The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 1

How am I to tell her? How can I tell her that I don’t even know if that man was what I said he was? How can I tell her that the war I’m fighting began a long time ago? And that even if I tell her about it she’ll think I’m crazy, crazier than she ever dared suspect before? And how can I convince her that it’s all true? How can I tell her that I think the man I just killed...wasn’t a vampire at all, but a Nazi golem? A golem I’ve been chasing across history, around the world, beyond the boundaries of all reason...

I had been sent as an infiltrator to Germany, having learned the language while investigating a different matter in Sweden, the home of my birth. My skills, such as they were, the subject of scorn and ridicule previously, were thought adequate to the task at hand. The year was 1938, and the Third Reich was well on its way to attempted world conquest, an overblown response to matters that had nothing at all to do with its origins. Strangely enough, it was then that I adopted the name Oliver Row, then that I learned a great deal of things that would be...tangential to this narrative. Suffice to say, then that I began my present course, no matter how long and winding as it has been.

The Allies had learned of a great many alarming things that were being said about the Reich. Some were of immediate concern, some of military significance, and some that would need to take time to handle. In later years it became difficult, I know, to separate the urgency of response to all of them, and history is of course right about that, and also at an unfair advantage, for having no burden at all to do so.

The golem was considered least of the priorities, having the least likelihood of being real (and there were more doubts about the Reich than you would now believe), so I suppose that’s why the assignment fell to me. I packed my bags and prepared my papers to be welcomed with open arms by Nazis, as if such a thing did not send shivers down my spine, then as now.

The man I was assigned to was a biologist named Ostwald. An unassuming individual, Ostwald accepted me without question, which was less than I could say. I couldn’t understand how such a man, of negligible connections within the Reich, certainly no one of any importance, would warrant scrutiny much less active surveillance. I worked in his lab day and night, and saw nothing that seemed relevant to the reports of the golem I had memorized, and he seemed to have no social life nor activities of any kind outside of his home. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a tedious task, and Ostwald a tedious man.

It wasn’t until I saw him make it rain, once, when he grew frustrated cultivating a mundane sample from a frog’s liver, that I realized the truth: Ostwald wasn’t working on the golem project, he was the result of the project. Ostwald was the golem itself!

From what I could tell, no one seemed to have realized. Perhaps one moment he was an inanimate object, and the next a perfectly ordinary man, or so it looked. He might have duplicated one of the scientists from the project. It didn’t matter. No one believed my reports. It was suggested I should retire the field.

I would do no such thing.