Accidental Nazi

Parallel Nazi, Book 1

By: Ward Wagher

Narrated by: Scott Appleton

A misguided time travel experiment in the 25th 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.

©2016, 2021 Ward Wagher (P)2022 Ward Wagher

Better than I expected.

To be frank I picked this up expecting to get a good laugh out of it based on how goofy the summery sounded. Now I’m no stranger to the idea of Alt-History. Lord knows I’ve read my fair share of it over the years. But the idea of this one in particular just struck me as goofy. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that behind the goofy setup lay a genuinely great political thriller that kept me engaged enough to listen to the whole thing in one day. The machinations of the junta that replaces Hitler after his death, as they all vie for influence over the Reich made for an incredibly interesting, and fun story. This book had likable characters (those not from history at least), a good plot. And perhaps most importantly for this type of story, it knows not to take itself too seriously. If you are at all interested in alt-history or political thrillers I recommend you give this a try!

Where things all apart a little is the narration, meaning no disrespect to the narrator I found him very distracting due to his complete inability to pronounce German words. Which in another story wouldn't have been a problem of course, but in a story about the Third Reich, there are quite a lot of german words sprinkled throughout. Now I am neither German nor fluent in German but even I was distracted by this so if that is going to be a problem for you I advise against listening to this book.

Great writing, mediocre narration

When I first picked up the book out of curiosity, Being fond of Turtledove's books, I wondered how well the writing of this book would be. 9 books later, I found this story to be quite enjoyable. The only complaint I have about this audiobook is the narrator's performance.

Surprisingly good

I just want more of this. My favorite alternate timeline story about WWII that I have ever came across.

good story. narration was off.

way too many mispronounced words, names and places. it made the story clumsy since the correct pronunciation is so common.