Ben Elton - Two Brothers

But she did not faint or die. She remained stubbornly conscious of the fact that she was on her hands and knees, head bowed searching for scraps to pick up. Praying that they would not crush her fingers on the pavement with their boots.

A voice rose above the general hubbub.

It was a passer-by, one of those who had stopped to gloat. A woman, quite smartly dressed.

‘Make them lick it,’ she shouted. ‘Make them lick the pavement.’

And the Nazi young men thought that was a wonderful idea. They must have wondered how it had not occurred to them before.

And so, under threat of further blows, the Fischer family, mother, father and daughter, bowed their heads to the flagstones and putting out their tongues began to lick.

Laughter mingled now with the jeers. Horrible, triumphant, mocking laughter. Somebody tried to start a song, the Horst Wessel Lied , of course, ubiquitous marching anthem of the SA. It was inevitable. Did they only know one song?

But the singing did not catch on this time. People were having too much fun to bother singing.

Suddenly Dagmar could bear it no longer. She leapt to her feet, blind with tears, screaming at the top of her voice, and began to run. To her surprise the storm troopers didn’t stop her, perhaps her revolt had been so sudden and her condition so hysterical that they were taken by surprise.

The crowd parted too. She was not yet fourteen, a girl in a sailor dress, wild with terror, possibly they felt pity for her. Possibly they did not wish to be infected by the progeny of subhumans. Either way, she found herself suddenly outside the crowd and running along the wide pavement past the great display windows of the store.

She could hear the sound of her shoes on the pavement. They were beautiful shoes of shiny patent leather.

It was lucky her mother had made her wear flatties. She could never have run so fast in the heels she had begged to wear.

The store was huge. It spanned a whole block along the Ku’damm and stretched back nearly a block behind. It had many entrances, all of which were picketed by SA men.

She was running blindly. Looking down at her shoes, focusing on the black shining uppers as they rose and fell, disappearing under the hem of her dress and then re-emerging.

Had she not been stopped she would undoubtedly have careered into something or somebody or run off the kerb into traffic. But instead brown-shirted arms reached out, gathering her up as once more Dagmar found herself in the clutches of her mortal enemies.

‘Not so fast, little miss,’ a rough voice said. ‘We saw you run. Aren’t you supposed to be helping Daddy clean the street?’

‘Please,’ Dagmar whispered, ‘please.’

But the man did not reply.

Because suddenly and without warning she was back on the ground.

How had it happened?

At first she thought her SA tormentor had pushed her.

But he was on the ground too. Lying beside her, gasping for breath.

Gasping beneath the weight of a boy.

It was Otto Stengel.

The moment that the Stengel twins had put down the phone to Dagmar on the previous evening they had known that she wanted their support. A member of the Saturday Club had been reaching out to them and it was their duty to go to her. Although of course in truth their decision had nothing to do with those solemn weekend oaths of solidarity taken after their music lessons when they were little kids. Dagmar was an obsession for them both, an object of both reverence and desire. They certainly were not going to pass up this excellent and legitimate excuse to seek her out and perhaps do her service.

Therefore, on the following morning, the moment that they had left the Stengel apartment, ostensibly to go to school, Paulus and Otto rushed to the U-Bahn and jumped on a train to Bahnhof Zoo. From there they ran the rest of the way and emerged on to the Ku’damm just in time to see what was happening at the entrance to the department store. And Dagmar forcing her way through the crowd that had gathered to watch.

Instantly the twins gave chase, skirting the terrible scene where Herr and Frau Fischer were still on their knees, their heads to the pavement, and charging along after Dagmar, catching up with her just as the SA man took hold of her.

Otto, who always acted on instinct, simply launched himself at Dagmar’s attacker, hurling his body against the man at a full run, cannoning into him with all the force that a muscular thirteen-year-old boy travelling at speed could deliver. All three of them, Otto, Dagmar and the SA man, hit the pavement together. Otto on top of the large, pot-bellied, heavily winded thug, and Dagmar sprawling beside them both, her legs in the air and her pretty sailor dress torn and spoiled.

Paulus, who always acted on intellect, had been a step or two behind in the chase. As he brought himself to a skidding halt, barely avoiding tripping over the prostrate threesome, he knew he had perhaps a second and a half at most to consider his plan. After that there could be no doubt that the other Brownshirts would overcome their surprise, pull Otto off their comrade and beat him, very possibly to death.

The trick must be, Paulus thought, in the flash of time available to him, to get his story in first.

‘Bastard!’ he shouted, reaching down and hauling his brother to his feet and putting him into a vicious neck lock. ‘Got you now, haven’t I? You’re mine!’

Then with the arm that was not around his brother’s neck he delivered a rabbit punch to the side of Otto’s head (with what, Otto was later to complain, was unnecessary force).

Paulus then looked up at the Brownshirts who surrounded him.

‘Jews! Jews!’ he shouted in affected semi-panic. ‘Dirty Jews! A pack of them! With a German girl! Round the corner! They have her, it’s revenge! They’re pulling off her clothes! Please. I’ve got this guy, I won’t let him get away, run! You have to help.’

Young though he was and with almost no time in which to think, Paulus had made his pitch brilliantly, appealing to the very heart and soul of the Nazis’ pathological anti-Semitism. That most favourite and well-rehearsed part. The crude and salacious sexual fantasies that made up the majority of the accusations peddled against Jews in Der Stürmer and other Nazi papers.

The men didn’t hesitate. The prospect of being able to intervene violently in a pack rape appealed to so many of their natural instincts and secret fantasies at once that they clattered off immediately in the direction in which Paulus was pointing. This left just their winded comrade who was now beginning to pull himself together, sitting up on the pavement, chin on chest, catching his breath.

This man, Paulus realized, would be highly unlikely to give up his opportunity to avenge himself on Otto, even for the opportunity of seeing a girl having her clothes torn off by Jews. Besides which, it would only be moments before the other Brownshirts reached the corner and realized that they had been tricked. Again Paulus had less than seconds in which to consider his next move and again he was able to find the most promising point of psychological weakness in his still groggy opponent.

‘I’ll get these two across the street!’ Paulus shouted urgently, dragging a dazed Dagmar to her feet with his free arm. ‘My father is a Hauptsturmführer . He is collecting prisoners. He will be very pleased you stopped this swine. I’ll send him over to speak to you personally.’

As a sentence it did not make a lot of sense but what it did do was invoke authority. And if there was one thing that Paulus knew Nazis liked, it was to be told what to do. Nothing seemed to make them more comfortable than following a leader, and if there was a Hauptsturmführer in the vicinity then his will must of course be obeyed.