Another attempt at fic-original approach this time.

[Angedechu]

Yes, this is a SW Fic. You can see obviously where this is going.

 

Pillau, late January 1945…

 

The arrival at the harbor was rather gloomy, and foreshadowing of what would come. The minesweeper had to navigate between several wrecks just to reach the inner roadstead, itself packed with a variety of ships. What was the most telling were the lines and lines of refugees, camping on the docks for a spot in the next vessel, in a relative silence. A silence punctuated at regular intervals by the thunder of the naval guns of the Panzerschiffe firing near Pillau. It was a desperate, last ditch attempt to slow down the progression of the Red Army toward Koenisberg. The fact that the howling sound of Katiushas batteries was perfectly audible in the background showed quite well the success of this strategy.

 

The minesweeper’s Captain, who had done several supplies runs/evacuation runs over the last weeks, were nevertheless aghast at seeing the mass of civilians rushing for his ship. It was another sign that the situation in Eastern Prussia was getting desperate. While no one believed anymore the official reports, the reality was so grim that people had trouble to handle it either. One deckhand had told the Captain, hours before leaving Kiel, that his father-in-law, living in Potsdam, had told him that the Red Army had crossed the Oder in the previous days. This would have been truly the writing on the wall for the Reich, all this will the press was talking about the lines holding near Warsaw. The deckhand being quite shaken with the news, the Captain had sent him on a random errand and lifted anchor while the sailor was away: the lad risked an «accident» because of so-called defeatist talk otherwise.

And with their current cargo, such accidents were bound to happen. The minesweeper and its crew had spent much of the war on supply runs to Norway-a job as thankless as dangerous. The Captain would have actually preferred to keep shipping ammunition with heavy RAF interdiction than conveying the present passengers: at least, British bombers did not threatened periodically to have you shot. SS generals did not have the best reputation in the Kriegsmarine, but the one that they had to ferry to Pillau was really a special case-and his escort was far beyond special. The Captain and the crew quickly lost the track of the why and the when concerning the death threats they have received : antisubmarine evasions patterns were seen as skulking, average speed thanks to limited fuel reserves was seen as sabotage, and so forth.

 

Not that the passengers had a much more positive attitude with the regulars or the population in general, and they seemed keen on proving it. As soon as the minesweeper had docked, scores of refugees had swarmed it, pleading for evacuation, the pleas including sometimes promises of generous rewards. The General and his escort ignored this human wave, until someone spotted a walking wounded from the Heer. As he was missing most of his right hand, it was a fair bet that he was not faking it. It did not prevent the General for asking him about proofs of his military situation-paperwork about furlough and permission, medical reports. Considering the state of the front, such a request was very rhetorical. Asking what happened when the private was unable to provide one of the said documents was rather rhetorical too. Well, it had the merit of making the crowd of refugees move back, if only for a couple of meters and a very short time. Two SS dragged on the docks the body of the «deserter», trying to find a lamppost to hang it-a tough proposition thanks to the state of the city. The Captain then said something he thought witty, a crude joke about how the General could direct his attention toward the feldpost, if he disliked this much delays about documentation. Sure enough, the Captain ended propped against his ship, with submachine guns prodded between his ribs. He was not overly worried, however. The SS needed the supplies runs of the navy, in Kurland and elsewhere. They had thus orders from their leaderships to avoid incidents with naval personnel. This said, there was no lost loves between them and what remained of the Kriegsmarine.

 

The General barked an order, and his bodyguards let the Captain go, after a vicious prod with their weapons. As a Lieutenant from the garrison was wading through refugees to reach the commanding officer, the General made his thoughts rather clear.

 

«Orders or not, you are merely a dignified tramp steamer commander. If I could find a way to bring you and your cowards on the front, I would. If possible without weapons, so you could serve as shields for real soldiers. This said, you are dismissed»

 

«This means we won’t have the pleasure of escorting you back? What a pity»

 

The escort of the SS made some crude comments, but the General himself said nothing else. As he left, the Captain started to listen more closely about offers for his return trip. He had principles. He took kids first. Of course, if the parents had some sort of gift for him-

 

The General was well aware of this. Taking bribes was merely an aggravating offence for the crime of contributing to demoralization. Demoralization was quite loosely defined as anything that could harm the defense of the fast collapsing borders of the Reich. As seeing waves of refugees from Prussia could be the killing blow to the morale in the central areas of the Reich, helping with the evacuation was thus seen as demoralization, especially considering that the luminaries of the High Command had decided recently that the garrisons of the so-called fortress cities would fight harder with civilians trapped with them.

