Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (36 page)

Maisie marvelled quietly at his grasp of her tongue. His English was impeccable; only the singsong of his accent and some slight twang of hypercorrection identified his upbringing.

“So what happened? You were punished and sent to a camp, or released?”

He grinned, surprising her. “They offered the choice of arrest and internment, or as I was of good Aryan stock, traced back six generations; racially pure and had done well at school – perfect little Aryan boy – father fought for Germany in two wars, Party member from ’31 when Hitler got off scot free in court for perjury, and he realised they were the rising force – as such, I could choose military service to defend the Reich and redeem myself in the eyes of my country. As a bearer of the mighty Aryan race, I simply had to do my duty to the Fatherland.” The last sentence was undercut with biting sarcasm.

She was undeterred. “And your father?”

Without a hint of regret; “Died in Spain. Fought on the Turkish front in the Great War as a kid, and then stayed in the home army through the madness of the 20s…” Hans paused, and registered one particularly malevolent look from an old man who passed them. “So, still in the army, he was stuck waiting for whatever force took power in the melting pot of insanity. As it would come to be, he was still a military man when the
Nationalsozialisten
came to power. Then he got sent to help our glorious fascist
kameraden
destroy democracy in Spain.
Communism
, they called it. He got transferred to the Flying Corps, took part in the bombing raid on Guernica, and then later died in a crash during take-off. A pointless death in a pointless war... for Germany, at least. And for Spain,” he added.

They strolled on for a while longer, nearing the Euston Road area close to Regent’s Park and the London Zoo. He’d noticed that they’d already passed an underground stop en route, and Maisie had continued walking up the length of Tottenham Court Road in its entirety. He knew too, that the road’s eponymous tube station was nearby to her shop, less than a minute’s walk in the other direction. He chose not to pass comment.

“Is it really so bad for Jews over there?” Maisie blurted. It was the burning question on her lips. She’d had Jewish friends herself, as had her older brother. Until their mid-teens and the rise of Hitler in Germany, Jewishness had not been something she or it seemed, anyone else she knew gave any thought to. It was just there, or
not
there; like trees in a street, or leaves on the ground. Their apparent importance, influence and evil had baffled her, as she was sure it had the Jewish shopkeepers, students and assorted others she’d known. One was a librarian.

Hans sighed. Sweet girl – she had it all to come; the grim realities of life under Hitler, the realisation that life was cruel… or rather, just how cruel it could be, when viewed through the lens used by his country’s rulers. It would be a rude awakening.

“Germany is bad for everyone but Aryan Germans who believe in Nazism. Even the racially pure who do not have to speak through a rose at all times.”

“Is there no real opposition? Music, politics, literature?” She asked as though the very idea was utterly ludicrous. Even after weeks,
months
of occupation here, Jewish authors could be read in libraries. The wireless radio had been playing Mendelssohn the night before.

But Hans shook his head. “They burned subversive literature. Goebbels organised fires in the State Opera Square and made speeches about Jewish intellectuals. Un-German books were burned.”

“Music?” She was incredulous; a touch of anger bit her deep. Artistry was expression of the soul… censoring it was the ugliest, stupidest thing Maisie could imagine.

She shared that opinion with Hans, who enthusiastically agreed.

“So they even censor music?”

Hans answered, warming even more to her. So few girls in Germany had their own ideas now. So few had independent spirit, opinions…
passion
. Real passion. Anger and hatred is only pseudo-passion.

“Banned,” he affirmed. “Some
kinder
listen to, ah…
negro jazz
.”

Despite herself, Maisie gave a great snort of laughter at that. Hans looked bemused, and then shrugged good-naturedly.

“Sorry about my English.”

“No, it’s fantastic,” she sniggered, sobering. “Where did you learn?”

“Un-German literature was not always banned. I like police detective stories. I read Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Maisie was delighted, a blush appearing in her pale, smooth cheek. “Sherlock Holmes!”

“
Ja
. I like him. It’s why I kept coming back to speak to you; I saw your reading
Hound of the Baskervilles
. There were books in English with German translations, too.”

She flushed, slightly. Apart from her brother and his near-fanatical friends, she’d never met a boy who liked to read; who actively
enjoyed
reading, for
fun
, and to learn.

