Swastika by Michael Slade Read Free Book Online

All Jewish physicists, Stark warned us, are egocentric liars interested solely in personal publicity and commercial gain. All Aryan physicists, Stark implored us, must focus on quantum mechanics aimed at technological breakthroughs that will win this war!”
    Panzer had barked in agreement.
    “Professor Pascual Jordan! Honor that name. The genius of theoretical physics at the University of Rostock. The founder of quantum mechanics and the Führerprinzip . The ‘leadership principle,’ Jordan has proved, is present in the molecular structure of all matter. The Führerprinzip! And who is your führer, boys?”
    “Adolf Hitler!” Fritz and his classmates shouted in unison.
    “Would you die for our führer?”
    “Yes!”
    “Would you kill for our führer?”
    “Yes!”
    “Without remorse, boys?”
    “Yes!”
    “Does your obedience to the Führerprinzip outweigh attachment to anyone or anything else?”
    “Yes!”
    “Prove it, boys. Draw your daggers!”
    One and all, the Hitler Youths unsheathed the steel blades slung at their waists.
    “Blut und Ehre!”
    “Blood and honor!” they echoed.
    “Now do it, boys.”
    Each boy had been told to bring a favorite pet to study in Aryan science. The class was full of dogs and puppies, cats and kittens, and exotic birds. Panzer, the Alsatian pup that Streicher had given his sons at Christmas, wagged its tail between them. Fritz and Hans shared a dumbfounded look as the first shriek shrilled the room, then …
    “Blut und Ehre …
    “Blut und Ehre …
    “Blut und Ehre!”
    Both boys plunged their knives repeatedly to prove their love for Hitler.
    Though he would never admit it, Fritz was sometimes wrenched from sleep in a cold sweat by the nightmare howls of all those pets killed for the Führerprinzip .
    *    *    *
     
    The SS would reap what it had sown in Fritz and Hans Streicher. The Hitler Youth was designed to create for the Black Corps dynamic recruits instilled with physical toughness and ideological fervor. The zigzag Sig Runes on their belt buckles mirrored the dual lightning strikes of the SS symbol. Many recruits were earmarked for the Death’s Head units of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, from which the Black Corps drew its concentration camp guards. They might guard the subterranean secrets of Dora-Mittelbau, or the other underground factories run by SS-General Ernst Streicher. But not his sons.
    “Fritz, Hans,” their father had confided a month ago, “you are the future of the Third Reich. It used to be that candidates for the SS had to prove that their Aryan heritage had been untainted by inferior blood for eleven or twelve generations, back to the year 1650. That , my sons, was racial purity.”
    “Like us, father?” Hans asked.
    “Yes, but others are suspect. The demand was later shortened to a span of two generations. That requires clean blood no further back than 1885. Here we see the result of that weakening.”
    The concentration camp for recalcitrant Hitler Youths had been set up at Moringen, near Göttingen, in Lower Saxony in 1940. Some of the inmates were boys whom Fritz and Hans had run with in their Jungvolk packs. The infractions that could land an outcast in here were varied and many: drinking, smoking, singing prohibited songs, improper or sloppy saluting, violating curfew, or creating disorder in billiard or dance halls. The general had brought his sons here to drive home a point: no one could be trusted to be taint-free, even with the ever-present threat of punishment.
    At Moringen, boys collapsed from brutal exercise, shrank thinner from withheld meals, were thrashed with hickory sticks, and were confined alone for weeks on end. One boy—“A recidivist,” sneered the general—screamed hysterically for his mother from behind a cracked door in the dank cellar.
    “Take a look,” the general said. “He just wouldn’t learn. The taint is too deep.”
    Fritz had widened the crack to peer into the chamber. A frantically