BUNKER BINGO PARTY

A story by Kilgore Trout as retold by Kurt Vonnegut in Timequake,
and transcribed by KenA55 at dyestat.com on 06-21-2005:

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Adolph Hitler had a commodious bombproof bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin, Germany, at the end of World War Two in Europe. This war is Western Civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, please try again.
Tanks and infantry of the Soviet Union are only a few hundred yards away from the bunker's iron door up at street level. Hitler, trapped below, the most loathsome human being who ever lived, doesn't know whether to **** or go blind. He is down there with his mistress Eva Braun and a few close friends, including Joseph Goebbels, his minister of Propaganda, and Goebbels's wife and kids.
For want of anything remotely decisive to do, Hitler proposes marriage to Eva. She accepts!
What the heck?

Everybody forgets his or her troubles during the marriage ceremony. After the groom kisses the bride, though, the party goes flat again. Goebbels has a clubfoot. But Goebbels has always had a clubfoot. That is not the problem.
Goebbels remembers that his kids have brought the game of Bingo with them. It was captured intact from the American troops during the Battle of the Bulge some four months earlier. I myself was captured intact during that battle. Germany, in order to conserve its resources, has stopped making its own Bingo games. Because of that, and because the grownups in the bunker have been so busy during the rise of Hitler, and now his fall, the Goebbels kids are the only ones who know how the game is played. They learned from a neighbor kid, whose family owned a prewar Bingo set.
And so this amazing scene occurs: A boy and a girl, explaining the rules of Bingo, become the center of the Universe for Nazis in full regalia, including a gaga Adolph Hitler.

The Nazis participate in Bingo, with the Minister of Propaganda, arguably the most effective communicator in history, calling out the coordinates of winning or losing squares on the player's cards. The game proves as analgesic for war criminals in deep doodoo as it continues to be for harmless old biddies at church fairs.
Several of the war criminals wear an Iron Cross, awarded only to Germans who have demonstrated battlefield fearlessness so excessive as to be classifiable as psychopathic. Hitler wears one. He won it as a corporal in Western Civilation's first unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.
I was a PFC in the second botched effort to end it all. Like Ernest Hemmingway, I never shot a human being. Maybe Hitler never did that big trick, either. He didn't get his country's highest decoration for killing a lot of people. He got it for being such a brave messenger. Not everybody on a battlefield is supposed to concentrate on nothing but killing. I myself was an intelligence and reconnaissance scout, going places our side hadn't occupied, looking for enemies. I wasn't supposed to fight them if I found them. I was supposed to stay unnoticed and alive, so I could tell my superiors where they were, and what it looked like they were doing.
It was wintertime, and I myself was awarded my country's second lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frostbite.

When I got back home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, "You're a man now!"
I damn near killed my first German.

To return to the game: As though there were a God in Heaven after all, it is Der Fuhrer who shouts "BINGO!" Adolph Hitler wins! He says incredulously, in German, of course, "I can't believe it. I've never played this game before, and yet I've won, I've won! What can this be but a miracle?" He is a Roman Catholic.
He rises from his chair at the table. His eyes are still fixed on the winning card before him, as if it were a shred from the Shroud of Turin. This prick asks, "What can this mean but that things aren't as bad as we thought they were?"
Eva Braun spoils the moment by swallowing a capsule of cyanide. Goebbel's wife gave it to her for a wedding present. Frau Goebbels had more capsules than she needed for her immediate family. Eva's only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women.
A Communistic 240-millimeter howitzer shell explodes atop the bunker. Flakes of calcimine from the shaken ceiling shower down on the deafened occupants. Hitler himself makes a joke, demonstrating that he still has his sense of humor. "It snows," he says. That is a poetic way of saying, too, it is high time he killed himself, unless he wants to become a caged superstar in a travelling freak show, along with the bearded lady and the geek.
He puts a pistol to his head. Everybody says, "Nein, nein, nein." He convinces everyone that shooting himself is the dignified thing to do. What should his last words be? He says, "How about 'I regret nothing'?"
Goebbels replies that such a statement would be appropriate, but that the Parisian cabaret performer Edith Piaf has made a worldwide reputation by singing those same words in French for decades. "Her sobriquet," says Goebbels, "is 'Little Sparrow.' You don't want to be remembered as a little sparrow, or I miss my guess."
Hitler still hasn't lost his sense of humor. He says, "How about 'BINGO'?"
But he is tired. He puts his pistol to his head again. He says, "I never asked to be born in the first place."
The pistol goes "BANG!"