Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (60 page)

“Sneak home and
pray you’ll never know
,
the hell where youth and laughter go…
” Bill concluded with quiet bitterness, quoting Siegfried Sassoon.

“Sorry to hear that, Bill,” Charlie said, quietly, watching him.

Bill nodded.

“Long time ago, boy,” he said with some effort, managing a small smile. “So… what exactly happened to you last night then? I imagine it was our two friends… Arthur’s newest regulars.”

“Yeah, it were them two Germans that was in the pub yesterday, Bill. They jumped me just before you came along.”

“Why did they do that?” he wondered. Charlie already had his answer worked out; the experience had not inspired much in the way of reflection for him, nor had it needed analysis.

“They’re pricks, aint they? Just a pair of ’orrible pricks. Enjoyin’ ’emselves as Lords of the Manor, in their fancy kraut uniforms like coppers on a power trip. They were trying to get a rise out of me earlier, and when I left I knocked his drink over. Truth is I didn’t mean to do it, it’s just this stupid leg of mine.”

And Charlie, to his intense embarrassment, found tears stinging his eyes again.

To his surprise, Bill grinned.

“Come on lad. We’ll have the last laugh.”

“Oh yeah, sure. They’ll beat me up every chance they get, the evil bastards. They really enjoyed it. I saw them taking a rise out of you earlier, Bill.”

“Who doesn’t?” he shrugged, carelessly.

“Why do you take it, Bill?” his guest asked, confused. The man he had seen last night and this morning was so far removed from the drunken wastrel he had imagined Bill to be, it was difficult to reconcile what he remembered with sudden clarity; this man, whose slight East End-accented voice was not so unlike his own, was an overlooked and even mocked figure, who was given precious little respect from his peers.

Bill shrugged, carelessly, but there was still a pained look in his eyes.

“I don’t know Charlie, I don’t know.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say. Momentarily, Bill indicated he was ready to take his leave.

“Right, you’d better rest up here until you get well, lad.”

“Thank you Bill,” he said, with genuine gratitude. “I think you should be proud of yourself, you’re a real gentleman.”

“Kind of you to say, my boy… right, I’ve got to get on.”

“Going to the pub?”

That grin again. “I think so, boy.” And he disappeared.

The two Germans had promised an early return the next day; that meant between late morning and the mid-afternoon shutdown. An idea forming in his mind, Bill strolled into his bedroom, and took out his very best suit; a charcoal grey three piece, with matching tie. At the base of his wardrobe, he found an old fedora ringed with white that matched his best suit. Humming to himself, Bill murmured the words to
Forever Blowing Bubbles
as he finished trimming the last of his beard with a comb and scissors, until only a very short, neat mat of black hair covered the lower half of his face. He inspected his face; it was as though ten years had been removed in an instant. Still humming pleasantly, Bill dressed in his finest clothes, and gazed into the mirror with a mixture of amusement and real surprise.
A real gentleman
, Maureen’s voice told him.
You look like a million pounds, my Bill
.

The truck passed a checkpoint filled with guards who looked different to the SS they had thus far seen. Looking out through the bars of a veritable prison transport truck, Naomi saw long-coated grey figures in steel helmets, with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. They looked like fighter versions of the SS tormentors she had already, in the space of one night come to know too well.

Barbed wire is a cruel visage. A threatening deterrent to the outside world, and a bald statement of malice to any and all trapped within its confines. As the truck rolled on, and the green countryside began to recede, the perimeter of their destination came into view, and Naomi shuddered to see the spiked barbs. Once within the confines of the outer perimeter, the road stretched on until the grass stopped entirely, and lumpy, ugly military-style buildings loomed into view, behind more fencing topped by evil spikes.

The paddy wagon paused before a closed gate, with
Arbeit Macht Frei
adorning the entry.
Work makes free
, she translated in her mind, and a chill ran down her spine. Her memory was jogged unpleasantly, with little persuasion. It was the same sign as at Dachau.

One of the guards standing sentient came to check the driver’s papers. These men were clad in the more familiar SS garb.

An SS man with the blank collar patch grinned at the assembled group of ragged prisoners, most of whom bore some signs of physical abuse.

