Started October 29, 2007

I think I was a little too obsessed with my history project topic. Just a little. You see, I chose to write about the top four masterminds of the Third Reich. Wonderful topic, if I do say so myself. I was supposed to sum it up in just ten pages, but my professor took me by the arm on my way out of class.

“You picked something very broad,” Mr. Swann said, his squinting grey eyes looking at me. I could hear the asthmatic wheezing of his breath as he spoke to me. “Would you care to tell me what you are focusing your topic on?”

“Exactly what I said,” I told him. “The top four masterminds of the Third Reich, but not Hitler. There’s already too much written about him already.”

My teacher was not satisfied. You could tell he was not used to teaching such an elementary college history class. “All right. But what about the men? Their backgrounds, personalities, duties during the war… what?”

“All of that,” I said, ready to take the challenge. History had always fascinated me, and I was willing to devote all the time I could to my project.

“Will you be able to fit all that into the page limit?” Mr. Swann asked. His eyebrows crinkled up like dying caterpillars in skepticism. “I assure you, I do not have the time to read a twenty page paper from one student… not to dampen your enthusiasm, of course.”

“I’m sure I will be,” I said confidently. “I’m a pretty concise writer.”

Mr. Swann nodded and gathered his books off the podium where he droned out his lectures. “Very well. I will see you on Thursday, then. Your bibliography will be due.”

That very night, I dived into my research, having hardly anything to do in any of my other classes, and no work. They were cutting my hours to train new employees and the time I had off suited me. It was a good time for a break; in the middle of chilly October, when teachers always piled on the most work.

I sat back in my comfortable chair in my room, leaning back and stretching before loading Google and typing in the name of the first Nazi. An article on Wikipedia directed me to several photos and I took the link, knowing that it would help me better if I could visualize these men. The face I saw when I opened the link… looked like any normal man. They all looked perfectly normal, just like people you would see on the street, but somehow he was different. The man was florid and heavyset, bull-featured. Even his name was reminiscent of a bull: Goering. Isn’t that what a bull does? Does it not gore you? I asked myself, dismissing the information as an irrelevant reference to semantics. I wrote down some relevant information on Mr. Goering, then looked at my watch. It was nearly ten thirty and time for me to retire to bed.

For some reason, the image stayed in my mind all night, as I tried to go to sleep; Goering like a bull, running toward me; to gore me with his proverbial horn of authority. It struck me and I tried my best to rid myself of the nightmarish mental picture.

Wednesday, I woke up and was certain there was someone in the room with me, some dark figure from my dreams. Something strange. I blinked fast to erase it from my vision, then got up quickly and turned on the light, purposely blinding myself. Of course, nobody was there. I wondered vaguely what I had seen, and what it was or who. Just a phantom, I supposed.

Classes were the usual grinding bullshit. I suffered through lectures and jealous glances from several members of the class when I got questions right. Who cares about them? I thought. It’s not my fault I have extra time to study… and I use it.

The halls brought me down to the library, and I was immediately reminded of my history paper I was so enthused about. My classes were over for the day, and I decided to look in a few books. I checked the next name on my mental list; this one was my favorite. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of the Third Reich. The liar, the one who convinced a whole generation to believe in his lies; from what I heard and read, the man had even deluded himself.

Goebbels had been a cripple, I read. His right leg was malformed and shorter than the left, causing him to walk with a limp. To make up for his inferior physique, he directed his energies into writing and political news reports. He was second only to Hitler as the greatest speaker in the Nazi party. I sympathized with him immediately.

I often felt weaker than my fellow classmates, which was why I was always determined to show them up in class; give them a taste of my knowledge and intellectual superiority. My interest burning anew, I took the book and sat down with it at a nearby table. As I read on, I learned that Goebbels not only married a beautiful Aryan woman, he had affairs with a famous actress of the time, Lida Baarova. The inferiority complex must have taken a hold on his sex life, too. I chuckled, reading that.

After a few quiet minutes of reading, I took my cell phone out of my bag to check on it. As usual, no one had called me. No one from work, not even my parents had bothered to call and see how I was. It was time to go home anyway. My dogs were waiting to be fed and I had other homework waiting to be done.

