Free The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry Page B

hated Weimar Republic. As Hitler rose to power, Hermann acquired a publicity firm, sold editorial space to the National Socialists at bargain rates, and aided the rise of the Brown Shirts from terrorists to leaders. He then started a chain of newspapers and headed the German National People’s Party, which eventually aligned itself with the Nazis. He also sired three sons. Two never saw the end of the war, one dying in Russia, the other in France. Her father survived only because he was too young to fight. After the peace, her grandfather became one of the countless disappointed souls who’d made Hitler what he was and survived to endure the shame. He lost his newspapers, but luckily kept his factories, paper mills, and oil refinery, which were needed by the Allies, so his sins, if not forgiven, were conveniently forgotten.
    Her grandfather also claimed an irrational pride in his Teutonic heritage. He was enraptured with German nationalism, concluding that Western civilization was on the verge of collapse and its only hope lay in recovering long-lost truths. As she’d told Malone, in the late 1930s he’d spotted strange symbols in the gables of Dutch farmhouses and came to believe that they, along with the rock art from Sweden and Norway, and the stones from Antarctica, were a type of Aryan hieroglyph.
    The mother of all scripts.
    The language of heaven.
    Utter nonsense, but the Nazis loved those romantic ideas. By 1931 ten thousand men were part of the SS, which Himmler eventually transformed into a racial elite of young Aryan males. Its Race and Settlement Office meticulously determined if an applicant was genetically fit for membership. Then, in 1935, Himmler went a step farther and created a brain trust dedicated to reconstructing a golden Aryan past.
    The trust’s mission was twofold.
    Unearth evidence of Germany’s ancestors back to the Old Stone Age, and convey those findings to the German people.
    A long label lent credibility to its supposed importance. Deutsches Ahnenerbe — Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte. German Ancestral Her itage—the Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas. Or, more simply, the Ahnenerbe. Something inherited from the forefathers. One hundred thirty-seven scholars and scientists, another eighty-two filmmakers, photographers, artists, sculptors, librarians, technicians, accountants, and secretaries.
    Headed by Hermann Oberhauser.
    And while her grandfather toiled on fiction, Germans died by the millions. Hitler eventually fired him from the Ahnenerbe and publicly humiliated both him and the entire Oberhauser family. That was when he retreated here, to the abbey, safe behind walls that religion protected, and tried to rehabilitate himself.
    But never did.
    She remembered the day he died.
    “Papa.” She knelt beside the bed and grasped his frail hand.
    The old man’s eyes opened, but he said nothing. He’d long ago lost all memory of her.
    “It’s never time to give up,” she said.
    “Let me go ashore.” The words came only upon his breath and she had to strain to hear him.
    “Papa, what are you saying?”
    His eyes glazed over, the oily glare disconcerting. He slowly shook his head.
    “You want to die?” she asked.
    “I must go ashore. Tell the captain.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He shook his head again. “Their world. It is gone. I have to go ashore.”
    She started to speak, to reassure him, but his grip relaxed and his chest fluttered. Then his mouth slowly opened and he said, “Heil . . . Hitler.”
    Her spine tingled every time she thought of those final words. Why had he felt compelled, with his dying breath, to proclaim an allegiance to evil?
    Unfortunately, she would never know.
    The door to the subterranean room opened and the woman from the cable car returned. Dorothea watched as she strolled confidently through the displays. How had things come to this point? Her grandfather had died a Nazi, her father had perished a dreamer.
    Now she