Introduction.
It is 1937.
Once; they whispered... long ago, this land, and the lands stretching far out to the east were steeped in dark rumours of Myth and Magic. Once; they said... in the far distant, and long-forgotten past; there was a fabulous society who lived in these lands. If there was ever such an age, it is now lost beyond the realms of legend… lost beyond fable. The Age of Mankind has long been at hand, and in this time, there is only fear.
For this land is Germany. This place is Berlin.
In this time, a convulsion of fear comes with the squeal of brakes and the slamming of Car doors in the street outside in the cold, grey light of an early Berlin dawn; or in the small, dead hours of the morning. It comes with the ominous clatter of footsteps on the stairs.
In today’s Germany this is not the milkman or the postman arriving. Almost every ordinary citizen in the Reich fears someone who comes to the door before six o’clock in the morning. This fear clutches at the heart with the hammering of fists on the panelling of the apartment door. This fear comes with the sinister young men in black, ankle-length leather coats, wearing black felt fedoras with the brims pulled well down over their eyes... like detectives in a bad American movie; flashing their oval, silver-coloured discs in the palm of their hand and saying politely that they would like to have “a little chat.”
The disc they proffer is the dreaded Gestapo Warrant disc… the “Dienstmarke,” On one side is embossed the ubiquitous German eagle... ”Die Parteiadler”with its head looking over its right shoulder; and clutching in its talons a laurel crown that encircles the swastika; On the other side of the disc are impressed the words “Geheime Staatspolizei”... ‘Secret State Police’; and below the embossed legend, the Agent’s stamped serial number. On one edge of the disc is a small hole by which the bearer of the badge can attach it by a chain to a leather security fob slipped over a concealed button inside his jacket.
There will be no prior warning… just a pounding on the door, and a few fleeting moments to settle the affairs of a lifetime as the polite young men in the long leather coats ransack the rooms searching for anything even remotely incriminating. Then will come the bundling into the back of the black Mercedes 260 saloon waiting outside in the chill, deserted street, and the drive to Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8… or worse, to the dreaded Gestapo-Gefängnis Columbia-Haus prison on the edge of Zentralflughafen Tempelhof-Berlin for “Interrogation.”
Far to the East, in Soviet Russia, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin has been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee since 1922. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, he prevailed in an epic power struggle over Leon Trotsky.
In the 1930′s, Stalin initiated the “Bolshaya Chistka”… The Great Purge; a campaign of political repression, persecution, and executions that would reach its peak in 1937. Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders, contributed to what can only be called a genocidal famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union… the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and North Caucasus, which resulted in millions of deaths. In the spring of 1933 alone, seven million people died of starvation. Many peasants openly resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were brutally repressed; most notably, the prosperous peasants deemed “Kulaks.”
Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, summarily executed or deported to the Gulag. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Thousands of Kulaks were executed, and at least five million were deported to Siberia or Central Asia. Of these, approximately a quarter of these had perished by the time they reached their destinations. The purging of the army, meanwhile, saw some thirty-five- thousand military officers shot, or incarcerated in the notorious Gulags of Siberia.
As Sir Edward Grey, First Viscount Grey of Fallodon, and British Foreign Secretary; after delivering a doom-laden speech in Parliament on 3rd August 1914, concerning the German declaration of War on France and their invasion of neutral Belgium; is reputed to have remarked to his friend John Alfred Spender, the then editor of the Westminster Gazette, that evening as they stood at a window of the Foreign office overlooking St James’s Park watching the glow of the first gas lamps being lit as the lamplighters made their way along The Mall;
“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Perhaps, he was not so very far from the truth. Perhaps, he was just a few years too soon in his ominous prediction… for the Darkness is gathering once again.
