In The Presence Of My Enemies

Part of her still wished for the feeling of belonging she'd had before she found out what she was. But, considering a lot of the things Germans had done, maybe being on the outside looking in was the better part of the bargain.

Had Lise Gimpel expected miracles from the new Reichstag, she would have been disappointed. Since she expected very little, she found herself pleasantly surprised every now and again. The delegates chose Rolf Stolle as their Speaker. The Gauleiter used his new bully pulpit to go right on slanging Heinz Buckliger for not doing enough, and for not doing it fast enough. That didn't surprise Lise at all.

Laws cutting back the powers of the SS did. So did the public hangings of a couple of Lothar Prutzmann's chief henchmen. The dangling bodies-shown on the evening news-declared the new laws had teeth. The lesson was unsubtle and thoroughly Nazi, but no less effective for that.

Holland held elections, too, and chose a parliament with a non-Fascist majority. Panzers didn't roll. The German Foreign Ministry said not a word. Dutchmen didn't dance in the streets. They didn't seem to want to give the Reich any excuse to change its mind. Lise couldn't blame them.

As summer gave way to fall, Heinrich said the Americans were getting friskier than ever. "What will they do?" Lise asked him. "Will they try to rebel?"

"I don't think so. I hope not," her husband answered. "That would be just what…some people needed." He still spoke carefully. The house might be bugged.

"How hard would the government…the way it is now…try to stop them?"

"I don't know that, either," Heinrich said. "But if the government…the way it is now…didn't try to stop them, I don't think it would be the government for very long."

"But they really have put a boot on the SS's neck," Lise protested.

"I wasn't talking about the SS. I was talking about the Wehrmacht, " Heinrich said. "The Army won't put up with weakness here, and it won't want to let the Yankees get too strong. They aren't like the Dutch or the Czechs. They could be rivals. They could be worse rivals than the Empire of Japan, because they're more like us. The Wehrmacht wouldn't like that at all, and how can you blame it?"

Lise eyed her husband before answering. He'd tacked on the last half dozen words, she judged, to keep anyone on the other end of a bug happy. "Who possibly could?" she said in the same spirit. "After it broke up the Putsch, who could blame it for anything?"

Heinrich started to nod, then caught himself and wagged a finger at her, as if to say,Naughty, naughty. Lise stuck out her tongue. Maybe she'd meant you couldn't blame the Wehrmacht for anything because it hadn't done anything blameworthy. Or maybe she'd meant you didn't dare blame it for anything, because it was the greatest power in the land. Which? Her green eyes dancing, she shook her head. She was a woman. She was entitled to her mysteries. And she wasn't altogether sure herself.

"What about the Czechs?" she asked, changing the subject a little. "Will the Reich let them go?"

Her husband shrugged. "Beats me. They have the vote last summer to back up their declaration of independence. And if anybody can outfinagle the Foreign Ministry, it's the fellow they've got leading Unity. He can make you feel ashamed when you do something that isn't on the up-and-up, and how many people are able to do that? But…"

"Yes. But." Lise knew why Heinrich hesitated. The Czechs were Slavs, and Slavs, even Slavs like the Czechs who'd been entangled in German affairs since time out of mind, were in the National Socialist way of thinking Untermenschen. If you once started making concessions to Untermenschen, didn't you acknowledge they might not be so inferior after all? And if you acknowledged that, how did you justify the massacres and the slave labor that had filled the last seventy years?

Even more to the point, if you acknowledged that Slavs-or some Slavs-might not be Untermenschen, didn't you take a step towards acknowledging that Jews also might not be Untermenschen?Could a National Socialist government take a step in that direction?

"the Fuhrer has said mistakes were made in years gone by," Heinrich said; if the Fuhrer said it, it couldn't possibly be treasonous-as long as he stayed Fuhrer. "If we decide to set some of those mistakes to rights, that wouldn't be so bad."

"No. Of course it wouldn't," Lise answered. Even though the Czechs were doing most of the agitating these days, they'd got off relatively easy. How could the Reich make amends to the relative handful of Poles and Russians and Ukrainians who still survived?