Harry Turtledove: The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

Now as I begin a new life of semiretirement up here in America’s first space city, haunted by equal portions of earthlight and moonlight, I wish to reconsider this period of history. Besides, if I don’t write a new book, I believe I will go out of my mind.

Yesterday they had me speak to an audience of five hundred about my life as a writer. They wanted to know how much research I had put into the series about postwar Japan and China. They wanted to know how I deal with writer’s block. But most of all they wanted to hear about Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.

A handsome young Japanese boy saved me by asking what I considered the greatest moment of my life. I told him it was that I had been a successful thief. Once the audience of dedicated free-enterprisers had stopped gasping like fish out of water, I explained. Back in the eighties, the specter of cancer was finally put to rest, thanks to new work derived from original research by Dr. Richard Dietrich. Yes, the most pleasant irony I’ve ever tasted was that “Mabuse’s” final achievement was for life instead of death; I made it possible. It was I who delivered his papers into the hands of American scientists.

I must take repeated breaks in writing this addendum. My back gives me nothing but trouble, and I spend at least three times a day in zero-g therapy. How Hitler would have loved that. After the last bomb attempt on him his central concern became the damage to his Sieg Heiling arm, and his most characteristic feature—his ass. To think my Father literally worshiped that man! I guess if Napoleon had succeeded in unifying Europe he’d be just as popular.

Now I’m reclining on a yellow couch in Observation 10A. There is a breathtaking view of Europe spread out to my right, although I can’t make out Germany. The Fatherland is hidden beneath a patch of clouds. What I can see of the continent is cleaner than any map: there are no borderlines.

Who could have predicted the ultimate consequence of Hitler’s war? Certainly not myself. I recognized what Nazi Germany was, because I grew up there. It was an organization in the most modern meaning of the word. It was a conveyor belt. Hitler’s ideology was the excuse for operating the controls, but that mechanism had a life of its own. Horrors were born of that machine; but so were fruits. Medals and barbed wire; diplomas and death sentences—they were all the same to the machine. The monster seemed unstoppable. In the belly of such a state it was easy to become an anarchist. The next step was just as easy—join a gang of your own, to fight the gang you hate. None of us on any side, not the Burgundians, not the underground, not the Reich itself, could see what was really happening. Only a few pacifists grasped the point.

Adolf Hitler achieved the exact opposite of all his long-term goals, and he did this by winning World War II. Economic reality subverted National Socialism.

The average German used to defend Hitler by saying that he got us out of the Depression, without bothering to note that the way the glorious Führer paid off all the classes of Germany was by looting foreigners. This was not the friendliest method of undoing the harm of Versailles. But as Europe began to remove age-old barriers to commerce, economic benefits began to spread. A thriving black market ensured that all would benefit from the new plenty, and ideology be damned. While the Burgundians actually tried to implement Hitlerian ideas, the rest of Europe enjoyed the new prosperity.

Father was intelligent enough to notice this trend, but he carefully avoided drawing the obvious conclusion: Nazi Germany was becoming less National Socialist with every passing decade. For all the talk of Race Destiny, it was the technical mind of Albert Speer that ran the German Empire. Our sideshow bigots provided the decoration. Hitler was going to achieve permanent race segregation; his New Order lasted only long enough to knock down the barriers to racial separation, and economics did the rest. There is more racial intermarriage today than ever, thanks to Adolf Hitler.

Today Germany is seeing a flowering of historical revisionists who are debunking the Hitler myth. They are showing his feet of clay. They are asking why Germany used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, while President Dewey restricted his atomic bombs to Japanese military targets in the open sea. Even a thick-headed German may get the point after a while. The Reich’s youth protests against the treatment of Russians by Rosenberg’s Cultural Bureaus, and they are no longer shot, no longer arrested… and who knows but that they may accomplish something? If this keeps up, maybe my books, including Final Entries of Dr. Joseph Goebbels , will become available in the open market, instead of merely being black-market bestsellers already. America is still the only uncensored society.

More than anything else I am encouraged by what happens when German and American scientists and engineers work together. The magnificent new autobahns of Africa demonstrate this. But nothing is more beautiful than the space cities—the American and German complexes, the Japanese one, and finally, Israel. I’ve received an invitation to visit. I’m looking forward to setting foot inside a colony that proves Der Jude could not be stopped by a mere Führer . They have returned to their Holy Land, but at an unexpected altitude.

What would Father make of this sane new world? His final testament was the torment of a soul that had seen his victory become something alien and unconcerned with its architects. His life was melodrama, but his death a cheap farce. They didn’t even know what to say at his funeral, he, the great orator of National Socialism. Without his guiding hand, they could not give him a Wagnerian exit.

The final joke is on him, and its practitioner is Dr. Mabuse. Father sincerely believed that in Adolf Hitler, long-awaited Zarathustra, the new man, had descended from the mountain. This, above all others, was the greatest lie of Joseph Goebbels’s life.

The new man will ascend from the test tube. I pray that he will be wiser than his parents.

Paul Joseph Goebbels

Born October 29, 1897

Died March 15, 1970

HARRY TURTLEDOVE was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After flunking out of Caltech, he earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and he has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. His alternate-history works have included many short stories, the Civil War classic The Guns of the South , the epic World War I series The Great War, and the Worldwar tetralogy that began with Worldwar: In the Balance . He is a winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History for his novel How Few Remain .

MARTIN H. GREENBERG is a veteran anthologist and book packager with over 700 books to his credit. He lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his wife, daughter, and four cats.

A Del Rey ®Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Introduction and compilation copyright © 2001 by Harry Turtledove

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001093752

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