excerpt from beginning of Chapter 1 ©

 

Rubble. April, 1945

 

Dirt was a part of his body. It gathered in small patches on the bends and in the hollows of his sticky flesh and lately seemed to grow rather than collect. It penetrated into his blood system and pumped thickly in his veins. He moved more slowly, without vigor. Dirt turned his blood into mucky sludge. Filth seeped into his mind. Days dragged and dates fell across each other lazily. Numbers of the month trudged by in a temporal morass and sank.

 

Oberstleutnant Walter Zeller, assigned earlier in the year by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to head the German Society of Polar Research, wanted a bath. A basin of water to splash his face and clean under his arms. Clean water was rare in Berlin. Pure water, water not crawling with microscopic bugs ready to eat what was left of a whole body.

 

The plumbing of the ramshackle hotel converted to barrack Zeller’s small platoon had ceased functioning weeks before. A tailored white uniform—Luftwaffe 54th Death’s Head Bomber Wing—that had been the lofty expression of his vanity was folded neatly in a suitcase awaiting an appropriate occasion. Gold epaulets, buttons, and stripes on the side of each pant leg reminded him of his days of glory. The last time he had worn it, it hung loosely on his five-foot-ten frame. He had lost weight. He was not now the imposing, rotund figure who dazzled maidens at Reichsmarschall Göring’s gala, all-night soirées.    

 

The buzz of uncontested Soviet Lavochkin LA-7s strafing the center of Berlin was punctuated by explosions. Zeller ignored them. He tried to remember the scent of the rose cologne and rose soap he had at the beginning of the war. He lathered his hands in dirty gray water with the sliver of a bar of horse soap. He craved to once again smell the rose-scented women in Madame Fabienne Jamet’s opulent One Two Two Club on 122 Rue de Provence in Paris that he had so often visited with the Reichsmarschall. The fourth floor of the club was his favorite. As Madame Fabienne loved to repeat with a smile shaped by sinister mischief, “Plus on allait vers le ciel, plus on se rapprochait de l’enfer.”

 

Indeed, Zeller remembered, the closer one got to the sky, the closer one got to hell. Sadist pleasures were to be found on the top floor of the One Two Two Club.

 

In the mirror above his water basin, Zeller saw a scrawny black cat with white paws and face balanced on the sill of an open window of his second-floor room. Its ribs showed through in scaly red patches of wrinkled skin depleted of hair.

 

“Hello, pretty kitty,” Zeller purred, hands held palms up. He approached the pitiful animal slowly, speaking softly. When he was within reach, when the cat stretched to sniff his hands, he snatched it and rotated its head and body in opposite directions in one swift motion. Before he threw the corpse to the street below, he noticed that it was a female. Like that slut, Yvette, in Madame Jamet’s One Two Two Club, he thought. I should have twisted her skinny neck, too, instead of breaking her nose.

 

No one laughs at a Luftwaffe officer.

 

For a week, Zeller had tried to make an appointment to see the Führer’s secretary, Traudl Junge, without success. The Supreme Leader of the German people was busy with problems more pressing than escape. Reichsmarschall Göring ignored Zeller’s requests to intercede.

 

Mad hope prevailed in the Führerbunker. Hitler shouted orders to army commanders whose divisions did not exist. Marshal Zhukov’s First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts streamed towards Berlin without serious resistance. The earth as well as the sky belonged to Stalin.

 

In the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery, those about to die gaily celebrated the Führer’s birthday. Eva Braun hosted the bawdy party. Hitler did not attend.

 

Zeller scrubbed his hands with the coarse soap, his mind preoccupied in his hedonistic past, when a corporal in his detachment knocked on the open doorframe of his room. A young boy stood at attention next to the corporal. Zeller motioned the two forward and took an envelope from the hands of the adolescent currier dressed in an outsized and ragged uniform. Hitler Youth insignia were crudely sewn on its lapels. Zeller guessed his age to be 14. The sandy-haired boy wore an Iron Cross over his heart and disciplined dedication on his face. His hands and face were smudged with dirt.

 

A typed letter ordered Zeller to accompany the boy soldier back to the Führerbunker. Zeller noticed the date. April 29, 1945. Zeller checked his watch. 8:15. The letter had been typed earlier that morning, before dawn revealed Berlin’s hopelessness. An appointment had been made to speak to Hitler. The order was signed by Martin Bormann, Reichsleiter of the Party Chancellery. 

 

Only four months before, at the end of a strenuous New Year celebration at Göring’s Berlin estate, the Reichsmarschall  had appointed Zeller to head the German Society of Polar Research. Zeller tackled his assignment with enthusiasm. More than his faith in the Party and loyalty to the Führer, Zeller bonded to Reichsmarschall Göring. He modeled himself—his dress, mannerisms, and values—on his patron and friend, Hermann Göring.

 

Later that day, his friend fled Berlin for the safety of Berchtesgaden, the Nazi mountain retreat in Bavaria.

 

Zeller had learned much in four months. He visited the Führerbunker every day, only to be told to come back the next. Each day, he saw the disintegration of order and discipline and heard despair settle into the voice of Frau Junge. He watched the traffic of beaten soldiers and minor officials in and out of the bunker slow to a trickle. He learned the lessons of disap­pointment, defeat, and soured hope, and with these lessons he understood the great importance of the assignment that Göring had entrusted to him.

 

In the months since he arrived in Berlin, Zeller had familiarized himself with the history of the Society of Polar Research. By mid-April, he knew its history and every participant in its work since Captain Alfred Ritscher’s Antarctic Expedition in 1938-39 laid claim to New Swabia and ignored existing Norwegian claims for the same territory.

 

Without notes, he knew the demographics and population of New Swabia, Germany’s territory in Antarctica, a frozen colony unknown to the world, unknown in Germany except to those immediately involved. Over 10,000. He knew secret sea routes, the names of submarine commanders, freighter and tanker captains, and the crew and cargo capacity of each ship. He acquainted himself with rivalries and animosities that underscored the selection of emigrants to the colony. He studied the power struggles and shifting alliances that existed in New Swabia. He gauged the power of each faction, particularly the struggle between Reichführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

 

Zeller and the Hitler Youth cadet made their way through the street debris, avoiding areas that were open to sight from the sky. A burnt out Horch 853 Sport Cabriolet smoldered at one intersection. Other blackened hulks, some on their sides, some turned over, were tombstones of a dying nation. A troop carrier emitted the acrid smell of burning rubber. Civilian and military corpses created a haphazard cemetery.

 

Voss Strasse, the main avenue leading to the Führerbunker, was pitted with bomb craters and large chunks of pavement and lined with piles of dross rubble—cracked bricks and concrete blocks, splintered wood, shattered glass, discarded mementos of a better past, and broken dreams.

 

The open square of Wilhelmplatz was overgrown with weeds and strewn with the shards of a society in ruins. Faded, crumpled photographs of family gatherings, partially burned sheets of official documents, and yellowed newspaper pages travelled across the square to nowhere in particular, propelled by gusts of spring.

 

Block after block, mile after mile, Berlin was a city of rubble, walls missing on buildings still standing, interiors embarrassed by the sunlight and their suffering exposed.

 

Zeller’s uniform was dusty with an unidentifiable, fine-grained mist that was not factory smoke or fog. His uniform, already soiled from the streets he walked every day, was rank and spotted with perspiration in the armpits and along the spine. His boots were dull, scuffed by the bombed rubble that littered fractured roads and fallen walls that were once arrogant Berlin. Random, rancid stench swirled through the streets. Unattached officers seeking orders avoided decomposing dogs and horses. Desperate citizens scrounged the ruins of the diseased city for food.

 

There was a pathetic, indistinguishable consistency to everything that Zeller saw and those who saw him were equally unable to distinguish him from other soldiers orphaned by the state apparatus as it collapsed. He was another detached and neglected officer in a starving family, lost and unwanted. Another soiled, defeated warrior.

 

Zeller and the cadet, dodging real and imaginary shells, found temporary shelter behind the skeleton of a blackened trolley. Zeller gazed in both directions. Gutted shells of office and apartment buildings stretched as far as he could see. Mounds of brink, broken concrete, and twisted, iron rebar pushed in from both sides of the narrow avenue. Here and there, individual civilians and soldiers darted from one heap to another. American bombing in the last year had left 100,000 Berliners homeless, living as they could in the rubble, frozen corpses gesticulating death in the winter, decomposing and reeking carcasses attracting starving dogs in the spring. The advance troops of an imperium of maggots.

 

Entire neighborhoods, street after street, had been demolished by Allied blockbuster bombs and incinerated in cyclonic fire storms.

 

Zeller thought back to 1941, when the German army sat on Europe, a juggernaut bird of prey. The German officer had been the bird’s master.

 

That was 1941.

 

This was 1945. April 29, 1945, a good day for a German officer to cleanse himself of the uniform of the vanquished.

 

At daybreak that morning, the Soviet 3rd Shock Army crossed Moltke Bridge and spread out into the streets surrounding the Reichstag. British, French, and American troops had already taken southern and western Germany. The Supreme Leader, it was rumored, had suffered a nervous breakdown.

 

Oberstleutnant Zeller was only partially distracted by fear of capture by advancing Russians. He considered what he would say to some Russian peasant if he were captured.

 

He anticipated what he would say in his meeting with Hitler.

 

If the Führer wants to escape the vengeance of the Russians, if he prefers suicide, what can I do? Better honorable death than dragged by Asiatic hoards through the streets of Moscow in a cage like a circus animal.

 

Zeller rehearsed his summary of the plan of escape, a plan of escape so full-proof that it had already been set in operation. The Hitler Youth cadet pointed to the entrance to the Führerbunker.

 

Zeller unfolded a letter that falsely identified him as a hydrologist. Bold letters at the top stood out:

 

Berlin Department of Water, Purification Section

 

He stuffed the letter in a jacket pocket and suffered the bitter irony of his false identity and the gray water in the basin in his room. In his mind, he revisited in bitter memory Yvette in Madame Jamet’s One Two Two Club and lashed at her full, naked rump with a silver-handled riding whip until the smell of burning rubber from the broad, rubble-strewn avenue behind him brought him back to the dismal external reality that enclosed him.

 

The cadet led Zeller forward with the fearless courage and story heroics of a boy who has not yet experienced war. On each side of the street, the façade walls of three-story apartment buildings had been torn off and, like doll houses, their interiors were exposed.

 

In a second-story apartment, Zeller saw a woman standing close to an invisible fourth wall. She appeared to be staring into a mirror hanging on a wall that was not there, fixing her hair. She did not see Zeller and the cadet, though they were plainly visible from her vantage. She tilted forward and fell forward, face first, ending behind a mound of debris as a puff of dust thrown up by her impact and that, in the end, was the full impact of her life on earth. Dust thrown up by death on impact.

 

At the entrance of the Führerbunker, a dandelion pushed through the crack between cobblestones. The cadet did not notice that he stepped on it as they entered the bunker. 

 

A dark cloud of smoke rose from a burning ministry. Zeller fantasized that the filth that surrounded him was cleansed. He saw himself, a portly and tailored leader in a white uniform with gold epaulets, buttons, and stripes.

 

He imagined himself in an immaculate, white city in Antarctica.