Stupid Luck and Happenstance, Thread II

What is a two star General doing investigating Radical Students? The police have people for that.

When Kat was retired and acting as the Emperors personal problem solver I could see it, but not now that she is back on active service and at her current rank.
 
What is a two star General doing investigating Radical Students? The police have people for that.

When Kat was retired and acting as the Emperors personal problem solver I could see it, but not now that she is back on active service and at her current rank.
A threat from a far right group needs to be investigated, especially if it has links to a previous revolution that tore down a monarchy....
 
What is a two star General doing investigating Radical Students? The police have people for that.

When Kat was retired and acting as the Emperors personal problem solver I could see it, but not now that she is back on active service and at her current rank.

I agree.

Sticking Kat on this is totally crossing the lines between "Police" and "Military". I appreciate that technically Kat has jurisdiction (IIRC, Imperial Guards, that is the forces guarding the Royal Family, are under her command now along with the SF) but this is still strictly a Civil matter and she shouldn't be let anywhere within a country mile of the situation outside of a vague "The Police are looking into this" level. Anything more than that could totally screw up any criminal prosecutions.
 

ferdi254

Banned
Sorry, I went the wrong way.
The OKW was an institution that was put in place in the third Reich. In WWI it was OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung). And without ToV my best guess is that it would stay the same. But then again things might have changed considerably, wonder if there is still a Bavarian army.
 
Sorry, I went the wrong way.
The OKW was an institution that was put in place in the third Reich. In WWI it was OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung). And without ToV my best guess is that it would stay the same. But then again things might have changed considerably, wonder if there is still a Bavarian army.

Probably.

Getting Bavaria to centralise would be harder than splitting the atom. It might be pretty reduced, say into a National Guard type thing (to use an American example) but it would still be there.
 
What is a two star General doing investigating Radical Students? The police have people for that.

When Kat was retired and acting as the Emperors personal problem solver I could see it, but not now that she is back on active service and at her current rank.
Kat puts on and takes off whatever hat she is wearing at the time and puts another one on depending what the need is.
In this case she has now taken off her KSK hat and is now wearing the hat of the Kaiser’s Special Investigator.
Kat may first want to ask a student like Aurora and instructors like Ilse if they have heard anything.
 
Kat puts on and takes off whatever hat she is wearing at the time and puts another one on depending what the need is.
In this case she has now taken off her KSK hat and is now wearing the hat of the Kaiser’s Special Investigator.

And one of these days, that hat change is going to go catastrophically wrong.
 
Yeah, it's fun doing research on the Finnish Air Force as their roundel was, for a time, a Swastika.
Never mind the Finnish Air Force. Pre-Hitler a respectable British publishing firm (Macmillan I think or Hutchinson) used the Swastika as a corporate logo. I remember the first time I saw one in a second hand bookshop doing a big double take at some totally innocuous 1930s boarding school story with a swastika stamped on its spine. It wasn't even the Right Book Club;)
 
The OKW was an institution that was put in place in the third Reich. In WWI it was OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung).
In this TL the German Army would have had to reorganise a bit around the incorporation of Polish and Bohemian (Czech) forces and "High Command of the Wehrmacht" isn't a very unlikely or improbable title even if it was also used in Nazi Germany OTL. It's not like they called it "Co-ordination of our Glorious Aryan Destiny" or some such that really wouldn't translate to this TL's totally different German political culture.
 
Never mind the Finnish Air Force. Pre-Hitler a respectable British publishing firm (Macmillan I think or Hutchinson) used the Swastika as a corporate logo. I remember the first time I saw one in a second hand bookshop doing a big double take at some totally innocuous 1930s boarding school story with a swastika stamped on its spine. It wasn't even the Right Book Club;)

Chase Manhatten Bank - their corporate logo is a swastika - the centre is a square, but anyone with eyes can see the swastika there. Then again, for evil bankers, it's quite apt.
 
What is a two star General doing investigating Radical Students? The police have people for that.

When Kat was retired and acting as the Emperors personal problem solver I could see it, but not now that she is back on active service and at her current rank.
She is still the unoficial imperial investigator she she will probably coordinate with the police and inteligence to grafe and track the threat.
 
