Chapter 24: The Hand is Dealt
November 10, 1937
7:07 AM

1
Hultz Bauer was trying to figure out how to get out of the Fürhrerbunker. Two SS still guarded the door.

“What is going on outside?” The others had asked during the explosions and gunshots that rang through Berlin earlier. All nine of the surviving Die Hand des Schicksals members were stuck in the bunker. They knew that Goebbels and his group had long since left Berlin. They were either on their way to Denmark, or all dead.

Anders Baak was sitting in a chair in the bunker. He was wishing he had a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden in the SS, though Baak did it anyway. He and Theophilus Kant were both dreaming of parties. Drinking, smoking, they wanted it all back. Berlin had been a place of massive parties and fun before the Nazis took over. Kant and Baak had joined the Gestapo in the hopes that such a high position would get them more women. It didn’t work.

Ehrhart Wennemann was the biggest womanizer in the group. He was sleeping on the floor, dreaming about sex. He had several girlfriends throughout Berlin, but he had assumed all were dead now. Hitler hated promiscuous sex, and only tolerated Wennemann because he had a good record as an agent, at least until his failure to fight at Gendarmenmarkt, which he was very much embarrassed over.

Leonhard Handler was awake watching Wennemann. He was also a womanizer, but he saw about as much hope for his lovers as Wennemann. He did have one girl whom he truly loved. She was almost certainly dead, as she lived in Wilmersdorf and he hadn’t heard from her since the explosion there Friday. God, he thought, that was only five days ago.

Wolfgang Baumueller was even more depressed. He suffered from severe melancholia and tried to suppress it with jokes and laughter. He was always making cracks and witty remarks. This made him popular with people, but it did nothing to solve his depression. He knew his parents and two brothers were dead. He wanted to join them. He had his knife, and he’d thought about just quietly slitting his wrists and hoping no one noticed until he’d crossed the Jordan. Even being a Tinte would be better than this, he thought.

If Baumueller’s main emotion was sadness, Fritz Reinwald Gwisdek’s was anger. He didn’t believe Goebbels’ insane theory that some doctor did this. The diary could have been faked, as could the recording bug with Hitler and Himmler’s voices on it. He was still certain the Jews did this. He wanted revenge. He was sitting in the corner fuming with rage. He wanted to snap the neck of every kike in Berlin. Then again, the Tinten may have taken care of that one, he thought.

Peter Narbe and Ruprecht Reitz were the only ones talking. They were discussing the inner workings of the Chancellery. There were air vent shafts leading in and out of the Fürhrerbunker. They thought that it might be wise to make use of them. It would be a means of escaping this bunker.

“Quiet!” Someone said to them. It was Baumueller. He’d heard the two guards speaking.

“Can I be honest with you?” One guard asked another.

“Yes. What are you thinking?” The other answered.

“Hitler and Himmler are just two men. They are the only ones here. My parents live out in Treptow. I’m starting to think that I should leave and go find them.”

“You mean desert our posts?”

“Yes, but who is going to punish us now? Germany has been destroyed. The Fatherland will never return to its former glory. We might as well leave the Chancellery and go be with our loved ones.”

“I’m still hesitant. Desertion is a capital crime.”

“Or would be if Germany’s government still existed. But now? There’s no point in staying here. When our absence is discovered, we’ll be long gone. And what could Hitler do about it anyway? It’s not like he can search all of Berlin for us two by himself.”

“What about Die Hand des Schicksals?”

“Well, we should keep them contained. I’ll be right back.” The guard disappeared and returned a bit later with something that made a metallic clinking noise.

“Chains! That should work.” The two guards chained the doors shut and then walked out onto Wilhelmstrasse. Die Hand des Schicksals would never learn what happened to the two.

2
“So we’re chained in here now? That’s a big improvement.” Handler said.

“Can anyone here cut through the chains?” Gwisdek asked.

“Not with the tools we have. But there is another way.” Reitz said.

“What is it?”

“On the wall here is a large vent grille. The vent shafts leading to the Fürhrerbunker are unusually large. They’re large enough for a man to fit through.”

