I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 155

Model didn’t know that the Soviet army was after his neck because of him.

No, he himself was the one who was being chased by the Soviets. 

In just two years, the Soviet army had transformed from a ragtag bunch to a formidable force. 

If he had known that the weaklings he faced in June of '41 would change so much…

‘No, I shouldn’t have invaded the Soviet Union in the first place.’

In the brutal war, the elite soldiers of the German army were consumed and disappeared from the battlefield. They couldn’t use those who had lost their arms, legs, or eyes as active soldiers.

They had to train soldiers from the rear units or assign them to paperwork, and drag out the administrative soldiers or staff officers who were in their original positions to the front lines.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Model recalled the time he went to the hospital to visit the wounded soldiers.

“Walter? Walter Model?”

“Who dares to call the name of the commander-in-chief so casually!”

As he walked around the ward, someone called his name. 

All the eyes in the ward were drawn to him. 

At the end of it, there was an old and haggard wounded soldier who was staring at Model with wide eyes. 

Model frowned and scrutinized his familiar face.

“I’m Hans Muller! Hans from the Domgymnasium in Naumburg! Walter, I can’t believe you’ve become like this. It’s unbelievable!”

“Tha… that bastard!”

The staff and guards around him were furious, but Model stopped them when he heard the name of his alma mater. 

And finally, he was able to recognize him after digging up his vague childhood memories.

He thought there was no way he would be here.

“Teacher? Hans teacher?”

“Yes! It’s you, Walter!”

The old man in his sixties looked at his former student who had aged much more than he had. Model was speechless.

“Didn’t you stay out of the last war because you were too old, teacher?”

“That’s right.”

He said that, but he ran to hug his old teacher and found himself in a very awkward situation. 

The teacher’s loose right sleeve couldn’t reach out to his beloved student. Hans teacher hesitated for a moment and then blurted out.

“I gave it to the country.”

“…”

Tears welled up in his eyes. He couldn’t say anything. Model silently hugged his old teacher who had grown old.

The people around them were also dumbfounded. 

It was a touching reunion of a teacher and a student in the hospital. But if the student was a fifty-year-old field commander and the teacher was a sixty-something old man, was this a comedy or a tragedy?

This war, where the young people were all dead and the old and the children were dragged into the war.

***

“I saw you in the newspapers sometimes, but I thought you were a namesake. Now I see it.”

“Ha ha… It just happened.”

The son of a shy teacher who went to Domgymnasium had become a veteran of a hundred battles. Hans teacher shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the reports. He poured himself another cup of coffee with an awkward gesture.

“It’s hard to have a cup of coffee in the rear. This is the first decent coffee I’ve had in a long time…”

He said that and put a lot of sugar and cream in his coffee. Model knew it too. The rear was short of everything.

They had brought down Britain and opened the sea route, but the national budget was in deficit. 

The regime forced the people to buy war bonds. 

Almost all the foreign currency they could get was requisitioned to buy the war materials that had skyrocketed in price.

And that wasn’t enough. 

The military production was also hampered. 

As the commander-in-chief of the eastern front, Model started to look at the data from there and bit his lip.

“But… how old are you, teacher…?”

“Heh, the country told me to come out, so I had to. I think they dragged me out because there was no soldier in my house. I’m worried about my grandson, who has no one to take care of him…”

“What? Didn’t you have a son, teacher?”

“…He died.”

Oops, he asked a stupid question. Model flinched. 

The teacher closed his eyes slightly and savored the taste of the strong and sweet coffee he hadn’t had in a long time. 

And Model had to taste the bitter and heavy guilt.

“By the way, what is your leader thinking? Making something like that.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“That, that thing. The… anti-aircraft tower?”

***

“What’s the problem with that? If we don’t have enough fighters, we have to use whatever means we can, don’t we?”

“Yes, yes, of course, leader. But…”

Lately, there were hardly any people who expressed their opinions to the leader. 

The fear of being dragged to the ‘factory’ if they said a word of dissent to the absolute power that the leader had gained dominated the people.

The rule of terror, that word best described Germany today.

But now, in this situation, they had some conscience left in some corner of their minds that they couldn’t say nothing.

“But this is a serious war crime…”

“Crime? Did you say crime now!”

Eek! The leader’s voice rose and everyone shrank. 

The brave ones had already left on their own or been insulted and executed.

Model was too busy overseeing the eastern front and didn’t know what was going on in the rear. 

There was no one who could stop him after all the people who could speak the truth to the leader had disappeared.

“Crime is defined by the winners. If we win, we can justify whatever we did in front of history! Do you think they didn’t commit any crimes? But who will remember that after we win!”

No one could open their mouths to the leader’s arrogant words in front of history.

They had already experienced chemical weapons, including poison gas, in the last war. 

They closed their eyes tightly. Was that nightmare of a trench war going to repeat itself? 

And besides, the leader ordered the ‘SS Sanitation Corps’ to develop biological weapons as soon as possible.

“We will win if we stall for time! We just need to buy a little time!”

“…”

Everyone who knew already knew. The president kept talking about a giant bomb that would wipe out the ‘inferior races’.

He was so deluded by his absurd nonsense that he invested millions, maybe billions of marks in it. 

He lost the Azores, had no fighter planes to defend the mainland from air raids, and was pushed back to the original borders after losing most of the occupied territories.

And yet, he said we just needed a little more time.

