Swastika Read online

  Streicher hoped the garb was meat-hook insurance.

  Inside the bunker, it was ghostlike and bleak. So low was the ceiling and narrow the central passage that Streicher felt as if he were being buried alive in a crypt. So poor was the mechanical ventilation that the rough, bare concrete of the rusty brown walls dripped moisture and in places was splotched with mold. The relentless bombardment of Berlin had kept the masons from finishing their plasterwork. As the SS general and his sons followed the odious Bormann toward the center of the Third Reich’s unraveling web, they passed from a cocoon of sultry warmth to a pocket of clammy cold. The resulting shivers felt like the bony finger of death caressing their spines. At this hour of the night, it was eerily quiet, except for the sound of their echoing footfalls and the loud hum of a diesel generator in the powerhouse to the right. On their left, a steel door opened into the toilets. To the musty odors of fungous boots, sweaty woolen uniforms, and coal-tar disinfectants was added a wretched stench. A drainage backup had befouled the bunker, turning it into a public urinal.

  A divider split the central passage into a general sitting area and a conference hall beyond. Passing the switchboard room, next to the powerhouse, Bormann entered the conference hall, stopped, swiveled, and ushered the Streichers toward a threshold just inside the divider and to their left.

  Hitler’s anteroom.

  Martin Bormann brought to mind a stuffed weisswurst sausage. Like the Munich delicacy, his puffy face was blanched white by the artificial light. Streicher knew Hitler’s take-charge toady by reputation. Universally hated and feared by the staff of the bunker, this stocky, hard-drinking bully had maneuvered his own desk into the anteroom and was always hovering at Hitler’s elbow. By controlling access to der Chef, he could pull strings for personal gain in these dying days of the Nazi power game.

  A sycophant.

  A fawner.

  An obsequious turd of a yes-man.

  The measure of Martin Bormann was the extent of his lying. Because Hitler didn’t drink, the toady hid his own drinking. Because Hitler didn’t smoke, Bormann hid that too. The ultimate hypocrite, he even professed to being a vegetarian. Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—Streicher’s boss in the Black Corps, the head of the Gestapo and architect of the final solution—had an aversion to the hunting of animals. “Pure murder,” in Himmler’s lexicon. The führer’s vegetarianism dated back to 1931, when the love of his life, his niece Geli Raubal, committed suicide by shooting herself in the heart. From that point on, Hitler could no longer stomach meat. “It’s like eating a corpse!” he would tell dinner guests as they cut into their schnitzels. Bormann, the fawning “vegetarian,” was known to hang a salami for midnight snacks from a hook on the back of his cot.

  “The führer!” Bormann announced as the SS general and his sons stepped into the anteroom.

  The glare that Hitler’s henchman shot Streicher was ripe with malevolence. He was a dangerous foe who was jealous of what Streicher controlled down in the SS mines.

  At Dora-Mittelbau.

  And east in the Sudeten.

  Clicking the heels of his jackboots, the general shot his right arm forward in the Hitler salute. Flanking him, Fritz and Hans acknowledged the führer too.

  “Heil Hitler!”

  In the next room, they could see him.

  And the Angel of Death.

  * * *

  The candlelight reminded Fritz of the Nuremberg rally and his first Nazi salute. Of the thirty rooms on both levels of the Führerbunker, the three that made up Hitler’s private quarters were slightly larger than the rest, ten by fifteen feet. The anteroom fronted the study where he now sat in flickering gloom, staring at the wall. Off the study to the right was his bedroom, and to the left was a toilet and shower. In keeping with Hitler’s monastic nature, his spartan cells were furbished with but a few sticks of furniture. In Hitler’s study, the candlelight burnished the couch on which the führer sat, a coffee table, three chairs, and—the only wall decoration—a portrait of Frederick the Great.

  “Come with me, boys.”

  It was the angel who summoned.

