Nazism Uber Alles

By John Skow

TITLE: FATHERLAND

AUTHOR: ROBERT HARRIS

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 338 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: A disturbing thriller imagines what might have been if Hitler had triumphed.

Only two decades have gone by since Germany's great victory in World War II. It is 1964, and a vassal Germanic empire unites Europe from England almost to the Urals. It's true that war has sputtered on endlessly against what remains of the Soviet Union and that anti-Nazi terrorists at home have provoked repeated crackdowns. Still, why does the Fatherland seem shabby and dispirited?

Though Barbara Cartland has just written a new romantic novel, The Kaiser's Ball, not all is pure and Aryan in popular culture. A newspaper critic complains about the "pernicious Negroid wailings" of an unnamed group of young Englishmen from Liverpool who are playing to packed audiences of German youths in Hamburg. But Adolf Hitler is still hale, for a man of 75; and in the U.S., President Joseph Kennedy, also 75, is planning a state visit to Berlin to quiet rumors of supposed Nazi human-rights violations against Jews during the war. His trip will make clear the solidly anti-Semitic, pro-German slant of American neutrality.

Thus all should be well, but SS Sturmbannfuhrer Xavier March is uneasy. He is a homicide investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei, the Kripo, and he realizes that the drowning of a reclusive former high government official was neither accidental nor a suicide. March is unusually good at his job, and until now this has allowed him to get away with being openly apolitical. But as pressure builds to drop the murder inquiry, March learns that his own loyalty is under Gestapo investigation.

More out of stubbornness than nobility, March plugs on with his inconvenient questions. At first it seems that the dead man, a bureaucrat named Buhler, was merely involved in a scheme to get rich selling artwork confiscated from Jews. This would not be a major offense, because it is known that during the war, all Jews were evacuated to the east somewhere -- March isn't clear on the details -- and never came back.

Then matters darken and deepen. March, harassed by Gestapo thugs, finds documents showing that Buhler was present at a high-level conference at Wannsee on Jan. 20, 1942. Another who attended was Adolf Eichmann. The meeting dealt with a concept March has never heard mentioned: "the final solution of * the Jewish question" and the planning of death camps. In shock he takes the papers and, with the Gestapo close behind, commandeers a car in a desperate run to the Swiss border.

Fatherland is being compared to Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, set in the Soviet Union, another well-done, shadowed thriller about an honest cop operating within a malign bureaucracy. But Harris' narrative is more unsettling because it erodes our solid past and shows our present to be less than inevitable. His brooding, brown-and-black setting of a victorious Nazi regime is believable and troubling, the stuff of long nights of little sleep.