Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (35 page)

But this boy was dangerous, she realised. Something about him suggested danger; there was a coolness in his grey-blue eyes, an assuredness, but he was not cocky. Quite the
opposite…
there was no arrogance or cruelty there. He’d even seemed shy, a sort of confidence bred by the masculinity of the culture overriding a naturally sweet temperament… oh,
God
, she thought, I’m thinking about him again.

This time, she allowed herself a few moments to ruminate. He was definitely not arrogant, or cocky, nor cruel or overbearing. She wasn’t sure he was even a patriot, which by now had been a legal prerequisite in his country for almost eight years; punishable by God knows
what
bestial atrocities. Maisie wondered what horrors he’d face, if ever he were betrayed – assuming of course that her assumptions were correct.
Cat’o’nine tails, rubber truncheons, imprisonment, torture, death
. Or perhaps being made to listen to the Führer’s speeches for days on end. To those not hypnotised by his particular brand of magnetism and gravitas, he had the air of a particularly menacing escaped lunatic, a carpet-chewing syphilitic madman, and Maisie bitterly longed for the days in which such opinions could be voiced without being fearful of who was in earshot.

Pulling herself out of the umpteenth reverie that day, she got on with the hasty process of shutting the shop up. As she was locking the door, Maisie sensed rather than saw a shadow looming up, and a figure come upon her. She was about to jump, when a hand lightly grasped her shoulder and the double whammy made her involuntarily yell out.

She caught herself quickly, and glowered at the man before her, who gallantly stepped back with head slightly bowed.

“Jesus Christ,” she all-but yelled, “what are you playing at?”

Hans was mortified. He backed away slightly, though his tall, lean body was already out of arms reach.

“I’m very sorry,” he offered, clumsily. The composure of his approach had been shot to pieces. “It was certainly not my intention to scare you.”

She looked at him for a moment, and for the first time in her life, couldn’t hold a man’s gaze. Noting the somewhat overly careful English, she decided to tease him instead.

“It’s ok…
certainly
.”

He looked baffled, which made her cross.

“Well you did. Anyway… never mind. I’m off for the train. I’ll see you later.” She stumbled over the latter part, sending out mixed signals.
Push, pull
, she thought… silly girl! What am I doing?

She turned with poise and began to walk away, northwards in the direction of Regent’s Park, and almost incredulously sensed – again, sensed – his movement. An immediate reaction. Do I make this boy nervous, she wondered, and her own insecurities were instantly banished.

“May I walk with you,” he asked her, coming level.

She glanced at him, and almost laughed at his earnest expression. He noted it himself, wryly.

“I’m heading this way anyway, fraulein. I would enjoy your company.”

She affected a sigh, which they both knew was false. She made sure it didn’t sound too serious.

“Come on then,” she chirped.

Hans kept stealing glances at her as they walked along, seeing nothing of Tottenham Court Road, the street, the buildings, passers-by. He didn’t register any of it.

She was tall, and well-made, though simultaneously lean; he supposed she had a good bone structure. There was no fat evident in her face, or her legs, which were covered tastefully by the long white dress she wore, with its padded shoulders. Evidently, wartime rationing had affected her and Hans could see that she’d sewed over several patches – with some skill, he noted, as they weren’t especially visible – but in the brief moment in which he was in close proximity to the girl, he filled his nostrils with her clean scent. She was washed, which was not always a given in either this country or his, and her dress gave off a freshly washed, clean odour. Her hair – naturally dirty blonde, a sort of light brown that naturally curled at shoulder length, was also clean and flowing. He decided he liked her hair, in contrast to the vast majority of German girls now who were adhering with proper National Socialist discipline to their Aryan roots, and using peroxide to dye their heads blonde.

So they can be as Nordic as our Aryan supermen leading us
, Hans had joked in the Tiergarten to his old friend Isi, brother to his lover. This was before laws had forbidden his pal from entering the park; at this point, only the park benches and the Tiergarten Zoo were off-limits.
Nordic as our heroic leadership.
Limping Joe, Fat Hermann and the carpet muncher; the ideal German men for a New Age of Warriors.

Isi had laughed.
Just my luck to be a Yid. An accident of birth; if only I were as blond as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels and as slim as Göring!

Just my luck too, you Jewish swine. If you’d been all that, I wouldn’t be risking my life to be seen with you. To have my pure German mind corrupted by your poisonous words.

