1945 Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a distant melancholy. "If you should ever get a message from me inquiring about your father, it's a clear warning that the show's about to start. Remember that, and . . . take care, my cousin." He reached out, squeezed Jim's hand, and disappeared into the crowd.
    Jim made a studied effort to appear as if nothing at all had transpired between him and his cousin other than a friendly chat while looking for a misplaced girlfriend. Slinging his camera bag over his shoulder, he continued down the thoroughfare, pausing for a moment to look in a shop window where the new television sets were on display.
    Berlin had opened the worlds first full-time television station the month before, and a crowd was gathered around the window watching an old propaganda film about the start of the war with Russia four years ago. The image was grainy, and the picture tube no more than a hand's span across, but even so it had a certain hypnotic quality.
    One of Jims assignments was to track down leads on a rumored Nazi superweapon, which mated a television camera and maneuvering fins to a rocket bomb. The resulting weapon would be remotely guided to its target. ... If the Nazis had managed such a trick they had also ushered in a revolution in warfare straight out of science fiction. He watched the picture, trying to image how a maneuvering target — such as, say, a US aircraft carrier, would look on the grainy screen.
    After a minute or two he turned and continued on, pausing here and there to look in shop windows that were again filled with goods. Gasoline, rubber products, and anything that required copper, brass, or aluminum were still impossible for ordinary folk to find, but the food markets overflowed with loot: Russian sausages, bread, and vodka (which had become the cheap hard liquor of Germany); fruit from the Black Sea region; French wines and the latest Parisian fashions. Even silk stockings were coming back, though they generally sold out in a few hours.
    Sadly, Jim had noted that hemlines were dropping again. To his mind the effect on hemlines of the tight rationing of cloth had been one of the few real wartime benefits, both in Europe and America.
    But despite the lowering hemlines the people around him seemed relaxed and happy; clearly they were enjoying the fruits of German victory — even though, Martel supposed, they could not help noticing that there were far more female celebrants than male.
    Other social changes the war had created were evident as well. Under Speer s wartime economy program, rushed into effect within days of Hitler's accident, German women had filled the factories. Germany had still been playing a guns-and-butter game up until then, but instantly when given the opportunity, Speer had changed that. Within eighteen months, the most essential military production was up three hundred percent, and the majority of the labor force was female, something previously unthinkable.
    Women controlled the money now and spent it as they pleased. Jim wondered how, if Germany ever did demobilize, these women would react when the former masters of the house came back home and tried to reassert control.
    As he passed a beer garden, loud and boisterous singing rioted through the open doors from an interior packed with soldiers in a happy mood after the parade. He continued on with the flow of the crowd, sensing from them the same self-satisfied contentment that emanated f rom crowds going home after Fourth of July and Labor Day picnics.
    Martel wondered how that could be. How could they not know of the horrors being perpetrated in their name all over the Reich and in the conquered territories? Slave labor starved in the East while working to fill Berlin shops. Tens of thousands were dying of overwork, malnourishment and exposure as they labored like the captives of Pharaoh on the new Autobahn extensions that were pushing deeper and deeper into the Ukraine and Occupied Russia. And worst of all, the camps. On the other hand, in a