 

If shooting a naval officer was hard to do officially nowadays, there was other ways to achieve the same results, useful ones. A minesweeper, after all, was a very minor warship. The General had the exclusive use of the radio for most of the trip, under the pretext of getting updates from Berlin. Of course most of the updates had consisted of hours long rants from the Chancellery, but it could still count as orders. Issue was, the crew had thus missed in the previous hours a crucial warning about several Soviet submarines spotted in the immediate vicinity. As the ASW had never been a priority for the Kriegsmarine, the minesweeper could have an unfortunate accident in the next hours. Such an accident would certainly help to relieve the pressure on the Baltic harbors-well, from a certain point of view.

 

Hoping that the Captain and his crew would have a watery fate, the General was led to the vehicles that had been prepared for his mission: a mere two half-tracks. Their so-called armor was dented by numerous bullets impacts, the machine gun that was the only armament of the vehicle long removed for more pressing needs. But the engines were apparently working, which was what mattered. As nightfall was close, he gave orders for immediate departure. The lieutenant, who had kept trying all this time to tell the General something (only getting as answers murderous looks from the SS guards) finally dared a more direct approach»

 

«General Lash would be delighted to receive you at his command post. »

 

«I’m here to oversee the evacuation of critical assets for the war effort. I’m sure that General Lash understands that those orders easily supersede any instructions he have. »

 

«Yes, General Lash made that point quite clear. But your assistance could help us strengthen the command structure here. The Gauleiter keeps interfering with our defense efforts, and the SS companies we have in the city are almost openly refusing to take orders from General Lash…»

 

The General almost chuckled. Lash was probably complaining loudly about issues like this to separate himself from the SS-and the Genral guessed the command issues involved..

 

«Let me guess. You mean that SS are shooting deserters and traitors belonging to the Heer, and that this is annoying officers from the said Heer, who feels that the SS are not respecting their authority? Do you really want to say something as stupid as this to me, Lieutenant? Do you really think I’m here to nurse the hurt feelings of general Lash?»

 

The silence of the lieutenant proved that the guess was pretty much spot on.

 

«Besides, General Lash should deal himself with traitors. The SS will however gladly assist him into finding and punishing the said traitors, with or without assistance of the Heer. This city is the birthplace of Prussia. It will not be surrendered to the Red Army»

 

Oh, such sentences were heard often recently. The Gauleiter, who was hiding on some military outpost close to the sea, was spending his days writing proclamations about how «Koenisberg will be defended to the death» and how «the Prussians will never give up the city that is the symbol of the Reich». General Lash answered with proclamations that the Wehrmacht would «fight to the death» and how the city would «be defended to the last soldier and the last bullet». The garrison and the population were quite sure that all the parts about dying were not bombast and that the authorities were quite willing to do everything in their power to achieve this objective. However, recently, there had been a glimmer of hope. Not for their own survival, but at least an impression that the upcoming sacrifice was going to be helpful in a way. As the general was getting under way, the Lieutenant tried to convince himself of this, by asking indirectly the General for a confirmation of the rumors swirling around.

 

«Rest assured, General. We know how vital your mission is. Every single man available is working on the Emden, and it will be ready when you will need it»

 

The lieutenant was not sure he actually heard one of the SS guard remove the safety on his weapon. It was probably an illusion. What was not an illusion was that the said guards were considering shooting him, and were merely waiting for an order. Well, he did have his answer about the general mission tied to the Emden.

 

«The Emden mission is of great importance for Berlin» said coldly the General Giving the enemy airpower, any indiscretion could have dire consequences for the Reich. »

 

«We don’t know anything-and I don’t wish too either» said nervously the lieutenant. «We just know that you have been sent here for the sole purpose of taking a cargo on the Emden»

 

So Lash or the Gauleiter had presented the future cargo of the Emden as vital for the war effort, probably as some kind of ridiculous wunderwaffen. It was a quite creative way to present the matter, but that could help to speed up the repair work-besides, the General would not be there when the garrison would learn what was the goal of the Emden mission.

 

In any case, the repair work was not exactly a luxury. According to the damage reports, the Emden guns were out of condition, the cruiser was listing and its machinery was on its last miles. It would never been able to limp to Kiel without an escort. It would be another moment of painful revelation for the locals when they would learn that the said escort would be provided by the Panzerschiffe, by far the most important military asset remaining in the area. Another carefully hidden information was the fact that the warship was supposed to «escort» the Emden by presenting itself as incredibly more tempting target than a crippled light cruiser.

 

The precious cargo of the General had first to reach Koenisberg, then Pillau: hence the vehicles, to go inland and meet with the detachment that had the said cargo. To guarantee a successful transportation, some issues had to be dealt with along the way-aggressively. The most important of those issues was on the other bank of Vistula lagoon. The ice on the lagoon was apparently solid enough for light vehicles, as the scores of refugees crossing it, but probably not solid enough for half-tracks. They would have to pass next to Koenisberg. Well, that would be the occasion to check the actual defense preparations: any air attack could cripple further the Emden, and it was quite possible that he would have to stay for several days in the area.

