The Doomsday Decree

by Peter MacAlan

  The young man leaned against the wall, shoulders heaving, and then began to move out into the roadway again. But his balance was obviously failing now. He hesitated; his eyes abruptly rolled back and then he took an involuntary step backward and collapsed into the gutter.

  Other people passed by, each studiously ignoring him except for one elderly lady, a little more courageous than her fellow citizens, who declaimed loudly: ‘Drunk! No wonder the Fatherland is in peril!’

  An elderly man, accompanying her, hissed her into silence, glancing swiftly round to make sure no one had taken notice and then pushing her quickly onward.

  A moment later a motorcycle combination lurched round the corner of the street, its two-man crew clad in the grey-green of the Geheime Feldpolizei. They saw the inert body of the SS man in the gutter and braked to a halt. One of them dismounted, walked over to the man and bent to shake him by the shoulder.

  ‘Come on, corporal,’ he admonished, ‘this is no place to be sleeping off the booze.’

  There was no response from the young soldier.

  The military policeman frowned as he examined the man’s pallid features and noted the strange, stertorous breathing. He bent closer and sniffed. There was no tell-tale smell of alcohol. He removed a glove and laid his hand against the young man’s death-white cheek. It was damp with sweat and yet icy cold at the same time. He jerked his hand back.

  ‘Grüss Gott!’

  ‘What is it?’ demanded his companion, still astride the motorcycle.

  ‘This man’s ill,’ replied the first policeman. ‘Ill, not drunk. We’d better get him to the hospital.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It could be typhus.’

  ‘Get away from him, then,’ ordered the other in a shocked voice. ‘I’ll call headquarters for an ambulance. Don’t touch him again.’

  *

  Paul Horder became conscious of a warm, gentle breeze blowing repeatedly against his face. He groaned slightly and tried to return to the pleasant, comfortable dream that he had been experiencing. The puffs of warm air against his cheek persisted, and irritably he reached up a hand, as if trying to ward them off, and began to retreat under the blankets.

  ‘Wake up, Paul,’ a soft voice said. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock.’

  Paul Horder opened his eyes. Six inches from his face Ilse was bending over him and smiling. He sighed and shut his eyes as if to snuggle back into his dream. Again he felt Ilse’s warm breath as she blew gently against his face.

  ‘All right,’ he muttered reluctantly. ‘I’m awake.’

  He pushed himself up onto the pillow and blinked. Ilse was now pulling on her overcoat, but it scarcely disguised her tall, shapely figure.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said, looking down at him. ‘Are you sure you’re awake?’

  Paul nodded irritably, reaching to the bedside table with one hand and feeling for his packet of Stumpen cheroots and matches. He lit one and sighed.

  Ilse was already at the door of the single-room apartment they shared. She blew him a kiss and was gone.

  Paul smothered a yawn, closed his eyes and relaxed for a moment against the pillows. Ilse Meek had been sharing his apartment for the last three months. He called her his Traumfrau, his dream woman: a tall, silver-blonde with a figure like a Wagnerian Rheitimädchen. She was a secretary at the city hall. One night, during a particularly bad bombing raid, they had been literally thrown together. Within a few days they were living together. It was not unusual in these days when every hour might be one’s last and nothing was ever certain. Death was a constant companion in the city — death from British bombers by night and American ones by day, and death at any time from the paranoiac officials of the National Socialist Party.

  The historic city of Münster, capital of the province of Westphalia, was used to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse constantly riding through it. Every generation since the city received its charter in 1137 AD had suffered from wars and revolutions. Again and again, armies and factions had caused bloodshed and mayhem in the shadow of its thousand-year-old cathedral. Yet Münster had survived.

  Before the war it had been an excellent example of the beautiful old cities of Germany, with its churches, convents, museums and ancient university. It had a predominantly Catholic population and a tradition of liberalism, in spite of its seven years of domination by the fanatical Johann van Leyden and his Anabaptist dictatorship. During the 1932 election campaign, the citizens of Münster had pelted Hitler with over-ripe fruit and rotten eggs. The Führer had never forgotten the insult and had vowed never to set foot in the city again. To him it was the Schwarzstadt, the Black City, because of the priests, nuns and monks who inhabited its religious institutions. Over 60 per cent of the city’s electorate had opposed Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933, and during the early days of Hitler’s Reich, Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Münster, had continually denounced the Nazi Party. His speeches were aimed at an unheeding world, however, whose rulers were too busy trying to appease Hitler and use Fascism to secure their power against what they saw as the greater threat of Communism.

