Chapter I- The Fight
A/N: I was interested in the character Sturmbannführer Dieter Hellstrom of the Gestapo right away. He's unusually young for a Sturmbannführer (SS equivalent of Major), and is inexplicably totally committed to the Nazi cause. In this story, I don't try to excuse the character's politics or anything he did (or might have done) because of them. Instead, I try to explain how such a fanatical young Nazi came into being in the first place. Monsters- if Hellstrom is one- are never born. They're made.
"I must say, I grow weary of these monkeyshines." Rudolf Hellstrom snatched a hammer off the kitchen table. He'd left it there since his return from the factory today, but then Dieter came home in that damned HJ uniform of his and Rudolf's temper hit the roof. Dieter had stood his ground, shouting about how the Hitler Youth was giving him something to do, how Hitler was going to change Germany. Now, though, he was the picture of adolescent fury, shaking his fists and halfway to tears. Dieter's mother, previously unable to do anything besides hover in a corner as her husband and son shouted at each other, now advanced, driven by an instinct to protect her son. Rudolf often drank when he got home from work, and when he drank he got mean. Hitting Dieter had long been a favored 'sport' of his, under such cheerful themes as "making a man out of him" and so on. Usually Dieter got out of those well enough, scrambling over chairs and under tables until Rudolf got bored or fell over and passed out. But sometimes he didn't, and afterwards Katya would spend time- too much time- in the kitchen with her battered boy, healing the bruises and cuts with that unique love only a mother can know.
But this time was different. Katya knew that immediately. She had supported Dieter in secret when he'd approached her two years ago, shy but plain about his intentions to join the Hitler Youth. He couldn't keep hiding his uniform forever, though, so this day had more or less been coming. Katya moved forward, grasping Rudolf's shoulder. He had to listen to her, just this once. "Rudolf, put that away- you could put his eye out with that!" But Rudolf shrugged his wife off with one move of his broad shoulders, and shoved her back with one hand, so forcefully Katya stumbled back against the china cabinet. "Get off me, woman!" he barked, and advanced on Dieter. Dieter, shaking with an intoxicating mixture of rage and fear, shouted through rising tears, "Go on, you old drunk! I'm in the HJ and it's going to stay that way! I'll go to all the meetings I want, and you can't stop me!" A searing wave of pain flashed across the left side of Dieter's face, and the youth lost his footing and crashed to the floor. A red mark was already starting to form where Rudolf Hellstrom's hand had struck him. Dieter was crying so hard now he could barely see. Above him he could hear voices; his mother shrilly arguing and pleading, his father's rough and callous- and he was laughing. Dieter pulled himself to his feet and cleared his vision just in time to see his mother, openly defying her husband at last, standing in the way as Rudolf Hellstrom swung the hammer- and brought it down on her skull.
With a cry of rage he didn't even know he could make, Dieter Hellstrom threw himself at his father- and shoved him out of the way. He bolted from the kitchen and shot upstairs like lighting. He knew exactly where he wanted to go, needed to go. Behind him, close but not close enough, he could hear his father's heavy footsteps, "the ogre's approach" his mother had said when Rudolf was not around to hear. From the bottom of the stairs, Dieter could hear him roar, "Only one of us is leaving this house, boy! You're no more a German than any of the rest of those worthless Nazis!" But Dieter was done crying now, done cringing in fear. He was no longer even looking for a place to hide. That time was past.
Dieter now moved swiftly, silently, and with an unshakable sense of purpose. He threw himself into the guest room, spun around, slammed the carved door shut and locked it. Almost immediately after the fists began slamming into the door, and behind him Dieter could hear his father bellowing still. His hands rifled through the spare sheets in the bedside dresser, and as his father finally kicked the door open with a well-placed boot, Dieter set his hand on the cold steel of the WWI-issue Luger. Given to the family by Katya's father, an old career soldier in the Heer, the pistol had always been kept in a drawer in this room, moved once in a while when Rudolf wasn't around. Katya had always insisted it was for use against burglars, the many armed gangs roaming the streets of Berlin these days. But maybe she'd anticipated this day as well. The day when Dieter would have to stand up to his father alone, and have only one way of stopping him. As Rudolf Hellstrom charged into the room, his 'runt of a son' locked a round into the chamber- and fired. The gunshot exploded in the close quarters of the room, but it was quickly followed by another, and another. While he had only meant to fire one round, now Dieter could not seem to stop. He fired half a dozen rounds, then a full magazine, long after his father had keeled over and crashed to the floor, blood seeping from wounds in his chest and an expression of total shock on his face.
Finally, silence retook the Hellstrom household. The smoking Luger dropped from Dieter's hands, and he backed away from it, suddenly horrified and revolted. He turned and bolted out of the room just as fast as he had come, taking the stairs two at a time. He threw open the door to the apartment- the Hellstroms lived on the first floor of a four floor building, but he didn't see any coming to investigate just yet- and fled out into the night. He sprinted down the block, his legs pumping until they burned, his lungs screaming for him to stop- and then suddenly he did. Dieter's legs flew out from under him and he crashed to the pavement, noticing the coppery taste of blood for the second time that night. A boot prodded him and turned him over, and Dieter found himself looking up at the black uniform of an SS major.