“Are you saying we should crawl out the vents?” Kant asked.

“Exactly.” Reitz got out his knife and started unscrewing the grille. He got it off quickly. However, he would need something to stand on to get himself into the vent.

“How about this thing?” Baak asked. It was the Morgenstern machine.

“That’ll be perfect.” They slid the Morgenstern over to the vent and Reitz climbed on top of it. He bent down and went into the shaft. The other eight followed.

3
The vent shaft stayed horizontal for about ten meters before it bent straight up.

“What now?” Baak asked.

“Get on your backs. Slide up by bending at the waist. It should be large enough.” Reitz replied. He then bent up and was soon standing inside. There were crevices where each section of ductwork was connected to another. These crevices were large enough to climb up. All nine men were in good physical shape and could climb up without difficulty.

The vent continued this way for about five meters. There was a fork after that. One vent shaft ran perpendicular to the vertical shaft, with the direction running left and right. The third option was to keep going up.

“Which way, men?” Reitz asked.

“We should go straight up.” Bauer said. “We can get to the roof of the Chancellery.” Reitz nodded and they continued up. All nine men saw through a vent grille into the reception room. A group of the SS had hanged themselves. They were horrified by the sight, but all knew that meant there would be no way they could get caught in their escape attempt. Hitler and Himmler were the only ones still at the Chancellery. They could easily evade them, and even if the they were caught, the numbers being nine versus two would make the situation easy to deal with.

They kept climbing. They did run into one obstacle. There was a vent fan about ten meters from the roof. Reitz got out his knife and unscrewed it. There was another intersection, and he threw it into the horizontal duct.

They reached the roof of the Chancellery and found an air conditioning unit on top of it. They managed to unscrew the grille to it and got onto the roof of the Chancellery.

4
All right, we’re on the roof. What-holy shit.” Bauer said. They looked around the city. None of them could believe their eyes. The entire northern part of Berlin was burning. Walls of fire hundreds of meters high covered the sky to the north.

“The entire city is ablaze. What the hell happened?” Wennemann asked.

“I’m not sure I want to know.” Kant said. “Regardless, let’s get the hell off this building.” They went down the roof access and went through a hall on the opposite end of the building from Hitler’s office. Within five minutes, they were standing in the street.

“Well men, we did it. We escaped from the Chancellery. Now we face the biggest challenge. Getting to our families.” Bauer said. “I don’t know where all of you are going, but I wish you all the best of luck in getting there.” The men did the Nazi salute and walked off in the direction of where they intended to go.

5
Anders Baak wished there were still stores selling cigarettes. Hitler hadn’t banned smoking entirely, but it had become far more difficult to find cigarettes since the Nazis had taken over. Baak suspected that smoking would have been banned by 1945 or so had this whole Tinten disaster not happened.

His apartment was in Reinickendorf. He was certain that it had gone up along with the rest of that borough. He thought that the 1st Infantry Division Goebbels mentioned had tried to storm the city. From the flames, it was obvious the battle had been a defeat for humanity.

He started walking south, toward the Brandenburg Gate. He saw it in the distance. It was a short walk.

He passed by it, looking at the smoking ruins of Gendarmenmarkt. He walked south on Ebertstrasse. He kept going south, surprised that he wasn’t running into any Tinten.

Along the way, he saw many scenes of devastation. The forests of Tiergarten to his right were dead silent. The buildings of Berlin to the left were badly damaged.

Baak heard something coming toward him at Potsdamer Platz. He looked inside the U-Bahn station, only to find that it was filled with water. The U-Bahn system had apparently caved in and flooded.

He heard a growling coming from the S-Bahn station. One of the trains had crashed into a bus and derailed. The bus was split in half from the strike. It looked like the Tinten had made a meal off the survivors of the wreck. There was blood and gore everywhere.

A Höllenhund, once a Blue Heeler from the looks of it, tore apart a child’s body. It shook its head as it tore off an arm. It got a peripheral look at Baak. He had a dog at home, and he knew that they had a far wider field of vision than humans.

