Recovered GOC Debriefing 9/1/1953
A lot of people stepped out of the grey during WWII. I tendered my resignation as a field agent after the Night of Long Knives in 1934. At that point, the Foundation was still trying to keep people from leaving, but my tradecraft and connections gave me a lot of places to run. They had completely abandoned that policy by 1940; they simply couldn’t hope to hold back everyone who wanted to take part.
Of those of us who stepped out of the shadows, Bachmann was indisputably the worst. I first knew him as a particularly vehement Chaos Insurgency operative. Rumor had it that he had been a young zealot in the original uprising, but had been more enthusiastic about the purges than the message. In the years after that, he pursued the anomalous with a ruthless violence unmatched by any but Mssr. Dark himself.
It was no surprise when he ended up with the Nazis. It was never clear to me if he was the CI’s Quisling or if he completely switched sides, but by 1935 he was a pointman for the SS Ahnenerbe, Hitler’s personal occult bloodhounds. He spent most of the pre-war years murdering and torturing his way through the antiquarian and occult communities, tracking down anything anomalous that could be even remotely connected to the Aryans.
By late 1944, the Germans were getting desperate. Bombers were perpetually raining death on German cities, the allies were rolling up territory on either side, and she simply didn’t have the troops to keep the war going. It was at this point that a crooked officer in the Abwehr slipped us a communique from Bachmannn to his superiors. They had assumed it was in code because they weren’t aware of Foundation lingo.
My commander in the OSS knew to some extent what I had done before the war, and called me back from a field operation to advise on this assignment. What we had was an aerial reconnaissance photo of a covert facility somewhere in the Scandinavian Mountains. My superiors were convinced almost immediately that it was a Foundation Site. It had the hallmark triple-redundant security installations, but none of the activity of a military installation. It had clearly been complete for some time, as it lacked the ramshackle appearance of American or Soviet science cities or German labor camps. I couldn't wrap my head around it. I had had significant clearance back in the day, specializing in securing Keter-class objects, but I had never heard of a Site this size anywhere in the region.
Bachmann believed this to be one of the mythical dark Sites that had gone off the grid during the CI uprising. He had some kind of convoluted evidence about the site containing an XK-class apocalypse which he had filtered through Hitler's "positive Christianity," but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Not my area of expertise. What mattered was, he was absolutely convinced that whatever was contained there could be appropriated and used to turn the tide for Germany. People on both sides were getting ragged at this point, but while the cracks were starting to show for the rest of us, Bachmann seemed to have shattered. He had spent the last decade propping up the myth of the Aryan Volk, and there was nothing left for him outside of that. That, or he was a damn convincing double agent.
What we had at that point wasn’t so much of a plan as the necessity to get involved. They dropped me and a dozen Norwegian resistance fighters out of a Handley Page Halifax onto a godforsaken wind-swept bluff. I wasn’t much on skis, but I was the only one handy who had held a Foundation clearance and had any knowledge of standard security protocols. We had arrived two days ahead of a hundred crack Gebirgsjäger mountain troops, led by a gaggle of SS officers and Bachmann himself. We were woefully outnumbered and outgunned, but we only had two objectives. First, we were to establish radio contact with the facility and warn them of an incoming hostile GOI. Second, my job was to identify Bachmann and anyone else with Foundation experience, and put them down. If capture seemed likely, this included me. We simply couldn’t afford to let the Nazis into this kind of facility.
One of our sharpshooters broke his leg in the jump, so we had to leave him. The SS found him at the drop site and brought him along. At night, we knew how close they were behind us by the sound of his screams. The mountains there are treacherous, and by twists of terrain and weather we only arrived a few hours before the Germans. We set up a defensive position in a copse of trees facing what appeared to be the main entrance to the facility. Radio was no luck; our equipment couldn’t transmit or receive. We knew the facility was surrounded by equipment, but I had assumed it was some kind of containment apparatus. If this was primarily a covert facility, it might have been some kind of jammer.
By the time the German ski troops arrived, Bachmann was completely enraptured. The jägers clearly wanted to establish a perimeter, but he and the SS officers would have none of it. We watched them try portable radio, fail, and then march right towards the entrance like kids in a candy store.
None of the SS toadies were anyone I knew, and their grunts and non-coms clearly weren’t doing any talking. At about 100 yards from the facility, I gave the signal. Four sharpshooters fired, and Bachmann danced as three shots took him. Blood spouted from a hit in the neck, while his upper body pivoted one direction from a shot in the ribs and his legs went another from a hit in the thigh.
The other sharpshooters rang shots in the brief moment before he fell, taking down a number of the SS officers. The Waffen SS were the ones responsible for anti-guerrilla death squads, so resistance fighters were never ones to let them out of their sights. Bachmann’s body hit the ground, and the remaining officers broke and ran for the cover of the facility.
Then, they were all gone. The jägers, the SS, Bachmann’s corpse, and any sign that the facility had ever been there; nothing. We searched the whole area for evidence - trash, blood, dropped weapons - before we thought to count our number, see if anyone had been lost in the brief chaos. We found we were one too many: The man who had been hurt in the jump was limping along with us as we frantically searched. Our team leader greeted him with jubilation, but I had to quietly talk a few of the men down from shooting him. My Foundation training speaking again: when something this anomalous happens, isolation and study are the first priorities, not superstition.
After we had satisfied ourselves that the facility was well and truly gone, we made our way down the mountain to our extraction point. Everything then on went to plan. Our mission was still on record and declared a rousing success, but the photo and coded messages were gone. I asked around the occult intelligence community. Bachmann had died with a whole gaggle of Thule Society fucks in 1929, while looking too closely into the Pleistoscene Afro-Asiatic Culture Group. Good riddance. His more prominent crimes had been spread into the biographies of the whole Obskurakorps clique, but some of his victims had survived instead. I suppose there are small mercies.
I could never trust the Foundation after that. The idea that they not only had that level of power, but were willing to use it, seemed to invalidate everything I had ever believed about them. It made everything I had done in their service entirely futile. I moved from the OSS to the GOC as soon as the option was available, and have been here ever since.