The Nazi Alchemist (The Wyvern Series), page 1
Gomery Kimber
NAZI ALCHEMIST
First published by Procursus Press 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Gomery Kimber
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Gomery Kimber asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.
PLEASE NOTE - This book was originally published in 2021 by Procursus Press under the title ‘No Air Native, No Man Kindred.’
Second edition
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For my wife, A., and to the memory of my exemplar the philosopher, novelist and critic, Colin Wilson, whose existential and evolutionary fiction are the inspiration for the present volume.
‘There is only one kind of animal who loathes the idea of becoming tame. That animal I have called ‘the Outsider.’ He looks around at a society of lazy and more-or-less happy people, and something in him revolts. For he sees clearly that this kind of contentment is the opposite of the god-like. It destroys the will.’
Colin Wilson, ‘Poetry and Mysticism’
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Also by Gomery Kimber
PROLOGUE
Dr Peregrine Muir arrived in Cairo on the morning of Saturday 20th June 1942.
The debriefing of James Valentine was deemed to be of the very highest importance, and Muir was flown from England on a priority flight, via Gibraltar and Malta. From RAF Heliopolis, he went directly to the offices of MI6 in Garden City. There he learned the details of how Sir Harry Wyvern died, struck by a taxi on Tolombat Street, near British Army General Headquarters, as he tried to retrieve his hat from the road. But Muir did not tarry. Within the hour, he was at the Citadel Hospital, the bearer of gifts - grapes purchased from a street vendor, and the unfinished manuscript that his friend, Harry, had laboured over for years, a biography of his infamous ancestor, Sir Edward Wyvern. The young Captain Valentine was seated alone on a spacious balcony facing the Mokattam Hills.
‘Professor Lustgarten was quite mad, you know,’ said Valentine.
‘Oh, I know that,’ answered Muir.
‘You didn’t believe he was the man who created Adolf Hitler?’
‘Your Uncle Harry did.’
‘Did he?’ said Valentine.
‘It was your cousin, Clarissa, who was the source of the story. She was in Paris, in the spring of 1933.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘She got to know a man there.’
‘You don’t surprise me.’
‘No, I suppose not. His name, let us say, was Hermann. Hermann was a medical man, with an interest in the occult. He claimed to know Professor Lustgarten. Both men had been members of a certain esoteric and racialist Order, active in Munich from 1917 onwards. Both were . . . Well, they’d been close, shall we say? So close, in fact, that Lustgarten told Hermann the secret story of Adolf Hitler’s irresistible rise.’
‘Wyvernism,’ said Valentine.
‘Is that what Lustgarten told you?’
‘After a fashion.’
‘I see. Well, some years later, Hermann had a falling out with Lustgarten,’ resumed Muir. ‘He saw the error of his ways and became an anti-Nazi. In January 1933, after Hitler came to power, Hermann fled Germany for Paris, and it was there that he began to write an account of how Siegmund Lustgarten was able to ‘create,’ and to control, the Fuehrer.’
‘Control him. Yes, he claimed to be able to do that.’
‘Perhaps he could.’
‘But how?’
‘By using the very lowest methods. Lustgarten thought he was a universal genius, but he was really nothing more than a sorcerer. His methods were the same as any tribal witch doctor.’
‘You had someone spying on him,’ stated Valentine.
Muir cocked an eyebrow. ‘You sound somewhat disenchanted, James.’
‘Of the family business? Yes. That’s what Harry used to call it.’
Muir looked at Valentine’s bandaged right leg. ‘How bad is it?’
‘Bad enough for me to seek other employment.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Muir. ‘You’re far too important to be machine-gunned.’
Valentine appreciated the remark. ‘Shaw,’ he said.
‘Yes, at your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death,’ quoted Muir.
‘To feel the life in me more intensely. Captain Shotover got it all wrong.’
‘You must tell me everything, James.’
‘I’ve been sitting here thinking of Husserl’s intentionality,’ said Valentine. ‘Human beings not only have perceptions, but we also have a will to perceive. Intentionality reveals reality. The greater our intention, the more it reveals. This seems to me to be of fundamental importance.’
‘Fascinating, I’m sure, but I was referring to what happened on the island of Panos.’
‘Oh, that. That doesn’t seem as important. Not anymore.’
‘No less a personage than Winston Churchill desires to learn what happened.’
‘Churchill, Hitler,’ said Valentine. ‘They’re not important. You don’t believe they are, either.’
‘Val, I am here to debrief you. There will be plenty of time for Husserl. The rest of your life, in fact. Let’s start with Hitler. Tell me what Lustgarten told you about Adolf Hitler.’
CHAPTER ONE
Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler was an unusual patient; had he not been, Dr Lustgarten would have known exactly how to treat him. As it was, after accepting Dr Meyer’s challenge to restore Hitler’s sight, Lustgarten was at something of a loss, and it was ten days before he decided on the correct course of action. It was a strange and unusual occurrence which decided him: Dr Lustgarten, alone in his office one evening, clearly heard a disembodied voice say the words, ‘Mimir’s Well.’
The patient named Hitler was a dispatch runner with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. On the morning of Tuesday 15th October 1918, he was blinded by poison gas during a British attack at Wervick, a few kilometres north of Lille near the Belgian border with France. Hitler and some fellow messengers were eating breakfast when gas bombs landed nearby and exploded. Immediately, the soldiers began to choke on the noxious fumes, and even though they pulled on their gas masks, their lungs and eyes had already been affected.
The least stricken of them led his blinded comrades to the nearest casualty clearing station, where the soldiers had their eyes bathed, and exchanged their contaminated uniforms for fresh clothes. The diagnosis of gas poisoning was easily made, but the case of Lance-Corporal Hitler was somewhat different from that of his comrades; and so, rather than being sent to the military hospital at Brussels, Hitler was separated from the others and sent the thirty miles to the hospital at Oudenaarde. Here, the medical staff made a further assessment, and the following morning a movement order was drawn up, transferring the Lance-Corporal to the nerve clinic at Pasewalk in Pomerania, not far from the German border with Poland; and there he would undoubtedly have been sent had not Dr Lustgarten been visiting an old medical school friend, Dr Meyer, at Oudenaarde.
‘A case of hysterical blindness,’ said Meyer, as they toured the ward, ‘but a rather strange one.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘The man with the moustache, his name is Hitler. He doesn’t want to escape the fighting; he positively insists that we cure him and return him to the front in short order.’
‘Perhaps he is shamming.’
‘My own thoughts initially, of course, but now I think not. Listen to him.’
The man named Hitler, his eyes covered by a clean gauze dressing, stood in the middle of the ward, hands grasping the back of a wooden chair as he spoke. Physically, he was unprepossessing, being thin and pale, the black moustache drooping, but it was evident that this wasn’t just another German soldier, for he was speaking with passion and conviction, and around him had gathered a group of wounded men listening intently to what he had to say.
Another rabble rouser: that was Dr Lustgarten’s immediate reaction. They were suddenly everywhere, unsoldierly and un-German, spouting the rhetoric of violent revolution. But not this man. As Lustgarten listened, he realised that the hysteric was in fact a patriot and a fierce nationalist, preaching not the brotherhood of the proletariat but the absolute necessity of overcoming war weariness and pressing on to final victory.
‘There is no damage to his eyes?’
‘None,’ said Meyer, ‘apart from the irritation caused by the patient himself rubbing the eyelids.’
‘And he is not shamming.’
‘As you can see.’
‘Hmm, an interesting case.’
‘Yes,’ said Meyer, moving away. ‘He’s being sent to Pasewalk.’
It was typical Meyer, this kind of subtlety. He had baited the hook and was now waiting patiently for the fish to bite. Lustgarten was both amused by this and a little annoyed: he did not like to be manipulated, even by an old friend and in a good cause. Nevertheless, he could not pass up the chance.
‘Why not let me take him?’ he said.
Meyer stopped and turned, an innocent expression on his tired face. ‘How would you go about it?’ he asked.
‘My dear Meyer, I’ve only just seen the man, never mind examined him.’
‘Your usual approach won’t work, or I would have tried it myself.’
‘No,’ Lustgarten admitted.
He had spoken of the ‘hectoring cure’ at the conference in Bruges, but bullying this man, who evidently wanted to return to the fighting, would be of no use at all, and might indeed be completely counterproductive.
‘May I examine your patient?’ Lustgarten asked.
‘Of course,’ said Meyer, calling: ‘Corporal Hitler? Come over here.’
The man named Hitler, who had been explaining to his audience, self-pityingly, that in civilian life he was an artist, and feared he would end up a beggar if his sight was not restored, immediately turned his head at the sound of the doctor’s voice.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, letting go of the chair.
Lustgarten watched the man carefully as he made his hesitant way along the ward between the rows of beds, hands held out before him. Meyer went to guide him the final few steps.
‘All right, Corporal, stand here,’ said Meyer, taking the man by the shoulders. ‘My colleague Dr Lustgarten would like to examine you.’
Close to, it was evident that the corporal was agitated, probably due to his fear of ending up begging on the streets, Lustgarten thought.
‘You say you are an artist, Hitler?’ Lustgarten asked him gently.
