Robert Adams - Horses of the North

“Prior to his very precipitate departure from Paris and the French court, Monsieur le Comte first sent bravos to kill me, next notified certain sworn and deadly enemies as to my current whereabouts and finally, all else having failed, endeavored to have me taken by the Holy Office for examination on a charge of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. This last meant that I, perforce, had to depart the court and city and country in some haste myself; but it was as well that I did so then, for within a very short time the rabble of peasants and artisans had arisen and were soaking France in the blood of the better classes, finally even murdering their hereditary king.

“Late in the nineteenth century, I became a physician and surgeon, and I was practicing this profession in Munich in the years after the First World War when I happened to meet the second of our kind, who then was leading a small political party made up mostly of former soldiers. I was able to teach him much concerning himself and how best to use his powerful mind to sway masses of people.

“He had wonderful dreams and plans for his party and his nation and his race. Had destiny allowed for him more time to prepare properly the ground, to lay firmly the foundations of his new and much better order, to draw about him a corps of capable, effective men rather than the flawed fanatics with whom he found himself burdened, then who knows how very grand and great an edifice he might have built for Germany and the world.

“But, alas, circumstances over which he had no control forced his hand, compelled him to launch prematurely portions of his grand design which should have incubated for much longer. And, slipping into a degree of overconfidence bred from his early successes as much as by the lavish praise of the sycophants then surrounding him, he plunged onward, disregarding my advice and even the warnings of his own reasoning abilities.

“As if overextending a finite military were not enough, he allowed certain frothing, fanatic lunatics to destroy certain irreplaceable resources that might, properly utilized, have even so late given him victory. With a wild abandon, henchmen of these fanatics turned potential laborers into corpses, made of would-be allies sworn enemies, even went so far as to cause battles to be lost and German soldiers to die needlessly in order to misuse the rail transport to their own lunatic ends, hauling Jews off to the slaughter, rather than munitions and supplies to the fighting fronts.

“Heinrich Himmler had always hated me and deeply envied my behind-the-scenes influence on my protégé, and after the try to blow up the Fuhrer failed so disastrously, Himmler accused me of being implicated and ordered my arrest. I fled Berlin and, after assuming the identity of a fellow surgeon who had died only the day before in an air raid on Magdeburg, I used his Soldbuch and orders to get me to the Western Front, then arranged to be captured by the American army, which presented no great difficulty in my unit’s sector, so fluid was the front then become.

“The medical officer of the Wehrmacht I was become—one Hauptmann Klaus Rudolf von Klippe—was well treated by his initial captors, only cursorily questioned by a tired, overworked intelligence officer who spoke very poor German, worse French and most ungrammatical English. After many weeks of waiting and of traveling, Hauptmann von Klippe arrived at Camp Trinidad, Colorado, U. S. A., and he there remained until quite late in the year of 1946, practicing his profession (for which he was paid by the U. S. Department of Defense), living quite comfortably and eating better than most any German then still in Germany.

“Repatriated to Germany in 1947, Hauptmann von Klippe disappeared, ceased to exist, which was not at all a difficult thing or an unusual occurrence in the Germany of those bleak days of defeat and national dismemberment.

“I then lived in Switzerland for a short while after I had claimed and taken possession of certain funds from a numbered account established years before in anticipation of just such a contingency. Then, by way of contacts in the Vatican, I made my way to South America, supposedly one Hauptsturmführer Alois Schmidt, but traveling under the passport of Karl Herbert Bucher provided by the Vatican.

“Friend Milo, I know that many people thought that the Fuhrer actually survived the debacle of the defeat of die Dritten Deutschen Reich, that he faked his death and escaped to Spain or to South America as did so many others, but I do not, cannot, so believe and I possess the very best of bases for my lack of belief.

“You see, I became connected with the ODESSA network, and I traveled all over South and Central America, as well as to Spain, Portugal, the Near East and parts of Africa, on their behalf, and if he had been in hiding I would surely have found him, for no matter how he might have had his physical attributes changed, he could not have changed his mental makeup, and that I would have instantly recognized.

“Oh, yes, we are most difficult to kill. Mere cyanide or a bullet in the brain would not have accomplished the purpose. But, because we know ourselves, a suicide would have been very easy and could have been accomplished most painlessly, as well. Even so long ago, there were drugs available which might have been used by trained personnel in such a way as to have frozen the action of the lungs for sufficient time to cause the organism to run out of oxygen and so die. Then a trusted associate could have fired a bullet into the head and the body could have been borne up to ground level, soaked with petrol and burned.

“This would, of course, have required complete cooperation on the Fuhrer’s part, but I think that his despondency at the foiling of all his plans and hopes and aspirations nurtured for so very long might have rendered him suicidal, knowing his mind as well as I did. Other causative factors might have been the announced intentions of his friend Josef Goebbels to take not only his own life but those of Frau Goebbels and all of his children, the deaths or desertions of so many men he had liked and trusted over the years and last, but far from least, the unhealthy influence of the Braun woman, who was at best a borderline manic-depressive personality and harbored suicidal tendencies almost constantly. She never was good for him, but he would hear no scintilla of her true nature from anyone, no matter how close or sincere.

“In 1975, I entered Germany on a tourist visa as an Uruguayan citizen, traveled on in slow, leisurely stages to Switzerland and drew upon my last untouched account. With these funds, I returned again to Germany and, through certain persons, was able to purchase a new identity as a citizen of the Federal Republic and a physician.

“Then, in 1980, I took advantage of the shortage of medical practitioners in the United States of America, emigrated and married an American-born woman of Germanic descent. Nurturing pleasant memories of my so-enjoyed and most comfortable captivity in Colorado, I moved there and set up a practice in an affluent suburb of Denver. It so happened that my wife and I were looking over investment property in Wyoming when the missiles were launched and Denver died.

“As I am certain that you recall, friend Milo, ‘chaotic’ is a very mild term for the two weeks that followed the War, and in the interests of simple safety for my wife if for no other reason, I decided to remain in our hotel suite in Casper rather than try to make it back to who knew what in my home area.

“Then those horrible, deadly plagues began, killing ninety-five or ninety-six out of every hundred who contracted them, and I, like every other person with even a soupcon of medical training or experience, was desperately needed in the overflowing hospitals and makeshift wards in commandeered buildings. My dear wife, Brigitte, had been a registered nurse when I met and wedded her, and she insisted on joining me in my labors despite the risk.