In the Heart of the Enchanted Lands

Chapter 2: The Iron of Death and Destruction

If he were to be put on trial for being an accessory to the atrocities that Germany had committed—on orders by his superiors—then he would hope that the Allies would show leniency and have him shipped to the United States to be with his family. Unfortunately, Meinrad held false hopes. It is obvious why they wouldn't show any mercy. After the things both the SS and the Wehrmacht had done, it is no wonder the Allies weren't so merciful. It wouldn't have taken a child to know why, either. Why would they be, anyway? But there is another factor that played into it.

Germany—more so, Der Führer—was in no shape to win this war. It didn't win the first one, so what made it think it would win this one, especially with modern weaponry and machinery? But above all else, Meinrad wanted to at least have the mental capacity to acknowledge it as hope because it seemed more than obvious that Germany no longer had any hope of winning this war. The Allies breached the beaches and were heading their way—most likely to put their heads on pikes.

It made Meinrad feel hopeless, and he had every reason to feel this way. He had hoped that he would fulfill the promise he made to Thekla many years ago when she left Germany, but that was only a white lie; it's always been from the start. He knows that he is going to die—either during battle or after he is captured, arrested, and executed by the Allies for what he had done, like the rest of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht and the SS.

The idea that Thekla will never see her eldest brother again filled Meinrad's heart with depressing sadness. He could only hope to see his siblings and his aunt again, but no matter how much he hoped, he knew that hoping for it would be all for nothing. This is the end.

He would either go dying like a soldier or accept death like a coward—Meinrad accepted that it's better to die a soldier than a coward. He decides to make his final choice to fight to the death, but he is still scared of death itself. He killed and killed many of the enemy soldiers of the enemy countries of Germany, but even then, he still feared death. He couldn't possibly imagine what the enemy soldiers he had killed in the past saw when they died, and he didn't want to imagine it ever.

This was never what Meinrad signed up for, but it's what he is ordered to do. He never agreed with anything Der Führer said, did, or demanded—he just followed orders like every other soldier in the Wehrmacht. But does this reasoning justify the things he had done and witnessed? No one has an answer to that question nowadays, and perhaps never will, even when the war is finished. They have done it so much to the point where they feel that no matter how they think of it, the reasoning as to whether or not what they had done or seen was justified will always be ambiguous.

Some who did believe in Der Führer's cause surely did believe it without a doubt; there were folk who didn't believe in it; there were folk who weren't taking sides; and then there were folk who were unsure of what to do or think. Meinrad is one of them.

Meinrad would have gasped in horror every time he looked at himself in a mirror—if it wasn't already shattered by other Wehrmacht soldiers who punched it in fright when they saw the dead ghostly faces of the soldiers or civilians they killed looking right back at them, taunting them—but he can't remember the last time he ever did see himself in the mirror. If he did, he would have wished to see the old version of himself, and by the old version, he means the one where he isn't some brutal-minded beast who kills and kills just to satisfy the bloodlust Der Führer had for the rest of the countries in all of Europe. Give him the right power; we're all pretty much screwed.

Everyone would have been if Der Führer had some futuristic weapon pulled straight out of a science-fiction novel hiding somewhere in the Führerbunker. If Albert Speer—der Führer's German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production—had the technology from the future, or if that crazy son of a bitch would even know how to use it if he did, he would have made the weapons that Der Führer wanted, we would all have been dead. Thankfully, everyone had to thank any holy spirit that listened that Speer didn't—and more so the fact that Der Führer didn't either.