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
About the Editors
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.
Copyright
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Introduction and compilation copyright © 2001 by Harry Turtledove
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001093752
Permission acknowledgments follow.
“The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Copyright © 1984 by K. S. Robinson. First published in Universe 14, ed. by Terry Carr. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Winterberry” by Nicholas A. DiChario. Copyright © 1992 by Nicholas A. DiChario. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Islands in the Sea” by Harry Turtledove, Alternities, ed. by Robert Adams and Pamela Crippin Adams, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Harry Turtledove. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Suppose They Gave a Peace” by Susan Shwartz. Copyright © 2000 by Susan Shwartz. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“All the Myriad Ways” by Larry Niven, from What Might Have Been, ed. by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. Copyright © 1989 by Larry Niven. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Through Road No Whither” by Greg Bear. Copyright © 1985 by Greg Bear. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Manassas, Again” by Gregory Benford. Copyright © 1991 by Abbenford Associates. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dance Band on the Titanic” by Jack L. Chalker. Copyright © 1979, 1997 by Jack L. Chalker. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Undiscovered” by William Sanders. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1997. Copyright © 1997 by William Sanders. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Bring the Jubilee” by Ward Moore. Copyright © 1952, 1980 by the Estate of Ward Moore. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.