At this altitude it is still winter, below it is springtime.… Come, our transportation has arrived. Before you know it, you will be where the air is warm and there are actually flowers. “But you will have to on your return, Herr Lassiter,” countered the late-middle-aged German, smiling broadly under the protection of a tree, as he, too, brushed off the snow. “That’s not a bridge I’d care to cross too often,” said the American, slapping the snow off his clothing and removing his gloves to massage his face. Unsteadily, they reached the other side and the traveler in front spoke. The two figures walking across the bridge were dressed in heavy parkas, fur hats, and thick alpine boots each turned his face away from the blasts of wind and snow that buffeted him. It was the headquarters of Die Brüderschaft der Wacht, The Brotherhood of the Watch, the progenitors of Germany’s Fourth Reich. The much warmer flatland was dotted with green fields and greener trees … and a complex of small buildings, the roofs camouflaged by slashing diagonals of painted earth colors, undetectable from the skies, merely a part of the mountainous terrain. Once crossed, and passing through a tree-notched maze, there was a hidden road cut out of the mountain forest, a steep, twisting road that descended well over seven thousand feet to the isolated valley where the crocuses and the jonquils grew. There was a thick, sturdy bridge, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, that spanned a seventy-foot gorge several hundred feet above a rushing offshoot of the Salzach River. In fact, it was not on any map issued for public scrutiny. This particular pass was neither a border checkpoint nor a transfer post from one part of the mountain range to another. T he Alpine pass, high in the Austrian Hausruck, was swept by the winter snow and assaulted by the cold north winds, while far below, a valley sprouted crocuses and the jonquils of early spring. Like a moral black hole, it seems to defy the laws of nature while being part of that nature. To any sane person there has always been an unfathomable mystery about the systematic evil the Nazi regime perpetrated.
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