The Madagaskar Plan Page 5

“If I hadn’t, you would have fled. What example is that?”

  “I will be reporting this matter to the Führer.”

  Hochburg was on his feet. “Then you can also tell him this.”

  He wrenched open the blast curtains, flooding the room with furious light. The city was pockmarked with columns of smoke. 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 British, yes,” said Hochburg. “Mired in imperial weakness. But not us.”

  “The same British whose grip around Elisabethstadt we’ve been unable to loosen? Who are supplying the Belgians with tanks and artillery? Their blood is up. You have underestimated them.”

  “You sound almost admiring, General.”

  “Then there’s the matter of civilians. While you were away on your riverbank ‘adventure,’ the Belgians took the water treatment plant.”

  “And while they took it, you were in here. Or did a simple door lock flummox the cream of the Waffen command?”

  “The sewage system is also damaged. In a few days, dysentery will be rife. Cholera will follow, typhoid.”

  “What would you suggest then, Herr General?”

  Ockener lowered his voice: “Surrender.”

  “Those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live,” replied Hochburg, citing the Führer’s book. He judged that the quote would be well known around the table.

  “A cease-fire then. A truce.”

  “No.”

  “At least some form of negotiation.”

  “No.”

  An exasperated Ach. “Then a squadron of Heinkel bombers to flatten the city.”

  Hochburg roared with laughter. “There’s hope yet.” He swiveled his chair to gaze out across the city. The wall of fire was beginning to ebb. “Every soldier is to fight,” he said. “Street to street. If they lack the guts for it, we shoot them where they stand.” He spun back. “It’s a matter of reasserting discipline. Punish the worst cowards and the rest will fall into place. If need be, we can start in this room.”

  Hushed words flitted round the table.

  “It is not my wish that the civilian population suffer,” continued Hochburg, “but it must also be mobilized. Give a rifle to every last man and woman. Remind the fair maidens of this city that these guerrillas, and the blacks among them, have the most base of needs, needs that will have been unmet in the jungle.”

  “And the children?” said Ockener. He was toying with the bauble again.

  “Teach them what milk bottles and petrol can do.”

  “The civilians should be allowed to leave. They are German citizens.”

  “Who have been indulged enough. Most have lives better than anything in Europe. In Germania all they’d get is forty-four square meters of living space. Here they have sixty. They enjoyed the abundance of conquest; now it’s time to endure for it.”

  “They may not wish to die for sixteen meters—”

  The door opened. Zelman slid in, unblinking as ever.

  “I have the Reichsführer’s private office on the line.”

  “This city will rise!” said Hochburg, reaching for the phone on the table. “That will be all, gentlemen.” Nobody moved. “Five minutes ago you were complaining about locks; now you won’t leave? Zelman, get them food and drink. They have long days ahead.”

  As soon as Hochburg was alone he lifted the receiver and found some blossom in his throat. “Heinrich, it’s Walter. How are you?”

  The connection crackled and fizzed. “This is Fegelein.” Hermann Fegelein: Himmler’s chief of staff.

  “I want to speak to the Reichsführer.”

  “He’s at lunch.”

  “At lunch … Is he aware that the Schädelplatz was attacked?”

  “Yes.”

  “That it has been lost.”

  “This he also knows,” said Fegelein.

  “And he has no response?”

  The line squeaked: sixty-five hundred kilometers of static.

  “The Reichsführer has always approved of your methods, Hochburg. Your thor
oughness, your grasp of the ‘biological’ issues. But your pagan square is far from his only concern. He’s preoccupied with the Jews again. In Madagaskar. Surely you know about this?”

  “I’ve been preoccupied myself.”

  “We may have another full-scale rebellion on the island. Poor Globus is struggling to maintain control. He blames you for everything.”

  Globus: Odilo Globocnik, the SS governor of Madagaskar.

  “That drunken satrap,” said Hochburg. “Is he still whining about the men I commandeered?”

  “It was an entire brigade,” replied Fegelein. “He claims if they hadn’t been sent to Kongo—to ‘shore you up,’ as he tells the Reichsführer—the Jews would be in their place.”

  “And as I like to tell Heinrich, half a million tons of copper was shipped from Kongo last year. What does Globus give the Reich? Fucking canned meat.”

