Christopher Reich - The Runner

“We are a divided people,” said Weber, picking up the baton. Dressed in a severe black suit, monocle in his eye, he was the embodiment of his native Prussia. “The Allies have split the country into four zones of occupation. The British have taken the Ruhr and the north. The French, the Rhineland and Saar. The Americans control the center from Bavaria to Niedersachsen, and the Russians have stolen the east.”

“Our industry is in ruins,” continued Schnitzel. “Frankfurt, Cologne, Mannheim — all leveled. Young Bach here lost seventy of his ninety plants. Sixty percent of his production capability wiped out.” A short, white-haired man who had lost his right leg at the Somme in 1916, Schnitzel wore his crutches and neatly pinned trousers more proudly than any medal. Friends and enemies alike knew him as “the Stork”. “I’m hardly better off. Fifty-five percent of my factories have been damaged beyond repair.”

“But salvageable,” added Weber. “None of our companies have been forced to stop production completely. Give us five years and we can bring our output back to what it was before the war. The key to the revival of Germany is the re-building of our industry.”

“If we are permitted to do so,” said Egon. “The Allies have forbidden us to reconstruct our plants. They want to dismantle the forges, blast furnaces and steel works that survived the war and cart them off to France and England, even, God forbid, to Russia. A crew of American engineers is scheduled to dismantle our 15,000-ton press next week. They’ll probably ship the damn thing to New Jersey and use it to make guns for their battleships.”

Perched on the edge of his seat, Seyss listened with a rapt silence. The recounting of his country’s pillage stoked his anger as a breeze fans a fire. And though he said nothing, his mind was churning. What could be so important that Weber and Schnitzel had risked arrest to see him? Why this lengthy preamble? Why the persuasive pitch to their voices, the pleading gleam to their eyes? There was no need to convince him. He was a soldier. He did what he was told.

He’d imagined that he’d been summoned from Garmisch to help a Kamerad escape the country — Bormann, perhaps Eichmann, maybe even the Fuhrer. There were rumors Hitler was alive, that the corpses in the Reich Chancellery belonged to his double and Eva Braun’s sister. Clearly that wasn’t the case. The conversation was more concerned with the state of the economy than any military objective. Confused, he was left with the same question as when he’d jumped into the back of Egon’s Mercedes nearly twenty-four hours earlier. What did they have in store for him?

“Rumor has it they’re going to flood the coal mines,” Weber was saying. “Send our soldiers to France as forced labor.”

“A permanent end to our war-making ability,” lamented Schnitzel. “Germany is to become a pastoral state, an agrarian economy.”

“Think of Denmark,” said Egon. “Without Tivoli Gardens.” Standing, he walked to a side table where a scale model of Grosse Gertie , the Bach’s monstrous two hundred millimeter cannon, rested. He picked up the field gun, admiring it from every angle as if it were a Faberge egg. “The Allies have confiscated our weaponry. It is against the law for a German to possess so much as a sidearm. We’re not even allowed the keep the grease from our stoves, lest we use it to manufacture explosives. We will be left nothing with which to defend ourselves.”

Weber plucked the monocle from his eye. “And that, Herr Seyss, is our problem. We haven’t gathered here today to bemoan our financial losses. We have larger issues at heart. Look around you. The Americans are withdrawing their troops from our country and sending them to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan. The war has bankrupted the British. There’s an election in a few weeks’ time and talk is Churchill is for the dung heap. You can imagine where that will leave us and our agrarian economy.”

Seyss nodded, quick to draw his own inferences.

“You’ve fought against the Russians,” said Egon. “What do you think Mr Stalin will do with the tanks and cannons which now line the Elbe? Do you think he will send them back to Mother Russia? Of course not. He will move them to our border and he will wait. He will wait for the Americans to go home and for the British to withdraw. He will wait until our factories are no more and our presses are dismantled and the lot of us are in the fields milking Holsteins and tending flocks of sheep with our thumbs up our agrarian asses. That is what he will do. And then he will attack. I give him two days until he is at the Rhine.”

Weber lectured Seyss with the butt of his monocle, his voice crackling with a fevered intensity. “Today we live as a conquered people. But the Americans are like us. They are not an evil race. Each day, they work to make sure we have enough to eat and that our sewers no longer back up and that we can have a few hours of electricity. The Bolsheviks are not cut from the same cloth. They are from the east. Untermenschen . Sub-humans. The descendants of Genghis Khan. It would be better to die than to submit to their will!”

Weber sounded like an editorial from Der Sturmer, thought Seyss. Unfortunately, everything he said was true.

“I agree that Stalin is a bastard,” Seyss burst out, no longer able to bottle his frustration. “I agree that the dismantling of our industrial capacity poses a grave threat to our nation’s ability to defend itself. And that we cannot permit our mines to be flooded. But, gentlemen, what do you wish me to do about it? I am a soldier, not a politician. Tell me to take an enemy ridge, I can assemble my men, put together a plan, and attack. Ask me to convince the Americans not to make Germany an agrarian state, I don’t know how I can help.”

“The two aren’t as far removed as you might think,” said Weber, eyes bright.

Egon Bach lifted a calming hand. “We understand your confusion. Just hear us out. At first, we, too, were skeptical as to our ability to color the final outcome. But the situation is too important to let fate run its course unchallenged.”

“Then tell me what you want me to do.” Despite its size, the room was beginning to close in upon him. A pallor of smoke hung in the air. Even with bulbs burning in four lamps, the shelter seemed to be growing dimmer and dimmer.

Egon raised both hands in front of him, patting the air. “In due time, Erich. In due time.” Seyss sat ramrod straight. He knew the longer the preface, the more dangerous the mission. Sachlichkeit , he whispered, drawing a heavy breath.Discipline.

“Thirteen years ago, my father convened a group of gentlemen unhappy with the complexion of German politics,” said Egon. “The depression had silenced our country’s factories. Our own firm was on the verge of collapse. Father’s guests shared the same bleak prospects. Krupp. Thyssen. Rocher. Men who had constructed the steel works, rolling mills, foundries, and shipyards that power our nation.”

Egon paused, sweeping his owl’s head to look each man in the eye. He was a mesmerizing little creep, Seyss would give him that much.

“Father recognized that only one man could save them. Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. Hitler would rearm the nation and lead us to war. And though war wasn’t a pleasant prospect, as a businessman, he recognized it was the only solution to their problems. But in November of 1932, the Nazi party was in danger of collapse. They had lost thirty-five seats to the communists in the most recent elections. Worse, they were all but bankrupt. Goering came to Father and confided that without an immediate cash infusion the party would be unable to pay the mountain of bills it had run up in the election. A failure to meet their obligations would be catastrophic. Ernst Roehm and his storm troopers were threatening to rebel and throw Hitler out. If that happened, President Hindenburg would have no choice but to seek a chancellor from the left. An entente with the communists was even possible, God forbid.