Sorry, I went the wrong way.
The OKW was an institution that was put in place in the third Reich. In WWI it was OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung). And without ToV my best guess is that it would stay the same. But then again things might have changed considerably, wonder if there is still a Bavarian army.

OHL as used during the imperial period was the High Command of the Field Army* ("Feldheer"). It wasn't the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (that's the Emperor anyways). In addition to the OHL there was the German Imperial Admiralty Staff ("Admiralstab") which commanded the active fleet elements, especially the High Seas Fleet**. During the time of the German Empire there was no equivalent of a OKW or Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It is completely reasonable that the Germans ITTL use both OKW and Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht itself was used to describe the combined armed forces of a nation (e.g. the Japanese "Wehrmacht", the French "Wehrmacht", etc). You can read it everywhere in books or reports and articles written up until the end of WW2. And the word itself is completely generic: "Wehr" is translated to defense (there is for example the German word "Feuerwehr" - fire fighters or "Bundeswehr" - lit. Federal Defense). And "Macht" translates to power or force. So "Wehrmacht" means Defense Force / Defense Power. The reason it's not used anymore should be obvious.


*all German armies, with the exception of the Royal Bavarian Army (in peace time)
** in August 1918 the navy high command was reorganized into the newly-formed SKL ("Seekriegsleitung", Maritime Warfare Command) but this is after TTLs POD.
 
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Part 96, Chapter 1511
Chapter One Thousand Five Hundred Eleven


22nd September 1962

Tempelhof, Berlin

There were worse things than spending a Saturday morning in. Just when Kat and Doug had finished with other activities, they had nothing better than to do than talk about what was going on with them. It was also a reminder that there were times when Doug seemed to revel in the fact that he didn’t have nearly the number of professional obligations as Kat did.

“They are calling it an annual threat review” Kat said, “What it amounts to is holding Louis’ hand while he gets to hear about all the cranks who would like to see him hung from the nearest lamp post.”

“So, there are disadvantages to you being the Emperor’s Office Wife?” Doug asked with a smirk on his face which caused Kat to hit him over the head with a pillow.

There were times when he was a little too on the money for his own good. This whole Office Wife nonsense was just more of that. Kat had served as Louis’ first wife’s Aide-de-Camp for a long time and had been a surrogate Aunt for his children. Even if her influence on those children was something that she had come to have a number of misgivings about, it was easy to see why the Emperor saw her as one of the few people he knew whose loyalty or motivations he didn’t need to question. There were often times though when Kat felt the need to distance herself from the Emperor and not just because she knew that no one was indispensable. It was because of things like what had just happened. She had spent the prior week telling the people who she paid to mind her financial assets to prepare for an upcoming economic recession and they had turned around and had told her how she could profit handsomely from having that information. It was a reminder of just how far Kat was from where she had started and why people at the top of the heap tended to stay there.

“In all seriousness, just how much danger is Louis in on any given day?” Doug asked, “I thought that he was generally well liked by the public.”

“That’s just it” Kat replied, “He is a public figure and for someone who is relatively harmless, he is certainly the target of a lot of unfocused rage by the worst sort of malcontents and naïve students playing at being radicals.”

“It’s a part of your job to deal with that sort of thing?”

Kat snorted, as she tried not to laugh. “Louis has got people for just that purpose” She said, “I was there because as I said, Louis needed someone he trusted to hold his hand.”

Doug gave Kat a skeptical look. After being married for as long as they had been, he had a good idea of when she wasn’t telling him the entire story.


Schwielowsee

Hera was sitting on the window ledge watching the wooded bank of the lake pass by. The aged calico seemed to be happy so long as she could be close to her preferred human, even if that included Kiki’s new floating home. Kiki just wished that she was as sanguine about the hurtles that life threw in her path as Hera was.

When Kiki had gotten back into her chambers after the medal presentation she had felt as if she had been going insane. Her instructions might have been to accept her due with a smile on her face and that had proven absolutely excruciating for her. Afterwards, she had only wanted to escape from her life and how it had gotten so completely out of control, be someone else for a while. She had weeks of leave ahead of her, so the only thing that Kiki had been certain of was that she would not be missed. That had been when she had discovered that she had months of backpay and that the allowance that the family trust had given her amounted to a great deal of money. More than enough to do what she wanted, and the issue was only where she would go.

