“I know,” Gudrun said. She looked up at him. “Are you going to betray me?”
“How could I without revealing that I sneaked into the hospital beside you?” Kurt asked, dryly. “You couldn’t have done it without me.”
That was true, Gudrun knew. But betraying the person who’d helped write and distribute the leaflets would probably have won him forgiveness. He wasn’t a student, after all; he was a Berlin Guardsman who was probably bound for South Africa soon…
“Thank you,” she said, instead. “I’m not going to stop.”
“I know,” Kurt said. “You’re as stubborn as father.”
“And if I wasn’t a girl, he’d have something to be proud of,” Gudrun snarled.
“He’s had a bad day,” Kurt reminded her. “The girls he had to round up would have been very like you – some of them might only be a year or two younger. He didn’t join the police for that.”
Gudrun shrugged as her brother patted her on the shoulder and rose, heading for the door. As far as she could tell, the Order Police were intended to push people around. Why else would anyone join up?
“Get some rest,” Kurt advised. “You have to go back to university tomorrow.”
“I know,” Gudrun said. “Thank you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Reichstag, Berlin
28 July 1985
It was not, Hans Krueger decided, going to be a particularly pleasant meeting.
He’d been expecting a vote on the deployment of additional troops to South Africa – his sources had told him that the SS was trying to strike a deal with the military – and had been preparing for a long argument when the news about the protest leaflets reached the Ministry of Finance, followed by an urgent demand for an immediate meeting. He’d obtained one of the leaflets from the security office, read it while walking to the Reichstag and made his way up to the central meeting room. The others had already arrived and were seated around the table.
“This is a crisis,” Karl Holliston said. The Reichsführer-SS had one of the leaflets unfolded in front of him and was glowering down at it. “Someone spread seditious propaganda in Berlin itself and escaped!”
Hans took a seat, forcing himself to remain calm. The SS – and the other security forces – would be embarrassed, if not humiliated, by the whole affair. He didn’t blame them. It was physically impossible for them to patrol the entire Reich, let alone maintain a level of omnipresence second only to God’s. Their control rested on fear, rested on the population believing that they might be under surveillance at any moment, that anything they said might be recorded and used in evidence against them at a later date. To have someone – or a small group of traitors – pull off such a coup in the centre of Berlin would call their capabilities into doubt.
“Let us not turn this molehill into a mountain,” he said, as he dropped his own copy of the leaflet on the table. “Annoying as this is, it is a very minor issue.”
“Any defiance of the Reich is a major issue,” Holliston snapped. “By now, copies of this damnable tissue of lies are spreading through the city!”
Hans frowned. “They are?”
“Yes,” Holliston said. “Apparently, a number of copies were dropped into letterboxes all over Berlin. We’ve had at least a dozen handed in to the local police. This is not an isolated act of protest, but a calculated strike against the authority of the Reich!”
“So we track down the people responsible and eliminate them,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said. “That should not be too difficult.”
“It may not be that easy,” Hans said. He hadn’t had long to think about the implications, but he was a veteran of countless political wars. “We need to treat this very carefully.”
“We need to stamp on these traitors as hard as we can,” Holliston insisted.
“It isn’t that simple,” Hans said. “How many leaflets were not handed in to the police?”
He pressed on before anyone could try to answer an unanswerable question. “This leaflet urges people to ask questions about other soldiers who have dropped out of contact, neither writing to their families nor returning home on leave,” he said. “How many civilians in Berlin have relatives in South Africa, relatives who have seemingly vanished because we have not told their families about their conditions? It will not be long before people start putting together the full story.”
“They are not encouraged to ask questions,” Holliston said.
Hans gave him a sharp look. “You plan to keep two mothers from talking about their children? Or two housewives from worrying about their husbands? Right now, I imagine, word is spreading, no matter what we do about it. There is no way we can deny everything and expect to be believed.”
“Radio Berlin can tell the Reich that the leaflets are talking nonsense,” Holliston insisted.
“But they’re not talking nonsense,” Hans snapped back. “And the population will know they’re not talking nonsense.”
“Then we tell the population that the soldiers died in a good cause,” Holliston said. “We shift our policy to honouring the dead and tending to the wounded!”
“That would add credence to the leaflet’s claims,” Field Marshal Gunter Voss said. “It would also make it look like we were allowing these… these rebels to dictate our actions.”
Holliston scowled at him, angrily. “And they also want free elections to the Reichstag,” he said. “Are we going to tamely surrender power?”
“We could give them what they want,” Hans pointed out. “The Reichstag hasn’t had any real power since 1944.”
“The Nazi Party has governed this country since 1931,” Holliston said. “In fifty-four years, we have risen to a position of global dominance our forefathers couldn’t possibly have imagined. Our armies are the strongest in the world; our settlers are turning the wastelands of Russia and the Middle East into new civilisations. There is no reason to give power to a bunch of whining civilians who have done nothing to earn it.”
Hans frowned, inwardly. There was a certain degree of social mobility in the Reich, either through the military, the SS or the Nazi Party bureaucracy. He’d started out as a young bureaucrat, after all, and Holliston – to give the devil his due – had been a brave stormtrooper who’d seen genuine action. But the odds of anyone reaching the Reich Council were staggeringly low and, by the time they actually reached high office, they would be so thoroughly ingrained with the ideals of their particular branch that they’d have trouble seeing anyone else’s point of view. There were far too many bureaucrats, after all, who couldn’t understand why small businesses were complaining about the tax burden.
“I think we have to admit,” he said slowly, “that everything has just changed.”
He tapped the leaflet with one finger. “We have been using trickery to hide the fact that the death rate in South Africa is alarmingly high – and that isn’t the only thing we’ve been trying to hide. The state of our economy…”
“To hell with the economy,” Holliston thundered.
“That’s precisely where it’s going,” Hans said, mildly. “We have been robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last decade, using the loot from our conquests and our captive markets to paper over the cracks in the system. Now, we are running out of time; now, people are going to be asking questions; now, our reaction to those questions will only give the charges against us” – he tapped the leaflet again – “more credence. You know as well as I do that people talk, that word is going to spread through the Reich…”