Making The Monster

Funding in science took a strange turn towards the end of the 2030s. Several think tank types and their legion of graduate students used to come up with a proposal, submit it for a grant, and if necessary, see an ethics board for further approval. That ship sailed when several smooth talkers from Raytheon and General Dynamic were brought on as "Special Marketing Consultants" for Pfizer. Science, overnight, became a sexy trade, much like mortgage securities had in the 1980s. Lavish dinners, expensive gifts, and a new class of lobbyist to explain to the men and women who held the purse strings why their projects needed funding.

(Note to all you future scientists out there: Always add a few percentage points to your budget for the approver. What you call a bribe, your typical Union man calls a Vig, and there's not a building in America that gets approved without one. Never pay out of your pocket that which can be moved to the taxpayer.)

The proposal was ambitious. The combination of advanced cloning, sociological effects on an individual, as well as the psychological impact on a man raised in a simulation. Of course, I had to spice things up a bit. I added a few scenes from the Truman Show and got Jim Carrey to come to the presentation. He signed autographs, took selfies, and told a few of his zany stories. The man is a religious nut, go figure. However, any moral outrage he might have felt about the whole thing, he made sure to keep to himself. The check hadn’t been signed quite yet, not until after he left. 

Then it was my turn. I was to present the piece de résistance. The sexiest, most captivating part. The subject of the experiment. The Fuhrer of the Third Reich himself, Adolf Hitler. There should have been a record scratch. The audience, who was high off of being wined and dined, went all Hindenburg on me when I mentioned the star of the show. One board member, Dr. Rosenbaum, got up and left, muttering his disgust, so that was one in the ‘No’ column.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are not some fringe political group. We’re not going to venerate history’s greatest villain, the closest thing man has seen to the Anti-Christ. No, we are going to try to rehabilitate Hitler. We are going to raise him and put him through much of the same environment in which he lived his early years. He will see many of the same horrors that he did in the First World War, simulated by our crack acting team and Hollywood magic, of course. Then, as the years continue, we will monitor his actions in our simulated city, see who he talks to, and what he tries to learn, pinpointing the exact moment that the Austrian would-be artist turned into history’s great villain. Then, we can figure out how to ‘undo’ Hitler and ensure no child ever grows up to be one again.”

They ate it up. The villain of all villains rehabilitated. A little marketing magic can make any turd shine like a gold nugget with the right framing.

When I stopped by the lab one cold October morning, I’d finally come face to face with the gestating young Adolf. He’d have a few more months in his “birthing bag” until we’d get to see who he’d become.

As an aside, finding Hitler’s DNA was more challenging than I thought it would be. The man left very little behind in terms of physical evidence. There was his skull, but not much could be taken from it. In a small town in Austria, whose name I am not at liberty to divulge, but it was short and stark, an old woman had died and left behind a few boxes for her children to clean up. Some women have ‘hope chests;’ this woman had a Hitler chest. In the Hitler chest was a first printing of Mein Kampf, a few pictures of Hitler with her (presumably) father, and other bits of memorabilia that would fit into a morbid museum. There was a hair comb in all that memorabelia, and after verifying one of the hairs left in that comb, a pretty penny was paid to the embarrassed children of the deceased old woman, who had a lawyer draw up an NDA for us. As if we wanted to advertise them. (Smart move on their part, I must admit.)

I never tried to meet the child. That seemed to be... unwise. For one, I did not speak German. It would be strange for me to converse with the young Hitler, and to be honest, outside of running an experiment, I had no interest in the boy. These were the grueling steps to build our Hitler. We had to play it slow. He was 44 when he became Chancellor of Germany. 44 years to wait. I’d most likely be dead, as would many of the scientists and ‘cast members’ of the charade. It was the first project of this size and scale. The Truman Show, but with Hitler. I’d considered subsidizing many of our costs by making it a reality TV show, but the scientists believed it would ruin the experiment. I dropped the idea, for a while at least.

I did not meet with the boy, but I did meet with his parents. Claudia Schiller, a German-American girl, was cast as our Klara Hitler. She had the ‘right’ look. Not too pretty, like some Hollywood starlet, but not homely either. That kind of ‘goldilocks-just-right’ jenesequois makes for a perfectly lovely mother to a young boy. This was important. Every Hitler biography makes mention of his love for his mother. She may hold the key to understanding him.

Certainly the Freudians on staff believe this to be the case. We have all kinds of schools of thought to study the boy, piecing together the most comprehensive psychological profile we can. My only worry is that we mess something up and he does not grow up to be the villain we need him to be. What if he is just a painter?

Klara’s job is to nurture the boy. To love him like her own. Claudia was initially uncomfortable with the role, but she is a professional. Her prior work was in commercials. She was a barista at a coffee shop in a credit card commercial. I remember exactly what she said when we told her the details of the job.

