The Third Reich Read Online Free PDF

all of which he writes. It goes without saying that many of these fanzines would collapse without Conrad’s generosity, and in this too one can see his lack of ambition: the best that some of them deserve is to vanish without a trace, putrid little ditto sheets spawned by adolescents more interested in role-playing games or even computer games than the rigors of the hexagonal board. But that doesn’t matter to Conrad and he supports them. Many of his best articles, including his piece on the Ukrainian Gambit—which Conrad calls General Marcks’s Dream—were not only published by such a magazine but in fact written expressly for it.
    Curiously, it was Conrad who encouraged me to write for publications with a broader circulation and who persuaded me to go semipro. It’s to him that I owe my first contacts with Front Line , Jeux de Simulation , Stockade , Casus Belli , The General , etc. According to Conrad—and we spent an afternoon working this out—if I write regularly for ten magazines, some of them monthly, most bimonthly or trimonthly, I could give up my job and still get by while devoting myself entirely to writing. When I asked why he didn’t try it, since his job was worse than mine and he could write as well as I could, or better, he answered that he was so shy that it was painful for him, if not impossible, to establish business relationships with people he didn’t know, and that the work required a certain command of English, a language that Conrad could only just barely decipher.
    On that memorable day we set the goals to realize our dreams, and we got straight to work. Our friendship was cemented.
    Then came the Stuttgart tournament, preceding by a few months the Interzonal (essentially the national championship), to be held in Cologne. We both entered, promising half in earnest and half in jest that if fate pitted us against each other, we would be ruthlessdespite our steadfast friendship. Around that time Conrad had just published his Ukrainian Gambit in the fanzine Tötenkopf .
    At first the matches went well. We both made it through the first round without too much trouble. In the second round, Conrad was slated to play Mathias Müller, Stuttgart’s boy wonder, eighteen years old, editor of the fanzine Forced Marches and one of the fastest players we knew. The match was tough, one of the hardest fought of the tournament, and in the end Conrad was defeated. But this in no way discouraged him: with the enthusiasm of a scientist who after a resounding failure is at last able to see things clearly, he explained to me the initial flaws of the Ukrainian Gambit and its hidden virtues, how to use armored and mountain corps from the start, and where one could or couldn’t apply the Schwerpunkt, etc. In short, he became my adviser.
    I faced Mathias Müller in the semifinals and eliminated him. In the finals, I was pitted against Franz Grabowski, of the Model Kit Club, a good friend of Conrad’s and mine. That was how I won the right to represent Stuttgart. Then I went on to Cologne, where I competed against players of the caliber of Paul Huchel or Heimito Gerhardt, the latter of whom, at sixty-five, is the oldest of Germany’s gamers, a real role model for the sport. Conrad, who came with me, amused himself by giving nicknames to everyone gathered in Cologne, but when it came to Heimito Gerhardt he was at a loss, no longer so clever or boisterous. When he talked about him he called him the Old Man or Mr. Gerhardt; in front of Heimito he scarcely opened his mouth. Clearly he was afraid of saying something stupid.
    One day I asked him why he had such respect for Heimito. He answered that Heimito was a man of steel. That’s all he said. Rusty steel, he added with a smile, but steel even so. I thought he was referring to Heimito’s military past, and said so. No, said Conrad, I’m talking about the courage it takes for him to play. Nowadays, old men usually spend their time in front of the television or going