The Iron Dream (37 page)

"HAIL JAGGAR!" the SS scientists roared, slamming the heels of their high black leather boots together, and 239

shooting out their arms in a bone-snapping Party salute.

Then these gallant blond heroes executed smart about-faces, and set to work on the first rank of porcelain cloning vats. The nutrient fluids were drained out of the gleaming white vats through flush holes. The strapping blond clones were then jolted to final wakefulness with galvanic shocks.

A few minutes later, there were twenty blue-eyed blond giants standing before their vats, their expressions bright with superhuman intelligence, but blank as virgin parchment.

Viewing these magnificent specimens made Feric's heart soar. Each of them shared his own great stature and perfection of physiognomy and physique, and the brilliance that shone in their eyes was unmistakable. Behind them were another one hundred and eighty specimens of no smaller perfection waiting to be decanted, thousands more in this reproduction works alone, millions in the next year, tens of millions soon after that. Within his own lifetime, he would see every last inch of habitable space on earth secured and and occupied by the Master Race of Heldon, the magnificent SS clones. And after that—

The idea that came upon Feric overwhelmed him with its grandeur.

Before him, each tall blond SS scientist in black leather stood beside a naked giant with a genotype to match his own. These beaming SS heroes then delivered a silent massed Party salute.

To Feric's amazement and unabashed delight, fully half of the newly awakened SS clones mimicked the patriotic gesture of their tutors with a touchingly childish enthusiasm. Perhaps it was possible that loyalty to the Swastika could be impressed in the very genes!

"Today the world is finally and truly ours, my Commander!" Remler exclaimed buoyantly, his features shining with patriotic ecstasy.

"Indeed, Remler," Feric said. "And that is only the beginning. Tomorrow we shall conquer the stars!"

Never had so great a throng been assembled at one place at one time in the history of the world. The great soaring spaceship, a pointed cylinder of gleaming silvery metal two hundred feet high, stood on its fins on the broad plain of northeastern Heldon. A small platform had been erected at a safe distance from the rocket's mighty ex-240

haust. Upon this platform stood Feric, and around it a ring of tall, blond SS clones in shiny black leather as perfect as themselves.

Two hundred thousand identical blond SS clone giants in black uniforms and red Swastika capes surrounded the central pillar of the rocket ship in rank after perfect rank, ready to begin the ceremonial circular march. Beyond this formation were perhaps a million more SS clones in trim black leathers stretching beyond the horizon in all directions, and beyond them, out of Feric's sight, were uncounted hundreds of thousands of the older generation of Helder gathered to watch the blast-off from afar.

Standing before the cluster of microphones on the platform, Feric was filled with an excitement unparalleled in his entire experience. Every atom of his body tingled with ecstatic anticipation as he began to speak.

"Today, having conquered the earth, and populated it with a Master Race of superhuman specimens whose perfection transcends that of any creature ever created by the brute process of natural evolution, Heldon now takes its first step to the stars!"

At this, an incredible spontaneous roar issued from the vast throng, a sound that challenged the heavens and seemed to make the very earth tremble with joy on its axis. This became the greatest massed chanting of "Hail Jaggar!" that the world had ever seen, and millions of arms pumped frantically in repeated Party salutes, a forest of waving homage that filled Feric's field of vision and overwhelmed his soul with happiness. Feric let this demonstration go on for a full two minutes before he raised his hand for silence, for none could deny that this magnificent folk had more than earned the right to this jubilation.

"Inside this spaceship—the most advanced achievement of Helder scientific genius—are three hundred of the finest SS clones, frozen in suspended animation. In this ageless state they will remain for the long years it will take this ship to traverse the immense distance to Tau Ceti. Once the ship has reached its destination, the automatic machinery will land it, and thaw out the colonists so that they may emerge and spread the seed of Heldon over the face of yet another planet. Within three years, we will be launching fifty such ships a year, adding fifty planets a year to the domain of the true human genotype, not for a year, or a decade, or a century, but forever! The universe is infinite and the Master Race of Heldon will spread itself throughout the stars without end, filling the vast infinities between the galaxies with our own noble kind!"

