HHhH

never hid his Nazi sympathies. So, as in other “What if…?” stories, an alternative history is built upon a hypothesis: in this case, that Germany won the war and Hitler’s regime endured.

In the plot of Fatherland, Nazi dignitaries are being murdered; with the help of a female American journalist (in Germany to cover Kennedy’s visit), the SS inspector played by Rutger Hauer discovers the link between these murders. Buhler, Stuckart, Luther, Neumann, Lange… all were present at a mysterious meeting that took place twenty years before—at Wannsee, in January 1942, organized by Heydrich himself. In the 1960s Heydrich has taken Goring’s place as Reichsmarshall, and is more or less the regime’s number two. Afraid that the agreement with Kennedy might be compromised if the truth ever comes out, Hitler intends to make everyone who attended the meeting permanently disappear. Because it was at this meeting, on January 20, 1942, that the Final Solution was officially ratified by all the relevant ministers. Here, led by Heydrich, the Nazis planned the extermination by gas of eleven million Jews.

However, one of the participants does not want to die. Franz Luther, who represented Ribbentrop on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has irrefutable proof of the genocide of the Jews and he intends to offer it to the Americans in exchange for political asylum. Because the world is unaware of the genocide: officially, Europe’s Jews have been deported—to Ukraine, where the proximity of the Russian front makes it impossible for any international observer to go and verify their presence. Just before being murdered, Luther contacts the American journalist, who manages in extremis—as Hitler is about to welcome Kennedy amid great pomp—to deliver the precious documents to the American president. The meeting between Kennedy and Hitler is canceled, the United States goes back to war against Germany, and the Third Reich ends up collapsing, twenty years late.

In this fiction, the Wannsee Conference is in some way the crucial moment of the Final Solution. Now, it’s true that the decision wasn’t made at Wannsee. And it’s also true that Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen had already killed hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Eastern Front. But it was at Wannsee that the genocide was rubber-stamped. No longer need the task be given, more or less on the quiet (if you can really talk of killing millions of people “on the quiet”), to a few death squads; now the entire political and economic infrastructure of the regime is at their disposal.

The meeting lasted barely two hours. Two hours to settle what were essentially legal questions: What should be done with half-Jews? And with quarter-Jews? With Jews who’d been decorated in the First World War? With Jews married to German women? Should these men’s Aryan widows be compensated by giving them a pension? As in all meetings, the only decisions that are really made are those decided beforehand. In fact, for Heydrich, it was just a question of informing all the Reich ministries that they were going to have to work together with one objective in mind: the physical elimination of all Europe’s Jews.

I have in front of me a list distributed by Heydrich to all the participants at the conference that details the number of Jews to be “evacuated,” country by country. The list is divided in two parts. The first includes all the countries of the Reich, among which we notice that Estonia is already judenfrei, while the Government General (that is, Poland) still has more than two million Jews. The second part, giving an idea of how optimistic the Nazis still were in early 1942, brings together the satellite countries (Slovakia: 88,000 Jews; Croatia: 40,000 Jews) and allied countries (Italy, including Sardinia: 58,000 Jews), but also neutral countries (Switzerland: 18,000; Sweden: 8,000; Turkey: 55,500; Spain: 6,000) or even enemies (the only two remaining in Europe at this time: the USSR—already invaded to a great extent—with five million Jews, more than half of them in occupied Ukraine; and Britain, with 330,000 Jews, which was a long way from being invaded). So the plan was that every country in Europe would be forced or persuaded to deport its Jews. The total was written at the bottom of the page: more than eleven million. The mission would be half accomplished.

Eichmann has described what happened after the conference. The ministerial representatives having left, he and Heydrich were alone with “Gestapo” Muller. They moved through to an elegant wood-paneled drawing room. Heydrich poured himself a brandy, which he sipped while listening to classical music (Schubert, I believe), and the three men each smoked a cigar. According to Eichmann, Heydrich was in an excellent mood.

161

Raul Hilberg died yesterday. He was the leader of the “functionalists,” those historians who believe the extermination of the Jews was not premeditated but dictated by circumstances. This school of thought is in direct opposition to the “intentionalists,” who maintain it was all clearly and definitely planned from the beginning—that is, from the writing of Mein Kampf in 1924.

To mark Hilberg’s death, Le Monde published extracts from an interview he gave in 1994, in which the broad outlines of his theory are recapitulated:

I believe that the Germans did not know, at the beginning, what they were doing. It’s as if they were driving a train whose general direction was toward a growing violence against Jews, but whose precise destination was uncertain. Let’s not forget that Nazism was more than a political party: it was a movement that had to keep going forward, without ever stopping. Confronted with a completely unprecedented task, German bureaucracy didn’t know what to do. And that’s where Hitler’s role is important. Someone at the top had to give the green light to the naturally conservative bureaucrats.

One of the intentionalists’ main pieces of evidence is this phrase of Hitler’s, taken from a public speech made in January 1939: “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Conversely, the most revealing clue in support of the functionalists is that, for a long time, the Nazis were genuinely seeking out territories to which they might deport the Jews: Madagascar, the Arctic Ocean, Siberia, Palestine. On more than one occasion, Eichmann even met with some militant Zionists. But the hazards of war would force them to abandon all these plans. Most notably, the transportation of the Jews to Madagascar could not take place until the Germans had control of the seas—in other words, until the war with Great Britain was over. The search for more radical solutions would finally be precipitated by the turning of the war in the East. Even if they didn’t admit it, the Nazis knew their eastern conquests were in peril. They did not fear the worst—because nobody in 1942 imagined that the Red Army would one day invade Germany and penetrate all the way to Berlin—but the powerful Soviet resistance forced them to acknowledge that they might lose the occupied territories. Consequently, they had to move quickly. So it was, one thing leading to another, that the Jewish question took on an industrial dimension.

162

A freight train screeches to a halt. At the end of the tracks is a gate surmounted by a tower, with a brownstone wing on either side. Above, you hear the cawing of crows. The gate opens. You are now entering Auschwitz.

163

This morning, Heydrich receives an indignant letter from Himmler. It concerns some five hundred young Germans arrested by the Hamburg police because they were fans of swing, that degenerate foreign dance accompanied by Negro music.

I will oppose any half measures in this matter. All the ringleaders are to be sent to a concentration camp. First of all, these youths will get a good thrashing there. They will stay in the camp quite a long time—two or three years. Obviously they will no longer have the right to study. Only through brutal actions can we stop the spread of these dangerous Anglophile trends.

Heydrich will actually deport about fifty of these youngsters. Just because the Fuhrer has entrusted him with the historic task of getting rid of every single Jew in Europe does not mean he’s going to neglect his other