  In spite of Nazi intimidation, Bishop von Galen openly accused the Party of being ‘inhumanly criminal’. He was particularly active in his denunciations when the Party began to carry out their ‘euthanasia’, programme among the German psychiatrically ill and elderly. The programme of extermination had started at Hadamar, a small town to the south-east of Cologne. This mass murder had been justified by the Party on the grounds that those who did not work ‘shall not eat or be fed by the community.’ Following the Bishop of Münster’s denunciation, the Party turned on him and accused him of ‘treachery to the state’. But they were afraid to arrest von Galen because of the repercussions that would have followed among the Catholic German population. Instead, they began to secretly transport their victims to Eastern Poland for extermination there.

  The citizens of Münster, therefore, were a people suspected by the Party and detested by their Führer.

  Münster was a busy and efficient railway junction and a major industrial centre as well as a garrison city, the largest military base in Germany except for Potsdam. The entire city was surrounded by military installations, including barracks for infantry and artillery regiments, ordnance depots, construction services, district military hospitals, and two major military airfields at Loddenheide and Münster-Handorf. Also it was headquarters command centre for both the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe districts of Gau-Westfalen Nord. Because of this strategic position the city was subject to almost constant bombing.

  Paul Horder opened his eyes and sprang out of bed. The January chill penetrated the one-room apartment, seeping through the cracked windows with their dirty panes of glass stuck with tape as a feeble defence against bomb blasts. The single room contained a partitioned area which served as the kitchen and a small separate bathroom and toilet. The room was crammed into an attic corner of an old-fashioned, grimy five-storey tenement.

  Paul went to the bathroom, washed, shaved and hurried into his clothes. Ilse had left the coffee warming on the gas ring for him. Paul was lucky. Few people had gas in the city. Most supplies of gas and electricity had been destroyed in the bombing and use of the existing supplies was closely rationed. He sipped his coffee unenthusiastically. It was ersatz, made mainly from toasted acorns. It seemed a long time since he had tasted real coffee.

  He glanced at his watch. There was plenty of time before he had to report to the Frederick the Great Hospital where he worked as a junior surgeon. But he had another appointment to keep first. An important appointment. He put on his overcoat, picked up his medical case and let himself out of the apartment. The darkened stairway was deserted as he made his way downward and out into the cobbled street. He began to walk in leisurely fashion toward the centre of the city and the River Aa, which threaded its way carefully among the central buildings.

  A biting wind was blowing and the air was chill in spite of the sunshine and blue,
almost cloudless sky.

  Paul had worked at the Frederick the Great Hospital for eighteen months, ever since he had been invalided out of the Army Medical Corps. His mouth turned down sarcastically. Physician, heal thyself! In ’41 he had been called into the army to do compulsory military service, and as a leutnant in the Medical Corps, to which august rank his talent as a doctor had taken him, he was assigned to the Panzerarmee Afrika, popularly known as Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Paul had not seen a great amount of action in Africa, although he certainly saw the results of action. He was almost constantly on duty, operating in stuffy hot tents amidst swarming flies, the stench of wounds and the groans of dying men.

  It had been August ’42 when Rommel, held up by the British at a small town called El Alamein, made an eastward thrust at Alma Haifa in an attempt to pass into the Nile Valley. Three armoured divisions tried to turn the British line here but were halted by British heavy artillery and aerial bombardment. After four days, Rommel’s attack was turned back. Paul had been one of the medical team in the field hospitals supporting the armoured division’s thrust, and was actually operating when an artillery shell exploded on top of the hospital. Shrapnel pierced his left leg in several places; he passed out, to awaken much later in a field hospital in Tobruk. A few weeks later, just before the staggering defeat of the Panzerarmee at El Alamein itself, he was flown to Italy and thence to Austria. It took many months of recuperation before he left the hospital, with a permanent limp and an honourable discharge.

