Blood of the Reich Read online

  Blood of the Reich

  A Novel

  William Dietrich

  Dedication

  To Holly, once more

  Epigraph

  The chief task of the Tibet expedition was political and military, not scientific. Details may not be revealed.

  —REICH PROPAGANDA MINISTER JOSEPH GOEBBELS, IN A MEMO TO GERMAN NEWSPAPERS, 1940

  My ambition is to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will easily fit on the front of a T-shirt.

  —PHYSICIST LEON LEDERMAN, 1993

  Author’s Note

  This novel is inspired by a 1938 Nazi expedition to Tibet, its purpose debated to this day. The story is also based on a real quest. The complex philosophic tradition that gave rise to the Nazi Party included a speculative Vril Society and, in the 1930s, reports of a Wahrheitsgesellschaft, or Society for Truth, which sought Vril to power new machines. Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, an SS research organization, existed as described. Himmler’s castle at Wewelsburg can be visited. The Tibetan legend of Shambhala is real. String theory, dark matter, and dark energy are all part of the theoretical framework of modern physics.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by William Dietrich

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Berlin, Germany

  March 21, 1938

  First day of spring, and pregnant with the same expectancy that gripped Kurt Raeder at his unexpected summons from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The Prussian sky was cold, ragged sunlight dappling the German capital with that glitter atop iron that promised an end to winter. So might Himmler be the pagan sun to part the clouds of Raeder’s stalled career. So might Raeder win his own expedition.

  “We have read with interest your books on Tibet,” the summons stated. With that simple missive the explorer had been yanked out of the ennui of his university teaching and the gloom of his wife’s death, the opportunity like the twin lightning bolts of the SS Rune.

  As Raeder walked from the U-Bahn into the heart of Nazi power, Berlin seemed to share his anticipation. The city was its habitual gray, buds swollen but little green on the trees yet. The paving was bright from a night’s rain, however, and the capital seemed poised, purposeful, like one of the new steel tanks that had waited on the border for the Anschluss with Austria just nine days before. Now the two nations were united in a single German Reich, and once more public apprehension about a Nazi gamble had turned to excitement bright as the red swastika banners, vivid as a wound. All the world was waiting to see what Germany would do next. All Germany was waiting to see what Hitler would do next. His New Order was improbably succeeding, and on Wilhelm-Strasse, marble blocks and columns were stacked to the sky where the Führer’s imposing Chancellery was rising. Speer had promised completion in less than a year, and workers scrambled across the pile like frenzied ants. People watched, with pride.

  Raeder secretly liked the theatricality of his black SS uniform and the medieval ritual of SS indoctrination. It meant brotherhood, the satisfaction of being one of the chosen. Entry into the new German knighthood in 1933, suggested by a politician friend, had been a way to establish Aryan ancestry and win a measure of grudging deference in a university system glacial in its advancements. But while appointments had come quicker with the exodus of the Jews, Raeder’s brief fame had not solidified into promotion.

  University intellectuals were snobbish toward the Nazis. At school, Raeder had mostly avoided the costume, preferring to blend in with high starched collar and restricting tie through years of brief celebrity, dull instruction, and finally private tragedy.

  But now the Reichsführer SS had somehow taken notice. Here was the hinge of Raeder’s life. So the young professor had put on the Schutzstaffel uniform with its runic insignia, both proud and self-conscious. When his faculty colleague Gosling spied him from a café and joked about it, the zoologist managed the good humor to shrug.

  “Even scholars have to eat.”

  Life, the Nazis preached, was struggle.

  Raeder knew he cut a fine SS figure. Brown hair a shade too dark to be ideal, perhaps, but handsome and fit from his explorations: erect, wiry, what a German youth might wish to be, the new man, the Aryan prototype. Crack shot, alpinist, university scholar, hunter, author, and scientist for the Third Reich. Lotte’s death had not been publicized, out of deference to his achievements. His self-doubt he kept to himself.

  Almost unconsciously, Berliners swerved around his uniform on the crowded Wilhelm-Strasse, a caution he accepted as normal. The SS was not to be loved, Himmler had preached. But Untersturmführer Kurt Raeder, adventurer! His resolute gaze had been in magazines. Women swept by him and peeked.

  Pedestrians thinned as he walked past the sterile, massive headquarters of Göring’s new Air Ministry, the power of the Luftwaffe implied by its modernist bulk. And then thinned still more as he turned left onto Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and arrived at Number 8, the most notorious address in Nazi Germany. Here was the home of the Reich Security Ministry, which included the SS and Gestapo. Next door was Number 9, the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais Hotel, also subsumed by the growing security bureaucracy. To Raeder’s eye the home of the police was a more inviting structure than the plain severity of Göring’s headquarters. With classical arched entry and Renaissance styling, the SS buildings harkened back to the more refined nineteenth century. Only the black-clad sentries who flanked the door hinted at its new purpose.

