Free Swastika by Michael Slade

perfect in every detail. Its glass eyes were riveting, as if fired up for one of Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches.
    Swastika snapped his arm up in the Nazi salute.
    Sieg heil, Father.
    The memory was as sharp as Streicher’s dagger: the first time his father had whipped off the belt of his führer’s uniform to thrash his son for spying on something he shouldn’t have seen. That was back in the hazy days of his early childhood, just after he had somehow discovered—had the door been left ajar?—the secret passage where the Nazi gold had once been cached. He remembered descending the staircase to the bunker. He remembered seeing light coming through the peephole in the false wall. He remembered sneezing from the dust as he placed his eye to the spy hole. He remembered the terror of witnessing his father’s rage. He remembered the pain of the beating. But there was a blank in his mind. Whatever he had spied had been wiped from his memory by the fury of the führer’s belt.
    Only later had he uncovered clues in his mother’s closet.
    That was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when his parents had both vanished in East Germany.
    The female waxwork was supposed to be Eva Braun. The facial features, however, were those of Swastika’s mother. In fashioning the wax to fit her husband’s fantasy world, she had morphed the face of Hitler’s submissive wife into her own. The figure wore a replica of the black taffeta dress in which Eva had wed.
    The door off the hall at Swastika’s back led to an anteroom to the study in which Hitler had blown out his brains. Off the study to the right was Hitler’s bedroom. Off the study to the left was a reconstruction of Eva Braun’s boudoir that included a closet full of role-playing costumes, all of them, like the wedding dress in the hall, copied by Swastika’s mother from varied historical sources.
    Half of the closet lay open, flaunting knock-offs of Eva Braun’s clothes, from dirndl country attire to haute couture fashions looted from occupied Paris. As a boy, Swastika would watch his mother undress in preparation for one of their cuddly bed-rests, and she would neatly hang her clothes, garment by garment, in the open half.
    The other half, the verboten half with the big lock, was to him, as a young lad, akin to Pandora’s box. Pandora’s box, his mother had told him one day when they lay naked together in Hitler’s bed, was where the gods had hidden all the evils of the world. If the box were ever opened, all hell would break loose.
    That’s how he had imagined the locked half of his mother’s closet throughout his prepubescent years. Like Pandora’s box, full of delicious secrets. So once his parents were gone and the mansion belonged solely to him, Swastika had busted open the lock on his mother’s subconscious Freudian kinks.
    It was a man’s world in the years that followed the Second World War, and GIs returning from overseas had snapped up pulp magazines with lurid covers of hot nympho babes in peril or imperiling. These appealed to their basest male instincts of sex, power, and war. For thirty-five cents, a vet could purchase Swagger , Rage , For Men Only , Escape to Adventure , American Manhood , or any of the other rags that Swastika had found on a shelf in his mother’s secret closet. The cover of Climax: Exciting Stories for Men said it all: a burly, shirtless he-man straddled a flagpole flying a tattered American flag.
    The women in the mags were all bursting at the seams. With shirts unbuttoned to bare ample cleavage and skirts torn up their legs, the ones on the pages earmarked by his mother were captives trussed up in Nazi chains. Other pages depicted dominatrices—busty women in unbuttoned shirts with swastika armbands, Nazi helmets on their heads, and skin-tight jodhpurs sheathing their showgirl waists and thighs—tormenting red-blooded American POWs in concentration camps flying swastika flags.
    There were also canisters of film.
    Ilsa: