The Red Line

Along with his skill at fighting, he brought an orator’s tongue to the eager pulpit of the unhealed German psyche—the wounded national psyche that remained from the forced degradations of the last world war.

“Kill the Auslander!” Fromisch screamed.

“Kill the Slav!”

“Kill the Jew!”

“Kill! Kill! Kill!”

“Destroy the Communist menace!”

“Bring back our rightful place as the world’s master race!”

“Germany for the Germans!”

“Deutschland uber Alles!”

At first, the Germans of the West refused to listen. They resisted the old siren songs.

In the end, however, when their government failed them, they reluctantly turned toward the savior’s voice. They didn’t want him, but they had little choice if they desired to hold on to a united Germany. Millions gritted their teeth and fell in behind Fromisch’s banner. The dream of one Germany was just too strong.

The tide of battle turned. The East was pulled from the brink. With Fromisch at its head, the stream of blood became a flowing river. As summer dragged into fall, it was clear the struggle was over and the Communists would lose.

It was over for everyone except Cheninko. For he still had one card left to play.

For months, Cheninko’s elite ten thousand had waited in their barracks for the order to come. On three occasions, when the Communist victory appeared imminent, Cheninko had considered issuing such a command. Each time he hesitated, however, for the timing had never been quite right.

Now, from deep within the Kremlin’s walls, the secret orders went out to his commanders in East Germany. “Go out to protect the defenseless people from Fromisch’s butchers,” Cheninko said. “Pick your spots carefully. But entangle yourself in such a way that before the Germans realize what has happened, you’re in the middle of the civil war. Destroy the serpent Fromisch and his venomous army of murderers. Relight the Communist flame in the hearts of the East German people. Return them to their rightful place within the Soviet world.”

On an October day, when the leaves were dying and a pungent hint of the coming winter hung in the air, Communist men, women, and children were sent out. Acting upon Premier Cheninko’s directions, they found themselves surrounded by a company of Fromisch’s rogue army. The brave little band held their placards high. Just as they’d done many times before, Fromisch’s grinning skinheads moved in for the kill. The results, as they’d been so often in the past months, would be incredibly swift and brutally certain. Not a single Communist would survive the unfortunate encounter.

But things don’t always go as planned.

Instead, for the first time in months, the brown shirts found themselves on the wrong end of the slaughter. For from out of nowhere, a battalion of Russian soldiers emerged.

Fromisch’s rabble excelled in a street fight. This, however, was no street fight.

It was over in twenty minutes. Outnumbering the skinheads seven to one, the Soviets left two hundred of Fromisch’s maniacal henchmen lying dead on a blood-drenched street in East Berlin.

Three days later, the Soviets used the same tactic in Dresden. Another Russian battalion “stumbled” upon a slaughter in the making. Before it was over, scores of slain brown shirts sprawled in the gutters of a thousand-year-old alley.

Things were once again going Cheninko’s way.

The time had come. The morning after the Dresden victory, using the death of a handful of Russian soldiers as their justification, the Soviet forces would take to the streets. They would ruthlessly hunt down Fromisch and his men. No mercy would be shown. No quarter would be given.

They wouldn’t stop their onslaught until they’d wiped all traces of the brown shirts from the face of the earth.

The day broke on a clear autumn morning. The end was in sight. Within the week, East Germany would be firmly in Cheninko’s hands.

When each Russian commander awoke, however, he found his barracks surrounded by a well-armed force of Germans twenty times his battalion’s size. Faced with certain annihilation, all seven surrendered without a shot being fired.

Worldwide television captured the final humiliation. With the exuberant Fromisch at their head, the brown shirts marched the Russians to the Polish border and kicked them out of Germany.

Other than an occasional act of senseless sabotage, the battle for East Germany was over. East Germany belonged to Manfred Fromisch.

Germany’s adoration for the man who’d saved their country was boundless. With national elections scheduled for early in the coming spring, the latest polls showed that Fromisch and his neo-Nazi party held nearly 80 percent of the vote in both the East and the West.

The next Chancellor of Germany would be Manfred Fromisch.

The next political party to lead the German nation was going to be the Nazis.

• • •

Defeat at the hands of Fromisch and his butchers was too much for Cheninko to bear. The horrors Nazi Germany presented haunted his every waking moment. It stole his fitful sleep. The anguish the Germans had wrought upon his country tore at the fabric of Cheninko’s tortured soul.

On the day the first snow touched upon Moscow, Cheninko gathered his field marshals.

?

??You’ll prepare a plan for the destruction of Germany.”

“Yes, Comrade Premier.”

“You’ll be ready to attack within four months or face the consequences of your failure.”

With thousands of their fellow officers dead at the hands of Cheninko’s firing squads, or in the living hell of the gulags, there was no question of what the consequences would be.

There could be only one response. “Yes, Comrade Premier.”

Unless the Germans turned away from the poison spewing from Fromisch’s mouth, they would pay dearly for their decision. Cheninko would see to that.

• • •

The American President was backed into a corner. If he abandoned Germany, there would be no chance of using his great country’s power to control Fromisch and swiftly push his vile Nazis aside. If he abandoned Germany, Fromisch would be free to do as he wished.

Yet if the President announced his acceptance of Fromisch, his country would appear to be giving legitimacy to those whose unspeakable acts had cost sixty million lives during World War II.

The President decided to do the only thing he could. He appeared on worldwide television in early December to announce his decision. Only a handful of his top advisors knew the true purpose behind his words. Not even America’s closest allies were privy to the President’s plans. He couldn’t take the chance that Fromisch would uncover America’s actual intentions.

“My friends. After much discussion, and with the backing of the House and the Senate, I have come to a decision on what America’s policy will be toward the upcoming German elections. As we must do, we will respect the duly elected government of Germany, no matter what leader and form of government the free people of that nation choose to guide their future. America reiterates her position that the sovereignty of Germany, like that of all remaining NATO countries, will be protected against aggression from any source.”

America had made the choice its interests dictated. America would do what it had to do.