The Breach and the Hexenfrieden (1919–1920)

The Brocken device was a last wonder-weapon, authorized by a High Command that had already lost and wanted to lose on better terms. On Walpurgisnacht 1919 it opened the Rift, and for five weeks things came down the mountain into Saxony and Thuringia faster than anyone could kill them. The Armistice became an alliance: every army in Europe, including the Red Army, converged on the Harz, and on 29 May, under a seven-minute eclipse, a circle of mystics sealed the Rift while Captain Albrecht von Falkenhorst's company held the last hundred meters of the summit.

Versailles, signed that November, is remembered in Germany as the Hexenfrieden, the witches' peace. It waived cash reparations in recognition of the dead and replaced them with an American-run reconstruction. It took Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar. And it imposed the Arcane Culpability clause, a permanent ban on German arcane research enforced by foreign inspectors with the run of the country, and the Sanitary Cordon clause, which required Germany to register and quarantine every Touched citizen before it could trade with anyone. Germany kept a 400,000-man army to guard the Harz Exclusion Zone and the Soviet frontier, and a grievance to go with it.

The Reconstruction (1920–1929)

Germany was rebuilt by Americans. The Dresden model (Ford, Mellon, and the young director of the American National Arcane Research Council building an entire new industrial region in Saxony on American capital) made the country a factory with foreign management, and the Inter-Allied Arcane Control Commission made it a laboratory with foreign supervision. The Touched registries the Allies demanded grew, under German civil servants, into the Reichsamt für Quarantäne, the largest agency in the Reich, with its own camps, called sanatoria, and its own doctors. Falkenhorst put down the Munich putsch of 1923, took command of the Exclusion Zone in 1927, and made it quiet.

Falkenhorst (1932–1939)

The Crash took the American money and the republic with it. Falkenhorst, elected Reichspräsident in 1932 as the only candidate without a party, used the Harz Incidents of February 1933 to proclaim a Permanent State of Bio-Aetheric Quarantine and National Emergency under Article 48. The constitution was not abolished; it was simply no longer in force. The sanatoria became camps, Reinhard Heydrich's Quarantine Intelligence Service went looking for the unregistered, and in 1934 the IAACC inspectors were given seventy-two hours to leave. Rearmament was open from 1935; the Ahnenerbe was chartered the same year to recover "the ancestral heritage of the German people" from wherever it was buried; Austria was annexed in 1936.

The invasion of the Ottoman Empire in September 1937 was the first war of the arcane age. Germany attacked its old ally through Bulgaria and by sea, took Constantinople in November, finished Anatolia in a year, and sent Erwin Rommel through Syria to Damascus (December 1938) and Jerusalem (summer 1939), which is now a Reich military district with the Ahnenerbe digging under the Temple Mount. Munich (1938) gave the Reich the Sudetenland and Prague's relic vaults without a shot. The Reissner–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939) divided eastern Europe and the world's dig sites with the Soviet Union, and Poland fell the following month.

The War (1939–)

France fell in six weeks in 1940; the Wehrmacht's arcane units went through the Maginot Line and the garrisons were found afterward unable to say what they had seen. Falkenhorst refused to invade Britain across a Channel the Royal Navy's aether-looms had made a graveyard, and ordered the U-boats to starve it instead. The Little War, the Afrika Korps' campaign against the British in Egypt, the Levant, and the Gulf, severed Suez in December 1940, took Cairo in March 1941, and seized Kuwait's oil in June. In the spring of 1942 the Reich holds Europe from Brest to the Bug and the Middle East from the Nile to the Gulf, is at war with Britain alone, is at peace with the United States, which Falkenhorst calls Germany's natural ally, and has a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, which everyone in Berlin, Moscow, and London expects him to break.