  There were rumors of Gestapo cells in the basement. There were always rumors, everywhere, of the very worst things. This was good, Raeder believed. Menace promised security to those who followed the rules. None could deny the Nazis had brought order out of chaos. While the democracies were flailing, the totalitarian models—Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan—were on the rise.

  This building was the fist of the future. Raeder’s future.

  There was a hush inside, like a church. A grand stairway with thick balustrade, steps carpeted in red plush like a movie palace, led up a flight to a vaulted entry
hall. The only decorations were three hanging swastika flags and busts of Hitler and Göring. Public depictions of Himmler were rare; his power was his air of mystery. Bare wooden benches as uncomfortable as pews lined one side of the waiting area, glacial light filtering in from arched, frosted windows. At the far end three steps led to another entry (like an altar, Raeder thought, continuing the church analogy) with black-clad guards presiding instead of black-robed priests. Himmler had modeled his elite on the Jesuits, and SS zeal on the discipline of the Inquisition.

  Raeder’s credentials were checked and he was admitted to a more private reception area, the offices beyond barricaded by a massive counter of dark-stained oak, stout as a dam. Now a more thorough check, this time by a blond-headed Nordic guard of the type the SS put on its posters. The officer scrutinized his insignia skeptically.

  “An Untersturmführer to see the Reichsführer?”

  Raeder showed the letter that had summoned the SS lieutenant from his residence in the respectable Wilmersdorf district, the apartment haunted now since Lotte’s death. “The Reichsführer expects all ranks to serve.”

  The comment drew no reaction from a man with the expressiveness of a robot. “Wait.”

  The explorer stood stiffly as the orderly spoke into a telephone and then returned it to its cradle. The guard didn’t bother to look at Raeder again.

  Long minutes passed. Raeder could hear the faint clack of heels on tile, the cricket-murmur of typewriter keys and code machines, the rumble of wooden file drawers sliding out and slamming home. Each muffled ring of distant phone was answered before it could jangle a second time. All was whispered, as if the ministry building had been selected to absorb sound. Was noise from the basement muted, too? The colors were institutional green and cream, the lights a somber yellow.

  “This way, Professor Raeder.”

  Another SS officer, a Sturmbanführer, thicker and pinker, briskly led him into the maze of corridors beyond. They wound one way and another, climbed a flight of stairs, and wound again. Raeder was (perhaps deliberately) lost. The office doors they passed were shut, shapes moving behind obscured glass. The few people in the hallways were male, hurried, boots drumming, conversation a murmur. The walls were blank. Floors gleamed. The calm efficiency, the monkish concentration, the paper-and-glue smell of a library . . . it was admirable and disquieting.

  Then more SS guards as strapping as Vikings snapped to attention, a double door swung open, and they came to a high-ceilinged anteroom paneled in beech. Sentries checked Raeder for weapons and scrutinized his identification once again. No one smiled or spoke more than the minimum. It was a wordless play, the anteroom dim, windowless. He was in the middle of a vast hive.

  A knock on a side door, an answering buzz, and he was ushered through.

  Raeder expected another corridor, but instead found himself in a modest painted office, with a lower ceiling than in the anteroom outside. A single window looked out on a courtyard, the wall it faced blank stone. No one from outside could look in. There was a large but plain desk, left over from some Prussian ministry, and three leather chairs in front of it. Behind sat the second most powerful man in Germany.

  Himmler looked up from a manila file and gave Raeder an owlish blink. With round spectacles, receding chin, and narrow shoulders, the Reichsführer SS was nothing like his praetorians outside. In fact, he resembled a bank clerk or schoolmaster. He had a thin mustache, pale skin, and white, fastidious, womanly hands. His hair was shaved close to the skull above his ears in the dull helmet shape of Prussian fashion.

  A much fiercer portrait of the Führer looked down on them with burning zeal: that shock of black hair, that punctuating mustache.

  The office was otherwise absent of decoration. There were no personal pictures or mementos, just a wall of books, many of them old, leather-bound, and cracked. Raeder couldn’t read the faded titles. The Reichsführer’s desk was as neat as that of an accountant, stacks of files with colored tabs precisely squared and ranked. Either this was not Himmler’s regular office or the Reichsführer had no need of the baronial opulence of a Hermann Göring. The abstention was eerie.

  Himmler closed the folder and turned it so Raeder could discern his own name and picture.

  “Sit.”

  The zoologist did so, sinking into a chair. Its legs had been trimmed so that he almost squatted, looking up at Himmler. The Reichsführer smiled thinly, as if to relax his guest, but the chilliness simply reinforced the man’s power. There was something oddly vacant about the personality he projected, as if Raeder were meeting with a facade.

  Then Himmler abruptly leaned forward in a disconcertingly intense way, with a predatory glare like an insect, eyes obscured behind the reflection of the glasses, purpose ignited as if with a match.

