Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [63]
Benny thought about that for a moment, then burst into laughter. ‘Sorry, but I’ve seen Earth a thousand years from now. As a matter of fact, it’s where the Doctor and I met Forrester and Cwej, the two policemen I was talking about.
Their time was hardly perfect, but there wasn’t a Nazi to be seen. In fact, when the Doctor told us we were coming here I had to tell them all about you. At this point I really do think I should mention that they knew all about Freud and Einstein.
Fascism disappears as a political force in your lifetime, Oskar. This Reich doesn’t even last a thousand weeks, let alone a thousand years. By 1976, to pick a year at random, the only people wearing the Nazi uniform were sad little blokes who couldn’t get it up any other way. A few gangs of glue-sniffing thugs had the swastika tattooed on their foreheads, but they never learnt what it really stood for. They hung around on street corners, spitting and swearing, trying to shock their parents. They weren’t up to anything other than petty vandalism and beating up immigrant women and children. In other words, Fascism ended just like it started.
Your only legacy will be their hatred, their ignorance. You want to see what Nazism means, you just look at Wolff and Kitzel there: the men are sadists, the women just stand in the corner and simper. Neither of them are exactly mental giants, are they?’
Summerfield’s eyes were wide now, full of passion. Wolff moved forward to hit her, hardly a refutation of her argument.
Steinmann restrained him. Instead, the older man asked simply, ‘How can we lose this war?’
‘Ah. Don’t try to trick me.’
‘It was a straight question. How can we possibly lose?
Are you suggesting that the British can ever beat us back to Berlin? They can’t even stop us attacking their cities! The English are a mongrel race, corrupt, decadent, divided. You tell me of their “stiff upper lip”, their “quiet resolve”, their “Blitz spirit”, their “tradition of democracy”? Just look at Guernsey, my dear, see how long those things lasted here. Not a single shot was fired. There isn’t any organized resistance. Don’t fool yourself that the Channel Islands are a special case, or that London and Manchester would resist any more than Paris or Lyons did. The sun has already set on the British Empire.
‘You ask me to look at Kitzel and Wolff. I am glad to.
Look at how tall Wolff his, how physically fit. Look at Kitzel’s childbearing hips, her hourglass figure. Look at their clear complexions, their blue eyes, their golden hair. How can such a pure, such a beautiful race, possibly be defeated? I see two attractive young people, working for their country. They are my bloodline. Do you not see: the Reich unites us. It harnesses our skills, leads us to total victory. I am of the first Nazi generation, but already the second is here, and they are stronger still. They, and the generation after that, learn in their schools of our science, our achievements. They learn of the failure of democracy. They learn to distrust the Jew, the Marxist, anyone who talks of equality while claiming to be set apart from lesser men. It is the twilight of the old age, elderly men like myself will soon give way to the ubermenschen, a glorious race of supermen. How can such people ever be defeated when the possibility of defeat does not even exist for them?
‘That’s why I know that you are lying, Summerfield. Not because you talk of men on the Moon and time travel. Not because you babble unscientific nonsense. These things you speak of are imaginative, but they are not impossible: half a century ago Lasswitz was writing about trips to Mars. Oberth and von Braun claimed ten years ago that they could build a
“Moon Rocket”. The Reich’s scientists have already broken the sound barrier; I’m sure that we’ll soon be travelling faster than light,