  As the son of an SS general who moved in Himmler’s inner circle, Fritz had heard rumors and whispers about females offering up their bodies to the führer. Women around Hitler were prone to suicide. Two had thrown themselves from apartment windows. One had jumped in front of Hitler’s car. Another had slashed her wrists. And two had shot themselves. It was said that the führer’s current mistress—was she this angel?—had tried to kill herself twice. First, she had shot herself in the chest, narrowly missing her heart, because the führer had built a shrine to a woman named Geli Something-or-other. Later, she had swallowed too many pills. All should have known, Fritz thought, that they couldn’t have him. Even had the führer not stated publicly, “My bride is Germany!”

  “Go with her,” the general ordered.

  Fritz and Hans stepped forward to join the beckoning angel.

  “Hello,” she chirped with a buoyant Bavarian accent. “My name is Eva Braun.”

  The Todesengel! The Angel of Death. Fritz wondered why the SS had dubbed her that. Eva seemed perfectly charming to him. Slim and demurely girlish, she was a strawberry blonde in a stylish black dress. Hitler liked his females “weich, süss, und dumm”—soft, sweet, and dumb—so they could fulfill the primary role of women in the Third Reich: giving birth to lots of Aryan children destined to rule the world. Girls were trained to be mothers in the Bund Deutscher Mädel—the German Girls’ League—their equivalent to the Hitler Youth. As he and Hans neared her, Fritz fell under the seductive spell of Eva’s French perfume, and wondered if this was what the mother he had never known had been like.

  The angel set her champagne glass down on the coffee table. With the siren song of silk lingerie looted from the Champs Elysées shops of occupied Paris rustling beneath her skirt, she led the boys past the führer and headed for the dark bedroom beyond like a heavenly Pied Piper.

  “My youth,” Hitler murmured as Fritz moved within reach. His right hand rising as if to return the Nazi salute, he instead paternally patted the Hitler Youth’s cheek.

  His touch was like an electric bolt, like the touch of God, like God in that ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel, where he extends his finger to touch the hand of man. It felt to Fritz as if the führer was passing the torch of the Third Reich’s thousand-year future to him.

  “Sieg heil,” the Hitler Youth replied.

  Were those tears in God’s fire-sparked eyes?

  Eva Braun stood aside at the bedroom door and allowed the boys to precede her into this holiest of holies. Here was where the führer slept and mounted the Todesengel. Only after closing the door did she switch on a weak lamp. The pool of yellow revealed more bare-bones furniture: a single bed, a night table, and a dresser. On the dresser sat a photograph of Hitler’s mother, Klara, whose death in 1907 had severely traumatized her teenage son.

  “Sit on the bed, boys,” Eva suggested.

  As Fritz and Hans sat, the bedsprings squeaked.

  The squeak became a shriek of sexual ecstasy in the fantasy world of Fritz’s Freudian mind. From this position, Eva Braun loomed between the Hitler Youths and the lamp. Fritz could see the silhouette of her long legs through the fabric of her skirt. The image reminded him of Marlene Dietrich—that sexy traitor—in The Blue Angel, one of those verboten films the camp guards liked to watch. Before the Nazis had crushed their “anything goes” degeneracy, the Kabaretts of Berlin had steamed with unbridled sex. Now, backlit Braun stirred both Fritz’s loins and his post-pubescent imagination, conjuring up that Hollywood queen in her early German role—with the top hat, the tight top that clung to her breasts, and the skirt that split at her waist to reveal the frilly knickers of a whore and the dark stockings that sheathed her long, long milky legs.

  You bitch in heat, thought Fritz. When I’m führer, I’ll have an Angel of Death like her.

  * * *

  The SS called her
the Todesengel because Braun’s mid-March arrival in Berlin meant that the führer planned to make his last stand here, smack dab in the path of the vengeful Russians—who were raping, pillaging, and killing their way in from the horrific graveyard of Stalingrad—rather than moving his Nazi elite to the Berghof complex, high in the Bavarian Alps, where the surrender, if it came to that, would be into the gentler hands of the Western Allies.

  Berlin meant suicide to the Black Corps.

  The Death’s Head for them.

  By candle glow, the SS general watched the Angel of Death spirit Fritz and Hans away from Hitler’s study. No sooner had Eva Braun shut the bedroom door than the führer dismissed his secretary with a flick of his hand. The scowl that Bormann cast at Streicher was as sharp as the daggers he’d confiscated from the Obergruppenführer’s sons, but the oaf had no option but to retreat to the anteroom.