‘Yes, doctor.’
‘You are Austrian?’
‘Yes.’
Lustgarten had noted the man’s accent. It softened somewhat the harshness of his views on winning the war.
‘Let me look at your eyes.’
‘Of course,’ said Hitler, still breathing heavily.
‘Try to relax. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘Yes, sir. It’s just that . . .’
‘All right,’ said Meyer, ‘that’s enough.’
Obediently, Hitler shut up, and Lustgarten removed the gauze that covered his eyes, eyes that turned out to be bright blue. Lustgarten glanced at Meyer, who nodded.
Yes, this was obviously a case of hysteria, no doubt about it. Had the patient been suffering from acute mustard gas poisoning, his eyes would have been blistered, the corneas grey and dull, and with the texture, if not the colour, of orange peel.
‘Look at my face,’ Lustgarten ordered, lifting the corporal’s chin with fingers and thumb. ‘What can you see?’
‘Nothing,’ said Hitler, breathing hard. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘If you regain your sight, what will you do?’
‘Go back to my regiment,’ said Hitler vigorously, his tone of voice that of one stating the obvious.
‘What if you are killed?’
‘Then I will have died in service of the Fatherland.’
‘Hitler,’ said Meyer, ‘is the recipient of the Iron Cross, first class.’
‘Indeed?’ This was certainly unusual for a soldier of such lowly rank. ‘You must stop rubbing your eyes, Corporal. That is why they are red and swollen.’
‘The irritation, sir,’ said Hitler, ‘it drives a man mad.’
‘Hold still,’ Lustgarten ordered. ‘There is some minor conjunctivitis,’ he continued, addressing Meyer, ‘but no dead tissue or any evidence of congealed fluid.’
‘Agreed,’ said Meyer. ‘Do you still want to take him?’
‘Of course,’ said Lustgarten. ‘Corporal, you will accompany me to my clinic where I shall restore your sight and in due course have you returned to your regiment.’
Hitler trembled. ‘You mean it, doctor? You can cure me?’
‘Dr Lustgarten is a specialist,’ said Meyer, ‘and not given to making idle boasts.’
Hitler’s expression changed. No longer was he nervous. He looked like a desperate man who had just been thrown a lifeline.
‘Thank you,’ he said, with deep feeling.
As so it was that Adolf Hitler was put into the care of Dr Lustgarten at his nerve clinic in a small village in the Eifel region of western Germany, near Simmerath. Such out of the way places had been chosen by the Army to house cases of hysteria for several reasons: firstly, so as to remove them from the general hospital population of the honourably wounded; secondly, because it was thought that hysteria was contagious; and thirdly, so as to isolate the hysterics from their families, who, it was often found, vociferously objected to the brutal and sometimes painful cures to which their menfolk were subjected.
But when Lustgarten returned to the clinic, he discovered that in his three-day absence a large number of new patients had been admitted, and these, along with innumerable other matters both medical and administrative, diverted his attention from the patient Hitler. In fact, for almost a week, he had no time at all to examine the corporal further, or even to think much about him. There were many other more straight forward cases that took priority, men who could be quickly cured by Lustgarten’s tried and tested methods.
So adept was Lustgarten, in fact, that only rarely did he resort to the painful application of electrical current, which less accomplished colleagues used as routine. No, he had what amounted to a rapport with his patients who so often thanked him profusely, some even with hot tears, for curing them of hysteria and enabling them to return to the front. But there was also something else, something rare and unusual about Siegmund Lustgarten, and highly prized by physicians: he was a healer, possessed of an ineffable power to cure his fellow human beings by his presence alone.
Where did it come from, this power? Lustgarten, a believer in the old Germanic gods and a secret practitioner of certain esoteric arts, had developed it through long years of disciplined activity directed at greater and greater self-control. A Hindu might have characterised this practice as raja yoga, and Lustgarten might well have concurred, for it was indeed his life’s ambition to become king-like, the first step as it was on the path to becoming god-like.
Naturally, Dr Lustgarten kept this part of his life completely separate from his profession as a nerve specialist and psychiatrist. His colleagues thought of his healing abilities in the same way an amateur musician might think of a virtuoso: that it was a talent Lustgarten had been born with, God-given, if you will. Lustgarten would not have agreed. The god that most interested him was Odin, and not in the sense of worship. No, Lustgarten did not want to bend the knee to his god, rather he wanted to become like his god.
And so, Dr Lustgarten was in no way perturbed when seated at his desk in his office one evening, feeling tired as he attended to paperwork and thinking vaguely of the case of Corporal Hitler, he heard the voice say quite clearly:
