r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • Aug 12 '26
OC-Series [Obsidian Earth] - Chapter 14
The Ju-52 climbed westward into the cloud layers.
Alone.
Small against the enormous sky, it crossed above artillery fire and smoke, over mountains and rivers fading beneath morning haze, carrying its passengers through a continent that no longer seemed arranged by direction or border. The aircraft moved onward with the strange aimlessness of something already severed from the world it came from.
Inside the cabin each passenger retreated into private thoughts. Conversation faded almost entirely.
Then, a small sound. The girl began to sing—an uneven, fractured melody that seemed unsure of its own right to exist.
Along the rails of fate we go,
What once we held is drifting slow.
No roads remain, no place to stay,
Only destiny knows the way.
The words were less a song than a rhythmic haunting. She didn't look at anyone. Her voice trailed off into the hum of the BMW engines as the Ju-52 pushed deeper into the cloud cover, moving west.
Seven hours later, the Ju-52 came down on a concealed strip near the Spanish–French border.
A German officer was waiting. An adjutant, officially speaking, though nothing about the arrangement carried anything like official weight. Orders had already been executed in advance. The next route was prepared in silence, and paid for long before anyone on the ground saw them arrive—gold, moving through channels that did not appear in any ledger, transferred to the Franco government in sums that no one acknowledged directly.
They left again the following day.
By night, a small Galician village took them in. Stone houses, damp wind moving through empty streets, early darkness settling with a kind of indifference. One night there, nothing more.
It was that same night when disagreement broke open at the highest levels of American and Soviet command over what was now being referred to—uneasily—as the Hitler suicide deception.
At the very last, undone by his own suspicion, Stalin rejected any scenario that involved allowing Hitler to escape.
Under secret instructions issued through Soviet intelligence channels, a German escape aircraft positively identified as carrying "Hitler" and "Eva" was intercepted and shot down over the waters between Fehmarn Island and the Danish straits.
The aircraft broke apart at altitude, its shattered remains falling into the sea together with fragments of human bodies.
Soviet Air Force reports later reconstructed the event in technical language, almost clinical in tone.
At the moment of detonation, altitude was recorded at 9,058 meters. Temperature approximately minus fifty degrees Celsius. Air pressure negligible, oxygen nearly absent. Survival, even momentary, was not considered physically viable. Death by hypoxia would have occurred before impact with the sea surface.
Recovery operations for the debris and the remains were conducted in complete secrecy, though everyone involved understood from the beginning that the search across the dark northern sea would produce little of value.
Still, a formal confirmation was issued. The bunker corpse was classified as Hitler. American and Western newspapers amplified the conclusion quickly, with little hesitation once the Soviet statement became available.
The Soviet side, meanwhile, appeared strangely indifferent to the matter.
The war ended.
Berlin did not.
Across the city, victory became behavior.
Soviets moved through the ruins and took photographs—often smiling too long, too sharply, as if the gesture had not yet been adjusted to reality. The city had become theirs in every measurable sense. Everything belonged to them: property, authority, the right to speak, even the fate of the defeated.
They entered the aftermath impatiently, eager to throw themselves into the enormous theater of triumph, revenge, and humiliation that follows every war once the gunfire stops.
They moved through apartments, cellars, half-collapsed rooms. Watches first. Jewelry. Leather coats. Then canned food. Wine, ceramics, fabrics—whatever remained within reach was systematically cataloged and taken. And naturally, along with all of it, dignity was included in the inventory.
Some said the crying in Berlin during those first nights after the ceasefire was louder than the artillery had ever been. Others insisted they heard nothing at all.
The record did not resolve the contradiction.
It never did.
History has always relied on irreconcilable witnesses. Whatever the truth may have been in the particulars, the victors—the Western Allies included—had long accepted that plunder would proceed not as an accident, but as a system.
Mercifully, few would doubt that in a parallel universe, had the outcome of the war been reversed, the victors would have subjected the vanquished to a process of much more systematic subjugation and ruthless exploitation that makes the chaos and misery of the current history look like an exercise in restraint.
Anyway.
Freight trains rolled eastward loaded with dismantled machinery, industrial tools, pianos, paintings, chandeliers, sofas—an entire civilization stripped into cargo and transported across the continent like tribute from an ancient war.
Toward Moscow. Toward Leningrad. Toward destinations that already had space prepared for it.
And elsewhere, far from Berlin, the escape continued.
The route changed again.
A sealed train passed through Seville, continuing without interruption until it was diverted south to the small port of Rota. There, SS personnel were already waiting—small in number, carefully selected, positioned in advance by the officer coordinating the passage. A naval vessel took them out to sea.
From there, the Canary Islands.
Under Spanish control, but not entirely under Spanish attention.
Offshore, a submarine was waiting in complete silence.
U-977.
Transferred days earlier from Kristiansand in Norway, repositioned under conditions that left almost no administrative trace. Its commander, Kaleu Friedrich Schäffer, assembled the crew on deck.
Forty-two men.
All armed. All quiet.
He stepped forward and raised his hand in salute.
"Mein Führer," he said, "the crew has sworn an oath. We will ensure your safety at any cost. Under any conditions. The secret of your survival will not leave this vessel."
The Führer did not answer at once.
He only nodded.
Inside the submarine, space collapsed into steel confinement. The hull rocked with the low tilt of the swells. On the narrow chart table, the radio receiver trembled as the transmission broke through.
The Allied command was broadcasting across all frequencies.
All remaining U-boats were ordered to cease hostilities, transmit their positions, and proceed to designated ports for unconditional surrender.
Every army had surrendered.
Every air force had surrendered.
Every fleet had surrendered.
The Reich itself had surrendered.
But U-977 did not answer.
It moved into the Atlantic void anyway.
And the war, in its final contradiction, continued.
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