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“Fly over them,” Willem ordered, “so we can look down.”
“Sir, we will be shot.”
“Fly over them, I say,” Willem shouted and brought out his pistol. “Or I will shoot you myself.”
We flew over the churning mass of tote Mä
“Good,” said Willem grimly. “Return.”
It was a safe bet that each of the tote Mä
We landed, and General Marcks himself joined us. Willem told him of the adventure and the anti-tote Mä
And it did not.
The Allies, so demoralized by the Reich’s new weapon, were unable to advance. German bombers were able to sink support craft in the cha
When I returned to Krakow in July to see my wife I still smelled of burning diesel and gunpowder. She made me bathe before I could kiss her.
The Daimler-Benz flying barges were deployed. These, I had not known about. They were gliders filled with forty or fifty tote Mä
But the Russians continued to advance. They were no less ruthless than the tote Mä
The Allied advance had not been routed as we’d hoped but only stalled as they tried to cope with their own problems. Had Germany remained the fighting force it had been at the begi
Willem created the todeskommandos. These were the last paratroopers still left in the Luftwaffe. They were infected without their knowing and dropped far behind enemy lines. Their mission was to spy on the enemy and return in two weeks’ time. Of course, they transformed in less than half that time and infected the Russians.
I refused to participate in this activity. I would not be a party to infecting unwitting German soldiers. Willem did not press me at that point though I knew a day of reckoning was coming. Knowing this, I persuaded Willem to loan me one of the Daimler-Benz engineers-preferably Joseph Bremer, a friend of Hans Braun and the engineer who had later proposed the trebuchet. I liked the way his mind worked. Willem sent him to me with the warning that something needed to be done about the Russians.
Bremer, being a mechanical rather than a chemical engineer, immediately saw solutions to the issues we had not solved. We had to maintain the environment of the worm and virus for the duration of delivery and then spray it out into the surrounding area without shredding either. Weber and I had already determined that inhaling the inoculum would not infect the host unless some portion was swallowed. The worm needed to actually enter the digestive tract to enter the blood stream. The only result from a purely pulmonary inoculation would be a sterile partial infection.
It was Bremer who devised an irritant to be added to the mixture. The irritant would not be poisonous in any way but would cause a mucous flow from the nose. The subjects would be forced to swallow. It worked in Birkenau experiments with great success.
By this time, Hitler had been sending V1’s against Britain for a few weeks. My purpose was to be able to replace the explosive in the V1 with a Todesluft canister and infect the Allies in their home territories.
Once we had the Todesluft device perfected, we approached Willem with it. Willem at once saw the possibilities but denied us the chance to try it out in a V1. Instead, he told us of a new rocket, vastly more powerful and accurate. It was to be called the V2.
The bombers over Berlin never stopped during that summer. Up until we released the tote Mä
I had thought to travel immediately to Krakow to be with Elsa. But before I could, Elsa showed up at the camp. Weber, Elsa, Helmut, and I were able to find safety in the basement of the headquarters building. I managed to locate an intact phone and called Willem to tell him where we were.
The bombing ceased in a day or so. The inmates were taken care of and we had food and water. Power was restored the following day.
Weber liked to be near us. Something profound had come undone in him. He mourned the death of his squad over and over. On the third day he accosted me out in the street as I cleaned up the front of the building.
“Could it have been the Jews?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The failure of our tote Mä
I sighed. “The tote Mä
“How can you say that? Germany is still losing the war!”
I considered responding to this. How could any single weapon ever win a war on its own? It was our failure, not any failure of the tote Mä
He ignored that. “We made tote Mä
“What would you have done instead? Made them out of Germans as Willem did?”
“I should not have been so reluctant to use Poles,” Weber said and sat on the bench, sunk in apathy.
I continued shoveling broken concrete and shards of wood out of the street.
Willem showed up that night. He was half-drunk and I was surprised he’d managed to drive all the way from Berlin. Morose and untalkative, he refused to speak until after di
“The Americans are smarter than we are.”
“Beg pardon?” I said, ready to defend German intelligence.
“It had to be the Americans. The British would not have considered it.”
“Considered what?”
Willem stared at me. “Of course. How could you know? They have been raining tote Mä
“That’s impossible. Did they drop them out of the bombers? Did they think we would be intimidated by smashed body parts?”