This time the demonstration of fanatic ecstasy surpassed even what had gone before, and it took Feric a full five minutes to still the massive chanting of "Hail Jaggar!" that all but threatened to topple the great rocket from its launching pad with its incredible force.

"But my fellow Helder, there is one final glory that I have withheld until now," he finally continued, unable to keep from breaking into a broad grin. "I myself have contributed cells to the cloning vats. This rocket and every one that follows it out into the trackless reaches of interstellar space for the next ten million years will be commanded by a clone grown from my own flesh and therefore my genetic equivalent, suited by destiny and pedigree to be a leader of men. Thus our colonies shall not fail no matter what manner of hostile aliens they may face under foreign suns, for the troops that will exterminate these subhumans horrors shall be none but the finest SS purebreds, and the leaders shall be created in my own genetic image! Hail Heldon! Hail the Swastika! Hail the Master Race! Hail the conquest of the universe!"

As the answering earthquake chanting of "Hail Jaggar!"

reverberated every molecule in the air, the huge ring of SS

troops began to march round the rocket and Feric's platform, kicking the heels of their steel-soled boots high in the air with every step and then bringing them down with a force that was quite literally earth-shaking. Faster and faster these magnificent specimens in snug black leather marched, kicking their heels ever higher, until the platform and the rocket were surrounded by a whirling circle of slick black leather, and the universe shook with the thunder of Helder boots.

Then, as a single man, these two hundred thousand tall blond SS clones snapped their arms out in the greatest massed Party salute in history and held them in this outstretched position as the chant of "Hail Jaggar!" continued to rise toward the heavens from millions of fervent throats.

Faster and faster the marching troops whirled around Feric, kicking their heels skyward with ever increasing vigor and force, as if attempting to smash through the vault in the sky^with the steel soles of their boots while the massed chanting merged with the rhythm of the falling boots, a staccato thunder that filled and shook the uni—242

verse and pounded with the blood racing in Feric's skull.

Feric felt the sound and the glory permeate every cell of his body with an incredible joyous fire; his blood pounded like racial thunder through his veins, faster and faster. It seemed finally as if he must fly apart and burst in a million pieces with ecstasy.

At this climactic moment, when he could bear the preternatural joy no longer, he threw a small switch.

With a deafening bellow, a magnificent billow of orange flame spurted out of the rocket. Every throat in Heldon joined with Feric's in a wordless cry of joyous triumph as the seed of the Swastika rose on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars.

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AFTERWORD

TO THE

SECOND EDITION

The popularity gained by Adolf Hitler's final science-fiction novel, Lord of the Swastika, in the five years since his death is an indisputable fact. The novel won the Hugo award given by the inner fraternity of science-fiction enthusiasts as the best science-fiction novel of 1954. While this may be a somewhat dubious literary credential, it surely would have pleased Hitler, who lived among these

"science-fiction fans" throughout his career in the United States, and considered himself one of them, going so far as to edit and publish his own amateur "fanzine" even while working as a full-time professional writer.

Of wider significance is the book's popularity and the adoption of the swastika motif and colors created in it among as diverse a spectrum of social groups and organizations as the Christian Anti-Communist Legion, various

"outlaw motorcycle gangs," and the American Knights of Bushido. Obviously, this science-fiction novel has struck some chord in the contemporary non-communist mind that raises its appeal far beyond the limited bounds of the science-fantasy genre.

On a purely literary level, this phenomenon seems rather inexplicable. Lord of the Swastika was written in the space of six weeks under contract to a paperback publisher in something of a frenzy shortly before Hitler's death in 1953. If we are to believe the gossip rife in the science-fiction "fanzines" of the day. Hitler had been behaving erratically for several years, being subject to fits of trembling and bouts of uncontrollable rage that frequently lapsed into near-hebephrenic rantings. Although the actual cause of Hitler's death was a cerebral hemorrhage, these symptoms at least hint at complications of tertiary syphilis.

