It’s a year to the day since The Madagaskar Plan was published. Have
you read it yet?
The URALS are a range of
mountains in Russia. If the Nazis had defeated the Soviet Union, the Urals
would have become the natural boundary of Germany’s Eastern Empire. Many
historians, however, believe a total defeat of the Soviets would have been
impossible and that a guerrilla conflict may have continued on the fringes of
the new Reich for years. Such a proposition is referred to
in other alternate histories such as Fatherland
and more recently Dominion. Hitler
himself acknowledged the possibility with his infamous quote: ‘People say to
me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerrilla warfare on your hands.”
I am delighted at the prospect... Germany will remain in a state of perpetual
alertness.’
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| The Urals, looking towards the east |
The Afrika Reich began as a more ambitious, five novel sequence. Originally it contained
a trilogy set in Nazi Africa featuring Burton and Hochburg, bookended by two
standalone novels. The first of these, Seven
Bridges to Toledo, was set during the Spanish Civil War and included
Patrick, Tünscher and Cranley. You can read more about this project here. The
final book in the sequence was called East
of the Urals and was set during the collapse of the Nazis’ Eastern Empire.
The main character of Urals was
Tünscher, returning East on a mission to assassinate a renegade colonel: Standartenführer
Kanvinksy, the only SS officer ever to be recalled because his
methods were regarded as too extreme – think Kurtz in the mountains.
Horrifyingly, he was a real person. Tünscher also had a softer, more personal motive for his journey East, what he
describes to Burton as his ‘debts’.
Because I plotted the sequence
of five novels well ahead of writing them, much of the Urals story was
foreshadowed in Madagaskar. Kanvinsky
is even mentioned in Chapter 50. That is why the Urals are such presence in the
book, like a gust of icy wind blowing through the narrative. Globocnik would
most certainly have served out there too which is why his sections are peppered
with references to the East.
For commercial reasons it’s now very unlikely that
the Spanish and Urals books will be written. In the original sequence of novels
Tünscher was only going to appear in the odd-number books – so we wouldn’t
discover the truth about his debts till the fifth book. I have now truncated
this – with his debt subtly explained at the end of Madagaskar and the full significance playing out in Book 3.
Beyond the Urals is Birobidzhan. It is never mentioned in the novel (only in the historical
note), though Globus and Tünscher occasionally allude to it. Madagascar is
where the Nazis planned to deport the Jews of Western Europe; the Jews of
Russia were to be exiled to Birobidzhan, in Siberia. If it’s possible,
Birobidzhan would have been worse than Madagaskar: monsoons and insufferable
heat in the summer, thirty below in the winter.
Birobidzhan is one of the
many things I wanted to include in Madagaskar
but was unable to because of word length issues. In the final couple of blog entries
I’ll discuss others things that didn’t make it into the published book.
U is also for URANIUM MINE
The URANIUM MINE that Hochburg visits in Chapter 7 –
Shinkolobwe – is a real place in Congo. The reason I chose it as a location is
that it was the source of the uranium used in the two bombs dropped on Japan at
the end of WW2. You can read more about the place in this excellent article by Patrick Marnham.
