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Monday, 13 February 2012

The sons of conspiracy

When I was speaking with Z earlier this evening, she mentioned a conspiracy she claimed to have heard from a friend of hers. What follows is entirely a description of what I've heard of it, and my reflections where stated.

During World War II, with the assurance of Aryan supremacy, Adolf Hitler should have had no trouble recruiting soldiers, given that many of them were those who had lost their jobs and lebensraum ("living space") because of an "economic invasion" by the Jews.

Despite these drives, there was apparently a brothel-that-wasn't-a-brothel somewhere in Germany where supremacist men and women prostituted their bodies for a strange cause: to birth children who would be brought up as Übermensch (from the Nietzschean philosophical concept of a "super-human") to serve the cause of the Third Reich. These children would be conditioned to believe that Hitler's word and beliefs were final and definitive, and to become warrior-mages (a notion borrowed from World of Warcraft).

The curious speculation doesn't end there but goes on to assert that such children were indeed present in the ranks of the army, and that they faced considerable ridicule because none of them knew who their fathers were. In other words, they were conceived in an environment of deliberate invalidity, stripped off their identities soon after birth, and turned into armed proselytizers. They were the walking bits of Nazi Germany.

[caption id="attachment_21607" align="aligncenter" width="512" caption=""We are... legion?""][/caption]

Although this theory was refuted by a historian that Z had spoken to, it doesn't hurt to conjecture the possibilities such a plot presents for historical fiction. The best book I have read in that regard - a book that captured properly the tension, fear and rage in Europe in the 1940s - is The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth: at its centre is a Nazi-hunting reporter attempting to track down a former SS concentration-camp commander. That's a choice of plot that makes the book simpler to write.

What of the sons of conspiracy? Were they willful participants or lost souls who moved with the current they were inadvertently generating? I - for what my opinion counts - believe that the initiative that created them could not have been organized by the government: Hitler was too principled a eugenicist to resort to prostitution. At the same time, it is not entirely implausible that a misguided fanatical cult could have perpetrated such a scheme.

Someone could write a good story about it... perhaps with a neo-noir narrative that is courageous enough to satirize the war so the comedians living the foolishness of 1941-Germany can be laughed at.

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