The parking lot was quite a ways away from the library, and I was pleased to walk there. The weather was excellent, and the pine trees on campus sighed in the wind, shaking off their dying needles and putting new ones out. Geese from the pond behind the school honked loudly at me as I passed. I avoided looking at them; I never cared much for birds.

I was just about to reach my car, when my cell phone went off loudly in my pocket. “Hello?” I answered.

“Hey!” It was one of my co-workers. Her anxious voice immediately alerted me. “You won’t believe what just happened!”

“What?” She sounded even more stressed than normal, and drawing from what little I knew of Becca, she always seemed stressed.

“A plane just crashed into the restaurant! Remember when I said I was thinking of quitting? Now I guess I don’t have to! No one was hurt… but…” She was breathing hard, and I wondered when she would start hyperventilating.

“What kind of plane?” I asked. “A jumbo jet or some little thing?”

“It’s all over TV! Now go watch it because I have to go!” Becca hung up abruptly. For some reason, she did not enjoy speaking to me; and I assumed one of the managers put her up to telling me the news that barely made me blink. Nobody was hurt, which was a major relief, but now I had to get a new job and fast.

I drove home with those thoughts in my mind; after homework and research, I had to go out jobhunting. Before I did all that, I obeyed Becca’s order and flicked on the television. On the local news channel, the anchors were showing pictures of the damage done to my former place of employment. The small plane had crashed directly into the entrance of the store. My managers appeared on the television, stated they had been working in the back and were not harmed.

“As for the pilot, he perished in the crash,” said the main anchor. “He was on one of his first solo flights, and needless to say, he failed.” The anchor shook his head and a photograph of the pilot appeared on the screen.

I peered at it; always the visual learner. He looked familiar… those florid cheeks, the corpulent face… the mouth enveloped in the fat of his jowls… Hermann Goring! The bull… the bull who gores with a look… my own mouth dropped open. It couldn’t be… how could Hermann Goring be the pilot when he was dead… I quickly popped out my cell phone and took a snapshot of the face on television. I must be hallucinating or something to even think it…or maybe it was some kind of odd coincidence.

I immediately turned on the computer and went to the website I had bookmarked. The face of the real Hermann Goring stared out at me. I immediately figured out there was no need to compare it side by side with the picture I had just taken. It was the same picture. It’s some mistake, I figured. They displayed the wrong picture in their archives or something. But that was ridiculous.

Hermann Goering was the commander of the Luftwaffe when he was alive; the man who had died was also a pilot, but an inexperienced one. Maybe it was the news channel’s idea of a joke. That didn’t seem plausible to me, but my mind lingered on it.

That night, I dreamed. Strange dark figures marched across the black screen of my unconscious mind, in perfect formation, but for one. One of the shadowy marchers had a limp and so, was slightly out of step with the others. I remember laughing at him in the dream, the one who could not keep in line. At the sound of my laugh, which I did not think was audible, the figure turned around, his dark eyes cold… the stare of a practiced liar. He smiled, a cruel sickle-shaped thing. His smile reaped the smirk from my face and turned my hands to stone at my sides. I had only realized that I, too was marching and I could not keep the pace… I woke up in fear.

When I recovered, it was time to leave for school and I was already late. My first class of the day on Mondays was PE, and we had no choice but to run around the lake behind the school. I was too tired to object, and a run would wake me up anyway.

The lake was beautiful and disorienting… I began to think about my paper once again, the inescapable subject that was too real. It could happen again; people like those men could meet up again and create the damage they had done. As I ran, I tried to shake it all from my mind, but it was impossible. How could those men have done those things?

The pine trees surrounding the lake were just beginning to shed their needles and start anew for the winter, and through their layered cover, I noticed something in the woods, in front of the lake. I slowed my running to a jogger’s cool down pace and got closer to the edge of the pathway around the trees.

