In the ranks of the old SS sang one Helmut Krueger. How good it was to Krueger, how very good, to once again feel the blood of youth coursing in his veins. How good to march with his old comrades, to sing the old songs. How good it was to be what Krueger had never thought himself to be any other than, an unrepentant, anti-Semitic, Nazi of the old school.
Krueger dreamed, daydreamed actually, of a broad-scale return of the old days. He imagined once more the cringing Jewish, Slavic and Gypsy whores opening their buttocks, legs and lips in fear of him. The power was an intoxicant. He saw, with half a mind’s eye, the cowards, suspended by their necks from lamp posts, kicking and gasping and choking out their last. Even the memory caused him to shiver slightly with delight. He heard the “Heils” coming from ten thousand throats and the sound was better than good. He remembered how grand he had felt at losing the self and joining such a godlike power. He saw the flaming towns and smiled. He heard the screams from the gas chambers and crematoria and shuddered with a nearly sexual joy.
Krueger was sure that after decades of exile he was at last coming home.
Missing his home, Dieter Schultz, aged eighteen, along with the other recruits, shuffled nervously in the cold snow. One would have thought that the boys would never have heard the songs, this being Germany, rules being rules. And, indeed, know the songs they did not. Yet they recognized them.
Dieter and the rest knew, absolutely knew, that that song, in particular, was against the law, against the rules. Soon the polizei would come and break up this had-to-be illegal gathering. Soon, minutes at most, these damned refugees-from-the-grave Nazis would all be arrested and shortly thereafter the reluctant recruits would be sent home to mama. They knew.
Mühlenkampf tapped his left boot toe unconsciously as the column of thousands of old-young veterans even now split to envelop the boys in their charge. The music and the song changed, the veterans singing in voices and tones designed to knock birds dead at a mile:
Mühlenkampf, suddenly conscious of the tapping boot, forced it to a stop. “Ah, I’ve always liked that one, I confess, Hansi. Why I remember…” yet the thought was lost, uncompleted.
With a ruffle of drums and a flourish of horns the song ended. Still, the marching feet beat out a tattoo on the icy pavement: crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Sparks were struck by hobnails grating on bare stone. The sparks clustered about the men’s feet, adding a surreal air to the proceedings.
Brasche stepped forward to the microphone. “Men of the SS Korps… halt.” The marching feet took one more step, then slammed to a simultaneous halt. “Links und rechts… Um.”[18] The enveloping pincers turned inward as though they were parts of a single, sentient, beast. “Generalleutnant Mühlenkampf sprache.”[19]
Hans Brasche stepped back from the microphone, sharply, as the black-leather-clad Mühlenkampf walked forward.
Mühlenkampf’s head twisted back and cocked proudly, arrogantly. “I speak first to my old comrades, who need no speeches. Well met, my friends, well met. We have shaken a world before, together. We shall shake several more worlds before we are done.”
The proud head looked down its straight, aristocratic nose at the new recruits. “I speak next to those who are here to join us. Filth! You are nothing and less than nothing. Unfit, weak, malingering, decadent… Refuse of a society turned to garbage. Spoiled rotten little huddlers at apron strings.
“You make me ill. You make your trainers, my cadre, ill. You are a disgrace to your species, a disgrace to your culture… a disgrace to our nation and traditions.”
Mühlenkampf’s face creased with the smallest of smiles. “And yet we, we old fighters, have another tradition. We are, to paraphrase an English poet, charms ‘for making riflemen from mud.’
“Regimental commanders, take charge of your regiments.”
On cue, the band struck up Beethoven’s “Yorkische Marsch.” The icy field rang with crisp commands. Units faced and wheeled. Even the new recruits, smarting under a brief and contemptuous tongue lashing, could not help but be forced into step by the march’s heavy, ponderous refrain. As a long and twisting snake, the column marched out from under the tent of light to enter the world of darkness.
As the last companies were disappearing into the dark, Brasche asked, “So you think this will work, Herr General?”
Mühlenkampf snorted as if the very thought struck him as ridiculous. “This speech? Some lights? A little insulting language? A little showmanship? Do I think these will work? Hansi, spare me. Nothing ‘works’ in that sense. The easy transformation, like the nonsensically — impossibly — successful spontaneous mass uprising, are bugaboos of the left, of the liberals and of the Reds and the Greens.
“Ah, but Hansi, they forget something, those Reds and Greens. Several things, really. Germany was no less decadent, divided and weak in the 1920s. I was there. I remember. Yet we shook the world in the ’40s. Why? Because transformations like that are as superficial and shallow as they are easy. Those boys down there are Germans, Hansi — lemmings, in other words.
“Lemmings, they are, Hansi. Germans: mindless herd animals, at best.” The brief and indulgent smile was replaced in turn by a feral grin. Mühlenkampf slapped Brasche heartily on the shoulder, adding, “But they’d rather be in a pack than a herd, my friend… a pack of wolves.”
Interlude
The boarding hordes snarled and snapped at each other as their God Kings herded them from the lighters and down into the storage bowels of the still forming globe. From one or another of the confused and frightened normals crocodilian teeth lashed out whenever followers of a different Kessentai came in range. Sometimes the needle-sharp rows of teeth drew yellowish blood and scraps of reptilian flesh before their wielders were lashed back to passive obedience.
Not for the first time, Ro’moloristen felt his own bile rise, his crest expand. Half of this was the result of dim, presentient memories of his own time in the breeding pens, a time of constant struggle and fear of being eaten alive by his siblings. The other half was more pungent.
The normals tended to lose control when upset or frightened. The crude loading and unloading, coupled with the strangeness of space flight, was more than sufficient to upset most of them and to actually frighten many, even as dull as they were. The result of that fear was a stench of carelessly dropped Posleen feces wafting up from the depths of the lighters to fill the air. In that section of the globe the loading of which it was the young God King’s task to supervise, the stench was overpowering to the extent of being sickening. Still, he thought, normals are so cute, so desirable. But they are so untidy.
17
This is from Baldur von Schirach’s “