  Doctors were, of course, in demand, especially surgeons with field service. Paul was almost immediately offered a position as a junior surgeon in the Frederick the Great Hospital in Münster.

  As he turned onto the ancient cobbled quayside by the Aa he suddenly smiled broadly. He had forgotten. Today was his birthday. Fancy forgetting that! 29 January 1945, and he was 31 years old. He would take Ilse out tonight to celebrate.

  Ahead of him, out of the rubble, rose the dirty façade of a small cafe, one of several battered-looking buildings along the quayside which had miraculously survived the great air raid of October 1943, when hundreds of Allied aircraft descended on Münster with the apparent intention of wiping it off the map. The Allied pilots evidently used the Aa Lake and the river as a guide for their bombing runs over the city, and thus did a great deal of damage to the old medieval quays.

  He entered the cafe. A long bar ran to one side; on the bar stood an ageing tea-urn and rows of dirty cups. A coffee pot bubbled on a small gas ring and there were a few plates stacked with unappetizing cakes. A series of marble-topped, iron-based tables and wooden chairs stretched along the other side of the long room. There were about half a dozen people there: a few young men in Luftwaffe overalls from a nearby flak battery, a middle-aged postman and a couple of elderly civilians.

  Paul selected a table near the entrance and ordered a coffee from the proprietor, who leant across the bar, examining him morosely. A few moments later the man came shuffling forward with the foul-smelling ersatz that was the staple fare when coffee was asked for.

  Paul glanced at his watch. He hoped the man he was meeting was not going to be late.

  Chapter Three

  The take-off that morning from Tempelhof had been tricky. The ‘Iron Annie’, officially designated a Junkers 52, perhaps the most famous of German transport aircraft, had climbed into the cloudy sky with its three 830-horsepower engines straining as the pilot tried to push it toward its top speed of 189 mph. The plane was no sooner airborne than a flight of three Soviet Yak-9U fighters pounced on it. They had obviously been circling around the airfield at Tempelhof awaiting such an opportunity.

  Brigadeführer Arnt Heiden crouched in his seat, as if this would somehow make his body a smaller target for the fighters’ chattering 12.7 mm machine guns and blasting 20 mm cannons.

  The upper turret gunner of the Junkers was firing madly as the pilot tried to virtually throw the aircraft across the sky in his efforts to avoid the diving Soviet machines.

  Heiden hung on grimly as he was thrown against the straps of his seat belt. From the window he could see the flashes of silver metal as the fighters dipped and whirled around the larger aircraft. The gaunt winter trees of the Grunewald forest rose dangerously near as the Luftwaffe pilot tried to bring his machine as low as possible to thwart the enemy fighters.

  Heiden grimaced angrily. What a bloody fiasco! There had been no need of him being called to Berlin at all. He had said nothing to the Führer in person which he could not have said on the telephone in half a minute. He had risked his life to get to Berlin simply for a few moments in the Chancellery. If these Soviet fighters blew him out of the sky, what would happen to Project Wotan? He supposed Bormann would simply appoint someone else. Who? It wasn’t fair! He had been with the project since it had first been conceived. It was his project! His! It was just not fair that he should die so stupid a death as this.

  He found himself staring through the perspex and yelling obscenities as a Soviet machine swung round and came tearing toward the Junkers, guns flaming. He winced as several rounds pierced the fuselage close by. Then the Yak was a shadow passing overhead, and from the mid-turret he could hear the clatter of the twin 7.9 mm MG 15 machine guns as the Junkers gunner followed the fighter in a desperate bid to bring it down.

  Suddenly, uncannily, there was silence. Heiden peered forward. There was no sign of the Soviet fighters. The Junkers was climbing toward its flight ceiling of 10,000 feet and the young Luftwaffe navigator was swaying along the body of the aircraft to where he sat.

  ‘Are you all right, Brigadeführer?’ the young man shouted over the roar of the engines.

  Heiden nodded, noticing the fact that the navigator did not call him Herr Brigadeführer. There was a lack of respect for the SS in the regular services. However, this was not the time or place to reprimand the arrogant Luftwaffe man.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Soviet machines pounced on us. They were chased away by a flight of our boys, Me109s.’ The reply was laconic. Heiden glowered.