Isi had sobered at that, his almost comically stereotypical Jewish face and its hooked nose twitching in the sunlight of a bright Berlin summer day.
Jest or not, you raise a valid point, my Aryan friend. An undeniable point.

Yes, but Isi my dear yiddo, I’d leave you in a heartbeat for the Hitlerjugend but how could I abandon your sister!

Thinking now of ‘Isidor’, as Yitzak was known, was painful, and he brought his attention back to the present.

They strolled along – slowly, Hans noticed – for around half a minute. He wondered if she was shy of him. The thought aroused his curiosity; even with Sarah, his only previous lover, he’d never quite understood what she saw in him, how he provoked such feverish passion in her or stirred her to such emotional depths. She gazed into his eyes sometimes with an intensity that confused him. He expressed himself with startling honesty, and had a good eye for, and appreciation of aesthetic beauty and a positive energy, but being prone to bouts of unhappiness despite Germany’s Great Awakening surely couldn’t be an attractive trait? Plus, he expressed himself clearly, not cleverly. Of course, that was simply practical these days; thinkers and intellectuals were frowned upon; anything Goebbels derided as idealistic or politically unreliable in public had the potential to land you in Dachau.

Thinking about Dachau and Sarah hurt too. In the present, on Tottenham Court Road, he opened his mouth, and then closed it. What was the point? She liked him, or didn’t.
Don’t get close. Don’t form attachments
.

“My name is Maisie”. She looked at him for the first time since they’d set off walking from the shop, and she smiled sweetly, her mouth closed. Her toothy grin was a game-winner, and she knew better than to play that card just yet.

He smiled back at her. “Hans.”

“Where are you from, Hans?”

He paused, looking around at the buildings lining Tottenham Court Road, as though they reminded him of home.

“Berlin…” he glanced at her, and she held his gaze. “The capital, just like you,” he added.

“Is it like London,” she asked, innocently. He considered; was it? In style, architecture, the roads… the soul of a place was no longer determined by its buildings, its architecture, its physical monuments to humanity, he’d decided. Not with ideology driving men to extremes, against each other.

He hesitated… “… in a sense, I suppose you would say. There are similarities. Physical similarities. I think even most of the people are the same. But…” he stopped himself. Experience had taught him caution. He used his honesty on a different tack. “I miss home. I love Berlin.”

“You miss Germany?”

“I miss
Berlin
,” he responded with gusto.

Maisie herself hesitated slightly. “You don’t seem to be… a
proud
Nazi soldier.”

That was it. She was safe. Probably, at least, and Hans decided to chance it. He glanced to his left, into the road and behind him; The German Glance,
Der Deutsche Blick
.

He decided to trust her.

“I’m not even a German.” Smiling at her confusion as she digested this, he added, “I’m a Berliner.”

“I’m not sure I understand?”

“Berlin is
Berlin
. There’s a reason National Socialism holds its major rallies in Bavaria; Munich, or Nuremberg… troll country. Big-bellied beer hall brawlers, Jew baiters and Neanderthals. They are, like you British say,
cavemen
. Not gentlemen. In my city, as long as they are lucky enough to have blond hair and blue eyes, nobody cares about calling Reichsmarschall Göring fat, or Goebbels a crippled dwarf, as long as there are no
polizei
nearby.” Maisie looked at him in surprise, her eyebrows arching high and he laughingly elaborated. “Oh yes! In their own homes, lots of people make fun of Limping Joe and his broadcasts. The
Mahatma Propagandhi
. And everyone hates the local informant – the Gestapo, ah… how do you say?”

“Snitch?”

Hans smirked. “Snitch. Disgusting! But, it is worse in troll country. Berlin has more ‘March Violets’, or party members who joined in 1933 than anywhere else in the Reich. Lots of social democrats, lots of Kozis – communists. Lots of cynical, sarcastic people, like England. Hitler hates Berlin.”

Maisie laughed. “No wonder you are comfortable here.”

Hans snorted with mirth. “I guess.
Ja
, Berlin… I know a lot of my old friends were disappointed when we took Paris… and
nobody
likes France.”

Now Maisie, against the warning of her inner voice, couldn’t help but query this astonishing boy.

“Then why are you a soldier? Why fight for Hitler?”