The dog abandoned the child and raced after Baak. He tried to withdraw his knife, but it got tangled in his belt and he couldn’t get it out before the dog was on him. It tore out his throat within seconds.

6
Hultz Bauer watched his men walk off. As for himself, he was stuck on what to do. Like Baak, his apartment was in Reinickendorf. Odds are it was gone. He sat on the steps of the Chancellery, wondering what to do. He had nowhere to go. His apartment was gone and his wife was almost certainly dead. He had just married her last year. They hadn’t had any kids yet, though Kaltenbrunner had often nagged him about it. Bauer was a blond-haired, blue-eyed German. Despite this and that he was with the Gestapo, he never had anything against Jews. He joined the Gestapo just so he’d have a job. He also found it ironic that Hitler had brown hair, considering how much he harped about blond Germans.

And then there was the elephant in the room. Hitler and Himmler had been responsible for the Tinten. They had caused the entire disaster. Bauer knew Gwisdek didn’t believe it, but he did.

He was thinking over his career. There had to be some way he could make up for it. He felt guilty for having joined the SS, a Nazi organization, an organization belonging to the party that caused millions of innocent people to die. It wasn’t just Jews; that was the horribly ironic thing. Germans were just as bad off now as Jews. Germany had become a chaotic hell for everyone.

Well, I can still do something about it, Bauer thought. He found a bloody Luger at the intersection to the north, and walked back into the Chancellery. He passed the hanging suicides and walked up the hall toward Hitler’s office. The time has come to get rid of that bastard, he thought. For Germany. For my men. For my wife. For every Jew who suffered and every German suffering now.

He opened the door to Hitler’s office. No one was inside. He looked around and found a bottle of sleeping pills. He wondered for a second if Hitler or Himmler had taken their own lives. No, he thought. They are too proud to commit suicide. Hitler probably took only a few to help him sleep. Bauer raised the Luger. He was determined to find Hitler and put a bullet in his head.

He knew he couldn’t kill him if he couldn’t find the fucker. He searched the next office, finding nothing but women’s clothes. He found that strange, since this office belonged to a man, but he put it out of his mind. He walked along the halls of the Chancellery, looking for the former Chancellor.

He just had time to turn around in frustration when Himmler bashed him on the head and knocked him out with a wooden chair.

7
Coincidentally, Wolfgang Baumueller also lived in Reinickendorf. Many of Die Hand des Schicksals found that a nice place to live. He wandered to the west. He wanted to walk through Tiergarten. He’d always liked parks. It was one of the few places he could feel right with nature in.

He was miserable. He’d been depressed even during the heyday of Nazi Germany, but now he was in the bluest of blues. He wanted to just sit down, weep, and shoot himself. Sadly, he lacked a gun, but he did have a knife.

He sat down at a statue of Hitler. He found no consolation in Nazism now. The Nazis had tried to make things better and failed. Germany was now doomed. There was no way for things to improve.

Baumueller simply sat down and cried. He had nothing left now. His family was gone. His home was gone. He had an apartment with his brothers. He was the middle child. His older brother was a mechanic, and his younger was attending TH Berlin for an literature degree.

“Something wrong, Herr Baumueller?” It was Gwisdek.

“I just feel sad. That’s all.” He said. Gwisdek was disgusted by Baumueller. He was sitting here sobbing like a little girl while the world crumbled.

Gwisdek gave an annoyed snort and continued on. He was walking toward Charlottenburger Chaussee, Baumueller figured.

He heard something behind him. He turned around and saw two female Tinten. Both were glaring at him. He knew if they attacked, he would die. Death, he thought. He’d be released from this nightmare once and for all. He could forget all of this. He wasn’t religious. He didn’t think any god could create a world this terrible. But he suddenly got an urge to fight. These Tinten, as bad as they were, were not human. They were unthinking, unfeeling monsters. Baumueller was a human being. He suddenly wanted to fight these things.

The first of the Tinten charged toward him. He got out the knife and held it out at the last second. The Tinte ran into it and blood poured out of a stab wound in its chest. The second one pulled the wounded one off and tried to claw at him. He ducked down and slashed the thing’s stomach. Black guts spilled out like pasta with ink poured on it. He then jabbed the knife into its neck. The blade went straight up through the roof of its mouth and into the brain. It moaned a little before falling dead.

