Death's Head Legion by Trey Garrison Page A

doctrine. Recruits were physically perfect and could prove their pure Aryan bloodline back over two hundred years. They were fanatically loyal to the Führer first, and to the SS second. They were the storm troopers of the New Order—it was the sound of their boots that would accompany the spread of National Socialism all over the world.
    Deitrich’s second in command, Major Hoffstetter, was likewise a Great War veteran, but as a clerk who served in a supply company. Hoffstetter and Heydrich were the architects of the eisensatzgruppen liquidation squads operating in the Russian Dead Zone to the east and the Damned Lands to the west. These were the regions where the sheer amount of slaughter, poison gases, firebombing, and dark energies released by the Great War had destroyed all life, except the broken and twisted things that nature never intended and that madmen dreamt of in nightmares. The Otherness that spilled out bore the monsters that now roamed the barrens to the east and west of Germany. More disturbing, it was speculated that the doorway might still lie open, and the life-hating Otherness was still coming into this world.
    The einsatzgruppen units were tasked with cleansing the landscape of the mutations and untermensch —sub-humans—in those decaying fields. It was a useless endeavor. But the squads had first brought back the samples of creatures and artifacts that were the genesis of Project Gefallener. Since they couldn’t clean up the hell unleashed on their borders, the Germans were damned well going to use it to their advantage. To that end they brought in scientists, alchemists, necromancers, transgenicists, and degreed madmen of all types to harness everything from the dark energies that emanated and radiated from the zones to the mutations that now lived there. Under Dr. Übel’s leadership, they sought to weaponize the evil they found—in whatever form they could. A whole unit of older SS men, the Death’s Head Legion—those deemed secretly more expendable, as they were past their physical prime and had already fathered children for the Reich—were brought in to serve as everything from test subjects to cannon fodder.
    Though he’d never fought in a single battle, Hoffstetter was a uniquely cruel man not afraid to lead these cleansing operations against unarmed civilians. It was rumored he enjoyed hunting the few people and many things that roamed the Dead Zone. For him killing was sport—so long as the quarry couldn’t shoot back.
    While note taking was not allowed in the General’s Hall, it was necessary that certain details might by necessity be taken down. Or conversely, a member might need exhibits to present to other members. Thus each member of the Black Sun had one junior SS officer as an aide-de-camp. They would not take notes but rather be responsible for remembering any detailed data necessary for a member. These junior officers were taken from among the top percentage of graduates from the SS officer’s academy at Wewelsburg—and screened repeatedly for the highest security clearance.
    Deitrich’s aide-de-camp, Untersturmführer Hans Bonhoeffer, just nineteen and a volunteer from Breslau who came up in the Hitler Youth, provided Hoffstetter and Deitrich various charts and updates. He was a favorite of Deitrich’s. The young, dark-haired officer was a virtual boy wonder—infallibly efficient at staff work as well as a highly competitive athlete and soldier in the field despite his shorter stature.
    Colonel Uhrwerk sat motionless, as always, listening to the discussion while his cold, calculating intellect analyzed probabilities, tactics, statistics, strategies, and new data. That Uhrwerk neither subscribed to nor had faith in the mystical elements of Dr. Übel’s work or the Thule propositions was irrelevant—he had seen evidence of the dark supernatural entities into which the doctor had tapped.
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