to the Führer telling the world about what he was going to do to Münster and the people who lived there. The radio was turned up loud so everyone could hear in spite of the noise from all the airplanes overhead.
And then, all of a sudden, the speech stopped. Theo heard a kind of a bang from the radio. At almost the same time, he heard kind of a bang from the direction of Münster.
“Scheisse!” one of the men in black panzer coveralls said loudly. He got up and whacked the radio with the heel of his hand. It went on hissing, but the Führer’s speech didn’t come back. He said “Scheisse!” again, even louder than the first time.
Adi Stoss leaned toward Theo. “The trouble’s not in the set, is it?” he murmured.
Since Theo was a radioman, he supposed he was the logical one to ask. He hadn’t checked out the radio, though, and he hated being wrong even more than he hated talking in general. All the same, some kind of answer seemed called for. “I … wouldn’t think so,” he said reluctantly.
That hiss went on and on, probably for two or three minutes. More bangs and booms came from the direction of Münster, though not from the radio set. That might not have meant anything much. You could hear bangs and booms from Münster almost every night. The people in town who didn’t fancy the regime used darkness as a camouflage cloak to help them strike at its backers. The timing now seemed intriguing, though.
“Change the frequency,” someone suggested. “See if we can pick up something somewhere else.”
“No, leave it.” Hermann Witt spoke up with a panzer commander’s authority. “Something funny’s going on. The Führer’s station wouldn’t crap out for no reason at all.”
There was another interesting point. Had Hitler’s station crapped out not for no reason but for some reason? If it had, what would that reason be?
No sooner had that thought crossed Theo’s mind than a voice started coming out of the radio. It wasn’t Hitler’s voice. Instead of sounding like a professional rabble-rouser, this fellow seemed tired unto death and had a harsh, abrupt Prussian way of talking.
“Good evening, people of Germany and people of the world,” he said. “I am Colonel General Heinz Guderian. I find myself heading the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.”
“The what?” Several people there in front of the radio said the same thing at the same time.
“As I speak to you, Adolf Hitler is dead,” Guderian went on. “We have removed him from power because he led Germany into a war that did not succeed, and because he threw away any chance of a fair result by bringing the United States of America into the European conflict. We took this step with great reluctance, but we also took it with great resolution. Even more than in the last war, the United States is an enemy Germany cannot hope to overcome.”
“Sweet Jesus Christ!” a panzer crewman exclaimed not far from Theo. “What do we do now?”
“Some people may not be happy that we have assumed authority in this way,” Guderian continued, which had to rank as one of the champion understatements of all time. “This being so, we need to make it very plain that the Nazi Party is no longer the ruling party in Germany, and is no longer the only party in Germany. As I speak, forces loyal to the Salvation Committee are arresting Göring, Goebbels, Hess, and Himmler.”
“Sweet Jesus!” That same voice rang out again.
“Soldiers of the Reich, sailors of the Reich, flying men of the Reich, obey your officers and carry on. We have taken this action to secure an honorable peace, and we believe we can,” Guderian said. “Men who would not confer with Hitler because of his endless lies will do so with our trustworthy officers and civilian representatives. All sides must see that peace is preferable to the past five and a half years of slaughter and destruction. God will surely bless our cause. Thank you, and good night.”