The Doomsday Decree

by Peter MacAlan

  ‘I’m sorry, Kendall,’ he said, turning to the injured man, ‘but this is as far as I can drive. We go on foot from here on.’

  Kendall shook his head dubiously.

  ‘I can’t walk far,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t that far. I’ll help you.’

  Paul packed a number of items in a rucksack, including the medical kit, and with one arm supporting Kendall, began to move in the direction of the farmhouse.

  It was a clear night and Paul, thanks to his time in the army, knew enough about the stars to guide him in the right direction. However, he had to pause frequently to allow Kendall to rest. The wound was bleeding profusely now and Paul knew that Kendall could not go on much longer.

  It was about three o’clock when Paul caught sight of the familiar dark shape of the farm buildings. He helped Kendall sit down by a large hedge.

  ‘Wait here,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll go forward and make sure the coast is clear.’

  Kendall grunted and lay back, his breath coming in deep gasps.

  Paul left the haversack with him and moved warily towards the darkened buildings.

  A dog began to bark nearby as if it sensed his presence. Paul pressed back against the shadow of an outbuilding, cursing the beast. If the Nazis were in occupation …

  He was moving backwards when he felt the sharp steel in his back.

  ‘Raise your hands!’ ordered a curt voice.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Paul slowly lifted his hands, silently cursing himself for being so careless.

  ‘Walk forward,’ said the curt voice. ‘Move toward the door ahead of you.’

  Paul had no option but to obey.

  He saw that his captor was guiding him toward the door of the farmhouse and as he neared it the man called out and the door swung open. The pressure in his back propelled him inside. Then the door was shut. He was aware of other figures in the gloom of the room. Someone was fiddling with a lantern. A match was struck. Light flooded the farmhouse kitchen.

  ‘Paul!’

  Before him, holding the lantern, Magda was staring in amazement. Beside her was her sister Erika, holding a small pistol in her hand. Magda’s wide-eyed gaze was focused on his SS uniform.

  Rolf came round from behind him. He held a 12-bore shotgun in his left hand. He gazed at Paul’s uniform with raised eyebrows.

  Paul grinned as Magda set down the lamp.

  ‘Just a disguise to get me back here safely,’ he said, lowering his arms.

  The next moment Magda had taken a pace forward and seized both his hands in a fierce grip.

  ‘Paul, I was so worried. But you’ve come back!’

  ‘I said I would,’ Paul replied gravely.

  ‘When we heard Trudi barking we thought there was an intruder about,’ Rolf was saying, as he broke open his shotgun and removed the cartridges. He grimaced. ‘I nearly shot you back there.’

  ‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ Paul said fervently. ‘But I have to tell you that I have a colleague with me … he’s been wounded. A gunshot wound in the arm.’

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’ was Magda’s immediate reaction.

  ‘I’ve extracted the bullet, but the wound needs redressing. He needs rest, too. He’s lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘Very well,’ began Rolf, but Paul interrupted.

  ‘I won’t try to disguise the fact … he is English.’

  Only Magda did not appear surprised. ‘So you did manage to contact the Allies?’

  Paul simply nodded.

  ‘And Project Wotan?’

  ‘Is destroyed.’

  Magda gave a sigh. ‘So all we have to do is wait for the Allies to overrun this area?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Paul said, and glanced hesitantly toward Erika and Rolf.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Magda said hurriedly. ‘After you left I explained everything to them. They understand.’

  Rolf smiled. ‘And we approve, Paul. But let’s get this wounded man inside.’

  He went with Paul to bring Kendall in. The elderly scientist had passed out. They half carried, half dragged him to the farmhouse and up to the spare room, where Paul and Magda cleaned and redressed the wound.

  ‘He’ll be fine if he doesn’t have to be moved again,’ Paul said. ‘It will probably be best if we make up a bed in your shelter below the barn for him, just in case of any searches.’

  A little while later Paul sat eating a breakfast with Magda, Erika and Rolf.

  He looked at them over the top of his coffee cup.

  ‘I know where Magda stands,’ he said, with a quick smile at the girl, ‘but it depends on your perspective, Erika, Rolf, whether you see me as a traitor or not.’

  ‘Of course you are not a traitor!’ snapped Magda, irritated by the idea.

  Paul smiled gently. ‘It is up to Erika and Rolf to decide. After all, I am their guest.’

  Rolf shrugged. ‘The people of Germany are facing a terrible ordeal, Paul. A trial, if that’s the word, that is perhaps without equal in history. This trial does not lie in the defeat of our country’s once proud armies, nor in the ruin and devastation of our ancient, once flourishing cities. Nor does it lie in the terrible suffering we, the people of Germany, have inflicted on the untold millions who, in the name of the Fatherland, we have caused to be driven from gutted homes to wander the countryside until starvation, disease and death have overtaken them.’