  “Untersturmführer,” the security minister began without preamble, folding his hands on Raeder’s folder, “do you believe in the importance of blood?”

  2

  Seattle, United States

  September 4, Present Day

  He was cute, he was checking her out, and he was a frozen foods guy.

  Rominy Pickett believed a man’s character could be divined by his location in the supermarket, a method at least as reliable as the signs of the zodiac. She usually dismissed males spotted in the beer-and-chips aisle, on the theory they might represent the man-child-slob archetype in need of too much reform. Those in stock foods she suspected to be conservative and dull: only a Republican would buy canned peas. The wine section was more promising (she supposed that marked her a bit of a snob, favoring wine over beer), and fruits and vegetables were also possible. She didn’t need a vegetarian, but a man who thought about his greens and took time to cook them might be thoughtful and slow about other things as well.

  The bread aisle was a place to find solid whole-wheat types, but too many already wore wedding rings. Picnic supplies suggested an outdoorsman, while intellect could be gauged by where a guy planted himself on the magazine aisle: Was he browsing The Economist or Truck Trend?

  But spices, condiments, and wine were best, Rominy believed, suggesting a fellow open to detail, experimentation, and taste.

  Admittedly, this screening was far from perfect, given the tendency of grocery hunks to move from one aisle to another. But then the zodiac was open to interpretation, too. Her criterion was at least as reliable, she maintained to her friends, as the arch fiction encountered on Internet dating sites.

  Frozen food was a problem. The likelihood of meeting bachelors rose here, given the stacks of entrees aimed at singles. But the freezer cases also implied haste, microwaving, even (could you read this much into a grocery cart?) a certain lack of ambition. Defrosting was too easy.

  True, she was in the frozen foods aisle, too, with Lean Cuisine Cheddar Potatoes and Broccoli and a pint of Häagen-Dazs. But this was about prospective life partners, not Rominy’s own singleton existence as software publicist. She’d achieved a bachelor’s in communication, a gray forty-square-foot cubicle with industrial carpet and underpowered PC, two longish relationships broken off well short of real commitment, and personal resolve not to settle for competent mediocrity. Yet nothing ever happened. Grim global news, limping economy, girlfriends who only quipped, men who only wanted to hang out.

  And shopping at Safeway. For one.

  She was almost thirty.

  Not that old, she reminded herself. Not nowadays. She was due for promotion soon. She was due for things to happen.

  And yes, cute frozen foods guy was glancing again. Rominy caught herself instinctively and embarrassingly flipping her brunette hair as she imagined a thousand things about him: that his lingering by the pizza case made him interested in Italian food and Renaissance art, that the way his left foot with trail shoes rested on the shopping cart gave him the athletic stance of a mountain biker or rugby player, that the pen in his shirt pocket announced not nerd-with-grocery-list but poet prepared for spontaneous inspiration. Unruly surfer blond hair, icy blue eye
s, an intriguing scar on the chin: how delicious if it had been from reckless danger! (Probably a juvenile skateboard accident.) And there was a hint of a muscular physique under the denim shirt. Yes, Rominy was a regular Sherlock in the way she could scope out the human male at a glance. Too bad if the scrutiny took them aback—and damn them if they did too much of the same to her.

  What she wanted was to undress their souls.

  He wasn’t approaching, however, just looking. Too much looking, in fact. Evaluating her with a curious, hesitant stare that was anything but coy, flirtatious, or even leering. He simply regarded her like a curious specimen. Creepy, Mr. Frozen Foods Guy. Or boring. Get a life.

  On to the condiments! Rominy pushed her cart two aisles down and pondered the advance in civilization represented by squeeze bottles of ketchup. Her ambition was to invent something simple and practical, like the paper clip, retire to the beach, and try Proust or Pynchon again. Master Sudoku. Train for the Iron Man. Open an animal shelter. Build a kayak. Figure out her camera.

  But then Frosty the Snowman idled into view, leaning on his own cart like a handsome cowboy over a saddle horn, oblivious to whatever might be melting on his metal mesh. Still looking but not doing. Shy or stalker? Not worth it to find out. Maybe she read too much chick lit, but she wanted a man who showed confident initiative. Who came up and said something funny.

  So she wheeled around and took a quick dash to the feminine products aisle, territory guaranteed to ward off unwanted males the way garlic and crucifix could deter vampires. Rominy should never have returned his glance in the first place, but how could you know? She’d camp here until the lurker had time to move away.

  But no, he’d peeked down the aisles from the broad corridor at the back of the store and tracked her to this new refuge. Now he turned his cart into terra incognita and, looking questioningly at her, mouth opening like a fish, hopelessly uncertain what his first line should be. Next to the tampons? Did she know this dude? No. Why was he trailing her? Why hadn’t he said anything? He wasn’t just checking her out. He was watching.