  As Bormann closed the padded door, he switched on the generated light.

  The SS general stifled a gasp. Hitler was now a mockery of his former dynamic self. From 1942 on, this man who had conquered an empire from the North Cape of Norway to the African deserts, from the Pyrenees of Spain to the Caucasus of Russia, had been aging at a rate of five visible years for each calendar one. Since he went underground, the slide had hastened.

  Plus, he was addled by drugs.

  Hatless, tonight the führer wore the same familiar uniform that he had donned on the first day of the war: the once spotless, simple, pearl gray tunic and long black trousers. On the breast pocket were his golden Nazi Party badge, his First World War black wound badge, and—for bravery in the trenches—his Iron Cross. But soup slop and mustard spots now stained the rumpled jacket, into the baggy shell of which he seemed to have withdrawn like a turtle. His head hunkered into his shoulders. His spine was hunched. As he struggled to his feet, he seemed in danger of losing his balance. Unable to stand erect, his body twitching and trembling, the führer braced his left leg against the coffee table for support. Obviously, Streicher had to go to him, for whatever that quack of a doctor had shot into his patient—at best, mysterious tranquilizers; at worst, morphine—der Chef was a palsied wreck.

  He’s done, thought the general.

  And so am I.

  At almost fifty-six, Hitler could have been taken for seventy. His eyes, once ice blue and lustrous, were now as gray and filmy as the skin of a grape. His eyeballs were sunken, the whites bloodshot. Glazed and unfocused, they registered no expression as Streicher approached, and neither did his immobile, vapid face. His brown hair had turned suddenly gray, and drooping black sacs beneath his eyes betrayed lack of sleep. Through the wrinkled mask of a sickly, sallow complexion ran deep folds from his pulpy nose to the corners of his mouth. Up close, the SS general could see the spittle on Hitler’s lips and the drool down the front of his tunic, and he could hear him whistling through his teeth.

  “My führer,” Streicher said. “You sent for me?”

  With a cold-fish, flapping gesture that was little more than a jerky reflex, Hitler listlessly took the Obergruppenführer’s hand and didn’t let go. That was telling indeed, for Streicher—like every survivor in the upper ranks of the Third Reich—knew that the führer recoiled from physical contact.

  Something was up.

  Like a child leading his parent across to a candy store window, the führer, dragging his left leg, shuffled toward the portrait of Frederick the Great on his study wall. Everyone in the SS had heard about “Old Fritz,” the oil painting by Anton Graff that Hitler had purchased in Munich in 1934. As der Chef had moved from HQ to HQ, through six long years of war, it was the perquisite that always flew with him. Chefpilot Hans Baur’s irksome chore was to handle Old Fritz with tender care, and nothing inside the führer’s plane took precedence over the special bulky packing crate. Even generals were left behind to make room for it in the narrow corridor between the Condor’s seats, where the wood-and-steel obstacle scratched the fancy leatherwork of Baur’s flying domain. Of flaming Bavarian temperament, Hitler’s pilot had complained, but his murmured exasperation always fell on deaf ears. Back and forth across the Reich, Old Fritz had flown, before ending up in the bunker for the last stand.

  “Argonaut,” muttered Hitler. “That was the code name. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. Used by the Big Three.”

  “Code name, Führer?”

  “For Yalta. The Crimea. On the Black Sea. Where they met to plot how to conquer me.”

  “Argonaut? From the Greek myth?”

  Hitler nodded. “To the Black Sea. That’s where they sailed. Jason and the Argonauts. On their hunt to find the land of the mythical Golden Fleece.”

  “I see.”

  Actually, Streicher didn’t see at all. So addled was the führer after nine years of injected poisonous drugs that he was barely able to speak a coherent thought. From 1942 until April 1944, the Crimean peninsula had been held by the German army. In selecting it as the place for their recent rendezvous, the Allies were trumpeting that the Nazis were in full retreat.

  “Frederick the Great. Remember, General?”

  The führer let go of Streicher’s hand to gesture at the painting in a shaky sweep. The portrait of Old Fritz—was that a wig or his own hairstyle?—showed him with a huge medal on his chest. So jittery was Hitler’s other hand that he had to corral it with his good arm and pin it against his Iron Cross.