A crowd of people were standing around an open pit. The trees obscured my vision of the people and I stepped closer, forgetting this was a timed run. Loud voices issued from the clearing and as I approached I saw several men standing around the pit wearing brown uniforms. I squinted at their armbands and gasped when the image became clear to me. It was a swastika! Had a neo-Nazi cult formed in my college? It was so unreal…

I came even closer, hiding behind a tree and peeking out. I noticed several other figures I had not seen before… I closed my eyes and opened them fast, just to make sure what I was seeing was real. These other figures were half naked and emaciated… what was going on? I was just about to shot something out to the men in brown, but I realized they had guns.

“Hey!” A loud voice broke me out of my visions. I turned around, my heart slamming in my chest and faced one of my classmates. “Aren’t you going to run?” she asked.

“Taking a break,” I said lamely, not even turning around to look her in the face. I was so entranced by what I was seeing (or not seeing) that I was in my own little world temporarily.

As my classmate jogged away, I stared out at the hole. One of the men in the brown uniforms seemed to be wishy-washy about the whole affair; he looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. I watched him closely; he looked familiar to me; probably one of the officials I had seen in a photograph. His small eyes were squinting in the sunlight and he nervously lifted his gun in the proper salute as the commanding officer walked by.

The group of emaciated Jews split up, and I saw one of them pulled from the crowd. The officer shoved the pitifully thin person (was it a man or a woman?) up against one of the slender pine trees. I was so close I could have reached out and touched the figure on the shoulder. Why, then did they not notice my presence? The officer barked in German right into the person’s face, but they bravely stood their ground. The commanding officer turned from the Jew as if in disgust, then motioned to the wishy-washy soldier. There was some rapid conversing in German, and I leaned closer to the figure of the Jew… I wished I could pull him back from the hell he was in… but they would be sure to notice me and even kill me, too. I was at odds.

Finally, when I was finished arguing with myself about it, the commanding officer seemed finished with his ranting at the hesitant soldier. He resorted to taking his anger out on the Jew, pointing at them and waving his pointer finger vigorously towards the pit.

The Jew began to walk on shaky legs, with the younger, hesitant young soldier pushing him along to his fate. I knew what would happen, but kept my eyes wide open. I was seeing history! I was seeing my project come to life!

The Jew stood at the edge of the pit, his eyes shut and his lips moving in what appeared to be a silent prayer. No one can save you, I thought uselessly. Not your god, not your country. Both are gone.

Commanding officer pointed at the hesitant soldier and barked something in German that made the Jew flinch and almost fall over the edge into the pit.

Hesitant soldier hoisted the gun up to his shoulder and stood a bit away from the Jew. The sights of the rifle trembled and I saw through his eyes. He did not want to do this; this was not pleasure for him at all; it was an order to be taken out… all to defend what he thought was a great country from a harmless foe.

The gun went off and I saw the bullet fly out as if in slow motion. It connected with the Jew’s head and I saw the rush of blood and brain splatter up from the body as the Jew fell into the pit with a flump at the bottom… not a human sound, but the sound of a mindless object. I was immediately sickened, yet still, I could not look away.

The barrel of the gun was shaking violently and the hesitant soldier had covered his mouth. I saw his throat work as he fought back a heave. I looked around, waiting for his commanding officer to berate him for showing an overt human reaction.

Something hit me abruptly in the back, jarring me, and I turned around. When I saw who had hit me, I almost screamed. Flat dark hair framed a hard, cynical face. His squinting, narrow eyes stared me down and he straightened his cap over his balding pate. He whispered something to me in German, harsh. Heinrich Himmler, engineer of the massacre of the Jewish population of Europe, was staring me in the eyes.

I didn’t remember fainting and I didn’t remember being carried back to the aerobics room for some fresh air. All I remember were the large, pain-filled eyes of the condemned Jew, the trembling barrel belonging to the hesitant Nazi soldier, and most of all, the look in Himmler’s eyes. The man had been the same as that Jew, and the same as his own underling, but he had paid the most horrible price of all; the price of sacrificing his freedom to a movement enslaving him to kill innocents.

I convinced the instructor and my fellow students that I was recovered (and sane) enough to drive home safely, and got into my car, pondering. I did something I had not done in quite some time; talked myself into a state of calm.

“Okay,” I whispered inanely; there was no one else in my car to hear me. “They are dead. I don’t know what I saw, but it certainly was not what I thought it was.”

A car cutting in front of me caught me temporarily off guard and I cursed under my breath. Maybe I was still too messed up to drive. I felt almost drunk, or as drunk as I could imagine myself being.

Traffic slowed to a stop at a red light and I groaned. This was the longest light in town, and I wanted to go home and rest, or at least collect my thoughts, as soon as possible.

All around me, there were cars; the jerk who cut in front of me, an eighteen wheeler behind me, and a red Mitsubishi Eclipse on my right side. I turned to my left and spotted a black car; it was elegant and shining and long… it looked to be from a much older time period than all the other older cars I usually saw driving around. It was a wonder the black car still ran at all. The headlights were circular and lit up, and the top was down. I could not understand why; the driver must have been from Antarctica to not have been freezing in this weather…

The driver… I looked over at him; he was dressed in a military style outfit, complete with ribbons and ornamentation. He looked like he had come from a costume party. His blond hair was parted on one side and he had a slim, aristocratic nose. His bearing was similarly so; he held his shoulders back, with both hands on the steering wheel of the car in the two and ten position.

He was looking at me, and I smiled at him, mouthing the words, “Nice car.” No sooner had I said that, then I heard a sound like a gunshot come from a nearby car.

As if in slow motion, I saw the bullet come straight towards the uniformed man in the old car. I flashed back to the scene by the pond, at the pit in my imagination and screamed loudly. The uniformed man did not even duck; he took the bullet full in the chest.

I saw his heart explode; I saw the blood splattering up and out and into his face; his face that still smiled, even in death. His eyes glazed over and he slumped back in the seat, still smiling derangedly as blood dripped down his face like tears from a sunset.

The traffic light turned green and I raced to hurry and get home. I glanced out of my rear view mirror to make sure the horrific image I saw had been another phantom and I noticed the front plate of the car with the dead man inside. SS-3.

There was no way I could even think of relaxing when I got home, but somehow I collapsed on my bed, removing my shoes and heavy schoolbag from my back all in one motion. Nothing was creepier than what had occurred today; the Jew in the pit, and then the uniformed man’s heart exploding… all right in front of me. What was it saying?

I tried my best not to think about it; I closed my eyes and lay down on my bed. Maybe I would go to sleep, wake up the next day and forget everything that had happened since. But I had my paper to do… and I was never one to procrastinate.

I got up reluctantly and logged on to my computer, bringing up my unfinished report and a few of the websites I had bookmarked.

I was a little scared to look at the pictures of the men I had picked to look up; after all, had I not seen them in real life, in flesh and blood these past few days? Hadn’t I?

Gathering my courage, I paged to a site about Hitler and his relationship with his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the short man with the limp. It took awhile to load, so while I was waiting, I stood in the empty kitchen.

My little brother was still at school and both my parents were at work, so at this time of day I usually had the house to myself.

The kitchen table was directly in front of an enormous window that gave an excellent view of my backyard. My mother had landscaped it herself, and it looked gorgeous with all the bright fall colors of a late October. I mused and imagined myself as an innocent child again, playing with the leaves. I began to drift off into a dreamlike state, wishing my innocence and free time were back again.

When I awoke I was still alone, and the clock read five thirty. That’s strange, I thought. Normally, everyone is back by now.

A loud rap on the door caught my attention and I got up from the chair, my vision spinning as it often did when I stood up too fast.

It was probably the man from FedEx, needing my signature on a package. A few weeks ago, I had ordered a hoodie from my favorite band, and I was anxiously awaiting its arrival. Maybe this was it!

I rushed to the door and opened it wide. It was not the FedEx by any means. It was another man in a brown shirt; actually two men. My mouth dropped open in horror and disbelief as I saw the armband on their uniforms. The black swastika. “Herr Mengele, we have been waiting for you,” said the shorter of the two, the one with the clubfoot.

“Yes, we have been waiting for quite some time. Why don’t you join us for a little reunion,” said the other one. His hard ice-blue eyes blazed into mine and his cynical tone made me swallow hard. I was staring at Adolf Hitler, mastermind of the Third Reich.