  “You miss the subtlety of the situation, Oberstgruppenführer. Globus keeps us Jew-free. That is worth a thousand years of minerals.”

  “I wonder whether Germania will feel the same if Kongo is overrun by niggers.” His tone became emphatic: “I need more men. If not from Africa, then spare me a division from the East.”

  “I doubt they’d make a difference now.”

  Hochburg’s fingers tightened around the receiver. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve not heard?”

  “No.”

  “Unreliable things, telex machines,” said the chief of staff, and he went on to detail events. Even across thousands of kilometers of wire, the gloating was apparent in Fegelein’s voice. The SS was riven with jealousy and petty rivalries: between Europe and Africa, between one governor and his neighbor, all kept simmering by Himmler to make sure no one challenged his position.

  Hochburg listened in silence, his throat thickening.

  “I hope the Reichsführer enjoys his lunch,” he said when the conversation was at an end. He couldn’t bear the gilded dining room at Wewelsburg, nor the fleshy droop of Himmler’s lip as he chewed. He set down the receiver and listened to the funnel of his breath. A shell landed near the base of the building. The decorations on the Christmas tree tinkled, waking Fenris.

  Hochburg leapt up and grabbed the telephone.

  Hurled it at the window.

  It bounced off, the wire yo-yoing it back into the room. He threw it again, this time with such ferocity that the glass cracked. Outside, the burning river was reduced to billows of smoke.

  “Come, dog,” he said and strode from the conference room.

  The corridor was empty except for Zelman.

  “I need a plane,” said Hochburg, heading to the stairs.

  “Technically,” replied Zelman, “Stanleystadt is part of the no-fly zone.”

  Hochburg stopped at the edge of the steps. He fixed his deputy with his black eyes till Zelman averted his gaze. “I expect it fueled and ready to leave in fifteen minutes.”

  “At once, Oberstgruppenführer. What is your destination?”

  “Elisabethstadt.” Hochburg began to descend. “I have a firing squad to arrange.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM STANLEYSTADT TO Elisabethstadt: fourteen hundred kilometers. Hochburg decided to pilot the plane himself, flicking away the concerns of Zelman and the ground crew: “How can a man rule the earth if he can’t command the heavens?” He had learned to fly when he was the governor of Muspel,* soaring alone over the dune seas.

  The plane was a Focke-Wulf Fw-189, a twin-engine propeller aircraft, nicknamed “Le Chambranle” (the window frame) by the Belgians because of its fishbowl cockpit enclosed in bands of metal; its primary function was reconnaissance. Hochburg dismissed the captain, kept the copilot and dorsal gunner. Fenris squeezed behind his seat and bedded down. The Focke-Wulf lifted off into a mesh of ack-ack fire, broke through, then turned south into empty skies. Hochburg fixed his eyes on the sun; it was too distressing to look back.

  Following the outbreak of war in central Africa, Prime Minister Halifax had requested an audience with Hitler. To his surprise, the Führer issued a statement detailing how there was no need to intensify hostilities after so many years of peace: “If we say we are fighting the British empire to the death, then obviously we shall drive even the last of them to arms against us.” He did not, however, leave his palace in Germania. Rumors bubbled: the Führer was ailing, had been incapacitated by a mystery illness; he refused to sign any document because he planned to pulverize Rhodesia from the sky. Some said that at sixty-three, now master of the world, he was simply bored with the diplomatic chase. Instead he sent Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Reich security and, it appeared, also its highest negotiator. Heydrich met Halifax’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and a number of points were swiftly announced.

  The conflict was deemed “local”: a colonial border dispute confined to Kongo and Northern Rhodesia. Renegade British elements had provoked it; they did not represent official government policy. There would be no escalation. No reinforcements were to be sent from Europe or any other African colonies with the exception of support personnel; Churchill quipped that the Waffen-SS had more cooks in it than any army in history. To protect economic infrastructure and, as a secondary concern, civilians, a no-fly zone was to be established between the first parallel north and the sixteenth south. In the meantime, Germania and London would work to a negotiated settlement. Both sides agreed that the war in Angola was a separate matter and that Portugal (a small European country with disproportionately large African colonies) should come to terms with the Reich immediately. Word of the Führer’s approval was passed on from his palace: for now, the Heydrich-Eden Pact was a mutually beneficial stalemate.