Whatever it is that I do
, Hans thought,
they react to it
. He recognised a similar reaction to when he’d first gotten to know Sarah.
Some kind of positive quality. Perhaps honesty. Or simplicity. Something they seem to respond to.

“Anyway…” he continued, “Germany is not good for opinions. We too are occupied in a certain way, although with the Kaiser we had a similar system that nobody could criticise. I feel we had the same ideas about different peoples then, too. I hear stories of the African colonies. Killings, forced starvations… Now though, it is far worse; even at home people are afraid of being denounced to the SS and the Gestapo. Nobody…” he spread his hands wide, and let them fall, as though world-weary. Hans shook his head in exasperation, blond hair swinging in short tufts on the crown of his head.
How to explain the madness
?

“Nobody is willing to share their opinions freely,” he said finally. “They all fear internment, questioning, torture. Even before we were at war, many people disappeared. All the time. Especially in Berlin. I think police can kill with impunity, as long as it is not a party member.”

“Scary,” Maisie shuddered. “Psychotic policeman with the legal right to kill you.”

Hans winced, nodding in agreement with the stark remark.

“It is terrible to live in fear.”

Never before had he spoken with such bleak frankness. Not even with Isidor, steeped as their rebellion was in humour, Semitism and love. Neither boy had ever expressed much in the way of weakness or insecurity. But with this English girl, and her compassionate eyes?
It is terrible to live in fear
.

What a treasure trove of information he was, Maisie thought, with his knowledge, and beautiful ease with the complexities of the English tongue. Smoothly crafting sentences, conveying emotion; fear, sorrow, regret – perhaps hope? She felt a vague guilt at her selfish motives in questioning him, and a distinct unease at the looks that bypassers were casting her way for being seen with a German soldier. The glances were brief and furtive – none dared direct opposition, with Hans in uniform – but she recognised the quick stab of hate in their eyes.
Collaborator
, they spat, silently seething.
Whore. Wench. Vixen
.

“People are afraid,” Hans added, himself once more oblivious to the negative attention. Perhaps he is used to it, in a conqueror’s uniform, Maisie mused.

“Christ. An awful way to live.”

“The Hitler way.
Heil Hitler
!”

Hans grinned again; dimples spreading under the soft flesh of his cheek, a wide smile splitting his face and the perfect form of white teeth ringed by red lips. Maisie liked his sudden expressions of… amusement? Happiness? She sensed his mischievous side; the schoolboy, constantly in trouble for unlawful consorting and a refusal to cowtow. An impish side, lurking dormant beneath his adult, soldierly surface.

“Of course, Maisie, you could report me for saying this…” the grin faded. “and men in SS field grey would haul me away, discipline me, throw me in prison and then, send me out east to wait in an East Prussian forest for the signal to cross the temporary Soviet border…” Hans held his hands up, in a parody of wonder, “And I’d be lucky enough to receive the ultimate German honour, freezing in the snow for lebensraum; crazy Bolsheviks shooting bullets at me… explosions, gunshots, massacres…”

Hans considered, all semblance of humour gone. “Or performing my heroic,
historic German tasks
such as rounding Jews up into ghettoes… or in some punishment battalion, clearing mines… either that, or just Dachau. They have my D-11 after all…”

He had no real fear of that happening, but part of him had wanted the vindication of her verbalising their bond. He regretted his transparent subterfuge of a joke, but Maisie was wide-eyed, and did not disappoint.

“Never, Hans.” As he looked at her, surprised at her earnestness, she winked.

“It’s been a while since I spoke this unpatriotically,” he confessed, suddenly embarrassed.

He couldn’t express it, but while the raging nationalism of the present system was abhorrent to him, he did love Germany. He
loved
Berlin, and the cynical, sardonic, mocking people of his beautiful city, and happy summer days on the nearby lake at Plötzensee. He just couldn’t express love without hate. He couldn’t verbalise the juxtaposition of the things that he, and others like him,
loved
, without justifications and recriminations and explanations and focus on all that was bad. It was a confusing position to be in; ideology, he’d realised, was the easy way out for the majority. It did your thinking for you. Life was made easy. Enemies were provided. Solutions were offered. Questions discouraged. Advancement described. Greatness narrated.

