cover image Hitler Victorious

Hitler Victorious

Dana Harry Sawyer, Benford. Garland Publishing, $30 (299pp) ISBN 978-0-8240-8658-9

Eleven well-known British writersM. Kornbluth, Hilary Bailey, Greg Bear, Keith Roberts, David Brin, Brad Linaweaver, Sheila Finch, Algis Budrys, Howard Goldsmith, Tom Shippey and Gregory Benfordcontribute tales that delineate a theme: even if the Nazis had won World War II, it would have been a hollow victory. The Germans portrayed here are as gray as the field-grade uniform. The settings range from a psychedelic trip by an American physicist in Los Alamos to a house haunted by the fetuses of murdered Jewish mothers to excerpts from Joseph Goebbels' postwar diaries. The volume has a seminal flaw, however. No matter how powerful the fiction or symbolic the myth, neither is as compelling as what actually happened during the years of the Third Reich. (November)