An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon Page B

Gisele was waiting for her at the Adlon, and they had lunch and a refreshing hour of gossip. Gisele had to leave early for a fitting and so she scurried out the Wilhelmstrasse exit. Paule strolled on the Unter den Linden. A parade was making its way down the Charlottenburg Chaussée toward the Brandenburg Gate. Every sort of Berliner was at the curbside as the marching, brown-shirted men came abreast. They were singing lustily, and the drums and brass of a band rang out behind them:
    â€œZum letzen Mal wird zum Apell geblasen,
    zum Kampfe steh’n wir alle schon bereit,
    Bald flattern Hitler-Fahnen über alien Strassen,
    die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit;
    Bald flattern Hitler-Fahnen über alien Strassen
    die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit.”
    Paule asked the woman next to her what the occasion was. A storm trooper in front of her turned around. He had very small eyes that seemed to have been pasted to either side of his nose. His mouth was twisted into a sneer. “What kind of a German are you?” he said to Paule. “Horst Wessel died for this country two years ago today.”
    â€œOh, yes. Thank you.” The storm trooper turned away. The elation that she had always felt during a parade began to fade. A mass of party flags went by, dozens of black swastikas in white circles laid upon fields of blood. Paule felt someone grab her arm roughly; the storm trooper was shouting at her. “You are too good to salute the flag? Are you a German or are you some kind of filthy Jew?”
    Paule felt herself tremble with outrage. She stared into his tiny eyes with flat distaste. “Franz! Set to!” she said and spat into his face. He punched her heavily and instinctively, knocking her backward into the crowd. She lay on her back and saw him rushing to her, his thin lips drawn back from his teeth, his heavy boot raised to kick her face. But miraculously the crowd closed around her, eager hands pulled her to her feet and spun her back and back, hiding her with their bodies. “You filthy Jew! Filthy Jew bitch!” the choked voice screamed after her as she stumbled toward the stone columns and the large lanterns at the doorway to the Adlon.

Ten
    The Imperial German Army begat the Freikorps and the Freikorps begat the Sturm Abteilungen, called the SA, and the SA begat the Schutz Staffeln, called the SS, which begat an eternity of shame for the German people. Arminius, the Cherusci’s Fuehrer, became a citizen of Rome in I A.D. then returned to his dripping, northern forest eight years later to overthrow Roman rule. Arminius led his people to worship Hercules in a weapons-decorated shrine deep in the Teutonwald. Almost two millennia later, Heinrich Himmler turned the German tribes to another barbaric, weapons-strewn religion. He called upon his Fuehrer to breathe upon the decrement of Germany and lo! a miracle skulked upon the earth. The prime sullage was processed. The cloacal scum of losers and rejects, of misfits and resenters; the exuviae of Bavarian emotional cripples, Thuringian hysterics, Saxonian eugenic disasters, Hanoverian paranoids, Swabian aberrants, and Viennese come-aparts became the bone and tissue, nerves and spirit of the SS. The rootless, the aimless, the perverted, the monstrous; the off-scourings of feeble haters yearning for chaos, the mental defectives with a knack for brawling, the secretly vicious who demanded punishment, apolitical lay-abouts and louts—these were the SS, the legally constituted maggots which feasted upon the German republic; the quintessence of the Fuehrer’s exalted dream of total nihilism.
    The SS was founded in 1923 as the Stasztruppe Hitler, a part of the brown-shirted Sturm Abteilungen, a bodyguard improvised by three Munich bravos named Shreck, Maurice, and Heiden. It was disbanded after the craven farce of November 9, 1923, because the party was declared illegal and the Fuehrer was put into prison. The ban on the