  ‘I didn’t know the Luftwaffe still flew,’ he said sarcastically.

  The navigator grinned humourlessly. ‘Oh yes, when we can get petrol for our fighters; that is, when the SS and party men can spare us a few cans from their private transports.’

  Heiden scowled and was about to retort when the navigator turned away.

  Heiden had always been very proud of his position in the SS. He had once been the general manager of one of I.G. Farben’s chemical factories in the Ruhr, in charge of co-ordinating the scientific development of synthetic oil and rubber. He was an early supporter of the Party and this had helped his subsequent career, for when Farben scientists set out to make Hitler’s Reich self-sufficient in two materials without which modern war could not be fought — gasoline and rubber — he became a liaison officer between the military and the civilian corporation. In fact, the problem of making synthetic gasoline from coal had been solved by Farben before Hitler’s rise to power, and in 1933 Hitler ordered the company to produce 300,000 tons of gasoline each year. By the beginning of 1934 the Reich Defence Council had mobilized Farben on a war footing. It was at this stage that Heiden found himself promoted into the SS Scientific Development Bureau.

  It was Heiden who had suggested to Farben in 1940 that they should open a new plant for the production of synthetic oil and rubber at Auschwitz and thus benefit from exploiting the slave labour of the camp inmates there. Among Heiden’s SS comrades who took over the administration of the labour camp for Farben were Josef Kramer and Rudolf Hoess. Auschwitz, under their regime, was soon to become infamous as a Vernichtungslager — an extermination camp — from which the Farben management conducted a highly profitable business.

  In 1941 Heiden had been seconded to co-ordinate other scientific work, and at the start of 1944 he was put in command of a scientific team which was to develop and test a new vengeance weapon, designated the V4. As the war turned against the Reich, Heiden grew mor
e and more dedicated to ensuring the perfection and success of the V4. He threw all his energies into it. And now, with the Reich on the verge of defeat, it would be he — Arnt Heiden — who would present his Führer with a weapon which would confound the enemies of the Fatherland and make the Reich great once more.

  Heiden smiled as he thought about it. The Führer wanted the rockets ready for launching on 28 February, so they would be ready. He would see to that, even if he had to work his scientists to death.

  The Luftwaffe navigator was standing at his shoulder. ‘Fasten your safety belt, Brigadeführer. We’ll be touching down at Loddenheide in ten minutes.’

  Heiden nodded sourly. Below them the ancient city of Münster stretched into the distance.

  February the twenty-eighth. The rockets would fly. It would be a day that the world would remember. He drew great comfort from the thought.

  *

  Paul had been sipping his ersatz coffee for ten minutes when the man he was waiting for entered the cafe. He was a well-dressed civilian who looked like a middle-ranking local government official in his dark suit, tie and white shirt. He wore a dark felt hat pulled well down over his face, and his shoulders were hunched under a heavy overcoat. He had a dull sallow complexion with dark sunken eyes. His eyes met Paul’s and he came straight to the table, ordering coffee on the way.

  He exchanged pleasantries with Paul, commented on the weather and then, after the coffee was brought, bent forward across the table.

  ‘The news is not good.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Is there any other sort of news but bad news these days?’

  ‘News of trials and executions of our people is still coming through,’ the man said. ‘The Widerstand has been almost destroyed.’

  ‘It is to be expected, Ulrich,’ Paul said softly. ‘After the failure of 20 July … ’ He let his voice trail off.

  While he was recuperating from his wounds in the Austrian hospital Paul had found time to think, to reflect, for the first time in years. He had never been comfortable with the Party, but he had never been a political animal and so had not given much thought to it. Not until he was forced to lie in bed with little to do but think about the situation had he really come to grips with what was happening in his country. He began to develop an awareness of the disastrous path along which Hitler was leading Germany. He became friendly with a hospital orderly named Rudi who had been a medical student in Munich. In the early 1930s the university students there had been among the most fanatical of Party supporters, but ten years of Party rule had brought disillusionment and then dissidence.