THE DAY THE EMPIRE DIED
Prussian Imperial troops in Paris during the Days of Tears (April, 1972)
The day is April 5th, 1972. America and its allies are finally about to strike against the "Catholic menace."
At 8:29 am, Caesar Napoleon VI, his wife, and his daughter arrive at their hotel in Berlin several hours before a scheduled meeting with the Prussian imperial family. They spend 45 minutes in their rooms.
Meanwhile, across town, an Australian radical nationalist named Willem Kruger is waiting nervously in the crowd anticipating the royals arrival. Under his leather coat he carries an American-made Carlson M65 pistol. He is wary of the security officers watching the crowd, but his participation in the Karratha Airport Crisis a year before had hardened his nerves. As the crowd cheered the Bonapartes as they got out of their Waterloo Engines '66 Sedan, Kruger took the Carlson out, aimed it at the monarch and his family, and fired six shots before anyone could react. Immediately, Caesar Napoleon VI, his wife, and his daughter were cut down. As the guards immediately tackled the assassin, another man, Joseph Fouché V, Duke of Otranto, the descendant of Napoleon I's chief of police of the same name and one of the most popular politicians in Europe, was shot by Kruger.
Napoleon VI's body is thrown into his sedan by secrets service agents (back); Joseph Fouché V (center) takes a bullet; Kruger twists out of the way of an oncoming agent (bottom left)
***
Caesar and his entire family were announced dead upon arrival at the Kaiser Helmut Wilhelm Memorial Hospital fifteen minutes later. Fouché went under extensive surgery, but quickly recovered. The entire world was shocked as news came in of the shooting. Kruger was brutally interrogated by the Berlin Police and the Imperial Secret Service. Now the question arose: who was to take the Bonaparte throne?
That role fell to none other than Napoleona's cuckolded husband, Karl II, last Emperor of the Rhine. He was a "spineless Hessian," according to everyone in France and Spain, and he was constantly pelted with accusations about his private life, from being a homosexual to having thirty mistresses. As Karl II unceremoniously ascended to the throne, much as he had done in 1955 for his father in the Rheinbund, Helmut Wilhelm and much of the rest of Europe's nobility feared there would be massive civil unrest in the Tripartite Empire. Their fears proved justly founded when riots broke out in Paris protesting the new Caesar Charles I.
Charles proved himself incapable of managing a crisis, as he turned the military on the civilians with brute force and declared martial law. The Austrian-born 83 year-old war hero, Count Adolf von Braunau, then began conspiring with Helmut Wilhelm for Prussian intervention, even though this would violate the Great War treaties. The plan was nevertheless put into action as thousands of Prussian soldiers crossed the border on April 18th
. The confused and dazed Tripartite military usually either sided with the encroaching Prussians or ran for the hills. Caesar Charles went into full panic mode and suffered a nervous breakdown in Paris. Von Braunau led groups of soldiers from the eastern part of the Tripartite Empire and stormed Paris, removing Charles from power. Von Braunau took full command of the Empire on April 25th, and the Prussian military rolled in to support his "emergency powers." Meanwhile, the 67 year-old Italian Emperor Massimiliano IV ousted the rest of lesser Bonapartist monarchs of Southern Europe who were rejecting the Prussian intervention and military coup.
As questions arose as to who would lead the Empire once von Braunau could not, fears began to grow about the possibility of a European War of Succession, and the winner would likely unite the continent under one crown. As Bonapartist loyalists built up their forces and began demanding "Prussian and United Nations peacekeepers" leave the Empire, Prussia and Sweden began making plans to finally and permanently shift the balance of power from Paris to Berlin. The rest of the European monarchs and leaders began settling themselves into one of two camps: those supporting the 16 year-old son of Karl and Napoleona, Napoleon VII, and his acting Prime Minister Joseph Fouché V, and those supporting Prussian dominance. Kronprinz Helmut Wilhelm II, Prussian hero of the Great War, was making many of the decisions for his elderly father, the Kaiser, and he was in turn setting the stage for himself to become Emperor of Europe.
Back in Australia, meanwhile, a civil war had broken out with the French-speaking Catholics and the Dutch-and-English-speaking Protestants (with their American allies) committing vicious acts of genocide against one another. Slowly, the continent was falling under American domination, even as the mounds of corpses burned in Sydney.
And thus the stage was set for the European War of Succession, the result of hundreds of years of wars and conflicts going back to the Fall of the Roman Empire. Whoever would win would be master of the continent...