After Poland had fallen to Hitler’s war machine, the other European countries fell like a series of dominoes: East Prussia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Italy, Belgium, then Luxembourg along with Finland and Norway. Only Russia, Turkey, France, Spain, and Portugal remained separate, with a plan of taking over North Africa in order to control the Mediterranean Sea. Now Bismarck was set about the business of taking control of the North Atlantic.
Meanwhile, if Hulsing could believe his contacts in Great Britain, Der Fuhrer had also begun internment camps fore Jews and other undesirables, but worse than merely housing people in stalags across Germany and much of Europe now, there were fearsome rumors first couched in the more melodic term endlosung but now being called endziel—the Final Solution to the problem of the embedded Jewish Peoples of not only Germany but Poland and the rest of Europe as well. In other words genocide planned against the inferior races of the planet.
In the meantime, good men in both civilian and military life, soldiers, mariners, pilots kept their eyes on their individual tasks to work assigned duties, concentrate on deployment and responsibilities. Everyone going along with the status quo, happy to have located their collective hive, set their feet on the mark upon which to stand in rows upon rows. Safety in numbers so long as you’re on the right side, he thought. Solidarity worked for a bad cause as well as a good one.
How Hitler loves seeing all the thousands of pressed naval shirts and buttons in rows here now on board his ship of fools. The men were followers in desperate love with the ideas this leader had cooked up for them.
Hard to fault their blindness; all they hoped for was enough bread and a brighter future in the new order of things. A way out of the morbid, crushing economic crisis.
Just concentrate on your own ass and einstatz, Hulsing had so often heard over the years now from the bullying officers he’d had to work under. The idea had certainly taken hold, duty above all else. The thought privately sickened him as he’d seen Nazi soldiers in occupied Poland set one old man on fire in the street. All it took was a little petro and a cigarette.
Now that’s suffering, he told himself, and begged for release as he stood at attention, pretending to be one with the ranks in perfect lock-step. Like the sheep we are, he privately muttered, his jaw set so hard as to chip a tooth.
Nearly finished with his inspection of the single section of seamen that he had chosen to get friendly with, Adolf Hitler’s eyes fell on each officer in turn. To these men, Erwin Hulsing included, he gave a stern, even fatherly stare as if to say, “I am placing my trust in you officers to return to Germany victorious.” Saying nothing, just casting what seemed to be the quintessence of the proverbial ‘evil eye’, he continued on his way to complete his cursory inspection of the seamen. Then in a flash, he returned to the admiral’s bridge where he stood before the microphone which covered more than half his face. Next his cutting voice, shrill and demanding, broke into Erwin’s thoughts of how the man could not even grow a proper mustache.
Hitler, with the Bismarck sailors still at attention, was now shouting into a microphone like a minister in the pulpit. His words condemned Gypsies first, then Jews, followed by other inferior races that must be exterminated from the globe.
“First it was get them all out of Germany, then it was get them all out of Europe,” Erwin whispered in Heinze Zucknat’s ear. “Now its get them off the planet.”
Zucknat, his next in command in the rear gun control room below decks merely shrugged and said, “We just need to be patient, sir, and when we see the Hood, it will be entschiedender sieg, eh?”
It was party rhetoric in the brainwashed heads of these men, Erwin knew. He repeated Heinze’s words,”Entschiedender sieg,” although he wanted just the opposite: an indecisive victory, one in which the Bismarck would be overtaken by the hood, boarded, her admiral surrendering his sword, and the ship towed to England where all aboard could wait out the war in a prisoner of war camp in Nova Scotia or perhaps even the United States if the US ever got off its collective ass and jumped into the war with both feet.
The inspection was taking an interminable amount of time, and Erwin felt more suspicious the longer Hitler tarried over his seemingly mock inspection of the ship and crew. Why had Der Fuhrer personally come aboard Bismarck? Were they here to make another propaganda film? The cameras were, after all, rolling, while his photographers chronicled every move, every word, every grimace, but where had they been when the immortal one and his guard had first boarded Bismarck with that unusual, custom-made crate? Sure, he was here to inspect Bismarck from stem to stern, but was this truly his only purpose? What might his ulterior motive be, other than to bless the ship before she set sail in the hunt for the British battleship, The Hood, which untill now had controlled the English Channel and the North Atlantic?
Hitler had begun a long and loud war prayer, ending with, “I pray not for you men of Bismarck!” This remark brought on more hidden sneers than cheers while Hitler paused, even lighting up a cigarette and puffing for effect, allowing time for his caustic words to sink in before adding, “I pray not for you, for you are men of the Aryan race, willingly here, willing to die for right and justice, and so many of you will die to achieve our ends! This is glory. This is magnificence! I pray not for the Bismarck herself either—a mass of steel. She is beautiful, yes, like you—you are all beautiful, but also like you, she is a missile to be used, to fire and be fired upon, and she could be mortally wounded, like any warrior… like all of you.” Hitler’s voice had gone to an uncharacteristic whisper behind the microphone that still hid his blunt features. Erwin wondered how the man could say such things without hearing a single grumble from the men aboard ship, when Hitler ended with, “I pray for der Reich, der Vaterland!”
Cheers drowned out Hitler’s last words, but Erwin, an expert in communications, read lips, so he heard Hitler say: “And so should you, my lovely seamen! Pray not for yourselves or Bismarck—all a means to an end. Pray for der Third Reich!”
This winding down of the speech sent a cheer up among the men so loud that it must have frightened seagulls a mile away.
Bismarck had been named for the dead Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a man whose memory had been extraordinarily twisted to fit Hitler’s war propaganda ends. Bismarck the man had somehow become a mythological symbol of moral correctness, flag-waving patriotism, religious righteousness, race purity, along with pure power in the Third Reich. Did it make sense? Not as far as Hulsing could see but then again, what did made sense anymore? After all, they’d already gone down the ‘rabbit hole’ so whether this use of Bismarck’s name—originally christened and launched amid a crowd of thousands of patriots—was right or proper, who but the fanatics cared? The fanatics and the Nazi Party had swarmed into the Hamburg shipyards February 14, 1939 and among the crowds stood huge numbers of boys and girls of the Hitler Youth Camps who had been bused in to celebrate the launch of Germany’s grandest battleship—the new power of the seas. Back in ’39 when Bismarck was first launched, cheers had filled the air, and Erwin had been on hand, in his uniform, under orders to be among the onlookers, giving the Nazi salute as the ceremony came to a close, while the giant warship groaned and moaned on her slow slide from her gantry, down the ramp, and into the water for her launching. At the time, Erwin Hulsing, an armaments and communications man, hadn’t a clue that he would be enlisted to be among Bismarck’s crew as a Lieutenant in charge of engineering and munitions—hardly a perfect choice some felt. Erwin had been a police detective in Berlin before the call for all able-bodied men to join the Party and now the military.