  Erika leant forward, nodding agreement. ‘We have often talked of this, Paul. And I agree with Rolf. Those who sow the wind must reap the whirlwind. That is the Biblical prophecy. We have unleashed on the world the same sorrow which now drives us hollow-eyed through the ruins of our towns and homes. Well, it seems that the other nations are surviving, enduring and overcoming their suffering. Germany, too, must survive and endure, and it will. But, as Rolf said, that is not our true ordeal. Our ordeal, our trial as Germans, is whether we shall be able to raise our heads in the years to come and save the soul of Germany for future generations.’

  There was a sudden silence in the farmhouse kitchen when Erika finished speaking.

  ‘The soul of Germany?’ Magda asked cynically. ‘Is there such a thing anymore?’

  Rolf nodded emphatically. ‘There is, I have to believe that, but we are a nation of fools and worse. We let a madman have absolute power over us. Now we must acknowledge our guilt. Can we ever atone for the millions who died because of our active or passive support of this madman? Millions died to appease his insane dream while we just sat by, or worse yet, joined him as his willing henchmen. We are all as guilty as Hitler, perhaps even more so because Hitler is mad and we, we are sane and yet we have allowed him to rule us.

  ‘I admire Paul. At least he did something. He was in the Widerstand, fighting against the Nazis.’ Rolf hesitated, his left hand creeping to the stump of his right arm. ‘I never even questioned the morality of what I was doing when I fought in the Luftwaffe. And after I was wounded I buried myself away from the war. I tried to forget there was a war, tried to shut my ears to the stories about what was happening in Germany. It was the passive support of people like me that let the Nazis get away with boasting of a German “national communion” in which the individual was no more than a fanatical atom, unconditionally serving the whole through the godhead of the Führer.’

  ‘You are being too hard on yourself, Rolf,’ Paul interrupted.

  ‘Rolf is right,’ Erika said firmly. ‘We must admit our guilt. There must be no attempts at self-justification. That would be an obscenity, to try to justify the last twelve years of Nazi rule. Only those who fought the Nazis within Germany have a right to plead “not guilty” before the world.’

  ‘You see, Paul,’ Rolf went on, ‘ultimately it wasn’t the madman or his individual henchmen who committed the horrors and excesses of the SS and Gestapo, it was our so-called German “communion” in which each stood for all and all for each. The crimes of the National Socialist Party, the unspeakable denigration of German civilization �
�� those things are the logical outcome of the devilish exaltation of the rights of the strongest and the claim that might is what serves the nation. Nothing can undo the fact that we Germans not only heeded the infernal doctrines of the National Socialists, we fervently embraced them and defended them with fire, steel and blood.’

  Paul reached across the table and patted Rolf’s shoulder. ‘The war will soon be over; days, weeks at the most.’

  Erika said: ‘And what you have done, Paul, is shown that some individuals in the German nation have tried to keep alive the soul of Germany, to keep faith with true German civilization and hand down its traditions to the future Germany.’

  ‘Germany will survive,’ Paul said slowly. ‘Even this terrible catastrophe that she has brought on herself will pass. And Germany will need people like you, Rolf, and you, Erika, who can put words together to express the truths she has refused to listen to during the last twelve years.’

  Magda reached out a hand to take Paul’s. ‘Do you really think there is any hope for Germany after her defeat?’

  ‘When the Nazis are defeated, that will be the greatest victory possible for the German people.’

  ‘And could it really be over within a few days?’

  ‘Yes, now that Hitler no longer has his dream of a super-bomb,’ Paul replied, smiling. ‘There’s no doubt it will soon be over. Perhaps a month at the most. As for us … I think the Allies will be here within a few days.’

  *

  Paul was right.

  It was exactly four days later when the Canadian First Army moved into Xanten and, after desultory resistance from a few SS units there, managed to secure the town.

  A day later a platoon of Canadian soldiers, led by a lieutenant, arrived at the farmhouse and searched it for stray troops and weapons. They did so briskly and professionally. Kendall, who was now recovering from his wound, asked the lieutenant if contact could be made with Colonel Roberts. The lieutenant was taken aback at finding an English civilian hiding out on the farm and suggested that Kendall and Paul should accompany him in his jeep into Xanten.

