Alternative history without normalizing Nazis--a nice trick if you can do it

Perhaps Alternative History novels like MacArthur's Luck are just entertaining stories. Then again, perhaps not.

In his ground-breaking book Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, Fairfield University Professor Gavriel Rosenfeld makes a strong case for the argument that a lot of alternative history contributes to the normalization or even glorification of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. (You should be reading his blog, The Counterfactual History Review, if you are truly interested in the "what ifs" of history.)

A counter sheet from the 1981 edition of Avalon Hill's much

acclaimed reissue of Battle of the Bulge. Even from this tiny

image you can tell that the dramatic black Waffen SS unit

counters are designed to stand out in contrast to the more 

subdued hues of the US, British, and even German Armies.

I think he has a point. I grew up as a war gamer in the old days of pushing cardboard counters around on paper maps with Avalon Hill's Panzerblitz or SPI's War in the East, and I can clearly remember that all the German units (particularly those representing the Waffen SS) were consciously designed to be more visually striking than those of the Russians or Anglo-Allies.

I can also remember the 1960s-1970s spate of English translations of popular German memoirs and histories that both glorified the technical superiority of the German panzers and simultaneously denied any knowledge of the Holocaust or the Einsatzgruppen killing Jews right up to the front lines in Russia: Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader, F. W. von Mellenthin's Panzer Battles, Paul Carell's Hitler Moves East. ...

So there's a tricky aspect to writing World War Two alternate history: how to write it so that it's not a glorification of war, normalization of the Shoah and other atrocities, no whitewashing of the things that happened--PLUS the writer needs to deal with some of the moral issues that derive from the setting and the situation.

In MacArthur's Luck I've tried to do this in several ways: from mental odyssey of Harry Rusch as he tries to come to grips with the enormity of total war and Nazi crimes to the exploits of George Thomas Carpenter and Jack Roosevelt Robinson pushing back against race prejudice in the US Army. It turns out (it was sort of a surprise to me as well) that there's a major LGBTQ character in uniform, and we'll get to watch him and his friends struggle with the issue of his identity in the context of the times.

I'm not suggesting that MacArthur's Luck is a philosophical treatise or even an historical treatment (on a couple of occasions even I--as author--cringed at some of the liberties I had to take with characters or events*). I was mostly attempting to tell a good story.

But the very best stories, I think, always have a moral component.

It's appropriate, I think, to
remember Albert Speer as
a Nazi, a willing supporter
of the Hitler regime.

*For the record, Albert Speer had a role to play in MacArthur's Luck that, as it unfolds, is probably far more consistent with his own Inside the Third Reich, than it is to the critical perspective of Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth or Joachim Fest's Speer: The Final Verdict. (And there should be a special ironic award for historians who believe they've managed to declare "the final verdict" about anything.) But the necessities of plotting required a Speer who acted as he did, though in later volumes we will discover that neither his motives nor his actions escape criticism.

You can purchase MacArthur's Luck for just $0.99 at Amazon, or through Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Apple iBook, or Smashwords. If you enjoy the book (even if you've got criticisms, please consider leaving a review at Amazon.) Watch this blog for notices about the forthcoming publication of The Fortunes of War #2: Stalin's Wager.