Kiki tried to remember when she had last been happy or at least content and had made a decision that would probably convince those who knew her that she had gone completely insane. As she looked from the glass enclosed pilothouse of eighteen-meter motor barge that she had bought a week earlier, Kiki realized that they would probably be right. The name that had been bestowed upon the barge by the previous owner was ML Meta and Kiki saw no reason to change it.

Oddly, Louis Junior had been very enthusiastic about her choice and had spent a day teaching her how to pilot the barge. He had been in Korea at the same time as she had been but had a very different experience. Where Kiki had been up to her eyeballs in the aftermath of the conflict, Louis had been a bit more removed. First aboard the SMS Brandenburg as a part of the Captain’s Staff and later piloting a Landing Craft that he said was remarkably similar to Kiki’s barge in its handling. She had a feeling that there was a joke in that which she didn’t quite get, and Louis had not explained it to her.

Today, Kiki was headed down the Havel River in search of adventure or at least a bit of peace. She had been told that she was on leave for at least the next month and that in order to return to service, she would need medical clearance and that would include a psychological evaluation. It was hardly a surprise that she was not in any rush to go back.
 
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Of her siblings, Louis may be the only one to have experienced a combat situation that came close to the prolonged exposure that Kiki had. She may find talking to him to helpful to some extent. Not sure about Michael as I can't recall if he was ever in theater or if he saw combat if he was present. I regards to Kiki's career, this could easily be the time for her superiors to channel her back into her original path to being a doctor, after all, search & rescue was sold to her as a means to gain necessary experience she wouldn't find in the university. Simply inform her that now that she has that, it time for her to continue her studies.

As for Kat, aside from her previous role as the Emperor's personal "investigator/hatchet woman", she is still one of his closest aides. This, combined with her command of ALL German special forces, means that she has a "need-to-know" about any & all threats to the Empire & Imperial Family. She also needs to be part of the investigation, at the highest of levels at least, because she and her people will need to plan for a possible military response to those threats, if the civil authorities request support or are unable to deal with a certain type of situation. That support could simply mean aiding the formation of & training of a federal police unit similar to OTL's GSG-9.
 
I can see the Jacobians as a weird mixture of left wing "intellectualism" and right wing nationalism that focus its ire on the monarchy.
The students involved in the movement are from well to do upper middle class families and they are what I would call the "Golden Generation" as they were born just in time for conscription to end and their fathers were either too old to to be sent to war or had jobs that were "vital to the war effort", their parents did not suffer due to the war but were inconvenienced by rationing and paying higher taxes and they grew up hearing anti-government rhetoric all during their childhood until they left for university.
The first things that they are going to protest if things follow IOTL is admission policies where ITTL veterans are getting preferential treatment over other students for their service, as an example Ben when he gets back from Korea he is going to go at the head of the line for any class or post graduate school he wants and those who did not serve are going to think that it is unfair and it promotes German militarism at the expense of more "deserving" students like themselves.
As more information is given, it wiil bring a more clearer picture of what is going on.
 
I can see the Jacobians as a weird mixture of left wing "intellectualism" and right wing nationalism that focus its ire on the monarchy.
The students involved in the movement are from well to do upper middle class families and they are what I would call the "Golden Generation" as they were born just in time for conscription to end and their fathers were either too old to to be sent to war or had jobs that were "vital to the war effort", their parents did not suffer due to the war but were inconvenienced by rationing and paying higher taxes and they grew up hearing anti-government rhetoric all during their childhood until they left for university.
The first things that they are going to protest if things follow IOTL is admission policies where ITTL veterans are getting preferential treatment over other students for their service, as an example Ben when he gets back from Korea he is going to go at the head of the line for any class or post graduate school he wants and those who did not serve are going to think that it is unfair and it promotes German militarism at the expense of more "deserving" students like themselves.
As more information is given, it wiil bring a more clearer picture of what is going on.

Considering that the Kaisar is leading (or promoting) many of the social reforms, this upcoming generation is experiencing its effects first hand as well. These "Jacobins" may be feeling that he is not going far enough with the political and social reforms...
 
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