  An Allied Field Security Office had been established in the old church in Xanten. On the church door was pinned the ‘Proclamation to the German People’ issued by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was simple and straightforward: The Allies came as conquerors but not as oppressors, it said. The chief task was to obliterate Nazism and abolish the cruel and oppressive laws and institutions created by the Party. Eisenhower charged all German officials with ‘the duty of remaining at their posts until further orders and obeying and enforcing all orders or directions of Military Government or the Allied authorities.’ This applied also to ‘official employees and workers of all public undertakings and utilities and to all other persons engaged in essential work.’

  Paul and Kendall waited in the church for two hours amidst the constant comings and goings of despatch riders and other personnel. Finally, Colonel Austin Roberts and a fair-haired lieutenant, his adjutant, came in.

  ‘Damn good show!’ Roberts smiled broadly, pumping them each by the hand. ‘Let’s go somewhere and talk about it.’

  Three hours later, Roberts wrote a special document, describing Paul’s services to the Allies in general terms and expressing the wish that he be allowed freedom of movement to continue his work as a medical doctor within the Allied occupied zone of Germany. He had originally suggested that Paul might like to accompany Kendall and himself back to Nijmegen, but Paul shook his head.

  ‘I’ll remain here,’ he said firmly.

  The leave-taking of Roberts and Kendall was unemotional; a brief handshake with Paul and an expression of good-luck wishes. Then the two Englishmen were bouncing away in Roberts’ Jeep through the rubble-strewn streets of Xanten. The same Canadian lieutenant who had brought Paul and Kendall to Xanten gave Paul a lift back to the farmhouse.

  The immediate future offered little choice for Paul and Magda. Medical staff were in great demand, and for the next four weeks they assisted at a makeshift hospital which had been established by the Canadians in Xanten.

  News came on 19 March that Adolf Hitler had finally pronounced his infamous ‘Nero Decree’ in spite of the opposition of Albert Speer and other Nazi Party bosses. Their protestations made no impact on the now totally insane Führer, who was insisting on the destruction of the German nation according to his ‘scorched earth’ policy. The only German territory the Allies were to occupy was to be blackened earth, devastated and depopulated.

  On 3 April, however, the British 6th Guards Tank Brigade managed to enter the once-beautiful medieval city of Münster, which had fallen after a day of fierce street fighting. The fighting then moved further eastward and Paul and Magda were given the option of returning to the Frederick the Great Hospital. They opted to remain in Xanten.

  On Monday, 30 April, at 3.45 p.m., a few days after his 56th birthday, Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich, placed the barrel of a 7.65mm Walther pistol in his mouth and shot himself. By his side, his former mistress and wife of a few days, Eva Braun, bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide. Around them Berlin was collapsing in flames as the Soviet Armies fought their way through the capital. For Hitler it was truly the Wagnerian vision of the Götterdämmerung, the ‘Twilight of the Gods’, yet for the German people it was the beginning of the end of a terrible twilight, of a dark age for the nation. Of those Nazi Party bosses who shared their mad Führer’s final hours, only the Reichsleiter, Martin Bormann, was to disappear from the bunker under the Chancellery, never to be seen again. At 2.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. At midnight precisely on 8,’9 May, the guns ceased firing, and — after twelve years, four months and eight days — the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ came to an end.

  The German people had not been destroyed as Hitler, in those last insane months in Berlin, had wished. Nor would they really appreciate how close Hitler had come to achieving his final spiteful dream of national obliteration. Even those Germans who heard whispers of Project Wotan could not bring themselves to believe that there was any substance in the story. In those last days, rumours of Project Wotan reached even as far east as Lower Saxony and came to the ears of the officers’ mess of those guarding Prisoner of War Camp Oflag IVC at Colditz. Hauptmann Reinhold Eggers, the security officer at the camp, was to comment in his subsequent memoirs: ‘Not even the Nazi Party men in the Mess would credit the mere thought of putting into effect atomic destruction as a weapon of war. The propaganda men must be raving!’

  Raving? Perhaps. Today, a little to the south-west of the village of Freckenhorst, lies a particularly peaceful and lush part of the German countryside. There are no remains of concrete bunkers, no rusting remnants of corrugated iron huts, no rotting barbed wire fences or watchtowers. Nor are there signs of scars in the earth … not unless one looks especially closely at the contours of the land. The tall, winter-green conifers have long since reclaimed for nature the site of Project Wotan.

  Historical Note

  The facts about Hitler’s atom-bomb project, which created such alarm and despondency among the Allies, are recounted in the book Alsos by Professor Samuel Goudsmit. Professor Goudsmit was put in charge of an American scientific team which entered Germany in the wake of the Allied armies in order to discover the facts behind the Nazi attempt to make the first atomic bomb. This investigation was given the code-name ‘Alsos’.

  Peter MacAlan

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