Thus, the literary totem of the present devotees of the swastika and its peculiar code was, in cold point of fact, written in six weeks by a commercial pulp writer who never displayed serious literary talent, and who may well have written the book while suffering from the early stages of paresis.

While the prose may display a certain praiseworthy competence, considering that Hitler learned English as a mature adult, one cannot for a moment seriously compare Hitler's mastery of his adopted literary language to that of Joseph Conrad, for instance, a Pole who came to our tongue at a similarly advanced age. Awkward traces of Germanic sentence structure and usage are evident throughout Lord of the Swastika.

There is admittedly a certain raw power in many passages of the novel, but this seems to be more the result of psychopathology than of conscious, controlled literary craftsmanship. Where Hitler may be said to excel as a writer is in his visual conceptualization of basically unrealistic or improbable scenes—notably those of extravagant battle, or the grand guignol military pageantry which festoons the book. But this power of visualization can easily be traced to Hitler's prior career as a magazine illustrator, rather than to any specific conscious mastery of prose style.

The imagery of the novel is something else again, an area of legitimate dispute. As anyone with even a cursory layman's knowledge of human psychology will realize, Lord of the Swastika is filled with the most blatant phallic symbolisms and allusions. A description of Feric Jaggar's magic weapon, the so-called Great Truncheon of Held:

"The shaft was a gleaming rod of ... metal full four feet long and thick around as a man's forearm ... the oversize headball was a life-sized steel fist, and a hero's fist at that." If this is not a description of a fantasy penis, what is? Further, everything about the Great Truncheon points to a phallic identification between Hitler's hero, Feric Jaggar, and his weapon. Not only is the truncheon fashioned in the shape of an enormous penis, but it is the source and symbol of Jaggar's power. Only Jaggar, the hero of the novel, can wield the Great Truncheon; it is the phallus of maximum size, potency, and status, the sceptre of rule in more ways than one. When he forces Stag Stopa to kiss the head of his weapon as a gesture of fealty, the phallic symbolism of the' Great Truncheon reaches a grotesque apex.

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But the phallic symbolism hardly stops with the Great Truncheon of Held. The outstretched-arm salute which forms an obsessive motif throughout the novel is patently a phallic gesture. Jaggar reviews one of the orgiastic military parades from the pinnacle of an enormous cylindrical tower which is described in rather obviously phallic terms.

Later, the pillar of fire in the center of the burning city of Bora becomes an immense phallic totem around which Jaggar parades his victorious troops. And in the final scene of the novel, a rocket quite literally filled with Jaggar's seed rises "on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars," as the orgasmic climax of a bizarre military spectacle which Jaggar clearly experiences as a somewhat heavy-handed analog of sexual intercourse.

There is'no doubt that a great deal of Lord of the Swastika's appeal to the unsophisticated comes from the blatant phallic symbolism which all but dominates the book. In a sense, the entire novel is a piece of sublimated pornography, a phallic orgy from beginning to end, with the sexuality symbolized in terms of grandiose fetishistic military displays and orgiastic bouts of unreal violence.

Since this phallic sexuality of violence and military pageantry is a common transference in western society, the book gains great power by keying itself into one of the most prevalent sexual pathologies of our civilization.

What is open to dispute is whether or not Hitler was consciously aware of what he was doing.

Those who would claim that Hitler employed his sys-tematic phallic imagery as a consciously calculated device can rightly claim that its consistent application points toward an act of self-conscious creation. Further, Hitler displays a cogent understanding of how visual symbols and events may be used to manipulate the mass psyche. One can believe that the mass torchlight rallies he describes in the book would in fact inflame the passions of real mobs hi a manner roughly akin to what takes place in the novel.

The adoption of the swastika colors by groups in our own society is additional evidence that Hitler knew full well how to devise visual images capable of having a powerful effect upon the viewer. Thus, by extension, it becomes superflcially reasonable to suppose that Hitler deliberately invested Lord of the Swastika with phallic imagery in order to capture the rapt attention of the unsophisticated.