I did it, he thought. I killed these bastards. He still felt miserable, but he did enjoy this victory on some level. He’d knocked off two Tinten.

He felt almost as if his life was complete now. He sat at the statue and laughed a manic, insane laugh. He barely noticed when a Tinte with a bow fired a bolt into his side. He fell onto the ground and the Tinte killed him, wondering why this piece of meat was laughing as it was devoured.

8
Gwisdek was appalled at Baumueller’s crying, but he was determined to put the image of that sobbing baby out of his mind.

He kept moving, heading toward Charlottenburger Chaussee. He walked west toward Charlottenburg, where his house was. He arrived at the Berlin Victory Column. He noticed that most of the swastika flags had fallen over. He was appalled to see one flag in a pothole, covered with snow and dirt. He still remained loyal to Nazism and he still hated the Jews with all his fury. Still, he wasn’t sure what to think about Hitler. He doubted Hitler was truly responsible for this, he assumed that was just a Jew lie that Goebbels had fallen for. Still, Hitler had ordered them trapped in the Fürhrerbunker, and he was annoyed about that.

He decided that all of the Nazi leaders had betrayed the master race. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, everyone. He wondered if he was the only person who still understood the true superiority of the Germanic race. If the Tinten had any sense, he thought, they’d target only Jews and other inferiors.

When he reached the Spree, he saw where the Red Contingent had been defeated. Thousands of dead bodies floated in the river. The water had gone from clear to red. The bodies would have bloated and fallen apart had the water been warm. Gwisdek knew the sight of death in scalding water. His father had poisoned himself in a bathtub filled with hot water when Gwisdek was a child. His father’s body was in there for over a week while he and his mother were on vacation. When he came back, he found his father’s body, with the flesh having slipped off his bones. His skin had turned black and also slid right off his body. His body had been cooked and had the consistency of meat from a chicken drumstick. Gwisdek still remembered the smell. It was truly horrific.

There was little smell here at the Spree, however. The water was only a few degrees above freezing. Snowflakes fell onto the half-frozen bodies. Many of the men had died of hypothermia. Gwisdek considered himself a strong man, but this horrified even him.

He looked to the north and saw the Hansabrücke. It had collapsed at some point during this disaster. He thought he saw the barrel of a howitzer sticking up from the wreckage, though he wasn’t sure that that was what it was. He continued under the Charlottenburger Tor and across the bridge toward TH Berlin.

He reached the Knie. It was covered with about thirty centimeters of water. He stuck his hand in it and felt the freezing cold.

He had thick boots on. He started wading through the water. He saw that most of Charlottenburg had been destroyed and subsequently flooded. The water got deeper, reaching knee high in some places. It poured into his boots, freezing his feet. He then slipped into a hole. This hole was two meters deep.

Gwisdek fell into the hole and broke his leg on a piece of brickwork. He landed in the water, which felt like a burning flame. He had been burned before, and he was stunned by how similar the cold felt. His nose and mouth were still over the water, so he could breathe. Still, he was unable to move.

He began to freeze. He was shivering, the shakes creating little ripples in the water. He soon felt numb. He knew what came next. He would feel a sort of euphoria. He had researched hypothermia before and knew what it felt like to freeze to death.

He tried to raise his arm, but by then it was too late. His arms were numb. He was in just a third of a meter of water and he was going to die in this watery grave. He knew the Jews had done all this, destroying Germany and releasing the Tinten. Still, his hatred slipped away as the euphoria took him. He felt water go down his nose and throat.

He died with the peace he never found in life.

9
Handler’s home was near the Tempelhof Airport on Alterstrasse. He started walking south. It would be a long walk, about an hour and half unless he found a car. He saw several, but all had been wrecked.

He saw car accidents and tangled remains of said accidents everywhere. He passed by the headquarters of the Gestapo on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. It was burning. He could feel the heat from across the road. He watched the flames lick the sky. He went by it. I have to wonder what caused the fire, he thought.

