The Ultimate Solution

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The Ultimate Solution
OCLC
1281098

The Ultimate Solution is a 1973

Axis forces won World War II and partitioned the world between them. The novel is noted for its particularly grim tone. Norden later wrote the 1977 Adolf Hitler-related science fiction novella The Primal Solution
.

Plot

A

Axis Powers allies, Germany and Japan, both of whom have nuclear weapons and are engaged in an arms race akin to that between the United States and Soviet Union
in our own timeline.

Odinist temples; pedophilia being legal with parents selling their children to sex brothels; and naked Slavic women being crucified in eroticized torture shows, among other horrors. [citation needed] Homosexuality is legal and considered a state ideal (in sharp contrast with the real-life homophobic policies of Germany
).

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 a North American Auschwitz where the Jews of New York and the East Coast died (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." German 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 killed (like at Lidice in Czechoslovakia
); 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.

"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

anti-Semitism
which he does not really feel (he was born when Jews had already become a literally dead issue) but in a sort of "kindness" since sending him on to Berlin would have only exposed him to some torture before being killed.

The "

putsch overturns the (relatively) moderate faction of Albert Speer, known as "Axists" because they want to maintain the Axis agreements with Japan. Power is then 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; this war is apparently incipient by the end of the text as the narrator mentions the NYPD coordinating an evacuation to the Catskills. Token and ineffectual resistance is all killed off, with the entire world about to end.

Reception

Norden's book, along with others exploring an alternate history where Germany won World War II, has been cited as a work that "fulfilled an important moral function by underscoring the barbarism of Nazism and clearly reinforcing the prevailing view that a Nazi-ruled world would have been an utterly horrific place."[2]

Gavriel David Rosenfeld, in his book The World Hitler Never Made (2005), suggests that Norden might have been inspired to write his novel by a ten-day-long interview he conducted with Albert Speer, which was published in the June 1971 edition of Playboy. During the interview, Speer commented to Norden, "If the Nazis had won, [people] ... would be living in a nightmare". Rosenfeld sees Norden's novel as a morally informed critique of the 1970s "Hitler Wave" of renewed interest in Nazism which followed the publication of Speer's Inside the Third Reich.[3]

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 World War II might have ended.

In support of the latter view can be 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

space program
and of having landed the first man on the Moon.

See also

References

External links