God's Formula Read Online Free

from an inside tunic pocket and handed it to Diebner. “The questions and answers are quite simple,” he said. “I wrote them myself. Study them. I will personally administer it tomorrow.”
    “I am honored, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
    “You should be. You are excused.”
     

     
    Himmler’s mole, the beautiful Marlene Jaeger, had told him that, though she could not be certain, she believed that Walter Friedeman had seen the camera in her hand when he surprised her in his office two nights ago. The SS Chief had decided to proceed with caution. Friedeman was German, that is to say, not a Jew. He had served honorably in the first war and was now a brilliant scientist, a nuclear physicist, who would be useful to the next war effort. Popular among his colleagues, he could not be arrested without good cause. A random, mistaken arrest would frighten them, perhaps stir up dissent, which Germany could not afford among its top scientists. Not now. He had ordered the Berlin Chief of Police, Hans Becker, an old Prussian who had succumbed meekly when Himmler and his SS took over all law enforcement departments throughout Germany in 1936, to have his men ready.
    Diebner had now provided the necessary good cause, in spades. A formula to build an atomic bomb in three months, developed in clandestine late night sessions at his lab at the KWI. Astounding. No one would object to Friedeman’s arrest. No one would care what happened to him afterward.
    After talking to Jaeger, Himmler had been up late studying dossiers on what he was told were Germany’s top nuclear physicists, those, that is, whose politics were pure. Removing his wire-rimmed spectacles and rubbing the spot on the bridge of his nose where they pinched his skin, he recalled how disappointingly small was their number. Scientists were a tricky lot to decipher, devoted as they were to science, and seemingly uninterested in ideology. Kurt Deibner was a refreshing exception, proud to be a member of the party, and clear-eyed when it came to the remaining Jews masquerading as German scientists. And to Jews in general. A man after his own heart.
    When Diebner quietly closed the office door behind him, Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, congratulated himself on a good night’s work. He closed his eyes and rested his balding head for a second on the back of his plush chair, then abruptly sat up and looked at his watch—it read 7:15. He rose and strode confidently across the long, richly carpeted room to his desk at the opposite end. There he picked up the phone and dialed the four numbers that would connect him to Hans Becker. When the chief, now an SS colonel, answered, Himmler said simply, “Are you ready?”
    “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer. My men are in place.”
    “Where is he?”
    “In the rear building.”
    “Arrest him,” Himmler said.
    Himmler rarely said goodbye or anything remotely cordial when greeting or taking leave of an inferior. Nothing else to say, he set the phone’s handset back in its cradle. He then turned and swept open the drapes behind his desk. As he did, a blinding flash appeared in the distance, followed a second or two later by a sharp
kaboom.
    Himmler knew that the bomb alert at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute two days earlier was not real. Goebbels had concocted it as part of the elaborate pretense the Fuhrer believed was necessary to invade Poland. What could this be then? The fire now raging on Berlin’s eastern perimeter, in Dahlem, the section of the city in which the KWI was located, looked very real. Was this Goebbels work? Or was this a real attack by an enemy? No matter, tomorrow Poland would fall, and the second world war of the twentieth century—the German Century—would begin. That is, if the English and the French were to keep their word, which they might or might not. It didn’t matter to Himmler. His portfolio was filled with the Fuhrer’s most cherished priorities. Eliminate the Jews, confiscate their money