The arms of my cross -chapter I-

April 20, 1969. My eightieth birthday

Today I am eighty years old.

Although it can never serve as an atonement for my terrifying sins, I can say that I am no longer the same, starting with my name. My name is Friedrich Strauss now.

Nor do I pretend to escape any justice, I cannot. In conscience I am paying my penalty every new day. "My struggle”Was the written testimony of my delirium while now I try to discern what is really left after the bitter awakening to my condemnation.

My debt to the justice of humans makes little sense to collect it from these old bones. I would let myself be devoured by the victims if I knew that it relieved the pain, that extreme and entrenched pain, old, stale, clinging to the daily lives of mothers, fathers, children, entire towns for whom the best thing would have been if I had not been born.

I don't know if I should have been born, but every morning when I wake up I rethink the idea that the right thing to do could have been to actually commit suicide in the bunker. I had that opportunity to die at once and not dragged by every second of later life that fate wanted to grant me.

And fate seems to have taken its justice, all these years are composed of days of pain, minutes relived in a past inhabited by monstrous memories, seconds linked by the continuous anguish of knowing that I have been one of the most abominable characters. of History.

I only slightly comfort myself in thinking that the fear that generated it all would have survived me, it was always there. It was a ghostly and monstrous bird that flew over Europe looking for a new leader in which to nest. He found me, and he will find others again in the future, on any continent, somewhere.

As for this, my other life, it all began on April 19, 1945, the day before the Red Army besieged Berlin. Martin Bormann, my secretary, confirmed what we already expected, my immediate departure from the country had been agreed and organized. I suppose that Nazism would hope that my cause, our cause, would resurface under the iron arm outstretched at the right moment, years later and from any remote point.

An interested part of the allies who defeated us, assumed that I would escape with my life deprived of my name, my influence, and become almost in his sixties, in exchange for the vast technological weapons knowledge of our army. Certainly insider information comes at a high price for them.

Subsequent suspicions about my imposed end were born in the Soviet Union and focused on the United States. Such a forced and uncomfortable alliance of two opposing powers to overthrow the Third Reich did not bode well for anything lasting.

Distrust broke out at the Potsdam conference on July 17 of that year 1945. At that gathering of scavengers, Churchill, the last English pirate, only passed by to collect the part for his empire; Stalin was certain of my escape; and Truman hid that he had been the promoter of it.

The American OSS of his predecessor Roosevelt was awarded by Truman thereafter with its immediate institutionalization as a central US intelligence agency, under the acronym CIA. Each new Yankee president was made to understand, in the best possible way, the need for an intelligence corps with carte blanche in their work. God knows what that agency is investigating today.

Initially, on May 2, 1945, when the Soviets entered the Chancellery, they were satisfied with the recognition of the bodies that were eventually also cremated, supposedly Eva's and mine. The dental identifications that we had prepared, with the help and supervision of the OSS, worked, but for a short time.

Soviet investigators tracked down my dentists to verify the identity of my body. For them, more experienced and rigorous than the leaders of the army that entered for the first time, it was suspicious how we had taken care of destroying files and belongings throughout the Chancellery, except in the medical consultation where the clues appeared.

The OSS errand boy who visited me during the first days after my escape, and who confirmed the information that we sold to them as an after-sales guarantee, also kept me up to date on everything. He rejoiced in telling me about the unsuccessful inquiries of the Reds, as he put it.

So days after our defeat, on July 17, 1945, as the forced allies sat in Potsdam to initiate dialogues with a view to administering Germany, Stalin, with his impetuous narcissistic leader, snapped: "Hitler is alive, he escaped. to Spain or Argentina ”. With that phrase the cold war really began.

The OSS envoy said not to worry about my search. The American army had been fully collaborating with the Soviets, torturing witnesses, pulling the thread of this possible escape and discarding it completely.

This is how I understood that the American OSS went on its own, independent of the army of its country, above past, current and future presidents. They, the OSS handled the real information and acted above all.

Twenty-some years later, except for the economic attribution that never stops coming, I no longer know anything about those people from the OSS, about their subsequent establishment as CIA, or about anyone. I suppose they will just wait for a natural death to overtake me that does not arouse the slightest suspicion.

I don't know, I can't put myself in the shoes of those guys who move the world today. I will always be an infamous guy, what's left of the monster. Perhaps they are worse and many of the current injustices are manufactured in their offices, where this planet maintains its unstable balance. They control that old fear that one day possessed me, the instrument to subdue wills en masse.

My fellow asylum seekers are lucky, they do not share my deep life trials. For them, that past that revisits them becomes above all a tender childhood. It must be that the similarities between the first and last days of a human being are manifested not only in the lack of control of the sphincters but also in the disorder of the neurons. With their brand-new anti-leak diapers and their last drips of reason, they, my old comrades, return to the only possible paradise: childhood.

But my past is not that ordinary life that I now wish I had lived. Everything, even my childhood, is veiled by the red and white of a flag, and by the crossed arms of a cross in which, I don't know how, I managed to nail myself of my own free will.

I only know that there comes a time when the past recedes towards oneself, until it becomes present. Now everything I experienced visits me again, like a prosecutor who has managed to prosecute me for genocidal, with the only and most effective final sentence of my near death.

For old people like me, life becomes a brief moment, a "today is too late and tomorrow I will not have time." Since a few days ago the movie was released 2001: a space odyssey, I have found new similarities between the decadent old age of any of us and the last scenes of that astronaut who is torn between life, death and eternity in a lonely and bright eighteenth-century room, transported whimsically to some place in a silent cosmos. The only difference is that my room is much more humble, barely 15 meters, including an internal bathroom that does not have a door so that grandparents do not make noise during our frequent nocturnal urinations.

Exactly thirty years ago, in 1939 when I turned fifty, I declared a national holiday in Germany. I get goose bumps as I recall the parades in my honor through Ost-West Achse, the thunderous and terrifying goose-step of the troops, the Nazi banners all over that East-West axis of the city.

But the current prickling of my skin is pure panic, vertigo. I think my ego hit the roof there. The problem is that it stayed up for a few more years.

The human being is not made for glory. The fault lies with the Greeks, who awakened in the West the imaginary that a species of demigods occupied this planet. Only Don Quixote gave back some light to make us see that we are crazy imagining that we live epics in our delusions.

Anyway, if it can be of any use, sorry.

You can now buy The Arms of My Cross, the novel by Juan Herranz, here: