Status Updates From Dracula vs. Hitler

Stopped reading all here— skip to Hitler letters & prisoner reports only; tedium of Harker-Lucy tension no longer bearable…plus this book has a lot of pages, probably a hundred too many honestly.

He says he checked out the box after removing the Top Secret page on top, box labeled “misc.” but doesn’t say how he managed to actually STEAL it for all the analysis to be done on the original contents/docs…

I am convinced that there is little doubt though scant physical evidence that the events described actually took place, however unbelievable & incomprehensible this may appear on a first reading.

I’m sure that there will be a slew of people who think this all fell out of a horse’s ass. That’s okay. Let the reader decide on the verity of the original authors & the story they tell.

How these documents found their way to MD I have no clue. Why they were never published or released b/f is obvious: what they reveal would cause more controversy than any govt would want. By releasing them now I hope that other individuals or agencies w/more resources than my own will pursue this investigation.

After careful & repeated readings I edited the documents to a provide a linear narrative…

It took moths to have the diary transcribed…Finding a translator for the German docs was easier…The thermal paper was more problematic…The Dutch translation was easy; a former teacher of mine in MI was sworn to silence & did the work. I will always remember his phone call asking me of this was some kind of prank I was playing in him. Thanks, Milt.

The combination of those two names was enough to send my curiosity into overdrive.

The last item @ bottom of box was a file folder of dark brown pasteboard cracked in 2 at the fold. B/t the halves were 13 loose sheets of manuscript handwritten in a small tight hand…saw it was in Dutch; I did recognize 1 name @ top of 1st & bottom of last page— Abraham Van Helsing.

My HBO project was now completely forgotten.

…Next was Manila folder, once held together by rubber band that was rotted & snapped but still stuck to the cardboard. Inside was stack of old copy paper the thermal facsimile type from the pre-Xerox era:

They were copies of German docs, many topped w/the Nazi eagle holding swastika. My eyes kept fixing on the 2 words I did recognize: Hitler & name mentioned repeatedly alongside it just as infamous or more-Dracula

…Inside the box a single sheet of paper w/the bright red declaration TOP SECRET lay upon a briefcase” & he opens it. “Why did I continue? I am a writer by trade. Curiosity is in the job description.”

Also in the box:
Leather-bound diary, initials JMH
Crumbling envelope w/Russian, inside another journal German
Accordion file w/typed manuscript “The Dragon Prince & I, a Modern Novel by Lenore Van Muller

…concentrating on the adventures of those female agents who spied for us in Nazi-occupied France: Yvonne Rudellat, a receptionist turned spy, Chilean actress Giliana Balmacwda, & Virginia Hall, an Am journalist w/a wooden leg she called Cuthbert.

Couldn’t find docs but “Then I saw stung stuck behind a sagging brown file box. Out of nothing but curiosity, inside the interior box into the open…

Begins with an “Editor’s Note”, the conceit being he found and put together the documents that make up the book

In a giant govt warehouse (he refers to end of Indy Jones), “I was researching an HBO project about female spies in Europe during WWII. I was on the hunt for a batch of old wartime records from the OSS-precursor to CIA-concerning the use of women in ‘umgentlemanly warfare’…