MAY 1942

GEORG’S “PHONEY WAR” DID COME to an end, and Nebe’s hopes for any kind of French supremacy were not to be fulfilled. He found it truly extraordinary and bitterly disappointing that the French didn’t put up a fight. The French caving in gave new fuel to Hitler’s fire and meant that Nebe would have to find another way to be liberated. The next best choice would be the Americans; the big problem was how to approach them without seeming obvious. On the other hand it would actually be comforting to be arrested by them rather than have to face the collapsing German hierarchy, or the rage of the Russians. The question was how to make it happen without becoming a total whore.

The best possible approach would be the representatives of the British, if they were capable of putting their petty differences aside. Still, Nebe had no leverage, at that moment he had nothing meaningful to offer them as an incentive to hear him out, they certainly wouldn’t be moved by his rather pathetic desire to save his own hide. It would have been convenient to implement his errand boys, but they weren’t having any. Nolte, and even Brandt, had steadily and methodically distanced themselves from him and that should have been enough to toll the bell of doom, yet as previously stated that slut Pandora was an unscrupulous bitch. She never seemed to know when to let well enough alone. Or shall we say: she reveled in same … and shame.

For the Gestapo, setting Nebe up was probably a most pathetically easy assignment. For Nebe himself it was more or less the next inevitable step on a path of continuous contradiction. All of his futile attempts to make contact with the allies were at best predictable, an embarrassment to the Reich and to himself. A man of truly noble spirit would have simply taken his own life, quietly and neatly. Nebe had however finally embraced the fact that the meaning of life was survival, his survival.

The day they came, he was almost relieved. Even had he never met Georg Elser, he now found it nearly impossible to continue a charade he could no longer even pretend to believe in. He would be taken to a place where all the thinking would be done for him—Nirvana—someone else would have to explain what had happened … bliss. As far as his family was concerned he no longer existed, as such they were finally on even ground.