Final impact

Well, in fact he couldn’t remember. It had been so long, and events had taken such a twisted and evil course since then, that Himmler seemed to have spent most of his waking life shuffling from one dank, stale-smelling underground bunker to another. The touch of morning sun on his face in the brief seconds between climbing out of his Mercedes and hurrying into the nondescript building on a small street running off Wilhelmstrasse had been like a week at a spa in the Alps. If only he could have lingered in the sooty, high-walled courtyard at the back of the building where his car had pulled up. He might have stood there all day, soaking in the warmth and the sweet, soft light. But such an indulgence was not for him. History was bearing on his shoulders, threatening to crush him.

Those foul, creeping, two-faced pigs in Moscow were…were…

His brain locked up, unable to get past the impacted rage and violation.

This was not supposed to happen. They were supposed to be plowed under by the Aryan race, led by his glorious SS. Instead a horde-a veritable Mongol horde of the beasts-was tearing across the steppes, threatening to break into the German heartland and plunge Western civilization into a new dark age. The fuhrer had been so overcome by his anger that he’d suffered some form of seizure and actually passed out in the bunker, stopping in midrant and smashing his head on the edge of the table as he collapsed. None of the trembling, whey-faced physicians had been able to revive him. He had simply remained there on the floor, his head resting on the balled-up jacket of a Luftwaffe officer, as grotesque spasms swept over his prostrate form.

Finally Himmler had been unable to stand it any longer, calling for an SS medic to attend. The man had arrived ten minutes later, and unlike the sniveling civilian doctors he had acted, getting the fuhrer transferred to a cot in his private chambers and administering a sedative that noticeably calmed the tremors. He had re-dressed the ugly, swollen gash over Hitler’s left eye and sternly warned everyone not to disturb him. He had then taken Himmler aside and, in a low worried tone, had explained that it was possible the fuhrer had suffered a stroke and might well be impaired for some time. One arm was lifeless, and the whole right side of his face looked like that of a wax dummy exposed to an excess of heat. It…drooped was about the best word Himmler could come up with.

At that moment a terrifying loneliness had seized the Reichsfuhrer. He felt like a child who loses sight of its parents in a crowd. What if the fuhrer was gone? What if he had been poisoned, or succumbed to the enormous strain of the past month? No one else in the world had to deal with the sort of pressure to which he had been subjected. Nobody else could possibly have withstood the physical and psychic torment like Adolf Hitler.

But what if he was gone?

Himmler had returned to the map room, where a heavy pall still hung, and explained that long hours had caught up with the fuhrer and he had simply passed out, in need of some rest. Yet his endurance was a beacon to all. The SS chief explained then that he would assume administrative responsibilities for the next few hours, until the fuhrer awoke, and told the assembled staff officers that he wasn’t going to meddle with their deliberations; they were to dispose of their forces as they saw fit to meet the challenges on both the Eastern and Western fronts.

Then he had excused himself.

Flanked by his bodyguards now, Himmler hastened up the narrow steps into the rear of the building for his meeting with Oshima. The Japanese envoy wasn’t due for another half an hour, and it was more than likely that he would be delayed anyway. Once inside, he was confronted with a narrow hallway that ended in a steel door, which was blocked by two more SS guards who came rigidly to attention when they saw him. As Himmler acknowledged their salutes, one of the guards spoke into a telephone. The door, which resembled a watertight hatch on a warship, clanked open and Himmler passed through. Bare concrete stairs led downward on the other side. He descended, holding tight to the steel handrail. The staircase was steep and the steps were quite narrow. It would be easy to slip and break his neck.

Behind him the three-story block presented the faзade of a well-maintained baroque apartment building. Formerly owned by Jews, it had been converted to office space for use by the SS after the Kristallnacht pogrom. The uniformed Allgemeine-SS staffers in the aboveground offices were part of a unit charged with disposing of the worldly goods of Jews such as the former owners of this building, all of whom had gone into the ovens or died in forced labor camps.