There was a library nearby. He walked to it. He had always liked libraries. He didn’t read very often, but he just liked the atmosphere of such places. The books everywhere, the desks filled with students doing research for school projects and assignments, the elderly librarians willing to help with finding what one needed.

He found that the door to this library was unlocked. He went inside. He thought about getting some books for the trip to his home as he wandered around the shelves. The library was still intact. No fires, no blood, either black or red, no evidence that a major catastrophe had struck Berlin. He looked around the shelves and found a lot of books about Nazism and the master race. Many authors’ books had been banned under Hitler. Handler had found a home that had numerous copies of anti-war and anti-racism books. He reported the house, and the Nazis stormed it, beat up the owner, and burned the books in his front yard. Handler had even made the owner, a professor at Humboldt, light the match that set the books ablaze. He later regretted having been so brutal. He did find a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front among the books. He remembered reading that shortly before the Nazis took power. Handler knew that he had to do such things if he wanted to survive under the Third Reich. Of course, now the Third Reich had fallen. He could claim whatever books he wanted. If he wanted to read All Quiet on the Western Front, he was free to now. That is, he thought, assuming I can find a copy.

He walked to a bookshelf. This library had many shelves, and he walked to one where numerous books had fallen onto the floor. It was a bunch of encyclopedias about the Aryan race. He looked through the bookshelf. There was a small slit across the center of the shelf. A pair of bloodshot eyes looked at him through the slit. It was a Tinte. He drew his knife only to have the Tinte push the bookshelf over. It landed on him and then the next shelf over.

The shelf was the next to last from the tables, so no domino-like toppling of all the shelves happened. Leonhard Handler was pinned under the shelf. He thought of his girlfriend. This Tinte looked like her. He got a laugh when he saw this one was a woman and lost its clothes. One of its breasts had been chopped off somehow and half its pubic hair had been torn off. He tried to get out from between the shelves, but the Tinte was faster. It bit him on the wrist.

The Tinte’s blood went straight to his heart. He knew he didn’t have long. Handler, just to be silly, pulled the Tinte’s mouth toward his and French kissed it. The black blood tasted like motor oil. It was thick and bitter. There was none of the metallic taste of human blood. The Tinte bit the tip of his tongue off in rage. He spit the tip out and then waited to transform into one of the monsters.

10
Theophilus Kant couldn’t believe it. He’d made it. His apartment was on the opposite side of Tempelhof Airport as Leonhard Handler. He lived in a two-story apartment complex less than two hundred meters from the Tempelhof front entrance.

He had run the entire way. He didn’t slow down for so much as a second. He’d knocked down a small child Tinte that approached him. He had the key to his room. He opened the door and walked inside. He found his landlord dead on the front desk. That got a smile out of him. His landlord was an asshole. Kant had been having problems with his heating lately, and his landlord was being slow in doing anything about it. Kant was twenty-five, just out of college, and he needed a cheap apartment. He found one in Tempelhof. He was also glad to see the apartment still existed. Several of his friends had apartments up in Reinickendorf which had almost certainly been wiped out by that fire.

He spit on the landlord’s body. He didn’t notice that the landlord hadn’t been killed by Tinten. He’d been blown apart by a machine gun.

Kant walked up the stairs from the ground floor, then to the first and finally his room on the second floor. He stuck the key in the lock and went inside. His roommate had been a friend of his in college. He walked into his bedroom and looked around.

His roommate was dead. He’d been shot in the head. Kant was horrified, but he suspected his roommate might kill himself in the midst of such a bad situation. He didn’t handle stress well. He nearly went crazy every time he had an assignment due during their days at Humboldt.

He looked around for his cigarettes. He hadn’t brought any to the Chancellery. He knew that smoking in front of Hitler or any of the Nazis would be a bad move for his career. Of course, he no longer had a career now anyway. He heard footsteps downstairs. He knew that if his roommate had shot himself, then there would be a gun nearby to defend himself with. He looked around the man’s body.

There was no gun. He looked under the bed. Still no gun. His roommate was an assistant editor for Der Stürmer and didn’t have access to guns. Kant then remembered that the only gun in the apartment was his Luger. And Hitler had confiscated that when he imprisoned Die Hand des Schicksals.

That meant that his roommate didn’t kill himself. And that meant the only other option left was murder.

He did find his box of cigarettes. He took one out and lit it.

“Smoking isn’t a good idea.” Someone said. He looked into the bedroom door and saw a young man in a Luftwaffe uniform. “It’ll give you lung cancer.”

“Who the hell are you?” Kant asked.

“Just someone who doesn’t want you to smoke.”

“I won’t die of lung cancer.” Kant said.

“True. I’ll kill you long before lung cancer ever will.” With that the Luftwaffe pilot lifted his gun and put a bullet in the young Gestapo’s head.

11
Peter Narbe had only one desire: Get out of Berlin. He didn’t care how he did it, he just wanted out of this damned city. He walked east, hoping to find a car or something that would allow him to get out of the city as fast as humanly possible. He knew how to start a car without any keys.

He found an old Ford Model B near the Friedrichswerder Kirche. He decided that he’d take the car in a bit. There was something else he needed to do. He wanted to confess his sins.

Narbe had a side of him that few people knew about. He was deeply religious. He’d come from a devout Catholic family, and his faith had stayed with him to this day. He saw the sun rise. He considered it proof God existed.

He’d been in something of a quandary ever since he joined the SS in 1934. His father urged him to join and lay low until Hitler and his Nazi regime finally destroyed themselves. The problem was, Narbe was getting to enjoy this job. He liked wandering around, vandalizing Jewish stores and neighborhoods. He didn’t know why; he had no real issues with Jews. He finally realized about a month ago that he liked doing the destruction and violence for one reason: Because he could. He knew that humans were a violent species. But now God had destroyed the Nazis. He wanted to redeem himself in the eyes of God. He walked into the church.

He knew that this church normally belonged to the Protestants. He didn’t care. He never believed in the schism between Protestants and Catholics. He considered all who believed in Christ to be saved. He opened the church doors.

He kneeled at the crucifix at the altar. He made the sign of the cross and bowed his head. He sighed. A voice spoke from behind him.

“You are scared, my child.” It was a pastor for the church. His clerical collar was stained with blood.

“I am, father.” He didn’t know exactly what Protestants called their clergy. He hoped “father” would work. The man smiled.

“Then come, I have something to show you.” Narbe got up. The preacher led him to the basement of the church.

Narbe should have suspected something wasn’t right. He looked in the basement and saw numerous Tinten and Höllenhunde. They were hungry. Narbe saw dozens of severed limbs everywhere.

“What is this?” He asked.

“This is the pit of salvation, my child.” Narbe realized this preacher was a madman. He’d fed anyone he could find to these beasts.

He noticed that the stairs leading to the basement had been destroyed. It was a literal pit. The preacher tried to push Narbe into it.

“Fuck you, father!” Narbe was shoved into the pit, but managed to grab hold of the preacher’s collar. Both men landed in the pit.

“If I’m going to die, I’m taking you to hell with me!” Narbe yelled. It was his last living words.

12
The Wilhelmstrasse Bridge spanned the Spree. Ruprecht Reitz saw that a boat had crashed onto one of the columns holding the bridge up. He heard voices coming from the column. He looked down and saw three women and two men standing on it.

“Are you all right?” He asked them. One of the men responded.

“We’re all right! Can you help us?”

“I’ll be right back. Let me get some rope!”

He looked around for some kind of rope or cord. He found a downed power pole. He got out his knife, the same one used to unscrew the vent fan and grilles in the air ducts of the Chancellery, and cut a twenty-meter long segment of power cable. He pulled it to the bridge and dropped it down.

The five climbed up, one after another. Before long all six stood on the bridge.

“How did you end up there, anyway?” Reitz asked.

“We were on a sailboat in the Spree. We got on it to get away from the Tinten.” One of the women said.

“How did you get stuck on the bridge?”

“We crashed into it after getting caught in a fast current.” Another of the women said.

“Well, you five are safe now.” The six then walked up the bridge. They made it to the Museum für Naturkunde. They walked inside, seeing the Brachiosaurus skeleton in the central exhibit hall.

They stood under the skeleton, admiring it. Reitz had to admit, he’d never been to this museum before. He’d only recently begun living in Berlin. He did notice a large beam leaning precariously over the skeleton. He just had time to notice the Tinten above it when they jumped on the beam.

The beam fell on top of the dinosaur fossil. Pieces of fossilized bone shattered and flew everywhere. A piece of rib bone impaled one of the men, while a woman was stabbed in the stomach by a tooth. Reitz tried to run but was crushed by the top of the thing’s skull. It landed on his legs, breaking both of them.

In the end, only one of the women survived the destruction of the giant skeleton. She ran as fast as she could away from the exhibit hall. As for Reitz, he was quickly eaten by the infected director of the museum.

13
Ehrhart Wennemann walked south and then east. He knew where he was going. He wanted to see Gendarmenmarkt. He had been ashamed of his cowardice in that battle. He ran away to Goebbels. He knew that the battle had been a complete loss and that had he not run, he would be dead right now. That didn’t help. He still felt shame over his performance during that disaster.

He turned at the Brandenburg Gate. It was still standing. There was snow on the street at Unter den Linden. He saw a few corpses there. Most belonged to SS who tried to run from Gendarmenmarkt and didn’t make it.

He reached the pile of rubble that was once the Deutscher Dom. It was covered with gore and blood, both black and red, that was in turn covered by snow. He climbed onto the rubble. It was five meters high in places.

He peered out into the square. Only a few of the corpses were still there. He found it hard to believe that this battle had only happened about a day ago. What a difference a day makes.

He walked onto an unstable piece of stone. He took a step onto it and fell down. He cut his pant leg and his calf. Blood dripped down from it. He sighed and got back up.

As he stepped from the rubble and went onto Gendarmenmarkt itself, tears began to flow from his eyes. He was seeing the symbol of his cowardice, along with its results. He knew he had failed Germany and humanity. But worse yet, he was starting to feel lightheaded. He assumed it was just the cold and the intense emotions he was feeling. He closed his eyes. The rage was building within him.

A thought occurred to him. He thought he might be infected. That rubble probably had black blood on it. If any got in his wound, he was infected. He decided it made no difference. He had committed one cowardly act by running from the battle, he figured he could commit another and allow himself to turn into a Tinte. Still, he had his knife. He took the blade and ran it across his wrist. Blood dripped from the wound. He slashed across. Back in the deep of his mind, he knew that one was supposed to slash diagonally when attempting suicide via slitting one’s wrists, but he was cold and wasn’t thinking this through.

He sat down in the snow and thought about it. Before he could die from blood loss, he completed his transformation into a Tinte, albeit one with limited use of its hands because of damaged tendons.

14
Hitler was in a conference room. He’d taken sleeping pills while the battle was raging. He knew it was the 1st Infantry Division. They’d probably met with the traitor Goebbels by now.

Hitler had woken up about fifteen minutes ago. He’d slept on top of a hardwood table, using a seat cushion as a pillow. He didn’t need a blanket. One thing his body was always good at was retaining heat. There was no electricity at the Chancellery and therefore no heat, as the Chancellery used electric heating. Hitler recalled that everyone thought the Chancellery was modern when they switched to using electric heat. But now the temperature inside the building was at most ten degrees Celsius. Still, Hitler wasn’t cold. He knew Himmler got cold easily. He saw Himmler in his office with several blankets over him.

He was angry about everything that had happened. He’d lost his chancellorship, he’d lost virtually every friend and ally he’d had, he lost his nation, he’d lost everything except his life. And he was determined to hold on to that.

He shifted his weight. He was just about to go back to sleep when he heard a thump. It sounded like it was coming from near Himmler’s office.

He got into a sitting position. Himmler came into the conference room.

“Ach, what is going on?” He asked.

“Die Hand des Schicksals. They escaped. Except one. I have Hultz Bauer outside.” Hitler grinned.

Well, he thought, we’ll at least get revenge on one of those traitors.