Another short chapter today. Actually, very short. Just a few snippets of connective tissue, really. So short that if you fart and forget to roll down the window you’ll almost miss it.

So? How bout some music…? Some brief music? The Minute Waltz, perhaps?

No. No way. I guess you could try U2s new anti-Trump anthem, but I’m trying to remain apolitical for the time being so just Walk On By. Ooh…ah yes! How about some old Dionne Warwick? Walk On By…certainly. Valley of the Dolls? Ooh yes, please. And my all-time favorite: The April Fools (and that’s from one of my favorite movies too…and I’m referring to the Jack Lemmon & Catherine Deneuve film from 1969). Too laid back for you? Well, here’s a nice short one for you: Octavarium, by Dream Theater. Or another shortie? How ’bout: At The End Of The Day, by Spock’s Beard. You can thank me later. Of course, Yes just released the 50th anniversary edition of Tales From Topographic Oceans. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s only four songs long, too…

And now our brief chapter, and this one brought to you by Listerine, because nothing else quite makes your mouth taste like industrial waste quite like a nice swig of that old amber original.

Chapter 5

Rüdiger Abendruth had been nothing if not attentive. Most of the people gathered for his funereal had considered him a bright man, some thought him a genius. Yet as a young man, most considered him a student with few innate talents – save an unmatched capacity for self promotion. Or was it, as others closest to him seemed to imply, simply a case of self adulation?

His parents immigrated to Chile after the war, but when pressed they would admit to fleeing Berlin in the closing hours, or was it minutes, of the Soviet advance on the capitol of their Thousand Year Reich. They did so by flying to Basel, then on to Lisbon; not by chance, they met up with several other members of the chancellery staff fleeing Europe. The false bottoms of their children’s suitcases concealed dozens of 10 ounce gold bars; these families bribed customs and immigration officials with smaller bars of gold or silver before boarding tramp steamers bound for Buenos Aires or Valparaiso. Some actually went to America. Many other high ranking members of the Reich made the same journey, some by way of Marrakech, while a few high ranking members did so disguised as priests, flying directly to Rome from Switzerland and staying for months within the cloistered confines of the Vatican. This last route was rumored to be the Führer’s chosen escape route, this last-ditch effort planned months in advance – with, of course, his way out of Germany paved with prodigious quantities of gold and the finest intentions.

Rüdiger Abendruth remembered very little of those dark days. Fragments on a steamship in the middle of the ocean, the pain of his first real sunburn standing out in his mind most of all. He did not remember the dysentery and typhus onboard, or his mother’s seasickness – so bad that she very nearly died. He did not remember his little sister at all, who did pass away – from an outbreak of typhus among the crew that spread to the passenger decks.

Rüdiger did not remember the Reich, did not remember Hitler or Goering, even though his father worked with the latter in the German rearmaments program before the war, and then with Wernher von Braun in Peenemünde. He did not remember that his family’s history was intimately linked to I. G. Farben, nor did he know that his father managed their Mittelwerk, GmbH facilities – the sprawling underground facility that manufactured components of the V-1 and V-2 rockets during the war. Had he known of his father’s involvement, he might also have known that the facilities his father managed utilized inmates of nearby concentration camps as their primary source of labor.

Yet even if he had known these inconvenient truths it is doubtful that Rüdiger Abendruth would have objected.

For like many National Socialists, Rüdiger had always been virulently antisemitic. By the time he graduated from Heidelberg University in the late 1950s, he was a staunch proponent of National Socialist policies then being promulgated by the former ‘ministerium’ of the Reichskanzlei living in the mountains outside of Bariloche, Argentina, and when he returned from Germany after his studies were complete, he joined the descendants of other high ranking members of the Reich in developing a more cohesively organized colony in the Argentine Alps.

Funded by the very same industrial conglomerates that had once propelled Hitler to power, this new colony was reclusive in the extreme, to the point that people who – whether by accident or design – stumbled upon the colony and discovered the true objectives of the project…simply disappeared. Invited former members of the Party apparatus soon arrived, and all pledged allegiance to the new Reich when the colony’s objectives became clear. Quiet entreaties were made to critical industries in both Europe and the United States, and by the late-1980s the colony’s influence soon rivaled the largest corporations in the industrialized West. For a quiet, unincorporated colony of fewer than ten thousand people many were shocked to learn that the colony’s annual budget exceeded Switzerland’s, and yet only a handful of people beyond the colony’s borders knew precisely why.

Two months after the Berlin Wall came down, the colony elected who would become their last freely-elected chancellor.

His name was Rüdiger Abendruth, yet this new ‘Führer’ had no intricate designs of world conquest in mind, no hidden agendas or plans for world conquest. In fact, unlike the Third Reich he had little interest in the affairs of man.

Because Rüdiger Abendruth had only one objective.

He was going to take his new Reich to the stars, and he would let nothing stand in his way.

© 2025-26 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, plain and simple. Thanks for dropping by, and we’ll see you next time.

And see! I told you it was brief, but don’t forget where you are in the arc.