The Madagaskar Plan by Guy Saville Read Free Book Online Page B

Otraco was obscured behind a convulsing orange barrier that followed the bend in the river.
    Hochburg gave an exultant sweep of his arms. “Guard!” A sentry appeared. “The Brigadeführer here”—he pointed to the end of the table—“wishes to leave. Escort him outside. To the street.”
    “I am a general in the Waffen-SS. I will not be treated like—”
    “You can leave through the door—or the window. I don’t care which.”
    When he was gone, Hochburg flopped into his chair and rotated it toward Ockener. “You were saying, Herr General.”
    Ockener had been decorated at the Battle of Smolensk before chasing mass graves and medals across the Russian steppe; later he transferred to Africa and earned the nickname “Der Schnitter.” The reaper.
    “Your fire won’t burn forever, Oberstgruppenführer. Meantime, the enemy’s guns can strike anywhere.”
    “How did the dregs of Belgium’s army come to surround an entire city?”
    “Their ranks have been swollen by the Free French * and blacks who escaped deportation.” Ockener was playing with a bauble taken from the tree. “We don’t have enough soldiers to contain them. Too many were sent to Elisabethstadt. On your orders.”
    To relieve the siege of Elisabethstadt, Hochburg had sent contingents from the north of Kongo to the south. When they proved insufficient, he commandeered troops from Kamerun, Aquatoriana, and Madagaskar until the governors of these colonies complained that their own security situations were threatened. The Afrika Korps in Angola, whose commanding officer was mysteriously lost and whose soldiers were caught up in their own siege, was unable to offer support.
    Ockener put down the bauble and glanced at the other generals. Hochburg noted their tacit nods.
    “The position is clear, Herr Oberstgruppenführer.” A pause. “We cannot continue to fight.”
    From the streets below came shell bursts of German artillery. To Hochburg they sounded like the heartbeat of a dying lion: inconceivable, dwindling, full of fury.
    He leaned back in his chair till the leather cracked. “There was a time, not long ago, when the Waffen-SS was feared,” he said. “Now I have generals like you.”
    “Give me a BK44 and a sack of grenades, and I’ll gladly fill the drains of this city. The problem is the ranks.”
    “How dare you say that while you sit here. They are true white men.”
    “Half our numbers are ethnics. The rest, the pure Germans, too many of them don’t want to fight.”
    “Nonsense.”
    “You promised them a swift victory.”
    “It’s been four months. You’re telling me that’s all it’s taken to blunt their spirits?”
    “They are a generation of conquerors. They have never known attrition, or the possibility of losing.”
    “We fought for a year to take central Africa,” retorted Hochburg.
    “A mopping-up operation,” said Ockener, “of colonies whose European masters had been defeated. It was also a decade ago. All the fighting was a decade ago.”
    “Meaning?”
    “The ethnics are here because the alternative is herding goats in Ostland. The Germans just want a plantation, an obedient wife, and enough workers so they don’t have to get off their arses.”
    “It’s the same in the East,” muttered someone.
    The Soviet Union had been defeated in 1943, with Moscow razed to the ground and scattered with meadow seed. Despite that, a guerrilla war churned like a meat grinder on the shifting eastern fringe of the Reich. An intractable conflict stretching from the Ural Mountains deep into Siberia that the Russians couldn’t win and the Germans were weary of. But Africa, Hochburg believed, Africa was different. It wasn’t a battle of political ideology; the clash of races was as stark as the midday sun and the dead of night.
    “Perhaps one day,” continued Ockener, “we will have the means to wage war without men. Such an army will always be victorious. Until then, we’ve grown soft on peace.”
    “The