The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville

Author:Guy Saville
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2011-02-17T04:30:00+00:00

PAA, Kongo

17 September, 09:15

FROM the air it was even more impressive. A miracle of German engineering and Hochburg’s genius.

Kepplar was in the passenger seat of his master’s helicopter, marvelling at the scene below him. He had spent the last sixteen hours ransacking Stanleystadt for Cole and the American, working through the night to check every last tavern, flophouse and festering brothel. Nothing. He was resolute he wouldn’t return empty-handed again; had never seen the Oberstgruppenführer so agitated. Then came a report of an incident with the Unterjocher the previous afternoon. A prisoner had attempted to escape from one of the convoys to Wutrohr 161.

Now Kepplar was heading south, on his lap a dossier supplied by the Gestapo.

He had intended to use the flight to catch up on some sleep but as soon as the PAA came into view, the fatigue left him. His heart swelled. What they had achieved in Kongo in a single decade the Belgians failed to do in a century. Even the British in India – before the Hindoos kicked them out – couldn’t compare. The triumph belonged to the SS! They had put the niggers to good work in the years before Windhuk. Under Hochburg’s auspices new cities and mining towns were built, hydroelectric dams across the Rivers Klara and Rufiji, even an opera house in the jungle near Gerberstadt designed by Brinkmann. The key had been transport. Without it, Hochburg declared on the day he became Governor General, Kongo isn’t worth two pfennigs.

So: the Matadi lock system (largest in the world); ultramodern ports at Pythonhafen, Neu Berlin and Stanleystadt; the north–south railway network linking the colony to Muspel; a hub of airports to carry Germans back home or to the beach resorts of Kleine Küste and Strength-Through-Joy holidays. None of these achievements, however, stirred Kepplar as much as the Pan African Autobahn.

It was as straight as any Roman road, bisected the continent with its gleaming white lanes – arteries to pump the blood of German civilisation – with neither forest nor desert, river nor mountain allowed to stand in its path. The Kongo section had opened only a few months earlier. Along here the panzers of the Waffen-SS would thunder on their way to victory in Northern Rhodesia. But it was more than simply a triumph of civil engineering. The masterstroke of the PAA, at least for the German legs, was the material it was constructed from: a unique blend of concrete that would ensure the presence of National Socialism in Africa for millennia.

The idea was Hochburg’s.

When he presented it to Himmler only two things were demanded of him. One, that work begin immediately. Two, that no one outside the SS must ever know its secret. Later, Hochburg told Kepplar, the Reichsführer had danced a jig at what they planned.

The pilot’s voice came over the comlink. ‘Two minutes, Gruppenführer,’ he said, pointing to the horizon.

Kepplar opened the dossier on his lap, studied the photos in it, before returning his gaze to the grasslands below.

Already he could see the billowing chimneys of the Wutrohr labour camp.

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