  “The enemy at the gates,” der Chef added.

  So that was it. The Frederick the Great connection. The reason the führer had sat in the dark, motionless, as if in a trance, his chin buried in his hand, gazing at the portrait by candlelight. He was looking for hope, inspiration, a reason to believe. What the SS general had interrupted was a besieged man at prayer.

  The triumph was a familiar tale to every German schoolboy who’d been raised on the drum-and-trumpet history texts of Streicher’s generation. In 1762, toward the end of the Seven Years’ War, the king of Prussia—Old Fritz himself—was holed up in his ruined palace in Silesia, with his capital of Berlin under siege. His army was greatly outnumbered by a coalition of Russian, Austrian, and Saxon forces, so Frederick the Great was left with two options. He could fight to the death in a losing battle, or he could swallow the poison in a small glass tube.

  A tube like the one that Hitler now pulled from his pocket.

  “Cyanide,” said Hitler, holding up the vial.

  Streicher recognized the tube as one of those that Himmler had distributed to those Nazis who might be forced to commit “self-murder” in the days to come. The cylindrical container looked like a lipstick: a translucent plastic ampule encircled with a blue band. It went into a leather pouch that could be worn around the neck. At the moment, the SS general’s own poison was in his cheek, ready for him to bite down on if he learned that a Gestapo meat hook was his fate.

  “Kriegsglück,” mumbled Hitler.

  Now, two centuries later, Hitler faced the same catastrophe as Old Fritz. That Yalta coalition of Britain, America, and the Soviet Union was tightening around Berlin, where the führer—like his predecessor—was holed up in a ruined palace. Der Chef faced the same choice between the lesser of two evils. Fight to the death in a losing battle. Or crunch the vial of poison with his teeth.

  Unless …

  “Dr. Göbbels has seen it!”

  “Führer?”

  “In the stars!”

  “Seen what?” Streicher asked, taken aback.

  “Victory!”

  “When?”

  “Before the end of this month. Herr Doktor had them bring forth my horoscope.”

  “Who?”

  “The astrology department of his Propaganda Ministry. The stars foretold of disaster in the early months of 1945, followed by an overwhelming victory in late April.”

  “That is good news,” said Streicher.

  “It is written in the stars.”

  This physically senile has-been was fueled by shredded nerves and dubious medicaments, but abruptly the general caugh
t a spark of that old fury and willpower that had driven the führer to the apex of Nazi influence. Grabbing Streicher by the arm, Hitler sank his fingers into the engineer’s biceps.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Führer?”

  “The secret down in the mine?”

  “The Mittelwerk is in crisis. It has about a week. That’s when the U.S. First Army will reach Nordhausen.”

  Hitler dismissed that concern with a flap of his trembling left arm.

  “The East!” he snapped.

  Streicher sensed instantly that he, too, was in jeopardy. The wrong answer now would cost him his life.

  “The Flugkreisel works!” the general confirmed.

  Another flap of the arm dismissed that breakthrough as well.

  Hitler was getting angry. His yellow-gray face flushed. As his lips nervously nibbled each other, a strand of drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  “Die Glocke!” he shouted at last. “Is it safe?”

  “It is, Führer.”

  “And does it slow time?”

  SS-General Ernst Streicher carefully weighed his answer. “If time doesn’t run out on us, you will see the glorious future of your thousand-year Reich.”

  Cyclops

  Vancouver

  May 25, Now

  Sgt. Dane Winter awoke the next morning to learn that whoever had carved that Nazi swastika into the forehead of the Congo Man had been turned overnight by The Vancouver Times into a hero straight from the pages of Greek myth.

  Dane was an early riser. Morning was his time. He liked to get the jump on dawn to start his day, which invariably began with orange juice and the newspaper while he steeled his resolve for his five-mile run along the seawall of False Creek to watch the sun come up. So with juice glass in hand and still in his dressing gown, he fetched the morning paper from the mat of his second-story condo overlooking the narrow inlet that English Bay surveyors had mistaken for a creek back in the 1850s and read this: