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The Parallel Nazi #1
Accidental Nazi
A misguided time travel experiment in the twenty-fifth century fans out to impact hundreds of parallel universes. It most directly affected people who appear to be at the precise inflection point to jump them into a world that was almost the same as the place where they left. Heinrich Schloss had arrived at Berlin's Tempelhof airport in 1982 to pick up his wife after her shopping trip to London. After a brief migraine-like spasm, he opened his eyes to Tempelhof in 1941 to witness Hitler's death in an airplane accident. A history professor who had grown up in a divided Berlin was now a party chieftain in Nazi Germany. All those speculative conversations around the table with colleagues about what could have been changed to avoid the fall of Germany now had immediacy. The Schloss of this parallel world had replaced Martin Bormann to assume his role of party leader. The transplant now had to make himself into the alternate Schloss and interact with the murderous Nazis who surrounded Hitler.
382 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 12, 2016
109 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 24, 2024
Wow. The term that immediately comes to mind for this book is “utterly unique.” In a good way. We’ve all heard the trope of going back in time to kill Hitler—what if you were sent back in time, Hitler was already dead, and you were now the most powerful man in Germany?
Starting from that premise, this book launches a storyline of a type I’ve never seen before in fiction. Heinrich Schloss is a history professor from West Berlin in the year 1982. One day, he wakes up from a freak migraine to find himself in June 1941—just in time to witness Adolf Hitler’s death in a plane crash. Operation Barbarossa has not yet launched. The Final Solution is still in the planning stage. And Schloss is now the head of the Nazi Party. History has somehow changed—and he has a chance to change it even more. He can cancel the Holocaust. He can save his country from a war it cannot win. But it will mean staying alive in a game of ruthless intrigue among the most dangerous men on earth…
Picking up this book, it feels just like any other general market alternate history novel in terms of quality, story, and characterization. The prose was slightly wooden starting out, and the author has a tendency to tell rather than show in a lot of places, but this is something I’ve noticed in a lot of other authors in this genre. I was VERY surprised to see that the author is a Christian writing under traditional CBA content guidelines (absence of profanity, graphic sex, etc—though there is one risqué scene that is not described in detail). It was refreshing to read an example of clean fiction that isn’t dull or predictable. A Christian theme is interwoven into the book in a subtle fashion, becoming more and more obvious as narrative processes. This is done in a way that fits naturally into the story and is neither preachy nor contrived. Once you get past the fantastical elements of time travel and parallel universes, the plot is also astonishingly plausible. Even the most unlikely developments are done in a way that makes them seem like they could have really happened.
The protagonist, Heinrich Schloss, was also three-dimensional and believable. It was eerily fascinating to watch him slip into the role of a Nazi leader and learn details about that other man’s life and family. Among other things, Schloss’s 1940s counterpart is a widower with two young children. This highlights a disturbing reality about the real-world Nazis: many of them (concentration camp commanders included) were loving family men in their private lives. Schloss begins to find that the man he’s replaced is not that different from himself…
The hero ultimately begins playing a dangerous game. His plans for overthrowing the Nazis from within will mean handing them victory in the war and making the Germany of their time more powerful than ever. If he succeeds in changing history… will it cost him his soul?
Starting from that premise, this book launches a storyline of a type I’ve never seen before in fiction. Heinrich Schloss is a history professor from West Berlin in the year 1982. One day, he wakes up from a freak migraine to find himself in June 1941—just in time to witness Adolf Hitler’s death in a plane crash. Operation Barbarossa has not yet launched. The Final Solution is still in the planning stage. And Schloss is now the head of the Nazi Party. History has somehow changed—and he has a chance to change it even more. He can cancel the Holocaust. He can save his country from a war it cannot win. But it will mean staying alive in a game of ruthless intrigue among the most dangerous men on earth…
Picking up this book, it feels just like any other general market alternate history novel in terms of quality, story, and characterization. The prose was slightly wooden starting out, and the author has a tendency to tell rather than show in a lot of places, but this is something I’ve noticed in a lot of other authors in this genre. I was VERY surprised to see that the author is a Christian writing under traditional CBA content guidelines (absence of profanity, graphic sex, etc—though there is one risqué scene that is not described in detail). It was refreshing to read an example of clean fiction that isn’t dull or predictable. A Christian theme is interwoven into the book in a subtle fashion, becoming more and more obvious as narrative processes. This is done in a way that fits naturally into the story and is neither preachy nor contrived. Once you get past the fantastical elements of time travel and parallel universes, the plot is also astonishingly plausible. Even the most unlikely developments are done in a way that makes them seem like they could have really happened.
The protagonist, Heinrich Schloss, was also three-dimensional and believable. It was eerily fascinating to watch him slip into the role of a Nazi leader and learn details about that other man’s life and family. Among other things, Schloss’s 1940s counterpart is a widower with two young children. This highlights a disturbing reality about the real-world Nazis: many of them (concentration camp commanders included) were loving family men in their private lives. Schloss begins to find that the man he’s replaced is not that different from himself…
The hero ultimately begins playing a dangerous game. His plans for overthrowing the Nazis from within will mean handing them victory in the war and making the Germany of their time more powerful than ever. If he succeeds in changing history… will it cost him his soul?
August 29, 2018
Entertaining but a little superficial
This book would be a good comic opera, but it is not about real people. The main characters are drawn as simulacra. The genuine Nazis were morally insane not just cynical. However the story is interesting and it held my attention.
This book would be a good comic opera, but it is not about real people. The main characters are drawn as simulacra. The genuine Nazis were morally insane not just cynical. However the story is interesting and it held my attention.
Read
October 23, 2025On a visit to the airport, Heinrich Schloss has inexplicably found himself there in 1941, watching an airplane plow into the tarmac. Its passenger, Adolf Hitler, is now dead – and history will change. Schloss has no idea why he has transported back in time forty years, and he’s dumbfounded to find himself as the Parteileider, a position that in his memory was held by Martin Bormann. Evidently his alter-ego, this other Heinrich Schloss, shot Bormann and assumed his position. Schloss, who grew up in a West Berlin dominated by the threat of Soviet violence, knows two things: one, he needs to exploit his inexplicable arrival in this time and in this seat of power to prevent the Russians from invading Germany – and two, he needs to stop the Final Solution. Although the premise is a bit sketchy (we get a prologue in which scientists five centuries ahead of us do something and then go “…oh, that’s going to do some weird stuff in the multiverse”), the execution is surprisingly good.
Although Schloss has no idea how he got here, and he’s equally mystified and creeped out by the fact that the man he replaced was some instance of himself – same voice, face, handwriting – but has two advantages in using the position to pursue his primary goal of saving Germany from a hubristic attack on Russia. One, he was a teacher of German history with a specialty in World War 2, presumably in the area of vergangenheitsbewältigung, or reckoning with Germany’s Nazi past. Two, he’s good at parsing personalities and manipulating people, and he takes some pleasure in the act of doing so. When he’s suddenly made part of a small group of men who are responsible for navigating the Reich through these waters, those two skills combine nicely. He quickly emerges as one of the two power players at the table, and even as the fuhrer-council navigates through 1941 – considering Barbarossa, the air war against the Englanders, and keeping the Amis from wading further into the war – Schloss and Himmler are slowly maneuvering for the big seat. This is Highlander politics, though: in the end, there can only be one.
Character-wise, this novel is all kinds of interesting, in large part because Schloss is not the moralist readers are expecting, Yes, he does want to avoid the Final Solution, but his first priority is keeping Germany from HItler’s midwar mistakes that saw the Fatherland broken up and occupied by foreign powers. He is a German patriot, someone who wants to magnify its power even while scaling back the things that made Nazi Germany a reprehensible polity like mass murder and the police state. He wants Germany, not Russia, to dominate the continent, and he’s willing to take risks like annoying Himmler to do it. There’s a subtle complication, too: the “alter-Schloss”, the counterpart he appears to have replaced, is seemingly present within Schloss himself. He has the man’s ease with a Walther PPK, for instance, and some places and people seem familiar in a way he can’t explain. And then there’s the ambition, ambition that led alter-Schloss to murder Boremann and accuse the man of treachery. Are Schloss’s own desires to lead Germany into a greater future for itself his own – or are they alter-Schloss’s, now being moderated through Schloss’s own morality?
Connectedly, Wagher succeeds in creating a character-driven novel wherein most of the supporting characters are the Nasties themselves! We spend a lot of time seeing Schloss talk and argue with Goering, Himmler, Hess, Ribbontrop, and (to a much lesser degree) Goebbels. This extensive characterization muddies things for the reader. Not for a moment do we forget that they’re Nazis, of course, but when seen through Schloss’s eyes – as he evaluates their usability and their weaknesses– we see them as human villains rather than just the baddies. They are human not in the sense that Wagher is redeeming them, but in the sense that we’re getting a clearer view of their foibles and their interior drama. (The exception is Himmler, who is consistently antagonistic and often leaves meetings in a Huff.) Goering, for instance, is all kinds of awful – a thief, a glutton, and a morphine addict– but he becomes a key ally for Schloss. Hess, too, despite being somewhat erratic, proves to be excellent at giving speeches and spends most of the book being the figurehead for the council in a way that reminded me of Malenkov in The Death of Stalin.
As alt-history goes, this was really fun. Things are getting quite different but in believable ways, and the more they drift from our history’s course, the harder it is for Schloss to predict what to do: by the end he’s more dependent on his own instincts as a leader and his history with these men. The geopolitical situation gets lively, too, and I’ve already started the second novel where Herr Schloss is steaming into the complete unknown. There are other elements I appreciated, like a good sprinkling of German expressions for flavor, and for Schloss’s dark, sarcastic humor – what Phillip Kerr called the Berliner Schnauze. I was not expecting this to be as good as it was, given the self-published nature of the cover.
Although Schloss has no idea how he got here, and he’s equally mystified and creeped out by the fact that the man he replaced was some instance of himself – same voice, face, handwriting – but has two advantages in using the position to pursue his primary goal of saving Germany from a hubristic attack on Russia. One, he was a teacher of German history with a specialty in World War 2, presumably in the area of vergangenheitsbewältigung, or reckoning with Germany’s Nazi past. Two, he’s good at parsing personalities and manipulating people, and he takes some pleasure in the act of doing so. When he’s suddenly made part of a small group of men who are responsible for navigating the Reich through these waters, those two skills combine nicely. He quickly emerges as one of the two power players at the table, and even as the fuhrer-council navigates through 1941 – considering Barbarossa, the air war against the Englanders, and keeping the Amis from wading further into the war – Schloss and Himmler are slowly maneuvering for the big seat. This is Highlander politics, though: in the end, there can only be one.
Character-wise, this novel is all kinds of interesting, in large part because Schloss is not the moralist readers are expecting, Yes, he does want to avoid the Final Solution, but his first priority is keeping Germany from HItler’s midwar mistakes that saw the Fatherland broken up and occupied by foreign powers. He is a German patriot, someone who wants to magnify its power even while scaling back the things that made Nazi Germany a reprehensible polity like mass murder and the police state. He wants Germany, not Russia, to dominate the continent, and he’s willing to take risks like annoying Himmler to do it. There’s a subtle complication, too: the “alter-Schloss”, the counterpart he appears to have replaced, is seemingly present within Schloss himself. He has the man’s ease with a Walther PPK, for instance, and some places and people seem familiar in a way he can’t explain. And then there’s the ambition, ambition that led alter-Schloss to murder Boremann and accuse the man of treachery. Are Schloss’s own desires to lead Germany into a greater future for itself his own – or are they alter-Schloss’s, now being moderated through Schloss’s own morality?
Connectedly, Wagher succeeds in creating a character-driven novel wherein most of the supporting characters are the Nasties themselves! We spend a lot of time seeing Schloss talk and argue with Goering, Himmler, Hess, Ribbontrop, and (to a much lesser degree) Goebbels. This extensive characterization muddies things for the reader. Not for a moment do we forget that they’re Nazis, of course, but when seen through Schloss’s eyes – as he evaluates their usability and their weaknesses– we see them as human villains rather than just the baddies. They are human not in the sense that Wagher is redeeming them, but in the sense that we’re getting a clearer view of their foibles and their interior drama. (The exception is Himmler, who is consistently antagonistic and often leaves meetings in a Huff.) Goering, for instance, is all kinds of awful – a thief, a glutton, and a morphine addict– but he becomes a key ally for Schloss. Hess, too, despite being somewhat erratic, proves to be excellent at giving speeches and spends most of the book being the figurehead for the council in a way that reminded me of Malenkov in The Death of Stalin.
As alt-history goes, this was really fun. Things are getting quite different but in believable ways, and the more they drift from our history’s course, the harder it is for Schloss to predict what to do: by the end he’s more dependent on his own instincts as a leader and his history with these men. The geopolitical situation gets lively, too, and I’ve already started the second novel where Herr Schloss is steaming into the complete unknown. There are other elements I appreciated, like a good sprinkling of German expressions for flavor, and for Schloss’s dark, sarcastic humor – what Phillip Kerr called the Berliner Schnauze. I was not expecting this to be as good as it was, given the self-published nature of the cover.
December 9, 2021
outstanding !!!
Dear Ward,
Don’t keep us hanging, continue the story line. What a story. The author has the ability to grab the read and immerse them in both the storyline and the players. This is a very believable what if premise as to how WWII could have been. The Jews in Palestine with their own country and friendly to Germany, means the oil fields in the Middle East are up for the taking. There must be a follow on in the future. Good Job !
Dear Ward,
Don’t keep us hanging, continue the story line. What a story. The author has the ability to grab the read and immerse them in both the storyline and the players. This is a very believable what if premise as to how WWII could have been. The Jews in Palestine with their own country and friendly to Germany, means the oil fields in the Middle East are up for the taking. There must be a follow on in the future. Good Job !
