Old is New
Hans was glad the suit nipped the location discussion in the bud. He had no qualms about killing, but would prefer not to kill a team member in front of the team. Those kinds of kills are always best done in secret. Sometimes you could even make it look like the other side did the deed and focus the team by it instead of on it.
His real name was Karl, but everyone here called him Hans. They had called him it since the day he was assigned to this team. He doubted anyone other than the man in the suit knew his real name. Every name was an alias here. The man in the suit had introduced himself by a different name to every member of the team when they joined. They all called him “the man in the suit” now. If he smoked they would probably just call him “the cancer man.”
Hans had grown up in Germany. He learned long ago to keep his political views to himself. He had applied himself well in school, majoring in both Mathematics and Computer Science at the right time. Unlike most following that curriculum, he had played sports, drunk beer, and chased as many women as possible.
College campuses are where all parties indoctrinate the youth. It doesn’t matter if it is Democrat, Republican or The Reformed Nazi Party. Get them when they are idealistic, yearning to learn; teach them your beliefs and you make them yours for life. Even if they later try to leave, the beliefs are too deeply rooted to be lost completely. It was no different for Hans. He was recruited by the clandestine agencies in his government to work in intelligence. (Funny how it is always the dumbest people who refer to it as intelligence.)
He was drawn to some of the ideals of The Reformed Nazi Party. Not the ideals so much as the logic they used. They actually analyzed the failures of Hitler and made changes to the platform in accordance. Oh, they hadn’t moved much from the Aryan World Dominance theme, but they had changed the method of achieving it.
When he told them of his recruitment they told him to come to no more meetings. From time to time they would send someone to fill him in. He should not openly discuss the party, nor should his name appear on a registry of membership. They told him they had other members in those same organizations. Once he made it through all of the entrance requirements they would help steer him to the places where he could serve both his country and his party.
That had been a long time ago. Hans had worked on everything since then. Surveillance, encryption, decryption, computer penetration, you name it. He had killed many times to save his own life and sometimes simply because he had been ordered to kill. It didn’t bother him. He knew that everyone playing this game for any length of time deserved to die, including him.
Economic troubles back home had made the party grow some in size and become more open. There were many different versions of it, all claiming to be The Reformed Nazi Party or some such variation of the name. Each group held some political offices. Many factions held the common ground of Aryan Supremacy, others were simply willing to let it slide if they got everything else they wanted. Each had its own laundry list of what Hitler had bungled. Most of those lists only included the military bungles. Only his party had the root of it correct:
The first race you choose to kill off cannot be one the rest of the world is indifferent about.
College professors had analyzed World War II for decades. They focused on the debacles in Russia and the slaughter of the air force trying to bomb England into submission. While those made for good military discussions, they were not the heart of the problem. No, there were exactly two root causes for Hitler’s failure.
1. He hated his mother
2. He was going mad
Historians have only recently (in the last thirty years or so anyway) talked about the first dirty little secret. Adolf’s mother was a Jew. His sister chose to remain Jewish and wed a Jew. This sent Adolf’s unstable mind careening off well past dither. It was then that the crazy paper hanger wrote his book and proclaimed courage even though he cowered out of every fight.
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