“Welcome home, asocials. This is your natural habitat.”

He glanced out of both windows, at the partitioned sections lined with barrack huts. Around half of them seemed to be populated, Naomi surmised. Thin, unsmiling figures in ashen-grey and black striped pyjamas. It was like a scene from the wartime propaganda newsreel at the cinema; the images seared into her memory, the visions of her darkest dreams.

“Welcome to Catterick Konzentrationslager.”

The transport shuddered to a juttering halt.

“Out! Get out, now!” a guard shouted coarsely, banging the floor of the transport as the door swung open. Rough hands shoved the forlorn group out onto the asphalt, including the silent children.

The same guard barked at them, pacing restlessly in his polished jackboots. His uniform, too, slightly differed from the SD.

“It means Death’s Head,” one of the prisoners had whispered to her. “Those pirate logos they wear at the German camps. If we see the skull and crossbones on their tops we are as good as dead.”

But apart from the peaked caps, that insignia was nowhere to be seen. The guards in whose care they were so rudely deposited shared the blank collar patch, or sported the small SS lightning runes. Even in her fear, she noted how perverse it was that she was glad to see that hated symbol.

A tall guard with a duelling scar sliced across his right cheek towered over them, as he grimly led them into internment. The ‘SD’ diamond was on his sleeve, but all eyes were focused on the riding whip he carried that swung past the holstered luger pistol at his hip. Behind her, Naomi heard the older couple with young children praying quietly for deliverance and guidance from the Lord.

Naomi doubted He was listening.

They passed through a makeshift reception and front office building, where they were signed in and registered at the camp with the correct paperwork, and then led down an obscenely bright corridor that stunk of disinfectant to a shower area. Two guards stood sentinel at the door.

“Get undressed, clothes off!” the guard that had led them from reception barked. His voice echoed in an eerily quiet building.

“Why is this necessary?” came a scared, male voice that Naomi identified as from Barnsley, or south Yorkshire. It was as though fear had made him speak clearly, with no trace of the heavy regional dialect or usual glottal stops. The effect of fear changes people.

“Get undressed,” the guard screamed.

“What for!” was the return cry from the family, and the small children began to sob loudly, terrified out of their wits.

Noting the potent mix of fear and despair that could escalate, one of the SS guarding the doors stepped in to pacify the situation.

“Do not worry! You are to be deloused. We must delouse you in order for you to enter the camp. You are to wash, and change into the designated clothing prescribed you as per your entry into Protective Custody!”

The wailing stopped. The first guard quickly seized the initiative over the people in his ward, his red face bulging in turmoil like a swollen puff adder ready to strike.

“Get undressed! And the children! Remove their clothing!”

In a huddle of confusion, the transport of twelve prisoners brought from Leeds of which Naomi was part was soon joined with two others, and almost forty scared, naked and helpless people soon crowded into the showers, with the men separated into an adjacent room.

The buzz of frightened murmurs grew steadily louder.

“What’s going on,” a scared girl of perhaps twenty whispered to Naomi, who, similarly wide-eyed, had no answer to give.

The horrendous screaming that ensued almost burst their eardrums. Freezing cold water burst from the pipes and drenched the huddle of terrified prisoners, before dying out as quickly as it had started, with several final belching spurts of ejaculated ice water, finally draining away to leave a shivering huddle of frightened women and children, trembling in the metallic, icy room.

The great metal door at the other side of the room swung open with a great groaning creak, to reveal a blonde female guard. Naomi noted the ‘pirate’s logo’ she’d been warned about, and voiced a silent prayer.

“Everybody out! This way!” the small German woman roared, the noise belying her relatively small frame.

They filed out, and were given striped pyjamas in the next room.
How dehumanising
, Naomi thought. A uniform of dirty pyjamas. She noted with horror that hers were stained with what looked horribly like blood, on one of the rough and frayed sleeve hems. It was too small for her, and its cloth quickly irritated her cold, wet skin.

