Chapter 7

I finally got away from the scene of the bunker orgy and climbed the metal ladder leading up to the escape hatch on the surface with sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had reached the end of my rope.

Night was fast approaching on the surface and several other SS men were breathing in the odor of burning flesh and the noise of the closing circle of Russian artillery tightening the noose.

One of the female prisoners from below was bent over a fifty gallon water drum and her ass was waving in the cold night air like a white flag of surrender with a line of male admirers waiting for their turn. I asked one of the SS men who she was and was told, “Only a Jewish wench with a well-used pussy getting some exercise up above.” I was glad that Captain Simone had given me her Death’s Head pin to wear on my collar because I knew it gave me an air of authority that I needed to protect me from a similar fate.

Karl came up from below with the old well-dressed woman on his arm. He rudely pushed her to her knees and let her suck him with her tired lips as he looked about him getting a fix on the scene up above. He saw me and waved like we were old friend, and I knew I could count on him to keep his mouth shut because this must have seemed like the end of the line to him with the end of the leader almost certain.

An older man in civilian clothes came up after Karl and he introduced himself to me as, “Colonel Von Brandt from Prussia”. I didn’t recognize him from any of the historic photos I had studied earlier but he claimed he was Minister Goebbels’s special assistant for war crime analysis.

The Colonel had lots of questions for me about my ramblings about Nuremburg with Captain Simone and I was immediately on my guard for not wanting to divulge any intelligence that might possibly change the outcome of the future trials.

“Frau Simone tells me you have some predictions of the future war crime trials and I would appreciate your input on some of the details for me to pass on to the leader sooner rather than later as I suspect his time is quite short at this moment.”

I must admit the Colonel sounded logical, he sounded kind and he sounded like a normal human being. However, I was well acquainted with Goebbels’s role in the promulgation of the “Final Solution” and I knew he was angling for some sort of chink in the armor of the Allies prepared to prosecute the high ranking Nazi’s for their genocide of the Jewish race from Europe.

I looked him straight in the eye so he could see I was not being in the least bit devious or deceitful with my words, “My dear Colonel Brandt, the War Crime Trail at Nuremburg is not going to change the outcome of any recovery of the Third Reich from the ashes of history. Most of the higher up Nazi’s will face the hangman’s noose and the few that escape for one reason or another are finally hunted down and assassinated by Israeli secret police before they are able to die of natural causes.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully with a tiny square of cloth from his breast pocket.

“Under what authority do they plan to convene this trial?”

I had to admit that was a good question because the answer was even to this day argued as not quite logical in its planning.

The history books overlooked the Russian influence on the court and the French were not overly helpful in presenting any evidence because of their questionable assistance to the Nazi party with their Vichy government role and the way the French militia and the local police aided the Nazi’s in their rounding up of Jews and turning them over for extermination by the SS in concentration camps in other countries.

Even Britain was conflicted by the trail with rumors of deals with the Nazis early in the war long before the Americans were forced into it by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The sad story of the Jewish question was pushed from the headlines and hidden by almost every government in the entire world including all the allies right up until the final days.

I answered him with the truth as I knew it, “The Americans are the force leading the trials and they are paying for the whole thing if the truth be known. They were interested in doing the same thing in Japan, but the culture was such that most of the guilty committed Hari Kari before they could get organized.”

We were sitting in the open right next to the pit that was supposedly the leader’s final resting place. It was intended that he and the family would take the poison in private and then be carried up to the pit to be engulfed in the flames from the burning petrol poured over them. It had been used for just that purpose several times since the leader’s arrival at the underground bunker. I had seen the jumble of whitened bones sticking up into the air from the bottom of the pit. I fully expected that before the curtain dropped on the firepit, there would be more than two hundred bodies to sort through to identify the leader’s true bones.

The Colonel agreed with me that was one of the many distractions from the end of the Third Reich. He was three sheets to the wind when he laughingly joked about there being no less than three Hitlers in the bunker. It was the old shell game trick where the con was to find the real Hitler and confirm him dead once and for all.

He offered me some of his white powder from the pinch he had sprinkled on the back of his thumb. I didn’t ask him what it was, but it looked suspiciously like ordinary Cocaine to filter out the horrors of the final days of the Third Reich. I knew that most of the SS troops were crushing up what one doctor in the camp told me was a form of Oxycodone more powerful than the morphine that they had stashed for a graceful exit.