11.6.2014
Today, in an emergency meeting before the Bundestag, Gernot delivered a brief but powerful speech convincing the government body that the NDP is responsible for the terrorist attack in Hanover and presented the proof in the form of the recorded words of the terrorist captured at Hanover and interrogated by Jollenbeck and his men. When a vote was called, the entire floor, except for the NDP representatives, was in agreement with the banning and disbandment of the National Democratic Party of Germany. Never in my life had I seen such a unanimous vote before...at least, as unanimous as it was ever going to get. Not surprisingly, the NDP representatives stormed out of the Reichstag, accusing all whom they passed on their way out for infringing on their party's right to free speech and expression and claiming that the evidence that my husband had presented before the Bundestag was fabricated and untrue.
Thank God they are gone. Some things do not deserve to be protected, much less by a law.
I spent much of the day working with the rest of the Bundestag to pass a law specifically forbidding the creation or congregation of parties or individuals for extremist parties with known affiliations with former National Socialism or fascism or their ideals and beliefs. In addition, Gernot has ordered all police and military forces in Germany to immediately apprehend, detain, and/or arrest anyone with known connections to the NDP, however big or small, and to keep them in prison until those individuals could be confirmed to be non-threats to the German public.
It appeared that the general populace as also reacted with us in kind. Because Gernot is fairy popular as far as German chancellors go, when his speech was televised at the Reichstag, I received reports from members of our Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, our agency for domestic intelligence, or the BfV for short, that many towns and cities across the country appear to be taking steps of their own to ensure that the Hanover Massacre, as it is beginning to become known as, does not repeat elsewhere. Local police forces, perhaps because of Gernot's urging, are reported to be making longer, more vigilant patrol. This situation suggests to me that the German people will not tolerate those strange individuals known as Neo-Nazis to hurt other Germans.
But that is still not all. Gernot also used this incident as leverage against the Bundestag's traditional anti-military stance in legislation, and the Bundestag finally gave into his demands of calling for new legislation that would approve of increased military spending. Because of the other pieces of legislation that we spent the majority of today working on passing to outlaw the NDP, we expect that its members and leaders will turn rogue and hostile with a matter of time, and as Gernot stated himself, the sooner this problem could be fixed, the better. Of course, he could not inform the Bundestag of the classified information given to us by Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos, but I think the Bundestag got his message anyway. The new bill has authorized an amount to be allocated to all branches of the German armed forces that is no greater than 37 billion euros, a jump from our usual approximately 31 billion euros, to be divided into monthly deposits. In order to pay for this jump in military spending, we have increased taxes temporarily on alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline, but these taxes are to remain open and liable to change if the economy begins to take a turn for the worse or if enough people voice their concerns for a reversal of legislation in the near future.
Jollenbeck was especially pleased when he met with me in the evening after all the legislation for the day was completed. An additional six billion euros could mean that his men and the soldiers in the rest of the country's bases could finally become well equipped with the latest equipment that six billion euros could buy, or at the very least much needed upgrades to their current equipment. He remarked to me that he'd been waiting for quite some time to see the military budget spending increased for the soldiers' sake, as it would appear that much of our military spending goes into military intelligence networks, vehicular systems, and underground long-range missile sites, making our standard infantry regrettably neglected.
"We have the money now, and those Nazis don't. What will they buy? Cheap Chinese AK clones?" he said while laughing. I presume that is a military joke he made.
As Gernot and I returned home, I remarked how productive today had been. It is not that the Bundestag is known for indecisiveness or an inability to pass legislation efficiently, but certainly most days of legislation do not go so smoothly and quickly as today. Even just one bill of new legislation usually takes anywhere from a week to a month, perhaps even several months, to pass with heavy compromises and revisions made to it. But not today; almost all our time was spent on drafting the bills, and only a few things were revised during the process. Gernot agreed, although he added with a more sullen, bitter tone that he wished for legislation to always be this way. Even as a seasoned politician, he confessed, there were times when he simply did not want to deal with the long and drawn-out process of passing new legislation. He could be using his time to be doing more productive things than to sit inside the capitol building for eleven hours haggling the terms of a bill with those who opposed it.
Well, don't we all.
We were extremely surprised to find Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos sitting in our living room when we returned home and emerged from our garage. Prinz Eugen hurriedly explained to me that the two Americans had arrived literally three minutes before we did, and there they were, sitting on our couches, in full uniform and gear and their rifles standing up against the tables on their buttstocks. Thankfully, the rifles appeared to be empty, as they sported no magazines loaded in them, and the Americans assured us so too and apologized for their unannounced intrusion. However, Herr Deimos said that their work yesterday and today had discovered something that we, as the leaders of Germany, ought to know. As Max and Lebe brought them some grape juice and sweet pretzels, which they heartily appreciated (apparently, according to Herr Sanford, they had not eaten the entire day but denied our invitation for a full dinner on grounds that they needed to get going again), they began to detail to us their activities.
One of their anonymous sources here in Germany tipped Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos off to an old locksmith's shop in Brunswick, a town to the east of Hanover. The owner of the locksmith's shop himself held no affiliations with the NDP, but some of his customers did, when Sanford and Deimos dug through the locksmith's customer records. They asked the locksmith if those particular customers were frequenting his place of business, and the locksmith said yes and pointed out one of them. One of those customers had been visiting his shop very often, having him fix some locks or make some keys that he hadn't been very clear on what they were about or why they needed fixing. As a businessman, the locksmith didn't say anything or question it and simply did as he was told - he did get paid for his troubles, after all. herr Deimos then asked him if he knew where that customer typically ran off to after giving him those jobs, and the locksmith said he would sit in the small waiting room outside his workshop, and they searched the place. It turned out that there was a loose tile in the floor of the waiting room, and there, the two operatives discovered a secret, large storage pit right underneath the shop that had been dug out fairly recently, judging by the condition of the soil, and contained several empty boxes of ammunition and a crate that held only a single AK-47 assault rifle. One of the boxes held a manufacturer's seal on it still, so the two men traced the small cache to its source. A heavy industries factory in Greifswald had produced them, and this was the same factory that had produced the ammunition and guns that the terrorists at Hanover used for the Hanover Massacre. According to the men, this factory has been known to produce weapons and arms for NDP extremists in disturbances in the past, and that the owner of the factory had managed to evade prosecution by adequately proving that there was not sufficient enough evidence to prove him guilty and revoke his manufacturing license.
How different this time would be.
Herr Sanford assured us that they had already taken care of the threat. Earlier this morning, they stormed the factory building by themselves, apprehended the factory owner in his office in the building, and forced him to give a vocal testimony proving his involvement in the Hanover Massacre by providing the arms used there. This evidence, in the form of a normal USB drive, was given to me and Gernot by Herr Deimos, who told us to use that evidence in however ways we saw fit.
Gernot and I informed the two American operatives that in the end, we did not need their evidence to help us pass a bill to outlaw the NDP, as all the new bills of legislation had been written up and passed or will pass tomorrow, but they told us to hang onto it anyway. It may come in handy in the future, they said, so who knows.
And finally, before they boarded an American helicopter that had landed right outside our house to depart, Herr Sanford informed all of us (including the Wunderwaffe girls) that they had received news from their comrades back in America, their fellow Seal Team Six compatriots, who had released the schematics for another German ship girl, and that they had already relayed this information to the Wunderwaffe team here in Berlin. You can imagine the reactions of the girls who were listening: Lebe and Prinz Eugen begged the two American men to tell them, while Bismarck tried her best to appear aloof but could not resist the temptation anyway. U popped her head out from behind Herr Deimos, leaving everyone stumped as to how she even got there behind him with nobody noticing to begin with. Roma, Littorio, and Libeccio were a little disheartened that the next European ship girl would be yet another German instead of a fellow Italian, which made Max and Lebe feel guilty for them and profusely apologize, while Bismarck instead took the opposite approach and gloated about it to Roma, who nearly punched Bismarck in the face for her mistake.
For their convenience, Herr Deimos revealed the name of the new ship girl currently in construction to us:
Graf Zeppelin.
The reactions that the girls gave to this name made me so curious as to look her up on the Internet, and when I read her entry on Wikipedia, I came to understand why the girls gave that kind of reaction. Graf Zeppelin was an aircraft carrier who was 85% complete and the only German carrier launched by the country before the outbreak of the second war, but because of the shifting priorities of war in the eyes of the Nazis, Graf Zeppelin had never been completed and sat in the Baltic before being scuttled before the Russians could capture her, which they did anyway by raising her up and then sinking her again as a test ship north of Poland.
I do not intend to question the work that they are doing for us, but I cannot help but wonder why Seal Team Six made plans to construct a ship like this as a ship girl. Perhaps from a military standpoint, I can understand why: the Wunderwaffe girls are composed of two destroyers, a submarine, a heavy cruiser, and a battleship; adding a carrier to this roster would indeed make this fleet a much more well-rounded one with the addition of the utilities of an aircraft carrier. But now that I know the story behind Graf Zeppelin...
Is Seal Team Six intending to rewrite history?