Luka Löwe was lost in the forest of salutes and uniforms planted in the Grosser Platz. His boots were just one pair of the hundreds standing on the plaza’s stones. There was other footwear as well—saddle shoes and wing tips, heels and flat-strapped Mary Janes—belonging to the myriad of press and civilians. Many of them were Germanians (though some, unused to the capital’s new name, still slipped and called themselves Berliners), but others had traveled from all corners of the Reich to attend this assembly. The rally—meant to celebrate the Führer’s immense architectural overhaul of Germania—was being held in front of the old, torched Reichstag building. The amount of humanity in the Grosser Platz felt impossible: thousands upon packed thousands. All of them eager for a chance to see Adolf Hitler speak.
Luka hated being there, though he’d had little choice in the matter. Every one of the Führer’s public speeches was attended by a handful of carefully selected Hitler Youth. They always stood in a line—pressed uniforms, painfully identical—providing a gold mine of shots for Goebbels’s propaganda films.
One of the rally organizers had arranged the boys’ formation three hours earlier. Lining them up just so, angling their faces in view of the third Reichssender camera, instructing them to “look to the Führer and nowhere else.”
But the Führer wasn’t at the podium yet. A brass band had played “Horst-Wessel-Lied” beneath fluttering swastika banners, and some man named Albert Speer spoke at length about the grandeur and symbolism of the newly completed Volkshalle. (The dome of the monstrous building beside them was so high that the statue at the top—a Roman eagle clutching a globe in its talons—nearly touched the noon sun.)
Luka’s neck was starting to ache. His legs tingled with a hot-pin sensation. The boys next to him must have been just as uncomfortable, yet no one dared to break formation.
When Adolf Hitler finally stepped onto the stage, it was to an almighty roar of heils. Heil to Hitler. Heil to victory. Heils rang throughout the Grosser Platz; the power of them buzzed through Luka’s eardrums, made him cringe.
Eventually, the welcoming cries faded. Adolf Hitler started talking about communists and Aryans, building empires and destroying them. He’d gotten no more than a few words into what promised to be a long, spittle-flying, fist-pounding speech when Luka stopped listening. It wasn’t just Hitler’s yelling that bothered him, but the way the crowd yelled back during the speech’s planned pauses—so eager to be heard by this man, so willing to take Hitler’s words and make them their own.
Luka wanted no part in it, though he knew if he was caught withholding a salute, the consequences would be crushing. He realized at the next break in the monologue that he could swing his arm and move his lips without saying a word. No one would notice the difference.… The boys next to him were too busy shouting their own heils, and the cameras couldn’t pick apart Luka’s voicelessness from all the other moving mouths.
No one could hear his silence.
The pause ended. Hitler’s speech flowed on and a thirsty crowd listened. Luka’s thoughts began steering back to all the Axis Tour training he was missing when something—no, someone—caught his attention. The man was in uniform. Brown shirt and boots the same as Luka’s and those of hundreds of other rally-goers. His hair was an off sort of yellow, covered mostly by his cap. He would’ve been impossible to pick out from the rest of the crowd, except for one very simple fact: He was moving.
Every other brownshirt stood straight, eyes rapt on the Führer, as they’d been instructed. Luka couldn’t help but watch this man inching forward, shifting from line to line in a slow, subtle way.
No one else seemed to notice.
The Führer’s speech had reached the point of frenzy: red face, quivering mustache. “We’ve left the ruins of old Berlin behind, embraced the monumental splendor of Germania by building structures grander than any other in history! The Volkshalle shall be the shrine to which the world’s eyes turn! The great witness for the progress of the Aryan race!”
The uniformed man was making progress of his own, slipping closer to the rally stage. He was only two rows away, and a few more Hitler Youth boys had started to notice. Like Luka, they all watched as he removed his cap. They all had mere seconds to register the dark roots along his hairline before something much more shocking claimed their attention: the pistol hidden in his hat.
Luka expected the man to shout, but he didn’t say a word. He raised his gun, let his bullets scream for him.
One.
Two.
Three.
A trio of shots. Far more powerful, far more deafening than any of the crowd’s heils had been. Every shot hit its mark: Adolf Hitler’s chest.
The Führer choked on his own blood and words, collapsing down to some place that Luka—as close as he was to the stage—could not see. His eyes fell back to the marksman. There was a fire behind the man’s face. He wasn’t trying to run. It was almost as if, in his stillness, the marksman had forced everyone else to move. No other soul in the shadow of the Volkshalle was still. Brownshirts twisted and turned. Black streaks of SS uniforms tore to the base of the stage, Lugers drawn.
The flames behind the marksman’s face roared. Strength like burning. He raised his gun again, all the way to his head.
There was a fourth shot.
The Grosser Platz writhed with the screams of the living. Panic, fear, agony, emotion, too much emotion. The boys who’d stood so calmly beside Luka for hours on end were now running with nowhere to go, threatening to trample one another with their own hobnailed boots in their herdlike panic. Luka stood his ground, soles planted in the Grosser Platz’s stones. His mouth had fallen open, but no scream came.
For him, there was only silence.