I’ve got a remote impression that I’ve have read this one before, maybe past twenty years ago, but even so, Fatherland makes for fairly absorbing reading. Admittedly, the plot is a little implausible; a cynical and disillusioned police investigator in the German SS pairing up with an American female Journalist and together, outwitting the entire Nazi State. Still, Roberts is clever enough to allow his readers to suspend their disbelief long enough for the plot to successfully unfold. But the plot is, in many ways, simply the means by which Harris takes his readers into a dark and unnerving place.

Fatherland is one of those ‘what if’ historical novels, in this case, what if the Germans had won the Second World War? And as the plot unfolded. I found my thoughts meandering all over the place, imagining exactly what the world might look like today if Stalingrad and Moscow had fallen, England had been forced to capitulate, and the Americans had simply adapted to the new European reality. Harris expertly invites the reader to explore this new reality and the results are grimly fascinating.

Harris is not the first to play around with this theme. Steven Fry, in his hugely enjoyable, ‘Making History’, toys with the idea of what the world would be like had Hitler never been born. A different ‘what if’ but the conclusions Fry offers his readers are equally unsettling. As for Harris, if his plot is a little incredulous, the background mood he creates of a victorious German National Socialism is first class. It has all the bleak overtones of Orwell’s 1984 with the added ingredient of using real characters, real places and very real events. In Harris’s Fatherland, the ‘FInal Solution’ was not just partially completed, it was fully accomplished. And furthermore, this Europe-wide, industrial scale ethnic- cleansing of European Jewry was then virtually airbrushed out of history. That is of course, until Harris’s leading protagonists enter the historical stage.
But the nagging question that kept re-occurring in the back of my brain was just how different would the world be had the Nazis had won the day? We like to tell ourselves that the goodies won and the evil Germans and Japanese got their comeuppance. Britain and the US were the democrats fighting against barbaric, dictatorial fascism. It’s a highly simplified version of history which has its uses but doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. It ignores for example the plain and indisputable fact that immediately at the war’s end the victorious Allied powers rushed back in to claim their colonial territories. And where the Europeans proved too weak to enforce their diktat, the US simply filled the vacuum. The casualties were staggering. In the decades directly following the Second World War, some four million Koreans lost their lives, a further four million Vietnamese and Cambodians were slaughtered, as were countless Malays, Indonesians and other South East Asian nationalists who had the temerity to demand democracy and self-determination for their own counties. So much for a war fought for democracy.

And then there was Africa. As the seeds of fascist Apartheid were being sown in South Africa, Britain was busy setting up concentration camps in Kenya and its other African colonies. To this very day Britain is still fighting off claims of compensation for the murderous acts it carried out across the African continent and those entirely legitimate claims are only in their infancy. There is a whole lot more to be revealed. As for Britain in Kenya, so it was with the French in Algeria. But the brutality of the European victors is only the tip of the iceberg. The economic legacy of colonialism is still playing itself out across the globe. Economic, political and social backwardness deliberately inculcated by the European colonial authorities is the key to understanding third world under-development today.

The UN estimates that some fourteen million children die each year of malnourishment and preventable diseases much of which can be directly attributed to centuries of European colonialism and modern financial imperialism. Multiply that number by sixty-eight years and you get a sense of the on-going holocaust that has been gripping the world since the defeat of the evil ones.’ Could a world dominated by German National Socialism and Japanese militarism really have been much worse? If the German Nazis, under the leadership of Herr Hitler, had a pathological hatred of all things Jewish, the victorious Allies have shown themselves to have a pathological hatred of all those that dare stand in their way of imperial aggrandisement. People of colour – four/ fifths of the world’s population, have been perpetually under the cosh by US and European imperialism ever since the end of the Second World War.

Why even in the 1970’s and 80’s the British were using concentration camps in Ireland to round up and detain without trial any opponents to British colonialism in the six occupied counties of Ireland. H Blocks, Hell Blocks, British Concentration Camps. I can still remember those bitter chants that the Irish nationalist community would dare to chant in order to bring attention to the barbarism of British colonial rule. And what can be said of apartheid in South Africa? If that wasn’t a direct continuation of HItlerite policies I don’t know what was.

Then I turned my thoughts to South America. Here was a welcoming destination for our fleeing Nazis. There were two rat runs in operation after the war; one directly to the United States where Nazi scientists were welcomed with open arms, the other to the fascist dictatorships installed across South America by US imperialism. It is conceivable that there are still a few very old Nazis still living a life of luxury in secluded villas cross the continent. The methods employed by those fascistic dictatorships might even have made a few hardened Nazis blush with embarrassment. Dropping leftist opponents out of airplanes was just one of many methods of making democratic opponents disappear.

And in the United States itself, public lynching of African Americans was still prevalent right into the 1950’s. It took decades of bitter struggle for Black Americans to have anything resembling equality under the law. And the socio-economic ramifications of centuries of slavery are still being felt in the country that boasts it is the most advanced democracy on earth. And we should not forget, America had its own virulent form of anti-Semitism throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

‘What if Hitler had Won?’ is the sub title to Robert Harris’s novel. Perhaps an equally intriguing hypothetical question would be: What if international socialism had emerged triumphant at the conclusion of armed hostilities? What if the populations of Europe and the United States had had the ideological and material strength to overthrow their own imperialist masters and joined forces with the advancing Red Army? The beginning of a just social democratic world order, or the implementation of just another Orwellian nightmare? Now there is a novel just waiting to be written.