Reichsminister Albert Speer Pays His Respects to a Dead Jewish Acrobat

Except for the old lady who owned the house, everyone else was gone.

Ziggy stared down at the body. Looking at his dead brother, he still didn’t know what to feel. Regret? Loss? Inconsolable sadness? None of them were there. Perhaps they’d come later.

Manni came over and sat down across from the body.

Ziggy looked over at him. “He told me you were an assassin,” he said.

Manni looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was an imbecile. “And you’re a U-Boat captain with the Knight’s Cross,” he answered. “How many ships did you sink?”

"Including my time with Luth, fourteen.”

"That’s a lot of ships,” said Manni.


"Manni, do you feel the British gave you enough respect?”


Manni blew a burst of air through his nose, letting Ziggy know that what he’d said was funny, though not amusing.

"Where were you when Father died?” asked Ziggy.

"In Canada,” he answered. “Did you hear where Franzi was?”

Ziggy shook his head.

Manni offered a wry smile. “Tibet.”

"Tibet?”

"Ahnenerbe field trip.”

"Did he find anything?”

"Besides a bad case of the clap? I don’t think so.”

The door opened and the old lady gestured at Manni from the threshold. He got up. “Look,” he said, “we’re going to have to decide what to do about Franzi. We’ll talk about it when I get back.” Then he followed the old lady into the hall, closing the door behind him.

Ziggy stared down at the threadbare carpet and the stray threads splitting off from the worn spots and suddenly knew the path that lay ahead for Franzi. Himmler’s group wouldn’t stay together much longer. It wasn’t possible. Things were so unstable now that even the slightest obstacle would cause them to fray and spin out in different directions, and once that happened, Franzi would be free. He saw it with diamond-sharp clarity.

He looked at Sebastian and suddenly the sadness was tearing him apart. If only he could have known this. How long had he been dead? He looked at the reddening sky outside the window. Twenty four hours, the same as eternity.

He stood up and went over to the body and brushed his hand against Sebastian’s hair. He found himself remembering the old days when they were performing. Had he ever known how brilliant he was? Had he ever looked beyond the top hats and tails, the five-six-seven-eight razzmatazz and seen what the rest of the world all took for granted? That the seedy glamour and corniness were nothing more than a picture frame in which genius ran free? Ziggy had hated the reminiscing too. But they really had been something. Better than cartoons, as good as jazz.

The door opened. Ziggy looked up and saw Manni re-entering the room, followed by a man in a dark suit. It was Speer.

"Ziggy, you’ve met Herr Reichsminister Speer, haven’t you?” said Manni. Speer put his hand out and Ziggy shook it. “Please, allow me to extend my condolences over the death of your brother,” said Speer.

"Thank you,” said Ziggy.

Speer looked down at Sebastian’s body and tears welled in his eyes. He turned to Manni. “Honestly, Herr Manni, after all we’ve been through, I didn’t imagine anyone’s death would bother me this much, but it does. I don’t understand why.

"It’s funny how you hope for things. I thought that with the war ending we’d all get to see you perform again.” A tear ran down his cheek. He gave a polite bow and left.

Ziggy and Manni returned to their chairs. They sat for a while, then Manni said; “Sebastian is dead. That can’t be changed. Now what are we going to do about Franzi?”

Ziggy spoke quietly. “I’ve got a feeling that Franzi’s time will come soon. And when it does, he won’t need our help.”

"Is this something that you suspect, or are you getting premonitions?”

"No and yes,” said Ziggy.

Manni looked genuinely amazed. “I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

Ziggy shrugged.

The hostess gestured at Manni again. “We’ll talk about this later,” said Manni. “Let me see what she wants.”
(Excerpt from Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Schellenberg Picks a New Masseur for Himmler

When the call came, Franzi Loerber had already officially gone off duty and was sitting by himself in the staff and junior officers’ canteen having a cigarette while working out the final calculations on a large batch of horoscopes he’d been assigned to do on senior members of the planning staff. It was crap work, very tiresome. Calculate algorithms based on the variations factored from the shifting positions of fifteen ascendant and twelve descendant groups of stars over twelve nine-day intervals starting a month before conception. It was all complete nonsense, something he’d invented on the spur of the moment a long time ago, but for some reason people swore by it. And far be it from Franzi to tell anybody what they should believe in.

All in all, horoscopes were fairly formulaic stuff. The calculations took forever but the actual writing never took more than five minutes. You always had to make sure it offered so much opportunity, so much warning, and lots and lots of ambiguity. Just write something down, and boom, you’re done and you move on to the next one.

He went on with his number crunching for another hour until the tediousness finally got to him. Putting the horoscopes aside, he took out his hand-written Moscow Center coding chart and began composing a long overdue report.

