Free The Ghosts of Altona by Craig Russell Page A

A bright, fresh day but otherwise seemingly unexceptional. Except it would be exceptional. Sunday 17 July, 1932.
    Later, they would say that everything began that Sunday, that a ball had been set rolling that would crush out eighteen lives during the course of that one day, lead to four innocent men being beheaded a year later and more than fifty million lives lost beyond that. What unfolded that day in Altona would provide the excuse for the Prussian Coup and bring about the end of the Weimar Republic. That bright July Sunday had opened the door to the greatest darkness in the history of Germany, of the world.
    *
    It had been another Altona, back then. A cramped, smoky Altona of clustered apartments and terraces, each building with its own small square of yard, each yard with a fruit tree or vegetable plot. It was an Altona of narrow cobbled streets and fuming chimneys. No grand villas here. The people born here had been raised to toil, if toil could be found. This was the heart of workers’ Hamburg. Staunchly, proudly, resolutely working-class. Red Altona. Little Moscow.
    Georg had been thirteen, but big for his age. His father, like many of the men here, was small, compact, hard-hewn. A man of fifty, Franz Schmidt had become a father late and a widower early. Again like so many in Altona, Georg’s father was unemployed but had been a stevedore at the docks, his hands calloused, thick-fingered and rough from rope work.
    Georg’s father rarely smiled, had little to smile about, but never sought to conceal his pride in his son, who was not only growing tall and broad, but also clever. Nothing seemed to give Franz Schmidt more pleasure than seeing his son come back from the Christianeum library with a book in his hand. Franz Schmidt had been illiterate until adulthood and it had only been when he had joined the KPD that he had found someone to teach him the basics. It was his duty as a Communist, he had been told, to seize the most important capital of all denied the working classes: knowledge and education. But Franz Schmidt had known it was too late for him; that he probably never would have had the makings of a scholar, whatever social dice had been thrown for him. But his son . . . Georg was bright. Georg not only could read well, he ate books up. He lived in them, through them, for them. And Franz felt true pride swell in his breast every time he saw Georg with a book in his hands or when the boy sat reading to his father or telling him all about the latest book he was devouring. The truth was, Franz Schmidt knew, you were only ever given one life. There was no ‘after’, there was no better, simpler, purer, happier existence after physical extinction. The great lie of an afterlife for the hard-working, the loyal, the obedient, was just a device employed by church, state and patricians to enslave the masses. In the meantime, everyone was expected to know their place and accept their lot on the promise of something better to come. Franz was no deep thinker, but he knew he had been handed but the one life and that one life had been blighted. But one hope of an afterlife did gleam bright for Franz Schmidt: his son. He could live on through a son who would achieve things, would have a life that was worth living. Georg, his father knew, would go far in the world and Franz was sad only that the boy’s mother had not lived to see him grown.
    Georg’s father had loved to hear the facts that his son seemed to soak up like a sponge, especially those facts about their home quarter: how Altona had started out as a small settlement of fishermen and craftsmen, how it had grown to become the second biggest city in Denmark, envious eyes cast on it by its German neighbour, Hamburg. How it had developed a very Danish character and became known for its tolerance and its religious and commercial freedoms, attracting Jews and others discriminated against in Hamburg. Even after becoming German and absorption into the Prussian state of