The Ultimate Solution

"The Ultimate Solution" is an 1973 alternate history by Eric Norden, describing a world resulting from a total Nazi and Imperial Japanese victory in World War II and partition of the world between them, and is noted for its particularly grim tone.

Plot summary

It is written in the form of a detective book, the protagonist being a New York policeman charged with finding a Jew who is reported to have suddenly appeared in the city decades after all Jews are thought to have been exterminated. (The last few hundreds are mentioned as having been discovered and killed by relentless Einsatzgruppen hunters in 1962, having hidden at the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia).

The society described and taken by the protagonist as normal is as such: Blacks and Slavs being raised at "laboratories" and "farms" where their vocal cords are cut at birth and having the legal status not of slaves but of "domestic animals"; naked Black gladiators fighting to the death at the Madison Square Garden (the Roman "thumbs up" or "down" are modernised into green and red buttons, with a computer making the tally and automatically electrocuting the losing gladiator); children encouraged by TV programs to torture and kill animals; policemen routinely carrying mobile torture kits for "on the spot interrogations" and having the power of extrajudicial execution against "Enemies of the Reich"; body parts of murdered Jews on sale at souvenir shops, with "collectors" trying to have "a complete collection" of samples from all extermination camps; Christianity (and presumably other religions as well) suppressed in favor of Odinist temples.Fact|date=February 2008 At the time of the plot, following the recent death of Benito Mussolini who had to some degree resisted Nazi policies, the Germans are contemplating "a change in the racial classification of Italians", and North Italians are desperately trying to save themselves by sacrificing "The Sicilian Ayarabs" to the Nazis.

Former extermination camps are open to the public as "national shrines" - not to commemorate the victims, as in our world, but to glorify the murderers and present them as heroes. What we know as the inoffensive town of Croton-on-Hudson is in this world an American Auschwitz where the Jews of New York and the East Coast perished (another camp is mentioned in the Rocky Mountains, for the West Coast). At the entrance to the town, an Elks Club sign proclaims proudly: "Welcome to Croton-on-Hudson, home of the Final Solution! Here perished four million enemies of the Reich." Norden is careful to describe how Nazi doctrine in this world merges with the "American way": a neighboring town whose inhabitants gave refuge to escaping Jews was totally destroyed and its inhabitants massacred, like Lidice; its site was then covered with asphalt and made into a huge parking lot, and later an enormous shopping center was erected on the spot.

In an inversion of the normal conventions of a detective book, the "respectable" society is murderous, but when the protagonist starts digging deeper into the underworld, he discovers, hidden but still there, what we would call decent or even heroic people: first, old men still playing chess at the tables in Washington Square; a former Roman Catholic priest who had once broken under Gestapo interrogation and who dreams of a second chance to die as a martyr (the detective protagonist grants him his wish); a member of the underground, known as "Patties" (from George S. Patton, who together with Douglas MacArthur were executed in the "St.Louis Trials") still carrying on a desperate anti-Nazi fight against all odds; finally the hunted Jew himself, who turns out to be from our own world, having fallen into this nightmare world by the worst of bad fortune. The protagonist finally kills him - not out of anti-Semitism which he does not really feel (he was born when Jews had already become a literally dead issue) but in a kind of "kindness" since sending him on to Berlin would have only provided him some torture before being killed.

At the end of Norden's book, the "Cold War" between the Nazis and the Japanese seems ready to turn into World War III. In the power struggle over the legacy of the completely senile Hitler, a putsch overturns the (relatively) moderate faction of Albert Speer, known as "Axists" because they want to maintain the Axis agreements with Japan. Power is seized by Reinhard Heydrich and the most fanatical "Contraxists", who are determined to destroy "the degenerate Yellow Race" even at the price of an all-out nuclear war in which Germany itself would be annihilated. Thus, having presented the reader with this world, and letting the few characters who tried to present even a token and ineffectual resistance all be killed off, Norden ends the book with the entire world about to end.

Allusions/references from other works

Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle" preceded Norden in depicting an America defeated and occupied in World War II. A major difference between the two books is that Dick depicted a US partitioned between Germany and Japan, with the plot taking place on the Japanese-occupied West Coast. In Norden's version, the entire territory of the US (except possibly for Hawaii) is Nazi-occupied. This difference has a considerable significance, as a major plot element in Norden's book is the depiction of die-hard American patriots turning for help to Imperial Japan, the only anti-Nazi power left in the world (an ironic reversal of the anti-Japanese American attitudes of our history's WWII). This would not have been plausible with Japan itself sharing in the occupation. The Japanese Emperor is also mentioned as providing refuge to the Nazi-persecuted Christian clergy.

Norden's book seems to have inspired Harry Turtledove to write the novel "In the Presence of Mine Enemies", which starts from the same premise of a total victory and world conquest by the Nazis and Japanese. Specifically, Turtledove might have been inspired by one passage in which policemen wonder how the Jew they are hunting has managed to avoid capture for so long, when he openly carries specifically Jewish items and takes such actions as tearing up photos of Hitler and shouting "murderer" at the owner of a "souvenir shop" selling Jewish body parts. "This is not survival instinct, which this guy ought to have in spades. This is suicide instinct" wonders one of the police detectives. In Norden's book, this mystery is resolved when it turns out the Jew arrived not so long before from our own world. However, the main theme of Turtledove's version is to show in minute detail how Jews who do possess "survival instinct in spades" manage to "hide in plain sight" over generations, and maintain a clandestine Jewish community right in the Nazi capital Berlin itself.

The book also anticipated The Plot Against America in presenting Charles Lindbergh as President of the United States. However, here - unlike in Philip Roth's book - Linbergh is a completely powerless puppet, installed by the conquerors and doing their bidding, like the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling and the French Pierre Laval.

Criticism

The book is criticized as being too "farfetched", as many subjects in the book contradict real-life Nazism and some find it hard to believe that America could be occupied so easily. In the view of some critics, Norden - a radical opponent of the Vietnam War and other aspects of official US policies - might have meant to present to fellow Americans their reflection in "a very dark mirror" rather than portray a realistic alternate scenario of how WWII might have ended.

In support of the latter view can cited such features as that except for one German appearing briefly in the first chapter, all Nazis in the book are Americans, including the members of the SS and Gestapo, the concentration camp guards and commanders etc. Specifically, the commander of the extermination camp where the New York Jews were killed is presented as a kind of "All-American Boy", universally regarded as a hero, and who did it "not for hatred of Jews, but because it was a job which needed to be done". Further, these Nazis use typical colloquial American expressions while on their Nazi business ("If we don't catch that Jew fast, we're up shit creek"); members of the New York Police Department use the term "The Feds" when referring to the Gestapo; and they are proud of the Reich's space program and of having landed the first man on the Moon.

ee also

*"The Man in the High Castle"
*"In the Presence of Mine Enemies"
*"The Sound of His Horn"
*"Swastika Night"
*"After Dachau"

External links

* [http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521847060&ss=ind "The World Hitler Never Made"]