English should have been easier. It was German’s close cousin, and used the same alphabet as Heydrich’s birthspeech. But he found himself understanding the Soviets much more readily than the British-to say nothing of the Americans.
Soviet authorities reacted to the holdouts much as he’d expected. Deportations, executions, brutality…That all made sense to him. It was the way he would have attacked the problem were he running the NKVD. It was the way the Reich had attacked the partisan problem in Russia and Yugoslavia. The Germans hadn’t done so well as they would have liked, and Heydrich hoped the Soviets wouldn’t, either. But it was a good, rational approach.
The Americans, on the other hand…
On his desk sat a three-day-old copy of the International Herald-Tribune. The patriot who’d put the paper in a secure drop had circled a story on an inside page in red ink. Heydrich had already read the piece three times. He knew what all the words meant. He even understood the sentences-individually, anyhow. But the story as a whole struck him as insane.
“I thought this must be a joke,” he told Johannes Klein. “A joke or a trick, one.”
“What does it say?” Klein asked. The veteran Oberscharfuhrer did fine in German, and cared not a pfennig’s worth for any other language.
“It says there are rallies in America protesting the soldiers we’ve killed since the surrender. It says the people protesting demand that the Americans take their soldiers out of Germany so we can’t kill any more of them,” Heydrich answered.
“Fine,” Klein said. “When do the machine guns come out and teach these idiots some sense?”
“That’s what I wondered,” Heydrich answered. “That’s what we did to those White Rose traitors, by God.” He shook his head, still angry at the college kids who’d had the gall to object to the Fuhrer’s war policy-and to do it in public, too! Well, they’d paid for it: paid with their necks, a lot of them, and just what they deserved.
“Of course it is,” Hans Klein said. “What else can you do when a fool gets out of line?”
“The Yankees aren’t doing anything to them. Zero. Not even taking them in for questioning. Madness!” Heydrich said. He added the clincher: “One of their Congressmen is even making speeches taking the demonstrators’ side. Can you imagine that, Hans?”
His longtime comrade shook his head. So did Heydrich. He tried to picture a Reichstag deputy standing up in 1943 and telling the Fuhrer the war was lost and he ought to make the best peace he could. What would have happened to a deputy who did something like that? As near as Heydrich could tell, he wouldn’t just die. He would cease to exist, would cease ever to have existed. He would be aggressively forgotten, the way Ernst Rohm was after the Night of Long Knives.
As usual, Klein thought along with him. “So what are they doing to him?”
Heydrich brought a fist down on the newspaper. “Nothing!” he burst out. “This foolish rag goes on about freedom of speech and open discussion of ideas. Have you ever heard such twaddle in all your born days?”
“Not me,” Klein said.
“Not me, either,” Heydrich said. “I read this, and I thought the Yankees were trying to trick us. But a couple of our people have lived in America. They say it really works this way. Any crackpot can get up and go on about whatever the devil he wants.”
“How did they lick us?” Klein asked. No German asked that about the Russians. Stalin put out a fire by throwing bodies on it till it smothered. He commanded enough bodies to smother any fire, too, which had come as a dreadful surprise to the Fuhrer and the General Staff. But the Americans were…well, different seemed a polite word for it.
After some thought, Heydrich said, “That may be the wrong question.”
“Well, what’s the right one, then?”
“If they really are this naive”-Heydrich still had trouble believing it, but didn’t see what else he could think if the Herald-Tribune story wasn’t made up-“how do we take advantage of it?”
“Ah. Ach, so.” Once Klein saw the right question, he focused like the sun’s rays brought to a point by a burning glass. Like any long-serving noncom, he had a lot of practice taking advantage of officers with more power but less subtlety. His predicament with them was much like the Reich’s with its occupiers. Heydrich waited to see what he could come up with. After a few seconds, Klein said, “We have to keep fighting the Amis-”
“Aber naturlich!” Heydrich broke in.
“We have to keep fighting, ja.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to remind himself of where he’d been before he got to where he was going: “But we should also let them down easy, give them something these people who want to go home can latch on to and use for an excuse so they don’t look like a pack of gutless quitters.”
Like the pack of gutless quitters they really are, Heydrich thought. But Hans Klein wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s morale mattered. Germany had done well with propaganda against the Low Countries and France, then completely botched it against the Russians. Treating them like a bunch of niggers in the jungle wasn’t the smartest thing the Reich could have done. A little late to worry about that now, though. Heydrich leaned forward intently. “What have you got in mind?”
“Well, sir, way it looks to me is, we ought to say something like we’re only fighting to get our own country back again. We ought to let ’em know how much that means to us, and to ask ’em how happy they’d be if some son of a bitch was sitting on their head. And we ought to say we’ll be mild as milk if they just pack up and go away.”
Klein winked at Heydrich. The Reichsprotektor laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Of course Germany would rearm the moment it had the chance. And of course German physicists would get to work on atom bombs as soon as they could. That sparked another thought.
“As long as they’ve got this fancy bomb and we don’t, they have the whip hand, too,” Heydrich said. “We should tell them we understand that.”
“And we should promise we’d never go after the bomb. We should promise on a big, tall stack of Bibles.” Hans Klein winked again.
And damned if Heydrich didn’t laugh again. After the last war, the Treaty of Versailles said Germany couldn’t have all kinds of weapons. Her top aeronautical engineers designed civilian planes. Other engineers tested panzers in Russia-the Soviet Union was another pariah state. Artillery designs for Sweden, U-boats for Holland…When Hitler decided it was time to rearm, he didn’t have a bit of trouble. If Germany needed atom bombs to get ready for the next round, she’d have them.
“Can we do something like that, sir?” Klein asked.
“You’d better believe it.” Heydrich got up from his desk and walked over to a file cabinet under the Fuhrer’s framed photo. It held a complete run of Signal, the Reich’s wartime propaganda magazine. Signal was a slick product, printed in many languages; people said enemy publications like Life and Look had stolen from its layout and approach. That wasn’t why Heydrich started poring over back issues, though. They’d run an article he could adapt. He remembered it had come late in the war, after things on the Eastern Front went bad. That helped him narrow things down. He grunted when he found the copy he needed. “Here we go.”
“What have you got?” Hans Klein inquired.
“See for yourself.” Heydrich held out the magazine to him. The article was called “What We Are Fighting for.” It showed a wounded Wehrmacht man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain. On the facing page was a closeup of a blond, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old. The two photos summed up exactly what the Reich was fighting for, but text went with them. That text was what Heydrich wanted.