Christopher Nuttall - Ragnarok

…And so did he.

A pair of stormtroopers seemed to materialise out of nowhere. Hennecke had been so absorbed in himself that he hadn’t seen them coming. The two men looked absolutely perfect; their uniforms clean and tidy, their boots and buttons shined until they almost glowed, their faces utterly impassive. It was clear that they had never seen combat.

“Take this swinehund to the pen and hold him there,” the Sturmbannführer ordered.

Hennecke had no time to protest before the two stormtroopers frisked him — removing his pistol, his knife and a handful of tools — and then frog-marched him through the concealed camp. It was larger than he realised, he saw; a dozen tents, all carefully hidden under netting and guarded by SS stormtroopers. One tent was clearly set aside for the wounded; he glanced inside, ignoring the grunt of complaint from his escorts, and winced as he saw thirty men lying on the hard ground. A pair of medics were doing what they could, assisted by five young women, but it was clear that they were badly overworked…

He stared in horror until his escorts yanked him forward. He was no stranger to blood and gore, but the sight before him was horrific. Men had lost arms and legs, their bodies hideously mutilated… even if they were somehow rushed to better medical facilities, their chances of ever living a normal life again were slim. It made him realise just how many men might have been killed by their own side — a mercy kill — or left to bleed out and die during the retreat. The medics had strict orders — standing orders — to concentrate on the soldiers who could be saved. There wouldn’t be anything, not even morphine, for the ones who had no hope of survival.

And some of the ones left to die could have lived, with proper treatment , he thought.

His escorts kept dragging him forward until they reached the pen, a small region fenced off and guarded by armed stormtroopers. It didn’t look very secure — Hennecke was sure he could escape, easily — but he knew better than to try. The stormtroopers guarding the fence wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him down if they caught him trying to escape — and no one, least of all their superiors, would give a damn. Hennecke was an embarrassment. It was quite possible that he’d be taken out and shot within the next hour. Or perhaps they’d just slit his throat.

There’s probably a shortage of bullets , he thought, morbidly.

He glanced at his fellow prisoners as his escorts thrust him into the pen, then marched off to torment someone else. A number of soldiers — he was still the highest-ranking, he noticed — a trio of older men in civilian clothes and a pair of young women. He wondered, as he found a space on the ground, why they were being detained. If they were insurgents — or whatever one called treacherous rebels — they would have been shot already. Maybe they were just hostages for someone’s good behaviour. Neither of them seemed inclined to talk to him or anyone else.

There was nothing to do inside the pen, so he lay down on the hard ground and closed his eyes. He’d long-since mastered the art of sleeping whenever he had a spare moment, even though the ground was uncomfortable and there was a very real prospect of being shot by his own side. But it still felt as if he hadn’t slept at all when he was woken by the guards, who escorted him and the other soldier prisoners out of the pen and down to where a grim-faced Brigadeführer was standing. He honestly wasn’t sure how long he’d slept.

“You cowards fled,” the Brigadeführer snapped. His gaze raked over the prisoners, cold and hard and utterly devoid of mercy. “You could have fought. You could have organised yourselves. You could have given the rebels a bloody nose. Instead, you fled.”

Hennecke resisted the urge to say something in his own defence. There was nothing he could say. The SS was looking for scapegoats. And if they’d chosen him…

“You should be dispatched to the camps,” the Brigadeführer added. “But we have need of you here. You’ll be assigned to a penal unit instead. If you survive…”

Hennecke barely heard the rest of the speech. He’d heard horror stories about penal units. A soldier who was assigned to one would be allowed to return to his unit — his record wiped — if he survived a month in the penal unit…

…But the odds of survival were very low.

It might not matter , he told himself. In the distance, he heard thunder — or shellfire. The odds of any of us surviving are very low .

Germanica (Moscow), Germany East

29 October 1985

They had lost.

To lose was unthinkable, but they had lost.

No , Karl Holliston told himself, firmly. We have not lost. We have merely suffered a setback .

He sat in his office and studied the map on the wall. It was updated every hour on the hour by his staff, but he didn’t need the updates to know it told a tale of disaster. The Waffen-SS , the most powerful fighting force on the planet, was retreating from Berlin, pursued by the panzers of the treacherous Heer . A handful of units, he’d been told, were fighting a rearguard action, but there was no point in trying to make a stand until the SS was well away from Berlin. Entire formations had been shattered, first by the meatgrinder of Berlin and then by the enemy counterattack. Putting the Waffen-SS back together would take weeks , perhaps months. Karl was all too aware that he didn’t have months.

Winter is coming , he thought, grimly. That will buy us some time, at least .

He glared down at his hands. He’d been a child during the great conquests, back when the panzers had captured Moscow and pushed the borders of the Reich all the way to the Urals, but he’d heard stories. His time as Himmler’s aide had given him a chance to hear stories his boss had never heard. Men freezing in their uniforms, panzers and their supporting units breaking down because of the cold, even personal weapons failing because it was just too damn cold. The Waffen-SS had learned a great many lessons about fighting in the extreme cold over the last forty years. But far too many Heer units knew them too.

The office was massive, easily large enough for a hundred men. But he was alone. He knew, all too well, that his position had been badly weakened. No one gave a damn what the ordinary citizen thought — and the average citizen of Germany East was solidly behind the Waffen-SS — but his military and political subordinates posed a very different problem. Karl had declared himself the Führer , the first true warlord since Adolf Hitler himself; as long as he succeeded, as long as he met no significant setbacks, his position was completely unchallengeable. No one would dare to question him…

But now he had suffered a massive setback.

He was honest enough to admit it, at least to himself. The planned reconquest of Berlin had failed, miserably. There was no way, now, to destroy the rebel government. And of thousands of stormtroopers had been killed in the fighting. It was enough to weaken the resolve of a lesser man. Karl knew, all too well, that quite a few of his subordinates were lesser men. They’d sell out to the rebels in a heartbeat if they thought they could maintain their power and position. But he could do nothing. Purging every senior officer who might pose a threat would not only weaken his command structure, it would almost certainly prompt a coup. There were too many officers, even among the loyalists, who would assume that they too were going to be purged.