Frowning in concentration, Hans tried to explain it to her, knowing that her mind was unsullied and fertile, and she listened – still as wide-eyed as she had been during the description of an imagined Russia – and when he’d finished, she reassured him that he was a credit to his family. He had nothing to worry about. He was a thoroughly decent person. His soul was untarnished.

Maisie’s kindness almost overwhelmed him. She had such soft skin. This clean, wholesome girl who thought, and cared. This beautiful, funny, gentle English girl.

They’d reached the end of the great, wide Tottenham Court Road, at the junction where the main Euston Road thoroughfare sent the tube commuters north and east, into Bloomsbury. Hans stopped. The second tube station was now unavoidable. He looked over at Warren Street station, and back at Maisie expectantly; she merely smiled, coyly.

“Actually I walk up this way because… I like the park. After work I like to reconnect with the actual world, not just… stone. Buildings, and metal, and brick. To hear birds and see water and flowers. Regent’s Park is just over that way.”

She pointed over Hans’ shoulder, past a slovenly, unshaven man in an overcoat bearing the distinguishing hallmarks of Great War trauma, to where the next Tube station was situated on Marylebone Road and beyond it, the lush park.

“Oh… beautiful. I often walk in the Tiergarten. We have a zoo. This is the park where your zoo is, yes?” He gestured up the road.

“Yes.”

They held each other’s gaze, uncommonly comfortable.

“May I walk with you in the park, until you decide to leave?” he asked finally. She smiled for the umpteenth time at him and, registered the distaste of yet another disgruntled passer-by, took his arm and with a burst of self-assuredness that comes with an unalterable impulse backed by will, steered him towards the lovely green that rose pleasantly in the distance, past the man-made stone and brick.

“There are rose gardens there,” she purred happily. The words took a split-second to register, as Hans internally translated them into German, before almost shouting in laughter. It startled her, and she laughed along.

“Rose gardens,” he repeated happily. “In such times, there are still rose gardens.”

He felt her squeeze his arm, almost imperceptibly but a pressure nonetheless, between her linked arm and the flank of her torso. His nostrils caught another waft of her fresh, clean smell; wholesome, and innocent. He wondered if he deserved her.

She led him into the park, and they found a spot by the water where a foliage overhand formed a tunnel of the waterside path. Water lilies swayed slightly in the still pond. To their right was a green bush; the opposite bank was covered in rhododendron bushes of bright purple loderi and bell-shaped flowers of pink and blue. The smell was not of cloying water, but fresh, of grass and flowers, drifting lightly, unobtrusively, into their nostrils. Hans marvelled quietly at the scenery. This, too, was a great city, to foster nature and not forget it in the massive drive to erect monuments to humanity’s self-awareness and changing of environment and destiny, apotheosis, visible everywhere.

Daisy sat shoulder to shoulder with the young man lost in his thoughts. This time, she squeezed him to her hard enough for there to be no doubt. He was almost stiffened with surprise, and his heart-rate quickened. Her soft voice rose sweetly, in a world of green:

“There’ll be rose gardens after Hitler too, you know. And Göring, and all your nasty politicians and generals and policemen… There’ll still be rose gardens to sit in and read Sherlock Holmes by the lakeside.”

The thought made him dizzy.

Armed SS units fought ferociously alongside the Wehrmacht during the war in Poland, later becoming the “Waffen-SS”. One section of it bore the Death’s Head symbol on their collar tabs, as well as their caps, as they were formed from the Totenkopfverbände organisation of SS camp personnel, the perfect breeding ground of brutality. What was officially named the Waffen-SS Totenkopf “Death’s Head” division in October 1939 fought as three regiments in Poland, consisting of voluntary enlistments of concentration camp guards drafted from the SS-Totenkopfverbände, proudly sporting the sinister skull and crossbones insignia they had made their own.

The morning after his application to join the armed SS military unit being formed, Walther Hoffman, Untersturmführer of the SS-Totenkopfverbände had been summoned to the Dachau Commandant’s office to meet the camp’s first real commander, now Chief Inspector of The Concentration Camps and SS-Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke.