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Breslau, not a reporter at all.
I am sick and tired,he wrote,of inaccuracies that blacken the history of the Reichand the heroic deeds of our ancestors. Why men who were not there to see them now presume to cast judgment is beyond me. We should be grateful for what our ancestors accomplished. Without their heroism, Jewish Communists in Russia and Jewish capitalists in England and the United States would have swallowed up the whole world between them.
"Well, well," Willi said. "Looks like the other shoe just dropped, doesn't it?"
"You might say that," Heinrich replied. "Yes, you just might say that. Someone didn't like Stolle's speech, did he?"
"Not very much," Willi said. They both spoke of the article elliptically and in understatements. That was the best way to play down how frightening it was.
Heinrich read on with a detached, horrified fascination: the sort of fascination he would have given to a really nasty traffic accident on the other side of the road.The whole business of repression has been blown out of proportion in some younger men's heads, Dr. Jahnke declared.It overshadows any objective analysis of the past. Hitler may have made mistakes, but no one else could have readied the Reichfor the great struggle against Bolshevism. Anyone who thinks he can deny this suffers from ideological confusion and has lost his political bearings.
Jahnke wasn't afraid to name the Gauleiter of Berlin, saying,Rolf Stolle, in his arrogance, departs substantially from the accepted principles of National Socialism. And, he went on,other leaders try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present. He didn't name Heinz Buckliger, but he came close.
There is an internal process in this country and abroad,the doctor from Breslau thundered,that seeks to falsify the truths of National Socialism. Too many ignore the world-historical mission of the Volkand its role in the National Socialist movement. I, for one, can never forsake my ideals under any pretext.
When Heinrich finished the piece, he let out a small, tuneless whistle. Beside him, Willi nodded heavily, as if he'd just done a good job of summing things up. "Who?" Heinrich said. "Who would have the nerve to publish such a thing?"
"Why, you see for yourself," Willi answered. "He's a doctor from Breslau. That gives him the right to say anything he pleases."
"Quatsch,"Heinrich said, and then several things a great deal more pungent than that. "Do you notice how carefully this was timed? Think it's an accident that it shows up in the Beobachter when Buckliger's out of the country?"
"Just a coincidence," Willi said airily. "What else could it possibly be? They got this letter, and an assistant editor liked it, and so…" He couldn't go on, not with a straight face. He started to snort, and then to giggle. Any junior man who published an inflammatory-to say nothing of reactionary-piece like this without getting it cleared from on high would shortly thereafter wish he'd never been born.
"If you want to talk sense now, let's try it again." Heinrich unconsciously lowered his voice, as people did when they spoke of dangerous things. "Who?"
Willi leaned toward him and whispered in his ear: "Prutzma
That made much more sense than Heinrich wished it did. If Lothar Prutzma
"We'll see what happens when Buckliger comes home, that's all," Willi said. "If he lets this ride…" He didn't go on, or need to. If the Fuhrer accepted a rebuke like this, any hope of change was dead, and things would go on as they always had. If Buckliger didn't accept it, though…If he didn't accept it, things were liable to get very interesting very fast.
The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi went up to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Whenever Heinrich saw somebody carrying a Volkischer Beobachter, he tried to eavesdrop. How were Berliners taking this? For that matter, how were people in Breslau and Bo
He heard only two snatches of conversation, both from people going down escalators as he was going up past them. One was "-damn fool-" and the other "-about time-"…and both could have meant anything or nothing. So much for eavesdropping.
Nobody on the bus out of South Station seemed to be talking about "Enough Is Enough." That might have been out of a sense of self-preservation; people on that bus were heading for the beating heart of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. Or it might just have been to drive Heinrich crazy. He wouldn't have been surprised.
When he got off in front of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, he looked across Adolf Hitler Platz to the Fuhrer 's palace. Buckliger wasn't there now, of course. But if he didn't already have a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter, he would soon. What he did after that would say a lot about who ran the Reich.
As usual, Heinrich and Willi gave the guards at the top of the stairs their identification cards. One of the guards said, "We'll see if Stolle wants the blackshirts standing watch over him after what's in today's papers."
"Would you?" Willi asked. The guard waited till the card showed green on the machine reader, then shook his head.
That aspect of things hadn't occurred to Heinrich until then. If he were Rolf Stolle, would he want Prutzma
Ilse was on the telephone when Heinrich and Willi walked into their big office. She hung up a moment later, her face flushed with excitement. "The Gauleiter is taking me out to lunch today! Me! Can you believe it? Isn't it amazing?"
Heinrich didn't say anything. Willi said, "Amazing," in tones suggesting the only thing along those lines to delight him more would have been an outbreak of bubonic plague. Ilse might not even have noticed his gloom. Next to Rolf Stolle, a budget analyst wasn't amazing at all.
How would Willi handle that? Heinrich sat down, got to work, and watched his friend from the corner of his eye. Willi sat there and fumed: so openly that Heinrich wondered if the office smoke detectors would start buzzing. If Stolle came to pick Ilse up, he might need protection against more than Lothar Prutzma
But the Gauleiter of Berlin didn't come in person. And the men who did take Ilse off to whatever rendezvous Stolle had set up weren't the blackshirted guards who'd accompanied him on his last visit to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. They wore the gray uniforms of ordinary Berlin policemen, men much more likely to follow Stolle than Prutzma
Willi's worries, of course, were personal. Heinrich's were more on the order of,If the SS tries to assassinate Stolle, could those fellows keep him safe? Only one answer sprang to mind-how the devil do I know?
Ilse came back from lunch very, very late, with a big bouquet of roses in her arms and schnapps on her breath. She giggled a lot and didn't do much work the rest of the afternoon. Somehow, Heinrich doubted Rolf Stolle had spent their time together talking about how to reform National Socialism.