scorpiosoes

[scorpiosoes]

Friends

Hello internet peoples, I was recently given a writing assignment in my history course and wanted to share the resulting work. I am also including the assignment prompt in case someone else feels inspired to writing something.

Prompt: Assume the role of a fictional character either living during, or perhaps fighting, the Second World War-what might it have been like for a Polish citizen in 1939 during the German blitzkrieg, a Jewish inmate surviving in a Nazi death camp, a British pilot during the air war over London, a member of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation or perhaps an American in the midst of the Ardennes offensive. 

The title I gave to the assignment was Friends, hope you like it and if you see this feel free to leave thoughts or criticism, always looking to improve.

Friends

Do I regret what I did? Others like me would say no, but I would say that I do, with every fiber of my being I regret it. I was seduced by power, fame, and glory and could no longer tell right from wrong. What we did was wrong, what happened to the world was wrong, my hands will forever be soaked in the blood of millions of innocent lives for the part I played.

It had started subtly at first, propaganda posters started popping up everywhere, there were ads run in the newspapers and the media. They were printing and spreading blatant racist lies, I wish that where was it stopped, where we stopped. But we didn’t and before I knew it turned into something worse than anyone could have ever imagined, and millions of people were dead.

“But why?” It was one the first questions that I remember asking my mother; this is also the moment that I mark as the start of one of the worst periods in Germany, in the world, and in my own life. “But why?” It was the first question that I had asked my mother the day that she had hunted my down and demanded that I stop playing with my childhood best friend, I didn’t understand it then but things had started to change, and not for the better. “A good German boy like you should not be playing with the likes of him. He’s unclean,” those words made no sense to me as a child, he didn’t look dirty to me, he looked like he always had, his curtain of black curls partially covered his face and his brown eyes glinted in the sunlight. But my mother still pulled me away from him, that was the last time I ever played with Avi … or saw him ever again. Things were changing rapidly I was just too young to know it, I was innocent in the way that children are, blind to the politics and prejudices of the world, I didn’t know what she meant when she said that Avi was unclean. When asked about it sometime later she never elaborated, I never questioned it after that I imagined that my mother had her reasons. It was not until much later that I realized why she never told me. Avi was a Jew.

In the meantime, war came and went, the Great War as it was called at the time. It was fought because of rising international tensions between nations and because of an assassination that threw the world into chaos. It was the war that claimed my father’s life and nearly claimed my own. Germany had been in the war, of course, we were we had allies to help and we kept our word and helped them. This was a mistake. The consequences of Germany’s interference in the way came swiftly and without mercy. They were unfair to both Germany and her people; I shared this opinion with anyone who would listen. Many agreed of course, but none listened with as much fervor as a man I had recently met in the army, this man and I became close and I began to call him a friend. This man was Adolf Hitler, at the time I had met him I had never known a better man. We joked, laughed, and conspired together.

One day Adolf came to me and urged me to join him at an event he was attending, I didn’t refuse the invitation. It was a meeting, more like a rally really, for a group called National Socialist German Workers’ Party, these people shared my views, so I joined almost immediately. I deeply regret this decision; these people were the people that would come to be known throughout the world as Nazis.

Adolf was far more ambitious than I was, and he spoke more passionately about the issues facing Germany; he also pushed more and more people to join our ever-growing party. Because of this, the party insisted that he become its leader, and Adolf insisted that I be by his side. At the time I thought it was a great honor, I was moving up in the ranks and was granted more power. I didn’t consider what this meant for everyone that wasn’t the Nazis. Later, by a crazy stroke of luck, the Nazis were steadily seizing power, and Adolf and I were the two highest-ranking members in the party. Our power grew still, however, when Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany. This when things went from bad to worse.

Adolf came to his inner circle one day and said that something was to be done about his enemies, his political opponents, and the Jews and communists. I was the first to suggest banishment from Germany, if they were no longer in the country, they would no longer be our problem. He like that idea, but he didn’t want to afflict the Jews upon someone else. “A prison then,” I suggested to him. Somewhere where opponents and communists would no longer be an issue. “An inescapable camp that houses prisoners and Jews,” that was exactly how the man sitting across from me, Heinrich Himmler, pitched the idea. Adolf loved the whole concept, we later decided to call these places concentration camps. At first, it was just for political prisoners and communists, we could keep an eye on them, and they couldn’t spread their disease. That didn’t last long; it quickly became a death camp for anyone who was sent there. This is when I started to have doubts about what we were doing, we had been spouting this rhetoric, but I never thought that we would end up in a position to act upon it. Now that we had I didn’t think that I had to the stomach for it. I remained silent and faithful to my friend.

Soon we had taken the whole of Germany and parts of other countries like Austria. I thought we were going to stop, the Jews and communists and any other who would stand up to us had been thoroughly crushed under our feet and we ruled the nation. However, Adolf was ambitious, he wasn’t satisfied with just Germany. He began to talk of bigger things, things like freeing the world, not just Germany, from the Jewish plague and spreading Nazi influence. I mean we had rounded up a majority of the Jews and put them into concentration camps, we had also crushed anyone who dared oppose us, what more could he want. The world seemed to be the answer. I asked him outright if he was sure, we already had Germany and various other countries; the world sounded a bit too ambitious to me, but he questioned my faith and asked where my loyalties lie. With my friend, of course, but faith was starting to waver, I was starting to find out that I didn’t have the stomach for some of the things Adolf wanted.

All of a sudden, we were at war, I warned Adolf that he was being too ambitious, but he did not listen, now he had gone too far. Other countries had gotten involved and instead of dominance, we were now fighting for survival. I thought that The Great War was bad, the war that followed Adolf’s takeover of Poland was a bloodbath, millions were dying daily to gain barely any ground. Millions of people were laying down their lives to try and stop the thing that my friend had become, I wish that I could do the same. I was blinded by my loyalty and our relationship; he was my oldest friend and I watched with complacency as he became one of the worst serial killers the world would ever come to know. I too had a part to play in all of this, I encouraged him in the early days and I stood silently by as things went from bad to worse, during this time I had many chances to stop him, to end the war early and I took none of them. I tried once, I intended to kill him, I had the gun to his head, but I could not pull the trigger. It did not matter; we would not be alive for much longer.

The might of Germany had been tested and exhausted, the 1000-year Reich was crumbling around us and yet people still remained hopeful that we could win this war that we had been losing for the past couple of months. This was the end, everyone knew it, Adolf most of all. Our last conversation happened in his bunker, a place that he seldom left these days. He asked to speak to me. He said that he was sorry for what he had put me through, but that he wouldn’t apologize for what he, we, had done. I got to be part of something great. We had changed the world, if only for a moment. Shortly following this meeting Adolf took his own life he had taken a cyanide pill and then shot himself.

It’s bittersweet news, look at what we have done, we held an entire nation in the palms of our hands, but at what cost. Look at what it cost to get us here, we slaughtered people because they were different than us. Looking back on it now, in my final moments, I don’t know if I agreed with the anti-Jew messages or if I was just trying to find the easiest way to get revenge for Germany’s mistreatment all those years ago. It’s funny looking back at it now, my first friend, my best friend in the entire world was Jewish and now I have unreservedly slaughtered his people. I don’t know how I ended up here, but I pray to his God, to Avi’s God that he has mercy on my damned soul.