Harry Turtledove - The Man with the Iron Heart

“Hey, babe,” he said, more anxiety than he usually showed in his voice. “It’ll be okay, right?”

“Sure, Ed.” She might have been soothing little Stan. How? she wondered again.

“You did what you set out to do. I’m proud of you,” Ed said.

“I just wish I’d never set out to do it. I wish I’d never had to,” Diana said. And that was nothing but the truth. If Pat were alive…But he wasn’t, and he never would be. She started to cry. She’d been doing that a lot lately. Ed took her in his arms. He thought he knew all the reasons he was soothing her.

Lou Weissberg was taking papers out of filing cabinets and stuffing then into boxes when Howard Frank came in to see how he was doing. Lou was glad for the chance to stop for a couple of minutes. “Last man out of Germany-is me, or maybe you,” he said.

Major Frank winced. “It’s not quite that bad,” he said.

“Close enough, goddammit,” Lou said. “A garrison in Berlin. A few air bases and a little bit of armor-just enough to make the Red Army think twice about marching in…if we’re very, very lucky. Not enough to hold down the goddamn fanatics, and fat chance we’ll ever bring any guys back to take care of that.”

“The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats say they can whip the Nazis in any halfway honest election. The German police say they can fight the bastards off. They get a lot of the equipment we’re leaving behind,” Frank insisted.

“Yeah, all the other parties were so wonderful at stopping Hitler in 1933, too,” Lou said, which made his friend flinch again. “And how many German cops still get up on their hind legs and whinny every time they hear the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ ?”

“Some, sure. Not too many. I hope.” Major Frank spread his hands. “We’ve done the best we could, considering….”

“Yeah. Considering.” Lou made an ordinary word sound extraordinarily foul.

“Unless you want to stay here as a civilian, we’re heading for home day after tomorrow,” Frank said. “In its infinite wisdom, Congress has decided that’s the best thing-the very best thing-the United States can do.”

“Oh, yeah. Every fucking American Jew ever born is dying to be a civilian in Germany. Dying is just what I’d do here, you bet.” Lou’s loud opinion of Congress and its infinite wisdom would have got him shot for treason in any totalitarian country-and in about half the democracies currently in business, too.

All Howard Frank did was sadly wag an index finger and say, “Naughty, naughty.” A moment later, he added, “You must be slipping, man. I’ve called those assholes way worse than that.”

“Well, goody for you,” Lou said. “You gonna resign your commission after we get back to the States?”

This time, Major Frank looked genuinely sorrowful. He nodded anyway. “Yeah. After we go and do this, I don’t see any point to staying in. You?”

“Same here,” Lou said. “Back to my family, back to teaching English, back to being a civilian. And I’ll spend the rest of my days hoping I can live out the rest of my days before things blow up again, know what I mean?”

“Don’t I wish I didn’t!” Frank exclaimed. “Now that you’ve cheered me up, I’ll go back and cram more of my crap into boxes. The records will all be on file-if anybody ever bothers to look at ’em.”

“Yeah,” Lou said. “If.”

Two days later, trucks and halftracks pulled up in front of the commandeered Nuremberg hotel to take departing soldiers and the paperwork of an occupation gone bad north to the sea, and to the ships waiting to carry them across the Atlantic. Outside the building, Lou smoked a last cigarette and shot the shit with one of the German gendarmes who’d be taking over the place once the Americans were gone. Rolf was a pretty good guy. He’d been a corporal during the war-but Wehrmacht, not Waffen -SS. In his dyed-black U.S. fatigues and American helmet, he looked nothing like a German soldier. So Lou tried to tell himself, anyhow.

“We will miss you when you go,” the gendarme said. “You are the only thing standing between us and chaos.”

“You guys will do fine on your own,” Lou answered. You always reassured a sickroom patient, even-especially-when you didn’t think he’d make it.

“I fear the new parties will not have the moral authority they need to oppose the old order,” Rolf said. “I fear we-the police-will not have the weapons to hold back the fanatics.”

“Sure you will,” said Lou, who feared the very same things. Somebody yelled at him from a halftrack. He cussed under his breath, then handed Rolf what was left of the pack of Chesterfields. “Good luck to you, my friend.”

“Danke schon!” The gendarme happily pocketed the smokes. Lou trotted over to the halftrack and clambered up and in. The CIC convoy, protected not only by armored cars but also by Sherman tanks, rumbled away from the hotel, away from Nuremberg-and, soon, away from Germany.

Rolf Halbritter coughed from the dust the retreating convoy kicked up. He shook his head in wonder not far from awe. The Amis were really and truly going-no, really and truly gone.

Which meant…He had a badge pinned on the underside of his collar, where it didn’t show. Now he could wear it openly again. It was round, with a red outer ring that carried a legend in bronze letters: NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHE ARBEITERPARTEI. The white inner circle held a black swastika. Every Party member had one just like it. Pretty soon, they’d all be showing it, too.

There really was a German resistance movement after V-E Day. It was never very effective; it got off to a very late start, as the Nazis took much longer than they might have to realize they weren’t going to win the straight-up war. And it was hamstrung because the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Luftwaffe, and the Nazi Party all tried to take charge of it-which often meant that, for all practical purposes, no one took charge of it. By 1947, it had mostly petered out. Perry Biddiscombe’s two important books, Werewolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946 (Toronto: 1998) and The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 (Stroud, Gloucestershire and Charleston, S.C.: 2000) document what it did and failed to do in the real world.

I have tried to imagine circumstances under which the German resistance might have been much more effective. The Man with the Iron Heart is the result. In the real world, of course, the attack on Reinhard Heydrich that failed in this novel succeeded. Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were the assassins. They both killed themselves under attack by the SS on 18 June 1942. The SS also wiped the Czech village of Lidice off the map in revenge for Heydrich’s murder. A good recent biography of Heydrich is Mario R. Dederichs (Geoffrey Brooks, translator), Heydrich: The Face of Evil (London and St. Paul: 2006).

How would we have dealt with asymmetrical warfare had we met it in the 1940s in Europe rather than in the 1960s in Vietnam or in the present decade in Iraq? Conversely, how would the Soviets have dealt with it? I have no certain answers-by the nature of this kind of speculation, one can’t come up with certain answers. Sometimes-as here, I hope-posing the questions is interesting and instructive all by itself.

German nuclear physicists really were brought to England for interrogation and then returned to Germany as described here. And the Germans really did leave ten grams of radium behind in Hechingen. Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, N.Y.: 1996) is the indispensable source for the episode. To this day, no one seems to know what became of the radium.