Herman shrugged. The barricades were no longer necessary, now that most of the watching civilians had gone back home as soon as the military police arrived. God alone knew what they were saying, what rumours were spreading through the city, but for the moment he found it hard to care. The buildings within the sealed zone had either been locked up tight by the strikers, who were now trapped, or emptied by the military police. Herman rather doubted that anyone taken into custody by the military policemen would be enjoying the experience.
He followed Caius back to the van and scrambled inside. The vehicle roared to life; he sat back and forced himself to relax, despite the tension. He’d expected worse, somehow, than merely putting up the barricades. But then, the military policemen had done the real job…
And it isn’t over yet, Herman thought. The strikers will still have to be handled, somehow.
“We’re being diverted,” the driver called. “There’s a new crowd of people spilling out onto the street.”
Herman said nothing, but he worried as the van lurched. The strikers were bad enough; who else was joining the protests and why? Caius and several of the other policemen hurled questions at the driver, but he didn’t know anything more than what he’d already said. All they could do was wait, checking their weapons and equipment, until the van came to a halt one final time. The door opened, revealing a residential street… and hundreds of women of all ages marching down it, wearing their finest clothes.
Caius gasped. “What the hell…?”
Herman could only agree. He’d been prepared for rampaging students or workers, perhaps even Gastarbeiters, not women. Many of them were middle-aged, the same age as his wife, wearing outfits that cost more money than he cared to think about. They all looked to be respectable German womenfolk, wives and mothers; indeed, some of the women were even carrying their children in their arms or pushing prams. He knew how to handle rioters, but women? The thought of charging them, of using tear gas to break up their ranks, was unthinkable. And then his blood ran cold as he saw his wife in the throng.
“Adelinde?”
“Your wife?” Fritz asked. “You’d better get her out of here before all hell breaks loose.”
Herman nodded, then hurried away from the clump of uncertain policemen. At least he had something to focus on, besides absolute confusion and unwillingness to treat the women as just another bunch of rioters. The Captain would have to be insane to order the police to attack the crowd, not when it was so clearly composed of women and children. Herman knew he would go deaf if the order was ever given… and, if his superiors were wise, they’d accept it rather than risk triggering a mutiny.
“Adelinde,” he said, as his wife looked up at him. “What are you doing here?”
“Marching,” Adelinde said. She’d never argued with him in public before, even though she ruled the household with an iron hand. “They’ve arrested our daughter.”
Herman staggered backwards. Gudrun had been arrested? Of course she had, his thoughts yammered at him. It wasn’t as if he had any other daughters. And yet… he hadn’t seen her among the prisoners, but that proved nothing. Hell, Adelinde could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion and stuck to it in defiance of all logic and reason.
“You have to go home,” he said. He was the man of the house, damn it! His wife shouldn’t be embarrassing him, let alone defying him, in front of his comrades. “Adelinde…”
His wife tilted her head, looking alarmingly like his strong-willed mother. “Our daughter is under arrest,” she said, “merely for being a student. I’m not going home when she’s in danger.”
Herman found himself unsure what to say, let alone do. Adelinde had always defended her children, even as she meted out strict discipline. He pitied the teacher who’d sent home a note accusing her children of atrocities. But coming out onto the streets, risking arrest or worse… he felt sick as he realised what Gudrun might have gone through already and what might be waiting in her future. His daughter was no criminal, no Gastarbeiter bitch with no rights; she was a good little German girl, smart enough to be a university student, old enough to be a wife and a mother.
His wife read the expression on his face. “She’s your daughter,” she hissed. “Start doing your duty as a father and find her!”
“We’re not going home,” an older woman said. She was well-dressed enough that Herman had no trouble believing that her husband was both wealthy and very well connected. God knew she certainly sounded snooty enough to believe herself above rebuke, let alone punishment. “We want change.”
“We want our sons home,” another woman said. A dozen other women took up the cry. “We want an end to the war.”
Defeated, Herman could only turn and walk back to the other policemen, uncertain what he could say to them. Women were meant to obey their menfolk, first their fathers and then their husbands. But Adelinde had defied him, publicly. And, if she was right about Gudrun being arrested, he couldn’t blame her.
Fritz eyed him as he rejoined the small clump of policemen. “Well?”
“I have to make a few calls,” Herman said. “Until then, we do nothing.”
And hope to hell our superiors don’t do something stupid, he thought, privately. Almost every policeman he knew was married. How many other wives and daughters of policemen had joined the marching women? He was damned if he was firing on a crowd that included his wife, the mother of his children. But what do we do if we are ordered to fire?
Chapter Thirty
Berlin, Germany
12 August 1985
“This is getting out of hand,” Hans said. He glanced at his watch, meaningfully. It was late at night and dusk was slowly settling over Berlin. “The troubles are threatening to spread to a dozen other cities.”
“Then we clamp down on them,” Holliston insisted. The Reichsführer-SS hadn’t given up, not yet. “We should crush the strikers in their lairs.”
“If we kill the strikers, we lose part of our pool of trained labour,” Hans said, wearily. The argument had been going in circles for hours, as more and more reports flooded in from all over the Reich. “If they have time to damage or destroy the machinery in the factories, we will have to replace it… and that will put yet another hole in our budget. And if we order the police or the troops to open fire on the women… we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.”
“He’s right,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said. The Head of OKW leaned forward, his face pale. “There are already rumours spreading through the Berlin Guard, Herr Reichsführer. If they are sent in to clear the streets of women, I believe they will refuse to obey orders.”
“So arrest them for mutiny,” Holliston snapped.
“There hasn’t been a mass mutiny since we were stabbed in the back in 1918,” Stoffregen said. “A single coward could be arrested easily – his own barrack mates would hand out some rough justice if he wasn’t arrested quickly enough – but a collective mutiny would be much harder to suppress. The soldiers might turn their guns on the arresting officers.”
Holliston let out an angry hiss. “This is what you get for not indoctrinating soldiers properly!”