Hans stopped in his tracks, almost unconsciously. Maisie stopped with him, her eyes full of questions, heart full of hope. If this perfect Aryan model of the Nazi dream could hate the tyranny of her country and its evil government, its pervasive menace and the quietly haunted peoples living under its rule, perhaps there was hope for the world.

Hans, for his part, knew that confessing his true thoughts to this English girl he barely knew was the most foolhardy act imaginable. But almost because of that, he resolved to continue. Speaking freely was, in his opinion, a human right. The British and Americans were right about that, at least, as ridiculous as they were. Not his people. The Deutsche volk. As ridiculous and frightening as
they
were.

“I did not behave,” Hans started, cursing inwardly as a slight tremor in his slightly-singsong Berliner’s voice betrayed him, “in what you might call a racially desirable way.”

“
Racially desirable
,” she queried. He elaborated, sadly:

“I fraternised with Jews.”

Sweet Sarah. Isidor, who was likely in Dachau, perhaps dead. He was never a fighter; mocking, cynical, essentially sweet tempered, clever; he played the violin. Did they beat him with rubber truncheons before they took him? Did he have all his teeth when he finally reached the camp? And what then? Did the SS break his violinist’s fingers, which played Beethoven, Bach and Mozart? Oh, poor Isi.

Maisie was standing beside him, waiting for him to elaborate. He sighed at memories he preferred to shut out of his mind, keeping his eyes averted from her, looking ahead.

“I… fraternised. Visited Jewish shops, used Jewish businesses… The SA men painted stars of David on the windows; I would stroll in to buy items I did not even need. Back then all they did was curse at me, call me
Jude Liebhaber
– ‘Jew lover’.”

Hans’ tone was bitter. His eyebrows contracted in a set frown. He resolved to share the full extent of his past. “To tell you the truth… I had a Jewish lover. Her name was Sarah…” his voice trailed off, as the shadow of sorrow crept over him. As he glanced at her, Hans saw that its bleakness must have shown in his eyes, as she registered his pain. The eye contact was brief, but sufficient to register the shared moment of empathy before he looked away again. Maisie felt a rush of sympathy for her strange companion. He silently hoped that he had not revealed too much. They walked on, each momentarily lost in their thoughts.

“You say, you
had
a Jewish lover?” Maisie asked quietly. Hans nodded glumly. She had indeed noticed the shadow come across his face, and shuddered inwardly, dreading the answer. But she had to ask. She
had
to.

“Yes. She was interned in Lichtenberg
Konzentrationslager
... a concentration camp. Then they built a camp specifically for women. Ravensbrück. That was around two years ago, I think… they do not inform me; after all, I am a rehabilitated soldier of the Fatherland, and she is a Jew. I doubt she is alive.” He stopped. This was the first time he’d spoken about her since the day when, ashen-faced, he’d recounted the whole tale to his Mother, who could only stroke his head, faintly quavering at her son
oh my boy… oh my boy
… embracing the ashen faced teenager in the small apartment, whose world had collapsed around him.
How can I love my Fatherland,
he kept repeating in shock. She’d held him by each strong shoulder, looking up into her son’s teary face, stern now.
You must never say that. Speak through a rose. Smile through the pain. Live for tomorrow.

“I’m sorry.” Maisie jerked him back to the present, the sunlit Tottenham Court Road in London. Passing men were casting evil glances at the pair as they strolled along.

“Me too,” he said sharply, and instantly regretted it. “
Ja
,” he resumed in a far softer tone, more resembling his own, “… so inevitably, there was a denunciation to the Gestapo, and I was a criminal in the eyes of the law. I signed a consent form called a D-11, the ‘Order For Protective Custody’… one of the most laughable things you can imagine, no?”

She shook her head, uncomprehendingly. “House arrest? Or they thought you needed protection from other Germans for fraternising?”

Hans laughed at that. How cruel his world must seem to her. How little she understood of it, even with German soldiers in her country. How right she was.

“‘Protective custody’ is Nazi custody. It means I signed consent for my own internment, or incarceration, however you say – in a camp. It is not very ‘protective’. They call it a guarantee of good behaviour, for the record, but in reality they make you sign it, the Kriminalpolizei officer threatened to beat me until I did – and then they threw me in a cell, and hauled me before a court one week later, after some classic Berlin Kripo hospitality from some thugs who probably want a transfer to the Gestapo. Berlin cops were always tough; I absolve the Nazis of that much.”