“He commended General… Kessel…” Her voice broke off as she tried to pronounce Kesselring. “He said that he’d done great service and would get an extra iron cross.”
“Close enough,” the teacher said grudgingly. Stewart felt a tug at her sleeve as Thierbach pulled her out of the room. The teacher’s voice continued to speak as Stewart left, her camera already executing its ‘dump’ protocol, transmitting everything back to England.
“Those children were orphaned by your people,” Thierbach informed her, as soon as they were alone. “Not, I should add, the children of soldiers or seamen, but those of common workers who were killed in the factories. This next room is for those children who were caught in the blasts of your weapons.”
He opened a door into a darkened room. Stewart stared ahead of her; the room was filled with children playing, watched over by three jolly nurses. She felt a tidal wave of vomit rising up and forced it down desperately; all of the children were mutilated in some way. One had no arms; another was missing a leg. A third…
With a muffled cry, Stewart stumbled from the room. Cold logic suggested that the children were Jews or Poles or even candidates for the eradication programs that tried to exterminate people with birth defects, but cold logic wasn’t much against the sheer horror of the room.
“That was your work,” Thierbach said, almost regretfully. Stewart forced her mind to work; was he telling the truth or was he lying, deliberately or otherwise? She knew that the BBC research teams would be studying the footage and attempting to determine the truth, but it would be difficult.
“I never did anything like that,” she said desperately, trying to hold down her gorge. He passed her a glass of water; only afterwards did she realise that the entire manoeuvre must have been planned. Thierbach squeezed her arm gently; she shook him off angrily.
“That’s what your people did to us,” Thierbach said. “If you like, you can meet with their mothers, those who survived when the factory was destroyed. Their fathers are away at the fronts, being killed trying to keep your people away from these people here.”
Stewart recognised the glint of fanaticism in his eyes and said nothing. “Your own history books claim that the Russians are going to rape, loot and pillage across Berlin – and we won’t let them. Whatever it takes, we’ll do it, just to prevent that from happening again.”
Stewart scowled as Thierbach led her out of the orphanage. She’d been to camps for orphaned children in Syria, where rewriting history was the rule, or would have been the rule before the Germans entered and crushed the country. She didn’t know as much as she should, but she knew that it had been Hess, not Himmler, who’d transcribed Hitler’s tedious book.
They’re rewriting history, she said, and saw clearly for once in her life. Her hand danced over her PDA, recording comments in Urdu, a skill she’d picked up from a former boyfriend. The transliteration would be confusing even to a native speaker, and she was confident that Germany had no Urdu speakers. If Himmler was rewriting history to make him seem more of a hero, what did that mean for Germany? Was it an attempt to build grassroots support… or was it something more sinister?
“In that carriage there,” Thierbach said, “our Fuhrer forced the French to sign the treaty that created Vichy France, and later bound General Petain to the service of the Reich after you people broke the agreement to leave the French Empire alone.”
Stewart allowed him to lead her into the carriage. It seemed older than a year; the sign on the front claimed 1910. The plaque was of interest, she decided, written in French, German… and English.
ON THIS SPOT THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE FRENCH PEOPLE WAS BURIED FOREVER AND THEY ACCEPTED THEIR PLACE IN THE NEW ORDER UNDER THE FUHRER.
“Very… certain,” she said finally. The message rang a bell somewhere in her mind. “There’s no question that you’ll win, right?”
Thierbach smiled condescendingly at her. “Of course we’ll win,” he said. “The Fuhrer has decreed it himself.”
Not too far away, in one of the honeycomb of bunkers under the city, a troika met; Field Marshal Kesselring, General Galland, and Obergruppenfuehrer Herman Roth. It was a curious meeting; the men had little in common. Kesselring was there as one of the foremost strategists in the Reich and the author of the current war that was being fought in the Middle East. Galland was there as the fighter pilot turned Luffwaffe general and designer. Roth was there as the de facto Head of Future Technology Research, a task that called for an administrator, rather than a scientist.
“Thank you for coming,” Kesselring said. He’d explained the concept previously; even with Speer’s reforms there were still too many layers between the various departments within the Reich. By holding individual meetings, between people who really understood what was happening, they would be able to share information without too much delay.
“The ME-300 project has been proceeding slower than we anticipated,” Galland said. “Unfortunately, the plans we were provided with, I suspect, assumed a higher level of manufacturing technology than we possess. There have been accidents…”
Roth nodded. “As far as we can tell, the plans we were provided with were made by hobbyists; there was no government effort and apparently only a handful of production models. The designers… had no concept of the requirements of a real air force, or the resources needed to transform their visions into reality.”
“There is also the possibility that your source was lying to you,” Kesselring said.
“I don’t believe so,” Galland said, before Roth could reply. “The plans… should work, it’s just that we lack the ability to transform them into reality at once.”
Roth smiled thoughtfully. Germany had – and would have had in the years until the Reich fell the first time around – its fair share of people who had big dreams… and lack the ability to turn them into reality. With some of the future documents, it was possible to streamline the slender resources that Germany possessed into areas they knew would work, but not all of the workable ideas were worth developing.
“We do understand most of the principles involved,” Galland said. “The scientific information will keep the… scientists not directly involved in Project Kern busy for years, but they seem to assume that the people involved are stupid. There was even a warning about accidentally brining the hammer down on your thumb.”
Kesselring chuckled and Roth joined them. His… lover had once attempted to explain the legal culture to him, but he had to admit that it sounded crazy. If someone was stupid enough to hurt themselves, why should the company that had made the product – and in many cases given them what they asked for – make them independently wealthy for life?
“It’s the disparity between science and engineering,” he said, knowing that Galland understood, at least. “We know how to build a Eurofighter, one of the craft that waged war against us last summer, but we don’t have anything like the ability to build one. We lack, in many cases, the basis for understanding the construction methods involved; we lack the machines to make the machines… and so on ad infinitum.”
“I would be delighted to have a Eurofighter,” Kesselring said. “I suppose that the crashed planes were useless?”
Galland nodded. “They rigged small charges inside the plane’s systems,” he said. “Their pilots are brave men; I don’t think that anyone in the Luffwaffe would be happy to be flying in a bomb. We can’t learn anything from charred remains, and, of course, you know what happened to the pilots.”