‘Has the president finally lost his mind…’

The prophet who once earned his trust by mocking France and Britain and seizing the dominance of the oceans, the leader of the German nation, was no more. 

He was like a senile and incompetent king who clung to the elixir of immortality as he aged and died. 

Everyone looked at him with contempt as he spouted nonsense.

“Any complaints?”

“Then… please let us release the prisoners who are assigned to the anti-aircraft towers! This is not only torture for them, but also…”

“Shut up!”

What shocked the people was not the fact that he ordered the production of biological weapons.

He ordered them to build anti-aircraft towers to protect the cities from enemy air raids. 

He mobilized countless citizens to build the towers, only to realize that they were not immune to the enemy’s attacks.

He lacked steel and concrete, so the towers were bound to be flimsy. And he ordered them to tie up prisoners and Jews on top of them. 

The people, especially the comrades, could not attack the towers where they were used as human shields.

When he saw some results from the few towers where he had placed the human shields, he ordered all the towers to have a certain number of ‘criminals’ on them.

That category included Jews who had not yet been sent to the ‘factories’ and Soviet prisoners who were deemed unfit for forced labor.

“They’re nothing but vermin who only consume food, aren’t they? We only placed those who sabotaged us with malice!”

“But what about the morale of the people…”

“That damned defeatism! I will not forgive anyone who incites defeatism!”

The people who realized that the president would not listen to any words of war crimes or morality chose silence. 

The rebuttal that the people would be shocked and demoralized by the sight was branded with the magic mark of defeatism.

They all left the meeting room after listening to the president’s cheerful speech. 

Most of them had given up hope of doing anything, and the meeting was nothing but a formality. 

They just relayed the president’s pressure and orders to their subordinates.

Lately, after these meetings, the president always called Heisenberg.

“Doctor, doctor, please… how much longer?”

“Your Excellency, please wait for one more year!”

Lately, the president, who had been taking more pervitin, screamed and kicked with bloodshot eyes. 

The secretaries and guards tried to calm him down by touching his body, and then it was Heisenberg’s turn.

“Your Excellency, according to your orders, all the staff of our laboratory are working with utmost effort and enthusiasm to complete Project Spandau as soon as possible! But realistically, without more time…”

“One year is too late! Who knows when those damned inferior races will push into Berlin! Bombs are already falling in the German Empire… Ughahaha…”

“I will do my best, Your Excellency!”

The president seemed to be howling. The guards looked at him with boredom. They had seen this for a year, and it was understandable. Heisenberg could only say that he would do his best every time.

Nothing was actually happening.

“I see… I see… please… develop it as soon as possible… we will try to stop the filthy inferior races from coming in somehow…”

“Thank you, Your Excellency!”

“If we have gas and bacteria, we might be able to stop them for a while… Doctor, you have to speed up the research and development!”

Heisenberg was speechless. He knew from the newspapers what the scientists in Japan were doing. And Germany was doing the same?

Of course, he could not do much. 

There were plenty of people who advised and counseled the president, and if they had reached this point even after they had spoken, there was nothing a single scholar could do.

“Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!”

Heisenberg left the president’s office with a Nazi salute and hurried home. He was terrified by the eyes that followed him.

“Daddy!”

“Papa, papa!”

“Oh? Honey, you came home early today…?”

His children and pregnant wife ran out to see him, who had been working late and overnight. 

He was already the father of five children, and the children clung to him for the attention of their father they had not seen.

“Kids… just a moment, just a moment… Lisa! Can you get me my fountain pen?”

“Okay. What’s wrong? You look urgent…”

And he was indeed urgent, so Heisenberg rushed into his study. His whole body was shaking. He mistyped the password twice in front of the safe and typed it with his trembling hand.

“Honey, what’s going on…?”

“Just a moment! Just leave me alone for a moment!”

Heisenberg, who shouted angrily to the point of surprising himself, took out a bundle of letters from the safe and started writing a letter with the fountain pen his wife gave him.

The bundle of letters had the places and methods to contact him in case he wanted to defect. He slowly chewed on the methods written in the letter and wrote down what he wanted to say. Of course, Heisenberg’s brilliant brain remembered the codes in the letter exactly. His trembling hand just couldn’t keep up.

He wrote the wrong letters and scratched them several times, and Heisenberg finished one letter.

“Ah… and P.S…”

P.S… What should I write…

“The VIP… has given… a terrible order.”

Whew. He barely finished the letter and stuffed the paper into the envelope without waiting for it to dry properly.

He threw the bundle of letters he had received into the fireplace and said to his wife, who looked at him with a dumbfounded expression.

“I’m going to mail a letter. You…”

“Yes?”

“You pack your bags as soon as possible. Contact your parents too… and take only the valuables.”

A few days later, the letter arrived. With two burly men. They greeted Heisenberg in flawless German.

“Good day, Doctor. Are you ready?”

“Honey, what is this…”

“Trust me. Let’s go.”

Heisenberg knew very well. What he was making himself. And that Germany would develop nuclear weapons much later than the Soviet Union.

He hoped that nuclear weapons would never be used, but when he heard the president’s words about trying gas and germ warfare, he had a hunch. 

There would be a massive retaliation. 

The Nazi regime had crossed the line long ago.

It was ridiculous to try to stop the air raids by hanging prisoners on the anti-aircraft towers.

Now the retribution would come. Heisenberg hugged his children and urged them to flee.