The Harz Exclusion Zone

The center of the country is a hole. The Exclusion Zone is a rough circle, forty miles across, around the Brocken, walled since 1924 and patrolled since 1919. Inside it the Veil never healed: the sky is the wrong color at dusk, compasses turn, distances do not add up, and the surviving Breach fauna (the things that were too subtle or too patient to be killed in 1919) still hunt. Nordhausen, inside the wall, was never recovered. Three hundred thousand Germans lived in the Zone before the Breach; none do now, officially.

The Zone is also the Reich's most valuable asset. Its soil, air, and animals are saturated with the Rift's residue, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's extraction plants on the perimeter (at Wernigerode, Goslar, and Ilsenburg) refine it into the Harz-alloys, ichors, and reagents on which the Reich's arcane industry runs. The Wehrmacht's Exclusion Zone Command is the oldest formation in the army and the most decorated; its commander from 1927 to 1930 is now the President.

Thin places

Beyond the Zone, the Veil is thinnest at the old places: the Externsteine, the Untersberg, the Black Forest's deep valleys, and along the Rhine from Lorelei to Bingen. The Ahnenerbe has excavated all of them. What it found is in the Institute.

The arcane industries

The Reich's arcane industry is a state monopoly built on three legs: the Harz extraction plants, which supply the raw residue; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Paraphysics, which turns it into science; and Krupp, IG Farben, and Siemens, which turn the science into Harz-alloy armor plate, Entropic Cannon, Flicker-Packs, and the U-boat hulls that depth charges slide off. Topodynamics, the acoustic untying of matter, is the German specialty; the Reich's paraphysicists are the best in the world at making things come apart.

The Dresden region, built by Americans in the twenties, is the heart of it, and American capital still holds the bonds. Ford, Mellon, and the National Arcane Research Council retain a standing delegation at the Institute under the 1919 reconstruction agreements, and the trade in machine tools, aluminum, and oil has never stopped.

Relics and plunder

The Reich's second economy is loot. Prague's vaults, Cracow's library, the Louvre's reserve, the Vatican's wrong vault (the Reich denies this), the Levant, Egypt, and Jerusalem: the Ahnenerbe has recovered more arcane antiquities in seven years than every museum on earth collected in two centuries, and the Institute has bolted the useful ones into Panzer hulls and the rest into vaults under the Zone. Kuwait's oil, seized in 1941, keeps the Afrika Korps moving. The occupied countries pay occupation costs and export food.

Labor

The Reich has no unemployment. It has conscription, the Reich Labor Service, foreign labor from the occupied countries, and the camps, whose inmates are not, officially, laborers; they are subjects.

The Quarantine

The Reichsamt für Quarantäne was created by the Allies, staffed by Germans, and inherited by Falkenhorst. Its mandate under the Sanitary Cordon clause was to register, isolate, and quarantine the Touched; its mandate under the Permanent Emergency is the same, with the word "protect" added. By 1941 virtually every registered Touched in the Reich (some 890,000 of 1,120,000) had been moved to the camps, "for their own protection," where they are not forced labor but experimental subjects: the Institute's doctors study what the Veil did to them, and how to do it on purpose.

The exceptions are the agents. A Touched who will serve the Reich directly (in the Wehrmacht's arcane units, the Quarantine Intelligence Service, or the Institute) is exempted from quarantine, uniformed, watched, and, in the propaganda, honored. There are perhaps thirty thousand of them. They are the most dangerous soldiers in Europe and the most closely guarded.

The Reich's other racial laws exist and are enforced: Jews have been excluded from public life since 1933 and pressed to emigrate since 1935, and the President has spoken of a "Levant resettlement" under the Afrika Korps' protection as a solution that would also empty Europe of them. But the Reich's great scapegoat, the population it was told by its conquerors to fear and has been taught by its President to hate, is the Touched. The Dolchstoßlegende of this century is that the Brocken would have won the war if traitors and witches had not corrupted the ritual; the Touched are the witches.