“That is sick; you know that’s sick, yes?”

“It’s science.”

“It’s monstrous. What if he got out? What if there was another Hitler in the world?”

“You’ll most likely have retired at that point. She dies rather young in his life. You’ll have enough to live on for the rest of your time, courtesy of a grateful world.”

“I don’t know. Something about all this seems wrong.”

“Have you ever played that game where people ask if you’d murder baby Hitler in his crib? Well, this is kind of like that, but delayed. You won’t be killing him, but raising him so that we may learn how he became Hitler. You’ll be saving the world from the next Hitler by helping us understand this one.”

She was a pro, of course. She got into character almost over night. In our staff meetings, she demanded to be called Klara. I don’t even think she was going to have children of her own. She sacrificed those years to raise the boy. I don’t know if she was ever religious, but the way she played into Christianity as the boy was growing up, you’d have thought she was going into the nunnery soon.

“You’re my very special boy,” she told him. She told him this often. She told him of her three dead children, his older siblings, and how she loved him because he was the one who lived. She was acting, I hoped. But I don’t think so. I don’t think you can raise a child without loving it. The way she spoke about him, it was clear she loved him.

“He’s so precocious. And so good at drawing. I didn’t teach him anything like that, but he drew that house all by himself.” The "masterpiece,” as she declared it, was a child’s drawing of a house. The picture was analyzed by every child psychologist we had on staff, and even a few we’d flown in for a week to analyze his development. The jury was in; it was a standard picture, drawn by a child. He was no Michaelangelo, but there was some obvious talent there.

“I don’t know; I don’t think I know what I’ve signed up for,” Klara said. “I pray for him every night. He’s so beautiful, you know. I think he is. He has such a playful laugh. He can be mischievous, but I don’t see any hint of evil in him. I know who he is and what he will grow up to do, but... I don’t see him being that. I can’t. When this part is over, I don’t want to be contacted. I don’t want to be told anything about this ever. I may just check myself into an insane asylum. ‘I’m Hitler’s mother,’ I’ll tell the other patients, and they’ll nod and say that they’re Napoleon’s uncle or Caligula’s plumber. But he’s my baby. In there is the future leader of Germany. The Fuhrer of the Third Reich. The worst person in history.”

I had not considered what this would do to her. I didn’t think to get her her own shrink.

“You know, this boy, our boy, won’t hurt all those people. We won’t let that happen. Yes, he is a clone, but your boy will. We will make sure that he is allowed another path. A special path, just for him.”

“I just wonder if it’s my fault. If I love him too much. Maybe if I were more strict, he’d become all that. Maybe I’m the real villain in all this.”

Strictness was not needed. Strictness was well covered by our Alois. For everything that Claudia was for the boy, our Alois was the opposite. Max Blumberg was a theater actor from New York. You could probably tell from the name, but yes, Max is Jewish. His grandfather came to America after the war and met his grandmother. He did not tell me of his grandfather’s experience in the war, but that was not necessary. I could tell that Max wanted to be part of this, if only to get some kind of understanding about the man who’s choices created him, if only by third, fourth, fifth, two-hundreth-order events.

“I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess I thought he’d have a little mustache. But he’s just a child. A normal child. Claudia is off her rocker, of course. She pays little attention to Edmund. He’s slated to die in February. I feel worst for him. And Paula. She didn’t sign up for this. She’s going to grow up thinking all this is normal. At least the other children are a bit older. They can pretend it’s a game and then be told what’s going on. Not Paula though. It has to be real to her. Normal. This isn’t normal. Not at all. I get it’s for science, but do we really need to subject these children to these kinds of tortures? They’re not Hitlers.”

Over time, Max showed more and more anger about his situation. All their situations. When he spoke of the boy, he spat venom. I was intrigued by this. It was like every day, he grew closer and closer to being Hitler, so every day, Max grew more and more disgusted by the boy. When I told him to start hitting the boy, I thought for sure there’d be some objection. I got none.

“Good. The kid could use a smack or two. And don’t let Claudia get in the way. I don’t need to hear her bitching about it. I have half a mind to give her a slap to knock some sense into her. I mean, really, what kind of nutjob acts like she does? He’s not her son; he’s Adolf-Fucking-Hitler. Not one person in the whole world would be worse off if the real Klara Hitler had the courage to do what was necessary and drown the little bastard before he was out of diapers.”

The beatings started and continued until Alois’s exit from our melodrama. And, according to plan, whatever rules Max tried to enforce with hitting, the boy simply ignored. One day, he just stopped crying, even when Max wailed on him as hard as he could. Was it then? Did we just make Hitler right then and there? We did not tell the governing board about the beatings. They would not have signed off on child abuse, but really. We’re talking about Hitler here. We’re trying to stop how many Hitlers from rising up in the wake of the real one at the expense of his clone.

