From:

SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, Head, SS Hauptamt

To:

SS-Hauptsturmführer Carl Strasser, British Free Corps

Date:

31 January 1944

Subject:

Recruitment

Strasser

I am concerned at the slow progress you are making in finding members for the British Free Corps.

Although I am glad you have found yourself a British officer, you are still far short of the desired strength of thirty that the Führer has ordered the unit to reach before it goes into action.

I insist that you redouble your efforts, and use every means at your disposal to recruit more men. There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Britons languishing at our expense in POW camps who are willing to join in our cause against the subhuman scum from the east.

You must find them. Use every means necessary.

I order you to mount the recruiting drive immediately, using the best of the existing members as advertisements to the POWs. They are more likely to sign up if they see their fellow countrymen have already done so.

You will not fail.

Berger

He threw the letter back on his desk in disgust. “You will not fail.” The past few weeks had been an endless series of phone calls, letters and telegrams. Organizing a recruiting drive, on top of looking after the unit, was a lot harder than Berger seemed to think. POW camps had to be rung—who then wanted written confirmation. The Gestapo had to be informed. Photographs had to be sent to Berlin, passes to be prepared. The railway authorities notified. And the Wehrmacht, just in case. Then of course there was the SD, the RSHA, and those dolts in the police. And those were just the ones Strasser could remember. All of them needed convincing, needed proof that this wasn’t some sort of joke, or a devious piece of trickery devised by the Allies. This was a civil servant’s job, not his, not a soldier’s. Hillen-Ziegfeld ought to be doing all this, but the odious little rat had wriggled out of it.

The only thing that remotely cheered him was that his office was a little more hospitable. He had requisitioned a piece of state-approved art from the gallery in town and had hung it above the small fireplace. It was a cheerful painting, showing naked and long-limbed Aryan youths dancing around an Alpine meadow. When the war was over, when he was living off the land, he would do that—dance naked with a beautiful girl in a spring meadow. Strasser smiled to himself—perhaps he was more romantic than he thought. Who would the girl be? Leni? No—he couldn’t marry a whore, no matter how much he liked her.

On the wall opposite the painting was a magnificent framed poster of the Führer on horseback, dressed as a knight in armor, complete with a lance. Strasser had also managed to get himself a better desk and chair, and now had two phones instead of one. But bundles of paper lay on nearly every flat surface—he was the victim of bureaucracy. He took another deep breath.