Onwards they marched, through corridors whose smell strongly reminded Naomi of St. James’ Hospital. She glanced into the rooms they passed, seeing much the same thing; piles of rings, jewellery, brooches and the like; mounds of valuables and clothes were stacked. The whole building looked like a giant processing unit for personal items.
And what of their owners
, she thought.
What of the people
to whom these items once belonged
?

Finally, the disorientated group were frogmarched out back into the sunlight, to a segregated barrack huts area separated by a barbed wire fence. Several makeshift guard towers were dotted along the wire at intervals, obviously designed in a hurry and reachable via ladder cut into the wood.

They approached a large, fleshy figure, built like a bull squeezed into an SS uniform, stood waiting in the area in front of the two accommodation blocks, spaced roughly one hundred metres apart. To his back, miserable prisoners scattered around were watching quietly. That was the scary part, Naomi decided, glumly. How broken they appear.
Inanimate dolls; a parody of human life in all its possibility
.

A black-clad figure, the officer wore standard SS field uniform, but sported the older greatcoat of black wool. It gave him the menacing appearance of the ‘Blackshirt’ of nightmares; the original SS, the first ‘Schwarze Korps’ of infamy that came to be feared throughout Germany as the elite armed bearers of Hitler’s will. He stood planted, possessed of some great suppressed malevolence, with the predatory air of a vicious carnivore waiting to pounce. The tall guard strode over to him, saluting smartly.

“Heil Hitler!”

The man almost lazily raised his own arm, first into a Hitler salute then, as though he’d changed his mind halfway through the manoeuvre, flicked his wrist back, in the style of the Führer, Adolf Hitler himself, acknowledging cheering crowds.

“Very well, Hauptscharführer. Line them,” he ordered in a low growl.

“
Jawohl
, Brigadeführer Globocnik.”

Odilo Globocnik nodded, and the junior officer organised the new internees into nine rows of four.
I look forward to returning to Poland
, Globocnik thought.
To be the
leader
. ‘Jawohl, SS und Polizeiführer’. No chance of being called that here. That bastard Jew Heydrich
.
Reichsprotektor Moses Handel
. Fucking yid kike
bastard
.

Still, he knew the prestige of the role in Britain. And as the Jew had promised him, it was all in preparation.
Himmler
, Heydrich assured him,
has a special role for you in the east, Globus. I think it will suit your temperament. Use your time in Britain well. I shall be watching.

Slippery fucking kike
, he mused.

Globocnik raised his hand.

“Jews and criminal subversives,” he began, his voice a guttural rasp of coarse German, each syllable steeped in a low, resonating anger, much like Hitler’s. The tall guard repeated his sentences in English for the benefit of the prisoners.

“… This is
Konzentrationslager Catterick
. Here you will find out the real meaning of work, and the danger of opposing the Greater Reich. Some of you,” he grinned nastily, “will not survive your stay with us. Works makes you free, but redemption does not come easy…”

Globocnik hawked up a great blob of phlegm as the translator repeated his little speech, and spat it into the thin grey dust of the asphalt, only a metre of so from Naomi’s feet. He was already bored with the rigmarole; merely trying to lead by example as the new system went through its infancy.

“Women and children on this side. Men over there,” he snapped.

The rows of four were obliged to approach Globocnik, whose pallid face glowered, his great coat billowing in the wind, framed against the sun like a Gothic vampire; a devilish incarnation of Dracula, or some kind of Dickensian villain. The big man oozed thinly veiled malevolence, and Naomi shuddered to the core as she searched his fleshy, brutal face for human qualities. None were evident.

The prisoners were separated as they neared Globocnik, split by gender into the two hut areas. As it came to the family’s turn, the screaming mother refused to be parted from her boys, until the SS waded in with their truncheons and forcibly parted them. Even in her own despair, Naomi winced at the screams. She looked down at her own feet as the terrible ordeal was worsened by Globocnik’s hungry, lingering gaze as he took her in, as a wolf would a sheep.

The family were separated by a double fence of barbed wire.
The cruellest thing of all
, Naomi thought, as she sized up the segregation boundary
is that it’s only just too wide a gap to be able to touch
.
Agonisingly out of physical reach, by the smallest margin
. The SS were, evidently, masters in psychological torture.