Wednesday, May 18, 2011

5/18/11 ABWEHR - The Flight of the U-Men

I bet you're wondering where all these scorched bags of dog !@#$ came from. That's a good question. A better question is why I'm putting them on the side of the balcony, right now, and loading this pistol with frangible, flammable bullets.

But I'd rather talk about something else for the moment. It's six days away from NAZISMASH, and since you're all invited along, I'd like to talk about the enemy for a moment or two.

Let's talk about ABWEHR, you and me.

Let me start out with the obvious question: does that name sound familiar? If so, give yourself a gold star for either being a grade-A student of World War II, or one of the few people who actually sat through that movie where the guy from Mission Impossible tried to beat me to killing Hitler.

There was an Abwehr before there was an ABWEHR, you see. The original was a joke that the triumphant parties in World War I allowed the Germans to have in the place of any kind of real espionage body. Sort of like the Self Defense Force that Japan's had since the occupation ended, which is great for getting giant monsters out of Tokyo, but would have been in big !@#$ trouble if the North Koreans or the Chinese had gotten uppity.

The joke's in the name. Abwehr means "defense," and that's pretty much all they did. They watched,  they listened, they took polite but meticulous notes. And they did get some decent operations off the ground, but Hitler and his cronies kept giving them the runaround.

Of course, it's hard to cry foul when most of your people are planning on killing your very own dictator. That and a tea party gone wrong pretty much brought the whole thing down around its operatives' spit-polished boots in '44, and the war went on its merry way without them.

Jump ahead to the end of that war. Hitler's in little pieces, thanks to yours truly. His subordinates are hiding in a bunker in Berlin with one of Der Fuhrer's body doubles trying to keep up appearances. It isn't working too well because the body double in question, the only one still left alive, is the worst of the bunch and even more off his head than Hitler was towards the end. And believe you me, son, that is saying something.

So the sad little remnants of Hitler's genocidal knitting circle realize they need to come up with a plan. The best one they have is to keep the Allies at bay long enough for them to activate some of the crazier things that Nazi science came up with. There's at least one doomsday weapon they can throw the switch on, and maybe buy them some time to negotiate or press the advantage, but it's going to take time to get working.

But that's the big !@#$ problem right there. They have no time left. The Soviets are less than 8 miles from them. I'm even closer, though, admittedly, I was busy getting a lot of well-deserved payback. The more upright heroes we had on our side for that conflict aren't too far behind me.

So it's a race between us and the Commies to see who can collect the largest numbers of Nazi ass for the propaganda shorts. No matter who wins, the Nazis lose. You gotta love competitions like that.

Faced with that, one of those people in that bunker comes up with a plan. His name is Wilhelm Ganz, and he's been working with the crazy scientists since before the war started, using every scientific and mystical breakthrough they could find to manufacture superheroes. He's not a scientist, of course, just a functionary and a go-between, but the creation of the Ubermenschen's as much his doing as anyone else's.

I know you've read about those Ubermenschen, the U-Men. Those terrible and beautiful soldiers did the Fatherland proud, early on. Ask the Russians if you don't believe me. Some of their veterans still remember what it was like to see human gods picking up Soviet tanks and throwing them at each other.

But the Battle for Britain and the fighting in Africa and the Middle East did away with a lot of those supernazis. And since D-Day we've been leaving those U-Men in bloody heaps alongside the road, and now they don't have a whole lot left. They don't have a lot of test subjects, either, or conscripts willing to risk death, mutation, or worse in order to take the little, black pills that could make a god out of a man.

Not a whole lot, except for the Nazis holed up in the bunker.

What choice do these Generals and Commanders have? They go ahead with the crazycake that Ganz is selling. They take blood tests and determine who's best suited to try the treatment, which Ganz just happened to have brought along in bulk.

Most wash out. Some try and die, messily. You really don't want to know what happened to the Hitler body double, either.

But the ten men and women who survive the Night of the Black Pill, as ABWEHR still calls it, become as gods in mortal form. They suit up and go out into Berlin, there to become the last line of defense against the Soviets. And they swear that they are willing to die to give time to the ones who are going to stay behind and get the Doomsday Clock working.

You know what happens, next. That's why you aren't speaking German and sending your friends and neighbors off to prison for telling bad jokes. But those new U-Men who survive their tussle with the People's Protectors flee Berlin and go to ground with the werewolves, hoping to enact the scorched earth policy that they couldn't quite get working in time. Ganz escapes with them, and turns up like a bad penny throughout most of the next few decades.

But the supernazis? They're the real stars of this show. They consider their first, failed mission to be a point of honor, and call themselves "defense." ABWEHR. Sometimes it's an acronym, and sometimes it's not, but whatever way you want to bend the name it spells !@#$

!@#$ in South America when they hook up with ODESSA and try taking over a few banana republics in the name of Adolf.

!@#$ in South Africa when they make inroads with the really scary elements in the Apartheid government and start trying to manufacture superhumans.

!@#$ in Antarctica when they get that !@#$ base up and running and use it as a base of operations for their stupid supernazi take over the world plan malarkey.

!@#$ in the Middle East when they make happy tree friends with various terrorist organizations and their supporting countries to try and finish what they started in World War II, only with Israel this time.

!@#$ all over the world, throughout most of the 20th century, until, after a few key battles towards its end, after they throw everything they have into one last, massive doomsday plan, their back gets broken by just about every superspy organization, superhuman, and even a few supervillains who just say no to Nazi !@#$.

As of this moment, they're a sad and sorry remnant of a time best forgotten. They lost the ability to make black pills when Ganz died in a horrible autoerotic accident in Thailand. They lost their oldest leaders in the last battle of the doomsday plan. They lost their money, most of their armory, heck they don't even have that silly UFO they used to travel around in, anymore.

(I personally stole it, got drunk, and crashed it somewhere out West once the worst of the fighting was over. Not sure where I deep-sixed it, anymore. I'll have to look into that sometime this week, I think.)

That's not to say that ABWEHR is not dangerous. That's not to say there's no reason to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't put a single foot outside their Ice Palace, down yonder in Penguin Town. That's not to say they couldn't be a problem again if certain things went their way.

But they're a broken and sorry bunch of ex-players who couldn't get enough people together to make a good football team at this point. So when I throw the weight of The COMPANY at them, six days from now, I think it'll be a mercy killing more than anything.

And you know how merciful I am. Ask the last bunch of nutbags I introduced to the air stairs, just this morning. Neo York's finest sanitation engineers are outside right now, burning me in effigy, and in my mercy I'm not organizing a piss-kill.

But they're going to have a whole new perspective on flaming bags of dog !@#$ in a minute or two, here.

(SPYGOD is listening to The Red Queen (Funker Vogt) and drinking Chateau Adolf off his latest "executive assistant")

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