February 3, 2022
Excellent and believable alternative history
Even though this book is marked as being for 12-18 year old, I found this book very easy and fun to read (I'm 63).
The alternative history of ww2 is very interesting, mixing bits of what actually happened in with those that occur purely in this alternative reality.
A real page turner, I found it very hard to put down. Always wanting to read just a few more pages.
I am looking forward to continuing the story in book 2.
Even though this book is marked as being for 12-18 year old, I found this book very easy and fun to read (I'm 63).
The alternative history of ww2 is very interesting, mixing bits of what actually happened in with those that occur purely in this alternative reality.
A real page turner, I found it very hard to put down. Always wanting to read just a few more pages.
I am looking forward to continuing the story in book 2.
February 26, 2022
Unexpected treasure! A mix of time travel, historical fiction, what-if, body swapping and military history all rolled into a delicious package. This is my first read from the author…i am impressed. He absolutely grabbed my interest in the opening chapter and build upon it with excellent dialog, memorable characters and fascinating “what-if” scenarios. This is book one of many in a series…ready for book two!
March 18, 2024
Remarkable. As the title of the book may imply, I did not know what to expect from the book. This book is a damn good read. The character of Schloss is flawed, challenged, threatened and even to the end you are left in suspense of the next book. So far in March, its my book of the year with just how compelling the story is
May 4, 2024
Interesting concept and this book kept me reading. The author tells a good story and has interesting characters. I assess Goering differently from the author, but that was not a problem. I don't know how deep Wagher will develop his characters in future books, but that does not matter for this one. I have ordered the next book and look forward to what comes next in this alternate history.
January 14, 2026
Accidental Nazi
The main character, a history professor from our current time, finds himself at a German airport in the middle of WW2. He is assumed to be one of Hitler's inner circle. As the summer of 1941 turns into winter and 1942 arrives, his world becomes increasingly dangerous but much more fulfilling than his life as a teacher.
The main character, a history professor from our current time, finds himself at a German airport in the middle of WW2. He is assumed to be one of Hitler's inner circle. As the summer of 1941 turns into winter and 1942 arrives, his world becomes increasingly dangerous but much more fulfilling than his life as a teacher.
December 3, 2021
Great start to a series
This is an excellent foundation novel for a series I had never heard of until Amazon recommended it. Lots of twists and turns as our main character feels his way into an alternate life he never expected.
This is an excellent foundation novel for a series I had never heard of until Amazon recommended it. Lots of twists and turns as our main character feels his way into an alternate life he never expected.
June 29, 2022
good read
The book was interesting with quite a twist, it’s why I like alternative history. Makes you wonder what a different world we could live in with just a twist here and there.
The book was interesting with quite a twist, it’s why I like alternative history. Makes you wonder what a different world we could live in with just a twist here and there.
September 17, 2025
Alternate-history books can be fun
This is a unique Hitler/Nazi-based alt-history. Forget the tropes, this is a new approach.
Wagner writes some entertaining books and this series adds to his reputation.
This is a unique Hitler/Nazi-based alt-history. Forget the tropes, this is a new approach.
Wagner writes some entertaining books and this series adds to his reputation.
June 1, 2017
Fairly fun book to read. A lot of the most important events, seemed so rushed... A bit more character development and backstory would've been nice.
September 29, 2018
Great alt history book
I enjoyed this story because it is told from a modern German prospective. I can't wait to read more of this series.
I enjoyed this story because it is told from a modern German prospective. I can't wait to read more of this series.
August 19, 2020
Glad I read it
I keep skipping this book, but now I tried it. Was a lot like one of my favorite time books Forget the Alamo in how the do the time switch.
I keep skipping this book, but now I tried it. Was a lot like one of my favorite time books Forget the Alamo in how the do the time switch.
September 18, 2020
4 stars. I found the book engaging.
November 7, 2021
It was entertaining, books 2 and 3 are not as good.
December 21, 2023
It's the best Nazi book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It was very authentic and thorough. The inner circle characters mirror the real ones. Can't wait to read the next book.
December 24, 2024
So glad I found this book to add in. I read most of the series in 2020. I did not know there were more!
January 9, 2022
An engaging alternate history with a sci-fi element. This is a character drama which primarily explores the struggles of one man to work within Nazi Germany to change things for the better, and it works. A romance engages the reader on one hand, while Frau Marsden's disapproval entertains on the other!
I recommend this for YA and adult readers.
I recommend this for YA and adult readers.
October 2, 2019
Interesting alternate history story.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews