“Symbols”
Brief Synopsis: Heinrich, a Nazi soldier serving in Hitler’s underground bunker, is eager to gift a bag of coins to the Fuhrer.
Heinrich lay sprawled out on his bed in the Fuhrerbunker underneath Berlin, proudly looking the bag of shiny old coins he had poured out before himself. He had been carrying them for good luck ever since serving in Poland. When the Slavs of Warsaw, his vile enemies, dared to rise up in defiance of the glory of his German Fatherland they responded with more than just killing the dissidents. The slain make for good martyrs, they needed to go more for the morale, since the power of destroying a symbol of the enemy’s identity can often shatter the spirit more than the war dead. Heinrich and his comrades leveled the Warsaw Castle, proud relic of the allegedly glorious Polish past.
Heinrich scoffed at the idea of an inferior race even having built such a castle and figured Germans must have played a part. He would rather be a peasant amongst Aryans than a king of untermenschen anyway. Nevertheless, the Poles looked on it with pride and a proud foe is a formidable one. The city as a whole was to be destroyed to crush the uprising, but Heinrich’s troop took special pleasure in firing upon a national treasure such as the Castle.
While Heinrich was proud to serve his nation, he of course still had the innate human tendency of also serving his own interests. So when the German victory over the city seemed assured and its citizens were being marched off for mass execution, Heinrich roamed through the ruins to see if he could find himself a war trophy. Not ears or heads like his ancestors may have collected in battle, but something of value that perhaps he could sell, as a soldier’s salary didn’t really afford one a life of luxury.
In the rubble of the Royal Castle he found an old velvet sack. He looked around to be sure no superior officers would see and demand he share the spoils of war, then tucked it into his trench coat. He knew the idea reeked of the backwards superstitions of lesser nations, but he felt it provided him with some sort of good luck, as he survived every military encounter after without so much as a sore thumb.
He felt the luck also accounted for him being granted one of the greatest honors of his life: living in the Fuhrerbunker with his idol, Adolf Hitler himself. His comrades were beginning to falter in their devotion, as Berlin was now under the same assaults they had leveled against their Polish neighbors. Just last week, when fireworks should have filled the skies on the Fuhrers birthday, Russian artillery instead provided the equally loud but not equally celebratory background noise. Heinrich didn’t let it cause his convictions to waiver. It convinced him to work twice as hard to eradicate the unclean vermin of the world.
The coins looked ancient. He was no historian but he figured it must have belonged to some kings of yesteryear, perhaps even from the Roman Empire. In reality they were ducats of the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, but German schools didn’t bother teaching the history of those they did not view as equals, so the knowledge escaped Heinrich. All he knew was that they were pretty and old and the Fuhrer had a taste for collecting the antiquities of Europe, especially prior to when the decadence of the Jews perverted the artistic expressions of the continent.
Heinrich, although not allowed by his commanding officers to directly communicate with his Fuhrer, could sense Hitler’s morale was down. While he used to deliver impassioned speeches, he now had the look of a man questioning his actions. Heinrich planned to defy his commanding officers and go speak with Hitler. After demolishing the Royal Castle he understood the importance of symbolism. The Fuhrer was a symbol of the Aryan struggle. The coins looted from the ruins of Warsaw were a symbol of the Aryan superiority to the Slavic race, even to the Russian barbarians currently bombarding Berlin. Heinrich wished to gift the bag of coins to his beloved Fuhrer to remind him of this. To let him know at least one soldier stood by him while everything else around them fell apart. Hitler had done so much for the nation, and Heinrich wasn’t going to surrender and betray his hero.
Heinrich put the coins back in the sack, looked around to make sure none of his superiors were watching, and made his way down to Hitler’s bunker bedroom. He started to visualize how he would approach his idol. Perhaps he would remain very formal. “Mein Fuhrer, I ask permission to bestow a gift upon you.” Or maybe Hitler would need to be comforted like an old friend. A friend of the nation. A firm hug and a gentle “these are for you, a man amongst men.”
Heinrich’s fantasies were cut short when he heard a loud gun blast. He opened the door and found the corpse of his idol slumped over on the bed, blood pouring out from a suicidal self-inflicted pistol wound. In that moment, seeing the symbol of the Third Reich bleeding out onto a mattress in a cold bunker under their besieged capitol, Heinrich understood the pain of his enemies as they watched Warsaw fall. He dropped the sack in shock, and the coins went scattering across the floor.
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