2019
Americans. Immoral. Foolish. Naive.
Soft.
So very soft.
Wolfgang Hochstetter, a Gestapo major of the Third Reich, leaned back in his chair and glanced about the room. Well lit and neat, it certainly did not belong in a prison. In fact, nothing about the facility fit his idea of a prison. It was practically a luxury resort.
To be fair, it was minimum security. Hochstetter had been on his best behaviour. The first prison he had been held in was not nearly so pleasant, but still too cushy in Hochstetter's mind. He couldn't imagine being so soft on his own prisoners.
Back in that first prison, angry and indignant, he had tried everything to escape, to return to his own time. To his home. To his power.
But to no avail.
And then he realized something. Actually, he had learned it from Colonel Hogan: if he acted like a cowed prisoner, displayed a veneer of helplessness, he could slowly work to become the most dangerous man in America, right under his captors' noses.
He didn't change immediately. He played his hand very well. Slowly, he crafted a new his image for himself. Little by little he allowed himself to go from a frothing Nazi (words used by his captors), to a helpless man out of time, hopelessly confused by modern technology and the changing dynamics of the world in all its facets. A man from a nation defeated over half a century before. A man whose ideology was long dead and despised. A man so overwhelmed by this new world, that he could not possibly be a threat.
Truthfully, it wasn't hard. The future was strange and confusing. And learning that Germany had lost the war so terribly had initially shaken his morale.
In fact, it was all so overwhelming that he had briefly considered genuinely transforming himself.
But then he learned that ideas never really died. Yes, the Third Reich had crumbled, but deep in the underbelly of society, its ideals lived on. And as time went on, he learned that the ideas were not so deeply buried as polite society wanted people to think.
So even as he made himself more docile, even as he was moved from the darkest depths of the CIA's facilities and into better and better conditions because of his good behaviour, Major Hochstetter never really changed. He found allies within the prison walls- amongst inmates and captors alike. And, more importantly, he found them on the outside as well.
Computers. The internet. Foreign words and concepts at first, but once he learned of their capabilities, Hochstetter threw himself into learning everything he could about them, and all the other modern technologies he encountered. It boggled his mind that his captors would allow him, or any of their prisoners, access to such devices.
Soft. So soft.
Through these inventions, he could contact people outside his prison walls. Find like-minded people. People willing to help him.
He found other things too.
He couldn't even remember how he had stumbled across it, but he did. Hogan's Heroes. A television serial based on Colonel Hogan's espionage and sabotage activities against the Reich. A filthy series of lies that turned Hogan into the hero and Hochstetter and his compatriots into bumbling idiots. The only thing it got right what Klink's treasonous incompetence.
It infuriated him.
But what infuriated him even more was its popularity. The series itself was decades old, but people still watched it, still enjoyed it. So much so that there was a group of people who perpetuated the insulting premise by writing stories about it, long after the show had ended. People who sat behind their computers, concocting new ways to humiliate him and idolize Hogan.
Fanfiction, they called it. Bah. Nonsense written by delusional women who could not see Hogan for what he was: a menace who had stopped Germany from bringing peace and order to a muddled, filthy world.
He tried to dismiss it. He had more important things to focus on. But he soon found himself obsessed with the idea that there was a group of people so devoted to Hogan. He read everything. Every tale. Every lie. And with each new story where Hogan won, despite the odds, his resentment grew. Every time Hochstetter was foiled or made the fool, he became angrier and angrier. More and more obsessed.
And then he learned that some of those authors had help to orchestrate his capture and captivity in the future.
He hated them.
He hated the idea of them.
And so his plans evolved. He would go back. He would take his knowledge of the future and set things right. Germany would win this time, the world would be purged of everything filthy. Hogan would pay.
And those damned fawning authors too. All of them he could find.
The computer in front of him shook him out of his musings with a little ping.
A message.
"We have it."
A slow smile crossed Hochstetter's lips.
Finally.
Expertly, his fingers picked out a few letters in reply.
"Do it."