  The Focke-Wulf stopped to refuel at Tarufa.

  Hochburg left the aircraft and paced the landing strip to waken his legs and allow Fenris to drain his bladder. Dust rose from his boots. Deep in the cotton-growing region of Kongo, Tarufa was untouched by the war. A gaggle of boys had hurried to the perimeter fence when the plane touched down, hoping for some action. They quickly became bored and were now playing baseball, a craze that had spread through the colony from American prospectors working with the SS Oil Company; some fretted it would prove a greater threat than British tanks. One boy sat away from the others, his back to the fence. He appeared to be sawing something in his lap.

  “You’re not joining your friends,” said Hochburg.

  The boy made a show of being startled. He had the same unkempt black hair Hochburg had as a child. There was a familiar ravenous look in his eye, as if he wanted to consume the world.

  “They hate me,” he replied, then added, “but I hate them more.”

  “You’re in the JVA?” Jungvolk Afrika: the continent’s youth movement for boys between ten and fourteen.

  “Everyone is; you have to be. I prefer being alone.”

  “But you enjoy it?”

  “It would be better if they allowed girls.”

  A smile tightened Hochburg’s face. “And what is in your lap?”

  “I killed it myself.” The boy lifted up a headless snake with yellow scales, the tail still twitching. Hochburg recognized it as a puff adder; its venom could kill a man in minutes.

  “Does your mother know you hunt snakes?”

  “She’s dead. So is Papa. Malaria.”

  Hochburg wanted to comfort the child. “I lost my own parents when I was younger. My brothers, too.”

  “Who looked after you?”

  “Someone special. I was older than you, already in my twenties, and lucky to find her.”

  “I live with my aunt now. She worries a lot.” The boy snorted as if blowing a fly from his nostril. “Did your parents get malaria, too?”

  “No. They were killed.”

  “How?”

  “Butchered, by tribesmen.”

  Hochburg had been the sole survivor of his family. Afterward, sick with grief and nightmares, he was taken in by Eleanor and her husband. They were missionaries who ran
an orphanage in Togoland; Burton was eleven when he first arrived. Hochburg had sobbed in Eleanor’s arms and shared the horrors he’d witnessed; piece by piece, she made him whole again. Later they became lovers and eloped (Eleanor reveled in the romance of the word, perhaps because it obscured the reality of abandoning her husband and son). The two years they spent together were the happiest Hochburg ever knew. They lived simply, glutting in each other’s love, until the regret began to trickle into Eleanor and she looked back guiltily to the life she had discarded. This time it was Hochburg she abandoned, fleeing into the jungle to Burton and her death. That Eleanor met the same fate as his parents could only be a calling. A portent.

  “You must be very old,” said the boy. “The niggers are gone.”

  “Alas, not all.” Hochburg thought of the faces in the Schädelplatz. “What would you do if you saw one?”

  The boy pondered the question, then held up the two bloody pieces of snake.

  “Oberstgruppenführer!” The copilot beckoned to him. “We’re ready.”

  Hochburg drew his pistol and unlocked the clip. He freed a bullet and passed it through the chain-link fence. The boy dropped his snake and took it with red fingers.

  “Use it wisely, my child.”

  The Fw-189 lifted into the sky again. Two and a half thousand meters below, savannah drifted past: blots of jade and khaki like the camouflage pattern on an SS combat jacket. The sun beat through the glass cockpit. Sleep had been a snatched indulgence for Hochburg these past nights; drowsiness crept over him.

  “How long till we land?” he asked the copilot.

  “Another hour. Assuming we get through the British air defenses.”

  “Take control,” said Hochburg, relaxing his grip on the lever. “Wake me in twenty minutes.” He yawned, studding his eyes with tears, and let his head recline. Elisabethstadt filled his half-dreaming thoughts.

  Before the siege it had been the mining capital of Kongo, with its rows of prim bungalows, world-famous botanical garden, ice factories, and a railway hub that whisked Germans as far south as Cape Town or to the pleasures of Roscherhafen. As with other conquered cities, Hochburg had planned to rename it; to do so was part of the psychology of victory. It affirmed the Reich’s dominance as trenchantly as jackboots stamping the boulevards or the flutter of red, white, and black. For years he knew what to call it; he even had the approval of the Führer, who foolishly claimed to understand the Homeric allusion.