Fatherland by Richard Harris (New York: Random House, 1992) Several years ago I read an interesting book by Robert E. Herzstein entitled When Nazi Dreams Come True which dealt with what a "New World Order" would have been like under a German dominated Europe. Herzstein reconted the efforts of Nazi philosophers and social and economic theorists, who, insulated from the reality of mounting German defeats, mapped out grandiose plans for a postwar European Confederation with common legal and currency systems, a vast program of public works dependent of slave labor form the East, and an integrated European economy dominated by the Reich's cartels and monopolies. Wargamers have more than ample experience with the military aspects of this particular alternative history. Yet, aside from Len Deighton's SS-GB, few books of this genre have dealt with what normal life in a victorious Third Reich would have been like had all those Nazi dreams come true. Robert Harris' Fatherland remedies this lack by providing us a view of the Greater German Reich of 1964 as seen through the eyes of one SS-Stumbannfuhrer named Xavier March. March is a homicide investigator wiht the Berlin Kriminalpolizei and fate throws him into a sequence of cirsumstances that allow Harris latitutde to discuss this future. Militarily, Harris' Nazi victory proceeded along rather conventional lines for the genre. Victory over Russia occurred in 1943 when Joseph Stalin's war machine ground to a halt for lack of fuel, the end result of Germany's successful summer offense the year before. Peace with Britain came in 1944 when all U-Boats received new "unbreakable" cipher systems and consequently won the Battle of the Atlantic. With England starved into submission, Chuchill fled to Canada, leaving Edward VIII and his queen, Wallis reigning over an England anxious to make amends with Nazi Germany. A final peace with the United States was reached in 1946, for when America defeated Japan by use of an atomic bomb, Hitler sent a V-3 rocket to explode in the skies over New York, to prove that he could retaliate in kind. A nuclear stalemate, which the diplomats referred to as the Cold War, ensued. Hostilties dwindled to a series of guerilla conflicts on the eastern borders of the Greater German Reich. The borderd of this victorious Reich should come as no surprise to wargamers: Luxembourg became Mosselland, Alsace-Lorraine was annexed as Westmark, with Austria becoming Ostmark. Central Europe became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the General Government. And, stretching all the way from the Urals to the Caspian Sea were the Reichkommisariates (Reich commissaries) of Ostland, Ukraine, Muscovy and Caucasus. Germany didn't have to occupy the rest of Western and Northern Europe; she simply corralled then all into a trading bloc by the Treaty of Rome in which the Reichsmark became Europe's official currency and German the official second language. There was even a Pan-European flag (blue with a circle of golf stars), but in Europe the only flag that really mattered was th one with the broken cross — the Reich's swastika. In the new Germany, just about everyone but the family dog wears a uniform. Homosexuality and miscegenation are capital offenses. Abortion is punishable by death. For a German, ownership of a foreign bank account without express permission is illegal — the penalty: death! Hijackings were virtually nonexistent on Lufthansa for the simple reason that ineffective airport security guard would spend five years in a concentration camp. The churches were closed, but the regime compensated by building train stations that looked like cathedrals. (One wonders what the penalty for a late train was). In this regimented society, to be labeled "asocial" is but once removed form being a traitor in the Party's lexicon of crimes. But dry rot has set in this Thousand Year Reich. The old don't want to work, and the young don't want to fight — particularly since over 100,000 Germans have been killed in the Urals war against US-supplied Russian communists. Only detente between the United States and Germany can put end to this constant hemorrhaging, a process scheduled to begin with President Joseph P. Kenndy, Sr.'s state visit to Berlin in April 1964. Enter Xavier March, divorced and disaffected, who is called to respond to the drowning of a once prominent Nazi official, Josef Bruhler, in Lake Havel. As March begins his investigation and probes deeper into the seeming mystery, a disturbing pattern emerges. Almost immediately the Gestapo intervenes, declaring Bruhler's death a matter for state security — ordering March off the case. March is sufficiently aberrant from the docile, cowed German to persist. Slowly he unravels the threads of this particular tapestry, discovering a heretofore well kept secret of the Nazi regime, one that the Fuhrer's much sought after detente with President Kennedy. And SS-Sturmbannfuhrer March, who devoted his life to fighting criminals, discovers that the real criminals are those for whom he works, To continue would be to give away the plot of a novel that realistically depicts life in an Orwellian Third Reich, where drab, sullen existences are the norm. Fatherland, which extrapolates from the known proclivities of the Reich leadership makes it clear that even victorious, Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, would have been lucky to survive twenty years, a sobering but comforting thought! Back to Cry Havoc #8 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by David W. Tschanz. 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