The Masquerade peoples

The old peoples of Germany (the Old Academy's Heidelberg and Prague chapters, the fey of the Black Forest and the Bohemian marches, the undead houses of Vienna and the Rhine) broke cover in 1919 like everyone else and have fared worse than anywhere else. The Reich does not distinguish between a Touched and a vampire; both are "dimensionally altered," both are registered, both are quarantined. The Old Academy's German chapters closed in 1934 and their members are in Switzerland, in the camps, or working for the Institute under a name that is not theirs. The fey have gone back under the hills. The Black Forest is, by the Ahnenerbe's own reports, "unresponsive."

Arcane law

Private arcane practice is a capital offense. The state's arcane monopoly runs through the Institute, the Ahnenerbe, and the Wehrmacht, and through them alone; a hedge working in a Bavarian village is prosecuted as sabotage. The Quarantine Intelligence Service's inspectors carry Blondlot goggles and cold-iron badges and have the right of entry everywhere. The black market exists anyway, as it does everywhere, run by what remains of the old peoples and paid in Reichsmarks that cannot buy anything else.

Press, radio, and the pictures

All of it belongs to the state. The Reich's propaganda does not shout; it explains. Its posters are clean, its newsreels are calm, its radio voice is the President's, and its message is that Germany is the orderly nation in a disordered world, the one that was punished for discovering what everyone else then stole, and the one that will put things right. It is very effective, and the Americans who visit Dresden come home impressed.

The Permanent Emergency

The Weimar constitution is in force. Its Article 48 permits the President to suspend civil liberties in an emergency, and the emergency, proclaimed on 28 February 1933, has not ended. The President commands the armed forces directly under Article 47. The Chancellor, Hjalmar Schacht, runs the civil administration, the railways, the coal tariffs, and the rationing, acts as a lightning rod for domestic discontent, and countersigns the President's decrees. The Reichstag, purged in 1933 and uncontested since, meets twice a year to approve them. There are no parties. There is a President, a Chancellor, a General Staff, and an Institute.

The arrangement is deliberate. It gives American investors, isolationists, and the League a constitutional republic to recognize; it gives the Reich a government that has never once had to argue with itself; and it gives Falkenhorst, who has no party and wants none, the state without the inconvenience of politics.

The President

Albrecht von Falkenhorst is fifty-one. He is a Prussian aristocrat and General Staff officer, the hero of the Rift, the man who made the Exclusion Zone quiet, and since 1932 the Reich. He is handsome, blond, athletic, multilingual, courteous to a fault, and entirely calm; he sleeps four hours a night, reads the Institute's reports himself, and can be compassionate or brutal in the same meeting without any tell as to which is coming. He does not rant. He does not want a Thousand-Year Reich over all of Europe, and says so; he wants France broken, Russia broken after it, the oil, the ports, the relics, and a Germany that need never be inspected again. The country believes him because everything he has promised so far has happened on schedule.

He is also Touched. He looked into the Rift in the last seconds before it closed, and it looked back; his blood runs cold and dark, his reflection is unreliable, and there is a lesion on his chest that the Institute's best doctors measure monthly and cannot stop. He hides it under tailoring, discipline, and the loyalty of perhaps a dozen people who know. If it became public, the Permanent Emergency would have to quarantine the President.

The inner circle

• Hjalmar Schacht, Chancellor. The banker who rebuilt the currency in the twenties and runs the war economy now; the civilian face of the Reich.
• Reinhard Heydrich, Inquisitor-General of the Quarantine Intelligence Service. Finds the unregistered Touched. His hounds are the Reich's secret police.
• Erwin Rommel, Generalfeldmarschall commanding the Afrika Korps. The Reich's most popular soldier, in Egypt for oil and in the Levant for relics; the public face of the Little War.
• Wilhelm Canaris, Admiral, director of the Abwehr. Military intelligence and the back channels to London, Washington, and Moscow that the President maintains through him.
• The Director of the Institute (TBD). The Reich's chief paraphysicist and the one man who knows what is being built under the Zone.