When some of the observers raised concerns about the boy’s pain, I had to gently, but firmly, remind him of who that boy was. I don’t know how many memos went out from myself, the lead scientists, the money men over; everyone had to keep reminding everyone that we were doing something for the good of mankind at the expense of one child who, if he lived to grow up to become his adult self, would have no problems killing you and your family. When dealing with evil, almost any action can be seen as good. We put it on a few flyers and posted them around the office. People needed to be reminded.

Klara was becoming a problem. Always a problem. Now she thought she was the Virgin Mary. “She knew her son was destined to die for mankind. Perhaps I, too, know this. Perhaps I am like her. I wonder how she dealt with seeing her son die in such a horrible way. She knew from the moment He was conceived that He was the Son of God, that He was God. I knew from the moment I saw him, my son was Hitler. He was destined to do great and terrible things. I wonder what the Virgin Mary thought of Jesus’s first steps. His first words. I wonder if she laughed when He ate something He did not like. What is it like when God needs a diaper change? That poor woman. She did not ask to be the Mother of God. She agreed, but perhaps she did not know what that meant. I didn’t know what this all meant when I agreed. I didn’t know that, my Adolf,” she chuckled. “Even saying 'my Adolf’ is so perverse. I know what he is to become. I cannot stop it. I will not stop it. But it pains me. It pains me so much. Maybe if the first Adolf knew how much his mother ached for him, he would choose differently. Maybe.”

The boy had been studying in our version of Vienna when he was given the news that Klara was not long for the Earth. The observers saw him weeping alone before coming home and seeing her. He was only half a mile from her, but with the train that we created and more Hollywood magic, we made the trip last hours. He was surrounded by actors but did not speak to anyone. From all accounts, he was an affable young man. Now, deadly serious. He was beginning to look more like the Hitler from the black-and-white photographs and the old news reels and films. No mustache yet, but otherwise, yes, a young, serious man. We were eighteen years into this project now, and the boy was now legally a man. The clone of a man all grown up.

I had to admire him a bit. The dedication to her. He truly loved her as any man loved his mother. Some of the psychologists wished he emoted in public. At least in front of family. Instead, there was the one instance in his Viennese apartment that lasted half an hour, and then it stopped, only so he could go be with her. I remember being eighteen. I had my parents for another thirty years. Maybe this was what really did it. Perhaps he just became a grown child without parents, without anyone telling him what to do or how to be. Many think I’ve become inhuman. That I’m less than a person now after all this. All because I don’t stop the whole experiment and give the boy a hug because his fake mother is going to die. But it’s not fake to him. None of this is fake to him. He has not even reached the front; the war is still another few years away.

There was still so much to do, so much to do, so much to prepare. He did not cry when Max died. I wonder if he’ll cry in the war. I wonder what kind of man he is when he thinks no one is looking. Maybe he knows. Maybe he’s been on to us the whole time. I doubt it. He’d have confronted someone about it now. He’d probably have gone crazy, and we would have to shut it all down. No, he’s blissfully unaware of what’s going on. Right now, this is the worst day of his life. I wonder if, after all is said and done, that is still the case.

We never got to find out, though. As Adolf was getting off the train, the hustle and bustle of the simulated town were too authentic. In his grief, Adolf did not notice the oncoming people, and at the last moment, he moved too slowly and was struck by a horsedrawn wagon. The horse, not knowing how important Adolf was, trampled him and left him a broken mess on a dirt road. He was still alive, but barely. He was going to die. When Klara heard this, she ran to him, holding him in her arms, sobbing for him and what she’d done to him.

“My baby, my baby,” she cried into the crowd, all of them silent, all of them staring, none of them feeling any kind of need to help.

“Mutti,” he said to her. He spoke in German, but it had been relayed to me—the gist of his final words. “Mutti,” which means mama or mommy, “Mutti, you shouldn’t be out of bed.”

And those were the last words of Adolf Hitler’s clone. When he breathed his last, a few people started crying. Not tears of pain, but of joy. There was a strange laughter going on and a few cheers. The psychologists later would call this “temporal release,” a new term where re-enactors are able to breathe a sigh of relief once their parts have been completed and they return their psyche to the present. Apparently, that discovery won a few awards, salvaging the whole ordeal in the minds of our sponsors and the various boards we answered to.

I had another theory. We killed Hitler. Again. All the pain he caused and one day would cause again. All the anguish, all the misery. Snuffed out in an instance of dumb luck. We still had the technology. Even if the project had failed, a new project could replace it. One that would take the feelings we all felt on that day and market them to the general public.