I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 166

“Your Excellency, Your Excellency, please…”

“…The President has said he will not see anyone right now. Please go back.”

Martin Bormann, the President’s secretary and his closest confidant, gave the same answer again.

Hitler seemed to have given up on everything, ignoring all requests and reports for meetings and hiding in a deep bunker underground, shivering.

Whether he did that or not, the war was being handled by the generals and admirals anyway, so it didn’t make much difference. But the people who had direct access to the President were becoming more and more panicked.

They worshiped the President. 

They regarded Hitler as the savior of the Germanic people and Germany, and their faith reached its peak when he brought down all the enemy countries of the last war and took Europe into his hands.

But now that god had lost all his heroic glory and became a pitiful thing.

“…#$%!! ^&*!”

“…Is the President still in this state?”

“Yes, yes… since evening…”

He screamed incomprehensibly, intoxicated by the drugs and raging. 

He couldn’t dare to show the President in front of others. 

Most of the staff in the bunker were either very tight-lipped or had no family and ate and slept in the bunker.

For Bormann, who forged the President’s orders and wielded the power of the doorknob, the fact that the President had lost his judgment meant that he was virtually the supreme leader of the Third Reich, but it didn’t matter much now.

He started taking Pervitin to increase his work efficiency, and the amount increased more and more.

It was a drug that many people used on a daily basis, but as the dosage increased, the President’s mind deteriorated rapidly. 

No one, not even Dr. Theodor Morell, who the President trusted absolutely for his health, could stop him.

“Pervitin… bring more…”

“Your Excellency!”

Sometimes, when he got out of the drug haze, the President would show a flash of insight.

Now that insight only predicted the impending doom. Like a prophet who looked at the abyss ahead, the President was going mad.

“Ah… Bormann… can you bring me some more Pervitin?”

“Your Excellency…”

“Can’t you hear me? Bring me Pervitin!”

Methamphetamine, brand name Pervitin. The drug ruined the President. He was not normal to begin with, but even more so.

Hitler, who screamed and raged and collapsed exhausted on the couch, shook his hands. Was it because of the fear that dominated him?

“Well… do you have something to say?”

“Your Excellency, the negotiations with the United States that you ordered… unfortunately failed…!”

Crash! Hitler threw a vase that was on the desk at Bormann. Of course, it fell to the floor and shattered far away, due to his trembling hands and blurred eyes.

“Now, now it’s all over! Berlin will burn! It’s meaningless. Nothing matters…”

“Your Excellency, Model’s loyal soldiers are still holding back the Soviet advance. The United States… they landed in southern Italy because of the traitor Franco, but Kesselring is blocking them with the rugged mountain terrain!”

“What are you listening to me for?”

Bormann tried to argue, but Hitler twisted his face strangely and laughed. Was it a sneer or a self-mockery?

“I said Berlin will burn. Berlin.”

“The Soviets are still far away…”

“The Soviets are not the problem! Damn it! You idiot!”

How could the Soviets not be the problem? It was only 50km from the Oder River to Berlin. It was literally a stone’s throw away.

Now the Soviet fighters flew over the Berlin sky, dropping leaflets and inciting. 

Every night, the SS men caught and dragged away those who fled Berlin, believing the leaflets.

“Japan… should have made the United States surrender… we failed…”

“…”

Even the President, who was like a prophet, could not predict everything accurately.

Contrary to his judgment that the United States would eventually come to the negotiating table when the fleet, including the aircraft carriers, disappeared, the United States chose a desperate resistance to the end, even with a very small number of ships left.

He was always disparaging them for being weak-minded and lacking will, but the President seemed to collapse in front of the conclusion that it was actually Germany.

He stared blankly at Bormann, who said nothing, and reached out his hand again. Then he asked him with a watery eye, as if something came to his mind.

“Will you do me one favor…?”

***

“December 1943…”

The President picked up a pen with his trembling hands and wrote down his words.

He refused to take Pervitin, which he had been living on, even at the ‘last moment’, saying he had to be in his right mind. He looked rather calm.

In the President’s office in the bunker, several of his aides surrounded him, looking indifferent or anxious.

The secretaries and typists cried and could not even look at the words the President was writing down.

.

“This is me… Adolf Hitler’s will.”

He clenched his teeth, but calmly read his own will. The three people who agreed to certify the will read and signed the President’s will one by one.

A young typist sobbed and collapsed. An older secretary took her out of the room. Everyone cried and whimpered, and the President smoked a cigarette.

“I will return everything I own to the Nazi Party and the state. What use is wealth when I’m dead?”

“…Your Excellency!”

“I have selected the people who will be the leaders of the German state after my death in the will. I hope you follow it.”

He wrote down the result with his shaky hand, and it was hard to read, but he could tell.

“President of the Empire, Minister of War, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walter Model…?!”

“Read on.”

“Prime Minister of the Empire, Hermann Göring, Leader of the National Socialist Party, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arthur Seyss-Inquart…”

Even at the last moment, people couldn’t help but be surprised.

Walter Model. He received the President’s favor and rose through the ranks to become the commander-in-chief of the Eastern Front, and now he was appointed as the future head of state!

The President looked around at the people who seemed to demand an explanation and snapped.

“Wouldn’t he avenge me? The most excellent and… loyal.”

“…I understand, Your Excellency.”

“Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!”

The people just raised their right hands and saluted him. Even the secretaries who were sobbing echoed Heil Hitler like a reflex.

“Bring them.”

“Yes!”

The SS guard with a sturdy physique ran out as soon as he received the order. Eva Braun, who was quietly standing in the situation, began to look around anxiously.

“Um… Your Excellency?”

“…”

“Your Excellency! What are we going to do now…”

“Shh! Be quiet.”

Eva Braun shuddered and shook her hands hysterically, looking at the President who didn’t say a word about himself even in his will.

Hitler didn’t seem to have any interest in her, not even giving her a glance.

Meanwhile, the SS guard who had gone out came in with two large boxes.

“Take one each.”

“Yes?”

The first box contained a dozen shiny pistols. Starting from Bormann, one by one, they picked up the pistols as if possessed.

“Eva.”

“…”

The President offered a pistol to Eva Braun, who was frozen and trembling. 

Eva Braun cried with her makeup smeared, but bit her lips and picked up the pistol and left.

One by one, one by one. 

The people who picked up the pistols left the room. 

The SS guard opened the second long box, watching their backs.

“…Where did you get this from?”

“I got it through the art dealer. The price is…”

“What use is the price now?”

The President took out two beautifully crafted Japanese swords and pulled out the blades, shining them in the flickering light of the lamp.

“Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Yes… they are.”

“Well, you and the others…”

What would Europeans know? The President’s voice was so small and faint that the guard couldn’t understand what he was saying.

In the office where only the two of them were left, the President drew and swung the sword as if he was bewitched.

Bang! Bang!

There were several gunshots outside. His faithful followers obeyed his last order and followed the path of their lord.

By principle, by method, he should have worn white clothes and performed seppuku on the tatami, but there was no such thing here.

And someone should have cut his neck as a kaishaku, but… there was no one in Germany who had such sword skills. Even if there were, they would have gone to the battlefield and died.

“You too…”

“Yes! Long live the President! Heil Hitler!”

The guard also received the order, and he shouted long live the President with a fervent expression. 

He didn’t say anything absurd like it was an honor to share the last moment with him, but he whistled the SS anthem and walked out.

“…”

He knelt down and sat on the floor, unbuttoning his coat. He felt the cold metal on his bare skin. The feeling of death.

He used to wear a sword when he was a naval officer in the honorable Invincible Fleet, but… he never did that after he became ‘Hitler’. The feeling of the sword was unfamiliar.

This body was not his. His mind might not have been entirely his either.

His memories, his personality, they felt like they were being absorbed. When he was a naval colonel in the Invincible Fleet, Sato Ichiro, he never tried drugs. But this body was addicted to drugs, and he eventually addicted him too.

“Ah…”

Where did it go wrong?

Before his second suicide, he groaned at the memories that flashed by like a carousel. Last time, he took responsibility for the defeat and killed himself with some of the officers who shared his will.

He failed to protect the Emperor and the Japanese Empire! The contemptible Americans slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear bombs and burned two cities.

This time, too, this time history was trying to repeat itself.

When he first entered Hitler’s body, he thought that the gods who worshiped Japan had given him a second chance. Lead the war to victory and share the world with Germany, his ally!

But… but this time, too, the defeated country was on the brink of defeat.

So he chose suicide again. If he killed himself one more time, maybe he would get another chance.

“Fifty years of human life, compared to the river’s time…”

It was much easier to perform seppuku when he had a master swordsman as a kaishaku. But this time, there was no one, so he had to bear the burden alone.

“Long live the Japanese Empire! Long live the Emperor!”

As he tried to put strength in his hand, something huge shook the heavens and the earth.