Slaves of the Swastika by Kenneth Harding Read Free Book Online

step further in his passionate desire to end the war and save the German People before Hitler could plunge them all into a cataclysm of defeat and total disaster, a greater economic disaster than had followed the end of World War 1. He had asked this member of the Maquis to arrange a kind of code for him whereby if he found out important news which would be of value to the Maquis and the Allies, he could print it as a feature story in this publication, in a kind of code that would be understood only by the top military leaders.
    The Gestapo had not yet discovered this code within a code; for them, it had been enough that the forbidden newspaper contained scabrous articles about the mismanagement of the war, about some of Hitler's corrupt generals and Hitler's maniacal behavior. A high price had been placed on the unknown editor's head, but thus far he had not been captured. Oberst Friedrich Mueller had been assigned to the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo to ferret out all those who were connected with this illegal and treasonable publication.
    The Gestapo officer who had been torturing the Professor's beautiful wife Helga had made some lascivious speculations to the unfortunate woman as to her husband's being unfaithful to her with the student Kathy Flichtsen. In one sense, he had been partly right: Kurt Nordheim was having a mild affair with the pretty nineteen-year-old brownette. But the Professor was conducting this seemingly squalid little amour out of necessity so that, indeed, one might whimsically say that his infidelity to his own wife was pardonable because of its patriotic motive.
    The reason was very simply this: Kathy Flichtsen's elderly father owned an old-fashioned but still workable printing press, which he had forgotten he ever had. It was located in the basement of the old two-story house on Blumen Strassze. Kathy had found it some months ago and managed to stay after class on that particular afternoon to tell the Professor about her discovery. And he had seen a heaven-sent opportunity for publishing Till Eulenspiegel on a genuine press, rather than mimeographing it to a much smaller audience. Moreover, the code which the military experts had sent him via a reliable Maquis messenger could be handled by the ingenious technique of cartoons. The liaison officer in charge of military coding for the Allied war effort had devised a most imaginative system, creating characters who should have names that would stand for certain geographic fronts on which Hitler might be operating. And the captions would indicate what was taking place on these fronts.
    But Kathy Flichtsen was also romantic and she had just lost her fiance in the war. He had been a youth of twenty, a high-school sweetheart, who was not especially sympathetic to the Nazi viewpoint but had been conscripted and had died in France from a sniper's bullet in the brain. Kathy lived with her aging and almost senile father, her mother having died five years previously. She was lonely and passionate, and she had almost lost her virginity to her fiance. And so she had stipulated to the virile and mature Professor that in return for her letting him use her father's printing press, he must become her lover and satisfy her pent-up desires.
    The Professor had been in a quandry. He loved Helga very deeply, and he didn't want to hurt her, nor would he involve her. Anyone who knew of Till Eulenspiegel might easily confess under torture and implicate others. If his wife knew absolutely nothing, only an absolute brute interrogating her would persist in harming her to learn something she did not know, he had reasoned. So he had never taken Helga into his confidence, and he had been gone many times without explanation, which had started to puzzle her and now in the terrible subterranean interrogation room, and at the suggestion of Oberst Mueller, began to haunt her with the thought that perhaps indeed he was having an affair with this young girl and preferring Kathy to