1945 (6 page)

A happy Congress breathed a sigh of relief and congratulated itself for steadfastly ignoring Roosevelt's urgent suggestion after Pearl Harbor to move more forcefully to the aid of England—to say nothing of aiding the Communists. The military, of course, was pleased with the result as well, since they could concentrate fully on the Japanese. This was especially true for the Navy; the total conquest and absolute submission of the Japanese was a personal thing for every American sailor from King and Nimitz on down.

So now it is I who must deal with this man.

"How do you come to speak such fluent German?" Hitler finally asked, in heavily accented English.

"I studied at Heidelberg before the First War," Harrison replied. "Given world events, it seemed a good idea to maintain fluency."

"Good! My English is terrible," Hitler responded in his own language. Apparently now satisfied with Harrisons linguistic abilities, Hitler nodded a curt dismissal to the uniformed aide who had entered with him.

Harrison motioned to the small round table by the fire. Hitler preceded him to it and sat down.

"So. Did you like Heidelberg?" Hitler asked.

"It was one of the happier times of my life. I stayed in touch with several of my professors after the war, until they were arrested in '34."

"Student days," Hitler said with a sigh, ignoring the hint of anger. "I never had them. My school was the trenches of Verdun and the Somme."

"I was in those trenches too," Harrison replied coolly. "Perhaps we ... saw one another."

"No, no, I never saw an American unit." He waved his hand dismissively. "So what did you learn of us Germans? At school, I mean."

"I learned that the German passion for organized efficiency is the most intense of any people on the planet."

Hitler smiled. "That includes military efficiency."

"Yes. For good or ill, Germans are very efficient."

"You studied history, didn't you?"

"Yes. I specialized in 19th-century Germany, as it happens."

Could it be that Hitler had not immersed himself in the personal history of the American president he was about to meet? On reflection Harrison decided it was
not
possible. So what was he trying to accomplish with this? Soften him up with kindness and attention after the initial insult of being forty-five minutes late? God knew that tyrants had underestimated America and its leaders before, but this was ridiculous.

"Why are you not then a professor?"

"Oh, I was years from my doctorate, not even sure I wanted one. An opportunity for foreign study had come up and I took it, is all. Then came the war. Like you, I was gassed and spent nearly a year in the hospital. By the time I came home I had become more focused on practical things. I completed my Bachelors and that was that."

The President laughed inwardly. What harm in letting Hitler think he was cozened? It was plausible enough. Other world leaders had fallen for the Hitlerian charm, and Americans were notorious suckers for pretended empathy.

At that moment, however, Hitler again changed tack. "If you know our history, then you know
why
we must be efficient at war. We have no natural boundaries. Only the strength of our army stands between us and the East. As it was in Fredericks time, so it remains today. We are the guardians of the West. The world should not forget that.

"As to the land we took, it was being used haphazardly; we have already doubled prewar crop production in Poland and will do far better in Russia. It was our destiny to control those lands."

"Are you presenting a justification for your conquests?"

Hitler smiled. "I don't need to justify an accomplished fact, any more than you Americans need to justify to me your treatment of your Indians. We control Russia to the Volga, except for the pocket we permitted Stalin around Moscow and back through Gorky. In the west our natural border has been restored and the French are now our allies. On both frontiers we have accomplished what I set out to do."

"Africa?"

"What concern is Africa to either you or me? It's a land of barbarian
Untermenschen.
Let the French and the Italians control it. It suits them."

"If it is of no interest, then why did you take Southwest

Africa and Tanganyika as part of the armistice agreement with England?"

"It was the final stain of Versailles. It had to be rectified."

Harrison hesitated to show too much concern about that region. Whenever the Germans became fully aware of the value of the Belgian Congo's uranium deposits, the richest in the world, that would be soon enough. No need to help them along. "Let's not take our time rehashing the past. I'm more concerned with the future, particularly the future of our two countries."

Hitler stood up and walked over to the giant map that lined the far side of the room.

Such a strange map. Germany was a red smear reaching across the Vistula to engulf what had once been Poland and Lithuania. Latvia and Estonia were marked with the orange of allies as was Occupied Russia and the new puppet state of the Ukraine.

Yugoslavia had disappeared. Slovenia and Dalmatia had been thrown to Italy, while the other provinces had been divided into small independent states ruled from Berlin. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania had also taken small pieces of the former Yugoslavia from their master's table.

In the West, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Denmark were now states within the greater Reich. France had been rewarded for its complaisance with continued existence — as a lapdog whose coastal harbors and airfields from Brest to Dunkirk were occupied by German forces. In all of Europe west of the Urals, only Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden had some semblance of true independence—and all four knew that they existed now only because the man who stood before the map willed it so. Sure, it would take eighty divisions to conquer the Swiss, but what were eighty divisions to Hitler in a world at "peace"?

But still there was England, marked in green, pugnaciously defiant off the coast. "I don't like this talk of Churchill coming back as Prime Minister," Hitler said, his eyes locked on the one aspect of this new map of Europe that displeased him.

Harrison shrugged, said nothing.

"He caused the last crisis, you know."

"Oh? I thought it was your invasion of Poland."

"Poland was needed for living space and as preparation against Russia. We had no quarrel with England, and wanted none. It was that damnable Churchill who pushed it even after I carefully allowed his army to escape and offered him peace after Dunkirk. Now the stupid British want him back again!"

"And what do you propose to do about it if his party wins the election?"

"Rather, I should ask what you would do," Hitler replied.

Harrison was blunt. "If you attack England we will declare war on you—and this time we won't be diverted by affairs in the Pacific."

Hitler laughed. "Your Congress is tired of war, and your people are too. You Americans have your peace and want to keep it I don't think your war mongering would gamer much support."

"And I think it will," Harrison replied, even though he and the man facing him both knew it was a lie. If America had one lasting tradition, it was that of immediately demobilizing after a war. The Navy had already seen its vessels reduced by nearly half, and the Army had gone from thirty-five divisions to twelve—eight of which were still on occupation duty in the Pacific, or holding positions along the China coast to support the Nationalists. In the first flush of both electoral and military victory Harrison had not resisted demobilization very much. He now was coming to understand the enormity of his error. Half a navy and four ready divisions to face the Beast that crouched over Europe.

"May I recite to you what your current operational levels are?" Hitler said in a voice so cordial as to constitute mockery. The man's intuitive grasp of his interlocutor's mental processes filled Harrison with sour admiration. It was as if he did indeed have the ability to read an opponent's mind. Harrison recalled vaguely that breeding for telepathic ability was a principal tenet of the demented Nazi ideology. Could all that have happened to the world be a direct result of this man mistaking his own intuitive genius for
telepathy?

"But there's no need of this," Hitler continued, his voice again shifting to a "genuinely" friendly tone. "Our interests are, in fact, the same. As to our points of disagreement, they are minor."

"And those interests are?"

"Peace. I want peace the same as you. Nowhere on this Earth"—he pointed back toward the map—"is there any geopolitical crisis point between us. Our interests don't extend beyond Europe. Yours are defined by the Monroe Doctrine, which we are willing to respect."

"Though you lend material support to Argentine Fascists, and are making strong efforts in Mexico, while the French are building up their base in Martinique." As aviation advanced, airfields on islands such as Martinique and Grenada would pose a greater and greater threat to Latin America and the Panama Canal

"Friendly diplomacy," Hitler replied, "nothing more — and as for Martinique, quarrel with the French, not with me. And you Americans are not without sin. Only last month we caught one of your OSS spies in the Ukraine. We shot him of course."

"I know nothing about that," Andrew lied. The man had been their key contact into the Jewish underground and was instrumental in gathering evidence on what the Jewish community had begun calling the Holocaust. The agent had managed to get out several hundred photos and four and a half minutes of grainy eight-millimeter film showing a death factory near Kiev. The film, with its nightmare images of mounds of bodies, black smoke, and roaring crematoriums, had run counter to everything he had ever thought he knew about a culture that could produce Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller.

"What I do know something about is this," Harrison said coldly. He reached into his briefcase, pulled out a folder of photographs, and tossed them onto the table. Hitler walked over and looked down at them with an attitude of polite curiosity. When he recognized them for what they were, he waved his hand disdainfully and turned back to the map.

"Cheap Jewish and Communist propaganda. Staged and passed to that agent you know nothing about. Shocking that they would kill so many people for the sake of verisimilitude, don't you think?"

"There's hundreds more like these, and thousands of pages of testimony as to what your SS is doing in Russia and the Ukraine."

Hitler turned, looked straight at Harrison, and smiled. "I know nothing about that."

"But we
do!"
Harrison slammed his fist on the table.

Hitler, for one brief second, seemed shocked by Harrison's reaction. Then he came back to the table and leaned against it, bracing his balled fists on its edge. "Do you want to have a war over these lies?" With a rude brush of his hand he swept the photos off the table. "I doubt, President Harrison, that you'd get more than a hundred votes in your Congress, most of them already in the pockets of New York Jewish financiers, who are the true enemies. And you do not have the power to declare war on your own." He laughed sofdy at that absurd weakness.

"I am going to make this information public."

"Go ahead. A fair number of your people will applaud."

Harrison sat back in his chair, physically sickened, by the photographs, the reality that underlay them, and most of all by the almost playful nondenial. Perhaps that explained his next, ill-advised words.

"You have no idea of the character of Americans," he said in an almost conversational tone. "You have no idea of what we are, or what we stand for. We might not be able to stop what you're doing inside the land you control, not yet, but by God we won't let it spread."

"You—
you?
—threaten the
Reich?"
Hitler swelled like
a
venomous reptile. His rages were legendary. "Do you think we fear your mongrel nation? I hope you intended to start a war here today, because that is what you have done!" His fist too slammed the table. Louder, harder. He turned to leave.

Harrison watched as he stalked toward the oak door at the far side of the room. He knew it was histrionics, part of the famous act. He also knew that Hitler would back up those histrionics with all the power of what was at this moment the worlds greatest military machine. As for him, his administration was barely ten months old, and he was less than popular. The Isolationists and others who smelled a chance at last to undo all that Roosevelt had accomplished would surely accuse him of creating a new crisis as a diversion. As for his own party, they still looked to FDR as their leader, and might well accuse his successor of triggering an incident out of lack of experience or, worse yet, simple stupidity. Support for war in the military was nonexistent; given the current state of military preparedness they knew too well what odds they would face.

Harrison stood and uttered a single word, thereby performing the most difficult act of his life.

"Wait."

Hitler turned, even as his hand touched the door.

"Did you say something?"

"Let us continue with our discussion."