[Angedechu]

What the General saw as his small convoy moved next to the outskirts of the city convinced him that lingering here would be a folly. The outer defenses of the city still relied on 19th century works being hastily modernized into makeshift bunkers, backed with a force that was miserable even on paper, lacking men, supplies and weapons. Even the most basic war tools were missing: it was pretty telling on that matter than the typical platoons of Volkstrum sent on trench digging duty were using gardening shovels. The General briefly considered to tell the SS platoons «stimulating» the Volkstrum platoons to increase their efforts, but gave up quickly the idea. Even the most patriotic slogan or the most blood curling threats could not change anything to the fact that the ground was hard as rock thanks to frost and virtually impossible to dig. And those platoons could be useful to plug holes in defense lines later.

 

The trip further inland was rather tense. The Luftwaffe had withdrawn most of her assets beyond the Oder as her bases in Eastern Prussia were being overrun. There was thus nothing in the air to stop the swarms of Soviet Sturmoviks, which made any daytime movement quite suicidal. Even the Flak was now seriously lacking, with most of the guns being sent to the front to serve in emergency AT duty: their total lack of mobility meant that they did not last long. The only respite was when the weather was so atrocious that Russian aircraft could not take off, which obviously brought problems in itself. As a testament to Soviet air supremacy in the area, the ditches of the road were littered with what could be described as a museum of motorized and mechanized vehicles, not to mention a growing proportion of antiquated horse drawn transportation. But at least, moving inland was relatively easy. There was no new units, no reinforcements, and not even ammunition to send to the division, so one side of the road was quite clear. The same could not be said about the other side of the road.

 

For kilometers, the side of the road leading to Koenisberg and Pillau was filled with civilians fleeing the advance of the Red Army. The fact that the two half-tracks commandeered by the General and his party were the only vehicles going to the front gave a pretty accurate picture of the military situation. Those civilians would have quite a shock when they would see the scores of would-be evacuees on the docks and the state of the defense of the so-called Festung-not to mention the reluctance of the Party to help with evacuation.

 

Everyone was trying hard to stimulate resistance with wild stories about the plight of the refugees, but letting the general population see the chaos and confusion from Prussia was quite a different matters. Likewise, it was apparently good for the moral to speak for hours about the exactions of the Red Army, usually luridly descripted. After all, such an approach allowed everyone to not think too much about why every single civilian was trying to escape westward.

 

Virtually everyone in those trek had a son, brother or husband that had served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. And they knew what Germany had done there-that the Red Army was burning with vengeance. More accurately, this was vengeance for the things the Russians knew-their towns burned to the ground, their relatives starving, mass graves. Issue was, as the battle-hardened Russian soldiers closed on the Reich, they had started to discover new elements, unspeakable even for the incredibly harsh Eastern Front.

 

This explained some of the secondary orders of the General: If the Western Allies learned about certain complexes, plans and programs, this would harm the efforts to reach an armistice with them-provided this was possible, and the General doubted. The British had not surrendered in 1940, they would probably not surrender when their armies were on the Rhine. But the General was willing to work for even a slim chance, as one more day holding on the Eastern Front meant a victory a little more costly for the Soviet Union.

 

On all official documentation, the General was thus merely designated as someone tasked with «liquidating» programs and installations. This quite transparent euphemism had been requested by officers of the Wehrmacht, who were very busy right now pretending that they were totally unaware what the SS had been doing during the war. The General took great care to send to those officers his requests for weapons and ammunition for the said liquidations in triple copies, just to be sure that a paper trail existed. The liquidation was just not a euphemism, however. In the civil life, the General had been an accountant. He was thus also charged with checking the cash balance of the various projects he terminated fiscally and litteraly. His masters disliked deeply people embezzling funds. Sure, it could be maliciously argued that this was mostly because they wanted to embezzle the said funds themselves or that they wanted scapegoats, but the General did not cared, as it allowed him to audit violently.

Another advantage of liquidating dubious projects was to free up badly needed manpower for the front. The Etappe (rear areas) in all arms of the Reich had always been quite important a large number of officers and troops having spent most of the war in Berlin or Paris in purely administrative work, when there was work at all. Various more or less secret projects usually boiling down to embezzlement schemes and/or jobs that were basically there to prevent people from being sent to the front. His first stop was for one such facility.

 

To summarize, the facility appeared on maps as a suspiciously large model farm. It might have been true to some degree in the past, but it had been commandeered by the Reichwher after the Great War, for use as a black barrack. Eastern Prussia geographical proximity to the Soviet Union had gave major importance to this facility before 1933, where it had been used extensively for the secrets arrangements of the Rapallo accords. Otherwise said, the facility had been used by the Reichwher to provide a modicum of training to future tank drivers, ironically enough with Russian instructors thanks to accords with the Weimar Republic. The rise of the Nazis had negated the uses of such schemes, although the facility had seen continued use, mostly for convenience issues: by the time of the invasion of Russia, it was still training trucks drivers and such. The core issue was that this facility still had access to resources more precious than gold in Eastern Prussia at the moment: motor vehicles and oil to use them.

