The major objective of
Percival, the SOE commando team to which the PCs belong, in the first stages of Operation Brünnhilde was to mislead the defenders near the Brandenburger Tor sufficiently to avoid the gliders and parachutists of the Allied assault being shot down by flak and smallarms on approach. This they did using their disguises and papers representing them as senior SD men and telling flak gunners and unit commanders that the Luftwaffe was preparing a supply drop to relieve the defenders of the Zitadelle sector and that reinforcements in the form of elite fallschirmjäger might even be coming.
Lt. Lizzie St. Clair, in her disguise as Hauptführerin Katrina Kötterheinrich, allegedly a telegraph operator and assistant to extremely senior men of the OKW Amt Ausland/Abwehr, even spread a wild tale that a German counter-attack led by Armeeabteilung Steiner had by now closed the jaws on the Soviet Red Army, trapping them around Berlin as the Wehrmacht had been trapped around Stalingrad. The Führer had bravely remained in Berlin as the bait for a massive trap, but now that it was sprung, he was needed elsewhere to direct the counterattack.
The incoming supply drop, according to her story, was merely the beginning of a massive Luftwaffe effort in the relief of Berlin. She and the SD men she was accompanying were assigned to coordinate a most important special mission. Fallschirmjäger of the secret Luftwaffe Kampfgeschwader 200 were about to come down around the Brandenburger Tor to stiffen the defence and give heroic pilots of the KG 200 time to land and spirit the Führer away.
This deception worked very well, with the German defenders on the 29th of April apparently ready to believe nearly anything that offered hope. The PCs were nearly certain that one Helmut Wust*, a very old Oberst der Reserve who was commanding a mixed force of artillerymen, flak gunners and Volksturm did not believe a word of what they were saying, but he nevertheless encouraged them to spread their news to his men. "
Glaube, es wird meine Kindern nicht schaden" (Hope, it will not do my children any harm').
Even with this deception, some operatives from
Percival,
Lancelot and
Merlin had to resort to force before the gliders landed. While the smooth-talking secret agents among the teams spread disinformation, direct-action commandos in the units fought a number of quiet and ruthless skirmishes in the Tiergarten to avoid having German patrols stumble on the radio operators directing the planes in or the mission specialists carving mystical symbols around the landing zone.
During these exciting minutes, the PCs and their allies stabbed, shot (with suppressed Sten guns), bludgeoned and decapitated** individual members of the Volkssturm and Heer, as well as Vichy French Waffen-SS men from the Charlemagne division. None of them exhibited any unusual powers or appeared to be anything but young boys, old men and wounded veterans forced by circumstance into defending what was rapidly becoming a very small final enclave of the Reich.
Even once the assault force had landed and fought a pitched battle in the Ministergärten north of the Reichkanzlei, their opposition mostly appeared to be members of the
Begleit-Bataillon Reichsführer-SS. That's a new unit at this time and while the Allied assault force took catastrophic casualties, they did better than they'd have done against veterans from the Eastern Front.
The PCs have seen
some uncanny soldiers among the enemy, though. The night before the 29th, the day before that set for Operation Brünnhilde, two of them saw what appeared to be hundreds of stormtroopers, wearing gas masks, winter clothing and ponchos, taking up position in strangely neat ranks and files in the Ministergärten. Other German troops, also with gas masks and a lot of protective rubber gear, were wrestling with a Nebelwerfer rocket-launcher, which then proceeded to keep up a fairly heavy fire at the advancing Soviets on the south side of the Landwehrkanal all night.
Other PCs later heard several hundred troops march by, to the south, apparently goose stepping in uncanny unison. Smallarms fire indicated contact with advancing Soviets, but within a few hours, it died down until the next morning. To all appearances, the Soviet advance from the south and south-east has stalled at the Landwehrkanal and the Potsdamer Platz, with no further advance on that front being noticed by the PCs during the day of the 29th of April.
The PCs later exchanged shots with troops dressed in this manner and discovered more peculiarities about them. Their helmets are decorated with a Totenkopf crest and their uniforms are apparently Waffen-SS. Some of them appear to be wearing very old gear, with none of them wearing the late-war lighter uniforms or helmets. Some even seem to be wearing Pickelhaube. Their armament is heavy on automatic weapons and a significant part of them appear to be armed with flamethrowers of some kind. A rifle shot through a flamethrower tank failed to produce an explosion, however, but did produce grayish*** mist around the wounded stormtrooper.
Strangest, however, is that these stormtroopers apparently never stop advancing once the order to charge has been given. They never take cover, hesitate or retreat. While the first two 2nd Lt. Garner Lane Hadley engaged with his Garand fell to a pair of perfectly aimed center mass shots, he also noticed that all too many others continued to run even after taking several .30 caliber bullets to the torso. It was with relief that the PCs broke contact and maneuvered to avoid these
Totenkopf stormtroopers.
Probably the worst unit the PCs have encountered so far, however, have been clad in Waffen-SS camouflage battle dress, but without the SS runes. The only unit insignia are crossed rifles on the collars. They all carry automatic weapons, except the odd specialist with a scoped Gewehr 43, with the most common weapon among them being the Sturmgewehr 44. The evidence suggests that they might have a close connection to Himmler's bunker and the ordinary German soldiers appear afraid of them.
As it happens, in setting, SS-Oberfuehrer
Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger was transported to Himmler's secret bunker under the garden of the Reichskanzlei after being gravely wounded in action near Brandenburg in February 1945. On the Potsdamer Brücke, the PCs actually met him and a dozen of his men rigging traps for the approaching Soviets.
Havildar Kharak Bahadur Rai experienced a sensation that he described as his 'witch sense' screaming when he looked at the officer in charge of the small detail. There was something profoundly wrong with this man, on every level, psychologically and existentially, and Rai's professional judgment as a hereditary witchfinder was that shooting him immediately would in the long run be the safest course.
Sadly, doing so would have blown their cover as important SD officials heading for the Zitadelle sector escorted by retreating German soldiers. It would also have resulted in a firefight with twelve men at close range, with the odds good that the Waffen-SS and Volkssturm men defending the bridge would join in on the side of the trap-laying detail. The PCs weighed the odds and then decided that continuing on to the objective, which supposedly entailed saving the world, must take precedence over shooting people because there was something off about them.
Later on, it was soldiers from this unit who became suspicious of the PCs as they were walking around the defences, spreading rumours of incoming Luftwaffe supply drops to flak gunners. Eventually, the PCs were forced to deal with a small patrol of them, which they were fortunately able to do in a way that made the other German defenders believe Soviet snipers were responsible.****
*A fictional character, 70-year-old veteran of the Great War, where he was an artillery officer, now in charge of a mixed unit of reservists and boys manning flak guns, mortars and light artillery near the Brandenburger Tor.
**Havildar Rai, reporting for duty.
***In the dark, everything is one shade of gray or another.
****Using a DeLisle carbine, Starszy Sierzant Jan Wojcik shot them from a sniper's nest he'd constructed on the upper floor of the half-ruined former American embassy. The rest of the PCs reacted to this by shouting that they saw shooting from the Tiergarten, firing at imaginary Soviet snipers and generally running around in apparent confusion while making it thoroughly impossible for any of the local commanders to know what was happening.