This time, Major Frank looked genuinely sorrowful. He nodded anyway. “Yeah. After we go and do this, I don’t see any point to staying in. You?”
“Same here,” Lou said. “Back to my family, back to teaching English, back to being a civilian. And I’ll spend the rest of my days hoping I can live out the rest of my days before things blow up again, know what I mean?”
“Don’t I wish I didn’t!” Frank exclaimed. “Now that you’ve cheered me up, I’ll go back and cram more of my crap into boxes. The records will all be on file-if anybody ever bothers to look at ’em.”
“Yeah,” Lou said. “If.”
Two days later, trucks and halftracks pulled up in front of the commandeered Nuremberg hotel to take departing soldiers and the paperwork of an occupation gone bad north to the sea, and to the ships waiting to carry them across the Atlantic. Outside the building, Lou smoked a last cigarette and shot the shit with one of the German gendarmes who’d be taking over the place once the Americans were gone. Rolf was a pretty good guy. He’d been a corporal during the war-but Wehrmacht, not Waffen-SS. In his dyed-black U.S. fatigues and American helmet, he looked nothing like a German soldier. So Lou tried to tell himself, anyhow.
“We will miss you when you go,” the gendarme said. “You are the only thing standing between us and chaos.”
“You guys will do fine on your own,” Lou answered. You always reassured a sickroom patient, even-especially-when you didn’t think he’d make it.
“I fear the new parties will not have the moral authority they need to oppose the old order,” Rolf said. “I fear we-the police-will not have the weapons to hold back the fanatics.”
“Sure you will,” said Lou, who feared the very same things. Somebody yelled at him from a halftrack. He cussed under his breath, then handed Rolf what was left of the pack of Chesterfields. “Good luck to you, my friend.”
“Danke schon!” The gendarme happily pocketed the smokes. Lou trotted over to the halftrack and clambered up and in. The CIC convoy, protected not only by armored cars but also by Sherman tanks, rumbled away from the hotel, away from Nuremberg-and, soon, away from Germany.
Rolf Halbritter coughed from the dust the retreating convoy kicked up. He shook his head in wonder not far from awe. The Amis were really and truly going-no, really and truly gone.
Which meant…He had a badge pinned on the underside of his collar, where it didn’t show. Now he could wear it openly again. It was round, with a red outer ring that carried a legend in bronze letters: NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHE ARBEITERPARTEI. The white inner circle held a black swastika. Every Party member had one just like it. Pretty soon, they’d all be showing it, too.
HISTORICAL NOTE
There really was a German resistance movement after V-E Day. It was never very effective; it got off to a very late start, as the Nazis took much longer than they might have to realize they weren’t going to win the straight-up war. And it was hamstrung because the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Luftwaffe, and the Nazi Party all tried to take charge of it-which often meant that, for all practical purposes, no one took charge of it. By 1947, it had mostly petered out. Perry Biddiscombe’s two important books, Werewolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946 (Toronto: 1998) and The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 (Stroud, Gloucestershire and Charleston, S.C.: 2000) document what it did and failed to do in the real world.
I have tried to imagine circumstances under which the German resistance might have been much more effective. The Man with the Iron Heart is the result. In the real world, of course, the attack on Reinhard Heydrich that failed in this novel succeeded. Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were the assassins. They both killed themselves under attack by the SS on 18 June 1942. The SS also wiped the Czech village of Lidice off the map in revenge for Heydrich’s murder. A good recent biography of Heydrich is Mario R. Dederichs (Geoffrey Brooks, translator), Heydrich: The Face of Evil (London and St. Pauclass="underline" 2006).
How would we have dealt with asymmetrical warfare had we met it in the 1940s in Europe rather than in the 1960s in Vietnam or in the present decade in Iraq? Conversely, how would the Soviets have dealt with it? I have no certain answers-by the nature of this kind of speculation, one can’t come up with certain answers. Sometimes-as here, I hope-posing the questions is interesting and instructive all by itself.
German nuclear physicists really were brought to England for interrogation and then returned to Germany as described here. And the Germans really did leave ten grams of radium behind in Hechingen. Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, N.Y.: 1996) is the indispensable source for the episode. To this day, no one seems to know what became of the radium.
Unwary readers may suppose that no Congressman would say a President wanted to send troops anywhere to get their heads blown off for his amusement: words I’ve put in a Republican Congressman’s mouth aimed at President Truman. But, as reported in the October 24, 2007, Los Angeles Times, California Democratic Representative Pete Stark did say that, aiming the charge at President Bush. Truth really can be stranger than fiction. A motion to censure Congressman Stark failed, but he did subsequently apologize.