 

This was what had brought the attention of officials on this facility. A lot of the trucks earmarked for use in the Emden operation had gnarly encounters with T-34s or Sturmoviks, not to mention mechanical failures: Berlin had thus been reduced to raid the bottom of the barrel of its available motor transportation in Eastern Prussia. Unfortunately, this dignified garage had been requisitioned a couple of months ago by individuals with a murky link to the command chain. Those new users considered the vehicles, oil, and spare parts as their property, vital for their survival-and they had flatly refused to hand them over for the Emden mission. The General had to recuperate the trucks for the mission and then deal harshly with those saboteurs/hoarders/traitors/whatever was convenient for the power struggles in Berlin. The issue was, a lot of projects commissioned when the war was going well looked a little silly and wasteful right now, and they could be used against a lot of powerful characters.

 

The General prided himself to never be concerned with politics, which merely meant that he was quiet about it to back the winner. His master had been under a lot of flak recently, over the humiliating collapse in the Ardennes, and his enemies were moving for the kill. The said master thus claimed loudly that he had never funded this particular group this probably meant that he had indeed backed it and wanted the matter to be forgotten. Besides, the new rage to please the Leader was not to present him special researches, but special divisions, special corps and special divisions and so forth. Usually, the special part boiled down to the utter lack of supplies, cadre and gear but the whole point was to get little flags for the situation map. The scientists holed up in this garage would thus have the choice between having a lot of bullets fired upon them of having a handful of bullets to fire at the Russians-the latest

SS-sponsored unit in formation had a name as long as the list of weapons was short.

 

What made the case of those planqués even worse was the General personal distaste for this kind of research, that he found as useless as fraudulent. The claims they had made about recent breakthroughs while clamoring for quarters on the Emden for evacuation had just managed to make authorities in Berlin remember about them.

For starters, there were good reasons of being skeptical of credentials and research goals. As many people that had got the ears of Himmler about special research, they were extremely good at telling to their bosses what they wanted to hear, as well as inflating their own importance to pose about how they were positively vital to the Reich war effort in their current occupation. After all, when you «worked» on Tibetan astrology or Viking paganism, you were obviously far too precious to be, said, issued a single panzerfaust and sent inside a shoddy foxhole in the path of a Soviet tank column.

 

Those astute «scholars», who had been offered nice university jobs thank to their Party membership and the «departure» of actual scholars, had been clever enough to focus their efforts on finding links between medieval Christianity and ancient German paganism, fields in which results would have been pretty murky in the best of cases. They had spent most of the war writing verbose papers about the Teutonic Knights and their supposed admiration for paganism, about how medieval romance were coded works about Norse lore, about how such and such Christian miracle «proved» the existence of Humans with strange powers-the latest came of course with abstruse explanations making various saints Germans.

 

The General had been born in a pious family, with one of his brothers being even ordained. He had kept the appearances after his entry in the SS, mostly to spare the feelings of his mother. Whatever were his feelings toward Christianity he could not help but find works of this kind deeply insulting for intelligence. In any case, the «scholars» had managed to get postings in France, where they had spent a little time checking religious monuments and much more time organizing various black market schemes. The windfall of those proceedings was what had sent them back to a forsaken barrack in Eastern Prussia, from where they had been evacuated after the latest disasters on the front. They had been clamoring for evacuation since the destruction of Army Group Centre, and «curiously» their requests had been more and more desperate as the Red Army progressed. They must have grown really desperate over the previous months. The reports have evolved from the vague and so usual «project whose military applications could turn the tide of the war» to some frantic claims about ways to make elite soldiers of the Reich virtually invincible, coupled with some bizarre comments about the inner mental strength of the medieval Knight orders.

 

Of course, the researchers were prudent with specifics about this marvelous result-they just hoped that they could sweet talk themselves out of predicament upon reaching Berlin. This attitude was shown when the General arrived with his escort. The lack of any guard detail around the facility was a proof enough of the value those individuals had right now. Rather amusingly, the «scholars» had dutifully put on white lab coats, in a pathetic attempt to stress out their intellectual credentials. They must have thought that the General was the head of their evacuation detail. The relief vanished promptly from their faces. Maybe it was the stern look of the General orr the fact that the platoon used the butt of their guns for greeting them.

 

When the ritual protests were over, thanks to some boot kicks, the General spoke.

 

«I will be brief. You have the choice between dying here or on the front. Questions? »

 

«Our work here could save the R-» (detonation followed by screams)

 

«This was not a question. Anyone one want to make comment before making their choice? »