He forced himself to calm down with an effort. “And you ordered the BDM girls to be corralled in the square,” he added. “Just how many mothers do you think you panicked when they heard that their little girls were under arrest?”
“Those girls were helping to spread these damnable leaflets,” Holliston said.
“There isn’t a shred of evidence that the official BDM girls were doing anything other than handing out the standard propaganda leaflets,” Hans said. That might have been a lucky break; he’d long suspected that no one actually bothered to read the leaflets, no matter what they might have been told at school. “They’re not Jews, Karl. You can’t arrest – even for a couple of hours – fifty-seven schoolgirls and expect no one to comment on it.”
“I suggest,” Voss said, “that we focus on the issue at hand. Do we have any leads at all?”
“We’re working on it,” Holliston said. “There have been some… clashes between the different organisations involved in securing Berlin. The SS should take the lead, but the Gestapo and the Order Police think differently. I propose that the SS should formally take command of the counter-rebel operation.”
Hans frowned. The SS had lost control of the Order Police in the fifties, after Himmler had overreached himself. No one outside the SS – and quite a few factions within the SS – had been keen to see Himmler in sole control of the security services. And he wasn’t blind to the implications of handing Karl Holliston so much power. He’d take what he could and then make it permanent, perhaps even using it to boost himself into supreme power. Had he even started handing out the leaflets in the first place? Hans wouldn’t have put the thought past him.
And he may think I started it, he thought, morbidly. But neither of us really wants to undermine the Reich itself.
“We can discuss that later,” he said. “What do we know?”
“The leaflets were distributed by at least three girls, all wearing BDM uniforms,” Holliston said. “Only a couple of the witnesses were paying close attention; one reported a girl with long dark hair, another insisted he’d seen a blonde with a very large chest.”
“The witness was a teenage boy, I assume,” Voss said.
Hans fought to hide his smile. “It could easily have been a middle-aged man,” he pointed out. “Was it?”
“It was a soldier, home from the wars,” Holliston said, curtly. “As far as we can tell, all of the BDM girls who were trapped within the square were linked to matrons, so we believe that the fakes left the square before the alert was sounded and made their escape into the city. So far, we do not have any leads on just who spread the rest of the leaflets, but we are working on it. There aren’t, however, many places the leaflets could have been printed.”
Voss took the leaflet from the table and inspected it. “The paper is softer,” he said. “Not absorbent enough to be useful, unfortunately, but it isn’t a perfect copy.”
Holliston gave him a sharp look. “A small printing shop could have done it,” he said, “and we will follow them. However, the most likely place where the leaflets were produced is the university.”
Hans swore under his breath. Holliston had always hated the university, hated how it brought American ideals into even a relatively small population of students. And yet it was necessary. No one knew better than Hans just how badly the Reich was falling apart, just how desperately they needed to reinvigorate their technological base. The students might be the only thing capable of saving the Reich from itself.
“We shut the university down,” Holliston continued, “and investigate all the students for seditious leanings.”
“That would do a great deal of damage to our already weakened economy,” Hans pointed out, tartly. “The computer network alone would be badly hampered if we refused to allow university-taught experts to work on it. And without that…”
“Our forefathers didn’t have a computer network,” Holliston snapped.
“They weren’t facing anyone who did, either,” Hans countered. “The Americans have been leveraging their computer network and using it as the base for a whole new series of technological developments. If we shut our network down, as sparse as it is compared to the American design, we might as well shoot ourselves in the head and save time!”
“And yet we have to buy computers off the Americans,” Holliston said. “How do we know we can even trust them?”
“The university will give us better computers in time,” Hans said. It was an old argument, but the truth was that the United States had moved far ahead. Reverse-engineering some of the more advanced machines the Reich had… obtained from the US had proved impossible, while what computers the Reich could produce were unsellable outside the Reich’s captive market. “We just need to give it time to flourish.”
“You’ve been saying that for five years,” Holliston reminded him.
“And what use,” Hans asked, “could one get out of a five-year-old child?”
“I think we’re moving away from the point,” Voss said. “We don’t have time to bicker when we need to come up with a response to these leaflets.”
“That is correct,” Field Marshal Stoffregen said. “Allow me to suggest a compromise.”
Hans exchanged a look with Holliston, then nodded.
“Finding these rebels and rooting them out is a priority,” Stoffregen continued, smoothly. Military officer or not, he wouldn’t have reached high office without being a skilled politician. “At the same time, we have no proof that the university is involved in the affair – and we do need the university. Therefore, I propose that we do not act overtly against the university, but we also place control of the affair in the hands of the SS. This would, of course, be a short-term measure.”
“That would be acceptable,” Holliston said, after a moment. “But we do need to tighten up security, both on the university campus itself and the streets.”
And you’ll do your level best to make it a long-term measure, Hans thought, coldly. The hell of it was that he doubted he could argue against the suggestion. They would leave the university in peace, at least for the moment, in exchange for a short-term surrender of power to the SS. And you can use that to take over the university or shut it down, given time.
“Putting additional policemen on the streets might be a good idea,” he said, carefully. “I would insist, however, that your people within the university be carefully trained in recognising the difference between student chatter and actual sedition.”
“There’s no time to train up additional agents,” Holliston said. He leaned forward. “A strong and visible presence may deter students from joining the movement, even if it doesn’t lead to any of the ringleaders.”
“Who may not even be students at all,” Hans snapped. He didn’t fault Holliston for jumping to such a conclusion, but there was no proof. A cell within the Nazi Party itself could have produced the leaflets, then arranged to have them handed out. It wasn’t beyond belief that some of his subordinates had actually decided to take matters into their own hands. “It was hard enough to build the university, Karl. We don’t want it wrecked overnight.”