BooksBarbecue
Back The Enigma Affair Save as PDF
Chapters (25)
  1. SECTION ONE: ALTA VISTA
  2. I
  3. II
  4. III
  5. SECTION TWO: BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
  6. IV
  7. V
  8. VI
  9. VII
  10. SECTION THREE: MUNICH
  11. VIII
  12. IX
  13. SECTION FOUR: PRAGUE
  14. X
  15. XI
  16. SECTION FIVE: BRENNER
  17. XII
  18. XIII
  19. SECTION SIX: OBERAMMERGAU
  20. XIV
  21. XV
  22. ARRT CODA
  23. Author’s Note
  24. Acknowledgments
  25. About the Author

Himmler was smaller than Helmut had imagined—slim and bespectacled with a receding hairline and a wisp of a mustache. If one passed him in the street, one might easily dismiss him as a failed middle-aged businessman. But as Helmut watched him standing on the rostrum speaking with passion to the crowd, he knew that in the presence of Reichsführer, he was in the presence of a greatness seen only once in a generation. Even from where he stood near the back of the crowd, Helmut could feel Himmler’s power, and more than anything Helmut wanted to share that power. He wanted to fight for the pure blood of Germany, to rid his homeland of the scourge of Jews and Bolsheviks. But most of all, he wanted to stand side by side with Himmler himself, to serve not in the rank and file of the SS, but at the right hand of the Reichsführer.

“This general movement is also directed against the white race, but we are qualitatively more valuable than the others. We are more valuable because our blood enables us to invent more than others, to lead our people better than the others; because it enables us to have better soldiers, better statesmen, higher culture, better characters.”

Yes, thought Helmut, they were more valuable than others, he was more valuable than others. And when the war came, as it surely would, he would prove that to Reichsführer Himmler. And when victory came, as it certainly would, he would be standing by Himmler’s side, the true chosen one, pure of blood and ready to serve the great leader.

II

II

Just after midnight, ten hours before his friend P.J. Harcourt would come under fire, Jasper Fleming started awake in a cold sweat to which, though it felt as familiar as his own skin, he had never fully inured himself. He slouched on the sofa in the silent flickering light of the television. The dream never changed. Though in his sleep he only saw the images and heard the sounds, on waking he also knew the facts. The dream took place on April 29, 1945. The dream took place just outside Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria in southern Germany. The dreamer was a private first class in the Third Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, Forty-Fifth Infantry Division of the United States Army. Adolf Hitler would commit suicide less than twenty-four hours later. The war in Europe would officially end in nine days. Jasper knew all this because the dream, though truly a dream, was also a memory.