Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (3 page)

As such, the driver kept his contradictory thoughts to himself.

“The group we are after tonight, Herr Untersturmführer… they are all resistance members?” he ventured to ask his Austrian passenger, after a lengthening silence began to hang heavy in the air.

“Yes.”

The reply was short. Thus, the conversation ended.

Goeth wrinkled his nose in disgust as the smell of manure wafted in, thick in the air, clinging to the insides of their nostrils. Quietly seething, he cursed, fumbling in his tunic to produce a packet of Turkish cigarettes, and with the flash of a match, lit one to overpower the nauseating stench. Immune to the chemical, industrial pollutions of the human habitat, the Austrian could not bear the uninvited intrusion of a natural, if repellent odour. As they rode on grimly through the night, the starry sky helped illuminate a natural vista, but it did not appeal to the sentiment of the Viennese city boy, with his haughty disdain for the provinces deeply ingrained; almost customary for those born and raised in the old Austro-Hungarian capital. The pleasant scenery barely registered in his cold eyes, even as the stars lit its distant horizon across sloping fields and rolling hills from the road’s high vantage.

The driver noted Goeth’s irritation, as the officer fidgeted in his seat, sucking crossly on the cigarette with each deep inhalation.

“Disgusting, isn’t it sir,” he remarked agreeably. Goeth gave no sign that he heard him.

The cross-coated convoy banked a sharp left, cutting through the heart of Garforth, a sleepy far-eastern village in Greater Leeds whose remaining inhabitants were sullenly observing the curfew in place, blissfully unaware of the intent of German men now encroaching on their soil. Onwards they rolled, the low sound of their motors the only noise audible in the quiet countryside town, beyond the incessant chirping of crickets.

Hurtling past the train station and eastwards, the trucks finally reached the last turn-off point at the edge of the town’s boundary, just before the road re-joined the main motorway for eastward thoroughfare. They turned right into the small estate; silently dozing in the thick of night, in deep, unsuspecting sleep; the low rumble of tyres a deadly lullaby that proved fatal. The Germans maintained pace, until finally, they were there.

Cedar Ridge. The convoy slowly filtered in to the leafy neighbourhood, as the tree-lined lane curved gently right and then left. The road ended three hundred metres further along in a field, but the SS had no call to drive even that far. The first left turn was fifty metres in, and upon reaching its impasse and the cluster of houses, the SS vehicles slowly ground to a halt. Black-clad figures disembarked, marshalled by Goeth. The trucks backed up, in preparation of exiting the estate. The stealthily moving men approached four separate houses in the silent cul-de-sac; scurrying predators, like pack animals preparing an ambush from the shadows at night.

Goeth’s hastily scribbled list, memorised, had read
2, 5, 6, 7
.

As quietly as was possible, the
Einsatzkommando
men congregated by the homes of the doomed, and with the awful, sudden noise of threat and violence breaking the silence of the night, four doors were kicked off their hinges, the sacred sanctuary irreversibly violated. The black coats swarmed in like an unstoppable virus, pistols drawn as they raced upstairs in each home, jackboots clobbering on the carpeted stairs.

The surprise of the ambush, perfectly timed to strike at a moment of optimal vulnerability, combined with the instant panic of fear made the ensnarement complete. So unsuspecting were the targets that no weapons for self-defence were found to hand, as the foreign intrusion neared its ugly inevitability. Two terrified married couples were dragged out of bed, their bodies betrayed by shock; frozen from action and still wrapped in bedclothes, the groggy Garforth targets offered only a token, weak resistance to the nocturnal assault. Other adults, resistance members seeking refuge with sympathetic friends or co-conspirators in their continuing struggles against the Germans were hauled from the settees and guest bedrooms of the four detached houses; those capable of attempting to repel their arrest were promptly beaten to a bloody pulp. The cruel blows of the cosh were punctuated by scornful jibes and foul obscenities spat at them in the fearful, harsh tones of a guttural tongue they could not understand, yet feared and loathed with an overwhelming force.

Cries of pain rang out through the sleeping suburb, quickly smothered.

In the fourth house, implacable malice was manifesting in equally odious fashion, as the basest of human instincts surfaced with sinister speed and an indecent urgency. Two stormtroopers roughly held a dazed woman back from her helpless husband as he was hauled away, tearing the nightdress from her back. Utterly impotent, the apoplectic husband was dragged out of sight, his stifled screams receding with every step until being silenced by a final, vicious blow. His wife was stranded; helpless game for the animalistic, predatory men who had shelved a vital part of their humanity. Alone in her own room, helpless in the face of their violent depravity, the shocked young lady made one final, impotent effort to wriggle free. But with her arms pinioned, naked breasts bouncing as she thrashed wildly in a frenzied panic, the unfortunate young woman had her right leg seized with an unbreakable grip. Now held in place by two others, the man facing her grimly clamped her leg as though in a vice, and with horrified certainty, she knew with a terrible shock that their brutal intentions were inescapable. Fear rose up her spine like an electric current; paralysed, she was wracked by overwhelming dread and terror. The two troopers tightly held her spasming body in place as the enlisted Gestapo brute forcibly penetrated her with his swollen flesh.

“Hold her, hold her still!” the senior squad member demanded in their native tongue; lust and excitement adding strain to his eager cry.

Screams died in her throat, as the awful indignity of her attack overwhelmed the unfortunate young quarry of a merciless predator; prey to his pitiless passion. The noise of his animal instincts echoed through the house, with sneering, guttural invectives in German directed at its victim; thrusting mercilessly into a body made compliant by shock and fear. Pain and revulsion throbbed through her as her assailant writhed and grunted, inserted in her, inside her, in violation of the most primitive intimacy of her being. Her jerky, pitiful yelps and pleas were stifled against the hand of another SS man, clasped tight in her savage defilement until the cruel display was halted upon Amon Goeth’s entry into the room.

The Austrian lieutenant strode in with fire burning in the dark globes of his eyes. Unhesitant, he struck the enlisted man hard across his angular jaw, flooring him, and the thump shuddered through the silence that had descended on the house as suddenly as the noise of violence had defiled it. The other men partially dropped the woman, who was now shaking in a state of fugue, whimpering pitifully with a wordless noise.

“Unterscharführer Beckenbauer, what the fuck do you think you are doing?” Goeth began, with dangerous calm.

“It’s Scharfü…” the trooper began, tenderly checking his injured jaw as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

Beckenbaur stopped himself, and stood up straight, withdrawing his still-exposed erection and wiping away the woman’s fluid as he did so with sullen contempt, as though her body’s unwanted evidence of his crime had been something insulting, disgusting and deliberate. Goeth cut in.

“I don’t care what it is. Is this Poland? Are we in Warsaw, or Leeds, England?”

“Leeds, sir.”

“Why would you have the men waiting outside, as I’m sure the other arrests have been made, while you commit a crime against Reich policy?” Goeth snarled at him, abandoning the superficial calm of his silky tone and unruffled air.

“Sir?” Beckenbauer asked, confused.

Kriminalassistent in a provincial Gestapo, Beckenbauer had been drafted in to the fold with the
Einsatzgruppen Britain
on the strong recommendations of his chief. Chosen by Heydrich and his Reich Security Office as an enlisted EGB stormtrooper, he had been assigned to the
gruppe
of Dr Rudolf Lange. In his platoon’s Austrian
Einsatzkommando
leader Goeth, however, Beckenbauer suddenly saw an imminent return to the province was at hand if he was lucky; perhaps there was even a court martial on the cards. With a predator’s instinct, he sensed danger.

Goeth’s evil stare continued to bore through the rapist.

“You stupid
swine
.”

“Sir?”

“This is house no. 7, is it
not
, Kriminalassistent whatever-your-fucking-SS-rank-is in your shithole province, you Gestapo clown?”

“Yes, sir,” Beckenbauer replied, resentfully.

Such a derogatory comment could have been used against an enlisted man and reported, but for Goeth to have been drafted as a chief lieutenant of SD Major Lange meant he was likely protected. The SD, after all, was under the wing of the same man as the Gestapo; complaints from one agency of the other at such a junior level would only serve to aggravate Heydrich the Hangman.

“Well…” Goeth said, jutting his brutal face into the smooth features of the younger man. “The woman of no.7 is a
Mischling
. You just fucked a Hebrew, a full-on
half-breed
, and in
SS uniform
. Bearing the badge of Heydrich’s own security
service
…” and he tapped the small ‘SD’ diamond on the sleeve, with gleeful malice underlying his rage.

Goeth’s eyes were terrible; the junior officer could only stand rooted to the spot, mortified, hardly believing his ears. The final words had been hissed with ferocity.

“What would the General say, I wonder,” Goeth mused sneeringly, his eyes bulging, “or indeed, Reichsführer Himmler? You fucked a Jew in uniform. I could have you
shot
.”

Beckenbauer was horrified. Neither he, nor the others present spoke, and the awkward tension grew, hanging palpably between them in the air.

Then Goeth grinned; a wide mouth full of evil teeth. Beckenbauer imagined them ripping at his throat. Not like a badger from its back, or the darting lunge of an opportunistic snake, but in the style of a big cat, or an angry alpha male of the ape world; a direct attack from the front, like a carnivorous animal. He would overpower by force, every blow and strike thrown with lethal intent. Goeth was more like the vain Achilles than a wily Ulysses. He was a dangerous man. Even the other professional murderers knew it.

“This is not Poland, you foolish pig,” an unblinking Goeth softly said. “Do the job you have been assigned…”

Beckenbauer clicked his heel, straightening up. Goeth sneered, framed in the door by hallway light, and he glanced to his right at the SS stormtroopers who were still holding the dazed arrestee in their grip.

“Bergmann, take the Jewess away,” the Austrian snapped.

One of the other men, a huge, bear-like figure quickly clicked his heel, and with agility that belied his frame, dragged the still-frozen Leodensian woman out of the room, roughly down the stairs and out to the waiting trucks. Still naked, quivering in the cold night air, she was unceremoniously thrown in to the back of the truck like a discarded inanimate object, of which no further use could be made. Her husband scrambled to the small, sad figure and he held her in comfort, weeping bitterly through the whispered, empty reassurances and soothing words. She was motionless; a shivering, foetal ball of flesh, in fugue, robbed of her spirit.

Back in the house, Goeth continued to stare at Beckenbauer with a half-grin, before turning on his heel and walking out. After a pause to recollect his wits, SS-Scharführer Beckenbauer, NCO of
Einsatzkommando 2
of
Einsatzgruppe Leeds
followed his battalion leader, marching out with purpose, cursorily saluting a still-sneering Goeth before clambering up and back into the truck. None of the other men mentioned what had happened in the cul-de-sac, House 7; sat with eyes facing directly ahead, expressionless and their rifles slung warily in a hair-trigger grip. Beckenbaur’s eyes bore into those of the man opposite; neither man averted their gaze. No German spoke. The silence was deafeningly loud.

Thirty seconds later they had left the boundary of the mining town, and drove eastwards and north for ten minutes in the hesitant first light of the northern sky, to a designated field, veering off the main road down a winding mud path to the chosen spot. A crude anti-tank ditch had been dug there, in the shade of a long line of birch trees; the first section of a shallow trench defence built in preparation of the German invasion that they all knew was imminent after the Fall of France.

Those ditches, dug with defence in mind, were now used for an altogether more macabre purpose. Unspoken amongst Germans, it was one of the many whispered rumours shared across cities and townships, concurrent with similar tales of atrocity that varied from factual to fanciful. But of all the fevered talk of death in the shadows, the purported use of what were now commonplace countryside ditches held the most gruesome fascination.

Under Goeth’s baleful gaze and the silent scrutiny of his cold-faced troops, the fourteen adults, and five children aged four, six and ten, were lined against the ditch. Under a cold, grey sky, several of the doomed raised their eyes to the pale morning sun, wincing as though in regret at its underwhelming final appearance to them. Others sobbed, the children cried, but none begged. The fearful confusion of the children made no impression on the
Einsatzkommando
, calloused as they were to such tasks, and the ill-fated women gently turned the small, tear-streaked faces away from the sight of those hard, cold figures, framed against the morning sky with their guns, pressing them instead into their own bodies with a warm, heartbroken love.

They held each other for comfort, as a signal from Goeth summoned submachine gun fire, crackling through the air; a volley of shots that sent the small, sad figures crashing back into the ditch, with brief fountains of blood spraying into the morning mist and then disappearing just as quickly as they had appeared, like a vaporous apparition.