“47361 73908 66214 38947 03418 87451,” he wrote. It was his way of saying everything was under control and that some promising leads were coming up. “15376 21294 97124 33965,” he added, more as an afterthought. It meant everyone believed the end would come soon.

Franzi looked up to see the cute captain from internal security eyeing him from the next table. Under normal circumstances he might have seen if he could take it somewhere, but since the captain was a spy-hunter and Franzi happened at that moment to be writing a coded letter to Moscow, he instead looked away. He thought about mentioning him in the report. Moscow seemed to like hearing who in SS Headquarters was queer. He tried to remember what the captain’s name was; Hessler, Hindemann?

“96101 49327 85634.” He hated what he was doing. Ziggy was a U-Boat captain, Manni an assassin, Sebastian was an operative for a secret Jewish terror network, all of them living lives of adventure and excitement. And all Franzi had done this entire war was calculate horoscopes and report his fellow SS queers to Moscow and London. “68225 79031 66496.”

Franzi looked at the clock. There was a dead drop hidden in one of the lavatories on the second floor. If he posted the message in the next twenty minutes, he could have Moscow off his back for at least two weeks, maybe longer if things went downhill fast enough. “98343 74588 19632.” He stared at the paper for a long time. Then he looked up. The cute captain was staring at him again. What did he want? Sex? Betrayal? Both? Why not? The captain smiled. Franzi smiled back. He crumpled the paper into a ball, then tossed it into a wastebasket along the wall. Franzi rolled his eyes. The captain gave him a sympathetic smirk like he knew what that was like.

He was done serving Moscow, Franzi decided. The war was all but over and now he had to start taking care of himself. Manni was already gone. He’d left for the Ruhr a month earlier and by this point he was probably safely behind Allied lines. Now Franzi needed to do the same. But how?

It had been a big mistake agreeing to spy for the Russians in the first place, but then at the time he hadn’t felt like he had any right to be picky. If he’d only waited for two more weeks, he could have gone to work for the British. It turned out their friend Nigel Westerby was a British operative and had already signed up Manni. Though Franzi readily agreed to share his information with them, he remembered seeing the disappointment on Westerby’s face.

He remembered how the Russians had first come to him after they’d found out Gustav had just wangled him a cushy research post with the Ahnenerbe, the SS-run racial heritage and occult studies institute. Franzi hadn’t liked the idea of spending the war working with a bunch of charlatans and mystic crackpots, but the Russians insisted it would be an excellent career choice and a great way to fight the Nazis from the inside. It turned out he’d been right on his first guess; it was worse than being a librarian. For someone like him, who’d spent his entire life in the celebrity spotlight, it was a living death. He remembered how, at first, everyone there was excited to have one of the Magical Loerber Brothers on the staff and people would come up to him all the time to ask questions and reminisce, but it wasn’t long before the utter mid-level facelessness of his new job wiped the shine right off him. And once that happened, everyone stopped thinking of him as anyone special.

He noticed two staff majors waving frantically at him from the canteen doorway. “Loerber, come here!” one of them hissed. They waited until Franzi was up close, then whispered. “You’re a masseur, aren’t you?”

Franzi nodded warily. “I’ve done some,” he said. “Not professionally.”

“Get your things,” one of them whispered. “You’re needed immediately at the Reichsfuhrer’s offices.”

Franzi picked up his papers and followed them upstairs to the fifth floor. He was brought past the guards and the identity checkpoint without anyone even taking his name down or checking his papers. Once inside, he was led through a warren of corridors and outer offices where an array of majors, colonels, generals and secretaries all stood attentively, waiting for his arrival. Outside the Reichsfuhrer’s office, a young general stood before the door. Franzi recognized him at once. It was Schellenberg, head of SS intelligence, head of all German intelligence, foreign and domestic, and Franzi’s boyfriend’s boss.

“The Reichsfuhrer needs your help,” Schellenberg said. “Do the best massage you can. And not a word of this to anybody, do you understand?”

Franzi nodded.

But Schellenberg wasn’t satisfied. “I mean nobody. Not your office mates or your fellow astrologers, and certainly not your boyfriend. Clear?”

Franzi nodded.

“Good,” said Schellenberg. “Now go in.”

“But Herr General, isn’t Professor Kersten the only one...?”

“Kersten is gone,” answered Schellenberg, holding open the door and then following him inside.
(Excerpt from Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Albert Speer, Magic, the Fall of Nazi Germany and the Story of the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers

Maybe my big problem as an author is that I don't properly grasp the concept of "Paranormal."

I just write novels about reality and if that reality happens to have what someone else considers "magic," that's kind of their problem.  I just consider it reality.  Reality is what exists and it has rules and, being reality, it's mostly gritty and messy and utterly, totally lacking in wonderfullness.  Okay, so people have visions, and can levitate and project ideas into other people's minds. They still have itchy feet and achey knees and if Franzi Loerber, one of my protaganists, has just managed to project enough psychic slippery onto a couple of stairsteps that an SS Major going down them has just flown ass-over-teakettles and broken his neck,   well Franzi is definitely going to be so wiped out from that feat, that all he's going to do is go find an empty chair and curl up into it and crash. To me, that's just reality.  But in book publishing, it's considered paranormal.

Both of my novels, Germania and Friend of the Devil, are full of encounters with the magical and the surreal and characters with abilities that are beyond their understanding. But I still think of it as realism rather than "Paranormal."

So you may wonder who the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers are and what all this happens to do with Albert Speer and the fall of Nazi Germany. Read on.

They were the toast of old Berlin. For ten years, during the raucous golden era before the Nazi takeover, the Magical Loerber Brothers were indisputably Berlin's most popular variety act.

What was it about the four young men that so completely captured the hearts of their audiences? Was it simply that they were identical? Or was it the way they somehow brought kitschy, lowbrow entertainment to a level which even the edgiest of the avant-garde found irresistible? No, it was something more than that. The brothers were magic. They were so magic, in fact, that even when the Nazis took over, none of them bothered noticing that they were Jewish.

But even magic has its limitations. In life, no one is ever truly exempt. What were they like ten years after their act had broken up, when they were pushing thirty and the Third Reich which had loved them so unconditionally was in its last bloody weeks?

Perhaps the best person to answer that question would be Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, armaments minister, and estranged only friend. At the time he ran into Manni Loerber, Speer was crisscrossing the industrial Ruhr in a lonely, fruitless rebellion against Hitler's orders to blow up everything before it fell into American hands. Manni was sneaking around the Ruhr, killing any Nazi Party official he could get his hands on. Speer needed help. Manni Loerber needed cover. And with Manni's uncanny ability to talk anyone into nearly anything, things suddenly began turning around for Speer. They were going so well, in fact, that Speer soon began believing that, like Manni, he could alter reality. Crazier still, he even started to think he had freed himself from Hitler.

What happened to Speer was not that different from what was also happening to SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg. After more than a year unsuccessfully trying to goad his powerful but hopelessly indecisive and superstitious boss, Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler, into deposing Hitler and ending the war, Schellenberg had just about given up hope. Then in walked Franzi Loerber, a low-level horoscope-jockey who'd spent the entire war buried in the bureaucratic depths of the Ahnenerbe, the SS mystical research institue. Franzi, it turned out, had an ability to calm Himmler and quickly turn his waffling into confidence and steely determination. Suddenly Schellenberg was back in business, or so he thought.

The normally crafty and suspicious Schellenberg should have easily figured out that Franzi Loerber was a Soviet mole, but he didn't, for the same reason Speer didn't really care that Manni Loerber was most certainly a British spy and assassin. They needed to believe in magic.

Then, of course, there are the other two Loerber brothers. There is Sebastian, whom everyone believes is long dead, only now he has turned up with the Blood of Israel, a Jewish underground group which is using his unique ability to project dreams to sow terror in their enemies' hearts. And then there is the normal one; Ziggy Loerber, the U-Boat ace, whose hatred of the Nazis runs nearly second to the aversion he feels toward his own nutball siblings and their carryings-on. Given the choice of a reunion or death, he would have gladly chosen the latter. But things don't always turn out the way people would like.

With Berlin falling and the war crashing towards its end, everything is thrown into chaos, and responsibility for continuing the fighting falls onto the shoulders of Grand Admiral Doenitz, head of the Navy and commander of the Northern Zone. With the war lost, all he wants is to die like a soldier. And he might have gotten to, had a telegram not arrived from Berlin, informing him that Hitler was dead and he was now the new Fuhrer.

In the midnight after Hitler's death, the remnants of Nazi Germany converge on Flensburg, a small port city on the Danish border where Doenitz has set up his capital. There they try to conjure up a rosy future in which their Nazi pasts do not matter. Some imagine glowing relationships with Eisenhower, the man they presume will now rule Europe like a Caesar. Others dream of escaping to Greenland to write their memoirs. Others try ingratiating themselves with the Allied Control Commission representatives wandering about. It's springtime and seeing Doenitz' government grow each day, people begin believing it might actually put down roots and last beyond the few days allotted to it through the world's inattention.

And into this world sail the four Magical Loerber Brothers. Though most have spent the war far from the spotlight, once in proximity of each other, their celebrity quickly catches up with them. Nobody cares that they are not the same people they were fifteen years earlier. In the public's memory, they are inseparable from the good old Weimar days and by extension, a portent of better times to come.

But to them, it is not so easy. While their reunion might be preordained by the stars, its tragic outcome is written in the war's lingering brutality and their divergent paths which can no longer be fully bridged by love, hope or magic.